The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLI, no. 242 new series, August 1916)

by Various

FOOTNOTES

[6] Justice of the Peace.

COINCIDENCES.

BY SIR LAURENCE GOMME.

A few weeks ago some remarkable examples of coincidences were recorded in the newspapers. They were the actual experiences of the writers, or the guaranteed experiences of relatives or intimate friends. Their genuineness cannot be called in question. But they are all isolated examples, each of them being communicated by different correspondents. Even as such they were sufficiently remarkable to make it worth while to ask whether coincidences in the order of things human play a definite part in life’s drama, in the science of life perhaps one ought to say, or whether they are so accidental and non-influential as to have no bearing upon the problems of life.

If they have a bearing on the unexplored meanings of human action, they seem to me to belong to individual, and not to social, man. They might explain the individual action of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and the great ones of the world; they might be one of the influences which have apparently made individual men rulers of human destiny for a time. But to prove any such theory as this, even if it be a possible theory at all, one must deal, not with single examples of coincidences which occur to different people, but with a series of examples which have happened to one individual. The comparative study of coincidences in separate lives would, it occurs to me, be not only scientifically valuable, but of intense interest to all who are fond of reading the lives of men who have made a mark in the world.

So much for the psychological aspect of what may be expected from the study of coincidences. In my small life as a student and public servant it happens that I have had two or three remarkable examples of coincidences. They principally belong to my literary life, and have always been of special interest to me; they have remained in my recollection as a sort of indication that the line I was taking was, on the whole, the right line. Upon my pledged assurance that they are all true, I propose to relate them for the amusement of my readers, and with a hope that more important cases may be related in due course. They are merely anecdotal and have no other interest beyond, perhaps, supplying a new chapter of the ‘Curiosities of Literature.’ I propose as far as possible to treat them chronologically in groups, as they have no possible relationship one with another. They will be related quite simply, and with many circumstantial details omitted.

The first incident which I have to relate is connected with my friendship with Henry Charles Coote, lawyer and historian. I had lent to me a copy of his little book, ‘A Neglected Fact in English History’ (London, 1864), and arranged to begin reading it one Sunday morning in 1876, while I walked through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens on my way to luncheon at Shepherd’s Bush. The brilliant little preface fascinated me. The still more brilliant pages in which his thesis of a Roman origin for the people of Britain was developed carried me right away, and I did not put the book down until I had finished it. As I read the last page, I remember saying to myself ‘I must know this man and I believe I shall know him.’ I met Mr. Coote at the first meeting of what was afterwards the Council of the Folklore Society on December 19, 1877. He sat next to me, and to my delight, after the meeting had concluded, he proposed to walk with me as far as Waterloo Place, with the result that we stood opposite the Athenæum Club for over an hour talking of things that interested both of us. He promised me a copy of his ‘Neglected Fact,’ and I have the volume before me, as I write, with his inscription to me written on the title-page. From that day we became fast friends. He never ceased to do kindnesses to me, and I never ceased to think of him with gratitude and affection. We used to discuss his special view of British history, and I gradually fell away from accepting this view. This made no difference to our intercourse until the end came. It impressed me with extraordinary force. Mr. and Mrs. Coote always spent their summer holiday in Italy, the Italy he loved so well, and returning in October, I generally met him for the first time after their journey at the November meeting of the Society of Antiquaries. In 1884 I went to this meeting as usual, but all during the evening I had been feeling strangely uneasy. I did not expect to see Mr. Coote there. And he was not there. On the next day I called upon him with every foreboding of evil, and I found him stricken down with paralysis, the seizure having taken place the night before just at the time when I was feeling so strangely anxious about him. Perhaps this may be a mere case of telepathy between two people with kindred ideas, but the coincidences are too close for this hypothesis. They are indeed too close to be described in anecdotal form, but I like the recollection to open the story of coincidences which I have to narrate.

I have one other coincidence to record, which belongs to the same sort of experience. After my father died, my mother and sisters came to stop with me for a short time while their affairs were being settled. Some pieces of family furniture, portraits, etc. were brought to my house. Among these was a library chair belonging to my father, and it was placed in my own library.

About this time I was being pressed by an official friend to attend a meeting at his house, for the purpose of taking part in a spirit rapping ceremony, but had always declined, because I did not believe in the phenomenon. However he particularly pressed me to come on account of my father’s recent death, saying I should be certain to learn something. Perhaps my nerves had been worn by recent events. In any case I consented to come, and I remember wearing my father’s watch chain and seal for the first time, to attune me to the atmosphere. I told no one at my house that I was going for this particular purpose. They thought I was simply going out to dinner in the ordinary way. My object in this silence was obvious. It was not to disturb the minds of those at home.

On arrival at my friend’s house we had dinner and then adjourned to the drawing-room. The whole company sat round a largish table holding hands. Several members of the company described certain experiences and conducted conversations with spirit manifestations. But I was absolutely unmoved and looked upon the whole thing as unreal and made up. I left the house angry with myself for giving way to such nonsense.

Reaching home, not very late, I let myself in with my latch-key, and was immediately met by my wife, my mother and sisters having retired, who was strongly agitated and troubled. The explanation was that about ten o’clock she was working in the library as usual, and looking up from her seat she saw the form of my father seated in his usual way in his old chair. And ten o’clock was the time when I, an unbeliever in spirit manifestations, had been seated at the round table gathering of spirit believers. The coincidence is remarkable, and I have ever since been deeply impressed by it, but it has not made me a believer in spirit manifestations.

My remaining coincidences are of a much more ordinary character. The first case occurred in 1882, when I was reading Elton’s ‘Origins of English History.’ On page 194 he describes from a printed collection the manorial customs of Taunton Deane in his own county of Somersetshire. For my own studies I wanted to examine these customs. I sought for the book in vain at the British Museum, at the Law Society’s Library, and at other libraries to which I had access. And at last I determined to appeal to Mr. Elton himself. At that time I did not know him well. He replied, pointing out the great value of the book, owing to it being printed locally for the use of the tenants of the manor and not for publication, and stated the probability of his copy being the only one in existence. Eventually he lent me the book on condition that I returned it within a week. It reached me one Monday morning, and in the evening I commenced to copy the entire book. It consisted of 132 and xxix pages of a small octavo, and its title was ‘The Ancient Customs of the Manor of Taunton Deane; collected from the records of the Manor presented by the Jury at the Law Day Court, the twenty-fourth of April 1817, and published under their sanction. By H. B. Shillibeer, Land surveyor etc. Taunton, 1821.’ I finished my copying for the night, a dozen pages or so, skipping the introduction of twenty-five pages. Among my letters on Tuesday morning was a catalogue from Hindley, the bookseller in the old Booksellers’ Row in the Strand, and the first entry which caught my eye was Shillibeer’s ‘Customs of Taunton Deane’ marked in the catalogue for three shillings and sixpence. Breakfast had no longer any interest for me, and I posted up to London and secured the copy, which still holds its place in my library. I have a note of one other copy in a Manchester catalogue at fifteen shillings, but have never met with another copy in a catalogue or in a library.

Always having been a student of manorial customs, I had sought for a copy of Elton’s ‘Tenures of Kent,’ 1867, which had gone out of print, and I remember the joy with which I at last secured a copy in Chancery Lane, and was assured it was the last copy in the market. But another manorial experience is more curious. The London County Council had succeeded to the rights of the Lord of Manor of Tooting Bec in connection with the purchase of Tooting Bec Common as an open space for London by the Metropolitan Board of Works. The Court Rolls of the Manor and documents relating thereto passed into possession of the Council, and in 1900 the Council decided to commence the publication of its records with that portion of these manor rolls which terminated with the reign of Henry V. Examination of the rolls showed two gaps, one a portion of the reign of Edward IV., and a second the period between the years 1443 and 1447. While editing the first volume for the Council, published in 1909, I had the good fortune to discover, in a second-hand catalogue, the missing rolls from 1443 and 1447, and the Council purchased them to include in the fine collection. My luck in coincidences had served me well in this instance. One other example comes from my collection of manorial books. ‘Extracts from the Court Rolls of the Manor of Wimbledon extending from 1 Edward IV. to A.D. 1864’ was published in 1866, and I picked up a second-hand copy. But there was a second volume published in 1869, consisting of ‘extracts from miscellaneous MSS., some of them purporting to be custumals and terriers,’ and I sought for a copy of this volume for many years in vain. At last one of my coincidences occurred. I was on my way to visit friends at Wimbledon one Saturday afternoon, and in the Waterloo Road I secured a copy of this second volume, picked out of a ‘twopenny box’ of pamphlets and small books.

Coincidences from the library do not, however, limit themselves to one subject. Some years ago I was due to dine with a folklore friend at Twickenham, and at luncheon time, on the same day, I sauntered up Whitcomb Street to look at a second-hand book-stall, from which I had occasionally secured some bargains. On this occasion my luck did not desert me, for I purchased, for, I think, the modest twopence so dear to book hunters, four volumes of ‘Times Telescope.’ This was a sort of calendar published annually, from 1801 to 1821, describing itself as ‘a complete guide to the almanack, containing an explanation of Saints’ days and holidays, with illustrations of British history and antiquities, notices of obsolete rites and customs,’ etc. This last feature was, of course, the centre of attraction to folklorists, and the information collected in these volumes is certainly curious and interesting, forming as they do forerunners to Hone’s ‘Year Book’ and ‘Every Day Book’ and Chambers’ ‘Book of Days.’ I did not feel equal to taking all four volumes with me to Twickenham and back again home, so I left three of the volumes at my office, and proceeded with my remaining treasure to my dinner appointment.

After dinner we were taking our coffee in my friend’s library, and of course talking of the books on the shelves, and I incidentally mentioned that I had that very morning secured a find. Upon informing my friend that the find consisted of some volumes of ‘Times Telescope,’ one of which I had brought with me, he eagerly asked to see it, and we proceeded to the hall where my coat was hanging. My friend took the volume from my hands, very hastily I remember, looked at the cover very narrowly, and then at the title-page, and proceeded with the volume in his possession, back to the library, where he promptly mounted the library steps and placed my volume in a vacant space on his shelves. It was the one volume he wanted to complete the series. The explanation was curious. He had collected all the volumes, but could not find a copy of this particular one. It had a curious misprint. The title-page showed the year to be 1812, but on the cover the figures had been transposed to 1821, and hence collectors had made mistakes over this volume time out of mind. The coincidence in this case was a double one. There was my purchase in the morning, and then my accidental selection of this volume to carry down to my friend’s house in the evening. Of course I left the volume there.

Another such coincidence occurred on a visit to my old friend Edward Solly at Sutton, where he had built himself a library, which was full of rarities dear only to an enthusiastic bibliophile. Mr. Solly never came home from a journey to London without bringing a book with him as an addition to his treasures, and I well remember the joy of browsing in his magnificent library. Among other treasures, he had a great collection of Swift’s works, first editions and the best of all the later editions. On the occasion of one of my visits to him, he showed me a copy of the first edition of ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ and then interested me by drawing attention to the book-plate and arms of a previous owner, ‘James Gomme.’ I told him of my relationship to this member of my family, my great-grandfather, and then he informed me that he only possessed two volumes of the three as published, and that he despaired of ever getting the third. I possessed that third volume, and had always mourned its lost fellows. Next day I sent my volume to Mr. Solly, thus adding a quite unusual example to my list of coincidences.

My next examples of coincidences, three in number, relate to the curiosities of research, and they are all three of a remarkable character. In writing my book on the ‘Governance of London’ (1907) I described the mode of land settlement outside London as compared with the mode inside London, and wrote as follows (pp. 162-163): ‘One has only to consult old London maps to discover easily in various parts the acre strips of ancient arable lands which distinguished London before the building of the houses and, which determine the position and site of houses to this day.’ I instanced the houses at Putney facing the river, for information as to which I was indebted to my friend Mr. Walter Rye, and then my discovery of a parallel case furnished by Park Lane, the line of frontage of which is so splendidly irregular. I had examined this irregularity very closely, and incurred the watchful attention of the police in so doing, and I concluded that it was due to the separate ownership of acre strips upon which owners built their modern property in succession to the ancient cultivating methods of Teutonic settlements. But I could find no proof of this conclusion, and my book was printed with the mere surmise. Almost immediately afterwards I discovered the needed proof from a map of the Ebury estate in the Crace collection, a ‘mapp or plot of the Lordship of Eburie being situated in the parish of St. Martins in the Fields Mary Dammison being proprietess by Henry Morgan 1675.’ This map showed the eastern side of Park Lane before it was built upon, and running parallel to Piccadilly, and therefore at right angles to Park Lane, are depicted the separate acre strips, with the names of the different owners marked on each strip. Proof of my unconfirmed conclusion was thus completed, and this coincidence of research was gleefully added to my memory of the other instances which have now been related in this paper.

The second example of a coincidence in research work is almost uncanny. I was at work upon my ‘Making of London’ (1912) and was behindhand with my proofs. On a Friday morning I received a special request from the publishers to send off the revised proof of a sheet not returned in its proper order. A difficulty had arisen. This part of the proof dealt with the relationship of the Tower of London to the city, and my story was incomplete without the evidence of the Tudor period. I could find nothing, and my morning’s work of research ended fruitlessly. We expected a distinguished visitor immediately after luncheon, and I knew there would be no chance of my finishing the proof after his arrival. I was singularly vexed at my want of success, and suddenly I said to myself ‘I can’t get any information by ordinary means, I will try extraordinary.’ I have no idea what led me to this decision. I was not in a credulous mood, but frankly annoyed with myself. Taking down a volume, selected by mere chance, of the folio edition of the ‘Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission,’ printed in double columns and containing some hundreds of pages, I stuck my paper-knife into the top of the volume, on the principle of the old practice of Sortes Virgilianae, and turned to discover the results. On the right-hand page of the volume thus arrived at I found the record of a legal case drawn up by Lord Coke dealing with the very subject upon which I was interested. Such a coincidence is surely quite remarkable, even in a lifetime of literary research.

My last example is even more remarkable because it is more important in its results. I have been studying the tradition of London for some time, and am satisfied that I have made some important discoveries, which I hope soon to be in a position to publish. A fragment of this tradition was communicated to The Athenæum by a distinguished scholar, and it was important to the case I was developing, especially if I could trace it to a Celtic source. But I had no evidence of this. Now business took me to Cardiff shortly after my discovery of this fragment, and I was occupied there for some few days. On the Saturday before returning home I journeyed to Caerleon to see the Roman remains there, and thoroughly enjoyed my morning’s visit. I wanted to go on to Caerwent to continue investigation there, and negotiated with the landlord of the inn to drive me over. While waiting for the trap being made ready, I talked to the landlady about the antiquities of Caerleon and asked whether there were any traditions of the place. She mentioned several quite well-known superstitions current in many parts of the country and believed in by the people of Caerleon, and then suddenly repeated almost word for word the fragment of London tradition in which I was so interested. The Caerleon people believed in and practised this London traditional rite definitely because it was a London rite, and the Celtic aspect of which I was in search was thereby established.

This short survey of coincidences in the experience of one person may be useful in more ways than one. Smaller occurrences have happened, but it did not seem worth while to note them. They seem to have produced a sort of feeling that my ‘luck’ was considerable, and accordingly I have thought it worth while to record them in the hope of discovering whether they have any value beyond that of interest for the curious.

RAMBLER’S LICHEN.

BY SIR JAMES H. YOXALL, M.P.

With trunk, limbs, and branches of travel an English country highway lies on the land like the section or vertical slice of a tall felled tree; fringes of hedge its foliage and fields its clouds of air. Never straight-ruled on the map, no Roman cypress nor close, unerring poplar, it is rather some indigenous great beech or elm, that swayed to the winds with a not too ready yielding, and grew up in lines hardly gaunt enough to be angular yet too clean-run to be curves.

Rooted at Sherborne, say, one of these great arboriferous road-systems wends north by east, towards camps of the present and earthworks of the past. At a widening of bole it forks, pushing one arm out easterly and another south-westerly; such is the swayed posture here that you glimpse the dryad in it, as you do the Venus de Milo in some real tree-trunk that ivy swathes to the hip. The eastward limb, if you cleave to that, will become stem itself, and sway out curved arms of its own to woo you; take one of those rustling prongs for a mile or two and it bifurcates, so that soon, like the squirrel, you must choose your branch. From bough to bough you may leap (so to speak) by agile footpaths, but if you keep on along a lean lane that presently thins into a mere rut, you attain to the extremest twig. It is thus that afoot from Sherborne you reach to Sandford Orcas, say, or if your wayfaring tree be rooted at Yeovil, to that extremity of path a foredraught (to use the old Worcestershire name for an approach to a farm), which brings you to Barrington Court.

And all along your way there will have been bivouacs of blossoms, fruit, seed for the next blooming; or in every footprint of Primavera you may have seen the primrose lichening the banks, some morning still covered with dew. Pray do not remark that the primroses are primulaceous—it is the occulter analogies a true loiterer likes to ramble into—nor declare that lichens are parasites which stifle their billets: maybe, maybe. But they are gentle intruders anyhow, no Prussians in Belgium, and the householder lives long, on excellent terms with his guest. Lichens are dowerings; indeed, our own wrinkles might be glad of them—they prank and enrich; even the sad coloured ones do, and the black. ‘These weeds are memories,’ Lear said, and fair lichen of remembrance, musing emotions of pity or relish, and dew of tears, even, may alight upon a rambler as he goes his discursive, his essayist’s way. Though he latterly gad at a slackening pace, and the extreme twig bring him, chief mourner for himself, at the head of a dark procession, to some short, shallow trench and clay cot, I think he will have been the happier and the longer-lived for his lichening; he may also have become wealthy meanwhile, in memorabilia, the thiefless hoard that never lessens; he may even have been hallowed somewhat, not left untouched at heart as the true ungodly, they whom neither the beauty of this world nor the dream of another can impassion, or the ‘sense of tears in mortal things’ soften inside. With a venial, reverent Pharisaism, therefore, that in truth is but gratitude, a rambler may thank his wandering stars that he has been no man unlichenable, upon whom no charm of place, or quip of illusion, nor the lacrymae rerum gat hold.

Lovely are the swayed bodies of dryad and Venus trees in silvery April, before they have hung their leafy mantillas and aprons about them, as if shrinking from gaze. But beautiful as September sunshine is the lichen upon them too, itself a veil; so goodly to look at that county men quarrel across their small frontiers about it—I remember Sir William Harcourt saying at Malwood that whenever Mr. Gladstone and he met in the country they contended whether Hawarden or Malwood trees were lichened the better. Yet I think it is upon stone walls and roofs, in Dorset, say, that the fungi-algae look best of all. Pickthanks and esurient flatterers of trees they may be, perhaps, but like Danaë gold and silver they descend upon masonry, giving, not taking, and finely wrought as coins that were minted at Syracuse. With nothing of Sir Gorgius Midas in their profusion, they do not pretend to be county people, exclusive, and as soon will gild a hamlet gable as a mansion coat-of-arms. Like sunshine spattered through meshes of leaves they descend upon their billets, but to last there after sunset, and to endure through winter, like our men entrenched in Flanders. The lodging they prefer is stone, I say—a brown stone that empurples; they seldom select the wattle-and-daub of a washed, half-timbered wall.

Few dwellings of that architecture linger on in stone counties now, however—I mean the prototypal make, the human nest built of mud; masonry has almost everywhere ousted the caked stuff which Shakespeare so often saw ‘stop a hole, to keep the wind away.’ In Warwickshire, Wilts, and other river-bed counties a rambler still happens upon this primal type of cottage sometimes; as he does at Clifden Hampden, in the aged building called the ‘Barley Mow’ near Wallingford Bridge. He recognises the ancient cot, cote, hutch, hut, or whatever its earliest English name was, by the inwardly-slanting timbers of its ends, cloven tree-trunks, which lean up into the gables from the floor corners, in couples that meet as if to embrace, beneath the watershed of the roof. Two pairs of such tree-trunks, starting from right distances at the base, and tied together at the top by a ridge-tree, formed the skeleton of the prototypal house; perhaps in the earliest huts the four supports were living saplings, still growing in pairs at convenient spots, for these could be yoked into service—bent while still green, to be then beheaded; maybe our word ‘roof-tree’ began in that.

We think of the famous half-timbered house at Stratford-on-Avon as ‘Elizabethan,’ but Beowulf may have had some such a habitation as that: this primal type must be inconceivably aged;

‘Old shepherd in your wattle cote,

I think a thousand years are done

Since first you took your pipe of oat.’

is only feebly approximate in date. Even the Bronze Epoch knew the latticed hovel roofed with daub; perhaps the skin-clad builders took lesson by the swallow’s bungalow, or the clay lining of the throstle’s house. Or perhaps the prototypal hut was the tent made permanent, a wigwam expressed in woven withies and caked mud? It must have been general in Europe when Christ was born, for certain first-century tombstones, dug up in Alsace, resemble the primal home in shape, and show markings for timbers at the gables; most likely these were mimic copies of the dead man’s earthly dwelling, meant to house his otherwise vagrant soul; this is lichen of the greyest morning, though Egyptian funerary chambers are older still. But it is lichen that lives on yet, for what is a modern mausoleum but a mansion for the dead? A family vault at Woking is as tribal as a patronymic; we are born thus lichened—the youngest are grey with these spores from the past.

Such surnames as Dabb, Dauber, Dobb, and Dobbin descend from early manipulators of viscous mud, I suppose, special craftsmen developed at the very beginning of ‘division of labour,’ and there is a certain French phrase for sturdiness—bâti à chaux et à sable—which must date as far back as the earliest mixing of lime and sand in with mud. ‘Clay-dabber Dick,’ a resented nickname for a brickmaker now, would begin as a proper cognomen in some loamy county, where clay could be used flat between the timberings, in place of wattle plastered with mud. Tyler would name the artisan who posed ridge-tiles and pantiles, that Potter had moulded, and baked perhaps in Robinson Crusoe’s outdoor way: Defoe, by the bye, was once ‘secretary to a pantile works at Tilbury.’ Such craft names as Mason and Quarrier would begin in stone counties first, very likely; but Thatcher is as proved an ancient as Dobster or Dobbin—his lichen is as old as any, I daresay. For dab and thatch must always have gone together, and still in Wilts and Bucks garden-walls made of dab are thatched lest they dissolve under rain. Ramblers along English road-trees see this straw-weaving go on yet, thank goodness, as it surely always will wherever people own taste as well as land. There are thatched churches extant; one at Markby in Lincolnshire, near loamy cliffs that wall out the sea. What warmth and simplicity of worship, under thatch!

Thatch ennobles—it can suggest the stately peruke; thatch is sporting—a covert-coat for a cottage; thatch shades its serge into such tints of khaki that it weaves the right ‘British warm.’ A thatcher can be an artist, as much as any Dick Tinto who paints; and I will also claim that Hedger and Ditcher are very ancient and skilled artisans. Thatch shapes into such slopes, too, it so canopies and rounds off gables, dormers, and porches, that for fitness and comeliness its motley is your hamlet’s only wear. And as patentees in their advertisements do, I urge ‘Reject all substitutes!’ and against metal roofs in particular, corrugated iron that basely counterfeits pantiles, I launch the curse of the rambler; for upon such hectic, crinkly awnings no lichen of loveliness ever gets hold. Let roof-tree and road-tree grow ‘in beauty side by side,’ as Mrs. Hemans’ family did, say I, and the wig of the cottage be blonde.

Road-trees sprout hamlets, dwellings grouped in greenery as if they were clusters of acorns or hazel-nuts, and these often are ripe old places, turning brown as nuts and acorns do, and blest with beautiful baptisms, names that a rambler reads upon slanting sign-posts or over rustical post-office doors. Many old place-names relate their own exegesis: I know a road that branches off at Headless Cross—the medieval picture and chiaroscuro of the past in that! One sees the Lollards in the foreground of it, dourly hewing a saint’s head off the top of a stone shaft, the thatched village looking sleepily on.

For six undulant miles or so this road from Headless Cross goes dandling along to Tardebigg, through delightful Foxlydiate, and past the bald summit of Muskott’s Way. ‘Tardebigg,’ more recondite than ‘Headless Cross,’ I guess to have named the site of some manor-house or farmstead built so dawdlingly as never to have been finished—a bachelor or spinster bit of building that never made a home, and childless died into the inane. Or ‘Tardebigg’ may have named some hill of late-harvesting barley—there is always the delight of shies at the local truth for you, one can seldom be quite sure of a hit. Yet who was Muskott, that he should ever have owned a long strip of common-land which could never belong to any particular body? It is fudge; I do not believe there ever was such a Muskott—Onesimus, George, or Ebenezer as the case might be. I’ll warrant that Muskott’s Way was known as Muskets Way in days when Napoleon threatened invasion, for in days when Louis Napoleon’s colonels threatened it, the Rifle Corps had their shooting-range up Muskott’s Way. There magazine rifles are practised with at present, I do not doubt, and there in Wat Tyler’s time bowmen would loose at the butts. The place is a palimpsest, of our successive preparations for war.

As for the christening of Foxlydiate, the road-tree sways gracefully down just there, and was not hlidh Early English for ‘slope’? There are other lyds and lydiates. ‘Foxlydiate’ may have meant the meet of the hunters—there are kennels near it still; but I think the name was anciently ‘Folks-lydiate,’ the hill of the ‘good folk’ or fays, and it is a superstitious little village yet. No stretch of country road used to live without its myth or chimera (of subtle contour often), its fable, its dreaming escape from the actual; a myriad perennial annals, vouched for by the affidavits of the aged, some of them puerile but some grim, lichen our by-ways; there is hardly a great house but when you pass the park-palings of split oak something romantical will come to mind, or be told in your ear. Beginning gay-coloured, as lichens often do, these sometimes darken; thus the legend at Foxlydiate is sombre and nocturnal now. The road there hears an equipage sometimes, after sunset, and this was once a fairy vehicle, I’ll warrant, perhaps a Cinderella’s coach; but it has become a nightmare now—the terror of ‘the Flying Hearse.’ Elms in platoons and companies shadow the road there, and there the bat of superstition flits through the twilight of the spirit; be there in the mood, and you may think you hear wheels rush uphill; smack of whip, snort of nag, clink of swingle-bar are heard, but no correspondent forms are visible; and that is salutary, the tradition says, for whoso sees the Flying Hearse must die within the year. Many a time there I as a lad, driving home in the twilight, listened with the delight of half-sceptical terror, but I doubt if people harken for that fatal omnibus now. Tilth and foison of ghost story, aged jest, and fine old tradition no longer flourish; for towns and townsmen, spreading into the country—lichen of a sort—bring the long age of romantic rural faiths to an end.

Townsmen in Arcady are rarer of late, however. War-time depopulates the country roads. The motor-car (itself a flying hearse sometimes) is scarce there now. Solitary the rambler jogs along, alone with himself, except for the flight of the mated thrush or other father bird on service of commissariat; but in what ease of silence you may now pursue your errantry, and into what delight of the unexpected! There are folk who think they ramble, yet go nose in map, by rule and rote of road; but as well employ a guide and an alpenstock—to ramble is not to ken whither, and yet to home. There are plausible short-cuts that deceive you, I know, and branches of road-trees bring you to sudden corners, hedged-in dichotomies, curves and exfoliations that the Development Commissioners, most leisurely of Government Trustees, had not even so much as begun to think of improving away, some day, before the War. These may perplex you, or even be perilous with storming petrels; but there are natural dug-outs, trenches with high green banks.

Often from such elbows as these a lane goes trooping off, like a truant from school. Dusky ways you come to, and bright ones, russet or green tunnels over-arched that make noontide a twilight, or jolly and titupping lanes that caper away from corner alehouses with merry, drunken staggers. Or you pass between roofless colonnades, stately cloisters with tree-trunks for mullions; these are lanes that once were avenues, leading long ago to the gates and curtilage of some manor-house now razed. It is by ways such as these that you pass the minuter Auburns, deserted cottages which by the something maniac there is now about their thatch make you think of Barnaby Rudge. And sometimes the raven croaks above those ruined little atriums; oftener the curlew calls across lesser lanes still, that were ancient pack-horse tracks, or were foot-worn in the lang syne of some local trade now dead—the Salt-way, the Rush-way, or the Keg-way leading up from some cove of contraband. The ring-dove coos to narrower paths still—O Lubin and Chloe!—the recognised sweethearting footways where every generation has loitered and whispered with the erratic ache of love.

These divers cuts and tacks shorten apparent distance and cheat the tiring foot, for the way itself seems to wander with you, and each new corner to beckon you on. And this is a portion of that English form of great art which lets things develop as if they were vegetal, into a perfect beauty of anarchy, various and infinite; no Ordnance surveyor nor planner of garden cities would invent such foot-beguiling roads as these. Some of them can astound even the most experienced rambler, he almost can hear them chuckle at his surprise when he rounds into a new vista, and some of them seem to go about with the zeal of an antiquary, discovering and reconnecting the tracks of some Titan who trapesed through the quag there, before it had hardened after Noah’s flood. There are leafy labyrinths, too, mazy suburbs, faubourgs of silent green cities, peopled by plants and shapes of leaves and scents so various, that in June, the schoolboy month, a man may rest there bewitched, ‘Tarrying and talked to by tongues aromatic,’ thinking himself a bodily translation, resolved into a forested world.

I suppose the skin-clad explorer of spaces we now name counties found no paths but the spoor of what a Boy Scout called ‘growly beasts.’ Between dens and water-breaks these tracks would go, and I never came to a ford without seeming to see some skin-clad explorer there before me, his tongue lapping water and his furtive eyes swivelling left and right for danger, since it was then always war-time for a man. In September, when great fleets of swallows gather in ports of departure, I have noticed them, myriad and midge-like in the air above and around—I cannot guess why—a ford. Water brings back some of the old feeling of mystery and danger into any journey, you spy the peril under the beauty as you come to a ferry, or to a string of white posts and chains that fence off a roadside burn.

How Shakespeare delighted in fords! He played with the word’s meaning again and again. Many a Warwickshire place he knew where ‘the shore was shelvy and shallow,’ and he—perhaps he most of all as most human of all—would be glad to get home to his shire. There was, and I hope is yet, a ford at the ‘beggarly Broome’ which he knew of, where the road pushed into the Avon abruptly, turned at a right angle midstream, splashed axle-deep thirty yards, and emerged uphill. And this used to be a place of delicious risk for a young palmer whose staff was a whip; for at any moment the gig might become a cockleshell, floating. It was a sacred water of danger to me; may Development Commissioners destroy it never, and least of all with some iron bridge, kept painted against the mollifying lichen of rust.

Splash went the fetlocks; or if you were afoot, under the lee of an old mill a lichened old boat swayed hooked, and across the echoing flow your cry went, ‘Ferry-oh!’ or ‘O-ver, miller!’—the very music of life. A ferry-boat is but a moving span, stepping-stones are a kind of ford, and bridges developed out of these, I think, for what were the piers at first but stepping-stones for a giant’s stride? Bridges—but pages and pages would not tell the rambler’s delight in those circumflex accents, those brooding brows bent over grey eyes of water wherein reflections lie deep, like thoughts that dream.

Such, Jean-Paul might have cried, in one of the conceits with which he rejoiced a dead old Germany, are the flowers and honey of a road-tree, with cottages like strawy hives, under linden-tresses murmurous of clustered delight; these be the joys that wing the rambler, so that away he goes bumbling tirelessly, as I do here, to the next blossoms, and the next. Life itself climbs and descends a road-tree, I suppose—the tree of Ygdrasil; but there can be continual breaking forth into new boughs of living if one carries Spring on into Autumn, keeping pretty young in spite of the impertinences of time. Has there not been grafting of road-trees, budding of fertile young stems into lichened old branches of ways?

But road-trees are deciduous, too, boughs and twigs of them withering for lack of the sap of daily use; with some sense of pathos a rambler obtrudes upon the hush of lanes long left unmetalled, where the latest wheel-marks are wan. He thus comes into places of pastoral indolence that once hummed with cultivation, where not even yet, in war-time, have farmers wakened their Sleepy Hollows up. Some of the elderliest by-roads are the loneliest, and seem to lie musing of their past; even a summer breeze can blow bleakly there, and in the lulls of it the silence waits, forlorn. There are very aged, lonesome ways which seem to shiver, Lear-like, and then the rambler thinks how all the hurriers and loiterers upon them in the past lie low. We too are in the tradition: ‘This great world itself shall so wear out to naught.’

Lear wandered the Roman roads of Britain; they set one thinking of strategic railways just now. In essence an old Latin militant broadway and a German route to the extravasation of blood are the same, I suppose. Both were pushed out like spears of offence, immense and excessive, and neither was a pleasant causeway for neighbourliness. Therefore a curse shall come upon the Prussian strategic paths, such as fell upon the Roman thoroughfares here long ago. Even yet these seem to march in arms among us, between the remains of sullen native forests—they are aliens still; listen along one of them yet, and you shall think you hear the clink of greaves or the centurion’s harsh command. These ancient roads can never be homely, they have never been naturalised, the little townships hold apart from them yet.

Follow Watling Street or the Fosse Way in rustic regions and you come upon few villages: our old horror of the Latin power seems to persist. British and Early-English field-folk huddled together in hamlets that developed like social islands, at the centre of cultivable common lands, connubial, away from forests of ferae and thoroughfares of war. Even in York and Lancaster days villagers would use the great old roads as seldom as might be—they were marches for soldiery, stretches of savagery that husbandman and maid had better avoid. They thus became bristling frontiers, limits of peaceable excursion, confines of wapentakes or counties; in days when people were

‘Parish-bound with hedgerows as with bars,’

it would be risky to quit your township, and almost armed invasion to cross the great road. We English no more became Latin then than Teutonic later; always we have gone our own ways. Between Newark and Nottingham the Fosse marches straight, a noble Roman superb and haughty, but the other road, the true Englishman, wends devious and unsystematic: it developed as the British Empire did, out of paths and lanes of trade and gossip: they never set out to be a main road or an empire at all.

Somewhere and sometime all roads end, as must this wandering gossip of road-trees. It is good to jog on the footpath way and hent the stile even in war-time; when skylarks are mounted, why not out and listen, though from the same Sussex hill you faintly hear the great guns? The lyric blaze above persists, in spite of war. Is it unfeeling to forget the drumming streets, the drilling camps, and go listen how underwoods ring with wild hyacinths? That Death is Life’s fierce, Prussian neighbour we know more than ever, just now—but Life has to be Death’s comrade in the whirling dream. The war will pass, though thick the lichen of it gather upon us meanwhile, sad-coloured and black. It is not heartless to look round the corner and over the hill meantime, and it is wisdom to lift up the heart in spite of all, as one plods towards the evening tent.

MONSEIGNEUR.

(Suggested by a Provençal conte of Alphonse Daudet’s.)

(The scene is a bedchamber in Monseigneur’s palace in Provence, and the time is a morning in early spring, towards the close of the fifteenth century.

Behind the closely-drawn, heavily-embroidered curtains of his vast state-bed, lies the little Monseigneur, most desperately ill. Notwithstanding the gay and brilliant sunshine that floods the palace, in the open fireplace of Monseigneur’s bedchamber there is a blazing scented fire of logs piled; while all the windows, with their stained armorial bearings, and all the heavy tapestry hangings over the narrow doorways that lead to garde-robe and oratory and corridor, are mercilessly closed. One would say, indeed, that the Doctor and Nurse who are in attendance were bent on killing the child, if only by depriving him of the faintest flutter of the revivifying spring air without. Yet they fully believe they are doing the best for their patient, and now are giving him the drink he cries for, faintly and fretfully, from within the tightly-drawn bed-curtains, putting the cup into the thin little hand that closes on it so feverishly.

Then the heavy hangings at the back are drawn, rattling sharply on their iron rings, and the Bishop of Langres enters. Behind him, in the blazing sunshine of the corridor, Beppo waits for permission to follow him; a ragged, sunburnt, Spanish-looking little boy, who carries a bird’s-nest with young thrushes in it, over which, as he stands there motionless, he seems entirely absorbed.)

Bishop (as he enters). Mother of God! The heat in this chamber!—Doctor Mabrise! (at which the Doctor merely shrugs his shoulders, as if to say: ‘What else can one do? In cases of fever!⸺’) But out of doors, my good Doctor, it is spring; the sun is hot enough already to split the stones. Is it really necessary?

Doctor (severely). Of course!

Bishop (in a low tone). Tell me—how is the boy?

Doctor (gloomily). Very bad.

Bishop. So?

Doctor. Passing rapidly, even beyond my skill! (So he goes to the fire, and stirs it ill-humouredly to an even more furious activity.)

Bishop. Already? (Murmurs.) Then we must make haste.

(Meanwhile the Nurse, as a hot little hand returns the drinking cup through the bed-curtains, softly asks:)

Nurse. Is that better? (To which the sick child within makes inarticulate, fretful reply. So she closes the curtains again tightly.) Try now to go to sleep again, and you will wake up quite well. (Soothingly.) Quite well!

(Then, with a profound obeisance to the Bishop, she goes to the table at the foot of the bed and replaces the cup among the many, many medicine bottles and phials of drugs; while outside, in the sunshine of the corridor, Beppo chants tunefully and joyously over his birds’-nest.)

Beppo. Mon-seig-neur!

(He looks up startled as both Nurse and Doctor make angry, violent gestures towards him of ‘’Ssh! ’Ssh!’, and then at his good friend, the Bishop, wondering what wrong it is he has done. A slight pause, while no sound comes from the bed. Then the Nurse goes up to him, beckoning him angrily, and once he is within the chamber draws the heavy hangings again over the corridor entrance.)

Nurse (in an angry whisper). Bawling and singing, like a drunken gipsy!

Beppo (faces her with an engaging smile). Mind my pretty nestlings. (And chants over them, softly and melodiously.) They are for Mon-seig-neur!

Nurse (in his face, sharply). ’Ssh! Vagabond!

Beppo (while the Nurse goes to the bed and peeps through the curtains, chants again very softly over his birds’-nest). For Mon-seig-neur!

Nurse (turns towards them and whispers). He is just off again. Fast asleep. (So she sits and resumes her sewing at the foot of the bed, while the Bishop also glances through the curtains, and Beppo, always absorbed over the birds’-nest, goes to show it to the Doctor.)

Bishop (with a heavy sigh). The last of his race! It would have killed his father. (Pause.)

Beppo. Doctor Mabrise! Look!

Doctor. What are they?

Beppo. Young thrushes. I found them this morning, in a great lilac-bush, below the Black Dog bastion. See! There are five.

Doctor (gloomily). They will die.

Beppo. In this hot chamber? Ah! Before Monseigneur can even see them? Malheur! (As if at once to take them into the open air.)

Bishop. Beppo! (Beppo pauses and looks up at him with a smile.) My poor boy! Thou art seeming very ragged and dirty this morning.

Beppo. Truly? (As he looks himself over.)

Bishop. If thou art to play once more with Monseigneur, we must have thee washed.

Beppo (troubled). Washed?

Bishop. It will not hurt thee; it may even do thee some good. Nurse! Take our young friend here and wash him. Wash him well!

Nurse (pleased with the commission, rises). Ah!

Beppo. Not with soap?

Nurse (menacingly). With soap and with pumice-stone. Come!

Bishop. Leave me thy birds’-nest. And, Nurse, let him at the same time be neatly dressed. Perhaps in some old suit of Monseigneur’s.

Beppo (annoyed). Old suit?

Bishop. They are of the same age and height. And to play with Monseigneur in those rags!—(As Beppo still lingers.) Go, my child.

Nurse. Come! I will give thee the best washing!—

Beppo (with recovered spirits). I am not afraid. Thou art only an old woman!

Nurse. Ah! Sayest thou?

Beppo (whispers, shaking a finger in her face). ’Ssh, old woman! ’Ssh! (So they leave the chamber, the Nurse angrily pushing him out in front of her.)

Bishop (tenderly, over Beppo’s birds’-nest). Little, hungry, weak birds! There is something infinitely pathetic, Doctor, in these young things of Nature.

Doctor (gloomily). So many of them die.

Bishop. It seems so; even without the aid of a surgeon. (He hands the Doctor the nest, who, not knowing what else to do with it, nor how to reply to the Bishop’s impertinence, places it on the ledge of the high and sloping couvre-feu over the fireplace.)

Doctor. There! The heat will do them good; nourish them. For heat is life. Calor est vita optima. (Mumbling and muttering to himself.) Galen hath said it.—Galen!—

Bishop (after a long pause, softly). Doctor Mabrise—tell me—is there no way, no hope, of keeping Monseigneur alive?

Doctor (warming his thin brown hands in front of the fire). My science knows none; she is at her wits’ end. And when science is at her wits’ end⸺

Bishop (drily). Methinks she hath but a short road to travel!

Doctor (piqued). Then let the Church try, my good Bishop; let the Church try. For if ever there were need for one of your miracles⸺

Bishop (gravely). Ah!

Doctor (points to the bed). There is your subject, ready for you; waiting. A dying child. You have my authority to begin.

Bishop (drily). Then we will begin by opening the windows; we will admit some of this soft spring air. (He unlatches and throws wide open one of the few windows of the bedchamber; while the Doctor, himself a poor consumptive, shivers and cowers over the fire.) You don’t like it?

Doctor (angrily). Seeing that all diseases enter by the mouth!

Bishop (amused). What? In springtime? In Provence?

Doctor (grumbles). Especially in springtime. Always! (Mumbling, with cloak drawn over his mouth.) Plague and fever!

Bishop. At any rate, Doctor, you will agree with me that if Monseigneur dies it means ruin for the Duchy.

Doctor (scornfully). If?

Bishop. There will infallibly be civil war here all through the summer. There will be neither harvest nor vintage!

Doctor (shortly). I agree.

Bishop. And in the autumn, here, in the very palace of Monseigneur, will most surely be found securely seated that dangerous ruffian, the Comte de Poix. An infidel; a pronounced foe to Holy Church! While you and I, my good friend⸺

Doctor (drily). All the more reason, Bishop, for you to set to work at once with your miracle. You have my full permission—plena auctoritas—to begin.

Bishop (with a glance at the bed). After all, Beppo is Monseigneur’s brother. You knew that, Doctor?

Doctor. Doubtless. What of it?

Bishop. Beppo and he are of precisely the same age. They are not unlike—at a distance. And at a distance, for some few years, it will be that the people will always see him.

Doctor (scoffs). You don’t call that a miracle? To substitute one boy for the other?

Bishop (gently). Not if it succeeds?

Doctor. Bishop! And Beppo? What will the people think has become of Beppo?

Bishop. Only that he has run away again somewhere, and got lost.

Doctor. Lost!

Bishop. Why, who is there ever gives him a moment’s thought here? Is he not a gipsy—a vagabond?

Doctor. And you propose to place him—in a palace?

Bishop (whispers). ’Ssh! Monseigneur is waking. (Goes to the bed and draws the curtains.) But how is this, Doctor? The boy is not undressed?

Doctor. He refused. He said that if he had to die he would die as his father did, in his clothes.

Bishop. Brave lad! (So he seats himself on the edge of the bed, outside of which the little Monseigneur lies, fully dressed, propped up by pillows. And after a while, as the Bishop leans forward and gently places his large peasant’s hand on the poor child’s small and scorching palm, Monseigneur turns towards him, feebly and languidly, and looks at him with wide-open, frightened eyes. Soothingly.) Well, Monseigneur? And how are we?

Monseigneur (murmurs). Bishop of Langres! Tell me—am I really going to die?

Bishop (gently). To die! After all, what is it to die? It is only to go from one room to another. And to another, better!

Monseigneur (fretfully). I would rather stay here. Here are all my friends, and my soldiers, and my new cannon. Besides, to die in spring! So early in the year, when there is so much to do; when my people want me. (Raising himself slightly.) Where is Beppo?

Bishop. He will be here directly. He is only being washed.

Monseigneur (smiles faintly). Poor Beppo! That is not one of his favourite amusements.

Bishop. You are fond of Beppo? Is it not so, Monseigneur?

Monseigneur. Very fond.

Bishop. You would like to do something for him? How shall I say? Assure his future? (On Monseigneur’s silence.) You understand what I mean, by assuring Beppo’s future?

Monseigneur. Of course! It means seeing that he has always somewhere to sleep, that he does not go so often hungry, and, in the winter, fireless; that he keeps himself clean. The difficulty will be to make him accept. (Smiles.) He is such a vagabond.

Bishop. Hitherto, no one has shown him any care.

Monseigneur. And yet—he is my brother.

Bishop (while the Doctor, who is listening, starts). Monseigneur! You knew? But how? Since when?

Monseigneur. Since one day—a long time ago—when I was quite a child, and my father and my mother were quarrelling.

Bishop. So?

Monseigneur. It seems, Messire, that when people quarrel—even before their own children—they will tell each other unpleasant truths.

Bishop (nods, gravely). Sometimes.

Monseigneur. So it was that my mother told my father he ought to be ashamed of himself. He had so many little bastards.

Bishop (shocked, with raised hands). Monseigneur!

Monseigneur. I did not understand. I had never heard the word. Therefore, one day I asked Lorrain, the big man-at-arms⸺ (Pauses.)

Bishop. And he told your lordship?

Monseigneur. He told me nothing. He only laughed. So did my father, when my mother charged him.—Aie! how well I remember!

Bishop. But Madame la Duchesse, your mother? She did not laugh?

Monseigneur (simply). Not at all. She was very angry. She said it was a scandal; particularly, with poor Beppo. Do you know why, Bishop? (Confidentially.) Because it seems he was born on the same day, the very same day, as I. Yet, somehow, she was not his mother. That was why she was so angry, I suppose?

Bishop. Very likely. (Pause, while the Doctor, after exchanging glances with the Bishop, resumes his seat by the fire).

Monseigneur. Bishop!

Bishop. Monseigneur?

Monseigneur. Do you think that if I gave my brother Beppo money—a great deal of money—he would die instead of me? Do you think the good God would mind?

Bishop (guardedly). It would be difficult.

Monseigneur (proudly). After all, the good God is my cousin. Dukes are all cousins of the Almighty God, Bishop. Are they not?

Bishop. They very often make the claim, Monseigneur. I do not know whether it has ever been allowed.

Monseigneur (with dignity). At least, Messire, I trust that in heaven I shall keep my proper rank? I shall not be required to mix with all the common people?

Bishop. Common people, Monseigneur? It is not the common people, believe me, who rise to heaven at all. Indeed, one must have uncommon qualities!⸺

Monseigneur (eagerly). And then my fine clothes; my ermine and my velvet? Doubtless I shall be allowed to wear them?

Bishop. Alas, my child, in heaven there are no distinctions; neither of rank nor of clothes. Sometimes I doubt whether even the sacred order of Bishops⸺

Monseigneur (angrily). Then what good to me is my birth? If I am to keep neither my rank nor my clothes, if I am not to be treated with proper respect, I might as well be Beppo! I will not die! I will not! I will not!

Bishop. Monseigneur!

Monseigneur (leaning on his elbow, screams,) Lorrain! Lorrain! (And while the Bishop rises, Lorrain, the big man-at-arms, comes clanking in through the hangings from the corridor.)

Lorrain (hoarsely). Monseigneur?

Monseigneur. Lorrain—listen! I have a duty for thee—at once!—a solemn duty!

Lorrain. Name it, Monseigneur. It shall be done.

Monseigneur (feverishly). Lorrain—thou knowest Death, dost thou not? Thou hast often seen him?

Lorrain. Death and I have often looked at each other, Monseigneur—many times!—straight in the eyes. I know him well.

Monseigneur. Good! Then take thy comrades, Lorrain—forty, fifty of thy stoutest men-at-arms—my Lansquenets! Post them at every door of this my palace; and if Death tries to enter, tell them to fire on him and kill him. My strictest orders!

Lorrain. Monseigneur, it shall be done. He shall not enter. We ourselves will die first. (Salutes and is going.)

Monseigneur (faintly, as he lies back). And, Lorrain⸺

Lorrain. Monseigneur?

Monseigneur. Fill the courtyard with cannon. Our new cannon. The villain might come on horseback—and try to storm—the great staircase.

Lorrain (gravely). Monseigneur, before Death enters the palace precincts, either on horseback or on foot, we will fire all the grosses pièces on him and blow him back to hell. It shall be done! (Whereupon Monseigneur, lying back on the pillows with closed eyes, makes a feeble little gesture of dismissal, and Lorrain salutes and disappears. From outside in the corridor is heard the clank of armour; then Lorrain’s hoarse voice ‘En avant, la garde! Mar-r-chez!’—while the Bishop returns to the bedside.)

Bishop (whispers). Doctor! (As the Doctor joins him and feels the child’s pulse.) How much longer?

Doctor. Moriturus!⸺Perhaps an hour.

Bishop. Ah!

Doctor. If your miracle is to succeed!⸺

Bishop. Beppo is coming. Let us leave them alone together. Come, Doctor, come.

Doctor. And the miracle? The famous miracle!

Bishop. We shall see. Only give them time. Come.

Doctor (with a scornful shrug). Time?

(So they go out into the corridor, and after a pause Beppo enters, washed and combed, smartly dressed in one of Monseigneur’s discarded suits, out of which he seems indeed to swell, it being somewhat too small for him, with pride and satisfaction. For it is the first time in all his life that he has worn anything but rags; and for the first time, also, he looks like what in fact he is, Monseigneur’s brother.)

Beppo (as he swaggers gaily in). Monseigneur enters! Monseigneur salutes with condescension the gay and gallant company assembled to welcome him! Monseigneur turns to the Court Physician, and in haughty tones⸺Tiens! Where is the Court Physician? Doctor Mabrise? Where the plague have they put my birds’-nest? (Screams.) Mabrise!—You old fool! (Then he sees the nest on the ledge of the couvre-feu.) Ah! So near the fire? (He jumps up on the footstool and takes the nest, while Monseigneur gradually recovers, and, raising himself on the pillows, watches him.) Dead! Every one of them dead! (As he jumps off the footstool.) The wretch has killed my thrushes! My sweet, beautiful, living thrushes! Ah, ça! (As he draws his dagger) Mabrise! Mabrise! (and runs towards the corridor.)

Monseigneur. Beppo!

Beppo. But he has killed my thrushes; the thrushes I brought thee! Look!

Monseigneur (as he takes the nest). So much the better. They will be all ready for me to play with—in heaven.

Beppo (crying with rage). I did not bring them for thee to play with in heaven; but here, with me.

Monseigneur. Perhaps they have only swooned, as I did just now. Take them, Beppo, place them in the sunshine, by the window. It is very likely they will recover.

Beppo (whimpering). Nay, I know they are dead. But, by Heaven, they shall be revenged!

Monseigneur. Beppo!

Beppo (as he places the nest in the sun on the window-ledge). I will lie in wait for their murderer; and one night when he is crawling about the streets—like an old cat in the dusk, as I have so often seen him—I will creep up behind, and I will stab him in the back.

Monseigneur (struggling to rise). In the back? Beppo! Dost thou think that the action of a knight?

Beppo. I am not a knight, but, like my mother, a gipsy, and I will stab him where I can.

Monseigneur (feebly, on the edge of the bed). Help me. Help me to the chair.

Beppo (as he helps him down off the bed, and into the Nurse’s chair). One—two—three! So! (Laughing.) Why, one would say thou wert drunk!

Monseigneur (with a wan little smile). Nay, Beppo! (and lies back in the chair with closed eyes.)

Beppo. Ah! Listen!

Monseigneur (languidly). Well?

Beppo. In the courtyard! (Running to the open window, he looks out.) Philippe! Cannon! The courtyard is full of cannon.

Monseigneur. I know. I ordered it.

Beppo. But is there some attack? The Comte de Poix? Already?

Monseigneur. One never knows. The times are troublous.

Beppo. But who will lead them, if thou art so ill?

Monseigneur (smiles). Why not thou? My brother?

Beppo (radiant). To battle? Philippe!

Monseigneur. Sit, Beppo, and I will give thee charge. Sit at my feet here, like a scholar, and I will teach thee.

Beppo. Monseigneur Philippe! (And looks up at him, breathless with interest, admiration, and attention.) Go on now; teach me! I am ready.

Monseigneur (gently). Thou knowest thou art my brother? (As Beppo nods.) Who has told thee?

Beppo (laughs). Everyone.

Monseigneur. Not in scorn?

Beppo. Nay! They know better.

Monseigneur. My mother was a wronged lady, Beppo.

Beppo. So was mine. Yet she never complained. She was too proud.

Monseigneur. Where is she now?

Beppo. She is dead.

Monseigneur. Ah?

Beppo. They killed her.

Monseigneur. Killed her?

Beppo. The tribe. They said she had disgraced them. She was a princess.

Monseigneur. Then thou art indeed alone in the world, Beppo; for thy father, thy father and mine, is dead, too.

Beppo (stoutly). I think it is a good thing to be alone in the world. One is all the stronger.

Monseigneur. To be hungry? Homeless? Friendless? Is that to be stronger?

Beppo. It seems so. Am not I stronger than thou?

Monseigneur (sighs). Indeed!

Beppo (patronisingly). If only they had let thee alone, Philippe; sent thee out hungry to play in the fields, sometimes to sleep there; kept thee away from that foolish book-learning; thou would’st not be so weak and languid. So childish! Thou would’st be strong like me. Strong as a mule!

Monseigneur (tearfully). Thou art a knave to say I am childish—a knave!—and when I am well again⸺

Beppo (boastfully). See, Philippe, how strong I am, and how active. See how I can jump! (As he jumps on to the settle by the fireplace, and vaults over the back.) Holà, there! Holà! And I can dance—and run—and swim!

Monseigneur (feebly and vindictively, drawing his dagger). If I could only reach thee—with my dagger!

Beppo. And I can fight, too! (Laughing.) Why, thou dost not even hold thy weapon rightly. See, Philippe, it is so!—the point upwards! Not so! That is how women fight, with bodkins. This is how men fight. (Stabbing at an imaginary foe.) Ha! Thou rapscallion! Thou mountebank! I will show thee!

Monseigneur. Beppo!

Beppo. Let me but reach thee, thou coward! I will split thee!

Monseigneur (screams). Beppo! Beppo! (As the Bishop hurries in from the corridor.)

Bishop. Children! Children! Quarrelling? With daggers drawn? (Severely.) Beppo?

Beppo (rather alarmed, explains). } I was only just showing him—(Together.)

Monseigneur (crying with rage). } He was teasing me!—teasing me.

Bishop (angrily). Beppo!

Beppo. I will not do it again. It was only to amuse him.

Bishop (aside, as he takes Beppo by the ear). Senseless! Dost not know he is dying?

Beppo (startled). Dying?

Bishop. Tease him no more, Beppo. Go; make friends with him; comfort him.

Beppo (distressed). Dying? Oh, my Philippe! (So he goes and throws himself on his knees before Monseigneur, huddled up, crying, in the Nurse’s chair.)

Bishop. I shall be here, within earshot, in the oratory. And if I so much as hear thee!⸺Remember! (And disappears through the hangings into the oratory.)

Beppo (gently). Give me thy dagger, Philippe; let us be friends again. So! (as he throws the daggers on the bed.) And if thou wilt, I will cure thee. (Winningly.) Shall I, Philippe?

Monseigneur (feebly). When I am well again, brute, I will knock thy head.

Beppo (soothingly). Thou shalt! Thou shalt! (as he puts his head on Monseigneur’s lap.) Knock it now, if it pleases thee. (Monseigneur gives him a feeble, vindictive little slap.) There! Is that better? Do it again. (Monseigneur pushes him fretfully away.) And now I will cure thee; make thee one day as strong as I. Only thou must obey me. Art ready—to obey me? Thou art still crying, Philippe? Nay, but why?

Monseigneur. To think how I leave my poor Duchy! Defenceless! Ah, if only thou wert my true brother!—if only there were not the bar!

Beppo (laughs). Why, then I might one day be duke. A droll duke; one that would need a deal of washing. Nay, I would not be duke, to be washed every day. (Gravely.) But if duke I ever were—there are things I should know. (With a wise nod.) Ah!

Monseigneur. What things?

Beppo. About the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the old. It does not matter so much for me; I am young and can bear it. But the old!—To be old is dreadful; but to be old and hungry, in autumn without a roof, without a fire in winter! If I were duke, Philippe, dost thou know what I would do? (As Monseigneur, lying back in the chair, feebly shakes his head.) In winter I would have all the old people here to live with me in the palace; feed them, and keep them warm.

Monseigneur. Ah? And in summer?

Beppo. They should come here, too, and rest all day in the shade of the corridors, to keep them cool. And I would go about among them and fulfil all their wants, and make them laugh with my antics and gay stories. Not pity them! The poor do not like to be pitied.

Monseigneur (wearily). Thou art very ignorant, Beppo.

Beppo. It is possible. Yet there are things I know one cannot learn from books. And of book-learning, Philippe, it seems to me that thou hast had too much.

Monseigneur. How can one have too much, if one is one day to be duke?

Beppo (laughs). Nay!

Monseigneur. Call me the Bishop, Beppo.

Beppo (troubled). The Bishop? But why?

Monseigneur (fretfully). Call him. (So Beppo rises, grumbling and muttering, and goes to the oratory doorway.)

Beppo (shouts ill-humouredly through the hangings). Bishop of Langres!

Bishop (as he enters). Monseigneur?

(While Beppo seizes the opportunity to steal away from them on tiptoe back to the open window and his birds’-nest. He almost screams with rapture to find that in the fresh air and broad, genial sunshine the nestlings are recovering, faintly stirring, ravenously opening their soft yellow beaks for food. Over them he is soon absorbed, touching them here and there and singing to them one of his many tuneful peasant songs.)

Monseigneur. Bishop of Langres—I have a charge for thee, a sacred charge.—Beppo, my brother.

Bishop. Monseigneur?

Monseigneur. Let him be taught. Only see to it, Bishop, that they do not try to teach him too much. Weary him not with lessons, as they have so often wearied me.

Bishop. And what would Monseigneur have him? A priest?

Monseigneur. I would have him a soldier and a gentleman; a leader of men. Bad times are ahead of us, Bishop, and it is possible—that one day—(he pauses, and then calls.) Beppo! (But Beppo is too absorbed to hear him.)

Bishop (angrily). Beppo! (And Beppo turns, startled, and on the Bishop’s gesture drags himself down to them unwillingly.)

Monseigneur. Beppo, I have determined to⸺(He pauses; then, puzzled, to the Bishop.) What was it?

Bishop. Assure his future.

Monseigneur. Yea, assure thy future. Thou shalt be taught to read (at which Beppo shifts his feet uneasily)—and, if God will, some day to write. Thou shalt learn history, statecraft, poetry; to dance, to ride.

Beppo (defiantly). I can do both already, to perfection.

Monseigneur (fretfully). To perfection!—when I myself have seen thee, lumping about like a servitor. Best of all, thou shall be taught courtly behaviour; to consider others; to be just and merciful, to speak the truth.

Beppo (shiftily). I never lie.

Monseigneur. I hope not, but I do not altogether believe it. Even I have lied—I!—who have been taught so much.

Beppo (mutters). There are certain things I do not call lies.

Monseigneur. Thou seest, Bishop, how ignorant he is? Take him, Messire, and teach him, and one day—doubtless—he will be all I might have been⸺

Bishop. Monseigneur!

Monseigneur. If only they had not killed me, by teaching me so much. So many lessons; so little play! Promise me, Beppo, thou wilt always do thy best.

Beppo (lightly). I promise.

Monseigneur (fiercely). Nay, not like that! Swear it! Or, by the Blood, I will come to thee at nightfall in thy bed—ride on thy throat—choke thee!

Beppo (terrified). Philippe! I swear!

Monseigneur. Good Beppo! Kiss me!

Beppo (tearfully). Willingly! Beloved Philippe! (And while the boys affectionately embrace, to hide his emotion, the good Bishop leaves them and disappears through the hangings out into the corridor. Then Beppo kneels lovingly at his brother’s feet.) And now it is my turn.

Monseigneur. To teach me?

Beppo. To cure thee, as I said I would.

Monseigneur. And how?

Beppo. Out there, in the sunshine. It has cured the thrushes, and why not thee?

Monseigneur (languidly). Ah! Out there?

Beppo. It is the place I always go to, when I myself am feeling wretchedly.

Monseigneur. Wretchedly? Thou?

Beppo. Sometimes.

Monseigneur (tenderly). Hungry?

Beppo. Hunger is nothing. But to be restless, dissatisfied; not often, but still sometimes. To feel oneself a beggar, an outcast, friendless; to be neither of the palace nor the hovel, yet to know oneself a part of each. In a word, Philippe, to feel oneself nothing; just the foam on the surface of the river, the bubble that breaks and vanishes even before the broad stream is aware of its existence.

Monseigneur. Thou hast such feelings? Thou?

Beppo. Sometimes. But when they come I take them where they always pass, and I am cured—as I will cure thee.

Monseigneur (smiles). And where is it?—this wonderful healing-place of thine.

Beppo. Out there—not far—on the warm slope below the Black Dog bastion. Thou knowest it; beneath the great lilac bush, where this morning I found for thee the baby thrushes.

Monseigneur (dreamily). I know it well. Thence one can see for many, many leagues.

Beppo (eagerly). Is it not so? The wandering river that looks like milk and steals away, a ribbon fading in the mist. The woods, the farms, the little towers of the châteaux; the distant steeple that points a finger for the country folk to God! And here and there the bright glint of sunlight one fancies striking on the spears of some brave knight’s company, riding and singing through the meadows; yet ’tis only gleaming on the window of some lonely, peaceful manor.

Monseigneur (gently). I think thou art a poet, Beppo.

Beppo (offended). I hope not. I only tell thee what there is to see.

Monseigneur. I know it well. I saw it last in summer with my mother.

Beppo. Now shalt thou see it in springtime, and with me; with all the orchard blossom, white and gay as brides with their bouquets. Come!

Monseigneur. Thou wilt take me there?

Beppo. Aye! and cure thee of thy sickness. Thou wilt come?

Monseigneur (yearningly). If only thou wilt help me.

Beppo. Walk but through the corridor, and I will carry thee down the great staircase and through the street and up the hill upon my back. And once there—under the lilac!—Come! (As he helps Monseigneur to struggle to his feet.) Now, then! Give me thine arm. So! Thine round my neck, and mine around thy body—so!—like girls who love each other. (Laughing.) Only we are men! En avant! Marche!

(So they turn, laughing gaily, towards the hangings that mask the corridor; when suddenly is heard sharply and faintly from the courtyard below the brisk challenge of a sentinel—‘Qui va là?’ The boys pause and listen, while gradually nearer and louder each sentinel in turn rapidly repeats it—‘Qui va là?—Qui va là?’—until close outside, at the end of the corridor, a rough, hoarse voice shouts—‘On ne passe pas!’ Follows the dash of steel, and a short, sharp cry of terror. Then complete silence.)

Monseigneur (in a frightened whisper). Beppo!

Beppo. But what is it? An alarm? Some thief? A gipsy?

Monseigneur (trembling). Nay, it is Death—for me!

Beppo (with his arms tightly round him). Death?

Monseigneur. He hath broken into the palace. Ah, Lorrain! Lorrain!—false soldier! Beppo! I can feel him—drawing nearer, ever nearer! He is there, behind the hanging. It is Death!

Beppo (whispers). Art thou sure? Shall I look?

Monseigneur. Aye, look. I dare not. (And while Beppo stands there, shaken and undecided:) Darest thou not?

Beppo. Yea, I dare! (With fear in his heart, he marches boldly to the hanging and swiftly withdraws it, the iron rings rattling and rippling sharply backwards along the rod; and behold! the wall of the corridor that faces them appears wondrously illuminated and transfigured into the faint vision of a chapel; and there on a throne, under the dim high altar, the Angel of Death is seated, an austere and lonely figure, just visible under the mild and steady gleam of many a tall candle and hanging sanctuary lamp. There he sits waiting, as though the youthful Michelangelo had carved him there, with the dreadful dart!—And Beppo sees it and screams.) Monseigneur Death! Nay, take me—I beseech thee! Take me—in my brother’s place. I am useless, friendless—a gipsy!—a vagabond!

Monseigneur. Nay, Beppo! I am still the duke here, and I do not permit it. It is for me he has come.

Beppo. Philippe!

Monseigneur. Out of my way, brother; wouldst disgrace me before Him?

Beppo. Philippe!

(And the little Monseigneur draws himself to his full height, and, as though proudly entering the court and presence of some great rival power, bravely steps some of the few paces still left him towards the faint line, on the other side of which, only that he must cross it, there lies he knows not what. Only this he knows, that neither rank, nor ermine, nor soldiers, nor cannon will now avail him. So he boldly demands of the Figure that seems to look at him so kindly, full in the face:)

Monseigneur. Thou wilt suffer me to kiss my brother first? To say good-bye? (And as Beppo still tries to hold him fast:) Farewell, brother!—and remember! Nay, Beppo! (And so he turns willingly towards the Angel, who now slowly rises to receive him.)

Beppo (as he beats the air passionately with his hands). Philippe! Don’t leave me! Beloved Philippe!

Monseigneur. But see, Beppo! He knows my quality; after all, he rises to receive me! Ah, now—it is easy! See, Beppo; how easy it is! (And the little Monseigneur passes into the Angel’s arms with a smile on his face and the happy laugh of a tired child who at last finds rest, and the vision fades; while Beppo, with a desolating cry, tries to follow him, but his forces fail and he falls there in a swoon.

The cry is so loud, so bitter, that the Nurse comes hurrying in.)

Nurse (angrily). Who is it, screaming so? (She sees Beppo.) Ah! Monseigneur! See!—he has fainted! Doctor! (as the Doctor and the Bishop come quickly in from the corridor.) Monseigneur! (Then she sees it is not Monseigneur, but Beppo.) Nay! it is⸺

Bishop (with authority). Monseigneur! Beppo has gone. I saw him. This time he has run away—for good.

Nurse (puzzled). Ah? (As she helps the Doctor to carry Beppo to the chair.)

Bishop (gaily). He is better, Doctor, is he not? The crisis hath passed; he will recover?

Doctor (doubtfully, bending over the inanimate Beppo in the chair). I think so—with care.

Bishop. Ah! (So he goes back into the corridor and shouts:) The trumpets, Lorrain!—the trumpets! Sound a fanfare! A miracle! Monseigneur recovers. The Duchy is safe!

Nurse (after a glance at the Doctor). A miracle, indeed! (And as the trumpets peal joyously and defiantly, she crosses herself and murmurs:)—Monseigneur!

Walter Frith.

THE CALL OF THE WEST.
A SKETCH OF AN INDIAN REGIMENT.

Through the ‘Kutcha’[7] of the Derajat runs the Indus: it is a shifting river and its tremendous sword of water carves now this channel, now that, on its way to the sea. In 1914 many acres of trees fell before its silver blade in the wood of Turton’s Folly that skirts the approach to the cantonment of Dera Ismail Khan. The road to the railhead at Darya Khan ever shifts with the river’s whims, and is but a track across the drifting sand dunes of the desert. The Indus is a mighty traveller, and the bridge of boats is flung across her in a new place every autumn so that the road travels far from the obliterated line of the previous year. The folk whom one meets upon the road are nomads, or those persistent travellers the Powindahs, who pass over the desert and river in their thousands to leave no more trace than the clouds that travel with the wind. The history of the region is the history of hawk-like travellers; of Alexander the Great who came down the grim passes, horse, foot, and man; of raiders who travel right swiftly and of cavalry that pursues, to this very day. Only the city and the mountains speak of permanence, for the cantonment with its lines and its bungalows is but a halting ground for the soldier folk, who have no abiding place, but travel always like the shifting river and the sands and the winds of the Derajat.

In August 1914 every Sahib gripped his sword when he thought of home, but in the Derajat Brigade the declaration of war did little more than recall its officers from leave, and they came back many hundreds of miles to look at the mountains, whose tribesmen only respect a frontier that is held against them by armed men, as frowning follies that kept them back from real war. September saw a Punjab regiment marching towards those dark hills to take over the Gumal outposts, and another regiment marched back on relief into the cantonment. Very early in October the great conflict levied its first contribution; some sepoys and sowars of a Sikh regiment and a cavalry regiment left Dera Ismail Khan as reinforcements for other corps; leaves from the tree blown by the breeze to the war’s whirlwind. But the cantonment still only stood sentry over the lawless of the frontier hills, nor could move to the war. Then, on October 11, a summons came, and ran along the wires to the Punjabis’ headquarters at Tank, and to Khajuri Kach, and Jandola, and the smaller outposts, that for the first time in the history of the frontier a regiment was to march away from the hills to war, to travel like the Indus to the sea, and cross the pathless ocean to the West.

Now those birds of passage, the Sahibs, go home by that familiar waterway, but for the man of the Punjab it was a summons to ‘Active Service Overseas’ and a strange land. Yet death is the strangest land of all to both Sahibs and sepoys, and in its vast region lies the eternal home of every traveller, so that they faced the way to the unknown right gladly together, and the reservists hastened to join them. There were as many rumours as there were men in the ranks, and each rumour was an enemy. To the Dogras there was the suggestion of violated caste in foreign lands; to the Sikh the pleasant whisper that the Raj feared the Khalsa and was carting the Sikhs away in ships to sink them; to the Pathan the assertion that the German Emperor and his Army were of the Mahomedan faith. But little cared the sepoys in the outposts—where doubtless they knew of the order before their officers, for the wires whisper many things well understood by the babus e’er ever they give official utterance—as they made haste to hand over to the Mahomedan regiment that marched hot foot to relieve them, while a regiment from down-country was railed north with all speed to keep the frontier cantonment at full strength. The Punjab regiment tramped into Dera Ismail Khan in little brown detachments that crossed the wide pale desert to the jingle of mules and the rumble of transport carts, and encamped on a bare parade ground awaiting orders. The General commanding the Derajat Brigade had his orders by then for the great war, so that the cantonment knew yet one more change. The Punjab regiment was extraordinarily busy; all the paraphernalia wherewith each human being encumbers himself, multiplied by one thousand, had to be dealt with. Mess trophies and treasures had to be packed; the regimental office had to be packed; all surplus kit had to be packed. Officers’ bungalows found new tenants; officers’ dogs found new owners; officers’ wives stood ready for their voyage to England on such dates and in such ships as the embarkation officer’s wire should direct. Very quickly the armed host shook itself free of encumbrance and stood equipped for war, the while post-cards from the sepoys’ homes fluttered into their camp, pleading ‘Come to me. Don’t go.’ And the voices that answered this pleading of hidden wives, the voices that replied to the hundred rumours—deep voices of sepoys speaking in the vernacular—will ring in my heart till I die. Thus, a Sikh, speaking to his officer’s wife of his ‘house’: ‘Nay, Huzur, I have not written. What profit to write? She will but say, “Take leave and come, I am ill,” and at this hour what man can get leave? This is without doubt no hour for leave. She will say, “Do not go,” having no understanding, but the Presence knows that there is an Order to go. Therefore from Karachi I will send a post-card saying, “I have gone. Bǎs!”[8]’ Yet it took thought for the welfare of its wives, this regiment of married men, and there was satisfaction in their tones when they announced to the Englishwoman,—‘The Colonel Sahib says that the Government will make provision for them, and that it will be in no man’s power to take it from them. That money will be no one’s “hukh,”[9] Protector of the Poor.’ Some hundred husbands knew content at the word of one man,—‘the Colonel Sahib says.’ And thus the Indian officers, very courteously,—‘We have eaten your salt and we fear nothing: it is good that we go.’ The Hindus spoke ever of the King, ‘Our King calls us,’ but the Mahomedan looked to his officer, ‘My Sahib is pleased to go; I also am pleased.’ All ranks spoke of the regiment’s name: ‘It is good for the name of the regiment that we go.’

A stripling rose up from among the hot shadows on the veranda, ‘Huzur, I am now the Sahib’s orderly. When the regiment went to Somaliland my father was the Sahib’s orderly. My father is dead, but I am the orderly of the Sahib.’ Something more here than the vow taken on enlistment: some vow this of the heart’s own making. And in the camp a spirit stirring among the menials: a young sweeper, son of a line sweeper, salaaming low to his Memsahib, ‘I am known to all men of the regiment, I go with the regiment.’ Surely they go upward as they go onward, these armed hosts of men who lift such humble beings out of the dust of themselves?

The club in the evenings was very gay, as though the fierceness of man was forged from bright metal. The comradeship was deep; ‘brothers in arms’ meant much to those soldier folk; the unspoken word was expressed in every handgrip, ‘Honorary member of my table, you give me orders, or take mine, but both serve King and Country—here’s luck to you.’ And when, on October 27, the Punjab regiment went forth to the war of the world, the courtesy and the tremendous sentiment which the Army feels for the Army was written plain by the cantonment for the city to see. And the city watched in little groups that drifted out through its narrow gates and took up positions where the desert breaks away from the military roads, and the piety of a Hindu has built a bathing place for such pilgrims as desire to perform orthodox ablutions in the waters of the hurrying river. Balu Ram’s Ghat was bleached by vivid sunshine, and an old Brahman accepted the respectful greetings of such as were not thrice-born. The portly tradesman of the cantonment, Beli Ram, whisked up on his bicycle and waited to watch them pass—those Sahibs who jested with him and paid his big bills when promotion worked miracles. Fat and lazy, yet not without shrewd enterprise; plausible and intriguing, but keeping faith in much; charitable, good-natured, indulgent to little children, he was well known to every man, woman, and child in the throng, and those sacrificial men of war, about to set forth on their perilous way, would carry him with them in their memories as ‘not half a bad fellow, old Beli Ram.’

In an empty bungalow among the litter of packing-cases, one young bearer was weeping shamefacedly. For many days he had protested his wish to follow his Sahib’s fortunes, but the night before departure the unknown had assumed a terrific aspect: the landsman dreaded the sea, the servant feared the bloody service of war—the spirit failed. His small bundles swayed aloft on a laden camel towards Darya Khan, but he stayed behind.

In one of the city dwellings two low-caste men, a syce and his brother, argued through the drowsy noon. Family debt, family affection cried ‘Stay,’ and so the charger was led to the door by an orderly who, saluting, announced ‘The syce has run away, what can be done? Nothing can be done. He has entirely departed, the son of Satan.’

The General and his Staff rode through the troops and took up a position beyond the Ghat. The band of a Sikh regiment sent its music rolling out over the river and the dunes. The wives of the officers made a little knot close to the shrine.

The disciplined wheat-coloured companies rippled out on to the dusty road, and those waiting by Balu Ram’s Ghat heard a shout rise deep-throated from its ranks, heard a cheer rise from the troops, horse, foot and guns, that lined its route, and heard the echoes die away across the desert sands, to rise and fall again and again.

In England regiments were marching through London Town, and the traffic was being held back at the crossings, while the housemaids threw open the upper windows and waved handkerchiefs; but by October crowds were silent, having grown weary of cheering the new warlike pageant of their thronged streets. In the hearts of the watching wives, and in the hearts of the British officers, the thoughts were of that hour at home, and not a little of the verdict which the people of those busy streets would pass on these Indian soldiers marching out of Dera Ismail Khan: men of strange faiths, men of diverse tongues, men of no education save for that stern schooling of war decreed by David the soldier poet—‘Thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things.’ Doran had raised this clan in 1857 at the urgent bidding of Lawrence, and it had crossed the seas in turn to China, Burma, and Somaliland, but never with so ill a wind, blowing no man aught of good, as is brewed to-day in Germany’s poisonous cauldrons. It had fought its way to Kabul, and been taken out of victorious action by a subaltern at Ali Masjid, but no mine nor shell had laid its young men low. It had nursed a British regiment that was sick unto death with cholera, and knew no white man by name, or sight, who would slay women, children, and the wounded. Long ago, in November 1858, it had passed from the service of stout John Company to the great service of the Crown, and for fifty-three years it served Empress and Emperors before it laid eyes on the person of its Sovereign, what time each Hindu officer and sepoy, among the millions of Calcutta folk, accounted that sacred privilege of beholding King George more favourable to the soul than three pilgrimages piously performed. In all its history only one man had set foot in England, an Afridi subadar, who attended the Coronation and returned full of mighty tales of the fabulous amount of milk given by our cows, of the work of scavengers done by Jews only, and many things hard to credit. But it was familiar with things strange to the far-off British Isles, this Indian regiment; earthquakes had tossed the villages of the Dogras to rubbish heaps in the spring of 1905, and for weary years plague had stricken the homes of Sikhs and Punjabi Mahomedans, while the neighbours of the Khattaks and Afridis ever held finger to rifle trigger. Neither pestilence, famine, battle, murder, nor sudden death were unknown to the men whose footsteps the knot of watchers by the Ghat could hear approaching, though months of sunless skies and sodden ground, bitter poverty of European slums, flowers tossed to the man of the East by white women, vast lands without mosque or temple or breath of the thronged bazaar, were things outside their experience, and beyond their imagination, on that October noonday.

The lay mind may fear or favour a regiment’s violence, but it is extraordinarily prone to lose sight of a regiment’s vocation. Now it had been brought home to one of the Englishwomen watching that regiment go forth to war that its strength was dedicated; for on a cold November morning in the Punjab she had seen a line of recruits drawn up opposite the battalion, and had heard the oath and affirmation taken in the vernacular which appointed each recruit a soldier and not a mere public executioner. Roughly translated, this is what she had heard,—‘I do swear,’ the Hindu youngster vowed; ‘I do swear by the holy Granth,’ declared the Sikh stripling; ‘I do solemnly affirm in the presence of Almighty God,’ the youthful Punjabi Mahomedan and Pathan said;—‘that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty the King Emperor, his heirs, and successors, and that I will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully serve in His Majesty’s Indian Forces, and go wherever I am ordered by land or by sea. And that I will observe and obey all commands of any officer set over me, even to the peril of my life.’ Thus, all the lusty yeomen of the northern plains and hills, among whom the Hindus added, ‘So help me God.’ Whereupon, very impressively, the battalion paid its highest honour, and gave its most profound welcome, to its sworn men by presenting arms to them. Moreover, in this matter of vocation, the handful of British officers, who, from the day of the regiment’s birth, had guided it in the way it should go through succeeding generations, held a mandate that invoked supreme authority:

‘By the Grace of God ... Defender of the Faith ... to our trusty and well beloved ... Gentleman, greeting. We, reposing special trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage, and good conduct, do by these presents constitute and appoint you to be an Officer ... and you are at all times to exercise and well discipline in arms, both the inferior officers and men serving under you, and use your best endeavours to keep them in good order and discipline. And We do hereby command them to obey you as their superior officer, and you to observe and follow such orders and directions, as from time to time you shall receive from Us or any your Superior Officer, according to the rules and discipline of war in pursuance of the trust hereby reposed in you.’

And so when, across the shadeless parade ground where only the clouds threw shadows, the shouting ranks approached the Ghat, it was plain that each soldier felt with the Israelites of old that it is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes or in man, for the Dogras were calling on Kali, the Sikhs on their Gurus, and the Mahomedans on Allah the God of Battles.

Only a bugler was given to frivolity. Some weeks before, in the pride of his schooling, he had questioned a Memsahib eagerly, ‘Can the Presence read? Can the Presence write?’ and was crestfallen at meeting his match. Yet a professional hope remained. ‘Can the Presence beegle?’[10] he challenged, and established complete superiority. His mother had stood by his side that day; a tall, dignified, strictly secluded woman of the purdah, but neither she, nor any Indian wife or mother of the sepoy folk, stood watching the regiment depart. Only the Englishwomen bade all God speed, while the happy little bugler went forth to war and cheered his own performance.

The British officers wheeled their chargers up to the group of their countrywomen; and the Indian officers left the shouting companies to step aside, salute, and shake hands. Then all passed on. The Sikh band struck up ‘For Auld Lang Syne,’ and many thought of the gallant comrade who would never be forgotten by his regiment, now leaving his lonely grave behind. It was a strangely dramatic chance that turned this regiment of all regiments away from the hills of the Mahsuds, for scarce six months were gone since that day when, with reversed arms, it had laid to rest the great Dodd, soldier, ruler, and friend of the frontier where he fell, foully murdered, amid the false peace of his own border garden. On the day of his burial the thunder roared from the treacherous hills, the Last Post bade him sleep well, the solemn volleys promised stern remembrance, and every officer and man of his regiment longed to avenge him according to the Rules of War. But the orders and directions ran otherwise, and so ‘Doran Sahib-ki-Paltan’ marched away from Waziristan, through Balu Ram’s Ghat, with all the officers of the brigade bearing it good company as far as the bridge of boats across the Indus, whence it set forth to a destination unknown, with the trusty and well-beloved Gentlemen leading.

That night the young bearer realised suddenly that his Sahib had gone, and, like a dog that misses his master and gives chase, he stood up and clamoured to the officer’s wife, ‘Huzur, get me an ekha that I may now drive to Darya Khan while there is yet time. Without doubt I must of necessity go with my Sahib.’ Half an hour later a scarecrow wrapped in a blanket stood at her door, and a syce’s voice insisted, ‘Memsahib! Memsahib! get me an ekha and I will go to the Sahib and Moti the mare. And give no money to my brother, Huzur, for he has taken all my clothes so that I should not go. But I go now very swiftly. There is four annas to pay to the khansamah, if the Presence will give it? Salaam!’

And over the dim desert, through the starless night, by the groping light of little crazy oil lamps, with endless joltings and bumpings, to where the sleeping regiment waited to entrain at dawn, there drove urgently Burgwan Das, bearer, and Bhagu, syce.

John Travers.