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Novel Notes

by Jerome K. Jerome

January, 2000 [Etext #2037]


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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1893 Leadenhall Press Ltd. edition.





NOVEL NOTES

by Jerome K. Jerome




PROLOGUE



Years ago, when I was very small, we lived in a great house in a
long, straight, brown-coloured street, in the east end of London.
It was a noisy, crowded street in the daytime; but a silent,
lonesome street at night, when the gas-lights, few and far between,
partook of the character of lighthouses rather than of illuminants,
and the tramp, tramp of the policeman on his long beat seemed to be
ever drawing nearer, or fading away, except for brief moments when
the footsteps ceased, as he paused to rattle a door or window, or to
flash his lantern into some dark passage leading down towards the
river.

The house had many advantages, so my father would explain to friends
who expressed surprise at his choosing such a residence, and among
these was included in my own small morbid mind the circumstance that
its back windows commanded an uninterrupted view of an ancient and
much-peopled churchyard.  Often of a night would I steal from
between the sheets, and climbing upon the high oak chest that stood
before my bedroom window, sit peering down fearfully upon the aged
gray tombstones far below, wondering whether the shadows that crept
among them might not be ghosts--soiled ghosts that had lost their
natural whiteness by long exposure to the city's smoke, and had
grown dingy, like the snow that sometimes lay there.

I persuaded myself that they were ghosts, and came, at length, to
have quite a friendly feeling for them.  I wondered what they
thought when they saw the fading letters of their own names upon the
stones, whether they remembered themselves and wished they were
alive again, or whether they were happier as they were.  But that
seemed a still sadder idea.

One night, as I sat there watching, I felt a hand upon my shoulder.
I was not frightened, because it was a soft, gentle hand that I well
knew, so I merely laid my cheek against it.

"What's mumma's naughty boy doing out of bed?  Shall I beat him?"
And the other hand was laid against my other cheek, and I could feel
the soft curls mingling with my own.

"Only looking at the ghosts, ma," I answered.  "There's such a lot
of 'em down there."  Then I added, musingly, "I wonder what it feels
like to be a ghost."

My mother said nothing, but took me up in her arms, and carried me
back to bed, and then, sitting down beside me, and holding my hand
in hers--there was not so very much difference in the size--began to
sing in that low, caressing voice of hers that always made me feel,
for the time being, that I wanted to be a good boy, a song she often
used to sing to me, and that I have never heard any one else sing
since, and should not care to.

But while she sang, something fell on my hand that caused me to sit
up and insist on examining her eyes.  She laughed; rather a strange,
broken little laugh, I thought, and said it was nothing, and told me
to lie still and go to sleep.  So I wriggled down again and shut my
eyes tight, but I could not understand what had made her cry.

Poor little mother, she had a notion, founded evidently upon inborn
belief rather than upon observation, that all children were angels,
and that, in consequence, an altogether exceptional demand existed
for them in a certain other place, where there are more openings for
angels, rendering their retention in this world difficult and
undependable.  My talk about ghosts must have made that foolishly
fond heart ache with a vague dread that night, and for many a night
onward, I fear.

For some time after this I would often look up to find my mother's
eyes fixed upon me.  Especially closely did she watch me at feeding
times, and on these occasions, as the meal progressed, her face
would acquire an expression of satisfaction and relief.

Once, during dinner, I heard her whisper to my father (for children
are not quite so deaf as their elders think), "He seems to eat all
right."

"Eat!" replied my father in the same penetrating undertone; "if he
dies of anything, it will be of eating."

So my little mother grew less troubled, and, as the days went by,
saw reason to think that my brother angels might consent to do
without me for yet a while longer; and I, putting away the child
with his ghostly fancies, became, in course of time, a grown-up
person, and ceased to believe in ghosts, together with many other
things that, perhaps, it were better for a man if he did believe in.

But the memory of that dingy graveyard, and of the shadows that
dwelt therein, came back to me very vividly the other day, for it
seemed to me as though I were a ghost myself, gliding through the
silent streets where once I had passed swiftly, full of life.

Diving into a long unopened drawer, I had, by chance, drawn forth a
dusty volume of manuscript, labelled upon its torn brown paper
cover, NOVEL NOTES.  The scent of dead days clung to its dogs'-eared
pages; and, as it lay open before me, my memory wandered back to the
summer evenings--not so very long ago, perhaps, if one but adds up
the years, but a long, long while ago if one measures Time by
feeling--when four friends had sat together making it, who would
never sit together any more.  With each crumpled leaf I turned, the
uncomfortable conviction that I was only a ghost, grew stronger.
The handwriting was my own, but the words were the words of a
stranger, so that as I read I wondered to myself, saying:  did I
ever think this? did I really hope that? did I plan to do this? did
I resolve to be such? does life, then, look so to the eyes of a
young man? not knowing whether to smile or sigh.

The book was a compilation, half diary, half memoranda.  In it lay
the record of many musings, of many talks, and out of it--selecting
what seemed suitable, adding, altering, and arranging--I have shaped
the chapters that hereafter follow.

That I have a right to do so I have fully satisfied my own
conscience, an exceptionally fussy one.  Of the four joint authors,
he whom I call "MacShaughnassy" has laid aside his title to all
things beyond six feet of sun-scorched ground in the African veldt;
while from him I have designated "Brown" I have borrowed but little,
and that little I may fairly claim to have made my own by reason of
the artistic merit with which I have embellished it.  Indeed, in
thus taking a few of his bald ideas and shaping them into readable
form, am I not doing him a kindness, and thereby returning good for
evil?  For has he not, slipping from the high ambition of his youth,
sunk ever downward step by step, until he has become a critic, and,
therefore, my natural enemy?  Does he not, in the columns of a
certain journal of large pretension but small circulation, call me
"'Arry" (without an "H," the satirical rogue), and is not his
contempt for the English-speaking people based chiefly upon the fact
that some of them read my books?  But in the days of Bloomsbury
lodgings and first-night pits we thought each other clever.

From "Jephson" I hold a letter, dated from a station deep in the
heart of the Queensland bush.  "Do what you like with it, dear boy,"
the letter runs, "so long as you keep me out of it.  Thanks for your
complimentary regrets, but I cannot share them.  I was never fitted
for a literary career.  Lucky for me, I found it out in time.  Some
poor devils don't.  (I'm not getting at you, old man.  We read all
your stuff, and like it very much.  Time hangs a bit heavy, you
know, here, in the winter, and we are glad of almost anything.)
This life suits me better.  I love to feel my horse between my
thighs, and the sun upon my skin.  And there are the youngsters
growing up about us, and the hands to look after, and the stock.  I
daresay it seems a very commonplace unintellectual life to you, but
it satisfies my nature more than the writing of books could ever do.
Besides, there are too many authors as it is.  The world is so busy
reading and writing, it has no time left for thinking.  You'll tell
me, of course, that books are thought, but that is only the jargon
of the Press.  You come out here, old man, and sit as I do sometimes
for days and nights together alone with the dumb cattle on an
upheaved island of earth, as it were, jutting out into the deep sky,
and you will know that they are not.  What a man thinks--really
thinks--goes down into him and grows in silence.  What a man writes
in books are the thoughts that he wishes to be thought to think."


Poor Jephson! he promised so well at one time.  But he always had
strange notions.



CHAPTER I



When, on returning home one evening, after a pipe party at my friend
Jephson's, I informed my wife that I was going to write a novel, she
expressed herself as pleased with the idea.  She said she had often
wondered I had never thought of doing so before.  "Look," she added,
"how silly all the novels are nowadays; I'm sure you could write
one."  (Ethelbertha intended to be complimentary, I am convinced;
but there is a looseness about her mode of expression which, at
times, renders her meaning obscure.)

When, however, I told her that my friend Jephson was going to
collaborate with me, she remarked, "Oh," in a doubtful tone; and
when I further went on to explain to her that Selkirk Brown and
Derrick MacShaughnassy were also going to assist, she replied, "Oh,"
in a tone which contained no trace of doubtfulness whatever, and
from which it was clear that her interest in the matter, as a
practical scheme, had entirely evaporated.

I fancy that the fact of my three collaborators being all bachelors
diminished somewhat our chances of success, in Ethelbertha's mind.
Against bachelors, as a class, she entertains a strong prejudice.  A
man's not having sense enough to want to marry, or, having that, not
having wit enough to do it, argues to her thinking either weakness
of intellect or natural depravity, the former rendering its victim
unable, and the latter unfit, ever to become a really useful
novelist.

I tried to make her understand the peculiar advantages our plan
possessed.

"You see," I explained, "in the usual common-place novel we only
get, as a matter of fact, one person's ideas.  Now, in this novel,
there will be four clever men all working together.  The public will
thus be enabled to obtain the thoughts and opinions of the whole
four of us, at the price usually asked for merely one author's
views.  If the British reader knows his own business, he will order
this book early, to avoid disappointment.  Such an opportunity may
not occur again for years."

Ethelbertha agreed that this was probable.

"Besides," I continued, my enthusiasm waxing stronger the more I
reflected upon the matter, "this work is going to be a genuine
bargain in another way also.  We are not going to put our mere
everyday ideas into it.  We are going to crowd into this one novel
all the wit and wisdom that the whole four of us possess, if the
book will hold it.  We shall not write another novel after this one.
Indeed, we shall not be able to; we shall have nothing more to
write.  This work will partake of the nature of an intellectual
clearance sale.  We are going to put into this novel simply all we
know."

Ethelbertha shut her lips, and said something inside; and then
remarked aloud that she supposed it would be a one volume affair.

I felt hurt at the implied sneer.  I pointed out to her that there
already existed a numerous body of specially-trained men employed to
do nothing else but make disagreeable observations upon authors and
their works--a duty that, so far as I could judge, they seemed
capable of performing without any amateur assistance whatever.  And
I hinted that, by his own fireside, a literary man looked to breathe
a more sympathetic atmosphere.

Ethelbertha replied that of course I knew what she meant.  She said
that she was not thinking of me, and that Jephson was, no doubt,
sensible enough (Jephson is engaged), but she did not see the object
of bringing half the parish into it.  (Nobody suggested bringing
"half the parish" into it.  Ethelbertha will talk so wildly.)  To
suppose that Brown and MacShaughnassy could be of any use whatever,
she considered absurd.  What could a couple of raw bachelors know
about life and human nature?  As regarded MacShaughnassy in
particular, she was of opinion that if we only wanted out of him all
that HE knew, and could keep him to the subject, we ought to be able
to get that into about a page.

My wife's present estimate of MacShaughnassy's knowledge is the
result of reaction.  The first time she ever saw him, she and he got
on wonderfully well together; and when I returned to the drawing-
room, after seeing him down to the gate, her first words were, "What
a wonderful man that Mr. MacShaughnassy is.  He seems to know so
much about everything."

That describes MacShaughnassy exactly.  He does seem to know a
tremendous lot.  He is possessed of more information than any man I
ever came across.  Occasionally, it is correct information; but,
speaking broadly, it is remarkable for its marvellous unreliability.
Where he gets it from is a secret that nobody has ever yet been able
to fathom.

Ethelbertha was very young when we started housekeeping.  (Our first
butcher very nearly lost her custom, I remember, once and for ever
by calling her "Missie," and giving her a message to take back to
her mother.  She arrived home in tears.  She said that perhaps she
wasn't fit to be anybody's wife, but she did not see why she should
be told so by the tradespeople.)  She was naturally somewhat
inexperienced in domestic affairs, and, feeling this keenly, was
grateful to any one who would give her useful hints and advice.
When MacShaughnassy came along he seemed, in her eyes, a sort of
glorified Mrs. Beeton.  He knew everything wanted to be known inside
a house, from the scientific method of peeling a potato to the cure
of spasms in cats, and Ethelbertha would sit at his feet,
figuratively speaking, and gain enough information in one evening to
make the house unlivable in for a month.

He told her how fires ought to be laid.  He said that the way fires
were usually laid in this country was contrary to all the laws of
nature, and he showed her how the thing was done in Crim Tartary, or
some such place, where the science of laying fires is alone properly
understood.  He proved to her that an immense saving in time and
labour, to say nothing of coals, could be effected by the adoption
of the Crim Tartary system; and he taught it to her then and there,
and she went straight downstairs and explained it to the girl.

Amenda, our then "general," was an extremely stolid young person,
and, in some respects, a model servant.  She never argued.  She
never seemed to have any notions of her own whatever.  She accepted
our ideas without comment, and carried them out with such pedantic
precision and such evident absence of all feeling of responsibility
concerning the result as to surround our home legislation with quite
a military atmosphere.

On the present occasion she stood quietly by while the
MacShaughnassy method of fire-laying was expounded to her.  When
Ethelbertha had finished she simply said:-

"You want me to lay the fires like that?"

"Yes, Amenda, we'll always have the fires laid like that in future,
if you please."

"All right, mum," replied Amenda, with perfect unconcern, and there
the matter ended, for that evening.

On coming downstairs the next morning we found the breakfast table
spread very nicely, but there was no breakfast.  We waited.  Ten
minutes went by--a quarter of an hour--twenty minutes.  Then
Ethelbertha rang the bell.  In response Amenda presented herself,
calm and respectful.

"Do you know that the proper time for breakfast is half-past eight,
Amenda?"

"Yes'm."

"And do you know that it's now nearly nine?"

"Yes'm."

"Well, isn't breakfast ready?"

"No, mum."

"Will it EVER be ready?"

"Well, mum," replied Amenda, in a tone of genial frankness, "to tell
you the truth, I don't think it ever will."

"What's the reason?  Won't the fire light?"

"Oh yes, it lights all right."

"Well, then, why can't you cook the breakfast?"

"Because before you can turn yourself round it goes out again."

Amenda never volunteered statements.  She answered the question put
to her and then stopped dead.  I called downstairs to her on one
occasion, before I understood her peculiarities, to ask her if she
knew the time.  She replied, "Yes, sir," and disappeared into the
back kitchen.  At the end of thirty seconds or so, I called down
again.  "I asked you, Amenda," I said reproachfully, "to tell me the
time about ten minutes ago."

"Oh, did you?" she called back pleasantly.  "I beg your pardon.  I
thought you asked me if I knew it--it's half-past four."

Ethelbertha inquired--to return to our fire--if she had tried
lighting it again.

"Oh yes, mum," answered the girl.  "I've tried four times."  Then
she added cheerfully, "I'll try again if you like, mum."

Amenda was the most willing servant we ever paid wages to.

Ethelbertha said she would step down and light the fire herself, and
told Amenda to follow her and watch how she did it.  I felt
interested in the experiment, and followed also.  Ethelbertha tucked
up her frock and set to work.  Amenda and I stood around and looked
on.

At the end of half an hour Ethelbertha retired from the contest,
hot, dirty, and a trifle irritable.  The fireplace retained the same
cold, cynical expression with which it had greeted our entrance.

Then I tried.  I honestly tried my best.  I was eager and anxious to
succeed.  For one reason, I wanted my breakfast.  For another, I
wanted to be able to say that I had done this thing.  It seemed to
me that for any human being to light a fire, laid as that fire was
laid, would be a feat to be proud of.  To light a fire even under
ordinary circumstances is not too easy a task:  to do so,
handicapped by MacShaughnassy's rules, would, I felt, be an
achievement pleasant to look back upon.  My idea, had I succeeded,
would have been to go round the neighbourhood and brag about it.

However, I did not succeed.  I lit various other things, including
the kitchen carpet and the cat, who would come sniffing about, but
the materials within the stove appeared to be fire-proof.

Ethelbertha and I sat down, one each side of our cheerless hearth,
and looked at one another, and thought of MacShaughnassy, until
Amenda chimed in on our despair with one of those practical
suggestions of hers that she occasionally threw out for us to accept
or not, as we chose.

"Maybe," said she, "I'd better light it in the old way just for to-
day."

"Do, Amenda," said Ethelbertha, rising.  And then she added, "I
think we'll always have them lighted in the old way, Amenda, if you
please."

Another time he showed us how to make coffee--according to the
Arabian method.  Arabia must be a very untidy country if they made
coffee often over there.  He dirtied two saucepans, three jugs, one
tablecloth, one nutmeg-grater, one hearthrug, three cups, and
himself.  This made coffee for two--what would have been necessary
in the case of a party, one dares not think.

That we did not like the coffee when made, MacShaughnassy attributed
to our debased taste--the result of long indulgence in an inferior
article.  He drank both cups himself, and afterwards went home in a
cab.

He had an aunt in those days, I remember, a mysterious old lady, who
lived in some secluded retreat from where she wrought incalculable
mischief upon MacShaughnassy's friends.  What he did not know--the
one or two things that he was NOT an authority upon--this aunt of
his knew.  "No," he would say with engaging candour--"no, that is a
thing I cannot advise you about myself.  But," he would add, "I'll
tell you what I'll do.  I'll write to my aunt and ask her."  And a
day or two afterwards he would call again, bringing his aunt's
advice with him; and, if you were young and inexperienced, or a
natural born fool, you might possibly follow it.

She sent us a recipe on one occasion, through MacShaughnassy, for
the extermination of blackbeetles.  We occupied a very picturesque
old house; but, as with most picturesque old houses, its advantages
were chiefly external.  There were many holes and cracks and
crevices within its creaking framework.  Frogs, who had lost their
way and taken the wrong turning, would suddenly discover themselves
in the middle of our dining-room, apparently quite as much to their
own surprise and annoyance as to ours.  A numerous company of rats
and mice, remarkably fond of physical exercise, had fitted the place
up as a gymnasium for themselves; and our kitchen, after ten
o'clock, was turned into a blackbeetles' club.  They came up through
the floor and out through the walls, and gambolled there in their
light-hearted, reckless way till daylight.

The rats and mice Amenda did not object to.  She said she liked to
watch them.  But against the blackbeetles she was prejudiced.
Therefore, when my wife informed her that MacShaughnassy's aunt had
given us an infallible recipe for their annihilation, she rejoiced.

We purchased the materials, manufactured the mixture, and put it
about.  The beetles came and ate it.  They seemed to like it.  They
finished it all up, and were evidently vexed that there was not
more.  But they did not die.

We told these facts to MacShaughnassy.  He smiled, a very grim
smile, and said in a low tone, full of meaning, "Let them eat!"

It appeared that this was one of those slow, insidious poisons.  It
did not kill the beetle off immediately, but it undermined his
constitution.  Day by day he would sink and droop without being able
to tell what was the matter with himself, until one morning we
should enter the kitchen to find him lying cold and very still.

So we made more stuff and laid it round each night, and the
blackbeetles from all about the parish swarmed to it.  Each night
they came in greater quantities.  They fetched up all their friends
and relations.  Strange beetles--beetles from other families, with
no claim on us whatever--got to hear about the thing, and came in
hordes, and tried to rob our blackbeetles of it.  By the end of a
week we had lured into our kitchen every beetle that wasn't lame for
miles round.

MacShaughnassy said it was a good thing.  We should clear the suburb
at one swoop.  The beetles had now been eating this poison steadily
for ten days, and he said that the end could not be far off.  I was
glad to hear it, because I was beginning to find this unlimited
hospitality expensive.  It was a dear poison that we were giving
them, and they were hearty eaters.

We went downstairs to see how they were getting on.  MacShaughnassy
thought they seemed queer, and was of opinion that they were
breaking up.  Speaking for myself, I can only say that a healthier-
looking lot of beetles I never wish to see.

One, it is true, did die that very evening.  He was detected in the
act of trying to make off with an unfairly large portion of the
poison, and three or four of the others set upon him savagely and
killed him.

But he was the only one, so far as I could ever discover, to whom
MacShaughnassy's recipe proved fatal.  As for the others, they grew
fat and sleek upon it.  Some of them, indeed, began to acquire quite
a figure.  We lessened their numbers eventually by the help of some
common oil-shop stuff.  But such vast numbers, attracted by
MacShaughnassy's poison, had settled in the house, that to finally
exterminate them now was hopeless.

I have not heard of MacShaughnassy's aunt lately.  Possibly, one of
MacShaughnassy's bosom friends has found out her address and has
gone down and murdered her.  If so, I should like to thank him.

I tried a little while ago to cure MacShaughnassy of his fatal
passion for advice-giving, by repeating to him a very sad story that
was told to me by a gentleman I met in an American railway car.  I
was travelling from Buffalo to New York, and, during the day, it
suddenly occurred to me that I might make the journey more
interesting by leaving the cars at Albany and completing the
distance by water.  But I did not know how the boats ran, and I had
no guide-book with me.  I glanced about for some one to question.  A
mild-looking, elderly gentleman sat by the next window reading a
book, the cover of which was familiar to me.  I deemed him to be
intelligent, and approached him.

"I beg your pardon for interrupting you," I said, sitting down
opposite to him, "but could you give me any information about the
boats between Albany and New York?"

"Well," he answered, looking up with a pleasant smile, "there are
three lines of boats altogether.  There is the Heggarty line, but
they only go as far as Catskill.  Then there are the Poughkeepsie
boats, which go every other day.  Or there is what we call the canal
boat."

"Oh," I said.  "Well now, which would you advise me to--"

He jumped to his feet with a cry, and stood glaring down at me with
a gleam in his eyes which was positively murderous.

"You villain!" he hissed in low tones of concentrated fury, "so
that's your game, is it?  I'll give you something that you'll want
advice about," and he whipped out a six-chambered revolver.

I felt hurt.  I also felt that if the interview were prolonged I
might feel even more hurt.  So I left him without a word, and
drifted over to the other end of the car, where I took up a position
between a stout lady and the door.

I was still musing upon the incident, when, looking up, I observed
my elderly friend making towards me.  I rose and laid my hand upon
the door-knob.  He should not find me unprepared.  He smiled,
reassuringly, however, and held out his hand.

"I've been thinking," he said, "that maybe I was a little rude just
now.  I should like, if you will let me, to explain.  I think, when
you have heard my story, you will understand, and forgive me."

There was that about him which made me trust him.  We found a quiet
corner in the smoking-car.  I had a "whiskey sour," and he
prescribed for himself a strange thing of his own invention.  Then
we lighted our cigars, and he talked.

"Thirty years ago," said he, "I was a young man with a healthy
belief in myself, and a desire to do good to others.  I did not
imagine myself a genius.  I did not even consider myself
exceptionally brilliant or talented.  But it did seem to me, and the
more I noted the doings of my fellow-men and women, the more assured
did I become of it, that I possessed plain, practical common sense
to an unusual and remarkable degree.  Conscious of this, I wrote a
little book, which I entitled How to be Happy, Wealthy, and Wise,
and published it at my own expense.  I did not seek for profit.  I
merely wished to be useful.

The book did not make the stir that I had anticipated.  Some two or
three hundred copies went off, and then the sale practically ceased.

I confess that at first I was disappointed.  But after a while, I
reflected that, if people would not take my advice, it was more
their loss than mine, and I dismissed the matter from my mind.

One morning, about a twelvemonth afterwards, I was sitting in my
study, when the servant entered to say that there was a man
downstairs who wanted very much to see me.

"I gave instructions that he should be sent up, and up accordingly
he came.

"He was a common man, but he had an open, intelligent countenance,
and his manner was most respectful.  I motioned him to be seated.
He selected a chair, and sat down on the extreme edge of it.

"'I hope you'll pard'n this intrusion, sir,' he began, speaking
deliberately, and twirling his hat the while; 'but I've come more'n
two hundred miles to see you, sir.'

"I expressed myself as pleased, and he continued:  'They tell me,
sir, as you're the gentleman as wrote that little book, How to be
Happy, Wealthy, and Wise."

He enumerated the three items slowly, dwelling lovingly on each.  I
admitted the fact.

"'Ah, that's a wonderful book, sir,' he went on.  'I ain't one of
them as has got brains of their own--not to speak of--but I know
enough to know them as has; and when I read that little book, I says
to myself, Josiah Hackett (that's my name, sir), when you're in
doubt don't you get addling that thick head o' yours, as will only
tell you all wrong; you go to the gentleman as wrote that little
book and ask him for his advice.  He is a kind-hearted gentleman, as
any one can tell, and he'll give it you; and WHEN you've got it, you
go straight ahead, full steam, and don't you stop for nothing,
'cause he'll know what's best for you, same as he knows what's best
for everybody.  That's what I says, sir; and that's what I'm here
for.'

"He paused, and wiped his brow with a green cotton handkerchief.  I
prayed him to proceed.

"It appeared that the worthy fellow wanted to marry, but could not
make up his mind WHOM he wanted to marry.  He had his eye--so he
expressed it--upon two young women, and they, he had reason to
believe, regarded him in return with more than usual favour.  His
difficulty was to decide which of the two--both of them excellent
and deserving young persons--would make him the best wife.  The one,
Juliana, the only daughter of a retired sea-captain, he described as
a winsome lassie.  The other, Hannah, was an older and altogether
more womanly girl.  She was the eldest of a large family.  Her
father, he said, was a God-fearing man, and was doing well in the
timber trade.  He asked me which of them I should advise him to
marry.

"I was flattered.  What man in my position would not have been?
This Josiah Hackett had come from afar to hear my wisdom.  He was
willing--nay, anxious--to entrust his whole life's happiness to my
discretion.  That he was wise in so doing, I entertained no doubt.
The choice of a wife I had always held to be a matter needing a
calm, unbiassed judgment, such as no lover could possibly bring to
bear upon the subject.  In such a case, I should not have hesitated
to offer advice to the wisest of men.  To this poor, simple-minded
fellow, I felt it would be cruel to refuse it.

"He handed me photographs of both the young persons under
consideration.  I jotted down on the back of each such particulars
as I deemed would assist me in estimating their respective fitness
for the vacancy in question, and promised to carefully consider the
problem, and write him in a day or two.

"His gratitude was touching.  'Don't you trouble to write no
letters, sir,' he said; 'you just stick down "Julia" or "Hannah" on
a bit of paper, and put it in an envelope.  I shall know what it
means, and that's the one as I shall marry.'

"Then he gripped me by the hand and left me.

"I gave a good deal of thought to the selection of Josiah's wife.  I
wanted him to be happy.

"Juliana was certainly very pretty.  There was a lurking playfulness
about the corners of Juliana's mouth which conjured up the sound of
rippling laughter.  Had I acted on impulse, I should have clasped
Juliana in Josiah's arms.

"But, I reflected, more sterling qualities than mere playfulness and
prettiness are needed for a wife.  Hannah, though not so charming,
clearly possessed both energy and sense--qualities highly necessary
to a poor man's wife.  Hannah's father was a pious man, and was
'doing well'--a thrifty, saving man, no doubt.  He would have
instilled into her lessons of economy and virtue; and, later on, she
might possibly come in for a little something.  She was the eldest
of a large family.  She was sure to have had to help her mother a
good deal.  She would be experienced in household matters, and would
understand the bringing up of children.

"Julia's father, on the other hand, was a retired sea-captain.
Seafaring folk are generally loose sort of fish.  He had probably
been in the habit of going about the house, using language and
expressing views, the hearing of which could not but have exercised
an injurious effect upon the formation of a growing girl's
character.  Juliana was his only child.  Only children generally
make bad men and women.  They are allowed to have their own way too
much.  The pretty daughter of a retired sea-captain would be certain
to be spoilt.

"Josiah, I had also to remember, was a man evidently of weak
character.  He would need management.  Now, there was something
about Hannah's eye that eminently suggested management.

"At the end of two days my mind was made up.  I wrote 'Hannah' on a
slip of paper, and posted it.

"A fortnight afterwards I received a letter from Josiah.  He thanked
me for my advice, but added, incidentally, that he wished I could
have made it Julia.  However, he said, he felt sure I knew best, and
by the time I received the letter he and Hannah would be one.

"That letter worried me.  I began to wonder if, after all, I had
chosen the right girl.  Suppose Hannah was not all I thought her!
What a terrible thing it would be for Josiah.  What data, sufficient
to reason upon, had I possessed?  How did I know that Hannah was not
a lazy, ill-tempered girl, a continual thorn in the side of her
poor, overworked mother, and a perpetual blister to her younger
brothers and sisters?  How did I know she had been well brought up?
Her father might be a precious old fraud:  most seemingly pious men
are.  She may have learned from him only hypocrisy.

"Then also, how did I know that Juliana's merry childishness would
not ripen into sweet, cheerful womanliness?  Her father, for all I
knew to the contrary, might be the model of what a retired sea-
captain should be; with possibly a snug little sum safely invested
somewhere.  And Juliana was his only child.  What reason had I for
rejecting this fair young creature's love for Josiah?

"I took her photo from my desk.  I seemed to detect a reproachful
look in the big eyes.  I saw before me the scene in the little far-
away home when the first tidings of Josiah's marriage fell like a
cruel stone into the hitherto placid waters of her life.  I saw her
kneeling by her father's chair, while the white-haired, bronzed old
man gently stroked the golden head, shaking with silent sobs against
his breast.  My remorse was almost more than I could bear.

"I put her aside and took up Hannah--my chosen one.  She seemed to
be regarding me with a smile of heartless triumph.  There began to
take possession of me a feeling of positive dislike to Hannah.

"I fought against the feeling.  I told myself it was prejudice.  But
the more I reasoned against it the stronger it became.  I could tell
that, as the days went by, it would grow from dislike to loathing,
from loathing to hate.  And this was the woman I had deliberately
selected as a life companion for Josiah!

"For weeks I knew no peace of mind.  Every letter that arrived I
dreaded to open, fearing it might be from Josiah.  At every knock I
started up, and looked about for a hiding-place.  Every time I came
across the heading, 'Domestic Tragedy,' in the newspapers, I broke
into a cold perspiration.  I expected to read that Josiah and Hannah
had murdered each other, and died cursing me.

"As the time went by, however, and I heard nothing, my fears began
to assuage, and my belief in my own intuitive good judgment to
return.  Maybe, I had done a good thing for Josiah and Hannah, and
they were blessing me.  Three years passed peacefully away, and I
was beginning to forget the existence of the Hacketts.

"Then he came again.  I returned home from business one evening to
find him waiting for me in the hall.  The moment I saw him I knew
that my worst fears had fallen short of the truth.  I motioned him
to follow me to my study.  He did so, and seated himself in the
identical chair on which he had sat three years ago.  The change in
him was remarkable; he looked old and careworn.  His manner was that
of resigned hopelessness.

"We remained for a while without speaking, he twirling his hat as at
our first interview, I making a show of arranging papers on my desk.
At length, feeling that anything would be more bearable than this
silence, I turned to him.

"'Things have not been going well with you, I'm afraid, Josiah?' I
said.

"'No, sir,' he replied quietly; 'I can't say as they have,
altogether.  That Hannah of yours has turned out a bit of a teaser.'

"There was no touch of reproach in his tones.  He simply stated a
melancholy fact.

"'But she is a good wife to you in other ways,' I urged.  'She has
her faults, of course.  We all have.  But she is energetic.  Come
now, you will admit she's energetic.'

"I owed it to myself to find some good in Hannah, and this was the
only thing I could think of at that moment.

"'Oh yes, she's that,' he assented.  'A little too much so for our
sized house, I sometimes think.'

"'You see,' he went on, 'she's a bit cornery in her temper, Hannah
is; and then her mother's a bit trying, at times.'

"'Her mother!' I exclaimed, 'but what's SHE got to do with you?'

"'Well, you see, sir,' he answered, 'she's living with us now--ever
since the old man went off.'

"'Hannah's father!  Is he dead, then?'

"'Well, not exactly, sir,' he replied.  'He ran off about a
twelvemonth ago with one of the young women who used to teach in the
Sunday School, and joined the Mormons.  It came as a great surprise
to every one.'

"I groaned.  'And his business,' I inquired--'the timber business,
who carries that on?'

"'Oh, that!' answered Josiah.  'Oh, that had to be sold to pay his
debts--leastways, to go towards 'em.'

"I remarked what a terrible thing it was for his family.  I supposed
the home was broken up, and they were all scattered.

"'No, sir,' he replied simply, 'they ain't scattered much.  They're
all living with us.'

"'But there,' he continued, seeing the look upon my face; 'of
course, all this has nothing to do with you sir.  You've got
troubles of your own, I daresay, sir.  I didn't come here to worry
you with mine.  That would be a poor return for all your kindness to
me.'

"'What has become of Julia?' I asked.  I did not feel I wanted to
question him any more about his own affairs.

"A smile broke the settled melancholy of his features.  'Ah,' he
said, in a more cheerful tone than he had hitherto employed, 'it
does one good to think about HER, it does.  She's married to a
friend of mine now, young Sam Jessop.  I slips out and gives 'em a
call now and then, when Hannah ain't round.  Lord, it's like getting
a glimpse of heaven to look into their little home.  He often chaffs
me about it, Sam does.  "Well, you WAS a sawny-headed chunk, Josiah,
YOU was," he often says to me.  We're old chums, you know, sir, Sam
and me, so he don't mind joking a bit like.'

"Then the smile died away, and he added with a sigh, 'Yes, I've
often thought since, sir, how jolly it would have been if you could
have seen your way to making it Juliana.'

"I felt I must get him back to Hannah at any cost.  I said, 'I
suppose you and your wife are still living in the old place?'

"'Yes,' he replied, 'if you can call it living.  It's a hard
struggle with so many of us.'

"He said he did not know how he should have managed if it had not
been for the help of Julia's father.  He said the captain had
behaved more like an angel than anything else he knew of.

"'I don't say as he's one of your clever sort, you know, sir,' he
explained.  'Not the man as one would go to for advice, like one
would to you, sir; but he's a good sort for all that.'

"'And that reminds me, sir,' he went on, 'of what I've come here
about.  You'll think it very bold of me to ask, sir, but--'

"I interrupted him.  'Josiah,' I said, 'I admit that I am much to
blame for what has come upon you.  You asked me for my advice, and I
gave it you.  Which of us was the bigger idiot, we will not discuss.
The point is that I did give it, and I am not a man to shirk my
responsibilities.  What, in reason, you ask, and I can grant, I will
give you.'

"He was overcome with gratitude.  'I knew it, sir,' he said.  'I
knew you would not refuse me.  I said so to Hannah.  I said, "I will
go to that gentleman and ask him.  I will go to him and ask him for
his advice.'"

"I said, 'His what?'

"'His advice,' repeated Josiah, apparently surprised at my tone, 'on
a little matter as I can't quite make up my mind about.'

"I thought at first he was trying to be sarcastic, but he wasn't.
That man sat there, and wrestled with me for my advice as to whether
he should invest a thousand dollars which Julia's father had offered
to lend him, in the purchase of a laundry business or a bar.  He
hadn't had enough of it (my advice, I mean); he wanted it again, and
he spun me reasons why I should give it him.  The choice of a wife
was a different thing altogether, he argued.  Perhaps he ought NOT
to have asked me for my opinion as to that.  But advice as to which
of two trades a man would do best to select, surely any business man
could give.  He said he had just been reading again my little book,
How to be Happy, etc., and if the gentleman who wrote that could not
decide between the respective merits of one particular laundry and
one particular bar, both situate in the same city, well, then, all
he had got to say was that knowledge and wisdom were clearly of no
practical use in this world whatever.

"Well, it did seem a simple thing to advise a man about.  Surely as
to a matter of this kind, I, a professed business man, must be able
to form a sounder judgment than this poor pumpkin-headed lamb.  It
would be heartless to refuse to help him.  I promised to look into
the matter, and let him know what I thought.

"He rose and shook me by the hand.  He said he would not try to
thank me; words would only seem weak.  He dashed away a tear and
went out.

I brought an amount of thought to bear upon this thousand-dollar
investment sufficient to have floated a bank.  I did not mean to
make another Hannah job, if I could help it.  I studied the papers
Josiah had left with me, but did not attempt to form any opinion
from them.  I went down quietly to Josiah's city, and inspected both
businesses on the spot.  I instituted secret but searching inquiries
in the neighbourhood.  I disguised myself as a simple-minded young
man who had come into a little money, and wormed myself into the
confidence of the servants.  I interviewed half the town upon the
pretence that I was writing the commercial history of New England,
and should like some particulars of their career, and I invariably
ended my examination by asking them which was their favourite bar,
and where they got their washing done.  I stayed a fortnight in the
town.  Most of my spare time I spent at the bar.  In my leisure
moments I dirtied my clothes so that they might be washed at the
laundry.

"As the result of my investigations I discovered that, so far as the
two businesses themselves were concerned, there was not a pin to
choose between them.  It became merely a question of which
particular trade would best suit the Hacketts.

"I reflected.  The keeper of a bar was exposed to much temptation.
A weak-minded man, mingling continually in the company of topers,
might possibly end by giving way to drink.  Now, Josiah was an
exceptionally weak-minded man.  It had also to be borne in mind that
he had a shrewish wife, and that her whole family had come to live
with him.  Clearly, to place Josiah in a position of easy access to
unlimited liquor would be madness.

"About a laundry, on the other hand, there was something soothing.
The working of a laundry needed many hands.  Hannah's relatives
might be used up in a laundry, and made to earn their own living.
Hannah might expend her energy in flat-ironing, and Josiah could
turn the mangle.  The idea conjured up quite a pleasant domestic
picture.  I recommended the laundry.

"On the following Monday, Josiah wrote to say that he had bought the
laundry.  On Tuesday I read in the Commercial Intelligence that one
of the most remarkable features of the time was the marvellous rise
taking place all over New England in the value of hotel and bar
property.  On Thursday, in the list of failures, I came across no
less than four laundry proprietors; and the paper added, in
explanation, that the American washing industry, owing to the rapid
growth of Chinese competition, was practically on its last legs.  I
went out and got drunk.

"My life became a curse to me.  All day long I thought of Josiah.
All night I dreamed of him.  Suppose that, not content with being
the cause of his domestic misery, I had now deprived him of the
means of earning a livelihood, and had rendered useless the
generosity of that good old sea-captain.  I began to appear to
myself as a malignant fiend, ever following this simple but worthy
man to work evil upon him.

"Time passed away, however; I heard nothing from or of him, and my
burden at last fell from me.

"Then at the end of about five years he came again.

"He came behind me as I was opening the door with my latch-key, and
laid an unsteady hand upon my arm.  It was a dark night, but a gas-
lamp showed me his face.  I recognised it in spite of the red
blotches and the bleary film that hid the eyes.  I caught him
roughly by the arm, and hurried him inside and up into my study.

"'Sit down,' I hissed, 'and tell me the worst first.'

"He was about to select his favourite chair.  I felt that if I saw
him and that particular chair in association for the third time, I
should do something terrible to both.  I snatched it away from him,
and he sat down heavily on the floor, and burst into tears.  I let
him remain there, and, thickly, between hiccoughs, he told his tale.

"The laundry had gone from bad to worse.  A new railway had come to
the town, altering its whole topography.  The business and
residential portion had gradually shifted northward.  The spot where
the bar--the particular one which I had rejected for the laundry--
had formerly stood was now the commercial centre of the city.  The
man who had purchased it in place of Josiah had sold out and made a
fortune.  The southern area (where the laundry was situate) was, it
had been discovered, built upon a swamp, and was in a highly
unsanitary condition.  Careful housewives naturally objected to
sending their washing into such a neighbourhood.

"Other troubles had also come.  The baby--Josiah's pet, the one
bright thing in his life--had fallen into the copper and been
boiled.  Hannah's mother had been crushed in the mangle, and was now
a helpless cripple, who had to be waited on day and night.

"Under these accumulated misfortunes Josiah had sought consolation
in drink, and had become a hopeless sot.  He felt his degradation
keenly, and wept copiously.  He said he thought that in a cheerful
place, such as a bar, he might have been strong and brave; but that
there was something about the everlasting smell of damp clothes and
suds, that seemed to sap his manhood.

"I asked him what the captain had said to it all.  He burst into
fresh tears, and replied that the captain was no more.  That, he
added, reminded him of what he had come about.  The good-hearted old
fellow had bequeathed him five thousand dollars.  He wanted my
advice as to how to invest it.

"My first impulse was to kill him on the spot.  I wish now that I
had.  I restrained myself, however, and offered him the alternative
of being thrown from the window or of leaving by the door without
another word.

"He answered that he was quite prepared to go by the window if I
would first tell him whether to put his money in the Terra del Fuego
Nitrate Company, Limited, or in the Union Pacific Bank.  Life had no
further interest for him.  All he cared for was to feel that this
little nest-egg was safely laid by for the benefit of his beloved
ones after he was gone.

"He pressed me to tell him what I thought of nitrates.  I replied
that I declined to say anything whatever on the subject.  He assumed
from my answer that I did not think much of nitrates, and announced
his intention of investing the money, in consequence, in the Union
Pacific Bank.

"I told him by all means to do so, if he liked.

"He paused, and seemed to be puzzling it out.  Then he smiled
knowingly, and said he thought he understood what I meant.  It was
very kind of me.  He should put every dollar he possessed in the
Terra del Fuego Nitrate Company.

"He rose (with difficulty) to go.  I stopped him.  I knew, as
certainly as I knew the sun would rise the next morning, that
whichever company I advised him, or he persisted in thinking I had
advised him (which was the same thing), to invest in, would, sooner
or later, come to smash.  My grandmother had all her little fortune
in the Terra del Fuego Nitrate Company.  I could not see her brought
to penury in her old age.  As for Josiah, it could make no
difference to him whatever.  He would lose his money in any event.
I advised him to invest in Union Pacific Bank Shares.  He went and
did it.

"The Union Pacific Bank held out for eighteen months.  Then it began
to totter.  The financial world stood bewildered.  It had always
been reckoned one of the safest banks in the country.  People asked
what could be the cause.  I knew well enough, but I did not tell.

"The Bank made a gallant fight, but the hand of fate was upon it.
At the end of another nine months the crash came.

"(Nitrates, it need hardly be said, had all this time been going up
by leaps and bounds.  My grandmother died worth a million dollars,
and left the whole of it to a charity.  Had she known how I had
saved her from ruin, she might have been more grateful.)

"A few days after the failure of the Bank, Josiah arrived on my
doorstep; and, this time, he brought his families with him.  There
were sixteen of them in all.

"What was I to do?  I had brought these people step by step to the
verge of starvation.  I had laid waste alike their happiness and
their prospects in life.  The least amends I could make was to see
that at all events they did not want for the necessities of
existence.

"That was seventeen years ago.  I am still seeing that they do not
want for the necessities of existence; and my conscience is growing
easier by noticing that they seem contented with their lot.  There
are twenty-two of them now, and we have hopes of another in the
spring.

"That is my story," he said.  "Perhaps you will now understand my
sudden emotion when you asked for my advice.  As a matter of fact, I
do not give advice now on any subject."


I told this tale to MacShaughnassy.  He agreed with me that it was
instructive, and said he should remember it.  He said he should
remember it so as to tell it to some fellows that he knew, to whom
he thought the lesson should prove useful.



CHAPTER II



I can't honestly say that we made much progress at our first
meeting.  It was Brown's fault.  He would begin by telling us a
story about a dog.  It was the old, old story of the dog who had
been in the habit of going every morning to a certain baker's shop
with a penny in his mouth, in exchange for which he always received
a penny bun.  One day, the baker, thinking he would not know the
difference, tried to palm off upon the poor animal a ha'penny bun,
whereupon the dog walked straight outside and fetched in a
policeman.  Brown had heard this chestnut for the first time that
afternoon, and was full of it.  It is always a mystery to me where
Brown has been for the last hundred years.  He stops you in the
street with, "Oh, I must tell you!--such a capital story!"  And he
thereupon proceeds to relate to you, with much spirit and gusto, one
of Noah's best known jokes, or some story that Romulus must have
originally told to Remus.  One of these days somebody will tell him
the history of Adam and Eve, and he will think he has got hold of a
new plot, and will work it up into a novel.

He gives forth these hoary antiquities as personal reminiscences of
his own, or, at furthest, as episodes in the life of his second
cousin.  There are certain strange and moving catastrophes that
would seem either to have occurred to, or to have been witnessed by,
nearly every one you meet.  I never came across a man yet who had
not seen some other man jerked off the top of an omnibus into a mud-
cart.  Half London must, at one time or another, have been jerked
off omnibuses into mud-carts, and have been fished out at the end of
a shovel.

Then there is the tale of the lady whose husband is taken suddenly
ill one night at an hotel.  She rushes downstairs, and prepares a
stiff mustard plaster to put on him, and runs up with it again.  In
her excitement, however, she charges into the wrong room, and,
rolling down the bedclothes, presses it lovingly upon the wrong man.
I have heard that story so often that I am quite nervous about going
to bed in an hotel now.  Each man who has told it me has invariably
slept in the room next door to that of the victim, and has been
awakened by the man's yell as the plaster came down upon him.  That
is how he (the story-teller) came to know all about it.

Brown wanted us to believe that this prehistoric animal he had been
telling us about had belonged to his brother-in-law, and was hurt
when Jephson murmured, sotto voce, that that made the twenty-eighth
man he had met whose brother-in-law had owned that dog--to say
nothing of the hundred and seventeen who had owned it themselves.

We tried to get to work afterwards, but Brown had unsettled us for
the evening.  It is a wicked thing to start dog stories among a
party of average sinful men.  Let one man tell a dog story, and
every other man in the room feels he wants to tell a bigger one.

There is a story going--I cannot vouch for its truth, it was told me
by a judge--of a man who lay dying.  The pastor of the parish, a
good and pious man, came to sit with him, and, thinking to cheer him
up, told him an anecdote about a dog.  When the pastor had finished,
the sick man sat up, and said, "I know a better story than that.  I
had a dog once, a big, brown, lop-sided--"

The effort had proved too much for his strength.  He fell back upon
the pillows, and the doctor, stepping forward, saw that it was a
question only of minutes.

The good old pastor rose, and took the poor fellow's hand in his,
and pressed it.  "We shall meet again," he gently said.

The sick man turned towards him with a consoled and grateful look.

"I'm glad to hear you say that," he feebly murmured.  "Remind me
about that dog."

Then he passed peacefully away, with a sweet smile upon his pale
lips.

Brown, who had had his dog story and was satisfied, wanted us to
settle our heroine; but the rest of us did not feel equal to
settling anybody just then.  We were thinking of all the true dog
stories we had ever heard, and wondering which was the one least
likely to be generally disbelieved.

MacShaughnassy, in particular, was growing every moment more
restless and moody.  Brown concluded a long discourse--to which
nobody had listened--by remarking with some pride, "What more can
you want?  The plot has never been used before, and the characters
are entirely original!"

Then MacShaughnassy gave way.  "Talking of plots," he said, hitching
his chair a little nearer the table, "that puts me in mind.  Did I
ever tell you about that dog we had when we lived in Norwood?"

"It's not that one about the bull-dog, is it?" queried Jephson
anxiously.

"Well, it was a bull-dog," admitted MacShaughnassy, "but I don't
think I've ever told it you before."

We knew, by experience, that to argue the matter would only prolong
the torture, so we let him go on.

"A great many burglaries had lately taken place in our
neighbourhood," he began, "and the pater came to the conclusion that
it was time he laid down a dog.  He thought a bull-dog would be the
best for his purpose, and he purchased the most savage and
murderous-looking specimen that he could find.

"My mother was alarmed when she saw the dog.  'Surely you're not
going to let that brute loose about the house!' she exclaimed.
'He'll kill somebody.  I can see it in his face.'

"'I want him to kill somebody,' replied my father; 'I want him to
kill burglars.'

"'I don't like to hear you talk like that, Thomas,' answered the
mater; 'it's not like you.  We've a right to protect our property,
but we've no right to take a fellow human creature's life.'

"'Our fellow human creatures will be all right--so long as they
don't come into our kitchen when they've no business there,'
retorted my father, somewhat testily.  'I'm going to fix up this dog
in the scullery, and if a burglar comes fooling around--well, that's
HIS affair.'

"The old folks quarrelled on and off for about a month over this
dog.  The dad thought the mater absurdly sentimental, and the mater
thought the dad unnecessarily vindictive.  Meanwhile the dog grew
more ferocious-looking every day.

"One night my mother woke my father up with:  'Thomas, there's a
burglar downstairs, I'm positive.  I distinctly heard the kitchen
door open.'

"'Oh, well, the dog's got him by now, then,' murmured my father, who
had heard nothing, and was sleepy.

"'Thomas,' replied my mother severely, 'I'm not going to lie here
while a fellow-creature is being murdered by a savage beast.  If you
won't go down and save that man's life, I will.'

"'Oh, bother,' said my father, preparing to get up.  'You're always
fancying you hear noises.  I believe that's all you women come to
bed for--to sit up and listen for burglars.'  Just to satisfy her,
however, he pulled on his trousers and socks, and went down.

"Well, sure enough, my mother was right, this time.  There WAS a
burglar in the house.  The pantry window stood open, and a light was
shining in the kitchen.  My father crept softly forward, and peeped
through the partly open door.  There sat the burglar, eating cold
beef and pickles, and there, beside him, on the floor, gazing up
into his face with a blood-curdling smile of affection, sat that
idiot of a dog, wagging his tail.

"My father was so taken aback that he forgot to keep silent.

"'Well, I'm--,' and he used a word that I should not care to repeat
to you fellows.

"The burglar, hearing him, made a dash, and got clear off by the
window; and the dog seemed vexed with my father for having driven
him away.

"Next morning we took the dog back to the trainer from whom we had
bought it.

"'What do you think I wanted this dog for?' asked my father, trying
to speak calmly.

"'Well,' replied the trainer, 'you said you wanted a good house
dog.'

"'Exactly so,' answered the dad.  'I didn't ask for a burglar's
companion, did I?  I didn't say I wanted a dog who'd chum on with a
burglar the first time he ever came to the house, and sit with him
while he had supper, in case he might feel lonesome, did I?'  And my
father recounted the incidents of the previous night.

"The man agreed that there was cause for complaint.  'I'll tell you
what it is, sir,' he said.  'It was my boy Jim as trained this 'ere
dawg, and I guess the young beggar's taught 'im more about tackling
rats than burglars.  You leave 'im with me for a week, sir; I'll put
that all right.'

"We did so, and at the end of the time the trainer brought him back
again.

"'You'll find 'im game enough now, sir,' said the man.  ''E ain't
what I call an intellectual dawg, but I think I've knocked the right
idea into 'im.'

"My father thought he'd like to test the matter, so we hired a man
for a shilling to break in through the kitchen window while the
trainer held the dog by a chain.  The dog remained perfectly quiet
until the man was fairly inside.  Then he made one savage spring at
him, and if the chain had not been stout the fellow would have
earned his shilling dearly.

"The dad was satisfied now that he could go to bed in peace; and the
mater's alarm for the safety of the local burglars was
proportionately increased.

"Months passed uneventfully by, and then another burglar sampled our
house.  This time there could be no doubt that the dog was doing
something for his living.  The din in the basement was terrific.
The house shook with the concussion of falling bodies.

"My father snatched up his revolver and rushed downstairs, and I
followed him.  The kitchen was in confusion.  Tables and chairs were
overturned, and on the floor lay a man gurgling for help.  The dog
was standing over him, choking him.

"The pater held his revolver to the man's ear, while I, by
superhuman effort, dragged our preserver away, and chained him up to
the sink, after which I lit the gas.

"Then we perceived that the gentleman on the floor was a police
constable.

"'Good heavens!' exclaimed my father, dropping the revolver,
'however did you come here?'

"''Ow did I come 'ere?' retorted the man, sitting up and speaking in
a tone of bitter, but not unnatural, indignation.  'Why, in the
course of my dooty, that's 'ow I come 'ere.  I see a burglar getting
in through the window, so I just follows and slips in after 'im.'

"'Did you catch him?' asked my father.

"'Did I catch 'im!' almost shrieked the man.  "Ow could I catch 'im
with that blasted dog of yours 'olding me down by the throat, while
'e lights 'is pipe and walks out by the back door?'

"The dog was for sale the next day.  The mater, who had grown to
like him, because he let the baby pull his tail, wanted us to keep
him.  The mistake, she said, was not the animal's fault.  Two men
broke into the house almost at the same time.  The dog could not go
for both of them.  He did his best, and went for one.  That his
selection should have fallen upon the policeman instead of upon the
burglar was unfortunate.  But still it was a thing that might have
happened to any dog.

"My father, however, had become prejudiced against the poor
creature, and that same week he inserted an advertisement in The
Field, in which the animal was recommended as an investment likely
to prove useful to any enterprising member of the criminal classes."

MacShaughnassy having had his innings, Jephson took a turn, and told
us a pathetic story about an unfortunate mongrel that was run over
in the Strand one day and its leg broken.  A medical student, who
was passing at the time, picked it up and carried it to the Charing
Cross Hospital, where its leg was set, and where it was kept and
tended until it was quite itself again, when it was sent home.

The poor thing had quite understood what was being done for it, and
had been the most grateful patient they had ever had in the
hospital.  The whole staff were quite sorry when it left.

One morning, a week or two later, the house-surgeon, looking out of
the window, saw the dog coming down the street.  When it came near
he noticed that it had a penny in its mouth.  A cat's-meat barrow
was standing by the kerb, and for a moment, as he passed it, the dog
hesitated.

But his nobler nature asserted itself, and, walking straight up to
the hospital railings, and raising himself upon his hind legs, he
dropped his penny into the contribution box.

MacShaughnassy was much affected by this story.  He said it showed
such a beautiful trait in the dog's character.  The animal was a
poor outcast, vagrant thing, that had perhaps never possessed a
penny before in all its life, and might never have another.  He said
that dog's penny seemed to him to be a greater gift than the biggest
cheque that the wealthiest patron ever signed.

The other three were very eager now to get to work on the novel, but
I did not quite see the fairness of this.  I had one or two dog
stories of my own.

I knew a black-and-tan terrier years ago.  He lodged in the same
house with me.  He did not belong to any one.  He had discharged his
owner (if, indeed, he had ever permitted himself to possess one,
which is doubtful, having regard to his aggressively independent
character), and was now running himself entirely on his own account.
He appropriated the front hall for his sleeping-apartment, and took
his meals with the other lodgers--whenever they happened to be
having meals.

At five o'clock he would take an early morning snack with young
Hollis, an engineer's pupil, who had to get up at half-past four and
make his own coffee, so as to be down at the works by six.  At
eight-thirty he would breakfast in a more sensible fashion with Mr.
Blair, on the first floor, and on occasions would join Jack Gadbut,
who was a late riser, in a devilled kidney at eleven.

From then till about five, when I generally had a cup of tea and a
chop, he regularly disappeared.  Where he went and what he did
between those hours nobody ever knew.  Gadbut swore that twice he
had met him coming out of a stockbroker's office in Threadneedle
Street, and, improbable though the statement at first appeared, some
colour of credibility began to attach to it when we reflected upon
the dog's inordinate passion for acquiring and hoarding coppers.

This craving of his for wealth was really quite remarkable.  He was
an elderly dog, with a great sense of his own dignity; yet, on the
promise of a penny, I have seen him run round after his own tail
until he didn't know one end of himself from the other.

He used to teach himself tricks, and go from room to room in the
evening, performing them, and when he had completed his programme he
would sit up and beg.  All the fellows used to humour him.  He must
have made pounds in the course of the year.

Once, just outside our door, I saw him standing in a crowd, watching
a performing poodle attached to a hurdy-gurdy.  The poodle stood on
his head, and then, with his hind legs in the air, walked round on
his front paws.  The people laughed very much, and, when afterwards
he came amongst them with his wooden saucer in his mouth, they gave
freely.

Our dog came in and immediately commenced to study.  In three days
HE could stand on his head and walk round on his front legs, and the
first evening he did so he made sixpence.  It must have been
terribly hard work for him at his age, and subject to rheumatism as
he was; but he would do anything for money.  I believe he would have
sold himself to the devil for eightpence down.

He knew the value of money.  If you held out to him a penny in one
hand and a threepenny-bit in the other, he would snatch at the
threepence, and then break his heart because he could not get the
penny in as well.  You might safely have left him in the room with a
leg of mutton, but it would not have been wise to leave your purse
about.

Now and then he spent a little, but not often.  He was desperately
fond of sponge-cakes, and occasionally, when he had had a good week,
he would indulge himself to the extent of one or two.  But he hated
paying for them, and always made a frantic and frequently successful
effort to get off with the cake and the penny also.  His plan of
operations was simple.  He would walk into the shop with his penny
in his mouth, well displayed, and a sweet and lamblike expression in
his eyes.  Taking his stand as near to the cakes as he could get,
and fixing his eyes affectionately upon them, he would begin to
whine, and the shopkeeper, thinking he was dealing with an honest
dog, would throw him one.

To get the cake he was obliged, of course, to drop the penny, and
then began a struggle between him and the shopkeeper for the
possession of the coin.  The man would try to pick it up.  The dog
would put his foot upon it, and growl savagely.  If he could finish
the cake before the contest was over, he would snap up the penny and
bolt.  I have known him to come home gorged with sponge-cakes, the
original penny still in his mouth.

So notorious throughout the neighbourhood did this dishonest
practice of his become, that, after a time, the majority of the
local tradespeople refused to serve him at all.  Only the
exceptionally quick and able-bodied would attempt to do business
with him.

Then he took his custom further afield, into districts where his
reputation had not yet penetrated.  And he would pick out shops kept
by nervous females or rheumatic old men.

They say that the love of money is the root of all evil.  It seemed
to have robbed him of every shred of principle.

It robbed him of his life in the end, and that came about in this
way.  He had been performing one evening in Gadbut's room, where a
few of us were sitting smoking and talking; and young Hollis, being
in a generous mood, had thrown him, as he thought, a sixpence.  The
dog grabbed it, and retired under the sofa.  This was an odd thing
for him to do, and we commented upon it.  Suddenly a thought
occurred to Hollis, and he took out his money and began counting it.

"By Jove," he exclaimed, "I've given that little beast half-a-
sovereign--here, Tiny!"

But Tiny only backed further underneath the sofa, and no mere verbal
invitation would induce him to stir.  So we adopted a more pressing
plan, and coaxed him out by the scruff of his neck.

He came, an inch at a time, growling viciously, and holding Hollis's
half-sovereign tight between his teeth.  We tried sweet
reasonableness at first.  We offered him a sixpence in exchange; he
looked insulted, and evidently considered the proposal as tantamount
to our calling him a fool.  We made it a shilling, then half-a-
crown--he seemed only bored by our persistence.

"I don't think you'll ever see this half-sovereign again, Hollis,"
said Gadbut, laughing.  We all, with the exception of young Hollis,
thought the affair a very good joke.  He, on the contrary, seemed
annoyed, and, taking the dog from Gadbut, made an attempt to pull
the coin out of its mouth.

Tiny, true to his life-long principle of never parting if he could
possibly help it, held on like grim death, until, feeling that his
little earnings were slowly but surely going from him, he made one
final desperate snatch, and swallowed the money.  It stuck in his
throat, and he began to choke.

Then we became seriously alarmed for the dog.  He was an amusing
chap, and we did not want any accident to happen to him.  Hollis
rushed into his room and procured a long pair of pincers, and the
rest of us held the little miser while Hollis tried to relieve him
of the cause of his suffering.

But poor Tiny did not understand our intentions.  He still thought
we were seeking to rob him of his night's takings, and resisted
vehemently.  His struggles fixed the coin firmer, and, in spite of
our efforts, he died--one more victim, among many, to the fierce
fever for gold.


I dreamt a very curious dream about riches once, that made a great
impression upon me.  I thought that I and a friend--a very dear
friend--were living together in a strange old house.  I don't think
anybody else dwelt in the house but just we two.  One day, wandering
about this strange old rambling place, I discovered the hidden door
of a secret room, and in this room were many iron-bound chests, and
when I raised the heavy lids I saw that each chest was full of gold.

And, when I saw this, I stole out softly and closed the hidden door,
and drew the worn tapestries in front of it again, and crept back
along the dim corridor, looking behind me, fearfully.

And the friend that I had loved came towards me, and we walked
together with our hands clasped.  But I hated him.

And all day long I kept beside him, or followed him unseen, lest by
chance he should learn the secret of that hidden door; and at night
I lay awake watching him.

But one night I sleep, and, when I open my eyes, he is no longer
near me.  I run swiftly up the narrow stairs and along the silent
corridor.  The tapestry is drawn aside, and the hidden door stands
open, and in the room beyond the friend that I loved is kneeling
before an open chest, and the glint of the gold is in my eyes.

His back is towards me, and I crawl forward inch by inch.  I have a
knife in my hand, with a strong, curved blade; and when I am near
enough I kill him as he kneels there.

His body falls against the door, and it shuts to with a clang, and I
try to open it, and cannot.  I beat my hands against its iron nails,
and scream, and the dead man grins at me.  The light streams in
through the chink beneath the massive door, and fades, and comes
again, and fades again, and I gnaw at the oaken lids of the iron-
bound chests, for the madness of hunger is climbing into my brain.

Then I awake, and find that I really am hungry, and remember that in
consequence of a headache I did not eat any dinner.  So I slip on a
few clothes, and go down to the kitchen on a foraging expedition.

It is said that dreams are momentary conglomerations of thought,
centring round the incident that awakens us, and, as with most
scientific facts, this is occasionally true.  There is one dream
that, with slight variations, is continually recurring to me.  Over
and over again I dream that I am suddenly called upon to act an
important part in some piece at the Lyceum.  That poor Mr. Irving
should invariably be the victim seems unfair, but really it is
entirely his own fault.  It is he who persuades and urges me.  I
myself would much prefer to remain quietly in bed, and I tell him
so.  But he insists on my getting up at once and coming down to the
theatre.  I explain to him that I can't act a bit.  He seems to
consider this unimportant, and says, "Oh, that will be all right."
We argue for a while, but he makes the matter quite a personal one,
and to oblige him and get him out of the bedroom I consent, though
much against my own judgment.  I generally dress the character in my
nightshirt, though on one occasion, for Banquo, I wore pyjamas, and
I never remember a single word of what I ought to say.  How I get
through I do not know.  Irving comes up afterwards and congratulates
me, but whether upon the brilliancy of my performance, or upon my
luck in getting off the stage before a brickbat is thrown at me, I
cannot say.

Whenever I dream this incident I invariably wake up to find that the
bedclothes are on the floor, and that I am shivering with cold; and
it is this shivering, I suppose, that causes me to dream I am
wandering about the Lyceum stage in nothing but my nightshirt.  But
still I do not understand why it should always be the Lyceum.

Another dream which I fancy I have dreamt more than once--or, if
not, I have dreamt that I dreamt it before, a thing one sometimes
does--is one in which I am walking down a very wide and very long
road in the East End of London.  It is a curious road to find there.
Omnibuses and trams pass up and down, and it is crowded with stalls
and barrows, beside which men in greasy caps stand shouting; yet on
each side it is bordered by a strip of tropical forest.  The road,
in fact, combines the advantages of Kew and Whitechapel.

Some one is with me, but I cannot see him, and we walk through the
forest, pushing our way among the tangled vines that cling about our
feet, and every now and then, between the giant tree-trunks, we
catch glimpses of the noisy street.

At the end of this road there is a narrow turning, and when I come
to it I am afraid, though I do not know why I am afraid.  It leads
to a house that I once lived in when a child, and now there is some
one waiting there who has something to tell me.

I turn to run away.  A Blackwall 'bus is passing, and I try to
overtake it.  But the horses turn into skeletons and gallop away
from me, and my feet are like lead, and the thing that is with me,
and that I cannot see, seizes me by the arm and drags me back.

It forces me along, and into the house, and the door slams to behind
us, and the sound echoes through the lifeless rooms.  I recognise
the rooms; I laughed and cried in them long ago.  Nothing is
changed.  The chairs stand in their places, empty.  My mother's
knitting lies upon the hearthrug, where the kitten, I remember,
dragged it, somewhere back in the sixties.

I go up into my own little attic.  My cot stands in the corner, and
my bricks lie tumbled out upon the floor (I was always an untidy
child).  An old man enters--an old, bent, withered man--holding a
lamp above his head, and I look at his face, and it is my own face.
And another enters, and he also is myself.  Then more and more, till
the room is thronged with faces, and the stair-way beyond, and all
the silent house.  Some of the faces are old and others young, and
some are fair and smile at me, and many are foul and leer at me.
And every face is my own face, but no two of them are alike.

I do not know why the sight of myself should alarm me so, but I rush
from the house in terror, and the faces follow me; and I run faster
and faster, but I know that I shall never leave them behind me.


As a rule one is the hero of one's own dreams, but at times I have
dreamt a dream entirely in the third person--a dream with the
incidents of which I have had no connection whatever, except as an
unseen and impotent spectator.  One of these I have often thought
about since, wondering if it could not be worked up into a story.
But, perhaps, it would be too painful a theme.

I dreamt I saw a woman's face among a throng.  It is an evil face,
but there is a strange beauty in it.  The flickering gleams thrown
by street lamps flash down upon it, showing the wonder of its evil
fairness.  Then the lights go out.

I see it next in a place that is very far away, and it is even more
beautiful than before, for the evil has gone out of it.  Another
face is looking down into it, a bright, pure face.  The faces meet
and kiss, and, as his lips touch hers, the blood mounts to her
cheeks and brow.  I see the two faces again.  But I cannot tell
where they are or how long a time has passed.  The man's face has
grown a little older, but it is still young and fair, and when the
woman's eyes rest upon it there comes a glory into her face so that
it is like the face of an angel.  But at times the woman is alone,
and then I see the old evil look struggling back.

Then I see clearer.  I see the room in which they live.  It is very
poor.  An old-fashioned piano stands in one corner, and beside it is
a table on which lie scattered a tumbled mass of papers round an
ink-stand.  An empty chair waits before the table.  The woman sits
by the open window.

From far below there rises the sound of a great city.  Its lights
throw up faint beams into the dark room.  The smell of its streets
is in the woman's nostrils.

Every now and again she looks towards the door and listens:  then
turns to the open window.  And I notice that each time she looks
towards the door the evil in her face shrinks back; but each time
she turns to the window it grows more fierce and sullen.

Suddenly she starts up, and there is a terror in her eyes that
frightens me as I dream, and I see great beads of sweat upon her
brow.  Then, very slowly, her face changes, and I see again the evil
creature of the night.  She wraps around her an old cloak, and
creeps out.  I hear her footsteps going down the stairs.  They grow
fainter and fainter.  I hear a door open.  The roar of the streets
rushes up into the house, and the woman's footsteps are swallowed
up.

Time drifts onward through my dream.  Scenes change, take shape, and
fade; but all is vague and undefined, until, out of the dimness,
there fashions itself a long, deserted street.  The lights make
glistening circles on the wet pavement.  A figure, dressed in gaudy
rags, slinks by, keeping close against the wall.  Its back is
towards me, and I do not see its face.  Another figure glides from
out the shadows.  I look upon its face, and I see it is the face
that the woman's eyes gazed up into and worshipped long ago, when my
dream was just begun.  But the fairness and the purity are gone from
it, and it is old and evil, as the woman's when I looked upon her
last.  The figure in the gaudy rags moves slowly on.  The second
figure follows it, and overtakes it.  The two pause, and speak to
one another as they draw near.  The street is very dark where they
have met, and the figure in the gaudy rags keeps its face still
turned aside.  They walk together in silence, till they come to
where a flaring gas-lamp hangs before a tavern; and there the woman
turns, and I see that it is the woman of my dream.  And she and the
man look into each other's eyes once more.


In another dream that I remember, an angel (or a devil, I am not
quite sure which) has come to a man and told him that so long as he
loves no living human thing--so long as he never suffers himself to
feel one touch of tenderness towards wife or child, towards kith or
kin, towards stranger or towards friend, so long will he succeed and
prosper in his dealings--so long will all this world's affairs go
well with him; and he will grow each day richer and greater and more
powerful.  But if ever he let one kindly thought for living thing
come into his heart, in that moment all his plans and schemes will
topple down about his ears; and from that hour his name will be
despised by men, and then forgotten.

And the man treasures up these words, for he is an ambitious man,
and wealth and fame and power are the sweetest things in all the
world to him.  A woman loves him and dies, thirsting for a loving
look from him; children's footsteps creep into his life and steal
away again, old faces fade and new ones come and go.

But never a kindly touch of his hand rests on any living thing;
never a kindly word comes from his lips; never a kindly thought
springs from his heart.  And in all his doings fortune favours him.

The years pass by, and at last there is left to him only one thing
that he need fear--a child's small, wistful face.  The child loves
him, as the woman, long ago, had loved him, and her eyes follow him
with a hungry, beseeching look.  But he sets his teeth, and turns
away from her.

The little face grows thin, and one day they come to him where he
sits before the keyboard of his many enterprises, and tell him she
is dying.  He comes and stands beside the bed, and the child's eyes
open and turn towards him; and, as he draws nearer, her little arms
stretch out towards him, pleading dumbly.  But the man's face never
changes, and the little arms fall feebly back upon the tumbled
coverlet, and the wistful eyes grow still, and a woman steps softly
forward, and draws the lids down over them; then the man goes back
to his plans and schemes.

But in the night, when the great house is silent, he steals up to
the room where the child still lies, and pushes back the white,
uneven sheet.

"Dead--dead," he mutters.  Then he takes the tiny corpse up in his
arms, and holds it tight against his breast, and kisses the cold
lips, and the cold cheeks, and the little, cold, stiff hands.

And at that point my story becomes impossible, for I dream that the
dead child lies always beneath the sheet in that quiet room, and
that the little face never changes, nor the limbs decay.

I puzzle about this for an instant, but soon forget to wonder; for
when the Dream Fairy tells us tales we are only as little children,
sitting round with open eyes, believing all, though marvelling that
such things should be.

Each night, when all else in the house sleeps, the door of that room
opens noiselessly, and the man enters and closes it behind him.
Each night he draws away the white sheet, and takes the small dead
body in his arms; and through the dark hours he paces softly to and
fro, holding it close against his breast, kissing it and crooning to
it, like a mother to her sleeping baby.

When the first ray of dawn peeps into the room, he lays the dead
child back again, and smooths the sheet above her, and steals away.

And he succeeds and prospers in all things, and each day he grows
richer and greater and more powerful.



CHAPTER III



We had much trouble with our heroine.  Brown wanted her ugly.
Brown's chief ambition in life is to be original, and his method of
obtaining the original is to take the unoriginal and turn it upside
down.

If Brown were given a little planet of his own to do as he liked
with, he would call day, night, and summer, winter.  He would make
all his men and women walk on their heads and shake hands with their
feet, his trees would grow with their roots in the air, and the old
cock would lay all the eggs while the hens sat on the fence and
crowed.  Then he would step back and say, "See what an original
world I have created, entirely my own idea!"

There are many other people besides Brown whose notion of
originality would seem to be precisely similar.

I know a little girl, the descendant of a long line of politicians.
The hereditary instinct is so strongly developed in her that she is
almost incapable of thinking for herself.  Instead, she copies in
everything her elder sister, who takes more after the mother.  If
her sister has two helpings of rice pudding for supper, then she has
two helpings of rice pudding.  If her sister isn't hungry and
doesn't want any supper at all, then she goes to bed without any
supper.

This lack of character in the child troubles her mother, who is not
an admirer of the political virtues, and one evening, taking the
little one on her lap, she talked seriously to her.

"Do try to think for yourself," said she.  "Don't always do just
what Jessie does, that's silly.  Have an idea of your own now and
then.  Be a little original."

The child promised she'd try, and went to bed thoughtful.

Next morning, for breakfast, a dish of kippers and a dish of kidneys
were placed on the table, side by side.  Now the child loved kippers
with an affection that amounted almost to passion, while she loathed
kidneys worse than powders.  It was the one subject on which she did
know her own mind.

"A kidney or a kipper for you, Jessie?" asked the mother, addressing
the elder child first.

Jessie hesitated for a moment, while her sister sat regarding her in
an agony of suspense.

"Kipper, please, ma," Jessie answered at last, and the younger child
turned her head away to hide the tears.

"You'll have a kipper, of course, Trixy?" said the mother, who had
noticed nothing.

"No, thank you, ma," said the small heroine, stifling a sob, and
speaking in a dry, tremulous voice, "I'll have a kidney."

"But I thought you couldn't bear kidneys," exclaimed her mother,
surprised.

"No, ma, I don't like 'em much."

"And you're so fond of kippers!"

"Yes, ma."

"Well, then, why on earth don't you have one?"

"'Cos Jessie's going to have one, and you told me to be original,"
and here the poor mite, reflecting upon the price her originality
was going to cost her, burst into tears.


The other three of us refused to sacrifice ourselves upon the altar
of Brown's originality.  We decided to be content with the customary
beautiful girl.

"Good or bad?" queried Brown.

"Bad," responded MacShaughnassy emphatically.  "What do you say,
Jephson?"

"Well," replied Jephson, taking the pipe from between his lips, and
speaking in that soothingly melancholy tone of voice that he never
varies, whether telling a joke about a wedding or an anecdote
relating to a funeral, "not altogether bad.  Bad, with good
instincts, the good instincts well under control."

"I wonder why it is," murmured MacShaughnassy reflectively, "that
bad people are so much more interesting than good."

"I don't think the reason is very difficult to find," answered
Jephson.  "There's more uncertainty about them.  They keep you more
on the alert.  It's like the difference between riding a well-
broken, steady-going hack and a lively young colt with ideas of his
own.  The one is comfortable to travel on, but the other provides
you with more exercise.  If you start off with a thoroughly good
woman for your heroine you give your story away in the first
chapter.  Everybody knows precisely how she will behave under every
conceivable combination of circumstances in which you can place her.
On every occasion she will do the same thing--that is the right
thing.

"With a bad heroine, on the other hand, you can never be quite sure
what is going to happen.  Out of the fifty or so courses open to
her, she may take the right one, or she may take one of the forty-
nine wrong ones, and you watch her with curiosity to see which it
will be."

"But surely there are plenty of good heroines who are interesting,"
I said.

"At intervals--when they do something wrong," answered Jephson.  "A
consistently irreproachable heroine is as irritating as Socrates
must have been to Xantippe, or as the model boy at school is to all
the other lads.  Take the stock heroine of the eighteenth-century
romance.  She never met her lover except for the purpose of telling
him that she could not be his, and she generally wept steadily
throughout the interview.  She never forgot to turn pale at the
sight of blood, nor to faint in his arms at the most inconvenient
moment possible.  She was determined never to marry without her
father's consent, and was equally resolved never to marry anybody
but the one particular person she was convinced he would never agree
to her marrying.  She was an excellent young woman, and nearly as
uninteresting as a celebrity at home."

"Ah, but you're not talking about good women now," I observed.
"You're talking about some silly person's idea of a good woman."

"I quite admit it," replied Jephson.  "Nor, indeed, am I prepared to
say what is a good woman.  I consider the subject too deep and too
complicated for any mere human being to give judgment upon.  But I
AM talking of the women who conformed to the popular idea of
maidenly goodness in the age when these books were written.  You
must remember goodness is not a known quantity.  It varies with
every age and every locality, and it is, generally speaking, your
'silly persons' who are responsible for its varying standards.  In
Japan, a 'good' girl would be a girl who would sell her honour in
order to afford little luxuries to her aged parents.  In certain
hospitable islands of the torrid zone the 'good' wife goes to
lengths that we should deem altogether unnecessary in making her
husband's guest feel himself at home.  In ancient Hebraic days, Jael
was accounted a good woman for murdering a sleeping man, and Sarai
stood in no danger of losing the respect of her little world when
she led Hagar unto Abraham.  In eighteenth-century England,
supernatural stupidity and dulness of a degree that must have been
difficult to attain, were held to be feminine virtues--indeed, they
are so still--and authors, who are always among the most servile
followers of public opinion, fashioned their puppets accordingly.
Nowadays 'slumming' is the most applauded virtue, and so all our
best heroines go slumming, and are 'good to the poor.'"

"How useful 'the poor' are," remarked MacShaughnassy, somewhat
abruptly, placing his feet on the mantelpiece, and tilting his chair
back till it stood at an angle that caused us to rivet our attention
upon it with hopeful interest.  "I don't think we scribbling fellows
ever fully grasp how much we owe to 'the poor.'  Where would our
angelic heroines and our noble-hearted heroes be if it were not for
'the poor'?  We want to show that the dear girl is as good as she is
beautiful.  What do we do?  We put a basket full of chickens and
bottles of wine on her arm, a fetching little sun-bonnet on her
head, and send her round among the poor.  How do we prove that our
apparent scamp of a hero is really a noble young man at heart?  Why,
by explaining that he is good to the poor.

"They are as useful in real life as they are in Bookland.  What is
it consoles the tradesman when the actor, earning eighty pounds a
week, cannot pay his debts?  Why, reading in the theatrical
newspapers gushing accounts of the dear fellow's invariable
generosity to the poor.  What is it stills the small but irritating
voice of conscience when we have successfully accomplished some
extra big feat of swindling?  Why, the noble resolve to give ten per
cent of the net profits to the poor.

"What does a man do when he finds himself growing old, and feels
that it is time for him to think seriously about securing his
position in the next world?  Why, he becomes suddenly good to the
poor.  If the poor were not there for him to be good to, what could
he do?  He would be unable to reform at all.  It's a great comfort
to think that the poor will always be with us.  They are the ladder
by which we climb into heaven."

There was silence for a few moments, while MacShaughnassy puffed
away vigorously, and almost savagely, at his pipe, and then Brown
said:  "I can tell you rather a quaint incident, bearing very aptly
on the subject.  A cousin of mine was a land-agent in a small
country town, and among the houses on his list was a fine old
mansion that had remained vacant for many years.  He had despaired
of ever selling it, when one day an elderly lady, very richly
dressed, drove up to the office and made inquiries about it.  She
said she had come across it accidentally while travelling through
that part of the country the previous autumn, and had been much
struck by its beauty and picturesqueness.  She added she was looking
out for some quiet spot where she could settle down and peacefully
pass the remainder of her days, and thought this place might
possibly prove to be the very thing for her.

"My cousin, delighted with the chance of a purchaser, at once drove
her across to the estate, which was about eight miles distant from
the town, and they went over it together.  My cousin waxed eloquent
upon the subject of its advantages.  He dwelt upon its quiet and
seclusion, its proximity--but not too close proximity--to the
church, its convenient distance from the village.

"Everything pointed to a satisfactory conclusion of the business.
The lady was charmed with the situation and the surroundings, and
delighted with the house and grounds.  She considered the price
moderate.

"'And now, Mr. Brown,' said she, as they stood by the lodge gate,
'tell me, what class of poor have you got round about?'

"'Poor?' answered my cousin; 'there are no poor.'

"'No poor!' exclaimed the lady.  'No poor people in the village, or
anywhere near?'

"'You won't find a poor person within five miles of the estate,' he
replied proudly.  'You see, my dear madam, this is a thinly
populated and exceedingly prosperous county:  this particular
district especially so.  There is not a family in it that is not,
comparatively speaking, well-to-do.'

"'I'm sorry to hear that,' said the lady, in a tone of
disappointment.  'The place would have suited me so admirably but
for that.'

"'But surely, madam,' cried my cousin, to whom a demand for poor
persons was an entirely new idea, 'you don't mean to say that you
WANT poor people!  Why, we've always considered it one of the chief
attractions of the property--nothing to shock the eye or wound the
susceptibilities of the most tender-hearted occupant.'

"'My dear Mr. Brown,' replied the lady, 'I will be perfectly frank
with you.  I am becoming an old woman, and my past life has not,
perhaps, been altogether too well spent.  It is my desire to atone
for the--er--follies of my youth by an old age of well-doing, and to
that end it is essential that I should be surrounded by a certain
number of deserving poor.  I had hoped to find in this charming
neighbourhood of yours the customary proportion of poverty and
misery, in which case I should have taken the house without
hesitation.  As it is, I must seek elsewhere.'

"My cousin was perplexed, and sad.  'There are plenty of poor people
in the town,' he said, 'many of them most interesting cases, and you
could have the entire care of them all.  There'd be no opposition
whatever, I'm positive.'

"'Thank you,' replied the lady, 'but I really couldn't go as far as
the town.  They must be within easy driving distance or they are no
good.'

"My cousin cudgelled his brains again.  He did not intend to let a
purchaser slip through his fingers if he could help it.  At last a
bright thought flashed into his mind.  'I'll tell you what we could
do,' he said.  'There's a piece of waste land the other end of the
village that we've never been able to do much with, in consequence
of its being so swampy.  If you liked, we could run you up a dozen
cottages on that, cheap--it would be all the better their being a
bit ramshackle and unhealthy--and get some poor people for you, and
put into them.'

"The lady reflected upon the idea, and it struck her as a good one.

"'You see,' continued my cousin, pushing his advantage, 'by adopting
this method you would be able to select your own poor.  We would get
you some nice, clean, grateful poor, and make the thing pleasant for
you.'

"It ended in the lady's accepting my cousin's offer, and giving him
a list of the poor people she would like to have.  She selected one
bedridden old woman (Church of England preferred); one paralytic old
man; one blind girl who would want to be read aloud to; one poor
atheist, willing to be converted; two cripples; one drunken father
who would consent to be talked to seriously; one disagreeable old
fellow, needing much patience; two large families, and four ordinary
assorted couples.

"My cousin experienced some difficulty in securing the drunken
father.  Most of the drunken fathers he interviewed upon the subject
had a rooted objection to being talked to at all.  After a long
search, however, he discovered a mild little man, who, upon the
lady's requirements and charitable intentions being explained to
him, undertook to qualify himself for the vacancy by getting
intoxicated at least once a week.  He said he could not promise more
than once a week at first, he unfortunately possessing a strong
natural distaste for all alcoholic liquors, which it would be
necessary for him to overcome.  As he got more used to them, he
would do better.

"Over the disagreeable old man, my cousin also had trouble.  It was
hard to hit the right degree of disagreeableness.  Some of them were
so very unpleasant.  He eventually made choice of a decayed cab-
driver with advanced Radical opinions, who insisted on a three
years' contract.

"The plan worked exceedingly well, and does so, my cousin tells me,
to this day.  The drunken father has completely conquered his
dislike to strong drink.  He has not been sober now for over three
weeks, and has lately taken to knocking his wife about.  The
disagreeable fellow is most conscientious in fulfilling his part of
the bargain, and makes himself a perfect curse to the whole village.
The others have dropped into their respective positions and are
working well.  The lady visits them all every afternoon, and is most
charitable.  They call her Lady Bountiful, and everybody blesses
her."

Brown rose as he finished speaking, and mixed himself a glass of
whisky and water with the self-satisfied air of a benevolent man
about to reward somebody for having done a good deed; and
MacShaughnassy lifted up his voice and talked.

"I know a story bearing on the subject, too," he said.  "It happened
in a tiny Yorkshire village--a peaceful, respectable spot, where
folks found life a bit slow.  One day, however, a new curate
arrived, and that woke things up considerably.  He was a nice young
man, and, having a large private income of his own, was altogether a
most desirable catch.  Every unmarried female in the place went for
him with one accord.

"But ordinary feminine blandishments appeared to have no effect upon
him.  He was a seriously inclined young man, and once, in the course
of a casual conversation upon the subject of love, he was heard to
say that he himself should never be attracted by mere beauty and
charm.  What would appeal to him, he said, would be a woman's
goodness--her charity and kindliness to the poor.

"Well, that set the petticoats all thinking.  They saw that in
studying fashion plates and practising expressions they had been
going upon the wrong tack.  The card for them to play was 'the
poor.'  But here a serious difficulty arose.  There was only one
poor person in the whole parish, a cantankerous old fellow who lived
in a tumble-down cottage at the back of the church, and fifteen
able-bodied women (eleven girls, three old maids, and a widow)
wanted to be 'good' to him.

"Miss Simmonds, one of the old maids, got hold of him first, and
commenced feeding him twice a day with beef-tea; and then the widow
boarded him with port wine and oysters.  Later in the week others of
the party drifted in upon him, and wanted to cram him with jelly and
chickens.

The old man couldn't understand it.  He was accustomed to a small
sack of coals now and then, accompanied by a long lecture on his
sins, and an occasional bottle of dandelion tea.  This sudden spurt
on the part of Providence puzzled him.  He said nothing, however,
but continued to take in as much of everything as he could hold.  At
the end of a month he was too fat to get through his own back door.

"The competition among the women-folk grew keener every day, and at
last the old man began to give himself airs, and to make the place
hard for them.  He made them clean his cottage out, and cook his
meals, and when he was tired of having them about the house, he set
them to work in the garden.

"They grumbled a good deal, and there was a talk at one time of a
sort of a strike, but what could they do?  He was the only pauper
for miles round, and knew it.  He had the monopoly, and, like all
monopolises, he abused his position.

"He made them run errands.  He sent them out to buy his 'baccy,' at
their own expense.  On one occasion he sent Miss Simmonds out with a
jug to get his supper beer.  She indignantly refused at first, but
he told her that if she gave him any of her stuck-up airs out she
would go, and never come into his house again.  If she wouldn't do
it there were plenty of others who would.  She knew it and went.

"They had been in the habit of reading to him--good books with an
elevating tendency.  But now he put his foot down upon that sort of
thing.  He said he didn't want Sunday-school rubbish at his time of
life.  What he liked was something spicy.  And he made them read him
French novels and sea-faring tales, containing realistic language.
And they didn't have to skip anything either, or he'd know the
reason why.

"He said he liked music, so a few of them clubbed together and
bought him a harmonium.  Their idea was that they would sing hymns
and play high-class melodies, but it wasn't his.  His idea was--
'Keeping up the old girl's birthday' and 'She winked the other eye,'
with chorus and skirt dance, and that's what they sang.

"To what lengths his tyranny would have gone it is difficult to say,
had not an event happened that brought his power to a premature
collapse.  This was the curate's sudden and somewhat unexpected
marriage with a very beautiful burlesque actress who had lately been
performing in a neighbouring town.  He gave up the Church on his
engagement, in consequence of his fiancee's objection to becoming a
minister's wife.  She said she could never 'tumble to' the district
visiting.

"With the curate's wedding the old pauper's brief career of
prosperity ended.  They packed him off to the workhouse after that,
and made him break stones."


At the end of the telling of his tale, MacShaughnassy lifted his
feet off the mantelpiece, and set to work to wake up his legs; and
Jephson took a hand, and began to spin us stories.

But none of us felt inclined to laugh at Jephson's stories, for they
dealt not with the goodness of the rich to the poor, which is a
virtue yielding quick and highly satisfactory returns, but with the
goodness of the poor to the poor, a somewhat less remunerative
investment and a different matter altogether.

For the poor themselves--I do not mean the noisy professional poor,
but the silent, fighting poor--one is bound to feel a genuine
respect.  One honours them, as one honours a wounded soldier.

In the perpetual warfare between Humanity and Nature, the poor stand
always in the van.  They die in the ditches, and we march over their
bodies with the flags flying and the drums playing.

One cannot think of them without an uncomfortable feeling that one
ought to be a little bit ashamed of living in security and ease,
leaving them to take all the hard blows.  It is as if one were
always skulking in the tents, while one's comrades were fighting and
dying in the front.

They bleed and fall in silence there.  Nature with her terrible
club, "Survival of the Fittest"; and Civilisation with her cruel
sword, "Supply and Demand," beat them back, and they give way inch
by inch, fighting to the end.  But it is in a dumb, sullen way, that
is not sufficiently picturesque to be heroic.

I remember seeing an old bull-dog, one Saturday night, lying on the
doorstep of a small shop in the New Cut.  He lay there very quiet,
and seemed a bit sleepy; and, as he looked savage, nobody disturbed
him.  People stepped in and out over him, and occasionally in doing
so, one would accidentally kick him, and then he would breathe a
little harder and quicker.

At last a passer-by, feeling something wet beneath his feet, looked
down, and found that he was standing in a pool of blood, and,
looking to see where it came from, found that it flowed in a thick,
dark stream from the step on which the dog was lying.

Then he stooped down and examined the dog, and the dog opened its
eyes sleepily and looked at him, gave a grin which may have implied
pleasure, or may have implied irritation at being disturbed, and
died.

A crowd collected, and they turned the dead body of the dog over on
its side, and saw a fearful gash in the groin, out of which oozed
blood, and other things.  The proprietor of the shop said the animal
had been there for over an hour.

I have known the poor to die in that same grim, silent way--not the
poor that you, my delicately-gloved Lady Bountiful and my very
excellent Sir Simon DoGood, know, or that you would care to know;
not the poor who march in processions with banners and collection-
boxes; not the poor that clamour round your soup kitchens and sing
hymns at your tea meetings; but the poor that you don't know are
poor until the tale is told at the coroner's inquest--the silent,
proud poor who wake each morning to wrestle with Death till night-
time, and who, when at last he overcomes them, and, forcing them
down on the rotting floor of the dim attic, strangles them, still
die with their teeth tight shut.

There was a boy I came to know when I was living in the East End of
London.  He was not a nice boy by any means.  He was not quite so
clean as are the good boys in the religious magazines, and I have
known a sailor to stop him in the street and reprove him for using
indelicate language.

He and his mother and the baby, a sickly infant of about five months
old, lived in a cellar down a turning off Three Colt Street.  I am
not quite sure what had become of the father.  I rather think he had
been "converted," and had gone off round the country on a preaching
tour.  The lad earned six shillings a week as an errand-boy; and the
mother stitched trousers, and on days when she was feeling strong
and energetic would often make as much as tenpence, or even a
shilling.  Unfortunately, there were days when the four bare walls
would chase each other round and round, and the candle seem a faint
speck of light, a very long way off; and the frequency of these
caused the family income for the week to occasionally fall somewhat
low.

One night the walls danced round quicker and quicker till they
danced away altogether, and the candle shot up through the ceiling
and became a star and the woman knew that it was time to put away
her sewing.

"Jim," she said:  she spoke very low, and the boy had to bend over
her to hear, "if you poke about in the middle of the mattress you'll
find a couple of pounds.  I saved them up a long while ago.  That
will pay for burying me.  And, Jim, you'll take care of the kid.
You won't let it go to the parish."

Jim promised.

"Say 'S'welp me Gawd,' Jim."

"S'welp me Gawd, mother."

Then the woman, having arranged her worldly affairs, lay back ready,
and Death struck.

Jim kept his oath.  He found the money, and buried his mother; and
then, putting his household goods on a barrow, moved into cheaper
apartments--half an old shed, for which he paid two shillings a
week.

For eighteen months he and the baby lived there.  He left the child
at a nursery every morning, fetching it away each evening on his
return from work, and for that he paid fourpence a day, which
included a limited supply of milk.  How he managed to keep himself
and more than half keep the child on the remaining two shillings I
cannot say.  I only know that he did it, and that not a soul ever
helped him or knew that there was help wanted.  He nursed the child,
often pacing the room with it for hours, washed it, occasionally,
and took it out for an airing every Sunday.

Notwithstanding all which care, the little beggar, at the end of the
time above mentioned, "pegged out," to use Jimmy's own words.

The coroner was very severe on Jim.  "If you had taken proper
steps," he said, "this child's life might have been preserved."  (He
seemed to think it would have been better if the child's life had
been preserved.  Coroners have quaint ideas!)  "Why didn't you apply
to the relieving officer?"

"'Cos I didn't want no relief," replied Jim sullenly.  "I promised
my mother it should never go on the parish, and it didn't."

The incident occurred, very luckily, during the dead season, and the
evening papers took the case up, and made rather a good thing out of
it.  Jim became quite a hero, I remember.  Kind-hearted people
wrote, urging that somebody--the ground landlord, or the Government,
or some one of that sort--ought to do something for him.  And
everybody abused the local vestry.  I really think some benefit to
Jim might have come out of it all if only the excitement had lasted
a little longer.  Unfortunately, however, just at its height a spicy
divorce case cropped up, and Jim was crowded out and forgotten.

I told the boys this story of mine, after Jephson had done telling
his, and, when I had finished, we found it was nearly one o'clock.
So, of course, it was too late to do any more work to the novel that
evening.



CHAPTER IV



We held our next business meeting on my houseboat.  Brown was
opposed at first to my going down to this houseboat at all.  He
thought that none of us should leave town while the novel was still
on hand.

MacShaughnassy, on the contrary, was of opinion that we should work
better on a houseboat.  Speaking for himself, he said he never felt
more like writing a really great work than when lying in a hammock
among whispering leaves, with the deep blue sky above him, and a
tumbler of iced claret cup within easy reach of his hand.  Failing a
hammock, he found a deck chair a great incentive to mental labour.
In the interests of the novel, he strongly recommended me to take
down with me at least one comfortable deck chair, and plenty of
lemons.

I could not myself see any reason why we should not be able to think
as well on a houseboat as anywhere else, and accordingly it was
settled that I should go down and establish myself upon the thing,
and that the others should visit me there from time to time, when we
would sit round and toil.

This houseboat was Ethelbertha's idea.  We had spent a day, the
summer before, on one belonging to a friend of mine, and she had
been enraptured with the life.  Everything was on such a
delightfully tiny scale.  You lived in a tiny little room; you slept
on a tiny little bed, in a tiny, tiny little bedroom; and you cooked
your little dinner by a tiny little fire, in the tiniest little
kitchen that ever you did see.  "Oh, it must be lovely, living on a
houseboat," said Ethelbertha, with a gasp of ecstasy; "it must be
like living in a doll's house."

Ethelbertha was very young--ridiculously young, as I think I have
mentioned before--in those days of which I am writing, and the love
of dolls, and of the gorgeous dresses that dolls wear, and of the
many-windowed but inconveniently arranged houses that dolls inhabit-
-or are supposed to inhabit, for as a rule they seem to prefer
sitting on the roof with their legs dangling down over the front
door, which has always appeared to me to be unladylike:  but then,
of course, I am no authority on doll etiquette--had not yet, I
think, quite departed from her.  Nay, am I not sure that it had not?
Do I not remember, years later, peeping into a certain room, the
walls of which are covered with works of art of a character
calculated to send any aesthetic person mad, and seeing her, sitting
on the floor, before a red brick mansion, containing two rooms and a
kitchen; and are not her hands trembling with delight as she
arranges the three real tin plates upon the dresser?  And does she
not knock at the real brass knocker upon the real front door until
it comes off, and I have to sit down beside her on the floor and
screw it on again?

Perhaps, however, it is unwise for me to recall these things, and
bring them forward thus in evidence against her, for cannot she in
turn laugh at me?  Did not I also assist in the arrangement and
appointment of that house beautiful?  We differed on the matter of
the drawing-room carpet, I recollect.  Ethelbertha fancied a dark
blue velvet, but I felt sure, taking the wall-paper into
consideration, that some shade of terra-cotta would harmonise best.
She agreed with me in the end, and we manufactured one out of an old
chest protector.  It had a really charming effect, and gave a
delightfully warm tone to the room.  The blue velvet we put in the
kitchen.  I deemed this extravagance, but Ethelbertha said that
servants thought a lot of a good carpet, and that it paid to humour
them in little things, when practicable.

The bedroom had one big bed and a cot in it; but I could not see
where the girl was going to sleep.  The architect had overlooked her
altogether:  that is so like an architect.  The house also suffered
from the inconvenience common to residences of its class, of
possessing no stairs, so that to move from one room to another it
was necessary to burst your way up through the ceiling, or else to
come outside and climb in through a window; either of which methods
must be fatiguing when you come to do it often.

Apart from these drawbacks, however, the house was one that any doll
agent would have been justified in describing as a "most desirable
family residence"; and it had been furnished with a lavishness that
bordered on positive ostentation.  In the bedroom there was a
washing-stand, and on the washing-stand there stood a jug and basin,
and in the jug there was real water.  But all this was as nothing.
I have known mere ordinary, middle-class dolls' houses in which you
might find washing-stands and jugs and basins and real water--ay,
and even soap.  But in this abode of luxury there was a real towel;
so that a body could not only wash himself, but wipe himself
afterwards, and that is a sensation that, as all dolls know, can be
enjoyed only in the very first-class establishments.

Then, in the drawing-room, there was a clock, which would tick just
so long as you continued to shake it (it never seemed to get tired);
also a picture and a piano, and a book upon the table, and a vase of
flowers that would upset the moment you touched it, just like a real
vase of flowers.  Oh, there was style about this room, I can tell
you.

But the glory of the house was its kitchen.  There were all things
that heart could desire in this kitchen, saucepans with lids that
took on and off, a flat-iron and a rolling-pin.  A dinner service
for three occupied about half the room, and what space was left was
filled up by the stove--a REAL stove!  Think of it, oh ye owners of
dolls' houses, a stove in which you could burn real bits of coal,
and on which you could boil real bits of potato for dinner--except
when people said you mustn't, because it was dangerous, and took the
grate away from you, and blew out the fire, a thing that hampers a
cook.

I never saw a house more complete in all its details.  Nothing had
been overlooked, not even the family.  It lay on its back, just
outside the front door, proud but calm, waiting to be put into
possession.  It was not an extensive family.  It consisted of four--
papa, and mamma, and baby, and the hired girl; just the family for a
beginner.

It was a well-dressed family too--not merely with grand clothes
outside, covering a shameful condition of things beneath, such as,
alas! is too often the case in doll society, but with every article
necessary and proper to a lady or gentleman, down to items that I
could not mention.  And all these garments, you must know, could be
unfastened and taken off.  I have known dolls--stylish enough dolls,
to look at, some of them--who have been content to go about with
their clothes gummed on to them, and, in some cases, nailed on with
tacks, which I take to be a slovenly and unhealthy habit.  But this
family could be undressed in five minutes, without the aid of either
hot water or a chisel.

Not that it was advisable from an artistic point of view that any of
them should.  They had not the figure that looks well in its natural
state--none of them.  There was a want of fulness about them all.
Besides, without their clothes, it might have been difficult to
distinguish the baby from the papa, or the maid from the mistress,
and thus domestic complications might have arisen.

When all was ready for their reception we established them in their
home.  We put as much of the baby to bed as the cot would hold, and
made the papa and mamma comfortable in the drawing-room, where they
sat on the floor and stared thoughtfully at each other across the
table.  (They had to sit on the floor because the chairs were not
big enough.)  The girl we placed in the kitchen, where she leant
against the dresser in an attitude suggestive of drink, embracing
the broom we had given her with maudlin affection.  Then we lifted
up the house with care, and carried it cautiously into another room,
and with the deftness of experienced conspirators placed it at the
foot of a small bed, on the south-west corner of which an absurdly
small somebody had hung an absurdly small stocking.

To return to our own doll's house, Ethelbertha and I, discussing the
subject during our return journey in the train, resolved that, next
year, we ourselves would possess a houseboat, a smaller houseboat,
if possible, than even the one we had just seen.  It should have
art-muslin curtains and a flag, and the flowers about it should be
wild roses and forget-me-nots.  I could work all the morning on the
roof, with an awning over me to keep off the sun, while Ethelbertha
trimmed the roses and made cakes for tea; and in the evenings we
would sit out on the little deck, and Ethelbertha would play the
guitar (she would begin learning it at once), or we could sit quiet
and listen to the nightingales.

For, when you are very, very young you dream that the summer is all
sunny days and moonlight nights, that the wind blows always softly
from the west, and that roses will thrive anywhere.  But, as you
grow older, you grow tired of waiting for the gray sky to break.  So
you close the door and come in, and crouch over the fire, wondering
why the winds blow ever from the east:  and you have given up trying
to rear roses.

I knew a little cottage girl who saved up her money for months and
months so as to buy a new frock in which to go to a flower-show.
But the day of the flower-show was a wet day, so she wore an old
frock instead.  And all the fete days for quite a long while were
wet days, and she feared she would never have a chance of wearing
her pretty white dress.  But at last there came a fete day morning
that was bright and sunny, and then the little girl clapped her
hands and ran upstairs, and took her new frock (which had been her
"new frock" for so long a time that it was now the oldest frock she
had) from the box where it lay neatly folded between lavender and
thyme, and held it up, and laughed to think how nice she would look
in it.

But when she went to put it on, she found that she had out-grown it,
and that it was too small for her every way.  So she had to wear a
common old frock after all.

Things happen that way, you know, in this world.  There were a boy
and girl once who loved each other very dearly.  But they were both
poor, so they agreed to wait till he had made enough money for them
to live comfortably upon, and then they would marry and be happy.
It took him a long while to make, because making money is very slow
work, and he wanted, while he was about it, to make enough for them
to be very happy upon indeed.  He accomplished the task eventually,
however, and came back home a wealthy man.

Then they met again in the poorly-furnished parlour where they had
parted.  But they did not sit as near to each other as of old.  For
she had lived alone so long that she had grown old-maidish, and she
was feeling vexed with him for having dirtied the carpet with his
muddy boots.  And he had worked so long earning money that he had
grown hard and cold like the money itself, and was trying to think
of something affectionate to say to her.

So for a while they sat, one each side of the paper "fire-stove
ornament," both wondering why they had shed such scalding tears on
that day they had kissed each other good-bye; then said "good-bye"
again, and were glad.

There is another tale with much the same moral that I learnt at
school out of a copy-book.  If I remember rightly, it runs somewhat
like this:-

Once upon a time there lived a wise grasshopper and a foolish ant.
All through the pleasant summer weather the grasshopper sported and
played, gambolling with his fellows in and out among the sun-beams,
dining sumptuously each day on leaves and dew-drops, never troubling
about the morrow, singing ever his one peaceful, droning song.

But there came the cruel winter, and the grass-hopper, looking
around, saw that his friends, the flowers, lay dead, and knew
thereby that his own little span was drawing near its close.

Then he felt glad that he had been so happy, and had not wasted his
life.  "It has been very short," said he to himself; "but it has
been very pleasant, and I think I have made the best use of it.  I
have drunk in the sunshine, I have lain on the soft, warm air, I
have played merry games in the waving grass, I have tasted the juice
of the sweet green leaves.  I have done what I could.  I have spread
my wings, I have sung my song.  Now I will thank God for the sunny
days that are passed, and die."

Saying which, he crawled under a brown leaf, and met his fate in the
way that all brave grasshoppers should; and a little bird that was
passing by picked him up tenderly and buried him.

Now when the foolish ant saw this, she was greatly puffed up with
Pharisaical conceit.  "How thankful I ought to be," said she, "that
I am industrious and prudent, and not like this poor grasshopper.
While he was flitting about from flower to flower, enjoying himself,
I was hard at work, putting by against the winter.  Now he is dead,
while I am about to make myself cosy in my warm home, and eat all
the good things that I have been saving up."

But, as she spoke, the gardener came along with his spade, and
levelled the hill where she dwelt to the ground, and left her lying
dead amidst the ruins.

Then the same kind little bird that had buried the grasshopper came
and picked her out and buried her also; and afterwards he composed
and sang a song, the burthen of which was, "Gather ye rosebuds while
ye may."  It was a very pretty song, and a very wise song, and a man
who lived in those days, and to whom the birds, loving him and
feeling that he was almost one of themselves, had taught their
language, fortunately overheard it and wrote it down, so that all
may read it to this day.

Unhappily for us, however, Fate is a harsh governess, who has no
sympathy with our desire for rosebuds.  "Don't stop to pick flowers
now, my dear," she cries, in her sharp, cross tones, as she seizes
our arm and jerks us back into the roadway; "we haven't time to-day.
We will come back again to-morrow, and you shall pick them then."

And we have to follow her, knowing, if we are experienced children,
that the chances are that we shall never come that way to-morrow; or
that, if we do, the roses will be dead.

Fate would not hear of our having a houseboat that summer,--which
was an exceptionally fine summer,--but promised us that if we were
good and saved up our money, we should have one next year; and
Ethelbertha and I, being simple-minded, inexperienced children, were
content with the promise, and had faith in its satisfactory
fulfilment.

As soon as we reached home we informed Amenda of our plan.  The
moment the girl opened the door, Ethelbertha burst out with:- "Oh!
can you swim, Amenda?"

"No, mum," answered Amenda, with entire absence of curiosity as to
why such a question had been addressed to her, "I never knew but one
girl as could, and she got drowned."

"Well, you'll have to make haste and learn, then," continued
Ethelbertha, "because you won't be able to walk out with your young
man, you'll have to swim out.  We're not going to live in a house
any more.  We're going to live on a boat in the middle of the
river."

Ethelbertha's chief object in life at this period was to surprise
and shock Amenda, and her chief sorrow that she had never succeeded
in doing so.  She had hoped great things from this announcement, but
the girl remained unmoved.  "Oh, are you, mum," she replied; and
went on to speak of other matters.

I believe the result would have been the same if we had told her we
were going to live in a balloon.

I do not know how it was, I am sure.  Amenda was always most
respectful in her manner.  But she had a knack of making Ethelbertha
and myself feel that we were a couple of children, playing at being
grown up and married, and that she was humouring us.

Amenda stayed with us for nearly five years--until the milkman,
having saved up sufficient to buy a "walk" of his own, had become
practicable--but her attitude towards us never changed.  Even when
we came to be really important married people, the proprietors of a
"family," it was evident that she merely considered we had gone a
step further in the game, and were playing now at being fathers and
mothers.

By some subtle process she contrived to imbue the baby also with
this idea.  The child never seemed to me to take either of us quite
seriously.  She would play with us, or join with us in light
conversation; but when it came to the serious affairs of life, such
as bathing or feeding, she preferred her nurse.

Ethelbertha attempted to take her out in the perambulator one
morning, but the child would not hear of it for a moment.

"It's all right, baby dear," explained Ethelbertha soothingly.
"Baby's going out with mamma this morning."

"Oh no, baby ain't," was baby's rejoinder, in effect if not in
words.  "Baby don't take a hand in experiments--not this baby.  I
don't want to be upset or run over."

Poor Ethel!  I shall never forget how heart-broken she was.  It was
the want of confidence that wounded her.

But these are reminiscences of other days, having no connection with
the days of which I am--or should be--writing; and to wander from
one matter to another is, in a teller of tales, a grievous sin, and
a growing custom much to be condemned.  Therefore I will close my
eyes to all other memories, and endeavour to see only that little
white and green houseboat by the ferry, which was the scene of our
future collaborations.

Houseboats then were not built to the scale of Mississippi steamers,
but this boat was a small one, even for that primitive age.  The man
from whom we hired it described it as "compact."  The man to whom,
at the end of the first month, we tried to sub-let it, characterised
it as "poky."  In our letters we traversed this definition.  In our
hearts we agreed with it.

At first, however, its size--or, rather, its lack of size--was one
of its chief charms in Ethelbertha's eyes.  The fact that if you got
out of bed carelessly you were certain to knock your head against
the ceiling, and that it was utterly impossible for any man to put
on his trousers except in the saloon, she regarded as a capital
joke.

That she herself had to take a looking-glass and go upon the roof to
do her back hair, she thought less amusing.

Amenda accepted her new surroundings with her usual philosophic
indifference.  On being informed that what she had mistaken for a
linen-press was her bedroom, she remarked that there was one
advantage about it, and that was, that she could not tumble out of
bed, seeing there was nowhere to tumble; and, on being shown the
kitchen, she observed that she should like it for two things--one
was that she could sit in the middle and reach everything without
getting up; the other, that nobody else could come into the
apartment while she was there.

"You see, Amenda," explained Ethelbertha apologetically, "we shall
really live outside."

"Yes, mum," answered Amenda, "I should say that would be the best
place to do it."

If only we could have lived more outside, the life might have been
pleasant enough, but the weather rendered it impossible, six days
out of the seven, for us to do more than look out of the window and
feel thankful that we had a roof over our heads.

I have known wet summers before and since.  I have learnt by many
bitter experiences the danger and foolishness of leaving the shelter
of London any time between the first of May and the thirty-first of
October.  Indeed, the country is always associate in my mind with
recollections of long, weary days passed in the pitiless rain, and
sad evenings spent in other people's clothes.  But never have I
known, and never, I pray night and morning, may I know again, such a
summer as the one we lived through (though none of us expected to)
on that confounded houseboat.

In the morning we would be awakened by the rain's forcing its way
through the window and wetting the bed, and would get up and mop out
the saloon.  After breakfast I would try to work, but the beating of
the hail upon the roof just over my head would drive every idea out
of my brain, and, after a wasted hour or two, I would fling down my
pen and hunt up Ethelbertha, and we would put on our mackintoshes
and take our umbrellas and go out for a row.  At mid-day we would
return and put on some dry clothes, and sit down to dinner.

In the afternoon the storm generally freshened up a bit, and we were
kept pretty busy rushing about with towels and cloths, trying to
prevent the water from coming into the rooms and swamping us.
During tea-time the saloon was usually illuminated by forked
lightning.  The evenings we spent in baling out the boat, after
which we took it in turns to go into the kitchen and warm ourselves.
At eight we supped, and from then until it was time to go to bed we
sat wrapped up in rugs, listening to the roaring of the thunder, and
the howling of the wind, and the lashing of the waves, and wondering
whether the boat would hold out through the night.

Friends would come down to spend the day with us--elderly, irritable
people, fond of warmth and comfort; people who did not, as a rule,
hanker after jaunts, even under the most favourable conditions; but
who had been persuaded by our silly talk that a day on the river
would be to them like a Saturday to Monday in Paradise.

They would arrive soaked; and we would shut them up in different
bunks, and leave them to strip themselves and put on things of
Ethelbertha's or of mine.  But Ethel and I, in those days, were
slim, so that stout, middle-aged people in our clothes neither
looked well nor felt happy.

Upon their emerging we would take them into the saloon and try to
entertain them by telling them what we had intended to do with them
had the day been fine.  But their answers were short, and
occasionally snappy, and after a while the conversation would flag,
and we would sit round reading last week's newspapers and coughing.

The moment their own clothes were dry (we lived in a perpetual
atmosphere of steaming clothes) they would insist upon leaving us,
which seemed to me discourteous after all that we had done for them,
and would dress themselves once more and start off home, and get wet
again before they got there.

We would generally receive a letter a few days afterwards, written
by some relative, informing us that both patients were doing as well
as could be expected, and promising to send us a card for the
funeral in case of a relapse.

Our chief recreation, our sole consolation, during the long weeks of
our imprisonment, was to watch from our windows the pleasure-seekers
passing by in small open boats, and to reflect what an awful day
they had had, or were going to have, as the case might be.

In the forenoon they would head up stream--young men with their
sweethearts; nephews taking out their rich old aunts; husbands and
wives (some of them pairs, some of them odd ones); stylish-looking
girls with cousins; energetic-looking men with dogs; high-class
silent parties; low-class noisy parties; quarrelsome family parties-
-boatload after boatload they went by, wet, but still hopeful,
pointing out bits of blue sky to each other.

In the evening they would return, drenched and gloomy, saying
disagreeable things to one another.

One couple, and one couple only, out of the many hundreds that
passed under our review, came back from the ordeal with pleasant
faces.  He was rowing hard and singing, with a handkerchief tied
round his head to keep his hat on, and she was laughing at him,
while trying to hold up an umbrella with one hand and steer with the
other.

There are but two explanations to account for people being jolly on
the river in the rain.  The one I dismissed as being both
uncharitable and improbable.  The other was creditable to the human
race, and, adopting it, I took off my cap to this damp but cheerful
pair as they went by.  They answered with a wave of the hand, and I
stood looking after them till they disappeared in the mist.

I am inclined to think that those young people, if they be still
alive, are happy.  Maybe, fortune has been kind to them, or maybe
she has not, but in either event they are, I am inclined to think,
happier than are most people.

Now and again, the daily tornado would rage with such fury as to
defeat its own purpose by prematurely exhausting itself.  On these
rare occasions we would sit out on the deck, and enjoy the unwonted
luxury of fresh air.

I remember well those few pleasant evenings:  the river, luminous
with the drowned light, the dark banks where the night lurked, the
storm-tossed sky, jewelled here and there with stars.

It was delightful not to hear for an hour or so the sullen thrashing
of the rain; but to listen to the leaping of the fishes, the soft
swirl raised by some water-rat, swimming stealthily among the
rushes, the restless twitterings of the few still wakeful birds.

An old corncrake lived near to us, and the way he used to disturb
all the other birds, and keep them from going to sleep, was
shameful.  Amenda, who was town-bred, mistook him at first for one
of those cheap alarm clocks, and wondered who was winding him up,
and why they went on doing it all night; and, above all, why they
didn't oil him.

He would begin his unhallowed performance about dusk, just as every
respectable bird was preparing to settle down for the night.  A
family of thrushes had their nest a few yards from his stand, and
they used to get perfectly furious with him.

"There's that fool at it again," the female thrush would say; "why
can't he do it in the day-time if he must do it at all?"  (She
spoke, of course, in twitters, but I am confident the above is a
correct translation.)

After a while, the young thrushes would wake up and begin chirping,
and then the mother would get madder than ever.

"Can't you say something to him?" she would cry indignantly to her
husband.  "How do you think the children can get to sleep, poor
things, with that hideous row going on all night?  Might just as
well be living in a saw-mill."

Thus adjured, the male thrush would put his head over the nest, and
call out in a nervous, apologetic manner:-

"I say, you know, you there, I wish you wouldn't mind being quiet a
bit.  My wife says she can't get the children to sleep.  It's too
bad, you know, 'pon my word it is."

"Gor on," the corncrake would answer surlily.  "You keep your wife
herself quiet; that's enough for you to do."  And on he would go
again worse than before.

Then a mother blackbird, from a little further off, would join in
the fray.

"Ah, it's a good hiding he wants, not a talking to.  And if I was a
cock, I'd give it him."  (This remark would be made in a tone of
withering contempt, and would appear to bear reference to some
previous discussion.)

"You're quite right, ma'am," Mrs. Thrush would reply.  "That's what
I tell my husband, but" (with rising inflection, so that every lady
in the plantation might hear) "HE wouldn't move himself, bless you--
no, not if I and the children were to die before his eyes for want
of sleep."

"Ah, he ain't the only one, my dear," the blackbird would pipe back,
"they're all alike"; then, in a voice more of sorrow than of anger:-
"but there, it ain't their fault, I suppose, poor things.  If you
ain't got the spirit of a bird you can't help yourself."

I would strain my ears at this point to hear if the male blackbird
was moved at all by these taunts, but the only sound I could ever
detect coming from his neighbourhood was that of palpably
exaggerated snoring.

By this time the whole glade would be awake, expressing views
concerning that corncrake that would have wounded a less callous
nature.

"Blow me tight, Bill," some vulgar little hedge-sparrow would chirp
out, in the midst of the hubbub, "if I don't believe the gent thinks
'e's a-singing."

"'Tain't 'is fault," Bill would reply, with mock sympathy.
"Somebody's put a penny in the slot, and 'e can't stop 'isself."

Irritated by the laugh that this would call forth from the younger
birds, the corncrake would exert himself to be more objectionable
than ever, and, as a means to this end, would commence giving his
marvellous imitation of the sharpening of a rusty saw by a steel
file.

But at this an old crow, not to be trifled with, would cry out
angrily:-

"Stop that, now.  If I come down to you I'll peck your cranky head
off, I will."

And then would follow silence for a quarter of an hour, after which
the whole thing would begin again.



CHAPTER V



Brown and MacShaughnassy came down together on the Saturday
afternoon; and, as soon as they had dried themselves, and had had
some tea, we settled down to work.

Jephson had written that he would not be able to be with us until
late in the evening, and Brown proposed that we should occupy
ourselves until his arrival with plots.

"Let each of us," said he, "sketch out a plot.  Afterwards we can
compare them, and select the best."

This we proceeded to do.  The plots themselves I forget, but I
remember that at the subsequent judging each man selected his own,
and became so indignant at the bitter criticism to which it was
subjected by the other two, that he tore it up; and, for the next
half-hour, we sat and smoked in silence.

When I was very young I yearned to know other people's opinion of me
and all my works; now, my chief aim is to avoid hearing it.  In
those days, had any one told me there was half a line about myself
in a newspaper, I should have tramped London to obtain that
publication.  Now, when I see a column headed with my name, I
hurriedly fold up the paper and put it away from me, subduing my
natural curiosity to read it by saying to myself, "Why should you?
It will only upset you for the day."

In my cubhood I possessed a friend.  Other friends have come into my
life since--very dear and precious friends--but they have none of
them been to me quite what this friend was.  Because he was my first
friend, and we lived together in a world that was much bigger than
this world--more full of joy and of grief; and, in that world, we
loved and hated deeper than we love and hate in this smaller world
that I have come to dwell in since.

He also had the very young man's craving to be criticised, and we
made it our custom to oblige each other.  We did not know then that
what we meant, when we asked for "criticism," was encouragement.  We
thought that we were strong--one does at the beginning of the
battle, and that we could bear to hear the truth.

Accordingly, each one pointed out to the other one his errors, and
this task kept us both so busy that we had never time to say a word
of praise to one another.  That we each had a high opinion of the
other's talents I am convinced, but our heads were full of silly
saws.  We said to ourselves:  "There are many who will praise a man;
it is only his friend who will tell him of his faults."  Also, we
said:  "No man sees his own shortcomings, but when these are pointed
out to him by another he is grateful, and proceeds to mend them."

As we came to know the world better, we learnt the fallacy of these
ideas.  But then it was too late, for the mischief had been done.

When one of us had written anything, he would read it to the other,
and when he had finished he would say, "Now, tell me what you think
of it--frankly and as a friend."

Those were his words.  But his thoughts, though he may not have
known them, were:-

"Tell me it is clever and good, my friend, even if you do not think
so.  The world is very cruel to those that have not yet conquered
it, and, though we keep a careless face, our young hearts are scored
with wrinkles.  Often we grow weary and faint-hearted.  Is it not
so, my friend?  No one has faith in us, and in our dark hours we
doubt ourselves.  You are my comrade.  You know what of myself I
have put into this thing that to others will be but an idle half-
hour's reading.  Tell me it is good, my friend.  Put a little heart
into me, I pray you."

But the other, full of the lust of criticism, which is
civilisation's substitute for cruelty, would answer more in
frankness than in friendship.  Then he who had written would flush
angrily, and scornful words would pass.

One evening, he read me a play he had written.  There was much that
was good in it, but there were also faults (there are in some
plays), and these I seized upon and made merry over.  I could hardly
have dealt out to the piece more unnecessary bitterness had I been a
professional critic.

As soon as I paused from my sport he rose, and, taking his
manuscript from the table, tore it in two, and flung it in the fire-
-he was but a very young man, you must remember--and then, standing
before me with a white face, told me, unsolicited, his opinion of me
and of my art.  After which double event, it is perhaps needless to
say that we parted in hot anger.

I did not see him again for years.  The streets of life are very
crowded, and if we loose each other's hands we are soon hustled far
apart.  When I did next meet him it was by accident.

I had left the Whitehall Rooms after a public dinner, and, glad of
the cool night air, was strolling home by the Embankment.  A man,
slouching along under the trees, paused as I overtook him.

"You couldn't oblige me with a light, could you, guv'nor?" he said.
The voice sounded strange, coming from the figure that it did.

I struck a match, and held it out to him, shaded by my hands.  As
the faint light illumined his face, I started back, and let the
match fall:-

"Harry!"

He answered with a short dry laugh.  "I didn't know it was you," he
said, "or I shouldn't have stopped you."

"How has it come to this, old fellow?" I asked, laying my hand upon
his shoulder.  His coat was unpleasantly greasy, and I drew my hand
away again as quickly as I could, and tried to wipe it covertly upon
my handkerchief.

"Oh, it's a long, story," he answered carelessly, "and too
conventional to be worth telling.  Some of us go up, you know.  Some
of us go down.  You're doing pretty well, I hear."

"I suppose so," I replied; "I've climbed a few feet up a greasy
pole, and am trying to stick there.  But it is of you I want to
talk.  Can't I do anything for you?"

We were passing under a gas-lamp at the moment.  He thrust his face
forward close to mine, and the light fell full and pitilessly upon
it.

"Do I look like a man you could do anything for?" he said.

We walked on in silence side by side, I casting about for words that
might seize hold of him.

"You needn't worry about me," he continued after a while, "I'm
comfortable enough.  We take life easily down here where I am.
We've no disappointments."

"Why did you give up like a weak coward?" I burst out angrily.  "You
had talent.  You would have won with ordinary perseverance."

"Maybe," he replied, in the same even tone of indifference.  "I
suppose I hadn't the grit.  I think if somebody had believed in me
it might have helped me.  But nobody did, and at last I lost belief
in myself.  And when a man loses that, he's like a balloon with the
gas let out."

I listened to his words in indignation and astonishment.  "Nobody
believed in you!" I repeated.  "Why, I always believed in you, you
know that I--"

Then I paused, remembering our "candid criticism" of one another.

"Did you?" he replied quietly, "I never heard you say so.  Good-
night."

In the course of our Strandward walking we had come to the
neighbourhood of the Savoy, and, as he spoke, he disappeared down
one of the dark turnings thereabouts.

I hastened after him, calling him by name, but though I heard his
quick steps before me for a little way, they were soon swallowed up
in the sound of other steps, and, when I reached the square in which
the chapel stands, I had lost all trace of him.

A policeman was standing by the churchyard railings, and of him I
made inquiries.

"What sort of a gent was he, sir?" questioned the man.

"A tall thin gentleman, very shabbily dressed--might be mistaken for
a tramp."

"Ah, there's a good many of that sort living in this town," replied
the man.  "I'm afraid you'll have some difficulty in finding him."

Thus for a second time had I heard his footsteps die away, knowing I
should never listen for their drawing near again.

I wondered as I walked on--I have wondered before and since--whether
Art, even with a capital A, is quite worth all the suffering that is
inflicted in her behalf--whether she and we are better for all the
scorning and the sneering, all the envying and the hating, that is
done in her name.

Jephson arrived about nine o'clock in the ferry-boat.  We were made
acquainted with this fact by having our heads bumped against the
sides of the saloon.

Somebody or other always had their head bumped whenever the ferry-
boat arrived.  It was a heavy and cumbersome machine, and the ferry-
boy was not a good punter.  He admitted this frankly, which was
creditable of him.  But he made no attempt to improve himself; that
is, where he was wrong.  His method was to arrange the punt before
starting in a line with the point towards which he wished to
proceed, and then to push hard, without ever looking behind him,
until something suddenly stopped him.  This was sometimes the bank,
sometimes another boat, occasionally a steamer, from six to a dozen
times a day our riparian dwelling.  That he never succeeded in
staving the houseboat in speaks highly for the man who built her.

One day he came down upon us with a tremendous crash.  Amenda was
walking along the passage at the moment, and the result to her was
that she received a violent blow first on the left side of her head
and then on the right.

She was accustomed to accept one bump as a matter of course, and to
regard it as an intimation from the boy that he had come; but this
double knock annoyed her:  so much "style" was out of place in a
mere ferry-boy.  Accordingly she went out to him in a state of high
indignation.

"What do you think you are?" she cried, balancing accounts by boxing
his ears first on one side and then on the other, "a torpedo!  What
are you doing here at all?  What do you want?"

"I don't want nothin'," explained the boy, rubbing his head; "I've
brought a gent down."

"A gent?" said Amenda, looking round, but seeing no one.  "What
gent?"

"A stout gent in a straw 'at," answered the boy, staring round him
bewilderedly.

"Well, where is he?" asked Amenda.

"I dunno," replied the boy, in an awed voice; "'e was a-standin'
there, at the other end of the punt, a-smokin' a cigar."

Just then a head appeared above the water, and a spent but
infuriated swimmer struggled up between the houseboat and the bank.

"Oh, there 'e is!" cried the boy delightedly, evidently much
relieved at this satisfactory solution of the mystery; "'e must ha'
tumbled off the punt."

"You're quite right, my lad, that's just what he did do, and there's
your fee for assisting him to do it."  Saying which, my dripping
friend, who had now scrambled upon deck, leant over, and following
Amenda's excellent example, expressed his feelings upon the boy's
head.

There was one comforting reflection about the transaction as a
whole, and that was that the ferry-boy had at last received a fit
and proper reward for his services.  I had often felt inclined to
give him something myself.  I think he was, without exception, the
most clumsy and stupid boy I have ever come across; and that is
saying a good deal.

His mother undertook that for three-and-sixpence a week he should
"make himself generally useful" to us for a couple of hours every
morning.

Those were the old lady's very words, and I repeated them to Amenda
when I introduced the boy to her.

"This is James, Amenda," I said; "he will come down here every
morning at seven, and bring us our milk and the letters, and from
then till nine he will make himself generally useful."

Amenda took stock of him.

"It will be a change of occupation for him, sir, I should say, by
the look of him," she remarked.

After that, whenever some more than usually stirring crash or blood-
curdling bump would cause us to leap from our seats and cry:  "What
on earth has happened?"  Amenda would reply:  "Oh, it's only James,
mum, making himself generally useful."

Whatever he lifted he let fall; whatever he touched he upset;
whatever he came near--that was not a fixture--he knocked over; if
it was a fixture, it knocked HIM over.  This was not carelessness:
it seemed to be a natural gift.  Never in his life, I am convinced,
had he carried a bucketful of anything anywhere without tumbling
over it before he got there.  One of his duties was to water the
flowers on the roof.  Fortunately--for the flowers--Nature, that
summer, stood drinks with a lavishness sufficient to satisfy the
most confirmed vegetable toper:  otherwise every plant on our boat
would have died from drought.  Never one drop of water did they
receive from him.  He was for ever taking them water, but he never
arrived there with it.  As a rule he upset the pail before he got it
on to the boat at all, and this was the best thing that could
happen, because then the water simply went back into the river, and
did no harm to any one.  Sometimes, however, he would succeed in
landing it, and then the chances were he would spill it over the
deck or into the passage.  Now and again, he would get halfway up
the ladder before the accident occurred.  Twice he nearly reached
the top; and once he actually did gain the roof.  What happened
there on that memorable occasion will never be known.  The boy
himself, when picked up, could explain nothing.  It is supposed that
he lost his head with the pride of the achievement, and essayed
feats that neither his previous training nor his natural abilities
justified him in attempting.  However that may be, the fact remains
that the main body of the water came down the kitchen chimney; and
that the boy and the empty pail arrived together on deck before they
knew they had started.

When he could find nothing else to damage, he would go out of his
way to upset himself.  He could not be sure of stepping from his own
punt on to the boat with safety.  As often as not, he would catch
his foot in the chain or the punt-pole, and arrive on his chest.

Amenda used to condole with him.  "Your mother ought to be ashamed
of herself," I heard her telling him one morning; "she could never
have taught you to walk.  What you want is a go-cart."

He was a willing lad, but his stupidity was super-natural.  A comet
appeared in the sky that year, and everybody was talking about it.
One day he said to me:-

"There's a comet coming, ain't there, sir?"  He talked about it as
though it were a circus.

"Coming!" I answered, "it's come.  Haven't you seen it?"

"No, sir."

"Oh, well, you have a look for it to-night.  It's worth seeing."

"Yees, sir, I should like to see it.  It's got a tail, ain't it,
sir?"

"Yes, a very fine tail."

"Yees, sir, they said it 'ad a tail.  Where do you go to see it,
sir?"

"Go!  You don't want to go anywhere.  You'll see it in your own
garden at ten o'clock."

He thanked me, and, tumbling over a sack of potatoes, plunged head
foremost into his punt and departed.

Next morning, I asked him if he had seen the comet.

"No, sir, I couldn't see it anywhere."

"Did you look?"

"Yees, sir.  I looked a long time."

"How on earth did you manage to miss it then?" I exclaimed.  "It was
a clear enough night.  Where did you look?"

"In our garden, sir.  Where you told me."

"Whereabouts in the garden?" chimed in Amenda, who happened to be
standing by; "under the gooseberry bushes?"

"Yees--everywhere."

That is what he had done:  he had taken the stable lantern and
searched the garden for it.

But the day when he broke even his own record for foolishness
happened about three weeks later.  MacShaughnassy was staying with
us at the time, and on the Friday evening he mixed us a salad,
according to a recipe given him by his aunt.  On the Saturday
morning, everybody was, of course, very ill.  Everybody always is
very ill after partaking of any dish prepared by MacShaughnassy.
Some people attempt to explain this fact by talking glibly of "cause
and effect."  MacShaughnassy maintains that it is simply
coincidence.

"How do you know," he says, "that you wouldn't have been ill if you
hadn't eaten any?  You're queer enough now, any one can see, and I'm
very sorry for you; but, for all that you can tell, if you hadn't
eaten any of that stuff you might have been very much worse--perhaps
dead.  In all probability, it has saved your life."  And for the
rest of the day, he assumes towards you the attitude of a man who
has dragged you from the grave.

The moment Jimmy arrived I seized hold of him.

"Jimmy," I said, "you must rush off to the chemist's immediately.
Don't stop for anything.  Tell him to give you something for colic--
the result of vegetable poisoning.  It must be something very
strong, and enough for four.  Don't forget, something to counteract
the effects of vegetable poisoning.  Hurry up, or it may be too
late."

My excitement communicated itself to the boy.  He tumbled back into
his punt, and pushed off vigorously.  I watched him land, and
disappear in the direction of the village.

Half an hour passed, but Jimmy did not return.  No one felt
sufficiently energetic to go after him.  We had only just strength
enough to sit still and feebly abuse him.  At the end of an hour we
were all feeling very much better.  At the end of an hour and a half
we were glad he had not returned when he ought to have, and were
only curious as to what had become of him.

In the evening, strolling through the village, we saw him sitting by
the open door of his mother's cottage, with a shawl wrapped round
him.  He was looking worn and ill.

"Why, Jimmy," I said, "what's the matter?  Why didn't you come back
this morning?"

"I couldn't, sir," Jimmy answered, "I was so queer.  Mother made me
go to bed."

"You seemed all right in the morning," I said; "what's made you
queer?"

"What Mr. Jones give me, sir:  it upset me awful."

A light broke in upon me.

"What did you say, Jimmy, when you got to Mr. Jones's shop?" I
asked.

"I told 'im what you said, sir, that 'e was to give me something to
counteract the effects of vegetable poisoning.  And that it was to
be very strong, and enough for four."

"And what did he say?"

"'E said that was only your nonsense, sir, and that I'd better have
enough for one to begin with; and then 'e asked me if I'd been
eating green apples again."

"And you told him?"

"Yees, sir, I told 'im I'd 'ad a few, and 'e said it served me
right, and that 'e 'oped it would be a warning to me.  And then 'e
put something fizzy in a glass and told me to drink it."

"And you drank it?"

"Yees, sir."

"It never occurred to you, Jimmy, that there was nothing the matter
with you--that you were never feeling better in your life, and that
you did not require any medicine?"

"No, sir."

"Did one single scintilla of thought of any kind occur to you in
connection with the matter, Jimmy, from beginning to end?"

"No, sir."

People who never met Jimmy disbelieve this story.  They argue that
its premises are in disaccord with the known laws governing human
nature, that its details do not square with the average of
probability.  People who have seen and conversed with Jimmy accept
it with simple faith.

The advent of Jephson--which I trust the reader has not entirely
forgotten--cheered us up considerably.  Jephson was always at his
best when all other things were at their worst.  It was not that he
struggled in Mark Tapley fashion to appear most cheerful when most
depressed; it was that petty misfortunes and mishaps genuinely
amused and inspirited him.  Most of us can recall our unpleasant
experiences with amused affection; Jephson possessed the robuster
philosophy that enabled him to enjoy his during their actual
progress.  He arrived drenched to the skin, chuckling hugely at the
idea of having come down on a visit to a houseboat in such weather.

Under his warming influence, the hard lines on our faces thawed, and
by supper time we were, as all Englishmen and women who wish to
enjoy life should be, independent of the weather.

Later on, as if disheartened by our indifference, the rain ceased,
and we took our chairs out on the deck, and sat watching the
lightning, which still played incessantly.  Then, not unnaturally,
the talk drifted into a sombre channel, and we began recounting
stories, dealing with the gloomy and mysterious side of life.

Some of these were worth remembering, and some were not.  The one
that left the strongest impression on my mind was a tale that
Jephson told us.

I had been relating a somewhat curious experience of my own.  I met
a man in the Strand one day that I knew very well, as I thought,
though I had not seen him for years.  We walked together to Charing
Cross, and there we shook hands and parted.  Next morning, I spoke
of this meeting to a mutual friend, and then I learnt, for the first
time, that the man had died six months before.

The natural inference was that I had mistaken one man for another,
an error that, not having a good memory for faces, I frequently fall
into.  What was remarkable about the matter, however, was that
throughout our walk I had conversed with the man under the
impression that he was that other dead man, and, whether by
coincidence or not, his replies had never once suggested to me my
mistake.

As soon as I finished, Jephson, who had been listening very
thoughtfully, asked me if I believed in spiritualism "to its fullest
extent."

"That is rather a large question," I answered.  "What do you mean by
'spiritualism to its fullest extent'?"

"Well, do you believe that the spirits of the dead have not only the
power of revisiting this earth at their will, but that, when here,
they have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action?
Let me put a definite case.  A spiritualist friend of mine, a
sensible and by no means imaginative man, once told me that a table,
through the medium of which the spirit of a friend had been in the
habit of communicating with him, came slowly across the room towards
him, of its own accord, one night as he sat alone, and pinioned him
against the wall.  Now can any of you believe that, or can't you?"

"I could," Brown took it upon himself to reply; "but, before doing
so, I should wish for an introduction to the friend who told you the
story.  Speaking generally," he continued, "it seems to me that the
difference between what we call the natural and the supernatural is
merely the difference between frequency and rarity of occurrence.
Having regard to the phenomena we are compelled to admit, I think it
illogical to disbelieve anything we are unable to disprove."

"For my part," remarked MacShaughnassy, "I can believe in the
ability of our spirit friends to give the quaint entertainments
credited to them much easier than I can in their desire to do so."

"You mean," added Jephson, "that you cannot understand why a spirit,
not compelled as we are by the exigencies of society, should care to
spend its evenings carrying on a laboured and childish conversation
with a room full of abnormally uninteresting people."

"That is precisely what I cannot understand," MacShaughnassy agreed.

"Nor I, either," said Jephson.  "But I was thinking of something
very different altogether.  Suppose a man died with the dearest wish
of his heart unfulfilled, do you believe that his spirit might have
power to return to earth and complete the interrupted work?"

"Well," answered MacShaughnassy, "if one admits the possibility of
spirits retaining any interest in the affairs of this world at all,
it is certainly more reasonable to imagine them engaged upon a task
such as you suggest, than to believe that they occupy themselves
with the performance of mere drawing-room tricks.  But what are you
leading up to?"

"Why, to this," replied Jephson, seating himself straddle-legged
across his chair, and leaning his arms upon the back.  "I was told a
story this morning at the hospital by an old French doctor.  The
actual facts are few and simple; all that is known can be read in
the Paris police records of sixty-two years ago.

"The most important part of the case, however, is the part that is
not known, and that never will be known.

"The story begins with a great wrong done by one man unto another
man.  What the wrong was I do not know.  I am inclined to think,
however, it was connected with a woman.  I think that, because he
who had been wronged hated him who had wronged him with a hate such
as does not often burn in a man's brain, unless it be fanned by the
memory of a woman's breath.

"Still that is only conjecture, and the point is immaterial.  The
man who had done the wrong fled, and the other man followed him.  It
became a point-to-point race, the first man having the advantage of
a day's start.  The course was the whole world, and the stakes were
the first man's life.

"Travellers were few and far between in those days, and this made
the trail easy to follow.  The first man, never knowing how far or
how near the other was behind him, and hoping now and again that he
might have baffled him, would rest for a while.  The second man,
knowing always just how far the first one was before him, never
paused, and thus each day the man who was spurred by Hate drew
nearer to the man who was spurred by Fear.

"At this town the answer to the never-varied question would be:-

"'At seven o'clock last evening, M'sieur.'

"'Seven--ah; eighteen hours.  Give me something to eat, quick, while
the horses are being put to.'

"At the next the calculation would be sixteen hours.

"Passing a lonely chalet, Monsieur puts his head out of the window:-

"'How long since a carriage passed this way, with a tall, fair man
inside?'

"'Such a one passed early this morning, M'sieur.'

"'Thanks, drive on, a hundred francs apiece if you are through the
pass before daybreak.'

"'And what for dead horses, M'sieur?'

"'Twice their value when living.'

"One day the man who was ridden by Fear looked up, and saw before
him the open door of a cathedral, and, passing in, knelt down and
prayed.  He prayed long and fervently, for men, when they are in
sore straits, clutch eagerly at the straws of faith.  He prayed that
he might be forgiven his sin, and, more important still, that he
might be pardoned the consequences of his sin, and be delivered from
his adversary; and a few chairs from him, facing him, knelt his
enemy, praying also.

"But the second man's prayer, being a thanksgiving merely, was
short, so that when the first man raised his eyes, he saw the face
of his enemy gazing at him across the chair-tops, with a mocking
smile upon it.

"He made no attempt to rise, but remained kneeling, fascinated by
the look of joy that shone out of the other man's eyes.  And the
other man moved the high-backed chairs one by one, and came towards
him softly.

"Then, just as the man who had been wronged stood beside the man who
had wronged him, full of gladness that his opportunity had come,
there burst from the cathedral tower a sudden clash of bells, and
the man, whose opportunity had come, broke his heart and fell back
dead, with that mocking smile still playing round his mouth.

"And so he lay there.

'Then the man who had done the wrong rose up and passed out,
praising God.

"What became of the body of the other man is not known.  It was the
body of a stranger who had died suddenly in the cathedral.  There
was none to identify it, none to claim it.

"Years passed away, and the survivor in the tragedy became a worthy
and useful citizen, and a noted man of science.

"In his laboratory were many objects necessary to him in his
researches, and, prominent among them, stood in a certain corner a
human skeleton.  It was a very old and much-mended skeleton, and one
day the long-expected end arrived, and it tumbled to pieces.

"Thus it became necessary to purchase another.

"The man of science visited a dealer he well knew--a little
parchment-faced old man who kept a dingy shop, where nothing was
ever sold, within the shadow of the towers of Notre Dame.

"The little parchment-faced old man had just the very thing that
Monsieur wanted--a singularly fine and well-proportioned 'study.'
It should be sent round and set up in Monsieur's laboratory that
very afternoon.

"The dealer was as good as his word.  When Monsieur entered his
laboratory that evening, the thing was in its place.

"Monsieur seated himself in his high-backed chair, and tried to
collect his thoughts.  But Monsieur's thoughts were unruly, and
inclined to wander, and to wander always in one direction.

"Monsieur opened a large volume and commenced to read.  He read of a
man who had wronged another and fled from him, the other man
following.  Finding himself reading this, he closed the book
angrily, and went and stood by the window and looked out.  He saw
before him the sun-pierced nave of a great cathedral, and on the
stones lay a dead man with a mocking smile upon his face.

"Cursing himself for a fool, he turned away with a laugh.  But his
laugh was short-lived, for it seemed to him that something else in
the room was laughing also.  Struck suddenly still, with his feet
glued to the ground, he stood listening for a while:  then sought
with starting eyes the corner from where the sound had seemed to
come.  But the white thing standing there was only grinning.

"Monsieur wiped the damp sweat from his head and hands, and stole
out.

"For a couple of days he did not enter the room again.  On the
third, telling himself that his fears were those of a hysterical
girl, he opened the door and went in.  To shame himself, he took his
lamp in his hand, and crossing over to the far corner where the
skeleton stood, examined it.  A set of bones bought for three
hundred francs.  Was he a child, to be scared by such a bogey!

"He held his lamp up in front of the thing's grinning head.  The
flame of the lamp flickered as though a faint breath had passed over
it.

"The man explained this to himself by saying that the walls of the
house were old and cracked, and that the wind might creep in
anywhere.  He repeated this explanation to himself as he recrossed
the room, walking backwards, with his eyes fixed on the thing.  When
he reached his desk, he sat down and gripped the arms of his chair
till his fingers turned white.

"He tried to work, but the empty sockets in that grinning head
seemed to be drawing him towards them.  He rose and battled with his
inclination to fly screaming from the room.  Glancing fearfully
about him, his eye fell upon a high screen, standing before the
door.  He dragged it forward, and placed it between himself and the
thing, so that he could not see it--nor it see him.  Then he sat
down again to his work.  For a while he forced himself to look at
the book in front of him, but at last, unable to control himself any
longer, he suffered his eyes to follow their own bent.

"It may have been an hallucination.  He may have accidentally placed
the screen so as to favour such an illusion.  But what he saw was a
bony hand coming round the corner of the screen, and, with a cry, he
fell to the floor in a swoon.

"The people of the house came running in, and lifting him up,
carried him out, and laid him upon his bed.  As soon as he
recovered, his first question was, where had they found the thing--
where was it when they entered the room? and when they told him they
had seen it standing where it always stood, and had gone down into
the room to look again, because of his frenzied entreaties, and
returned trying to hide their smiles, he listened to their talk
about overwork, and the necessity for change and rest, and said they
might do with him as they would.

"So for many months the laboratory door remained locked.  Then there
came a chill autumn evening when the man of science opened it again,
and closed it behind him.

"He lighted his lamp, and gathered his instruments and books around
him, and sat down before them in his high-backed chair.  And the old
terror returned to him.

"But this time he meant to conquer himself.  His nerves were
stronger now, and his brain clearer; he would fight his unreasoning
fear.  He crossed to the door and locked himself in, and flung the
key to the other end of the room, where it fell among jars and
bottles with an echoing clatter.

"Later on, his old housekeeper, going her final round, tapped at his
door and wished him good-night, as was her custom.  She received no
response, at first, and, growing nervous, tapped louder and called
again; and at length an answering 'good-night' came back to her.

"She thought little about it at the time, but afterwards she
remembered that the voice that had replied to her had been strangely
grating and mechanical.  Trying to describe it, she likened it to
such a voice as she would imagine coming from a statue.

"Next morning his door remained still locked.  It was no unusual
thing for him to work all night and far into the next day, so no one
thought to be surprised.  When, however, evening came, and yet he
did not appear, his servants gathered outside the room and
whispered, remembering what had happened once before.

"They listened, but could hear no sound.  They shook the door and
called to him, then beat with their fists upon the wooden panels.
But still no sound came from the room.

"Becoming alarmed, they decided to burst open the door, and, after
many blows, it gave way, and they crowded in.

He sat bolt upright in his high-backed chair.  They thought at first
he had died in his sleep.  But when they drew nearer and the light
fell upon him, they saw the livid marks of bony fingers round his
throat; and in his eyes there was a terror such as is not often seen
in human eyes."


Brown was the first to break the silence that followed.  He asked me
if I had any brandy on board.  He said he felt he should like just a
nip of brandy before going to bed.  That is one of the chief charms
of Jephson's stories:  they always make you feel you want a little
brandy.



CHAPTER VI



"Cats," remarked Jephson to me, one afternoon, as we sat in the punt
discussing the plot of our novel, "cats are animals for whom I
entertain a very great respect.  Cats and Nonconformists seem to me
the only things in this world possessed of a practicable working
conscience.  Watch a cat doing something mean and wrong--if ever one
gives you the chance; notice how anxious she is that nobody should
see her doing it; and how prompt, if detected, to pretend that she
was not doing it--that she was not even thinking of doing it--that,
as a matter of fact, she was just about to do something else, quite
different.  You might almost think they had a soul.

"Only this morning I was watching that tortoise-shell of yours on
the houseboat.  She was creeping along the roof, behind the flower-
boxes, stalking a young thrush that had perched upon a coil of rope.
Murder gleamed from her eye, assassination lurked in every twitching
muscle of her body.  As she crouched to spring, Fate, for once
favouring the weak, directed her attention to myself, and she
became, for the first time, aware of my presence.  It acted upon her
as a heavenly vision upon a Biblical criminal.  In an instant she
was a changed being.  The wicked beast, going about seeking whom it
might devour, had vanished.  In its place sat a long-tailed, furry
angel, gazing up into the sky with an expression that was one-third
innocence and two-thirds admiration of the beauties of nature.  What
was she doing there, did I want to know?  Why, could I not see,
playing with a bit of earth.  Surely I was not so evil-minded as to
imagine she wanted to kill that dear little bird--God bless it.

"Then note an old Tom, slinking home in the early morning, after a
night spent on a roof of bad repute.  Can you picture to yourself a
living creature less eager to attract attention?  'Dear me,' you can
all but hear it saying to itself, 'I'd no idea it was so late; how
time does go when one is enjoying oneself.  I do hope I shan't meet
any one I know--very awkward, it's being so light.'

"In the distance it sees a policeman, and stops suddenly within the
shelter of a shadow.  'Now what's he doing there,' it says, 'and
close to our door too?  I can't go in while he's hanging about.
He's sure to see and recognise me; and he's just the sort of man to
talk to the servants.'

"It hides itself behind a post and waits, peeping cautiously round
the corner from time to time.  The policeman, however, seems to have
taken up his residence at that particular spot, and the cat becomes
worried and excited.

"'What's the matter with the fool?' it mutters indignantly; 'is he
dead?  Why don't he move on, he's always telling other people to.
Stupid ass.'

"Just then a far-off cry of 'milk' is heard, and the cat starts up
in an agony of alarm.  'Great Scott, hark at that!  Why, everybody
will be down before I get in.  Well, I can't help it.  I must chance
it.'

"He glances round at himself, and hesitates.  'I wouldn't mind if I
didn't look so dirty and untidy,' he muses; 'people are so prone to
think evil in this world.'

"'Ah, well,' he adds, giving himself a shake, 'there's nothing else
for it, I must put my trust in Providence, it's pulled me through
before:  here goes.'

"He assumes an aspect of chastened sorrow, and trots along with a
demure and saddened step.  It is evident he wishes to convey the
idea that he has been out all night on work connected with the
Vigilance Association, and is now returning home sick at heart
because of the sights that he has seen.

"He squirms in, unnoticed, through a window, and has just time to
give himself a hurried lick down before he hears the cook's step on
the stairs.  When she enters the kitchen he is curled up on the
hearthrug, fast asleep.  The opening of the shutters awakes him.  He
rises and comes forward, yawning and stretching himself.

"'Dear me, is it morning, then?' he says drowsily.  'Heigh-ho!  I've
had such a lovely sleep, cook; and such a beautiful dream about poor
mother.'

"Cats! do you call them?  Why, they are Christians in everything
except the number of legs."

"They certainly are," I responded, "wonderfully cunning little
animals, and it is not by their moral and religious instincts alone
that they are so closely linked to man; the marvellous ability they
display in taking care of 'number one' is worthy of the human race
itself.  Some friends of mine had a cat, a big black Tom:  they have
got half of him still.  They had reared him from a kitten, and, in
their homely, undemonstrative way, they liked him.  There was
nothing, however, approaching passion on either side.

"One day a Chinchilla came to live in the neighbourhood, under the
charge of an elderly spinster, and the two cats met at a garden wall
party.

"'What sort of diggings have you got?' asked the Chinchilla.

"'Oh, pretty fair.'

"'Nice people?'

"'Yes, nice enough--as people go.'

"'Pretty willing?  Look after you well, and all that sort of thing?'

"'Yes--oh yes.  I've no fault to find with them.'

"'What's the victuals like?'

"'Oh, the usual thing, you know, bones and scraps, and a bit of dog-
biscuit now and then for a change.'

"'Bones and dog-biscuits!  Do you mean to say you eat bones?'

"'Yes, when I can get 'em.  Why, what's wrong about them?'

"'Shade of Egyptian Isis, bones and dog-biscuits!  Don't you ever
get any spring chickens, or a sardine, or a lamb cutlet?'

"'Chickens!  Sardines!  What are you talking about?  What are
sardines?'

"'What are sardines!  Oh, my dear child (the Chinchilla was a lady
cat, and always called gentlemen friends a little older than herself
'dear child'), these people of yours are treating you just
shamefully.  Come, sit down and tell me all about it.  What do they
give you to sleep on?'

"'The floor.'

"'I thought so; and skim milk and water to drink, I suppose?'

"'It IS a bit thin.'

"'I can quite imagine it.  You must leave these people, my dear, at
once.'

"'But where am I to go to?'

"'Anywhere.'

"'But who'll take me in?'

"'Anybody, if you go the right way to work.  How many times do you
think I've changed my people?  Seven!--and bettered myself on each
occasion.  Why, do you know where I was born?  In a pig-sty.  There
were three of us, mother and I and my little brother.  Mother would
leave us every evening, returning generally just as it was getting
light.  One morning she did not come back.  We waited and waited,
but the day passed on and she did not return, and we grew hungrier
and hungrier, and at last we lay down, side by side, and cried
ourselves to sleep.

"'In the evening, peeping through a hole in the door, we saw her
coming across the field.  She was crawling very slowly, with her
body close down against the ground.  We called to her, and she
answered with a low "crroo"; but she did not hasten her pace.

"'She crept in and rolled over on her side, and we ran to her, for
we were almost starving.  We lay long upon her breasts, and she
licked us over and over.

"'I dropped asleep upon her, and in the night I awoke, feeling cold.
I crept closer to her, but that only made me colder still, and she
was wet and clammy with a dark moisture that was oozing from her
side.  I did not know what it was at that time, but I have learnt
since.

"'That was when I could hardly have been four weeks old, and from
that day to this I've looked after myself:  you've got to do that in
this world, my dear.  For a while, I and my brother lived on in that
sty and kept ourselves.  It was a grim struggle at first, two babies
fighting for life; but we pulled through.  At the end of about three
months, wandering farther from home than usual, I came upon a
cottage, standing in the fields.  It looked warm and cosy through
the open door, and I went in:  I have always been blessed with
plenty of nerve.  Some children were playing round the fire, and
they welcomed me and made much of me.  It was a new sensation to me,
and I stayed there.  I thought the place a palace at the time.

"'I might have gone on thinking so if it had not been that, passing
through the village one day, I happened to catch sight of a room
behind a shop.  There was a carpet on the floor, and a rug before
the fire.  I had never known till then that there were such luxuries
in the world.  I determined to make that shop my home, and I did
so.'

"'How did you manage it?' asked the black cat, who was growing
interested.

"'By the simple process of walking in and sitting down.  My dear
child, cheek's the "Open sesame" to every door.  The cat that works
hard dies of starvation, the cat that has brains is kicked
downstairs for a fool, and the cat that has virtue is drowned for a
scamp; but the cat that has cheek sleeps on a velvet cushion and
dines on cream and horseflesh.  I marched straight in and rubbed
myself against the old man's legs.  He and his wife were quite taken
with what they called my "trustfulness," and adopted me with
enthusiasm.  Strolling about the fields of an evening I often used
to hear the children of the cottage calling my name.  It was weeks
before they gave up seeking for me.  One of them, the youngest,
would sob herself to sleep of a night, thinking that I was dead:
they were affectionate children.

"'I boarded with my shopkeeping friends for nearly a year, and from
them I went to some new people who had lately come to the
neighbourhood, and who possessed a really excellent cook.  I think I
could have been very satisfied with these people, but,
unfortunately, they came down in the world, and had to give up the
big house and the cook, and take a cottage, and I did not care to go
back to that sort of life.

"'Accordingly I looked about for a fresh opening.  There was a
curious old fellow who lived not far off.  People said he was rich,
but nobody liked him.  He was shaped differently from other men.  I
turned the matter over in my mind for a day or two, and then
determined to give him a trial.  Being a lonely sort of man, he
might make a fuss over me, and if not I could go.

"'My surmise proved correct.  I have never been more petted than I
was by "Toady," as the village boys had dubbed him.  My present
guardian is foolish enough over me, goodness knows, but she has
other ties, while "Toady" had nothing else to love, not even
himself.  He could hardly believe his eyes at first when I jumped up
on his knees and rubbed myself against his ugly face.  "Why, Kitty,"
he said, "do you know you're the first living thing that has ever
come to me of its own accord."  There were tears in his funny little
red eyes as he said that.

"'I remained two years with "Toady," and was very happy indeed.
Then he fell ill, and strange people came to the house, and I was
neglected.  "Toady" liked me to come up and lie upon the bed, where
he could stroke me with his long, thin hand, and at first I used to
do this.  But a sick man is not the best of company, as you can
imagine, and the atmosphere of a sick room not too healthy, so, all
things considered, I felt it was time for me to make a fresh move.

"'I had some difficulty in getting away.  "Toady" was always asking
for me, and they tried to keep me with him:  he seemed to lie easier
when I was there.  I succeeded at length, however, and, once outside
the door, I put sufficient distance between myself and the house to
ensure my not being captured, for I knew "Toady" so long as he lived
would never cease hoping to get me back.

"'Where to go, I did not know.  Two or three homes were offered me,
but none of them quite suited me.  At one place, where I put up for
a day, just to see how I liked it, there was a dog; and at another,
which would otherwise have done admirably, they kept a baby.
Whatever you do, never stop at a house where they keep a baby.  If a
child pulls your tail or ties a paper bag round your head, you can
give it one for itself and nobody blames you.  "Well, serve you
right," they say to the yelling brat, "you shouldn't tease the poor
thing."  But if you resent a baby's holding you by the throat and
trying to gouge out your eye with a wooden ladle, you are called a
spiteful beast, and "shoo'd" all round the garden.  If people keep
babies, they don't keep me; that's my rule.

"'After sampling some three or four families, I finally fixed upon a
banker.  Offers more advantageous from a worldly point of view were
open to me.  I could have gone to a public-house, where the victuals
were simply unlimited, and where the back door was left open all
night.  But about the banker's (he was also a churchwarden, and his
wife never smiled at anything less than a joke by the bishop) there
was an atmosphere of solid respectability that I felt would be
comforting to my nature.  My dear child, you will come across cynics
who will sneer at respectability:  don't you listen to them.
Respectability is its own reward--and a very real and practical
reward.  It may not bring you dainty dishes and soft beds, but it
brings you something better and more lasting.  It brings you the
consciousness that you are living the right life, that you are doing
the right thing, that, so far as earthly ingenuity can fix it, you
are going to the right place, and that other folks ain't.  Don't you
ever let any one set you against respectability.  It's the most
satisfying thing I know of in this world--and about the cheapest.

"'I was nearly three years with this family, and was sorry when I
had to go.  I should never have left if I could have helped it, but
one day something happened at the bank which necessitated the
banker's taking a sudden journey to Spain, and, after that, the
house became a somewhat unpleasant place to live in.  Noisy,
disagreeable people were continually knocking at the door and making
rows in the passage; and at night folks threw bricks at the windows.

"'I was in a delicate state of health at the time, and my nerves
could not stand it.  I said good-bye to the town, and making my way
back into the country, put up with a county family.

"'They were great swells, but I should have preferred them had they
been more homely.  I am of an affectionate disposition, and I like
every one about me to love me.  They were good enough to me in their
distant way, but they did not take much notice of me, and I soon got
tired of lavishing attentions on people that neither valued nor
responded to them.

"'From these people I went to a retired potato merchant.  It was a
social descent, but a rise so far as comfort and appreciation were
concerned.  They appeared to be an exceedingly nice family, and to
be extremely fond of me.  I say they "appeared" to be these things,
because the sequel proved that they were neither.  Six months after
I had come to them they went away and left me.  They never asked me
to accompany them.  They made no arrangements for me to stay behind.
They evidently did not care what became of me.  Such egotistical
indifference to the claims of friendship I had never before met
with.  It shook my faith--never too robust--in human nature.  I
determined that, in future, no one should have the opportunity of
disappointing my trust in them.  I selected my present mistress on
the recommendation of a gentleman friend of mine who had formerly
lived with her.  He said she was an excellent caterer.  The only
reason he had left her was that she expected him to be in at ten
each night, and that hour didn't fit in with his other arrangements.
It made no difference to me--as a matter of fact, I do not care for
these midnight reunions that are so popular amongst us.  There are
always too many cats for one properly to enjoy oneself, and sooner
or later a rowdy element is sure to creep in.  I offered myself to
her, and she accepted me gratefully.  But I have never liked her,
and never shall.  She is a silly old woman, and bores me.  She is,
however, devoted to me, and, unless something extra attractive turns
up, I shall stick to her.

"'That, my dear, is the story of my life, so far as it has gone.  I
tell it you to show you how easy it is to be "taken in."  Fix on
your house, and mew piteously at the back door.  When it is opened
run in and rub yourself against the first leg you come across.  Rub
hard, and look up confidingly.  Nothing gets round human beings, I
have noticed, quicker than confidence.  They don't get much of it,
and it pleases them.  Always be confiding.  At the same time be
prepared for emergencies.  If you are still doubtful as to your
reception, try and get yourself slightly wet.  Why people should
prefer a wet cat to a dry one I have never been able to understand;
but that a wet cat is practically sure of being taken in and gushed
over, while a dry cat is liable to have the garden hose turned upon
it, is an undoubted fact.  Also, if you can possibly manage it, and
it is offered you, eat a bit of dry bread.  The Human Race is always
stirred to its deepest depths by the sight of a cat eating a bit of
dry bread.'

"My friend's black Tom profited by the Chinchilla's wisdom.  A
catless couple had lately come to live next door.  He determined to
adopt them on trial.  Accordingly, on the first rainy day, he went
out soon after lunch and sat for four hours in an open field.  In
the evening, soaked to the skin, and feeling pretty hungry, he went
mewing to their door.  One of the maids opened it, he rushed under
her skirts and rubbed himself against her legs.  She screamed, and
down came the master and the mistress to know what was the matter.

"'It's a stray cat, mum,' said the girl.

"'Turn it out,' said the master.

"'Oh no, don't,' said the mistress.

"'Oh, poor thing, it's wet,' said the housemaid.

"'Perhaps it's hungry,' said the cook.

"'Try it with a bit of dry bread,' sneered the master, who wrote for
the newspapers, and thought he knew everything.

"A stale crust was proffered.  The cat ate it greedily, and
afterwards rubbed himself gratefully against the man's light
trousers.

"This made the man ashamed of himself, likewise of his trousers.
'Oh, well, let it stop if it wants to,' he said.

"So the cat was made comfortable, and stayed on.

"Meanwhile its own family were seeking for it high and low.  They
had not cared over much for it while they had had it; now it was
gone, they were inconsolable.  In the light of its absence, it
appeared to them the one thing that had made the place home.  The
shadows of suspicion gathered round the case.  The cat's
disappearance, at first regarded as a mystery, began to assume the
shape of a crime.  The wife openly accused the husband of never
having liked the animal, and more than hinted that he and the
gardener between them could give a tolerably truthful account of its
last moments; an insinuation that the husband repudiated with a
warmth that only added credence to the original surmise.

"The bull-terrier was had up and searchingly examined.  Fortunately
for him, he had not had a single fight for two whole days.  Had any
recent traces of blood been detected upon him, it would have gone
hard with him.

"The person who suffered most, however, was the youngest boy.  Three
weeks before, he had dressed the cat in doll's clothes and taken it
round the garden in the perambulator.  He himself had forgotten the
incident, but Justice, though tardy, was on his track.  The misdeed
was suddenly remembered at the very moment when unavailing regret
for the loss of the favourite was at its deepest, so that to box his
ears and send him, then and there, straight off to bed was felt to
be a positive relief.

"At the end of a fortnight, the cat, finding he had not, after all,
bettered himself, came back.  The family were so surprised that at
first they could not be sure whether he was flesh and blood, or a
spirit come to comfort them.  After watching him eat half a pound of
raw steak, they decided he was material, and caught him up and
hugged him to their bosoms.  For a week they over-fed him and made
much of him.  Then, the excitement cooling, he found himself
dropping back into his old position, and didn't like it, and went
next door again.

"The next door people had also missed him, and they likewise greeted
his return with extravagant ebullitions of joy.  This gave the cat
an idea.  He saw that his game was to play the two families off one
against the other; which he did.  He spent an alternate fortnight
with each, and lived like a fighting cock.  His return was always
greeted with enthusiasm, and every means were adopted to induce him
to stay.  His little whims were carefully studied, his favourite
dishes kept in constant readiness.

"The destination of his goings leaked out at length, and then the
two families quarrelled about him over the fence.  My friend accused
the newspaper man of having lured him away.  The newspaper man
retorted that the poor creature had come to his door wet and
starving, and added that he would be ashamed to keep an animal
merely to ill-treat it.  They have a quarrel about him twice a week
on the average.  It will probably come to blows one of these days."

Jephson appeared much surprised by this story.  He remained
thoughtful and silent.  I asked him if he would like to hear any
more, and as he offered no active opposition I went on.  (Maybe he
was asleep; that idea did not occur to me at the time.)

I told him of my grandmother's cat, who, after living a blameless
life for upwards of eleven years, and bringing up a family of
something like sixty-six, not counting those that died in infancy
and the water-butt, took to drink in her old age, and was run over
while in a state of intoxication (oh, the justice of it! ) by a
brewer's dray.  I have read in temperance tracts that no dumb animal
will touch a drop of alcoholic liquor.  My advice is, if you wish to
keep them respectable, don't give them a chance to get at it.  I
knew a pony-- But never mind him; we are talking about my
grandmother's cat.

A leaky beer-tap was the cause of her downfall.  A saucer used to be
placed underneath it to catch the drippings.  One day the cat,
coming in thirsty, and finding nothing else to drink, lapped up a
little, liked it, and lapped a little more, went away for half an
hour, and came back and finished the saucerful.  Then sat down
beside it, and waited for it to fill again.

From that day till the hour she died, I don't believe that cat was
ever once quite sober.  Her days she passed in a drunken stupor
before the kitchen fire.  Her nights she spent in the beer cellar.

My grandmother, shocked and grieved beyond expression, gave up her
barrel and adopted bottles.  The cat, thus condemned to enforced
abstinence, meandered about the house for a day and a half in a
disconsolate, quarrelsome mood.  Then she disappeared, returning at
eleven o'clock as tight as a drum.

Where she went, and how she managed to procure the drink, we never
discovered; but the same programme was repeated every day.  Some
time during the morning she would contrive to elude our vigilance
and escape; and late every evening she would come reeling home
across the fields in a condition that I will not sully my pen by
attempting to describe.

It was on Saturday night that she met the sad end to which I have
before alluded.  She must have been very drunk, for the man told us
that, in consequence of the darkness, and the fact that his horses
were tired, he was proceeding at little more than a snail's pace.

I think my grandmother was rather relieved than otherwise.  She had
been very fond of the cat at one time, but its recent conduct had
alienated her affection.  We children buried it in the garden under
the mulberry tree, but the old lady insisted that there should be no
tombstone, not even a mound raised.  So it lies there, unhonoured,
in a drunkard's grave.

I also told him of another cat our family had once possessed.  She
was the most motherly thing I have ever known.  She was never happy
without a family.  Indeed, I cannot remember her when she hadn't a
family in one stage or another.  She was not very particular what
sort of a family it was.  If she could not have kittens, then she
would content herself with puppies or rats.  Anything that she could
wash and feed seemed to satisfy her.  I believe she would have
brought up chickens if we had entrusted them to her.

All her brains must have run to motherliness, for she hadn't much
sense.  She could never tell the difference between her own children
and other people's.  She thought everything young was a kitten.  We
once mixed up a spaniel puppy that had lost its own mother among her
progeny.  I shall never forget her astonishment when it first
barked.  She boxed both its ears, and then sat looking down at it
with an expression of indignant sorrow that was really touching.

"You're going to be a credit to your mother," she seemed to be
saying "you're a nice comfort to any one's old age, you are, making
a row like that.  And look at your ears flopping all over your face.
I don't know where you pick up such ways."

He was a good little dog.  He did try to mew, and he did try to wash
his face with his paw, and to keep his tail still, but his success
was not commensurate with his will.  I do not know which was the
sadder to reflect upon, his efforts to become a creditable kitten,
or his foster-mother's despair of ever making him one.

Later on we gave her a baby squirrel to rear.  She was nursing a
family of her own at the time, but she adopted him with enthusiasm,
under the impression that he was another kitten, though she could
not quite make out how she had come to overlook him.  He soon became
her prime favourite.  She liked his colour, and took a mother's
pride in his tail.  What troubled her was that it would cock up over
his head.  She would hold it down with one paw, and lick it by the
half-hour together, trying to make it set properly.  But the moment
she let it go up it would cock again.  I have heard her cry with
vexation because of this.

One day a neighbouring cat came to see her, and the squirrel was
clearly the subject of their talk.

"It's a good colour," said the friend, looking critically at the
supposed kitten, who was sitting up on his haunches combing his
whiskers, and saying the only truthfully pleasant thing about him
that she could think of.

"He's a lovely colour," exclaimed our cat proudly.

"I don't like his legs much," remarked the friend.

"No," responded his mother thoughtfully, "you're right there.  His
legs are his weak point.  I can't say I think much of his legs
myself."

"Maybe they'll fill out later on," suggested the friend, kindly.

"Oh, I hope so," replied the mother, regaining her momentarily
dashed cheerfulness.  "Oh yes, they'll come all right in time.  And
then look at his tail.  Now, honestly, did you ever see a kitten
with a finer tail?"

"Yes, it's a good tail," assented the other; "but why do you do it
up over his head?"

"I don't," answered our cat.  "It goes that way.  I can't make it
out.  I suppose it will come straight as he gets older."

"It will be awkward if it don't," said the friend.

"Oh, but I'm sure it will," replied our cat.  "I must lick it more.
It's a tail that wants a good deal of licking, you can see that."

And for hours that afternoon, after the other cat had gone, she sat
trimming it; and, at the end, when she lifted her paw off it, and it
flew back again like a steel spring over the squirrel's head, she
sat and gazed at it with feelings that only those among my readers
who have been mothers themselves will be able to comprehend.

"What have I done," she seemed to say--"what have I done that this
trouble should come upon me?"

Jephson roused himself on my completion of this anecdote and sat up.

"You and your friends appear to have been the possessors of some
very remarkable cats," he observed.

"Yes," I answered, "our family has been singularly fortunate in its
cats."

"Singularly so," agreed Jephson; "I have never met but one man from
whom I have heard more wonderful cat talk than, at one time or
another, I have from you."

"Oh," I said, not, perhaps without a touch of jealousy in my voice,
"and who was he?"

"He was a seafaring man," replied Jephson.  "I met him on a
Hampstead tram, and we discussed the subject of animal sagacity.

"'Yes, sir,' he said, 'monkeys is cute.  I've come across monkeys as
could give points to one or two lubbers I've sailed under; and
elephants is pretty spry, if you can believe all that's told of 'em.
I've heard some tall tales about elephants.  And, of course, dogs
has their heads screwed on all right:  I don't say as they ain't.
But what I do say is:  that for straightfor'ard, level-headed
reasoning, give me cats.  You see, sir, a dog, he thinks a powerful
deal of a man--never was such a cute thing as a man, in a dog's
opinion; and he takes good care that everybody knows it.  Naturally
enough, we says a dog is the most intellectual animal there is.  Now
a cat, she's got her own opinion about human beings.  She don't say
much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the
whole of it.  The consequence is, we says a cat's got no
intelligence.  That's where we let our prejudice steer our judgment
wrong.  In a matter of plain common sense, there ain't a cat living
as couldn't take the lee side of a dog and fly round him.  Now, have
you ever noticed a dog at the end of a chain, trying to kill a cat
as is sitting washing her face three-quarters of an inch out of his
reach?  Of course you have.  Well, who's got the sense out of those
two?  The cat knows that it ain't in the nature of steel chains to
stretch.  The dog, who ought, you'd think, to know a durned sight
more about 'em than she does, is sure they will if you only bark
loud enough.

"'Then again, have you ever been made mad by cats screeching in the
night, and jumped out of bed and opened the window and yelled at
them?  Did they ever budge an inch for that, though you shrieked
loud enough to skeer the dead, and waved your arms about like a man
in a play?  Not they.  They've turned and looked at you, that's all.
"Yell away, old man," they've said, "we like to hear you:  the more
the merrier."  Then what have you done?  Why, you've snatched up a
hair-brush, or a boot, or a candlestick, and made as if you'd throw
it at them.  They've seen your attitude, they've seen the thing in
your hand, but they ain't moved a point.  They knew as you weren't
going to chuck valuable property out of window with the chance of
getting it lost or spoiled.  They've got sense themselves, and they
give you credit for having some.  If you don't believe that's the
reason, you try showing them a lump of coal, or half a brick, next
time--something as they know you WILL throw.  Before you're ready to
heave it, there won't be a cat within aim.

"'Then as to judgment and knowledge of the world, why dogs are
babies to 'em.  Have you ever tried telling a yarn before a cat,
sir?'

"I replied that cats had often been present during anecdotal
recitals of mine, but that, hitherto, I had paid no particular
attention to their demeanour.

"'Ah, well, you take an opportunity of doing so one day, sir,'
answered the old fellow; 'it's worth the experiment.  If you're
telling a story before a cat, and she don't get uneasy during any
part of the narrative, you can reckon you've got hold of a thing as
it will be safe for you to tell to the Lord Chief Justice of
England.

"'I've got a messmate,' he continued; 'William Cooley is his name.
We call him Truthful Billy.  He's as good a seaman as ever trod
quarter-deck; but when he gets spinning yarns he ain't the sort of
man as I could advise you to rely upon.  Well, Billy, he's got a
dog, and I've seen him sit and tell yarns before that dog that would
make a cat squirm out of its skin, and that dog's taken 'em in and
believed 'em.  One night, up at his old woman's, Bill told us a yarn
by the side of which salt junk two voyages old would pass for spring
chicken.  I watched the dog, to see how he would take it.  He
listened to it from beginning to end with cocked ears, and never so
much as blinked.  Every now and then he would look round with an
expression of astonishment or delight that seemed to say:
"Wonderful, isn't it!"  "Dear me, just think of it!"  "Did you
ever!"  "Well, if that don't beat everything!"  He was a chuckle-
headed dog; you could have told him anything.

"'It irritated me that Bill should have such an animal about him to
encourage him, and when he had finished I said to him, "I wish you'd
tell that yarn round at my quarters one evening."

"'Why?' said Bill.

"'Oh, it's just a fancy of mine,' I says.  I didn't tell him I was
wanting my old cat to hear it.

"'Oh, all right,' says Bill, 'you remind me.'  He loved yarning,
Billy did.

"'Next night but one he slings himself up in my cabin, and I does
so.  Nothing loth, off he starts.  There was about half-a-dozen of
us stretched round, and the cat was sitting before the fire fussing
itself up.  Before Bill had got fairly under weigh, she stops
washing and looks up at me, puzzled like, as much as to say, "What
have we got here, a missionary?"  I signalled to her to keep quiet,
and Bill went on with his yarn.  When he got to the part about the
sharks, she turned deliberately round and looked at him.  I tell you
there was an expression of disgust on that cat's face as might have
made a travelling Cheap Jack feel ashamed of himself.  It was that
human, I give you my word, sir, I forgot for the moment as the poor
animal couldn't speak.  I could see the words that were on its lips:
"Why don't you tell us you swallowed the anchor?" and I sat on
tenter-hooks, fearing each instant that she would say them aloud.
It was a relief to me when she turned her back on Bill.

"'For a few minutes she sat very still, and seemed to be wrestling
with herself like.  I never saw a cat more set on controlling its
feelings, or that seemed to suffer more in silence.  It made my
heart ache to watch it.

"'At last Bill came to the point where he and the captain between
'em hold the shark's mouth open while the cabin-boy dives in head
foremost, and fetches up, undigested, the gold watch and chain as
the bo'sun was a-wearing when he fell overboard; and at that the old
cat giv'd a screech, and rolled over on her side with her legs in
the air.

"'I thought at first the poor thing was dead, but she rallied after
a bit, and it seemed as though she had braced herself up to hear the
thing out.

"'But a little further on, Bill got too much for her again, and this
time she owned herself beat.  She rose up and looked round at us:
"You'll excuse me, gentlemen," she said--leastways that is what she
said if looks go for anything--"maybe you're used to this sort of
rubbish, and it don't get on your nerves.  With me it's different.
I guess I've heard as much of this fool's talk as my constitution
will stand, and if it's all the same to you I'll get outside before
I'm sick."

"'With that she walked up to the door, and I opened it for her, and
she went out.

"'You can't fool a cat with talk same as you can a dog.'"



CHAPTER VII



Does man ever reform?  Balzac says he doesn't.  So far as my
experience goes, it agrees with that of Balzac--a fact the admirers
of that author are at liberty to make what use of they please.

When I was young and accustomed to take my views of life from people
who were older than myself, and who knew better, so they said, I
used to believe that he did.  Examples of "reformed characters" were
frequently pointed out to me--indeed, our village, situate a few
miles from a small seaport town, seemed to be peculiarly rich in
such.  They were, from all accounts, including their own, persons
who had formerly behaved with quite unnecessary depravity, and who,
at the time I knew them, appeared to be going to equally
objectionable lengths in the opposite direction.  They invariably
belonged to one of two classes, the low-spirited or the aggressively
unpleasant.  They said, and I believed, that they were happy; but I
could not help reflecting how very sad they must have been before
they were happy.

One of them, a small, meek-eyed old man with a piping voice, had
been exceptionally wild in his youth.  What had been his special
villainy I could never discover.  People responded to my inquiries
by saying that he had been "Oh, generally bad," and increased my
longing for detail by adding that little boys ought not to want to
know about such things.  From their tone and manner I assumed that
he must have been a pirate at the very least, and regarded him with
awe, not unmingled with secret admiration.

Whatever it was, he had been saved from it by his wife, a bony lady
of unprepossessing appearance, but irreproachable views.

One day he called at our house for some purpose or other, and, being
left alone with him for a few minutes, I took the opportunity of
interviewing him personally on the subject.

"You were very wicked once, weren't you?" I said, seeking by
emphasis on the "once" to mitigate what I felt might be the
disagreeable nature of the question.

To my intense surprise, a gleam of shameful glory lit up his wizened
face, and a sound which I tried to think a sigh, but which sounded
like a chuckle, escaped his lips.

"Ay," he replied; "I've been a bit of a spanker in my time."

The term "spanker" in such connection puzzled me.  I had been
hitherto led to regard a spanker as an eminently conscientious
person, especially where the short-comings of other people were
concerned; a person who laboured for the good of others.  That the
word could also be employed to designate a sinful party was a
revelation to me.

"But you are good now, aren't you?" I continued, dismissing further
reflection upon the etymology of "spanker" to a more fitting
occasion.

"Ay, ay," he answered, his countenance resuming its customary aspect
of resigned melancholy.  "I be a brand plucked from the burning, I
be.  There beant much wrong wi' Deacon Sawyers, now."

"And it was your wife that made you good, wasn't it?" I persisted,
determined, now that I had started this investigation, to obtain
confirmation at first hand on all points.

At the mention of his wife his features became suddenly transformed.
Glancing hurriedly round, to make sure, apparently, that no one but
myself was within hearing, he leaned across and hissed these words
into my ear--I have never forgotten them, there was a ring of such
evident sincerity about them -

"I'd like to skin her, I'd like to skin her alive."

It struck me, even in the light of my then limited judgment, as an
unregenerate wish; and thus early my faith in the possibility of
man's reformation received the first of those many blows that have
resulted in shattering it.

Nature, whether human or otherwise, was not made to be reformed.
You can develop, you can check, but you cannot alter it.

You can take a small tiger and train it to sit on a hearthrug, and
to lap milk, and so long as you provide it with hearthrugs to lie on
and sufficient milk to drink, it will purr and behave like an
affectionate domestic pet.  But it is a tiger, with all a tiger's
instincts, and its progeny to the end of all time will be tigers.

In the same way, you can take an ape and develop it through a few
thousand generations until it loses its tail and becomes an
altogether superior ape.  You can go on developing it through still
a few more thousands of generations until it gathers to itself out
of the waste vapours of eternity an intellect and a soul, by the aid
of which it is enabled to keep the original apish nature more or
less under control.

But the ape is still there, and always will be, and every now and
again, when Constable Civilisation turns his back for a moment, as
during "Spanish Furies," or "September massacres," or Western mob
rule, it creeps out and bites and tears at quivering flesh, or
plunges its hairy arms elbow deep in blood, or dances round a
burning nigger.

I knew a man once--or, rather, I knew of a man--who was a confirmed
drunkard.  He became and continued a drunkard, not through weakness,
but through will.  When his friends remonstrated with him, he told
them to mind their own business, and to let him mind his.  If he saw
any reason for not getting drunk he would give it up.  Meanwhile he
liked getting drunk, and he meant to get drunk as often as possible.

He went about it deliberately, and did it thoroughly.  For nearly
ten years, so it was reported, he never went to bed sober.  This may
be an exaggeration--it would be a singular report were it not--but
it can be relied upon as sufficiently truthful for all practical
purposes.

Then there came a day when he did see a reason for not getting
drunk.  He signed no pledge, he took no oath.  He said, "I will
never touch another drop of drink," and for twenty-six years he kept
his word.

At the end of that time a combination of circumstances occurred that
made life troublesome to him, so that he desired to be rid of it
altogether.  He was a man accustomed, when he desired a thing within
his reach, to stretch out his hand and take it.  He reviewed the
case calmly, and decided to commit suicide.

If the thing were to be done at all, it would be best, for reasons
that if set forth would make this a long story, that it should be
done that very night, and, if possible, before eleven o'clock, which
was the earliest hour a certain person could arrive from a certain
place.

It was then four in the afternoon.  He attended to some necessary
business, and wrote some necessary letters.  This occupied him until
seven.  He then called a cab and drove to a small hotel in the
suburbs, engaged a private room, and ordered up materials for the
making of the particular punch that had been the last beverage he
had got drunk on, six-and-twenty years ago.

For three hours he sat there drinking steadily, with his watch
before him.  At half-past ten he rang the bell, paid his bill, came
home, and cut his throat.

For a quarter of a century people had been calling that man a
"reformed character."  His character had not reformed one jot.  The
craving for drink had never died.  For twenty-six years he had,
being a great man, held it gripped by the throat.  When all things
became a matter of indifference to him, he loosened his grasp, and
the evil instinct rose up within him as strong on the day he died as
on the day he forced it down.

That is all a man can do, pray for strength to crush down the evil
that is in him, and to keep it held down day after day.  I never
hear washy talk about "changed characters" and "reformed natures"
but I think of a sermon I once heard at a Wesleyan revivalist
meeting in the Black Country.

"Ah! my friends, we've all of us got the devil inside us.  I've got
him, you've got him," cried the preacher--he was an old man, with
long white hair and beard, and wild, fighting eyes.  Most of the
preachers who came "reviving," as it was called, through that
district, had those eyes.  Some of them needed "reviving"
themselves, in quite another sense, before they got clear out of it.
I am speaking now of more than thirty years ago.

"Ah! so us have--so us have," came the response.

"And you carn't get rid of him," continued the speaker.

"Not of oursel's," ejaculated a fervent voice at the end of the
room, "but the Lord will help us."

The old preacher turned on him almost fiercely:-

"But th' Lord woan't," he shouted; "doan't 'ee reckon on that, lad.
Ye've got him an' ye've got ta keep him.  Ye carn't get rid of him.
Th' Lord doan't mean 'ee to."

Here there broke forth murmurs of angry disapproval, but the old
fellow went on, unheeding:-

"It arn't good for 'ee to get rid of him.  Ye've just got to hug him
tight.  Doan't let him go.  Hold him fast, and--LAM INTO HIM.  I
tell 'ee it's good, healthy Christian exercise."

We had been discussing the subject with reference to our hero.  It
had been suggested by Brown as an unhackneyed idea, and one lending
itself, therefore, to comparative freshness of treatment, that our
hero should be a thorough-paced scamp.

Jephson seconded the proposal, for the reason that it would the
better enable us to accomplish artistic work.  He was of opinion
that we should be more sure of our ground in drawing a villain than
in attempting to portray a good man.

MacShaughnassy thirded (if I may coin what has often appeared to me
to be a much-needed word) the motion with ardour.  He was tired, he
said, of the crystal-hearted, noble-thinking young man of fiction.
Besides, it made bad reading for the "young person."  It gave her
false ideas, and made her dissatisfied with mankind as he really is.

And, thereupon, he launched forth and sketched us his idea of a
hero, with reference to whom I can only say that I should not like
to meet him on a dark night.

Brown, our one earnest member, begged us to be reasonable, and
reminded us, not for the first time, and not, perhaps, altogether
unnecessarily, that these meetings were for the purpose of
discussing business, not of talking nonsense.

Thus adjured, we attacked the subject conscientiously.

Brown's idea was that the man should be an out-and-out blackguard,
until about the middle of the book, when some event should transpire
that would have the effect of completely reforming him.  This
naturally brought the discussion down to the question with which I
have commenced this chapter:  Does man ever reform?  I argued in the
negative, and gave the reasons for my disbelief much as I have set
them forth here.  MacShaughnassy, on the other hand, contended that
he did, and instanced the case of himself--a man who, in his early
days, so he asserted, had been a scatterbrained, impracticable
person, entirely without stability.

I maintained that this was merely an example of enormous will-power
enabling a man to overcome and rise superior to the defects of
character with which nature had handicapped him.

"My opinion of you," I said, "is that you are naturally a hopelessly
irresponsible, well-meaning ass.  But," I continued quickly, seeing
his hand reaching out towards a complete Shakespeare in one volume
that lay upon the piano, "your mental capabilities are of such
extraordinary power that you can disguise this fact, and make
yourself appear a man of sense and wisdom."

Brown agreed with me that in MacShaughnassy's case traces of the
former disposition were clearly apparent, but pleaded that the
illustration was an unfortunate one, and that it ought not to have
weight in the discussion.

"Seriously speaking," said he, "don't you think that there are some
experiences great enough to break up and re-form a man's nature?"

"To break up," I replied, "yes; but to re-form, no.  Passing through
a great experience may shatter a man, or it may strengthen a man,
just as passing through a furnace may melt or purify metal, but no
furnace ever lit upon this earth can change a bar of gold into a bar
of lead, or a bar of lead into one of gold."

I asked Jephson what he thought.  He did not consider the bar of
gold simile a good one.  He held that a man's character was not an
immutable element.  He likened it to a drug--poison or elixir--
compounded by each man for himself from the pharmacopoeia of all
things known to life and time, and saw no impossibility, though some
improbability, in the glass being flung aside and a fresh draught
prepared with pain and labour.

"Well," I said, "let us put the case practically; did you ever know
a man's character to change?"

"Yes," he answered, "I did know a man whose character seemed to me
to be completely changed by an experience that happened to him.  It
may, as you say, only have been that he was shattered, or that the
lesson may have taught him to keep his natural disposition ever
under control.  The result, in any case, was striking."

We asked him to give us the history of the case, and he did so.

"He was a friend of some cousins of mine," Jephson began, "people I
used to see a good deal of in my undergraduate days.  When I met him
first he was a young fellow of twenty-six, strong mentally and
physically, and of a stern and stubborn nature that those who liked
him called masterful, and that those who disliked him--a more
numerous body--termed tyrannical.  When I saw him three years later,
he was an old man of twenty-nine, gentle and yielding beyond the
border-line of weakness, mistrustful of himself and considerate of
others to a degree that was often unwise.  Formerly, his anger had
been a thing very easily and frequently aroused.  Since the change
of which I speak, I have never known the shade of anger to cross his
face but once.  In the course of a walk, one day, we came upon a
young rough terrifying a small child by pretending to set a dog at
her.  He seized the boy with a grip that almost choked him, and
administered to him a punishment that seemed to me altogether out of
proportion to the crime, brutal though it was.

"I remonstrated with him when he rejoined me.

"'Yes,' he replied apologetically; 'I suppose I'm a hard judge of
some follies.'  And, knowing what his haunted eyes were looking at,
I said no more.

"He was junior partner in a large firm of tea brokers in the City.
There was not much for him to do in the London office, and when,
therefore, as the result of some mortgage transactions, a South
Indian tea plantation fell into the hands of the firm, it was
suggested that he should go out and take the management of it.  The
plan suited him admirably.  He was a man in every way qualified to
lead a rough life; to face a by no means contemptible amount of
difficulty and danger, to govern a small army of native workers more
amenable to fear than to affection.  Such a life, demanding thought
and action, would afford his strong nature greater interest and
enjoyment than he could ever hope to obtain amid the cramped
surroundings of civilisation.

"Only one thing could in reason have been urged against the
arrangement, that thing was his wife.  She was a fragile, delicate
girl, whom he had married in obedience to that instinct of
attraction towards the opposite which Nature, for the purpose of
maintaining her average, has implanted in our breasts--a timid,
meek-eyed creature, one of those women to whom death is less
terrible than danger, and fate easier to face than fear.  Such women
have been known to run screaming from a mouse and to meet martyrdom
with heroism.  They can no more keep their nerves from trembling
than an aspen tree can stay the quivering of its leaves.

"That she was totally unfitted for, and would be made wretched by
the life to which his acceptance of the post would condemn her might
have readily occurred to him, had he stopped to consider for a
moment her feelings in the matter.  But to view a question from any
other standpoint than his own was not his habit.  That he loved her
passionately, in his way, as a thing belonging to himself, there can
be no doubt, but it was with the love that such men have for the dog
they will thrash, the horse they will spur to a broken back.  To
consult her on the subject never entered his head.  He informed her
one day of his decision and of the date of their sailing, and,
handing her a handsome cheque, told her to purchase all things
necessary to her, and to let him know if she needed more; and she,
loving him with a dog-like devotion that was not good for him,
opened her big eyes a little wider, but said nothing.  She thought
much about the coming change to herself, however, and, when nobody
was by, she would cry softly; then, hearing his footsteps, would
hastily wipe away the traces of her tears, and go to meet him with a
smile.

"Now, her timidity and nervousness, which at home had been a butt
for mere chaff, became, under the new circumstances of their life, a
serious annoyance to the man.  A woman who seemed unable to repress
a scream whenever she turned and saw in the gloom a pair of piercing
eyes looking out at her from a dusky face, who was liable to drop
off her horse with fear at the sound of a wild beast's roar a mile
off, and who would turn white and limp with horror at the mere sight
of a snake, was not a companionable person to live with in the
neighbourhood of Indian jungles.

"He himself was entirely without fear, and could not understand it.
To him it was pure affectation.  He had a muddled idea, common to
men of his stamp, that women assume nervousness because they think
it pretty and becoming to them, and that if one could only convince
them of the folly of it they might be induced to lay it aside, in
the same way that they lay aside mincing steps and simpering voices.
A man who prided himself, as he did, upon his knowledge of horses,
might, one would think, have grasped a truer notion of the nature of
nervousness, which is a mere matter of temperament.  But the man was
a fool.

"The thing that vexed him most was her horror of snakes.  He was
unblessed--or uncursed, whichever you may prefer--with imagination
of any kind.  There was no special enmity between him and the seed
of the serpent.  A creature that crawled upon its belly was no more
terrible to him than a creature that walked upon its legs; indeed,
less so, for he knew that, as a rule, there was less danger to be
apprehended from them.  A reptile is only too eager at all times to
escape from man.  Unless attacked or frightened, it will make no
onset.  Most people are content to acquire their knowledge of this
fact from the natural history books.  He had proved it for himself.
His servant, an old sergeant of dragoons, has told me that he has
seen him stop with his face six inches from the head of a hooded
cobra, and stand watching it through his eye-glass as it crawled
away from him, knowing that one touch of its fangs would mean death
from which there could be no possible escape.  That any reasoning
being should be inspired with terror--sickening, deadly terror--by
such pitifully harmless things, seemed to him monstrous; and he
determined to try and cure her of her fear of them.

"He succeeded in doing this eventually somewhat more thoroughly than
he had anticipated, but it left a terror in his own eyes that has
not gone out of them to this day, and that never will.

"One evening, riding home through a part of the jungle not far from
his bungalow, he heard a soft, low hiss close to his ear, and,
looking up, saw a python swing itself from the branch of a tree and
make off through the long grass.  He had been out antelope-shooting,
and his loaded rifle hung by his stirrup.  Springing from the
frightened horse, he was just in time to get a shot at the creature
before it disappeared.  He had hardly expected, under the
circumstances, to even hit it.  By chance the bullet struck it at
the junction of the vertebrae with the head, and killed it
instantly.  It was a well-marked specimen, and, except for the small
wound the bullet had made, quite uninjured.  He picked it up, and
hung it across the saddle, intending to take it home and preserve
it.

"Galloping along, glancing down every now and again at the huge,
hideous thing swaying and writhing in front of him almost as if
still alive, a brilliant idea occurred to him.  He would use this
dead reptile to cure his wife of her fear of living ones.  He would
fix matters so that she should see it, and think it was alive, and
be terrified by it; then he would show her that she had been
frightened by a mere dead thing, and she would feel ashamed of
herself, and be healed of her folly.  It was the sort of idea that
would occur to a fool.

"When he reached home, he took the dead snake into his smoking-room;
then, locking the door, the idiot set out his prescription.  He
arranged the monster in a very natural and life-like position.  It
appeared to be crawling from the open window across the floor, and
any one coming into the room suddenly could hardly avoid treading on
it.  It was very cleverly done.

"That finished, he picked out a book from the shelves, opened it,
and laid it face downward upon the couch.  When he had completed all
things to his satisfaction he unlocked the door and came out, very
pleased with himself.

"After dinner he lit a cigar and sat smoking a while in silence.

"'Are you feeling tired?' he said to her at length, with a smile.

"She laughed, and, calling him a lazy old thing, asked what it was
he wanted.

"'Only my novel that I was reading.  I left it in my den.  Do you
mind?  You will find it open on the couch.'

"She sprang up and ran lightly to the door.

"As she paused there for a moment to look back at him and ask the
name of the book, he thought how pretty and how sweet she was; and
for the first time a faint glimmer of the true nature of the thing
he was doing forced itself into his brain.

"'Never mind,' he said, half rising, 'I'll--'; then, enamoured of
the brilliancy of his plan, checked himself; and she was gone.

"He heard her footsteps passing along the matted passage, and smiled
to himself.  He thought the affair was going to be rather amusing.
One finds it difficult to pity him even now when one thinks of it.

"The smoking-room door opened and closed, and he still sat gazing
dreamily at the ash of his cigar, and smiling.

"One moment, perhaps two passed, but the time seemed much longer.
The man blew the gray cloud from before his eyes and waited.  Then
he heard what he had been expecting to hear--a piercing shriek.
Then another, which, expecting to hear the clanging of the distant
door and the scurrying back of her footsteps along the passage,
puzzled him, so that the smile died away from his lips.

"Then another, and another, and another, shriek after shriek.

"The native servant, gliding noiselessly about the room, laid down
the thing that was in his hand and moved instinctively towards the
door.  The man started up and held him back.

"'Keep where you are,' he said hoarsely.  'It is nothing.  Your
mistress is frightened, that is all.  She must learn to get over
this folly.'  Then he listened again, and the shrieks ended with
what sounded curiously like a smothered laugh; and there came a
sudden silence.

"And out of that bottomless silence, Fear for the first time in his
life came to the man, and he and the dusky servant looked at each
other with eyes in which there was a strange likeness; and by a
common instinct moved together towards the place where the silence
came from.

"When the man opened the door he saw three things:  one was the dead
python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python,
its comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a
crushed, bloody heap in the middle of the floor.

"He himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he
opened his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native
servant, before he fled screaming from the house, saw his master
fling himself upon the living serpent and grasp it with his hands,
and when, later on, others burst into the room and caught him
staggering in their arms, they found the second python with its head
torn off.

"That is the incident that changed the character of my man--if it be
changed," concluded Jephson.  "He told it me one night as we sat on
the deck of the steamer, returning from Bombay.  He did not spare
himself.  He told me the story, much as I have told it to you, but
in an even, monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind.  I asked
him, when he had finished, how he could bear to recall it.

"'Recall it!' he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; 'it is
always with me.'"



CHAPTER VIII



One day we spoke of crime and criminals.  We had discussed the
possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it
would be uninteresting.

"It is a terribly sad reflection," remarked MacShaughnassy,
musingly; "but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if
it were not for our friends the bad people.  Do you know," he
continued, "when I hear of folks going about the world trying to
reform everybody and make them good, I get positively nervous.  Once
do away with sin, and literature will become a thing of the past.
Without the criminal classes we authors would starve."

"I shouldn't worry," replied Jephson, drily; "one half mankind has
been 'reforming' the other half pretty steadily ever since the
Creation, yet there appears to be a fairly appreciable amount of
human nature left in it, notwithstanding.  Suppressing sin is much
the same sort of task that suppressing a volcano would be--plugging
one vent merely opens another.  Evil will last our time."

"I cannot take your optimistic view of the case," answered
MacShaughnassy.  "It seems to me that crime--at all events,
interesting crime--is being slowly driven out of our existence.
Pirates and highwaymen have been practically abolished.  Dear old
'Smuggler Bill' has melted down his cutlass into a pint-can with a
false bottom.  The pressgang that was always so ready to rescue our
hero from his approaching marriage has been disbanded.  There's not
a lugger fit for the purposes of abduction left upon the coast.  Men
settle their 'affairs of honour' in the law courts, and return home
wounded only in the pocket.  Assaults on unprotected females are
confined to the slums, where heroes do not dwell, and are avenged by
the nearest magistrate.  Your modern burglar is generally an out-of-
work green-grocer.  His 'swag' usually consists of an overcoat and a
pair of boots, in attempting to make off with which he is captured
by the servant-girl.  Suicides and murders are getting scarcer every
season.  At the present rate of decrease, deaths by violence will be
unheard of in another decade, and a murder story will be laughed at
as too improbable to be interesting.  A certain section of
busybodies are even crying out for the enforcement of the seventh
commandment.  If they succeed authors will have to follow the advice
generally given to them by the critics, and retire from business
altogether.  I tell you our means of livelihood are being filched
from us one by one.  Authors ought to form themselves into a society
for the support and encouragement of crime."

MacShaughnassy's leading intention in making these remarks was to
shock and grieve Brown, and in this object he succeeded.  Brown is--
or was, in those days--an earnest young man with an exalted--some
were inclined to say an exaggerated--view of the importance and
dignity of the literary profession.  Brown's notion of the scheme of
Creation was that God made the universe so as to give the literary
man something to write about.  I used at one time to credit Brown
with originality for this idea; but as I have grown older I have
learned that the theory is a very common and popular one in cultured
circles.

Brown expostulated with MacShaughnassy.  "You speak," he said, "as
though literature were the parasite of evil."

"And what else is she?" replied the MacShaughnassy, with enthusiasm.
"What would become of literature without folly and sin?  What is the
work of the literary man but raking a living for himself out of the
dust-heap of human woe?  Imagine, if you can, a perfect world--a
world where men and women never said foolish things and never did
unwise ones; where small boys were never mischievous and children
never made awkward remarks; where dogs never fought and cats never
screeched; where wives never henpecked their husbands and mothers-
in-law never nagged; where men never went to bed in their boots and
sea-captains never swore; where plumbers understood their work and
old maids never dressed as girls; where niggers never stole chickens
and proud men were never sea-sick! where would be your humour and
your wit?  Imagine a world where hearts were never bruised; where
lips were never pressed with pain; where eyes were never dim; where
feet were never weary; where stomachs were never empty! where would
be your pathos?  Imagine a world where husbands never loved more
wives than one, and that the right one; where wives were never
kissed but by their husbands; where men's hearts were never black
and women's thoughts never impure; where there was no hating and no
envying; no desiring; no despairing! where would be your scenes of
passion, your interesting complications, your subtle psychological
analyses?  My dear Brown, we writers--novelists, dramatists, poets--
we fatten on the misery of our fellow-creatures.  God created man
and woman, and the woman created the literary man when she put her
teeth into the apple.  We came into the world under the shadow of
the serpent.  We are special correspondents with the Devil's army.
We report his victories in our three-volume novels, his occasional
defeats in our five-act melodramas."

"All of which is very true," remarked Jephson; "but you must
remember it is not only the literary man who traffics in misfortune.
The doctor, the lawyer, the preacher, the newspaper proprietor, the
weather prophet, will hardly, I should say, welcome the millennium.
I shall never forget an anecdote my uncle used to relate, dealing
with the period when he was chaplain of the Lincolnshire county
jail.  One morning there was to be a hanging; and the usual little
crowd of witnesses, consisting of the sheriff, the governor, three
or four reporters, a magistrate, and a couple of warders, was
assembled in the prison.  The condemned man, a brutal ruffian who
had been found guilty of murdering a young girl under exceptionally
revolting circumstances, was being pinioned by the hangman and his
assistant; and my uncle was employing the last few moments at his
disposal in trying to break down the sullen indifference the fellow
had throughout manifested towards both his crime and his fate.

My uncle failing to make any impression upon him, the governor
ventured to add a few words of exhortation, upon which the man
turned fiercely on the whole of them.

"'Go to hell,' he cried, 'with your snivelling jaw.  Who are you, to
preach at me?  YOU'RE glad enough I'm here--all of you.  Why, I'm
the only one of you as ain't going to make a bit over this job.
Where would you all be, I should like to know, you canting swine, if
it wasn't for me and my sort?  Why, it's the likes of me as KEEPS
the likes of you,' with which he walked straight to the gallows and
told the hangman to 'hurry up' and not keep the gentlemen waiting."

"There was some 'grit' in that man," said MacShaughnassy.

"Yes," added Jephson, "and wholesome wit also."

MacShaughnassy puffed a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was
just about to kill a fly.  This caused the spider to fall into the
river, from where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him.

"You remind me," he said, "of a scene I once witnessed in the office
of The Daily--well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper.  It
was the dead season, and things were somewhat slow.  An endeavour
had been made to launch a discussion on the question 'Are Babies a
Blessing?'  The youngest reporter on the staff, writing over the
simple but touching signature of 'Mother of Six,' had led off with a
scathing, though somewhat irrelevant, attack upon husbands, as a
class; the Sporting Editor, signing himself 'Working Man,' and
garnishing his contribution with painfully elaborated orthographical
lapses, arranged to give an air of verisimilitude to the
correspondence, while, at the same time, not to offend the
susceptibilities of the democracy (from whom the paper derived its
chief support), had replied, vindicating the British father, and
giving what purported to be stirring midnight experiences of his
own.  The Gallery Man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination,
'Gentleman and Christian,' wrote indignantly that he considered the
agitation of the subject to be both impious and indelicate, and
added he was surprised that a paper holding the exalted, and
deservedly popular, position of The--should have opened its columns
to the brainless vapourings of 'Mother of Six' and 'Working Man.'

"The topic had, however, fallen flat.  With the exception of one man
who had invented a new feeding-bottle, and thought he was going to
advertise it for nothing, the outside public did not respond, and
over the editorial department gloom had settled down.

"One evening, as two or three of us were mooning about the stairs,
praying secretly for a war or a famine, Todhunter, the town
reporter, rushed past us with a cheer, and burst into the Sub-
editor's room.  We followed.  He was waving his notebook above his
head, and clamouring, after the manner of people in French
exercises, for pens, ink, and paper.

"'What's up?' cried the Sub-editor, catching his enthusiasm;
'influenza again?'

"'Better than that!' shouted Todhunter.  'Excursion steamer run
down, a hundred and twenty-five lives lost--four good columns of
heartrending scenes.'

"'By Jove!' said the Sub, 'couldn't have happened at a better time
either'--and then he sat down and dashed off a leaderette, in which
he dwelt upon the pain and regret the paper felt at having to
announce the disaster, and drew attention to the exceptionally
harrowing account provided by the energy and talent of 'our special
reporter.'"

"It is the law of nature," said Jephson:  "we are not the first
party of young philosophers who have been struck with the fact that
one man's misfortune is another man's opportunity."

"Occasionally, another woman's," I observed.

I was thinking of an incident told me by a nurse.  If a nurse in
fair practice does not know more about human nature--does not see
clearer into the souls of men and women than all the novelists in
little Bookland put together--it must be because she is physically
blind and deaf.  All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
merely players; so long as we are in good health, we play our parts
out bravely to the end, acting them, on the whole, artistically and
with strenuousness, even to the extent of sometimes fancying
ourselves the people we are pretending to be.  But with sickness
comes forgetfulness of our part, and carelessness of the impression
we are making upon the audience.  We are too weak to put the paint
and powder on our faces, the stage finery lies unheeded by our side.
The heroic gestures, the virtuous sentiments are a weariness to us.
In the quiet, darkened room, where the foot-lights of the great
stage no longer glare upon us, where our ears are no longer strained
to catch the clapping or the hissing of the town, we are, for a
brief space, ourselves.

This nurse was a quiet, demure little woman, with a pair of dreamy,
soft gray eyes that had a curious power of absorbing everything that
passed before them without seeming to look at anything.  Gazing upon
much life, laid bare, had given to them a slightly cynical
expression, but there was a background of kindliness behind.

During the evenings of my convalescence she would talk to me of her
nursing experiences.  I have sometimes thought I would put down in
writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading.
The majority of them, I fear, would show only the tangled, seamy
side of human nature, and God knows there is little need for us to
point that out to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think
it the only work worth doing.  A few of them were sweet, but I think
they were the saddest; and over one or two a man might laugh, but it
would not be a pleasant laugh.

"I never enter the door of a house to which I have been summoned,"
she said to me one evening, "without wondering, as I step over the
threshold, what the story is going to be.  I always feel inside a
sick-room as if I were behind the scenes of life.  The people come
and go about you, and you listen to them talking and laughing, and
you look into your patient's eyes, and you just know that it's all a
play."

The incident that Jephson's remark had reminded me of, she told me
one afternoon, as I sat propped up by the fire, trying to drink a
glass of port wine, and feeling somewhat depressed at discovering I
did not like it.

"One of my first cases," she said, "was a surgical operation.  I was
very young at the time, and I made rather an awkward mistake--I
don't mean a professional mistake--but a mistake nevertheless that I
ought to have had more sense than to make.

"My patient was a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman.  The wife
was a pretty, dark little woman, but I never liked her from the
first; she was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who
always give me the idea that they were born in a church, and have
never got over the chill.  However, she seemed very fond of him, and
he of her; and they talked very prettily to each other--too prettily
for it to be quite genuine, I should have said, if I'd known as much
of the world then as I do now.

"The operation was a difficult and dangerous one.  When I came on
duty in the evening I found him, as I expected, highly delirious.  I
kept him as quiet as I could, but towards nine o'clock, as the
delirium only increased, I began to get anxious.  I bent down close
to him and listened to his ravings.  Over and over again I heard the
name 'Louise.'  Why wouldn't 'Louise' come to him?  It was so unkind
of her--they had dug a great pit, and were pushing him down into it-
-oh! why didn't she come and save him?  He should be saved if she
would only come and take his hand.

"His cries became so pitiful that I could bear them no longer.  His
wife had gone to attend a prayer-meeting, but the church was only in
the next street.  Fortunately, the day-nurse had not left the house:
I called her in to watch him for a minute, and, slipping on my
bonnet, ran across.  I told my errand to one of the vergers and he
took me to her.  She was kneeling, but I could not wait.  I pushed
open the pew door, and, bending down, whispered to her, 'Please come
over at once; your husband is more delirious than I quite care
about, and you may be able to calm him.'

"She whispered back, without raising her head, 'I'll be over in a
little while.  The meeting won't last much longer.'

"Her answer surprised and nettled me.  'You'll be acting more like a
Christian woman by coming home with me,' I said sharply, 'than by
stopping here.  He keeps calling for you, and I can't get him to
sleep.'

"She raised her head from her hands:  'Calling for me?' she asked,
with a slightly incredulous accent.

"'Yes,' I replied, 'it has been his one cry for the last hour:
Where's Louise, why doesn't Louise come to him.'

"Her face was in shadow, but as she turned it away, and the faint
light from one of the turned-down gas-jets fell across it, I fancied
I saw a smile upon it, and I disliked her more than ever.

"'I'll come back with you,' she said, rising and putting her books
away, and we left the church together.

"She asked me many questions on the way:  Did patients, when they
were delirious, know the people about them?  Did they remember
actual facts, or was their talk mere incoherent rambling?  Could one
guide their thoughts in any way?

"The moment we were inside the door, she flung off her bonnet and
cloak, and came upstairs quickly and softly.

"She walked to the bedside, and stood looking down at him, but he
was quite unconscious of her presence, and continued muttering.  I
suggested that she should speak to him, but she said she was sure it
would be useless, and drawing a chair back into the shadow, sat down
beside him.

"Seeing she was no good to him, I tried to persuade her to go to
bed, but she said she would rather stop, and I, being little more
than a girl then, and without much authority, let her.  All night
long he tossed and raved, the one name on his lips being ever
Louise--Louise--and all night long that woman sat there in the
shadow, never moving, never speaking, with a set smile on her lips
that made me long to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

"At one time he imagined himself back in his courting days, and
pleaded, 'Say you love me, Louise.  I know you do.  I can read it in
your eyes.  What's the use of our pretending?  We KNOW each other.
Put your white arms about me.  Let me feel your breath upon my neck.
Ah!  I knew it, my darling, my love!'

"The whole house was deadly still, and I could hear every word of
his troubled ravings.  I almost felt as if I had no right to be
there, listening to them, but my duty held me.  Later on, he fancied
himself planning a holiday with her, so I concluded.  'I shall start
on Monday evening,' he was saying, and you can join me in Dublin at
Jackson's Hotel on the Wednesday, and we'll go straight on.'

"His voice grew a little faint, and his wife moved forward on her
chair, and bent her head closer to his lips.

"'No, no,' he continued, after a pause, 'there's no danger whatever.
It's a lonely little place, right in the heart of the Galway
Mountains--O'Mullen's Half-way House they call it--five miles from
Ballynahinch.  We shan't meet a soul there.  We'll have three weeks
of heaven all to ourselves, my goddess, my Mrs. Maddox from Boston--
don't forget the name.'

"He laughed in his delirium; and the woman, sitting by his side,
laughed also; and then the truth flashed across me.

"I ran up to her and caught her by the arm.  'Your name's not
Louise,' I said, looking straight at her.  It was an impertinent
interference, but I felt excited, and acted on impulse.

"'No,' she replied, very quietly; 'but it's the name of a very dear
school friend of mine.  I've got the clue to-night that I've been
waiting two years to get.  Good-night, nurse, thanks for fetching
me.'

"She rose and went out, and I listened to her footsteps going down
the stairs, and then drew up the blind and let in the dawn.

"I've never told that incident to any one until this evening," my
nurse concluded, as she took the empty port wine glass out of my
hand, and stirred the fire.  "A nurse wouldn't get many engagements
if she had the reputation for making blunders of that sort."

Another story that she told me showed married life more lovelit, but
then, as she added, with that cynical twinkle which glinted so oddly
from her gentle, demure eyes, this couple had only very recently
been wed--had, in fact, only just returned from their honeymoon.

They had been travelling on the Continent, and there had both
contracted typhoid fever, which showed itself immediately on their
home-coming.

"I was called in to them on the very day of their arrival," she
said; "the husband was the first to take to his bed, and the wife
followed suit twelve hours afterwards.  We placed them in adjoining
rooms, and, as often as was possible, we left the door ajar so that
they could call out to one another.

"Poor things!  They were little else than boy and girl, and they
worried more about each other than they thought about themselves.
The wife's only trouble was that she wouldn't be able to do anything
for 'poor Jack.'  'Oh, nurse, you will be good to him, won't you?'
she would cry, with her big childish eyes full of tears; and the
moment I went in to him it would be:  'Oh, don't trouble about me,
nurse, I'm all right.  Just look after the wifie, will you?'

"I had a hard time between the two of them, for, with the help of
her sister, I was nursing them both.  It was an unprofessional thing
to do, but I could see they were not well off, and I assured the
doctor that I could manage.  To me it was worth while going through
the double work just to breathe the atmosphere of unselfishness that
sweetened those two sick-rooms.  The average invalid is not the
patient sufferer people imagine.  It is a fretful, querulous, self-
pitying little world that we live in as a rule, and that we grow
hard in.  It gave me a new heart, nursing these young people.

"The man pulled through, and began steadily to recover, but the wife
was a wee slip of a girl, and her strength--what there was of it--
ebbed day by day.  As he got stronger he would call out more and
more cheerfully to her through the open door, and ask her how she
was getting on, and she would struggle to call back laughing
answers.  It had been a mistake to put them next to each other, and
I blamed myself for having done so, but it was too late to change
then.  All we could do was to beg her not to exhaust herself, and to
let us, when he called out, tell him she was asleep.  But the
thought of not answering him or calling to him made her so wretched
that it seemed safer to let her have her way.

"Her one anxiety was that he should not know how weak she was.  'It
will worry him so,' she would say; 'he is such an old fidget over
me.  And I AM getting stronger, slowly; ain't I, nurse?'

"One morning he called out to her, as usual, asking her how she was,
and she answered, though she had to wait for a few seconds to gather
strength to do so.  He seemed to detect the effort, for he called
back anxiously, 'Are you SURE you're all right, dear?'

"'Yes,' she replied, 'getting on famously.  Why?'

"'I thought your voice sounded a little weak, dear,' he answered;
'don't call out if it tries you.'

"Then for the first time she began to worry about herself--not for
her own sake, but because of him.

"'Do you think I AM getting weaker, nurse?' she asked me, fixing her
great eyes on me with a frightened look.

"'You're making yourself weak by calling out,' I answered, a little
sharply.  'I shall have to keep that door shut.'

"'Oh, don't tell him'--that was all her thought--'don't let him know
it.  Tell him I'm strong, won't you, nurse?  It will kill him if he
thinks I'm not getting well.'

"I was glad when her sister came up, and I could get out of the
room, for you're not much good at nursing when you feel, as I felt
then, as though you had swallowed a tablespoon and it was sticking
in your throat.

"Later on, when I went in to him, he drew me to the bedside, and
whispered me to tell him truly how she was.  If you are telling a
lie at all, you may just as well make it a good one, so I told him
she was really wonderfully well, only a little exhausted after the
illness, as was natural, and that I expected to have her up before
him.

"Poor lad! that lie did him more good than a week's doctoring and
nursing; and next morning he called out more cheerily than ever to
her, and offered to bet her a new bonnet against a new hat that he
would race her, and be up first.

"She laughed back quite merrily (I was in his room at the time).
'All right,' she said, 'you'll lose.  I shall be well first, and I
shall come and visit you.'

"Her laugh was so bright, and her voice sounded so much stronger,
that I really began to think she had taken a turn for the better, so
that when on going in to her I found her pillow wet with tears, I
could not understand it.

"'Why, we were so cheerful just a minute ago,' I said; 'what's the
matter?'

"'Oh, poor Jack!' she moaned, as her little, wasted fingers opened
and closed upon the counterpane.  'Poor Jack, it will break his
heart.'

"It was no good my saying anything.  There comes a moment when
something tells your patient all that is to be known about the case,
and the doctor and the nurse can keep their hopeful assurances for
where they will be of more use.  The only thing that would have
brought comfort to her then would have been to convince her that he
would soon forget her and be happy without her.  I thought it at the
time, and I tried to say something of the kind to her, but I
couldn't get it out, and she wouldn't have believed me if I had.

"So all I could do was to go back to the other room, and tell him
that I wanted her to go to sleep, and that he must not call out to
her until I told him.

"She lay very still all day.  The doctor came at his usual hour and
looked at her.  He patted her hand, and just glanced at the
untouched food beside her.

"'Yes,' he said, quietly.  'I shouldn't worry her, nurse.'  And I
understood.

"Towards evening she opened her eyes, and beckoned to her sister,
who was standing by the bedside, to bend down.

"'Jeanie,' she whispered, 'do you think it wrong to deceive any one
when it's for their own good?'

"'I don't know,' said the girl, in a dry voice; 'I shouldn't think
so.  Why do you ask?'

"'Jeanie, your voice was always very much like mine--do you
remember, they used to mistake us at home.  Jeanie, call out for me-
-just till--till he's a bit better; promise me.'

"They had loved each other, those two, more than is common among
sisters.  Jeanie could not answer, but she pressed her sister closer
in her arms, and the other was satisfied.

"Then, drawing all her little stock of life together for one final
effort, the child raised herself in her sister's arms.

"'Good-night, Jack,' she called out, loud and clear enough to be
heard through the closed door.

"'Good-night, little wife,' he cried back, cheerily; 'are you all
right?'

"'Yes, dear.  Good-night.'

"Her little, worn-out frame dropped back upon the bed, and the next
thing I remember is snatching up a pillow, and holding it tight-
pressed against Jeanie's face for fear the sound of her sobs should
penetrate into the next room; and afterwards we both got out,
somehow, by the other door, and rushed downstairs, and clung to each
other in the back kitchen.

"How we two women managed to keep up the deceit, as, for three whole
days, we did, I shall never myself know.  Jeanie sat in the room
where her dead sister, from its head to its sticking-up feet, lay
outlined under the white sheet; and I stayed beside the living man,
and told lies and acted lies, till I took a joy in them, and had to
guard against the danger of over-elaborating them.

"He wondered at what he thought my 'new merry mood,' and I told him
it was because of my delight that his wife was out of danger; and
then I went on for the pure devilment of the thing, and told him
that a week ago, when we had let him think his wife was growing
stronger, we had been deceiving him; that, as a matter of fact, she
was at that time in great peril, and I had been in hourly alarm
concerning her, but that now the strain was over, and she was safe;
and I dropped down by the foot of the bed, and burst into a fit of
laughter, and had to clutch hold of the bedstead to keep myself from
rolling on the floor.

"He had started up in bed with a wild white face when Jeanie had
first answered him from the other room, though the sisters' voices
had been so uncannily alike that I had never been able to
distinguish one from the other at any time.  I told him the slight
change was the result of the fever, that his own voice also was
changed a little, and that such was always the case with a person
recovering from a long illness.  To guide his thoughts away from the
real clue, I told him Jeanie had broken down with the long work, and
that, the need for her being past, I had packed her off into the
country for a short rest.  That afternoon we concocted a letter to
him, and I watched Jeanie's eyes with a towel in my hand while she
wrote it, so that no tears should fall on it, and that night she
travelled twenty miles down the Great Western line to post it,
returning by the next up-train.

"No suspicion of the truth ever occurred to him, and the doctor
helped us out with our deception; yet his pulse, which day by day
had been getting stronger, now beat feebler every hour.  In that
part of the country where I was born and grew up, the folks say that
wherever the dead lie, there round about them, whether the time be
summer or winter, the air grows cold and colder, and that no fire,
though you pile the logs half-way up the chimney, will ever make it
warm.  A few months' hospital training generally cures one of all
fanciful notions about death, but this idea I have never been able
to get rid of.  My thermometer may show me sixty, and I may try to
believe that the temperature IS sixty, but if the dead are beside me
I feel cold to the marrow of my bones.  I could SEE the chill from
the dead room crawling underneath the door, and creeping up about
his bed, and reaching out its hand to touch his heart.

"Jeanie and I redoubled our efforts, for it seemed to us as if Death
were waiting just outside in the passage, watching with his eye at
the keyhole for either of us to make a blunder and let the truth
slip out.  I hardly ever left his side except now and again to go
into that next room, and poke an imaginary fire, and say a few
chaffing words to an imaginary living woman on the bed where the
dead one lay; and Jeanie sat close to the corpse, and called out
saucy messages to him, or reassuring answers to his anxious
questions.

"At times, knowing that if we stopped another moment in these rooms
we should scream, we would steal softly out and rush downstairs,
and, shutting ourselves out of hearing in a cellar underneath the
yard, laugh till we reeled against the dirty walls.  I think we were
both getting a little mad.

"One day--it was the third of that nightmare life, so I learned
afterwards, though for all I could have told then it might have been
the three hundredth, for Time seemed to have fled from that house as
from a dream, so that all things were tangled--I made a slip that
came near to ending the matter, then and there.

"I had gone into that other room.  Jeanie had left her post for a
moment, and the place was empty.

"I did not think what I was doing.  I had not closed my eyes that I
can remember since the wife had died, and my brain and my senses
were losing their hold of one another.  I went through my usual
performance of talking loudly to the thing underneath the white
sheet, and noisily patting the pillows and rattling the bottles on
the table.

"On my return, he asked me how she was, and I answered, half in a
dream, 'Oh, bonny, she's trying to read a little,' and he raised
himself on his elbow and called out to her, and for answer there
came back silence--not the silence that IS silence, but the silence
that is as a voice.  I do not know if you understand what I mean by
that.  If you had lived among the dead as long as I have, you would
know.

"I darted to the door and pretended to look in.  'She's fallen
asleep,' I whispered, closing it; and he said nothing, but his eyes
looked queerly at me.

"That night, Jeanie and I stood in the hall talking.  He had fallen
to sleep early, and I had locked the door between the two rooms, and
put the key in my pocket, and had stolen down to tell her what had
happened, and to consult with her.

"'What can we do!  God help us, what can we do!' was all that Jeanie
could say.  We had thought that in a day or two he would be
stronger, and that the truth might be broken to him.  But instead of
that he had grown so weak, that to excite his suspicions now by
moving him or her would be to kill him.

"We stood looking blankly in each other's faces, wondering how the
problem could be solved; and while we did so the problem solved
itself.

"The one woman-servant had gone out, and the house was very silent--
so silent that I could hear the ticking of Jeanie's watch inside her
dress.  Suddenly, into the stillness there came a sound.  It was not
a cry.  It came from no human voice.  I have heard the voice of
human pain till I know its every note, and have grown careless to
it; but I have prayed God on my knees that I may never hear that
sound again, for it was the sob of a soul.

"It wailed through the quiet house and passed away, and neither of
us stirred.

"At length, with the return of the blood to our veins, we went
upstairs together.  He had crept from his own room along the passage
into hers.  He had not had strength enough to pull the sheet off,
though he had tried.  He lay across the bed with one hand grasping
hers."


My nurse sat for a while without speaking, a somewhat unusual thing
for her to do.

"You ought to write your experiences," I said.

"Ah!" she said, giving the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen
as much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn't want to write a
sad book."

"I think," she added, after a long pause, with the poker still in
her hand, "it can only be the people who have never KNOWN suffering
who can care to read of it.  If I could write a book, I should write
a merry book--a book that would make people laugh."



CHAPTER IX



The discussion arose in this way.  I had proposed a match between
our villain and the daughter of the local chemist, a singularly
noble and pure-minded girl, the humble but worthy friend of the
heroine.

Brown had refused his consent on the ground of improbability.  "What
in thunder would induce him to marry HER?" he asked.

"Love!" I replied; "love, that burns as brightly in the meanest
villain's breast as in the proud heart of the good young man."

"Are you trying to be light and amusing," returned Brown, severely,
"or are you supposed to be discussing the matter seriously?  What
attraction could such a girl have for such a man as Reuben Neil?"

"Every attraction," I retorted.  "She is the exact moral contrast to
himself.  She is beautiful (if she's not beautiful enough, we can
touch her up a bit), and, when the father dies, there will be the
shop."

"Besides," I added, "it will make the thing seem more natural if
everybody wonders what on earth could have been the reason for their
marrying each other."

Brown wasted no further words on me, but turned to MacShaughnassy.

"Can YOU imagine our friend Reuben seized with a burning desire to
marry Mary Holme?" he asked, with a smile.

"Of course I can," said MacShaughnassy; "I can imagine anything, and
believe anything of anybody.  It is only in novels that people act
reasonably and in accordance with what might be expected of them.  I
knew an old sea-captain who used to read the Young Ladies' Journal
in bed, and cry over it.  I knew a bookmaker who always carried
Browning's poems about with him in his pocket to study in the train.
I have known a Harley Street doctor to develop at forty-eight a
sudden and overmastering passion for switchbacks, and to spend every
hour he could spare from his practice at one or other of the
exhibitions, having three-pen'orths one after the other.  I have
known a book-reviewer give oranges (not poisoned ones) to children.
A man is not a character, he is a dozen characters, one of them
prominent, the other eleven more or less undeveloped.  I knew a man
once, two of whose characters were of equal value, and the
consequences were peculiar."

We begged him to relate the case to us, and he did so.

"He was a Balliol man," said MacShaughnassy, "and his Christian name
was Joseph.  He was a member of the 'Devonshire' at the time I knew
him, and was, I think, the most superior person I have ever met.  He
sneered at the Saturday Review as the pet journal of the suburban
literary club; and at the Athenaeum as the trade organ of the
unsuccessful writer.  Thackeray, he considered, was fairly entitled
to his position of favourite author to the cultured clerk; and
Carlyle he regarded as the exponent of the earnest artisan.  Living
authors he never read, but this did not prevent his criticising them
contemptuously.  The only inhabitants of the nineteenth century that
he ever praised were a few obscure French novelists, of whom nobody
but himself had ever heard.  He had his own opinion about God
Almighty, and objected to Heaven on account of the strong Clapham
contingent likely to be found in residence there.  Humour made him
sad, and sentiment made him ill.  Art irritated him and science
bored him.  He despised his own family and disliked everybody else.
For exercise he yawned, and his conversation was mainly confined to
an occasional shrug.

"Nobody liked him, but everybody respected him.  One felt grateful
to him for his condescension in living at all.

"One summer, I was fishing over the Norfolk Broads, and on the Bank
Holiday, thinking I would like to see the London 'Arry in his glory,
I ran over to Yarmouth.  Walking along the sea-front in the evening,
I suddenly found myself confronted by four remarkably choice
specimens of the class.  They were urging on their wild and erratic
career arm-in-arm.  The one nearest the road was playing an
unusually wheezy concertina, and the other three were bawling out
the chorus of a music-hall song, the heroine of which appeared to be
'Hemmer.'

They spread themselves right across the pavement, compelling all the
women and children they met to step into the roadway.  I stood my
ground on the kerb, and as they brushed by me something in the face
of the one with the concertina struck me as familiar.

"I turned and followed them.  They were evidently enjoying
themselves immensely.  To every girl they passed they yelled out,
'Oh, you little jam tart!' and every old lady they addressed as
'Mar.'  The noisiest and the most vulgar of the four was the one
with the concertina.

"I followed them on to the pier, and then, hurrying past, waited for
them under a gas-lamp.  When the man with the concertina came into
the light and I saw him clearly I started.  From the face I could
have sworn it was Joseph; but everything else about him rendered
such an assumption impossible.  Putting aside the time and the
place, and forgetting his behaviour, his companions, and his
instrument, what remained was sufficient to make the suggestion
absurd.  Joseph was always clean shaven; this youth had a smudgy
moustache and a pair of incipient red whiskers.  He was dressed in
the loudest check suit I have ever seen, off the stage.  He wore
patent-leather boots with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a necktie
that in an earlier age would have called down lightning out of
Heaven.  He had a low-crowned billycock hat on his head, and a big
evil-smelling cigar between his lips.

"Argue as I would, however, the face was the face of Joseph; and,
moved by a curiosity I could not control, I kept near him, watching
him.

"Once, for a little while, I missed him; but there was not much fear
of losing that suit for long, and after a little looking about I
struck it again.  He was sitting at the end of the pier, where it
was less crowded, with his arm round a girl's waist.  I crept close.
She was a jolly, red-faced girl, good-looking enough, but common to
the last degree.  Her hat lay on the seat beside her, and her head
was resting on his shoulder.  She appeared to be fond of him, but he
was evidently bored.

"'Don'tcher like me, Joe?' I heard her murmur.

"'Yas,' he replied, somewhat unconvincingly, 'o' course I likes
yer.'

"She gave him an affectionate slap, but he did not respond, and a
few minutes afterwards, muttering some excuse, he rose and left her,
and I followed him as he made his way towards the refreshment-room.
At the door he met one of his pals.

"'Hullo!' was the question, 'wot 'a yer done wi' 'Liza?'

"'Oh, I carn't stand 'er,' was his reply; 'she gives me the bloomin'
'ump.  You 'ave a turn with 'er.'

"His friend disappeared in the direction of 'Liza, and Joe pushed
into the room, I keeping close behind him.  Now that he was alone I
was determined to speak to him.  The longer I had studied his
features the more resemblance I had found in them to those of my
superior friend Joseph.

"He was leaning across the bar, clamouring for two of gin, when I
tapped him on the shoulder.  He turned his head, and the moment he
saw me, his face went livid.

"'Mr. Joseph Smythe, I believe,' I said with a smile.

"'Who's Mr. Joseph Smythe?' he answered hoarsely; 'my name's Smith,
I ain't no bloomin' Smythe.  Who are you?  I don't know yer.'

"As he spoke, my eyes rested upon a curious gold ring of Indian
workmanship which he wore upon his left hand.  There was no
mistaking the ring, at all events:  it had been passed round the
club on more than one occasion as a unique curiosity.  His eyes
followed my gaze.  He burst into tears, and pushing me before him
into a quiet corner of the saloon, sat down facing me.

"'Don't give me away, old man,' he whimpered; 'for Gawd's sake,
don't let on to any of the chaps 'ere that I'm a member of that
blessed old waxwork show in Saint James's:  they'd never speak to me
agen.  And keep yer mug shut about Oxford, there's a good sort.  I
wouldn't 'ave 'em know as 'ow I was one o' them college blokes for
anythink.'

"I sat aghast.  I had listened to hear him entreat me to keep
'Smith,' the rorty 'Arry, a secret from the acquaintances of
'Smythe,' the superior person.  Here was 'Smith' in mortal terror
lest his pals should hear of his identity with the aristocratic
'Smythe,' and discard him.  His attitude puzzled me at the time,
but, when I came to reflect, my wonder was at myself for having
expected the opposite.

"'I carn't 'elp it,' he went on; 'I 'ave to live two lives.  'Arf my
time I'm a stuck-up prig, as orter be jolly well kicked--'

"'At which times,' I interrupted, 'I have heard you express some
extremely uncomplimentary opinions concerning 'Arries.'

"'I know,' he replied, in a voice betraying strong emotion; 'that's
where it's so precious rough on me.  When I'm a toff I despises
myself, 'cos I knows that underneath my sneering phiz I'm a bloomin'
'Arry.  When I'm an 'Arry, I 'ates myself 'cos I knows I'm a toff.'

"'Can't you decide which character you prefer, and stick to it?' I
asked.

"'No,' he answered, 'I carn't.  It's a rum thing, but whichever I
am, sure as fate, 'bout the end of a month I begin to get sick o'
myself.'

"'I can quite understand it,' I murmured; 'I should give way myself
in a fortnight.'

"'I've been myself, now,' he continued, without noticing my remark,
'for somethin' like ten days.  One mornin', in 'bout three weeks'
time, I shall get up in my diggins in the Mile End Road, and I shall
look round the room, and at these clothes 'angin' over the bed, and
at this yer concertina' (he gave it an affectionate squeeze), 'and I
shall feel myself gettin' scarlet all over.  Then I shall jump out
o' bed, and look at myself in the glass.  "You howling little cad,"
I shall say to myself, "I have half a mind to strangle you"; and I
shall shave myself, and put on a quiet blue serge suit and a bowler
'at, tell my landlady to keep my rooms for me till I comes back,
slip out o' the 'ouse, and into the fust 'ansom I meets, and back to
the Halbany.  And a month arter that, I shall come into my chambers
at the Halbany, fling Voltaire and Parini into the fire, shy me 'at
at the bust of good old 'Omer, slip on my blue suit agen, and back
to the Mile End Road.'

"'How do you explain your absence to both parties?' I asked.

"'Oh, that's simple enough,' he replied.  'I just tells my
'ousekeeper at the Halbany as I'm goin' on the Continong; and my
mates 'ere thinks I'm a traveller.'

"'Nobody misses me much,' he added, pathetically; 'I hain't a
partic'larly fetchin' sort o' bloke, either of me.  I'm sich an out-
and-outer.  When I'm an 'Arry, I'm too much of an 'Arry, and when
I'm a prig, I'm a reg'lar fust prize prig.  Seems to me as if I was
two ends of a man without any middle.  If I could only mix myself up
a bit more, I'd be all right.'

"He sniffed once or twice, and then he laughed.  'Ah, well,' he
said, casting aside his momentary gloom; 'it's all a game, and wot's
the odds so long as yer 'appy.  'Ave a wet?'

"I declined the wet, and left him playing sentimental airs to
himself upon the concertina.

"One afternoon, about a month later, the servant came to me with a
card on which was engraved the name of 'Mr. Joseph Smythe.'  I
requested her to show him up.  He entered with his usual air of
languid superciliousness, and seated himself in a graceful attitude
upon the sofa.

"'Well,' I said, as soon as the girl had closed the door behind her,
'so you've got rid of Smith?'

"A sickly smile passed over his face.  'You have not mentioned it to
any one?' he asked anxiously.

"'Not to a soul,' I replied; 'though I confess I often feel tempted
to.'

"'I sincerely trust you never will,' he said, in a tone of alarm.
'You can have no conception of the misery the whole thing causes me.
I cannot understand it.  What possible affinity there can be between
myself and that disgusting little snob passes my comprehension.  I
assure you, my dear Mac, the knowledge that I was a ghoul, or a
vampire, would cause me less nausea than the reflection that I am
one and the same with that odious little Whitechapel bounder.  When
I think of him every nerve in my body--'

"'Don't think about him any more,' I interrupted, perceiving his
strongly-suppressed emotion.  'You didn't come here to talk about
him, I'm sure.  Let us dismiss him.'

"'Well,' he replied, 'in a certain roundabout way it is slightly
connected with him.  That is really my excuse for inflicting the
subject upon you.  You are the only man I CAN speak to about it--if
I shall not bore you?'

"'Not in the least,' I said.  'I am most interested.'  As he still
hesitated, I asked him point-blank what it was.

"He appeared embarrassed.  'It is really very absurd of me,' he
said, while the faintest suspicion of pink crossed his usually
colourless face; 'but I feel I must talk to somebody about it.  The
fact is, my dear Mac, I am in love.'

"'Capital!' I cried; 'I'm delighted to hear it.'  (I thought it
might make a man of him.)  'Do I know the lady?'

"'I am inclined to think you must have seen her,' he replied; 'she
was with me on the pier at Yarmouth that evening you met me.'

"'Not 'Liza!' I exclaimed.

"'That was she,' he answered; 'Miss Elizabeth Muggins.'  He dwelt
lovingly upon the name.

"'But,' I said, 'you seemed--I really could not help noticing, it
was so pronounced--you seemed to positively dislike her.  Indeed, I
gathered from your remark to a friend that her society was
distinctly distasteful to you.'

"'To Smith,' he corrected me.  'What judge would that howling little
blackguard be of a woman's worth!  The dislike of such a man as that
is a testimonial to her merit!'

"'I may be mistaken,' I said; 'but she struck me as a bit common.'

"'She is not, perhaps, what the world would call a lady,' he
admitted; 'but then, my dear Mac, my opinion of the world is not
such as to render ITS opinion of much value to me.  I and the world
differ on most subjects, I am glad to say.  She is beautiful, and
she is good, and she is my choice.'

"'She's a jolly enough little girl,' I replied, 'and, I should say,
affectionate; but have you considered, Smythe, whether she is quite-
-what shall we say--quite as intellectual as could be desired?'

"'Really, to tell the truth, I have not troubled myself much about
her intellect,' he replied, with one of his sneering smiles.  'I
have no doubt that the amount of intellect absolutely necessary to
the formation of a British home, I shall be able to supply myself.
I have no desire for an intellectual wife.  One is compelled to meet
tiresome people, but one does not live with them if one can avoid
it.'

"'No,' he continued, reverting to his more natural tone; 'the more I
think of Elizabeth the more clear it becomes to me that she is the
one woman in the world for whom marriage with me is possible.  I
perceive that to the superficial observer my selection must appear
extraordinary.  I do not pretend to explain it, or even to
understand it.  The study of mankind is beyond man.  Only fools
attempt it.  Maybe it is her contrast to myself that attracts me.
Maybe my, perhaps, too spiritual nature feels the need of contact
with her coarser clay to perfect itself.  I cannot tell.  These
things must always remain mysteries.  I only know that I love her--
that, if any reliance is to be placed upon instinct, she is the mate
to whom Artemis is leading me.'

"It was clear that he was in love, and I therefore ceased to argue
with him.  'You kept up your acquaintanceship with her, then, after
you'--I was going to say 'after you ceased to be Smith,' but not
wishing to agitate him by more mention of that person than I could
help, I substituted, 'after you returned to the Albany?'

"'Not exactly,' he replied; 'I lost sight of her after I left
Yarmouth, and I did not see her again until five days ago, when I
came across her in an aerated bread shop.  I had gone in to get a
glass of milk and a bun, and SHE brought them to me.  I recognised
her in a moment.'  His face lighted up with quite a human smile.  'I
take tea there every afternoon now,' he added, glancing towards the
clock, 'at four.'

"'There's not much need to ask HER views on the subject,' I said,
laughing; 'her feelings towards you were pretty evident.'

"'Well, that is the curious part of it,' he replied, with a return
to his former embarrassment; 'she does not seem to care for me now
at all.  Indeed, she positively refuses me.  She says--to put it in
the dear child's own racy language--that she wouldn't take me on at
any price.  She says it would be like marrying a clockwork figure
without the key.  She's more frank than complimentary, but I like
that.'

"'Wait a minute,' I said; 'an idea occurs to me.  Does she know of
your identity with Smith?'

"'No,' he replied, alarmed, 'I would not have her know it for
worlds.  Only yesterday she told me that I reminded her of a fellow
she had met at Yarmouth, and my heart was in my mouth.'

"'How did she look when she told you that?' I asked.

"'How did she look?' he repeated, not understanding me.

"'What was her expression at that moment?' I said--'was it severe or
tender?'

"'Well,' he replied, 'now I come to think of it, she did seem to
soften a bit just then.'

"'My dear boy,' I said, 'the case is as clear as day-light.  She
loves Smith.  No girl who admired Smith could be attracted by
Smythe.  As your present self you will never win her.  In a few
weeks' time, however, you will be Smith.  Leave the matter over
until then.  Propose to her as Smith, and she will accept you.
After marriage you can break Smythe gently to her.'

"'By Jove!' he exclaimed, startled out of his customary lethargy, 'I
never thought of that.  The truth is, when I am in my right senses,
Smith and all his affairs seem like a dream to me.  Any idea
connected with him would never enter my mind.'

"He rose and held out his hand.  'I am so glad I came to see you,'
he said; 'your suggestion has almost reconciled me to my miserable
fate.  Indeed, I quite look forward to a month of Smith, now.'

"'I'm so pleased,' I answered, shaking hands with him.  'Mind you
come and tell me how you get on.  Another man's love affairs are not
usually absorbing, but there is an element of interest about yours
that renders the case exceptional.'

"We parted, and I did not see him again for another month.  Then,
late one evening, the servant knocked at my door to say that a Mr.
Smith wished to see me.

"'Smith, Smith,' I repeated; 'what Smith? didn't he give you a
card?'

"'No, sir,' answered the girl; 'he doesn't look the sort that would
have a card.  He's not a gentleman, sir; but he says you'll know
him.'  She evidently regarded the statement as an aspersion upon
myself.

"I was about to tell her to say I was out, when the recollection of
Smythe's other self flashed into my mind, and I directed her to send
him up.

"A minute passed, and then he entered.  He was wearing a new suit of
a louder pattern, if possible, than before.  I think he must have
designed it himself.  He looked hot and greasy.  He did not offer to
shake hands, but sat down awkwardly on the extreme edge of a small
chair, and gaped about the room as if he had never seen it before.

"He communicated his shyness to myself.  I could not think what to
say, and we sat for a while in painful silence.

"'Well,' I said, at last, plunging head-foremost into the matter,
according to the method of shy people, 'and how's 'Liza?'

"'Oh, SHE'S all right,' he replied, keeping his eyes fixed on his
hat.

"'Have you done it?' I continued.

"'Done wot?' he asked, looking up.

"'Married her.'

"'No,' he answered, returning to the contemplation of his hat.

"'Has she refused you then?' I said.

"'I ain't arst 'er,' he returned.

He seemed unwilling to explain matters of his own accord.  I had to
put the conversation into the form of a cross-examination.

"'Why not?' I asked; 'don't you think she cares for you any longer?'

He burst into a harsh laugh.  'There ain't much fear o' that,' he
said; 'it's like 'aving an Alcock's porous plaster mashed on yer,
blowed if it ain't.  There's no gettin' rid of 'er.  I wish she'd
giv' somebody else a turn.  I'm fair sick of 'er.'

"'But you were enthusiastic about her a month ago!' I exclaimed in
astonishment.

"'Smythe may 'ave been,' he said; 'there ain't no accounting for
that ninny, 'is 'ead's full of starch.  Anyhow, I don't take 'er on
while I'm myself.  I'm too jolly fly.'

"'That sort o' gal's all right enough to lark with,' he continued;
'but yer don't want to marry 'em.  They don't do yer no good.  A man
wants a wife as 'e can respect--some one as is a cut above 'imself,
as will raise 'im up a peg or two--some one as 'e can look up to and
worship.  A man's wife orter be to 'im a gawddess--a hangel, a--'

"'You appear to have met the lady,' I remarked, interrupting him.

"He blushed scarlet, and became suddenly absorbed in the pattern of
the carpet.  But the next moment he looked up again, and his face
seemed literally transformed.

"'Oh!  Mr. MacShaughnassy,' he burst out, with a ring of genuine
manliness in his voice, 'you don't know 'ow good, 'ow beautiful she
is.  I ain't fit to breathe 'er name in my thoughts.  An' she's so
clever.  I met 'er at that Toynbee 'All.  There was a party of toffs
there all together.  You would 'ave enjoyed it, Mr. MacShaughnassy,
if you could 'ave 'eard 'er; she was makin' fun of the pictures and
the people round about to 'er pa--such wit, such learnin', such
'aughtiness.  I follered them out and opened the carriage door for
'er, and she just drew 'er skirt aside and looked at me as if I was
the dirt in the road.  I wish I was, for then perhaps one day I'd
kiss 'er feet.'

"His emotion was so genuine that I did not feel inclined to laugh at
him.  'Did you find out who she was?' I asked.

"'Yes,' he answered; 'I 'eard the old gentleman say "'Ome" to the
coachman, and I ran after the carriage all the way to 'Arley Street.
Trevior's 'er name, Hedith Trevior.'

"'Miss Trevior!' I cried, 'a tall, dark girl, with untidy hair and
rather weak eyes?'

"'Tall and dark,' he replied 'with 'air that seems tryin' to reach
'er lips to kiss 'em, and heyes, light blue, like a Cambridge
necktie.  A 'undred and seventy-three was the number.'

"'That's right,' I said; 'my dear Smith, this is becoming
complicated.  You've met the lady and talked to her for half an
hour--as Smythe, don't you remember?'

"'No,' he said, after cogitating for a minute, 'carn't say I do; I
never can remember much about Smythe.  He allers seems to me like a
bad dream.'

"'Well, you met her,' I said; 'I'm positive.  I introduced you to
her myself, and she confided to me afterwards that she thought you a
most charming man.'

"'No--did she?' he remarked, evidently softening in his feelings
towards Smythe; 'and did I like 'ER?'

"'Well, to tell the truth,' I answered, 'I don't think you did.  You
looked intensely bored.'

"'The Juggins,' I heard him mutter to himself, and then he said
aloud:  'D'yer think I shall get a chance o' seein' 'er agen, when
I'm--when I'm Smythe?'

"'Of course,' I said, 'I'll take you round myself.  By the bye,' I
added, jumping up and looking on the mantelpiece, 'I've got a card
for a Cinderella at their place--something to do with a birthday.
Will you be Smythe on November the twentieth?'

"'Ye--as,' he replied; 'oh, yas--bound to be by then.'

"'Very well, then,' I said, 'I'll call round for you at the Albany,
and we'll go together.'

"He rose and stood smoothing his hat with his sleeve.  'Fust time
I've ever looked for'ard to bein' that hanimated corpse, Smythe,' he
said slowly.  'Blowed if I don't try to 'urry it up--'pon my sivey I
will.'

"'He'll be no good to you till the twentieth,' I reminded him.
'And,' I added, as I stood up to ring the bell, 'you're sure it's a
genuine case this time.  You won't be going back to 'Liza?'

"'Oh, don't talk 'bout 'Liza in the same breath with Hedith,' he
replied, 'it sounds like sacrilege.'

"He stood hesitating with the handle of the door in his hand.  At
last, opening it and looking very hard at his hat, he said, 'I'm
goin' to 'Arley Street now.  I walk up and down outside the 'ouse
every evening, and sometimes, when there ain't no one lookin', I get
a chance to kiss the doorstep.'

"He disappeared, and I returned to my chair.

"On November twentieth, I called for him according to promise.  I
found him on the point of starting for the club:  he had forgotten
all about our appointment.  I reminded him of it, and he with
difficulty recalled it, and consented, without any enthusiasm, to
accompany me.  By a few artful hints to her mother (including a
casual mention of his income), I manoeuvred matters so that he had
Edith almost entirely to himself for the whole evening.  I was proud
of what I had done, and as we were walking home together I waited to
receive his gratitude.

"As it seemed slow in coming, I hinted my expectations.

"'Well,' I said, 'I think I managed that very cleverly for you.'

"'Managed what very cleverly?' said he.

"'Why, getting you and Miss Trevior left together for such a long
time in the conservatory,' I answered, somewhat hurt; 'I fixed that
for you.'

"'Oh, it was YOU, was it,' he replied; 'I've been cursing
Providence.'

"I stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, and faced him.
'Don't you love her?' I said.

"'Love her!' he repeated, in the utmost astonishment; 'what on earth
is there in her to love?  She's nothing but a bad translation of a
modern French comedy, with the interest omitted.'

"This 'tired' me--to use an Americanism.  'You came to me a month
ago,' I said, 'raving over her, and talking about being the dirt
under her feet and kissing her doorstep.'

"He turned very red.  'I wish, my dear Mac,' he said, 'you would pay
me the compliment of not mistaking me for that detestable little cad
with whom I have the misfortune to be connected.  You would greatly
oblige me if next time he attempts to inflict upon you his vulgar
drivel you would kindly kick him downstairs.'

"'No doubt,' he added, with a sneer, as we walked on, 'Miss Trevior
would be his ideal.  She is exactly the type of woman, I should say,
to charm that type of man.  For myself, I do not appreciate the
artistic and literary female.'

"'Besides,' he continued, in a deeper tone, 'you know my feelings.
I shall never care for any other woman but Elizabeth.'

"'And she?' I said

"'She,' he sighed, 'is breaking her heart for Smith.'

"'Why don't you tell her you are Smith?' I asked.

"'I cannot,' he replied, 'not even to win her.  Besides, she would
not believe me.'

"We said good-night at the corner of Bond Street, and I did not see
him again till one afternoon late in the following March, when I ran
against him in Ludgate Circus.  He was wearing his transition blue
suit and bowler hat.  I went up to him and took his arm.

"'Which are you?' I said.

"'Neither, for the moment,' he replied, 'thank God.  Half an hour
ago I was Smythe, half an hour hence I shall be Smith.  For the
present half-hour I am a man.'

"There was a pleasant, hearty ring in his voice, and a genial,
kindly light in his eyes, and he held himself like a frank
gentleman.

"'You are certainly an improvement upon both of them,' I said.

"He laughed a sunny laugh, with just the shadow of sadness dashed
across it.  'Do you know my idea of Heaven?' he said.

"'No,' I replied, somewhat surprised at the question.

"'Ludgate Circus,' was the answer.  'The only really satisfying
moments of my life,' he said, 'have been passed in the neighbourhood
of Ludgate Circus.  I leave Piccadilly an unhealthy, unwholesome
prig.  At Charing Cross I begin to feel my blood stir in my veins.
From Ludgate Circus to Cheapside I am a human thing with human
feeling throbbing in my heart, and human thought throbbing in my
brain--with fancies, sympathies, and hopes.  At the Bank my mind
becomes a blank.  As I walk on, my senses grow coarse and blunted;
and by the time I reach Whitechapel I am a poor little uncivilised
cad.  On the return journey it is the same thing reversed.'

"'Why not live in Ludgate Circus,' I said, 'and be always as you are
now?'

"'Because,' he answered, 'man is a pendulum, and must travel his
arc.'

"'My dear Mac,' said he, laying his hand upon my shoulder, 'there is
only one good thing about me, and that is a moral.  Man is as God
made him:  don't be so sure that you can take him to pieces and
improve him.  All my life I have sought to make myself an
unnaturally superior person.  Nature has retaliated by making me
also an unnaturally inferior person.  Nature abhors lopsidedness.
She turns out man as a whole, to be developed as a whole.  I always
wonder, whenever I come across a supernaturally pious, a
supernaturally moral, a supernaturally cultured person, if they also
have a reverse self.'

"I was shocked at his suggested argument, and walked by his side for
a while without speaking.  At last, feeling curious on the subject,
I asked him how his various love affairs were progressing.

"'Oh, as usual,' he replied; 'in and out of a cul de sac.  When I am
Smythe I love Eliza, and Eliza loathes me.  When I am Smith I love
Edith, and the mere sight of me makes her shudder.  It is as
unfortunate for them as for me.  I am not saying it boastfully.
Heaven knows it is an added draught of misery in my cup; but it is a
fact that Eliza is literally pining away for me as Smith, and--as
Smith I find it impossible to be even civil to her; while Edith,
poor girl, has been foolish enough to set her heart on me as Smythe,
and as Smythe she seems to me but the skin of a woman stuffed with
the husks of learning, and rags torn from the corpse of wit.'

"I remained absorbed in my own thoughts for some time, and did not
come out of them till we were crossing the Minories.  Then, the idea
suddenly occurring to me, I said:

"'Why don't you get a new girl altogether?  There must be medium
girls that both Smith and Smythe could like, and that would put up
with both of you.'

"'No more girls for this child,' he answered 'they're more trouble
than they're worth.  Those yer want yer carn't get, and those yer
can 'ave, yer don't want.'

"I started, and looked up at him.  He was slouching along with his
hands in his pockets, and a vacuous look in his face.

"A sudden repulsion seized me.  'I must go now,' I said, stopping.
'I'd no idea I had come so far.'

"He seemed as glad to be rid of me as I to be rid of him.  'Oh, must
yer,' he said, holding out his hand.  'Well, so long.'

"We shook hands carelessly.  He disappeared in the crowd, and that
is the last I have ever seen of him."


"Is that a true story?" asked Jephson.

"Well, I've altered the names and dates," said MacShaughnassy; "but
the main facts you can rely upon."



CHAPTER X



The final question discussed at our last meeting been:  What shall
our hero be?  MacShaughnassy had suggested an author, with a critic
for the villain.  My idea was a stockbroker, with an undercurrent of
romance in his nature.  Said Jephson, who has a practical mind:
"The question is not what we like, but what the female novel-reader
likes."

"That is so," agreed MacShaughnassy.  "I propose that we collect
feminine opinion upon this point.  I will write to my aunt and
obtain from her the old lady's view.  You," he said, turning to me,
"can put the case to your wife, and get the young lady's ideal.  Let
Brown write to his sister at Newnham, and find out whom the
intellectual maiden favours, while Jephson can learn from Miss
Medbury what is most attractive to the common-sensed girl."

This plan we had adopted, and the result was now under
consideration.  MacShaughnassy opened the proceedings by reading his
aunt's letter.  Wrote the old lady:


"I think, if I were you, my dear boy, I should choose a soldier.
You know your poor grandfather, who ran away to America with that
WICKED Mrs. Featherly, the banker's wife, was a soldier, and so was
your poor cousin Robert, who lost eight thousand pounds at Monte
Carlo.  I have always felt singularly drawn towards soldiers, even
as a girl; though your poor dear uncle could not bear them.  You
will find many allusions to soldiers and men of war in the Old
Testament (see Jer. xlviii. 14).  Of course one does not like to
think of their fighting and killing each other, but then they do not
seem to do that sort of thing nowadays."


"So much for the old lady," said MacShaughnassy, as he folded up the
letter and returned it to his pocket.  "What says culture?"

Brown produced from his cigar-case a letter addressed in a bold
round hand, and read as follows:


"What a curious coincidence!  A few of us were discussing this very
subject last night in Millicent Hightopper's rooms, and I may tell
you at once that our decision was unanimous in favour of soldiers.
You see, my dear Selkirk, in human nature the attraction is towards
the opposite.  To a milliner's apprentice a poet would no doubt be
satisfying; to a woman of intelligence he would he an unutterable
bore.  What the intellectual woman requires in man is not something
to argue with, but something to look at.  To an empty-headed woman I
can imagine the soldier type proving vapid and uninteresting; to the
woman of mind he represents her ideal of man--a creature strong,
handsome, well-dressed, and not too clever."


"That gives us two votes for the army," remarked MacShaughnassy, as
Brown tore his sister's letter in two, and threw the pieces into the
waste-paper basket.  "What says the common-sensed girl?"

"First catch your common-sensed girl," muttered Jephson, a little
grumpily, as it seemed to me.  "Where do you propose finding her?"

"Well," returned MacShaughnassy, "I looked to find her in Miss
Medbury."

As a rule, the mention of Miss Medbury's name brings a flush of joy
to Jephson's face; but now his features wore an expression
distinctly approaching a scowl.

"Oh!" he replied, "did you?  Well, then, the common-sensed girl
loves the military also."

"By Jove!" exclaimed MacShaughnassy, "what an extraordinary thing.
What reason does she give?"

"That there's a something about them, and that they dance so
divinely," answered Jephson, shortly.

"Well, you do surprise me," murmured MacShaughnassy, "I am
astonished."

Then to me he said:  "And what does the young married woman say?
The same?"

"Yes," I replied, "precisely the same."

"Does SHE give a reason?" he asked.

"Oh yes," I explained; "because you can't help liking them."

There was silence for the next few minutes, while we smoked and
thought.  I fancy we were all wishing we had never started this
inquiry.

That four distinctly different types of educated womanhood should,
with promptness and unanimity quite unfeminine, have selected the
soldier as their ideal, was certainly discouraging to the civilian
heart.  Had they been nursemaids or servant girls, I should have
expected it.  The worship of Mars by the Venus of the white cap is
one of the few vital religions left to this devoutless age.  A year
or two ago I lodged near a barracks, and the sight to be seen round
its huge iron gates on Sunday afternoons I shall never forget.  The
girls began to assemble about twelve o'clock.  By two, at which hour
the army, with its hair nicely oiled and a cane in its hand, was
ready for a stroll, there would be some four or five hundred of them
waiting in a line.  Formerly they had collected in a wild mob, and
as the soldiers were let out to them two at a time, had fought for
them, as lions for early Christians.  This, however, had led to
scenes of such disorder and brutality, that the police had been
obliged to interfere; and the girls were now marshalled in QUEUE,
two abreast, and compelled, by a force of constables specially told
off for the purpose, to keep their places and wait their proper
turn.

At three o'clock the sentry on duty would come down to the wicket
and close it.  "They're all gone, my dears," he would shout out to
the girls still left; "it's no good your stopping, we've no more for
you to-day."

"Oh, not one!" some poor child would murmur pleadingly, while the
tears welled up into her big round eyes, "not even a little one.
I've been waiting SUCH a long time."

"Can't help that," the honest fellow would reply, gruffly, but not
unkindly, turning aside to hide his emotion; "you've had 'em all
between you.  We don't make 'em, you know:  you can't have 'em if we
haven't got 'em, can you?  Come earlier next time."

Then he would hurry away to escape further importunity; and the
police, who appeared to have been waiting for this moment with
gloating anticipation, would jeeringly hustle away the weeping
remnant.  "Now then, pass along, you girls, pass along," they would
say, in that irritatingly unsympathetic voice of theirs.  "You've
had your chance.  Can't have the roadway blocked up all the
afternoon with this 'ere demonstration of the unloved.  Pass along."

In connection with this same barracks, our char-woman told Amenda,
who told Ethelbertha, who told me a story, which I now told the
boys.

Into a certain house, in a certain street in the neighbourhood,
there moved one day a certain family.  Their servant had left them--
most of their servants did at the end of a week--and the day after
the moving-in an advertisement for a domestic was drawn up and sent
to the Chronicle.  It ran thus:


WANTED, GENERAL SERVANT, in small family of eleven.  Wages, 6
pounds; no beer money.  Must be early riser and hard worker.
Washing done at home.  Must be good cook, and not object to window-
cleaning.  Unitarian preferred.--Apply, with references, to A. B.,
etc.


That advertisement was sent off on Wednesday afternoon.  At seven
o'clock on Thursday morning the whole family were awakened by
continuous ringing of the street-door bell.  The husband, looking
out of window, was surprised to see a crowd of about fifty girls
surrounding the house.  He slipped on his dressing-gown and went
down to see what was the matter.  The moment he opened the door,
fifteen of them charged tumultuously into the passage, sweeping him
completely off his legs.  Once inside, these fifteen faced round,
fought the other thirty-five or so back on to the door-step, and
slammed the door in their faces.  Then they picked up the master of
the house, and asked him politely to conduct them to A. B."

At first, owing to the clamour of the mob outside, who were
hammering at the door and shouting curses through the keyhole, he
could understand nothing, but at length they succeeded in explaining
to him that they were domestic servants come ill answer to his
wife's advertisement.  The man went and told his wife, and his wife
said she would see them, one at a time.

Which one should have audience first was a delicate question to
decide.  The man, on being appealed to, said he would prefer to
leave it to them.  They accordingly discussed the matter among
themselves.  At the end of a quarter of an hour, the victor, having
borrowed some hair-pins and a looking-glass from our charwoman, who
had slept in the house, went upstairs, while the remaining fourteen
sat down in the hall, and fanned themselves with their bonnets.

"A. B." was a good deal astonished when the first applicant
presented herself.  She was a tall, genteel-looking girl.  Up to
yesterday she had been head housemaid at Lady Stanton's, and before
that she had been under-cook for two years to the Duchess of York.

"And why did you leave Lady Stanton?" asked "A. B."

"To come here, mum," replied the girl.  The lady was puzzled.

"And you'll be satisfied with six pounds a year?" she asked.

"Certainly, mum, I think it ample."

"And you don't mind hard work?"

"I love it, mum."

"And you're an early riser?"

"Oh yes, mum, it upsets me stopping in bed after half-past five."

"You know we do the washing at home?"

"Yes, mum.  I think it so much better to do it at home.  Those
laundries ruin good clothes.  They're so careless."

"Are you a Unitarian?" continued the lady.

"Not yet, mum," replied the girl, "but I should like to be one."

The lady took her reference, and said she would write.

The next applicant offered to come for three pounds--thought six
pounds too much.  She expressed her willingness to sleep in the back
kitchen:  a shakedown under the sink was all she wanted.  She
likewise had yearnings towards Unitarianism.

The third girl did not require any wages at all--could not
understand what servants wanted with wages--thought wages only
encouraged a love of foolish finery--thought a comfortable home in a
Unitarian family ought to be sufficient wages for any girl.

This girl said there was one stipulation she should like to make,
and that was that she should be allowed to pay for all breakages
caused by her own carelessness or neglect.  She objected to holidays
and evenings out; she held that they distracted a girl from her
work.

The fourth candidate offered a premium of five pounds for the place;
and then "A. B." began to get frightened, and refused to see any
more of the girls, convinced that they must be lunatics from some
neighbouring asylum out for a walk.

Later in the day, meeting the next-door lady on the door-step, she
related her morning's experiences.

"Oh, that's nothing extraordinary," said the next-door lady; "none
of us on this side of the street pay wages; and we get the pick of
all the best servants in London.  Why, girls will come from the
other end of the kingdom to get into one of these houses.  It's the
dream of their lives.  They save up for years, so as to be able to
come here for nothing."

"What's the attraction?" asked "A. B.," more amazed than ever.

"Why, don't you see," explained the next door lady, "our back
windows open upon the barrack yard.  A girl living in one of these
houses is always close to soldiers.  By looking out of window she
can always see soldiers; and sometimes a soldier will nod to her or
even call up to her.  They never dream of asking for wages.  They'll
work eighteen hours a day, and put up with anything just to be
allowed to stop."

"A. B."  profited by this information, and engaged the girl who
offered the five pounds premium.  She found her a perfect treasure
of a servant.  She was invariably willing and respectful, slept on a
sofa in the kitchen, and was always contented with an egg for her
dinner.

The truth of this story I cannot vouch for.  Myself, I can believe
it.  Brown and MacShaughnassy made no attempt to do so, which seemed
unfriendly.  Jephson excused himself on the plea of a headache.  I
admit there are points in it presenting difficulties to the average
intellect.  As I explained at the commencement, it was told to me by
Ethelbertha, who had it from Amenda, who got it from the char-woman,
and exaggerations may have crept into it.  The following, however,
were incidents that came under my own personal observation.  They
afforded a still stronger example of the influence exercised by
Tommy Atkins upon the British domestic, and I therefore thought it
right to relate them.

"The heroine of them," I said, "is our Amenda.  Now, you would call
her a tolerably well-behaved, orderly young woman, would you not?"

"She is my ideal of unostentatious respectability," answered
MacShaughnassy

"That was my opinion also," I replied.  "You can, therefore, imagine
my feelings on passing her one evening in the Folkestone High Street
with a Panama hat upon her head (MY Panama hat), and a soldier's arm
round her waist.  She was one of a mob following the band of the
Third Berkshire Infantry, then in camp at Sandgate.  There was an
ecstatic, far-away look in her eyes.  She was dancing rather than
walking, and with her left hand she beat time to the music.

"Ethelbertha was with me at the time.  We stared after the
procession until it had turned the corner, and then we stared at
each other.

"'Oh, it's impossible,' said Ethelbertha to me.

"'But that was my hat,' I said to Ethelbertha.

"The moment we reached home Ethelbertha looked for Amenda, and I
looked for my hat.  Neither was to be found.

"Nine o'clock struck, ten o'clock struck.  At half-past ten, we went
down and got our own supper, and had it in the kitchen.  At a
quarter-past eleven, Amenda returned.  She walked into the kitchen
without a word, hung my hat up behind the door, and commenced
clearing away the supper things.

"Ethelbertha rose, calm but severe.

"'Where have you been, Amenda?' she inquired.

"'Gadding half over the county with a lot of low soldiers,' answered
Amenda, continuing her work.

"'You had on my hat,' I added.

"'Yes, sir,' replied Amenda, still continuing her work, 'it was the
first thing that came to hand.  What I'm thankful for is that it
wasn't missis's best bonnet.'

"Whether Ethelbertha was mollified by the proper spirit displayed in
this last remark, I cannot say, but I think it probable.  At all
events, it was in a voice more of sorrow than of anger that she
resumed her examination.

"'You were walking with a soldier's arm around your waist when we
passed you, Amenda?' she observed interrogatively.

"'I know, mum,' admitted Amenda, 'I found it there myself when the
music stopped.'

"Ethelbertha looked her inquiries.  Amenda filled a saucepan with
water, and then replied to them.

"'I'm a disgrace to a decent household,' she said; 'no mistress who
respected herself would keep me a moment.  I ought to be put on the
doorstep with my box and a month's wages.'

"'But why did you do it then?' said Ethelbertha, with natural
astonishment.

"'Because I'm a helpless ninny, mum.  I can't help myself; if I see
soldiers I'm bound to follow them.  It runs in our family.  My poor
cousin Emma was just such another fool.  She was engaged to be
married to a quiet, respectable young fellow with a shop of his own,
and three days before the wedding she ran off with a regiment of
marines to Chatham and married the colour-sergeant.  That's what I
shall end by doing.  I've been all the way to Sandgate with that lot
you saw me with, and I've kissed four of them--the nasty wretches.
I'm a nice sort of girl to be walking out with a respectable
milkman.'

"She was so deeply disgusted with herself that it seemed superfluous
for anybody else to be indignant with her; and Ethelbertha changed
her tone and tried to comfort her.

"'Oh, you'll get over all that nonsense, Amenda,' she said,
laughingly; 'you see yourself how silly it is.  You must tell Mr.
Bowles to keep you away from soldiers.'

"'Ah, I can't look at it in the same light way that you do, mum,'
returned Amenda, somewhat reprovingly; 'a girl that can't see a bit
of red marching down the street without wanting to rush out and
follow it ain't fit to be anybody's wife.  Why, I should be leaving
the shop with nobody in it about twice a week, and he'd have to go
the round of all the barracks in London, looking for me.  I shall
save up and get myself into a lunatic asylum, that's what I shall
do.'

"Ethelbertha began to grow quite troubled.  'But surely this is
something altogether new, Amenda,' she said; 'you must have often
met soldiers when you've been out in London?'

"'Oh yes, one or two at a time, walking about anyhow, I can stand
that all right.  It's when there's a lot of them with a band that I
lose my head.'

"'You don't know what it's like, mum,' she added, noticing
Ethelbertha's puzzled expression; 'you've never had it.  I only hope
you never may.'

"We kept a careful watch over Amenda during the remainder of our
stay at Folkestone, and an anxious time we had of it.  Every day
some regiment or other would march through the town, and at the
first sound of its music Amenda would become restless and excited.
The Pied Piper's reed could not have stirred the Hamelin children
deeper than did those Sandgate bands the heart of our domestic.
Fortunately, they generally passed early in the morning when we were
indoors, but one day, returning home to lunch, we heard distant
strains dying away upon the Hythe Road.  We hurried in.  Ethelbertha
ran down into the kitchen; it was empty!--up into Amenda's bedroom;
it was vacant!  We called.  There was no answer.

"'That miserable girl has gone off again,' said Ethelbertha.  'What
a terrible misfortune it is for her.  It's quite a disease.'

"Ethelbertha wanted me to go to Sandgate camp and inquire for her.
I was sorry for the girl myself, but the picture of a young and
innocent-looking man wandering about a complicated camp, inquiring
for a lost domestic, presenting itself to my mind, I said that I'd
rather not.

Ethelbertha thought me heartless, and said that if I would not go
she would go herself.  I replied that I thought one female member of
my household was enough in that camp at a time, and requested her
not to.  Ethelbertha expressed her sense of my inhuman behaviour by
haughtily declining to eat any lunch, and I expressed my sense of
her unreasonableness by sweeping the whole meal into the grate,
after which Ethelbertha suddenly developed exuberant affection for
the cat (who didn't want anybody's love, but wanted to get under the
grate after the lunch), and I became supernaturally absorbed in the
day-before-yesterday's newspaper.

"In the afternoon, strolling out into the garden, I heard the faint
cry of a female in distress.  I listened attentively, and the cry
was repeated.  I thought it sounded like Amenda's voice, but where
it came from I could not conceive.  It drew nearer, however, as I
approached the bottom of the garden, and at last I located it in a
small wooden shed, used by the proprietor of the house as a dark-
room for developing photographs.

"The door was locked.  'Is that you, Amenda?' I cried through the
keyhole.

"'Yes, sir,' came back the muffled answer. 'Will you please let me
out? you'll find the key on the ground near the door.'

"I discovered it on the grass about a yard away, and released her.
'Who locked you in?' I asked.

"'I did, sir,' she replied; 'I locked myself in, and pushed the key
out under the door.  I had to do it, or I should have gone off with
those beastly soldiers.'

"'I hope I haven't inconvenienced you, sir,' she added, stepping
out; 'I left the lunch all laid.'"


Amenda's passion for soldiers was her one tribute to sentiment.
Towards all others of the male sex she maintained an attitude of
callous unsusceptibility, and her engagements with them (which were
numerous) were entered into or abandoned on grounds so sordid as to
seriously shock Ethelbertha.

When she came to us she was engaged to a pork butcher--with a
milkman in reserve.  For Amenda's sake we dealt with the man, but we
never liked him, and we liked his pork still less.  When, therefore,
Amenda announced to us that her engagement with him was "off," and
intimated that her feelings would in no way suffer by our going
elsewhere for our bacon, we secretly rejoiced.

"I am confident you have done right, Amenda," said Ethelbertha; "you
would never have been happy with that man."

"No, mum, I don't think I ever should," replied Amenda.  "I don't
see how any girl could as hadn't the digestion of an ostrich."

Ethelbertha looked puzzled.  "But what has digestion got to do with
it?" she asked.

"A pretty good deal, mum," answered Amenda, "when you're thinking of
marrying a man as can't make a sausage fit to eat."

"But, surely," exclaimed Ethelbertha, "you don't mean to say you're
breaking off the match because you don't like his sausages!"

"Well, I suppose that's what it comes to," agreed Amenda,
unconcernedly.

"What an awful idea!" sighed poor Ethelbertha, after a long pause.
"Do you think you ever really loved him?"

"Oh yes," said Amenda, "I loved him right enough, but it's no good
loving a man that wants you to live on sausages that keep you awake
all night."

"But does he want you to live on sausages?" persisted Ethelbertha.

"Oh, he doesn't say anything about it," explained Amenda; "but you
know what it is, mum, when you marry a pork butcher; you're expected
to eat what's left over.  That's the mistake my poor cousin Eliza
made.  She married a muffin man.  Of course, what he didn't sell
they had to finish up themselves.  Why, one winter, when he had a
run of bad luck, they lived for two months on nothing but muffins.
I never saw a girl so changed in all my life.  One has to think of
these things, you know."

But the most shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda
ever entered into, was one with a 'bus conductor.  We were living in
the north of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger,
who kept a shop in Lupus Street, Chelsea.  He could not come up to
her because of the shop, so once a week she used to go down to him.
One did not ride ten miles for a penny in those days, and she found
the fare from Holloway to Victoria and back a severe tax upon her
purse.  The same 'bus that took her down at six brought her back at
ten.  During the first journey the 'bus conductor stared at Amenda;
during the second he talked to her, during the third he gave her a
cocoanut, during the fourth he proposed to her, and was promptly
accepted.  After that, Amenda was enabled to visit her cheesemonger
without expense.

He was a quaint character himself, this 'bus conductor.  I often
rode with him to Fleet Street.  He knew me quite well (I suppose
Amenda must have pointed me out to him), and would always ask me
after her--aloud, before all the other passengers, which was trying-
-and give me messages to take back to her.  Where women were
concerned he had what is called "a way" with him, and from the
extent and variety of his female acquaintance, and the evident
tenderness with which the majority of them regarded him, I am
inclined to hope that Amenda's desertion of him (which happened
contemporaneously with her jilting of the cheesemonger) caused him
less prolonged suffering than might otherwise have been the case.

He was a man from whom I derived a good deal of amusement one way
and another.  Thinking of him brings back to my mind a somewhat odd
incident.

One afternoon, I jumped upon his 'bus in the Seven Sisters Road.  An
elderly Frenchman was the only other occupant of the vehicle.  "You
vil not forget me," the Frenchman was saying as I entered, "I desire
Sharing Cross."

"I won't forget yer," answered the conductor, "you shall 'ave yer
Sharing Cross.  Don't make a fuss about it."

"That's the third time 'ee's arst me not to forget 'im," he remarked
to me in a stentorian aside; "'ee don't giv' yer much chance of
doin' it, does 'ee?"

At the corner of the Holloway Road we drew up, and our conductor
began to shout after the manner of his species:  "Charing Cross--
Charing Cross--'ere yer are--Come along, lady--Charing Cross."

The little Frenchman jumped up, and prepared to exit; the conductor
pushed him back.

"Sit down and don't be silly," he said; "this ain't Charing Cross."

The Frenchman looked puzzled, but collapsed meekly.  We picked up a
few passengers, and proceeded on our way.  Half a mile up the
Liverpool Road a lady stood on the kerb regarding us as we passed
with that pathetic mingling of desire and distrust which is the
average woman's attitude towards conveyances of all kinds.  Our
conductor stopped.

"Where d'yer want to go to?" he asked her severely--"Strand--Charing
Cross?"

The Frenchman did not hear or did not understand the first part of
the speech, but he caught the words "Charing Cross," and bounced up
and out on to the step.  The conductor collared him as he was
getting off, and jerked him back savagely.

"Carn't yer keep still a minute," he cried indignantly; "blessed if
you don't want lookin' after like a bloomin' kid."

"I vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," answered the Frenchman,
humbly.

"You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," repeated the other
bitterly, as he led him back to his seat.  "I shall put yer down in
the middle of the road if I 'ave much more of yer.  You stop there
till I come and sling yer out.  I ain't likely to let yer go much
past yer Sharing Cross, I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o'
yer."

The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on.  At "The Angel" we,
of course, stopped.  "Charing Cross," shouted the conductor, and up
sprang the Frenchman.

"Oh, my Gawd," said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and
forcing him down into the corner seat, "wot am I to do?  Carn't
somebody sit on 'im?"

He held him firmly down until the 'bus started, and then released
him.  At the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the
poor little Frenchman became exasperated.

"He keep saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross," he exclaimed, turning
to the other passengers; "and it is NO Sharing Cross.  He is fool."

"Carn't yer understand," retorted the conductor, equally indignant;
"of course I say Sharing Cross--I mean Charing Cross, but that don't
mean that it IS Charing Cross.  That means--" and then perceiving
from the blank look on the Frenchman's face the utter impossibility
of ever making the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an
appealing gesture, and asked:

"Does any gentleman know the French for 'bloomin' idiot'?"

A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus again.

"Well," I asked him, "did you get your French friend to Charing
Cross all right?"

"No, sir," he replied, "you'll 'ardly believe it, but I 'ad a bit of
a row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put
'im clean out o' my 'ead.  Blessed if I didn't run 'im on to
Victoria."



CHAPTER XI



Said Brown one evening, "There is but one vice, and that is
selfishness."

Jephson was standing before the fire lighting his pipe.  He puffed
the tobacco into a glow, threw the match into the embers, and then
said:

"And the seed of all virtue also."

"Sit down and get on with your work," said MacShaughnassy from the
sofa where he lay at full length with his heels on a chair; "we're
discussing the novel.  Paradoxes not admitted during business
hours."

Jephson, however, was in an argumentative mood.

"Selfishness," he continued, "is merely another name for Will.
Every deed, good or bad, that we do is prompted by selfishness.  We
are charitable to secure ourselves a good place in the next world,
to make ourselves respected in this, to ease our own distress at the
knowledge of suffering.  One man is kind because it gives him
pleasure to be kind, just as another is cruel because cruelty
pleases him.  A great man does his duty because to him the sense of
duty done is a deeper delight than would be the case resulting from
avoidance of duty.  The religious man is religious because he finds
a joy in religion; the moral man moral because with his strong self-
respect, viciousness would mean wretchedness.  Self-sacrifice itself
is only a subtle selfishness:  we prefer the mental exaltation
gained thereby to the sensual gratification which is the alternative
reward.  Man cannot be anything else but selfish.  Selfishness is
the law of all life.  Each thing, from the farthest fixed star to
the smallest insect crawling on the earth, fighting for itself
according to its strength; and brooding over all, the Eternal,
working for HIMSELF:  that is the universe."

"Have some whisky," said MacShaughnassy; "and don't be so
complicatedly metaphysical.  You make my head ache."

"If all action, good and bad, spring from selfishness," replied
Brown, "then there must be good selfishness and bad selfishness:
and your bad selfishness is my plain selfishness, without any
adjective, so we are back where we started.  I say selfishness--bad
selfishness--is the root of all evil, and there you are bound to
agree with me."

"Not always," persisted Jephson; "I've known selfishness--
selfishness according to the ordinarily accepted meaning of the
term--to be productive of good actions.  I can give you an instance,
if you like."

"Has it got a moral?" asked MacShaughnassy, drowsily,

Jephson mused a moment.  "Yes," he said at length; "a very practical
moral--and one very useful to young men."

"That's the sort of story we want," said the MacShaughnassy, raising
himself into a sitting position.  "You listen to this, Brown."

Jephson seated himself upon a chair, in his favourite attitude, with
his elbows resting upon the back, and smoked for a while in silence.

"There are three people in this story," he began; "the wife, the
wife's husband, and the other man.  In most dramas of this type, it
is the wife who is the chief character.  In this case, the
interesting person is the other man.

"The wife--I met her once:  she was the most beautiful woman I have
ever seen, and the most wicked-looking; which is saying a good deal
for both statements.  I remember, during a walking tour one year,
coming across a lovely little cottage.  It was the sweetest place
imaginable.  I need not describe it.  It was the cottage one sees in
pictures, and reads of in sentimental poetry.  I was leaning over
the neatly-cropped hedge, drinking in its beauty, when at one of the
tiny casements I saw, looking out at me, a face.  It stayed there
only a moment, but in that moment the cottage had become ugly, and I
hurried away with a shudder.

"That woman's face reminded me of the incident.  It was an angel's
face, until the woman herself looked out of it:  then you were
struck by the strange incongruity between tenement and tenant.

"That at one time she had loved her husband, I have little doubt.
Vicious women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of
them.  She had probably married him, borne towards him by one of
those waves of passion upon which the souls of animal natures are
continually rising and falling.  On possession, however, had quickly
followed satiety, and from satiety had grown the desire for a new
sensation.

"They were living at Cairo at the period; her husband held an
important official position there, and by virtue of this, and of her
own beauty and tact, her house soon became the centre of the Anglo-
Saxon society ever drifting in and out of the city.  The women
disliked her, and copied her.  The men spoke slightingly of her to
their wives, lightly of her to each other, and made idiots of
themselves when they were alone with her.  She laughed at them to
their faces, and mimicked them behind their backs.  Their friends
said it was clever.

"One year there arrived a young English engineer, who had come out
to superintend some canal works.  He brought with him satisfactory
letters of recommendation, and was at once received by the European
residents as a welcome addition to their social circle.  He was not
particularly good-looking, he was not remarkably charming, but he
possessed the one thing that few women can resist in a man, and that
is strength.  The woman looked at the man, and the man looked back
at the woman; and the drama began.

"Scandal flies swiftly through small communities.  Before a month,
their relationship was the chief topic of conversation throughout
the quarter.  In less than two, it reached the ears of the woman's
husband.

"He was either an exceptionally mean or an exceptionally noble
character, according to how one views the matter.  He worshipped his
wife--as men with big hearts and weak brains often do worship such
women--with dog-like devotion.  His only dread was lest the scandal
should reach proportions that would compel him to take notice of it,
and thus bring shame and suffering upon the woman to whom he would
have given his life.  That a man who saw her should love her seemed
natural to him; that she should have grown tired of himself, a thing
not to be wondered at.  He was grateful to her for having once loved
him, for a little while.

"As for 'the other man,' he proved somewhat of an enigma to the
gossips.  He attempted no secrecy; if anything, he rather paraded
his subjugation--or his conquest, it was difficult to decide which
term to apply.  He rode and drove with her; visited her in public
and in private (in such privacy as can be hoped for in a house
filled with chattering servants, and watched by spying eyes); loaded
her with expensive presents, which she wore openly, and papered his
smoking-den with her photographs.  Yet he never allowed himself to
appear in the least degree ridiculous; never allowed her to come
between him and his work.  A letter from her, he would lay aside
unopened until he had finished what he evidently regarded as more
important business.  When boudoir and engine-shed became rivals, it
was the boudoir that had to wait.

"The woman chafed under his self-control, which stung her like a
lash, but clung to him the more abjectly.

"'Tell me you love me!' she would cry fiercely, stretching her white
arms towards him.

"'I have told you so,' he would reply calmly, without moving.

"'I want to hear you tell it me again,' she would plead with a voice
that trembled on a sob.  'Come close to me and tell it me again,
again, again!'

"Then, as she lay with half-closed eyes, he would pour forth a flood
of passionate words sufficient to satisfy even her thirsty ears, and
afterwards, as the gates clanged behind him, would take up an
engineering problem at the exact point at which half an hour before,
on her entrance into the room, he had temporarily dismissed it.

"One day, a privileged friend put bluntly to him this question:
'Are you playing for love or vanity?'

"To which the man, after long pondering, gave this reply:  ''Pon my
soul, Jack, I couldn't tell you.'

"Now, when a man is in love with a woman who cannot make up her mind
whether she loves him or not, we call the complication comedy; where
it is the woman who is in earnest the result is generally tragedy.

"They continued to meet and to make love.  They talked--as people in
their position are prone to talk--of the beautiful life they would
lead if it only were not for the thing that was; of the earthly
paradise--or, maybe, 'earthy' would be the more suitable adjective--
they would each create for the other, if only they had the right
which they hadn't.

"In this work of imagination the man trusted chiefly to his literary
faculties, which were considerable; the woman to her desires.  Thus,
his scenes possessed a grace and finish which hers lacked, but her
pictures were the more vivid.  Indeed, so realistic did she paint
them, that to herself they seemed realities, waiting for her.  Then
she would rise to go towards them only to strike herself against the
thought of the thing that stood between her and them.  At first she
only hated the thing, but after a while there came an ugly look of
hope into her eyes.

"The time drew near for the man to return to England.  The canal was
completed, and a day appointed for the letting in of the water.  The
man determined to make the event the occasion of a social gathering.
He invited a large number of guests, among whom were the woman and
her husband, to assist at the function.  Afterwards the party were
to picnic at a pleasant wooded spot some three-quarters of a mile
from the first lock.

"The ceremony of flooding was to be performed by the woman, her
husband's position entitling her to this distinction.  Between the
river and the head of the cutting had been left a strong bank of
earth, pierced some distance down by a hole, which hole was kept
closed by means of a closely-fitting steel plate.  The woman drew
the lever releasing this plate, and the water rushed through and
began to press against the lock gates.  When it had attained a
certain depth, the sluices were raised, and the water poured down
into the deep basin of the lock.

"It was an exceptionally deep lock.  The party gathered round and
watched the water slowly rising.  The woman looked down, and
shuddered; the man was standing by her side.

"'How deep it is,' she said.

"'Yes,' he replied, 'it holds thirty feet of water, when full.'

"The water crept up inch by inch.

"'Why don't you open the gates, and let it in quickly?' she asked.

"'It would not do for it to come in too quickly,' he explained; 'we
shall half fill this lock, and then open the sluices at the other
end, and so let the water pass through.'

"The woman looked at the smooth stone walls and at the iron-plated
gates.

"'I wonder what a man would do,' she said, 'if he fell in, and there
was no one near to help him?'

"The man laughed.  'I think he would stop there,' he answered.
'Come, the others are waiting for us.'

"He lingered a moment to give some final instructions to the
workmen.  'You can follow on when you've made all right,' he said,
'and get something to eat.  There's no need for more than one to
stop.'  Then they joined the rest of the party, and sauntered on,
laughing and talking, to the picnic ground.

After lunch the party broke up, as is the custom of picnic parties,
and wandered away in groups and pairs.  The man, whose duty as host
had hitherto occupied all his attention, looked for the woman, but
she was gone.

"A friend strolled by, the same that had put the question to him
about love and vanity.

"'Have you quarrelled?' asked the friend.

"'No,' replied the man.

"'I fancied you had,' said the other.  'I met her just now walking
with her husband, of all men in the world, and making herself quite
agreeable to him.'

"The friend strolled on, and the man sat down on a fallen tree, and
lighted a cigar.  He smoked and thought, and the cigar burnt out,
but he still sat thinking.

"After a while he heard a faint rustling of the branches behind him,
and peering between the interlacing leaves that hid him, saw the
crouching figure of the woman creeping through the wood.

"His lips were parted to call her name, when she turned her
listening head in his direction, and his eyes fell full upon her
face.  Something about it, he could not have told what, struck him
dumb, and the woman crept on.

"Gradually the nebulous thoughts floating through his brain began to
solidify into a tangible idea, and the man unconsciously started
forward.  After walking a few steps he broke into a run, for the
idea had grown clearer.  It continued to grow still clearer and
clearer, and the man ran faster and faster, until at last he found
himself racing madly towards the lock.  As he approached it he
looked round for the watchman who ought to have been there, but the
man was gone from his post.  He shouted, but if any answer was
returned, it was drowned by the roar of the rushing water.

"He reached the edge and looked down.  Fifteen feet below him was
the reality of the dim vision that had come to him a mile back in
the woods:  the woman's husband swimming round and round like a rat
in a pail.

"The river was flowing in and out of the lock at the same rate, so
that the level of the water remained constant.  The first thing the
man did was to close the lower sluices and then open those in the
upper gate to their fullest extent.  The water began to rise.

"'Can you hold out?' he cried.

"The drowning man turned to him a face already contorted by the
agony of exhaustion, and answered with a feeble 'No.'

"He looked around for something to throw to the man.  A plank had
lain there in the morning, he remembered stumbling over it, and
complaining of its having been left there; he cursed himself now for
his care.

"A hut used by the navvies to keep their tools in stood about two
hundred yards away; perhaps it had been taken there, perhaps there
he might even find a rope.

"'Just one minute, old fellow!' he shouted down, 'and I'll be back.'

"But the other did not hear him.  The feeble struggles ceased.  The
face fell back upon the water, the eyes half closed as if with weary
indifference.  There was no time for him to do more than kick off
his riding boots and jump in and clutch the unconscious figure as it
sank.

"Down there, in that walled-in trap, he fought a long fight with
Death for the life that stood between him and the woman.  He was not
an expert swimmer, his clothes hampered him, he was already blown
with his long race, the burden in his arms dragged him down, the
water rose slowly enough to make his torture fit for Dante's hell.

"At first he could not understand why this was so, but in glancing
down he saw to his horror that he had not properly closed the lower
sluices; in each some eight or ten inches remained open, so that the
stream was passing out nearly half as fast as it came in.  It would
be another five-and-twenty minutes before the water would be high
enough for him to grasp the top.

"He noted where the line of wet had reached to, on the smooth stone
wall, then looked again after what he thought must be a lapse of ten
minutes, and found it had risen half an inch, if that.  Once or
twice he shouted for help, but the effort taxed severely his already
failing breath, and his voice only came back to him in a hundred
echoes from his prison walls.

"Inch by inch the line of wet crept up, but the spending of his
strength went on more swiftly.  It seemed to him as if his inside
were being gripped and torn slowly out:  his whole body cried out to
him to let it sink and lie in rest at the bottom.

"At length his unconscious burden opened its eyes and stared at him
stupidly, then closed them again with a sigh; a minute later opened
them once more, and looked long and hard at him.

"'Let me go,' he said, 'we shall both drown.  You can manage by
yourself.'

"He made a feeble effort to release himself, but the other held him.

"'Keep still, you fool!' he hissed; 'you're going to get out of this
with me, or I'm going down with you.'

"So the grim struggle went on in silence, till the man, looking up,
saw the stone coping just a little way above his head, made one mad
leap and caught it with his finger-tips, held on an instant, then
fell back with a 'plump' and sank; came up and made another dash,
and, helped by the impetus of his rise, caught the coping firmly
this time with the whole of his fingers, hung on till his eyes saw
the stunted grass, till they were both able to scramble out upon the
bank and lie there, their breasts pressed close against the ground,
their hands clutching the earth, while the overflowing water swirled
softly round them.

"After a while, they raised themselves and looked at one another.

"'Tiring work,' said the other man, with a nod towards the lock.

"'Yes,' answered the husband, 'beastly awkward not being a good
swimmer.  How did you know I had fallen in?  You met my wife, I
suppose?'

"'Yes,' said the other man.

"The husband sat staring at a point in the horizon for some minutes.
'Do you know what I was wondering this morning?' said he.

"'No,' said the other man.

"'Whether I should kill you or not.'

"'They told me,' he continued, after a pause, 'a lot of silly gossip
which I was cad enough to believe.  I know now it wasn't true,
because--well, if it had been, you would not have done what you have
done.'

"He rose and came across.  'I beg your pardon,' he said, holding out
his hand.

"'I beg yours,' said the other man, rising and taking it; 'do you
mind giving me a hand with the sluices?'

"They set to work to put the lock right.

"'How did you manage to fall in?' asked the other man, who was
raising one of the lower sluices, without looking round.

"The husband hesitated, as if he found the explanation somewhat
difficult.  'Oh,' he answered carelessly, 'the wife and I were
chaffing, and she said she'd often seen you jump it, and'--he
laughed a rather forced laugh--'she promised me a--a kiss if I
cleared it.  It was a foolish thing to do.'

"'Yes, it was rather,' said the other man.

"A few days afterwards the man and woman met at a reception.  He
found her in a leafy corner of the garden talking to some friends.
She advanced to meet him, holding out her hand.  'What can I say
more than thank you?' she murmured in a low voice.

"The others moved away, leaving them alone.  'They tell me you
risked your life to save his?' she said.

"'Yes,' he answered.

"She raised her eyes to his, then struck him across the face with
her ungloved hand.

"'You damned fool!' she whispered.

"He seized her by her white arms, and forced her back behind the
orange trees.  'Do you know why?' he said, speaking slowly and
distinctly; 'because I feared that, with him dead, you would want me
to marry you, and that, talked about as we have been, I might find
it awkward to avoid doing so; because I feared that, without him to
stand between us, you might prove an annoyance to me--perhaps come
between me and the woman I love, the woman I am going back to.  Now
do you understand?'

"'Yes,' whispered the woman, and he left her.

"But there are only two people," concluded Jephson, "who do not
regard his saving of the husband's life as a highly noble and
unselfish action, and they are the man himself and the woman."

We thanked Jephson for his story, and promised to profit by the
moral, when discovered.  Meanwhile, MacShaughnassy said that he knew
a story dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close
attachment of a woman to a strange man, which really had a moral,
which moral was:  don't have anything to do with inventions.

Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a
man plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral.  We agreed to
hear the particulars, and judge for ourselves.

"This story," commenced MacShaughnassy, "comes from Furtwangen, a
small town in the Black Forest.  There lived there a very wonderful
old fellow named Nicholaus Geibel.  His business was the making of
mechanical toys, at which work he had acquired an almost European
reputation.  He made rabbits that would emerge from the heart of a
cabbage, flap their ears, smooth their whiskers, and disappear
again; cats that would wash their faces, and mew so naturally that
dogs would mistake them for real cats, and fly at them; dolls, with
phonographs concealed within them, that would raise their hats and
say, 'Good morning; how do you do?' and some that would even sing a
song.

"But he was something more than a mere mechanic; he was an artist.
His work was with him a hobby, almost a passion.  His shop was
filled with all manner of strange things that never would, or could,
be sold--things he had made for the pure love of making them.  He
had contrived a mechanical donkey that would trot for two hours by
means of stored electricity, and trot, too, much faster than the
live article, and with less need for exertion on the part of the
driver; a bird that would shoot up into the air, fly round and round
in a circle, and drop to earth at the exact spot from where it
started; a skeleton that, supported by an upright iron bar, would
dance a hornpipe; a life-size lady doll that could play the fiddle;
and a gentleman with a hollow inside who could smoke a pipe and
drink more lager beer than any three average German students put
together, which is saying much.

"Indeed, it was the belief of the town that old Geibel could make a
man capable of doing everything that a respectable man need want to
do.  One day he made a man who did too much, and it came about in
this way.

"Young Doctor Follen had a baby, and the baby had a birthday.  Its
first birthday put Doctor Follen's household into somewhat of a
flurry, but on the occasion of its second birthday, Mrs. Doctor
Follen gave a ball in honour of the event.  Old Geibel and his
daughter Olga were among the guests.

"During the afternoon of the next day, some three or four of Olga's
bosom friends, who had also been present at the ball, dropped in to
have a chat about it.  They naturally fell to discussing the men,
and to criticising their dancing.  Old Geibel was in the room, but
he appeared to be absorbed in his newspaper, and the girls took no
notice of him.

"'There seem to be fewer men who can dance, at every ball you go
to,' said one of the girls.

"'Yes, and don't the ones who can, give themselves airs,' said
another; 'they make quite a favour of asking you.'

"'And how stupidly they talk,' added a third.  'They always say
exactly the same things:  "How charming you are looking to-night."
"Do you often go to Vienna?  Oh, you should, it's delightful."
"What a charming dress you have on."  "What a warm day it has been."
"Do you like Wagner?"  I do wish they'd think of something new.'

"'Oh, I never mind how they talk,' said a fourth.  'If a man dances
well he may be a fool for all I care.'

"'He generally is,' slipped in a thin girl, rather spitefully.

"'I go to a ball to dance,' continued the previous speaker, not
noticing the interruption.  'All I ask of a partner is that he shall
hold me firmly, take me round steadily, and not get tired before I
do.'

"'A clockwork figure would be the thing for you,' said the girl who
had interrupted.

"'Bravo!' cried one of the others, clapping her hands, 'what a
capital idea!'

"'What's a capital idea?' they asked.

"'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by
electricity and never run down.'

"The girls took up the idea with enthusiasm.

"'Oh, what a lovely partner he would make,' said one; 'he would
never kick you, or tread on your toes.'

"'Or tear your dress,' said another.

"'Or get out of step.'

"'Or get giddy and lean on you.'

"'And he would never want to mop his face with his handkerchief.  I
do hate to see a man do that after every dance.'

"'And wouldn't want to spend the whole evening in the supper-room.'

"'Why, with a phonograph inside him to grind out all the stock
remarks, you would not be able to tell him from a real man,' said
the girl who had first suggested the idea.

"'Oh yes, you would,' said the thin girl, 'he would be so much
nicer.'

"Old Geibel had laid down his paper, and was listening with both his
ears.  On one of the girls glancing in his direction, however, he
hurriedly hid himself again behind it.

"After the girls were gone, he went into his workshop, where Olga
heard him walking up and down, and every now and then chuckling to
himself; and that night he talked to her a good deal about dancing
and dancing men--asked what they usually said and did--what dances
were most popular--what steps were gone through, with many other
questions bearing on the subject.

"Then for a couple of weeks he kept much to his factory, and was
very thoughtful and busy, though prone at unexpected moments to
break into a quiet low laugh, as if enjoying a joke that nobody else
knew of.

"A month later another ball took place in Furtwangen.  On this
occasion it was given by old Wenzel, the wealthy timber merchant, to
celebrate his niece's betrothal, and Geibel and his daughter were
again among the invited.

"When the hour arrived to set out, Olga sought her father.  Not
finding him in the house, she tapped at the door of his workshop.
He appeared in his shirt-sleeves, looking hot, but radiant.

"'Don't wait for me,' he said, 'you go on, I'll follow you.  I've
got something to finish.'

"As she turned to obey he called after her, 'Tell them I'm going to
bring a young man with me--such a nice young man, and an excellent
dancer.  All the girls will like him.'  Then he laughed and closed
the door.

"Her father generally kept his doings secret from everybody, but she
had a pretty shrewd suspicion of what he had been planning, and so,
to a certain extent, was able to prepare the guests for what was
coming.  Anticipation ran high, and the arrival of the famous
mechanist was eagerly awaited.

"At length the sound of wheels was heard outside, followed by a
great commotion in the passage, and old Wenzel himself, his jolly
face red with excitement and suppressed laughter, burst into the
room and announced in stentorian tones:

"'Herr Geibel--and a friend.'

"Herr Geibel and his 'friend' entered, greeted with shouts of
laughter and applause, and advanced to the centre of the room.

"'Allow me, ladies and gentlemen,' said Herr Geibel, 'to introduce
you to my friend, Lieutenant Fritz.  Fritz, my dear fellow, bow to
the ladies and gentlemen.'

"Geibel placed his hand encouragingly on Fritz's shoulder, and the
lieutenant bowed low, accompanying the action with a harsh clicking
noise in his throat, unpleasantly suggestive of a death rattle.  But
that was only a detail.

"'He walks a little stiffly' (old Geibel took his arm and walked him
forward a few steps.  He certainly did walk stiffly), 'but then,
walking is not his forte.  He is essentially a dancing man.  I have
only been able to teach him the waltz as yet, but at that he is
faultless.  Come, which of you ladies may I introduce him to, as a
partner?  He keeps perfect time; he never gets tired; he won't kick
you or tread on your dress; he will hold you as firmly as you like,
and go as quickly or as slowly as you please; he never gets giddy;
and he is full of conversation.  Come, speak up for yourself, my
boy.'

"The old gentleman twisted one of the buttons of his coat, and
immediately Fritz opened his mouth, and in thin tones that appeared
to proceed from the back of his head, remarked suddenly, 'May I have
the pleasure?' and then shut his mouth again with a snap.

"That Lieutenant Fritz had made a strong impression on the company
was undoubted, yet none of the girls seemed inclined to dance with
him.  They looked askance at his waxen face, with its staring eyes
and fixed smile, and shuddered.  At last old Geibel came to the girl
who had conceived the idea.

"'It is your own suggestion, carried out to the letter,' said
Geibel, 'an electric dancer.  You owe it to the gentleman to give
him a trial.'

"She was a bright saucy little girl, fond of a frolic.  Her host
added his entreaties, and she consented.

"Herr Geibel fixed the figure to her.  Its right arm was screwed
round her waist, and held her firmly; its delicately jointed left
hand was made to fasten itself upon her right.  The old toymaker
showed her how to regulate its speed, and how to stop it, and
release herself.

"'It will take you round in a complete circle,' he explained; 'be
careful that no one knocks against you, and alters its course.'

"The music struck up.  Old Geibel put the current in motion, and
Annette and her strange partner began to dance.

"For a while every one stood watching them.  The figure performed
its purpose admirably.  Keeping perfect time and step, and holding
its little partner tightly clasped in an unyielding embrace, it
revolved steadily, pouring forth at the same time a constant flow of
squeaky conversation, broken by brief intervals of grinding silence.

"'How charming you are looking to-night,' it remarked in its thin,
far-away voice.  'What a lovely day it has been.  Do you like
dancing?  How well our steps agree.  You will give me another, won't
you?  Oh, don't be so cruel.  What a charming gown you have on.
Isn't waltzing delightful?  I could go on dancing for ever--with
you.  Have you had supper?'

"As she grew more familiar with the uncanny creature, the girl's
nervousness wore off, and she entered into the fun of the thing

"'Oh, he's just lovely,' she cried, laughing, 'I could go on dancing
with him all my life.'

"Couple after couple now joined them, and soon all the dancers in
the room were whirling round behind them.  Nicholaus Geibel stood
looking on, beaming with childish delight at his success,

"Old Wenzel approached him, and whispered something in his ear.
Geibel laughed and nodded, and the two worked their way quietly
towards the door.

"'This is the young people's house to-night,' said Wenzel, as soon
as they were outside; 'you and I will have a quiet pipe and a glass
of hock, over in the counting-house.'

"Meanwhile the dancing grew more fast and furious.  Little Annette
loosened the screw regulating her partner's rate of progress, and
the figure flew round with her swifter and swifter.  Couple after
couple dropped out exhausted, but they only went the faster, till at
length they were the only pair left dancing.

"Madder and madder became the waltz.  The music lagged behind:  the
musicians, unable to keep pace, ceased, and sat staring.  The
younger guests applauded, but the older faces began to grow anxious.

"'Hadn't you better stop, dear,' said one of the women, 'You'll make
yourself so tired.'

"But Annette did not answer.

"'I believe she's fainted,' cried out a girl, who had caught sight
of her face as it was swept by.

"One of the men sprang forward and clutched at the figure, but its
impetus threw him down on to the floor, where its steel-cased feet
laid bare his cheek.  The thing evidently did not intend to part
with its prize easily.

"Had any one retained a cool head, the figure, one cannot help
thinking, might easily have been stopped.  Two or three men, acting
in concert, might have lifted it bodily off the floor, or have
jammed it into a corner.  But few human heads are capable of
remaining cool under excitement.  Those who are not present think
how stupid must have been those who were; those who are, reflect
afterwards how simple it would have been to do this, that, or the
other, if only they had thought of it at the time.

"The women grew hysterical.  The men shouted contradictory
directions to one another.  Two of them made a bungling rush at the
figure, which had the result of forcing it out of its orbit in the
centre of the room, and sending it crashing against the walls and
furniture.  A stream of blood showed itself down the girl's white
frock, and followed her along the floor.  The affair was becoming
horrible.  The women rushed screaming from the room.  The men
followed them.

"One sensible suggestion was made:  'Find Geibel--fetch Geibel.'

"No one had noticed him leave the room, no one knew where he was.  A
party went in search of him.  The others, too unnerved to go back
into the ballroom, crowded outside the door and listened.  They
could hear the steady whir of the wheels upon the polished floor, as
the thing spun round and round; the dull thud as every now and again
it dashed itself and its burden against some opposing object and
ricocheted off in a new direction.

"And everlastingly it talked in that thin ghostly voice, repeating
over and over the same formula:  'How charming you are looking to-
night.  What a lovely day it has been.  Oh, don't be so cruel.  I
could go on dancing for ever--with you.  Have you had supper?'

"Of course they sought for Geibel everywhere but where he was.  They
looked in every room in the house, then they rushed off in a body to
his own place, and spent precious minutes in waking up his deaf old
housekeeper.  At last it occurred to one of the party that Wenzel
was missing also, and then the idea of the counting-house across the
yard presented itself to them, and there they found him.

"He rose up, very pale, and followed them; and he and old Wenzel
forced their way through the crowd of guests gathered outside, and
entered the room, and locked the door behind them.

"From within there came the muffled sound of low voices and quick
steps, followed by a confused scuffling noise, then silence, then
the low voices again.

"After a time the door opened, and those near it pressed forward to
enter, but old Wenzel's broad shoulders barred the way.

"'I want you--and you, Bekler,' he said, addressing a couple of the
elder men.  His voice was calm, but his face was deadly white.  'The
rest of you, please go--get the women away as quickly as you can.'

"From that day old Nicholaus Geibel confined himself to the making
of mechanical rabbits and cats that mewed and washed their faces."

We agreed that the moral of MacShaughnassy's story was a good one.



CHAPTER XII



How much more of our--fortunately not very valuable--time we devoted
to this wonderful novel of ours, I cannot exactly say.  Turning the
dogs'-eared leaves of the dilapidated diary that lies before me, I
find the record of our later gatherings confused and incomplete.
For weeks there does not appear a single word.  Then comes an
alarmingly business-like minute of a meeting at which there were--
"Present:  Jephson, MacShaughnassy, Brown, and Self"; and at which
the "Proceedings commenced at 8.30."  At what time the "proceedings"
terminated, and what business was done, the chronicle, however,
sayeth not; though, faintly pencilled in the margin of the page, I
trace these hieroglyphics:  "3.14.9-2.6.7," bringing out a result of
"1.8.2."  Evidently an unremunerative night.

On September 13th we seem to have become suddenly imbued with energy
to a quite remarkable degree, for I read that we "Resolved to start
the first chapter at once"--"at once" being underlined.  After this
spurt, we rest until October 4th, when we "Discussed whether it
should be a novel of plot or of character," without--so far as the
diary affords indication--arriving at any definite decision.  I
observe that on the same day "Mac told a story about a man who
accidentally bought a camel at a sale."  Details of the story are,
however, wanting, which, perhaps, is fortunate for the reader.

On the 16th, we were still debating the character of our hero; and I
see that I suggested "a man of the Charley Buswell type."

Poor Charley, I wonder what could have made me think of him in
connection with heroes; his lovableness, I suppose--certainly not
his heroic qualities.  I can recall his boyish face now (it was
always a boyish face), the tears streaming down it as he sat in the
schoolyard beside a bucket, in which he was drowning three white
mice and a tame rat.  I sat down opposite and cried too, while
helping him to hold a saucepan lid over the poor little creatures,
and thus there sprang up a friendship between us, which grew.

Over the grave of these murdered rodents, he took a solemn oath
never to break school rules again, by keeping either white mice or
tame rats, but to devote the whole of his energies for the future to
pleasing his masters, and affording his parents some satisfaction
for the money being spent upon his education.

Seven weeks later, the pervadence throughout the dormitory of an
atmospheric effect more curious than pleasing led to the discovery
that he had converted his box into a rabbit hutch.  Confronted with
eleven kicking witnesses, and reminded of his former promises, he
explained that rabbits were not mice, and seemed to consider that a
new and vexatious regulation had been sprung upon him.  The rabbits
were confiscated.  What was their ultimate fate, we never knew with
certainty, but three days later we were given rabbit-pie for dinner.
To comfort him I endeavoured to assure him that these could not be
his rabbits.  He, however, convinced that they were, cried steadily
into his plate all the time that he was eating them, and afterwards,
in the playground, had a stand-up fight with a fourth form boy who
had requested a second helping.

That evening he performed another solemn oath-taking, and for the
next month was the model boy of the school.  He read tracts, sent
his spare pocket-money to assist in annoying the heathen, and
subscribed to The Young Christian and The Weekly Rambler, an
Evangelical Miscellany (whatever that may mean).  An undiluted
course of this pernicious literature naturally created in him a
desire towards the opposite extreme.  He suddenly dropped The Young
Christian and The Weekly Rambler, and purchased penny dreadfuls; and
taking no further interest in the welfare of the heathen, saved up
and bought a second-hand revolver and a hundred cartridges.  His
ambition, he confided to me, was to become "a dead shot," and the
marvel of it is that he did not succeed.

Of course, there followed the usual discovery and consequent
trouble, the usual repentance and reformation, the usual
determination to start a new life.

Poor fellow, he lived "starting a new life."  Every New Year's Day
he would start a new life--on his birthday--on other people's
birthdays.  I fancy that, later on, when he came to know their
importance, he extended the principle to quarter days.  "Tidying up,
and starting afresh," he always called it.

I think as a young man he was better than most of us.  But he lacked
that great gift which is the distinguishing feature of the English-
speaking race all the world over, the gift of hypocrisy.  He seemed
incapable of doing the slightest thing without getting found out; a
grave misfortune for a man to suffer from, this.

Dear simple-hearted fellow, it never occurred to him that he was as
other men--with, perhaps, a dash of straightforwardness added; he
regarded himself as a monster of depravity.  One evening I found him
in his chambers engaged upon his Sisyphean labour of "tidying up." A
heap of letters, photographs, and bills lay before him.  He was
tearing them up and throwing them into the fire.

I came towards him, but he stopped me.  "Don't come near me," he
cried, "don't touch me.  I'm not fit to shake hands with a decent
man."

It was the sort of speech to make one feel hot and uncomfortable.  I
did not know what to answer, and murmured something about his being
no worse than the average.

"Don't talk like that," he answered excitedly; "you say that to
comfort me, I know; but I don't like to hear it.  If I thought other
men were like me I should be ashamed of being a man.  I've been a
blackguard, old fellow, but, please God, it's not too late.  To-
morrow morning I begin a new life."

He finished his work of destruction, and then rang the bell, and
sent his man downstairs for a bottle of champagne.

"My last drink," he said, as we clicked glasses.  "Here's to the old
life out, and the new life in."

He took a sip and flung the glass with the remainder into the fire.
He was always a little theatrical, especially when most in earnest.

For a long while after that I saw nothing of him.  Then, one
evening, sitting down to supper at a restaurant, I noticed him
opposite to me in company that could hardly be called doubtful.

He flushed and came over to me.  "I've been an old woman for nearly
six months," he said, with a laugh.  "I find I can't stand it any
longer."

"After all," he continued, "what is life for but to live?  It's only
hypocritical to try and be a thing we are not.  And do you know"--he
leant across the table, speaking earnestly--"honestly and seriously,
I'm a better man--I feel it and know it--when I am my natural self
than when I am trying to be an impossible saint."

That was the mistake he made; he always ran to extremes.  He thought
that an oath, if it were only big enough, would frighten away Human
Nature, instead of serving only as a challenge to it.  Accordingly,
each reformation was more intemperate than the last, to be duly
followed by a greater swing of the pendulum in the opposite
direction.

Being now in a thoroughly reckless mood, he went the pace rather
hotly.  Then, one evening, without any previous warning, I had a
note from him.  "Come round and see me on Thursday.  It is my
wedding eve."

I went.  He was once more "tidying up."  All his drawers were open,
and on the table were piled packs of cards, betting books, and much
written paper, all, as before, in course of demolition.

I smiled:  I could not help it, and, no way abashed, he laughed his
usual hearty, honest laugh.

"I know," he exclaimed gaily, "but this is not the same as the
others."

Then, laying his hand on my shoulder, and speaking with the sudden
seriousness that comes so readily to shallow natures, he said, "God
has heard my prayer, old friend.  He knows I am weak.  He has sent
down an angel out of Heaven to help me."

He took her portrait from the mantelpiece and handed it me.  It
seemed to me the face of a hard, narrow woman, but, of course, he
raved about her.

As he talked, there fluttered to the ground from the heap before him
an old restaurant bill, and, stooping, he picked it up and held it
in his hand, musing.

"Have you ever noticed how the scent of the champagne and the
candles seems to cling to these things?" he said lightly, sniffing
carelessly at it.  "I wonder what's become of her?"

"I think I wouldn't think about her at all tonight," I answered.

He loosened his hand, letting the paper fall into the fire.

"My God!" he cried vehemently, "when I think of all the wrong I have
done--the irreparable, ever-widening ruin I have perhaps brought
into the world--O God! spare me a long life that I may make amends.
Every hour, every minute of it shall be devoted to your service."

As he stood there, with his eager boyish eyes upraised, a light
seemed to fall upon his face and illumine it.  I had pushed the
photograph back to him, and it lay upon the table before him.  He
knelt and pressed his lips to it.

"With your help, my darling, and His," he murmured.

The next morning he was married.  She was a well-meaning girl,
though her piety, as is the case with most people, was of the
negative order; and her antipathy to things evil much stronger than
her sympathy with things good.  For a longer time than I had
expected she kept him straight--perhaps a little too straight.  But
at last there came the inevitable relapse.

I called upon him, in answer to an excited message, and found him in
the depths of despair.  It was the old story, human weakness,
combined with lamentable lack of the most ordinary precautions
against being found out.  He gave me details, interspersed with
exuberant denunciations of himself, and I undertook the delicate
task of peace-maker.

It was a weary work, but eventually she consented to forgive him.
His joy, when I told him, was boundless.

"How good women are," he said, while the tears came into his eyes.
"But she shall not repent it.  Please God, from this day forth,
I'll--"

He stopped, and for the first time in his life the doubt of himself
crossed his mind.  As I sat watching him, the joy died out of his
face, and the first hint of age passed over it.

"I seem to have been 'tidying up and starting afresh' all my life,"
he said wearily; "I'm beginning to see where the untidiness lies,
and the only way to get rid of it."

I did not understand the meaning of his words at the time, but
learnt it later on.

He strove, according to his strength, and fell.  But by a miracle
his transgression was not discovered.  The facts came to light long
afterwards, but at the time there were only two who knew.

It was his last failure.  Late one evening I received a hurriedly-
scrawled note from his wife, begging me to come round.

"A terrible thing has happened," it ran; "Charley went up to his
study after dinner, saying he had some 'tidying up,' as he calls it,
to do, and did not wish to be disturbed.  In clearing out his desk
he must have handled carelessly the revolver that he always keeps
there, not remembering, I suppose, that it was loaded.  We heard a
report, and on rushing into the room found him lying dead on the
floor.  The bullet had passed right through his heart."

Hardly the type of man for a hero!  And yet I do not know.  Perhaps
he fought harder than many a man who conquers.  In the world's
courts, we are compelled to judge on circumstantial evidence only,
and the chief witness, the man's soul, cannot very well be called.

I remember the subject of bravery being discussed one evening at a
dinner party, when a German gentleman present related an anecdote,
the hero of which was a young Prussian officer.

"I cannot give you his name," our German friend explained--"the man
himself told me the story in confidence; and though he personally,
by virtue of his after record, could afford to have it known, there
are other reasons why it should not be bruited about.

"How I learnt it was in this way.  For a dashing exploit performed
during the brief war against Austria he had been presented with the
Iron Cross.  This, as you are well aware, is the most highly-prized
decoration in our army; men who have earned it are usually conceited
about it, and, indeed, have some excuse for being so.  He, on the
contrary, kept his locked in a drawer of his desk, and never wore it
except when compelled by official etiquette.  The mere sight of it
seemed to be painful to him.  One day I asked him the reason.  We
are very old and close friends, and he told me.

"The incident occurred when he was a young lieutenant.  Indeed, it
was his first engagement.  By some means or another he had become
separated from his company, and, unable to regain it, had attached
himself to a line regiment stationed at the extreme right of the
Prussian lines.

"The enemy's effort was mainly directed against the left centre, and
for a while our young lieutenant was nothing more than a distant
spectator of the battle.  Suddenly, however, the attack shifted, and
the regiment found itself occupying an extremely important and
critical position.  The shells began to fall unpleasantly near, and
the order was given to 'grass.'

"The men fell upon their faces and waited.  The shells ploughed the
ground around them, smothering them with dirt.  A horrible, griping
pain started in my young friend's stomach, and began creeping
upwards.  His head and heart both seemed to be shrinking and growing
cold.  A shot tore off the head of the man next to him, sending the
blood spurting into his face; a minute later another ripped open the
back of a poor fellow lying to the front of him.

"His body seemed not to belong to himself at all.  A strange,
shrivelled creature had taken possession of it.  He raised his head
and peered about him.  He and three soldiers--youngsters, like
himself, who had never before been under fire--appeared to be
utterly alone in that hell.  They were the end men of the regiment,
and the configuration of the ground completely hid them from their
comrades.

"They glanced at each other, these four, and read one another's
thoughts.  Leaving their rifles lying on the grass, they commenced
to crawl stealthily upon their bellies, the lieutenant leading, the
other three following.

"Some few hundred yards in front of them rose a small, steep hill.
If they could reach this it would shut them out of sight.  They
hastened on, pausing every thirty yards or so to lie still and pant
for breath, then hurrying on again, quicker than before, tearing
their flesh against the broken ground.

"At last they reached the base of the slope, and slinking a little
way round it, raised their heads and looked back.  Where they were
it was impossible for them to be seen from the Prussian lines.

"They sprang to their feet and broke into a wild race.  A dozen
steps further they came face to face with an Austrian field battery.

"The demon that had taken possession of them had been growing
stronger the further they had fled.  They were not men, they were
animals mad with fear.  Driven by the same frenzy that prompted
other panic-stricken creatures to once rush down a steep place into
the sea, these four men, with a yell, flung themselves, sword in
hand, upon the whole battery; and the whole battery, bewildered by
the suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack, thinking the entire
battalion was upon them, gave way, and rushed pell-mell down the
hill.

"With the sight of those flying Austrians the fear, as independently
as it had come to him, left him, and he felt only a desire to hack
and kill.  The four Prussians flew after them, cutting and stabbing
at them as they ran; and when the Prussian cavalry came thundering
up, they found my young lieutenant and his three friends had
captured two guns and accounted for half a score of the enemy.

"Next day, he was summoned to headquarters.

"'Will you be good enough to remember for the future, sir,' said the
Chief of the Staff, 'that His Majesty does not require his
lieutenants to execute manoeuvres on their own responsibility, and
also that to attack a battery with three men is not war, but damned
tomfoolery.  You ought to be court-martialled, sir!'

"Then, in somewhat different tones, the old soldier added, his face
softening into a smile:  'However, alertness and daring, my young
friend, are good qualities, especially when crowned with success.
If the Austrians had once succeeded in planting a battery on that
hill it might have been difficult to dislodge them.  Perhaps, under
the circumstances, His Majesty may overlook your indiscretion.'

"'His Majesty not only overlooked it, but bestowed upon me the Iron
Cross,' concluded my friend.  'For the credit of the army, I judged
it better to keep quiet and take it.  But, as you can understand,
the sight of it does not recall very pleasurable reflections.'"


To return to my diary, I see that on November 14th we held another
meeting.  But at this there were present only "Jephson,
MacShaughnassy, and Self"; and of Brown's name I find henceforth no
further trace.  On Christmas eve we three met again, and my notes
inform me that MacShaughnassy brewed some whiskey-punch, according
to a recipe of his own, a record suggestive of a sad Christmas for
all three of us.  No particular business appears to have been
accomplished on either occasion.

Then there is a break until February 8th, and the assemblage has
shrunk to "Jephson and Self."  With a final flicker, as of a dying
candle, my diary at this point, however, grows luminous, shedding
much light upon that evening's conversation.

Our talk seems to have been of many things--of most things, in fact,
except our novel.  Among other subjects we spoke of literature
generally.

"I am tired of this eternal cackle about books," said Jephson;
"these columns of criticism to every line of writing; these endless
books about books; these shrill praises and shrill denunciations;
this silly worship of novelist Tom; this silly hate of poet Dick;
this silly squabbling over playwright Harry.  There is no soberness,
no sense in it all.  One would think, to listen to the High Priests
of Culture, that man was made for literature, not literature for
man.  Thought existed before the Printing Press; and the men who
wrote the best hundred books never read them.  Books have their
place in the world, but they are not its purpose.  They are things
side by side with beef and mutton, the scent of the sea, the touch
of a hand, the memory of a hope, and all the other items in the sum-
total of our three-score years and ten.  Yet we speak of them as
though they were the voice of Life instead of merely its faint echo.
Tales are delightful AS tales--sweet as primroses after the long
winter, restful as the cawing of rooks at sunset.  But we do not
write 'tales' now; we prepare 'human documents' and dissect souls."

He broke off abruptly in the midst of his tirade.  "Do you know what
these 'psychological studies,' that are so fashionable just now,
always make me think of?" he said.  "One monkey examining another
monkey for fleas.

"And what, after all, does our dissecting pen lay bare?" he
continued.  "Human nature? or merely some more or less unsavoury
undergarment, disguising and disfiguring human nature?  There is a
story told of an elderly tramp, who, overtaken by misfortune, was
compelled to retire for a while to the seclusion of Portland.  His
hosts, desiring to see as much as possible of their guest during his
limited stay with them, proceeded to bath him.  They bathed him
twice a day for a week, each time learning more of him; until at
last they reached a flannel shirt.  And with that they had to be
content, soap and water proving powerless to go further.

"That tramp appears to me symbolical of mankind.  Human Nature has
worn its conventions for so long that its habit has grown on to it.
In this nineteenth century it is impossible to say where the clothes
of custom end and the natural man begins.  Our virtues are taught to
us as a branch of 'Deportment'; our vices are the recognised vices
of our reign and set.  Our religion hangs ready-made beside our
cradle to be buttoned upon us by loving hands.  Our tastes we
acquire, with difficulty; our sentiments we learn by rote.  At cost
of infinite suffering, we study to love whiskey and cigars, high art
and classical music.  In one age we admire Byron and drink sweet
champagne:  twenty years later it is more fashionable to prefer
Shelley, and we like our champagne dry.  At school we are told that
Shakespeare is a great poet, and that the Venus di Medici is a fine
piece of sculpture; and so for the rest of our lives we go about
saying what a great poet we think Shakespeare, and that there is no
piece of sculpture, in our opinion, so fine as the Venus di Medici.
If we are Frenchmen we adore our mother; if Englishmen we love dogs
and virtue.  We grieve for the death of a near relative twelve
months; but for a second cousin we sorrow only three.  The good man
has his regulation excellencies to strive after, his regulation sins
to repent of.  I knew a good man who was quite troubled because he
was not proud, and could not, therefore, with any reasonableness,
pray for humility.  In society one must needs be cynical and mildly
wicked:  in Bohemia, orthodoxly unorthodox.  I remember my mother
expostulating with a friend, an actress, who had left a devoted
husband and eloped with a disagreeable, ugly, little low comedian (I
am speaking of long, long ago).

"'You must be mad,' said my mother; 'what on earth induced you to
take such a step?'

"'My dear Emma,' replied the lady; 'what else was there for me?  You
know I can't act.  I had to do SOMETHING to show I was 'an artiste!'

"We are dressed-up marionettes.  Our voice is the voice of the
unseen showman, Convention; our very movements of passion and pain
are but in answer to his jerk.  A man resembles one of those
gigantic bundles that one sees in nursemaids' arms.  It is very
bulky and very long; it looks a mass of delicate lace and rich fur
and fine woven stuffs; and somewhere, hidden out of sight among the
finery, there is a tiny red bit of bewildered humanity, with no
voice but a foolish cry.

"There is but one story," he went on, after a long pause, uttering
his own thoughts aloud rather than speaking to me.  "We sit at our
desks and think and think, and write and write, but the story is
ever the same.  Men told it and men listened to it many years ago;
we are telling it to one another to-day; we shall be telling it to
one another a thousand years hence; and the story is:  'Once upon a
time there lived a man, and a woman who loved him.'  The little
critic cries that it is not new, and asks for something fresh,
thinking--as children do--that there are strange things in the
world."


At that point my notes end, and there is nothing in the book beyond.
Whether any of us thought any more of the novel, whether we ever met
again to discuss it, whether it were ever begun, whether it were
ever abandoned--I cannot say.  There is a fairy story that I read
many, many years ago that has never ceased to haunt me.  It told how
a little boy once climbed a rainbow.  And at the end of the rainbow,
just behind the clouds, he found a wondrous city.  Its houses were
of gold, and its streets were paved with silver, and the light that
shone upon it was as the light that lies upon the sleeping world at
dawn.  In this city there were palaces so beautiful that merely to
look upon them satisfied all desires; temples so perfect that they
who once knelt therein were cleansed of sin.  And all the men who
dwelt in this wondrous city were great and good, and the women
fairer than the women of a young man's dreams.  And the name of the
city was, "The city of the things men meant to do."





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Novel Notes, by Jerome K. Jerome

