"Oh, the City, the City all day, and for my sins Exeter Hall, because my father's that sort of man; and in the evenings, parlour games, lawn tennis, parties,—my mother's that kind of woman; lecturing on minerals at the Polytechnics, debating at the mock Parliament, slumming in Southwark. Lord, how sick I was of it all—oh, how sick and tired! But now these woods, this life, if I could only understand,—meeting men, real men like you, with bodies instead of only souls."
"Poor little beggar! Yet I suppose there were things you liked even in your London?"
"Yes, cycling, boating, the debates, the lecturing, thinking, reading, finding out things. After all, it's a wonderful place, the centre of everything, the middle of the whole world."
"Give me the outside edge," said the Blackguard, "the jumping-off place where you look out into the dark occasionally, and catch a glimpse of heaven or hell through the window."
"That sounds like poetry."
"And it feels like life. I've never read a book, but I've lived—you bet, I've lived! Great gods, it's better than books; it's better than London, as you'll see when you get to live. You don't understand things yet. You don't know what it is to be in danger, to feel your heart jump with excitement, to feel your blood dance at the order to fire, to kill men, to be shot at. I used to like a bull feast once in Spain, but that's tame; to fight in our insurrections—that was better. Even a dead nation must have a little fun, and so, because we're not strong enough to fight our neighbours, we have comical insurrections among ourselves. We are quite bloodthirsty, and some people really get hurt. But there's not even that these last few years. Poor old Spain! Once she was mistress of the earth, once we Spaniards lived for war and wine and love, and had it all until we were satisfied. Now there are one or two live Spaniards like me, but to live as our fathers lived we have to serve under another flag.
"When you wake up, when you've forgotten all about that infernal old Balham, you'll see that there's another London, the centre of the Empire, which has stolen the fire from heaven that once belonged to Spain. We're making that Empire, we cowboys and miners, magistrates and mounted police of the frontier,—making the new empire in Australia, in Canada, in Africa, in India. That's what it means, the frontier which you've been trying, after your little Balham way, to live in these last few days." Then the Blackguard relapsed into a shamefaced chuckle. "By Jove, I didn't think I had it in me. I'm going to preach to the boys when I get back to camp. I'll make 'em sit up, and if they laugh I'll punch their heads till they're sick."
The hillside was clothed beneath the pines with a dense wet jungle of rotting deadfall, fruit bushes gorgeous with blossom, and the immense leaves poised on viciously barbed stems of the devil-club. After climbing for a very long time, the riders came to the brow of this lowest spur of the mountains, from whence the trail wound on through big timber for many a weary mile, gently rising save where there was an occasional abrupt slope to be surmounted. The top of the ridge was a gigantic stairway, and it was sundown before the Tenderfoot and his guide came to the base of the upper foothills.
"I say," said the Tenderfoot, as they breathed their horses before breasting the zig-zag trail up this mountain,—"I've been too much ashamed to say anything, but will these people at the Throne mind my coming without any luggage?"
"They won't mind, if you don't."