Chapter VI: Part 6

When she had had her little say, he would read her ecstatic words from the Song of Solomon and give her coffee filled with a sharp-sweet little flavouring, and then she would forget everything except his marvellous love-making. To the subtleties and ecstasies of love she had always remained a stranger. She had known nothing more intoxicating than her own desire, and that she had achieved. Josiah had always treated her with Presbyterian primness, wooing her with perfectly wooden propriety. Her ecstasy of Josiah’s embrace lay in release from home. When home dwindled into hemi-spheral distances, the ecstasy of Josiah ceased. He was a dull lover, in other words a perfect husband, and he retained a certain prosaic modesty of courtship by his total absence of any poetry of motive or motion. On occasions of connubial felicity he never did more than read her a chapter from the Epistles of St. Paul. The difference between St. Paul and Solomon was considerable.

The Prince remembered the word of the Prophet, whose blood ran in his tropical veins, and how Mohammed had said to every faithful, “Woman is thy field, plough her after thy will.” And he made love to Theodosia, to all her emotion and to all her soul, and with his body did worship and with his soul did adore her until she would swoon in his arms, and only awake from swoon to become sufficiently and sweetly conscious that she was swooning again. Often an Asiatic moon looked through the forests and gardens and lighted on her beautiful primrose hair as it lay in wet wythes across the hot mouth of His High Serenity and Holy Highness, who was graciously pleased for the moment to forget his race-horses in France and his chorus girls in England, and even the Exalted Star of India, which he had received during his last visit to Calcutta. For her part, Theodosia awoke to all that he roused in her. Whithersoever he called, she followed him even in a dream. Surely he had never known white woman like her, for she was the first to respond to his love and not to his pearls. And she satisfied his soul as well as his body. He found something strange and almost uncanny in her hidden beauty and unconscious charm. She came to exercise a magical effect on him, and when he remembered how she had come to him out of the seas, like Aphrodite through the foam, she became poetry and passion, a veritable goddess in his eye. Her sway and power became tantamount in the seraglio and, had she cared, supreme through the Palace and through the dominions of the Prince.

It was so strange, in his eyes, that she never asked him a favour and even gave him back the jewels with which he delighted to heap her sinuous body. Through unguents and the fingers of her attendants she had acquired a grace and dexterity for which her health and simplicity of life had prepared the way. When she lay sleeping she lay like a white snake that had just sloughed its scales, firm and warm and rippling. The Prince was appreciative of the gifts of Allah and felt frequently grateful that he was of the kindred of the Prophet.

It was true that he was often criticised in the Orient for his excessive love of things European, of English clothes, white women and French luxuries, but it was never dreamed or hinted that he could betray the faith of Islam. Astuteness as well as piety combined to keep him steady on that point. With the European Governments he was on the best of terms. His subtle religious influence was always thrown on the side of the English Raj, and a letter from his pen was always accorded special attention whenever he deigned to point out some unnoticed excellence of English rule or to convey some sentiment of the East to her understanding rulers. Though excluded from certain clubs, he stood socially very high in Europe.

Nevertheless there were movements abroad in Asia, and the ways of the Prince were not well seen by the Nationalists and devotees of Asiatic Bolshevism, and he was freely criticised and even cursed among many who should have been his followers. He had the misfortune to be equally distasteful to students with European culture, who applied a knowledge of the Higher Mathematics and chemistry to bomb manufacture in the East, and to the fanatics, who hated him for the horrible rumour that he had introduced a white missionary woman into his household.

But no rumour reached Theodosia, who was lulled to ease and at moments lifted to ecstasy, until she forgot her father and her father’s Kirk. The strictness that had been bred into her with a ramrod lapsed. She gave herself up to her lover until she could hardly bear to pass a day or a night without him. The sound of revolution and uprising never reached her. She never read apprehension on his strained features or realised that he loved her every hour as though it might be their last. She loved him each time as though it were the first. It was her perennial spirit. They were great and wonderful lovers, that was all.

* * * * *

The end was bound to come and it came. A day broke with ominous quiet over the Palace. The Prince had departed that morning on business of state for many days. He was travelling on his way to India. His secretary had just telegraphed the number of guns that the station master and the British Government were expected to provide, also the height and trappings necessary for the elephants privileged to carry his baggage and the holy bath water.... An hour or two passed of perfect calm.... Then a low wail arose outside the Palace and a frightened woman crept into the women’s quarters, spreading word that the holy one, the beloved of the Prophet, had been assassinated at the railway station. A moan swept through the harem like a subconscious sob of Suttee, as though every woman that had ever lain in his arms was turning her face to the wall to die. Slaves threw themselves on the ground and tore out their hair, mourning their dead lord with pitiful and heart-lacerating sounds. From outside the Palace rolled the rumble of confusion and disaster. Cries and occasional shots pierced the still of the afternoon air.

Theodosia, much astonied, felt neither grief nor fear. She had loved him as she could never love a husband or one of her own race. He was a vivid unreality, a weird monster, who came to her in dream, half Cupid and half Caliban, but he had appealed to the fairy part of her nature, and he had raped her soul till she felt there was none left. Therefore she sat without regrets and without remorse carelessly waiting what might come. As the shouts outside grew fiercer, women were thrown into hysterics of fear and grief.

Nobody knew now what might come. Theodosia was the only one who might have been expected to feel some tremor, to show some fear, for within her moved the child of the Prince. She kept her mind unstricken within herself that the child might not be frightened in the womb or released before the hour. Something stronger than herself upheld her. An immortal mood lifted her above the accidents of Oriental revolution. She was not overmatched by circumstances nor overthrown by approaching fate. She did not trouble to imagine the future in which she lived or died. She sat there vacant-minded with full body and high heart in that Palace of mourning and terrified despair. More than ever before in her life she knew that she was not of those around her. The mysterious sense of power and isolation drew her apart, which had once drawn her apart from her family in Ireland. During another hour fell expectancy hung over all. At last came knocks, cries and repeated inquiry. The guards had left their post so that the fanatics were able to enter without a word. The revolutionary students had settled the fate of the Prince at the railway station. It remained for the strict reactionaries to carry out a visitation of the harem.

The infidel wife of the favoured child of the Prophet had long been a ribald rumour upon the lips of their enemies. They had smarted too long under the taunts of other Moslem sects. Armed men, reeking with dust and fury, intruded. The harem was laid desecrate. The women crouched upon the floor of the inner chamber awaiting the sword. Theodosia retired to the room which privilege had accorded her and sat bolt upright. It had struck her that they would not dare to kill her while she carried child, the sacred child of the head of their own religion. But was it likely that they could know of her condition? She was only thinking how to save her child. Fate seemed always condemning her to child-bearing in perilous places. She stripped her pregnant body and threw over herself the beautiful opera cloak that her lover had given her. Then she waited. She could hear the harem being interrogated and repeating the formulas of Antichrist: “There is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet!” Each woman repeated the words with abject and craven eagerness. Theodosia was listening and wondering whether their repetition on her own lips would save her child or not. A certain pride sat in the place of her soul.

The search for the infidel woman followed. The inner apartments were ravaged, but the fanatics were surprised to see a white woman advancing coolly towards them, clad in a dark electric blue and green cloak fringed with ostrich fluff round her neck. There was a wild cry: “There is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet!” She stood smilingly shaking her head. Her nonchalance roused their fury and a man advanced threateningly. She saw the glint of steel in his hand and her feet froze to the marble steps. She was surrounded by assassins on every side, and she was not unaware of the danger. She opened her cloak and lifting it upon both arms, said simply, “Respect the child of the highly favoured son of the Prophet.” They drew back, crying, “It is true! She bears the child of the Prophet. Let her acknowledge Islam and live!” She stood there watching them idly and carelessly as in a dream. “Acknowledge there is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet!” they screamed, with swords and daggers lifted within striking distances.

“There is one God,” she replied, and a silence as of death weighed upon the Palace and upon her words. “The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God!” A groan passed through the fanatics on hearing this Christian blasphemy within the very dwelling of the head of their faith. Was it possible that this white infidel had been tolerated within, as rumour said, in order to corrupt the Moslem wives of the holy one and to defile the very hearth of their religion with Christianity? Now they knew the worst. They threw themselves upon her, and holding her wrists and ankles, carried her within and out of sight of the other women.... There was a pause and no sound was heard in that Palace until the cry of a newly-delivered child. A crowd of men and women had gathered outside. To them was shortly carried a dusky new-born boy. All knelt in adoration, for it was a Prince of the blood and kindred of the Prophet, and the hereditary head of the faith. Perfect and unscratched and unbruised was the child, as always are children born Cæsareanwise.

But even in that last hour of agony Theodosia found joy to look upon the child that was born into the world, before it was taken away from her for ever, and strength to cry aloud to her torturers, “The Father is God and the Son is God!” She could say no further, for a strong hand took her throat and she felt a ropelike strangulation shorten and finally quench her consciousness. Fiercely the blood seethed in her temples and the breath battered the tissue of her lungs. Swiftly, swiftly the fairy blood danced out of her heart and poured in torrents upon the floor. Slowly, slowly she died, not unworthily of a daughter of John Calvin, and was at eternal rest.

In the days of the Roman persecutions she would have not failed to become a spouse of Christ. She could have stood in the arena as calmly as she stood in the seraglio, and let her body be meshed by the net of the _retiarius_ as smilingly as she had lifted the folds of her opera cloak. When the women crept back frightened in the morning they found her body where her slayers had left it. Round her twisted neck was tightly tied a long plait of her primrose-coloured hair. It lay like a spilth of wild honey upon a broken bough of a white ash-tree in the first break of dawn, after a stormy night in some far away country of the West.

MIDIR AND ETAIN

Once upon a time the Kingdom of Meath was as rocky and stone-bound as the fields of Connaught to-day. Etain the girl fairy lived with Midir the King of the Elf-mounds of Ireland. She was the most beautiful of her kind, for the folk of Ireland judged beauty ever afterward by Etain the beautiful, but she was unstable and fitful. She had a mind and a half-memory, as well as a full memory. It was out of her half-memory that Midir heard her speak in her sleep of other lovers beside himself. With brooding on her strangeness he became a stranger to her in his own mind. With that he left her and went riding upon his coal-black horse. A snow-white hound ran for shadow by its side, for no fairy horse can throw a shape upon the ground.

It was a second wife he brought home. She was also of the fey, and her jealousy was more terrible than the jealousy of women born. She dealt secretly with her Druids to ply Etain with spells. They made Etain as a butterfly that eateth flowers. Etain fluttered vainly into Midir’s sight, but his eyes were cast elsewhere and the Druids’ wind blew Etain like a silken leaf across moor. Seven years she was carried hither and thither by the king-winds of Ireland until she lighted in the palace of Midir’s dear foster-son by the Boyne water. He knew her for woman under fey and built her a little house with windows instead of doors, and fed her with bog myrtle and rowanberries. At evening she would assume her ancient beauty. For the Druid spell was by the Sun and by the Moon and lost power in the twilight, which is neither of sunshine nor moonlight. Midir’s Druids knew she was come by Boyne water and hastened till they found her bower hanging like a swallow’s room to the palace walls. Etain was drying her wings in the light. With a magic blast they tossed her again upon the elements, and for seven years she floated like a little satin cloud hither and thither.

A lesser wind dropped her into the court where the people of Ulster sucked sweet hydromel from methers. Etain fell into the cup beside the King’s wife. It was a woman’s cup and white with milk, so that she swallowed Etain for a white curd. In earthly shape was Etain reborn and then was she called Etain, for her fairy name was not revealed then or thereafter by dream or Druid. With Ulster’s princely daughters she was reared till the noon of maidenhead. One day they bathed together in the blue speckled sea. A strange horseman rode by upon a coal-black horse, and a seagull sailed for silvery shadow under its hoofs. All but Etain slipped into the waves, but she stood, caught in her half-mind. The stranger said, so that she heard:

“She was so delicate that a Queen quaffed her unwitting. Her place is not with earth children. For her sake Meath shall be smoother than sea and the Elf-mounds of Ireland laid in ruin. The men of Ireland shall measure beauty by her name for ever.”

He said, and slipped behind air and was unseen. Hither and thither the princely maidens of Ulster waded for wonder and for fear of his words. But Etain stood trembling like a winged thing in a draught of fire.

Eochy was King of Ireland and lived in the demesne of Meath. For the man of Meath is the ruler of the men of Ireland. But the rocks of Meath gave no place to his horses, and the rushes no milk to his cows. He was wont to ride round Ireland visiting every King and Kingling of his allegiance. His loneliness for one was not healed by the company of the many. He stayed unwedded, not finding mate among the royal women of Ireland. Harpers he had sent upon horses and wizards upon air to find one willing and worthy to queen Ireland. Lastly he rode out with only a favourite harper alone with him. Toward evening they found Etain. A purple mantle stitched with silver hung across her shoulder. With a silver comb she drew her hair into plaits. Her cheeks were red as the sun upon the West, and her arms were whiter than the snow falling at dawn. Her teeth were pearls dashed in the foam of the sea. Her eyebrows were darker than the wing of the bright beetle.

The King asked her name. “I am Etain of the Elf-mounds,” she said; for by dreaming she had happed upon the place she came from. He asked if she were betrothed, and she told him that the Kings and noblemen of the Faery came wooing her by all the wells and waterways of Ireland. To forsake all the women of the world the King promised, if she would but come with him to Meath. But for love of the World-under-wave she would not queen Ireland.

Eochy returned to his home. By day he lay him down, and by night he rode and swam. Love of Etain let him not enjoy the life and valour of the world. Druid and harper could not quell the pangs of his pain nor the sorrow of his sickness. A leech came, who could tell the disease in the house from the smoke curling on the roof-top. “No need to lament,” quoth he, approaching the palace, “this man is undone by one of the two peerless plagues which afflict the men of Ireland. It is envy or it is love.” He saw the King and said: “It is not envy. It is beyond the dream of Druid and the healing of harpers. The herb of the physician cannot attain thereto.” The King rose and said: “My disease hath run deeper than my covering of skin. My love is a kingdom of strength and I am held therein. I am wrestling with a spectre. I am tossed to Heaven and I am thrown into the sea. I am enamoured of an echo.”

“Better seek the rock that gave you the echo,” said the leech, and the King set riding again with his harper. When they approached the dwelling of Etain, the King sent his harper to play in her hearing while he waited the distance of the sound away. Etain saw the King passing and took no notice, for she saw the darkness of his horse’s shadow upon the rocks. But of his sweetest the royal harper harped. When he played of the wonders and wooings of Meath, Etain listened and the Boyne river passed from her memory, and the Kingdom of the Elf-mounds from her half-memory. She rose to reward the harper. Nothing would he take but to tell her his story. He told her of Eochy, High King of Ireland, wasting away for her sake, until she took pity and told him to send the King to tryst at dawn that he might live and not die of her.

At dawn of dawn one drew near to her, and courted her with tales of the beauty and bravery of Meath. She soothed his love and went her way in the twilight. In the true dawn came the King, and when he found her gone he wished to lie down and die. His harper found Etain and persuaded her to tryst with the King at the dawn of the morrow. Once again it was the wraith that came to Etain in the twilight of dawn, but with the likeness and the voice of Eochy. The wraith told her that the women of Meath had lost all beauty in the night. Etain said: “It is with Eochy and not with you that I trysted at dawn lest he should come to his death.” The wraith replied: “It were better that you should court me than the sick King, for I was your lover in the aforetime.”

Ever was Etain remembering, and the wraith spoke to her by the fairy name that lay in her half-memory, and said: “I am Midir and by the sorcery of Druids we were driven apart. Again have I found thee as ever of enduring beauty and faithless mind. When I prattled to thee of the Methians thou thoughtest I was their King. King am I only of those who pass under wave and beyond world.” Then was Etain divided between her love for Faery and her anger at the trick which Midir had played against her, and she made pretence that she would marry the man who had Meath for his own. Answered Midir: “Can I not give thee all the may-meadows and well-waters of Ireland for bride gift?” Answered Etain: “Even so would I not exchange the Methian royalty for thy lineage, which is none that men know.” “True said,” replied Midir, “for there is no lineage where there is neither birth nor death.” Fiercely he pressed her to return with him to the Elf-mounds, saying: “Thou shalt live for ever with the primrose-haired. Thou shalt be Queen of the tribes who pass all-seeing and unseen through the hills of Ireland. Pleasant are the plains of Ireland, but there is a Plain which is beyond pleasure. Delicious to the minds of men is the sweet hydromel that the women of Ireland brew in vats, but the drink of my country enchanteth every sense together.”

Etain would have laid away her pretence then and gone with Midir, but Eochy drew near with his harper, and the earthly harper drowned the dream of Faery. For a year and a moon and a night Etain lived with Eochy in the Kingdom of Meath, and theirs were all the boundaries of all Ireland. Whoever is Lord of Meath kingeth every bound of Ireland. “The Setting is with the Jewel,” as the Brehons have said. Their allotted time passed and they chanced to sit in the hall of banquet. The inner gates were closed. The armed men were withdrawn from the ramparts, for it was against the chivalry of Ireland to make attack after nightfall. The porter stood alone in the court. A warrior was seen passing within the gates. The porter knew not his face nor his accoutrements and still-stood with fright. His knees kissed and his heels fled from each other. Eochy heard the clinking of his knees and cried aloud to the porter: “Who knocks?”

“Midir of the Elf-mounds,” was the reply, “and I am come to play against the royal harpers for a fee.”

The King of Ireland consented, both for his love of harmony and for his love of the hazard. Now the best harpers in Ireland are they who have learnt their tunes from the herdsmen who listen at the holes of the Elf-mounds, and Midir made sure that no harper of Eochy would play other than echoes of his own music. Very cunningly he played the music of challenge, and sang of the youth and beauty of the world that is ever young, until the old wine in the casks stored under the roof became fresh wine of the grape and poured down the walls. When he had finished, the very warriors and poets of Eochy cried: “Victory indeed!”

Then the King called his favourite harper, who had been stolen out of his cradle by a water-wench, and had heard better music under wave than ever upon earth. Long he played and all listened, Midir most of all. It was no music of Elf-land or echo of the elfin tune, but the music of the cities which have been drowned in the Western sea. The night winds carried the music into the trees outside the royal rath of the King and, though it was winter, they burst into bloom. When he had ended, all present cried: “Victory over victory!” Midir asked the fee he should pay to the royal harper of Ireland. “Clear the plains of Meath smooth of stone!” said the harper, who knew whence Midir came. Midir went as he came.

At dawn the royal steward went out and found the fields as smooth as the face of the clouds, and a great host with fairy oxen carrying away every stone except the magic stones of the Druids, and sinking them into the bogs and waterholes of Ireland.

But Midir was unsatisfied and came to the King the next night, passing porter and portals into the room of banquet. The King asked his need, and he said: “A game of royal chess.” The board was set of gold and silver squares, and the King slew half of Midir’s chessmen. Midir pretended anger, and bade the King choose whatever stake he would. “Rid the fields of Meath of every rush,” said the King. At dawn the royal steward went out and reported that a multitude of small folk were hewing down the last rushes as men destroy a forest.

The next night Eochy came again and asked another game. The King gladly consented to show his skill. Midir played with the wisdom of his own people, and he left no piece but his own standing upon the board, and the King’s kingpiece. The King inquired his stake. “To hold Etain the beautiful in my arms for a moment of time,” said Midir. The King was troubled and bade him return after the month.

At the end of the month Eochy filled his halls with chosen warriors and trim swordsmen, and sent men riding to and fro upon the ramparts. Midir passed through them all. “A debt is due to me,” he said. “I have not considered yet,” said the King. “Etain the beautiful thou hast promised me.” “But only for a moment of time,” said Eochy. Fear came upon Etain, for the year of her forgetfulness was passing from her. To the King she clung, saying: “Until thou resign me I will not go from thee.” “I will not resign thee,” said Eochy, “but he may take thee in his arms for a moment of time as thou art, and in the midst of my warriors, and while my horsemen gallop the battlements.” “Well said,” quoth Midir, “for a moment of love time is longer than all time.” To Etain then he whispered her fairy name.

She withdrew not from his arms, but passed away with him as she had come, through the lattice of the roof. Eochy the King rose and cried aloud as a sheep shouteth to an eagle bearing away her lamb. When the warriors in the court heard the cry of the King, they leaped against each other with their swords in their hands and shame in their eyes. And the riding men spurred to and fro upon the ramparts. Yet no one was seen to pass, and though the King of Ireland rode into the night with his harper and his Druid he never came by Etain the beautiful. But the fields of Royal Meath to this day are smooth of stone and rid of rush.

KATHLEEN

I cannot prove that animals have souls, but I would go so far as to say that the apparatus of a soul is there. Instinct is obviously not soul, and, moreover, is based on hereditary earth-fears and earth desires. With death, instinct dies like any other quality--like the power of smell or the colour of the fur. Reasons given to prove that animals have no souls are that they cannot laugh or they cannot pray, or they do not leave behind those wisps or waifs of floating personality which we call ghosts. Only beings with souls to lose or save have the faculty of impregnating place and time with those unsolved emanations, which we attribute to some great emotional violence or grief or crime, when we say that such and such a house is haunted. But then, if the material of a house can be haunted--that is, possessed by spirits, good or evil, of the past--why should it not be possible for an animal to become possessed and, being sentient and animate, to reproduce such effects as that same spirit would have on a human body?

But of themselves animals have no souls. Otherwise, one might sadly imagine what a multitude of ghosts would haunt the human race. Would not the old coach roads be infested with phantom horses once worn slowly to death in order to keep the system of mails and stages, before the era of railways, up to time? Would not numberless donkeys haunt the sea sands? And all the cats and dogs left to starve in deserted houses should provide the spectral shapes of their anguish and despair, all manner of feline phantoms and canine come-backs. But, however inhumanly an animal dies, it is just because it is not human that it leaves no avenging or haunting emanation on time’s spectroscope.

But an animal is susceptible of lodging a soul or spirit escaped from some other source. Holy Writ and Mediæval Sorcery combine to reassure us on that point. The driving of the evil spirits out of their human host into the Gadarene swine was the greatest experiment in Psychical Research since the seance of Endor, when the witch raised Samuel from the dead with the deliberate dare-devilry of a Kensington Pythoness. The Gadarene swine showed that the bodies of animals could be properly possessed by spirits, and of course the necromantic Middle Ages broidered every single Gospel fact to the full, and recorded every kind of fantastic variant such as familiar spirits occupying owls and men’s souls entering into wolves; all the horrible legend of lycanthropy, to give it its right name. The accepted fact that spirits could so easily make themselves at home in an animal’s body led the theologians to the theological deduction that an animal could not possibly have had a soul. It was empty, in fact. A human body, of course, is not easily occupied by spirits unless the person has been foolish enough to get out of his body and lose the way back. However, that is another story.

To return to Psychical Research and the animal world, nothing is better attested than the perception of the unseen to which the primitive instinct of a dog is liable. Our eyes are often too scaled or civilised to see what is happening in our own drawing-rooms. Dogs sometimes follow with their eyes some passing apparition which is held from their owner’s sight. And they rise and shiver in that numbing ice-breath, which is so common a concomitant of that which comes from the unseen. I have known of caged birds dying, well, it was said of a cold draught, but really of sheer terror....

Of leaving ghosts themselves animals have no specific record though they frequently figure in ghost stories. But the survivals and superannuations of human personality do return under animal form. There was the case of a Scotch recluse, who had a morbid little way about him, and was always upsetting his prosaic family by threatening to return to them in the body of one of his many pet sporting dogs. He was so insistent on this subject that the moment he died his family had all his dogs destroyed, but he came back all the same and rather unpleasantly, for visitors used to complain of the whining and scratching of a dog at their door during the night. Horses have certainly been known to make their distress known to their owners by telepathic means, whether they have thrown a foal untimely or stumbled into wire in the dark.

An old school friend of mine, Edward (and the family name I leave out) was convinced that a woman’s spirit dwelt in his favourite mare, but the circumstances he would never allow to be studied scientifically or published in any way. As he has long left the country, and as I think that I alone saw the story from start to finish (and can now evolve some theory) I will tell it as well as I can, always making the reservation that it is an unpleasant story in the extreme. However, with the necessary changes in names and places it can do no harm to present it to the morbid.

We were all at school together, Edward, Lord Petersfield (that was not his name) and myself, and Eton will make a very good disguise for the name of the Public School. Edward and Petersfield were prominent in athletics from the first, though Petersfield was always ahead. He was a bullnecked fellow with a face and nose of the type the Americans feelingly describe as “plug-ugly.” He had no brain, and being a peer’s son would never have been expected to use it if he had one, but he had tremendous grit and determination to collect all that he wanted in the shape of silver cups and coloured caps--in glorification of his bodily prowess. On the whole they prove delusive trophies to English youth, choking off higher ambitions and satisfying young men with a physical fitness which cannot last. Petersfield was really supreme of this type, brave, unscrupulous, thick-skinned and self-centred. He was the finest kick at football in the school or any school. I can still see the ball darting more than bouncing from his toe like a billiard ball from the cue, or describing long parabolas across the playing field like one of those drawings which illustrate the curve and velocity of cannon balls. And his pride and self-conceit! Well, it was our fault, for we worshipped as much as we disliked him. I think we feared him as well. He had such a relentless way of hurling others out of his path. He insisted on being first choice always. He had to be captain. He had to be winner. He had to be the record maker. Being second was poisonous to him. He could not stand being honourably beaten. He was a fine winner but a bad loser.

It was the same in later life. He was a fine billiard player, but, being once defeated in a passing game at the club, he put down his cue and never played again. Defeat, however honourable, was the only thing that appeared to hurt him. To the racket and bruises of an athletic career he was impervious. Besides, he gave as good as he took. His curiously ugly face was attributed to a streak of foreign blood. Certainly he had a full-blooded Oriental grandmother. Boys of foreign descent more often showed a taste at school for pretty clothes and expensive sweets. It was odd in those days to see one, captain of an English school Eleven charging and barging, and swearing like any muscular Christian. Of course there was plenty of English blood on his father’s side, and it was only while he was a small youth that he was chaffed about the colour of his Asiatic relations with that considerate tact which the English schoolboy has made his own. He soon could look after himself, and played cricket as well as football for the school. The mixture of blood made him strong as a mongrel and his endless conceit made him courageous. He was steeled, not unnerved, by the presence of a large crowd, and could be depended upon to make runs on a bad pitch. But he was always disliked.

Between Petersfield and Edward there had been a feud as fags when they first came to school, and it had always rankled. As soon as Petersfield found his level he had tried to bully Edward, and I remember the day when Edward decided to stand him no longer. He found himself cornered in another boy’s room, and seeing Petersfield descending upon him he snatched a knife from the table, and thrust it with a boy’s frenzy into his enemy. There was a lot of blood and a serious row. Luckily Petersfield was tough and no artery was severed. The parents of both boys were summoned by the Headmaster, and it was wisely decided to hush everything up. For the rest of their school life they were often athletic rivals, but they managed to keep out of each other’s way. They both reached the Eleven eventually, and whatever ill-humour remained was discharged on the football field. Petersfield left all his contemporaries behind, and was regarded as the best kick the school had ever produced, which set his selfishness and self-conceit running into a settled mould.

The privileges and good things of the English aristocratic life were abundantly his. The combination of wealth from abroad, title from home, and athletic prowess at school opened every club and country house to Petersfield. He went wherever he wished, and nine mothers out of ten encouraged their daughters to follow and flatter him without thinking whether he was likely to make an ideal husband, or perhaps because English mothers seem to believe that the ideal husband is the third stage of the idolised schoolboy who has become an idle bachelor.

Petersfield and Edward used to meet again in after life during the hunting season. In face of the solemn realities connected with the pursuit of foxes they could well afford to forget their disagreements at school. Edward used to hunt regularly, for in those days hunting was not out of the reach and pocket of those English country families for whom the sport had been divinely designed. The time had not yet come for the sport to become the monied luxury of townsmen rather than the occupation of squires, when men of wealth would command the hunts their fortunes supported, and when their lack of horsemanship and speed in the field would be met by a supply of well-aniseeded foxes and even three-padded Reynards, amputated for the benefit of sporting stalwarts who had paid to be in at the death. The King of Sports would have to be brought within range of the Kings of Commerce and Stock-broking. In the greater days of fox-hunting, Petersfield and Edward both rode in the first flight. Hunting was a serious matter in Leicestershire then, and it was a joy to behold how the hard-riding squires and gentlemen jockeys kept the after-Christmas crowd at a polite distance by forcing a tempestuous pace over the oxers and leaving the colliding Cockneys to drift into the distance. On such occasions there arose a closer understanding between Edward and Petersfield. They were both well mounted, and had no quarrel in the open. Indeed, by this time they must have forgotten the old rivalry at school. But it had left an impression on my mind, and, remembering how Petersfield had been able to snatch prize after prize in front of Edward’s nose, I would have been well satisfied to see him forfeit one of the more substantial gains in life to my friend.

There came a splendid season with record runs interspersed through the finest of hunting weather. The Leicestershire colonies settled down to their Elysian fields with no cloud on the horizon except the prospect of having to find a new Master for one of the best-known packs. Fortunately neither Petersfield nor Edward had any ambition that way, otherwise I would have been really grieved had Petersfield snatched the Mastership to himself. For any such public and honourable post I considered that Edward had far higher qualifications. His temper was more even, and he often thought of others besides himself.

When the time came for the renewal of their rivalry I noticed with interest and relief that it was over a woman that they were stirred, first vaguely and hesitatingly, and at last very relentlessly. Nevertheless the fair sex lead to far less unpleasantness in England than what are called sporting disputes. An Englishman who is kept out of some great sporting position or done out of his place in a team of eleven will harbour vendetta all his life. But for a jilting fiancée or a forsaking wife he will find a kind of bored consolation elsewhere. The arrows of love are fortunately blunted by the northern climate.

England is a man’s country not a woman’s. Affairs of honour, if they arise, rise in the realm of sport, not of gallantry. Cheating at cards, accusations of foul play, even labelling a man a dangerous shot, will set men fiercely apart, and will blind accuser and accused to the consequences. But as a rule men do not fight duels over women or lose their heads merely because they have lost their hearts. There are always as many mermaids in the sea as ever emerged from its waves. It was unfortunate and unnecessary, therefore, that Petersfield and Edward should have discovered that the one and only girl for them resided in the same person. Trouble stared them in the face the moment Kathleen FitzClare arrived to stay at the same hunting lodge where they were guests. But her charms are no part of my story or at least any detailed description of them. Their effect certainly is. They seemed to affect Petersfield and Edward both with the same deadly fascination, for they both began to court her in the intervals of pursuing the fox. I was thrown constantly with all three, and found myself something of a neutral pacemaker for Edward, with an inclination to ride off Petersfield if I could. But the game was so obviously one where the third man cannot interfere. The contest was as keen as could be expected among men whose first thoughts lay with hunting all the time. The game went to Petersfield.

Though I think on a desert island or on a social level Kathleen would have chosen Edward for the amiabilities which the other never had, Petersfield could urge a number of qualities in his cause, which counted high in the England of those days. A prospective Peerage still argued nobility and probably gentle blood. His wealth was based on land reinforced by a fortune abroad. He was unpopular, but his position was strong, and he could stroll into Parliament or a first-rate club, or most country houses, with very little preliminaries.

He was still pushing for prizes and generally picking them up whether he had to make an exertion or not. Perhaps he won them too easily, for he never had to give that concentration of purpose and pain by which alone the greatest trophies are won. He had distanced us all at school without taking the trouble to train himself, and in later life it was the same. Of him it was said that he could have played cricket for England and won the Grand National. He had the calibre for both but not the self-denial. He took his sport for his personal pride and pleasure and not for its own reward. It was his pleasure to keep his strong body magnificently fit, but he had no use for asceticism or reducing his weight or the toils of first class cricket and steeplechasing. And his pride was sufficiently served by the ease with which he could hold his own among the amateurs of his time. Nor was he the sort to love a woman with the bloodless devotion of a Harry Esmond. When he saw an easy and pleasurable chance to make love he took it. Edward became deeply in love with Kathleen, but Petersfield forced the pace and in the end he took her away. The day came when Edward realised that it was all up. We were coming up the stairs when we caught sight of Petersfield and Kathleen on the higher landing together. He was leaning backward and she seemed almost to be dragged forward by the eddy of his lips. I swore softly, but Edward turned a little pale and said nothing. Petersfield looked rather like one of those Satyrs that are so often depicted on classical altars. Well it made me hot and Edward cold, poor fellow! I do not suppose Petersfield was ever particularly passionate, but as she turned round I could see the glint of his teeth as he drew his mouth across her shoulders.... Their engagement was announced soon after.... At the wedding a curious incident happened. Edward crept into the church at the last moment, and, as luck would have it, ran into the bride. Without a word but with a face like marble she broke her wedding bouquet and handed one half to Edward. Nobody but myself saw the incident.

Edward seemed quite crushed for a long time after she married Petersfield, but his early training had prepared him for being knocked out from the same quarter. He never mentioned it to me then or afterwards. As for Kathleen--for all that the world knew, it was a happy marriage. Her relatives were wildly pleased and marriages are made to please relatives. She kept her end up and always showed herself well groomed and proud when she appeared in public, and perky and pleasant in the private houses she visited. Her behaviour showed the normal attitude with which women equally conceal the most fantastic tragedies or some secret happiness. You never can know by their conduct whether women have cancer or a lover. The same intangible veil conceals the most terrible secrets within. A man will make a hullabulloo over either, and tell all his friends in the Club sooner or later. Men are fools. Women will talk about everything that concerns the secrets of others, but their own they keep more often than people know. Kathleen kept hers and no one was a penny the wiser. But the marriage did not last. Neither women nor horses ever lasted Petersfield long. He was always passing restlessly on his way to try another. But there was no scandal or divorce in Kathleen’s case. In fact nobody thought anything was amiss until she was found dead one morning, and the Coroner stated at somewhat embarrassing length his reasons for supposing that she had taken an overdose of sleeping draught accidentally!

She had been out hunting the day before, and Edward told me that he had had a long talk with her. They had always remained close friends and met more and more gladly. This occasion had been Edward’s last memory of her, and they had met at the covertside and ridden into a corner field together. She had talked to Edward with more than her usual gay manner, with a real tenderness in fact, as though she were going for a far journey and they were not likely to meet again that season and for longer. She had shewn herself more interested in Edward than in the hounds, and had insisted on his wheeling his horse round and round behind the covert. He could not remember that she had told him anything important, certainly nothing to illuminate the dark tragedy of the morning after, but her manner had impressed him deeply. She seemed to be prescient of a coming disaster and unwilling for him to leave her side. She had kept him there, he could not tell whether it was ten minutes or an hour, but the hunt had meantime disappeared. Then with a handshake and allowing him to kiss her hand she had ridden home leaving him an imperishable souvenir. Of course he never saw her again, but, what was so curious, he could not recall a word that she had said. He was fortunately able to keep the incident from the Coroner whose interpretation would almost certainly have been wrong.

Edward felt her death terribly and took a good deal of the widower’s pose and portion upon himself. Petersfield continued hunting that season as though nothing had happened, but Edward grew moody and disappeared. He was always imaginative, and imaginative people, instead of being bored, brood and brood, and so a year passed. Petersfield married again without much ado, but Edward did not think it was any slight to Kathleen’s memory. Rather he came to think that, now her husband had remarried, she was more than ever his own, and the feud between the two men collapsed into its own ashes.

* * * * *

After a break of two seasons Edward was hunting again. Petersfield was now Master of the pack, but nothing could ever induce the least collision between the two. Edward’s ambitions and desires had been steadily blunted through life. He had taken an honourable second so often. There seemed nothing left for him but to enjoy good health and a place in the ranks of sport. When they met in the field, he and Petersfield exchanged cheery greeting. It was a good season and they had plenty of hunting matters to discuss. They were having rattling runs and the Hunt made lively reading in the rather monotonous chronicle of foxhunting which spoils a daily column of _The Times_ for the ordinary reader. Edward distinguished himself riding a young mare which his father had bred, a nice black satin-coated creature that made up for her slender shoulders by the cat-like cleverness with which she took double fences and complicated obstacles. She became a familiar beauty spot in the Hunt, and more than one generous offer was made for her, but Edward enjoyed her mixture of cunning and staying power which generally brought him to the front and sometimes gave him a hard run to himself and the huntsmen. With all that money could buy him in horseflesh, Petersfield could never appear on a mount like Edward’s. One day, returning from the day’s sport, Edward told me with a quiet bitterness that the bad blood was beginning to mount once again between himself and Petersfield. I asked what in Heaven’s name it could be for? “Over the mare of course. Petersfield cannot bear being passed when the pace really begins to tell and I pass him every time. He has offered me a record price for her.”

“You refused him, I hope,” I said. “I don’t see why he should have everything in life.”

Edward nodded in a queer sort of way as though it was no good. I was with him the next day when Petersfield swaggered up and congratulated Edward on his riding during the week. “You won’t let me double my offer of yesterday?” he laughed. Edward sat still. Petersfield continued: “You know. What’s the name of the mare that you ride?” Edward looked him fair in the face and said “Kathleen!”

It was the first and only time I saw Petersfield taken aback. He rode back to his hounds without saying another word. Then Edward told me why he had called her by the name of the dead woman he had loved. It was only a whim brought on by an accident.

“The first time I rode her to hounds,” he began, “she stopped dead in the corner of a field and would not move away. She whinnied and pawed the ground not out of fear but as though to attract my attention. It was no use trying to push, much less to punish such a willing goer, so I dismounted and tried to find out what was worrying her. I got off and looked round. Then I recognised the spot. It was the corner where I had said good-bye to Kathleen three years previously. It all came back to me then, and most curiously I immediately remembered for the first time what Kathleen had been speaking to me on that strange and ever-regretted afternoon. It was about old friends being best and how pleasant it was to come back to them in after years, and would I always allow her to feel like that toward me. That was about all. And the scene dug up the old impressions in my memory so fresh that I lay my head across the mare and fairly shook with grief. I thought she understood almost, and when I mounted her again she trotted off and we joined the hunt. She galloped like mad and I forgot her shying in the first field after the exhilaration of that run. She just showed her heels to the whole field. Though we often passed that field again, she never stopped or repeated her action. But what had happened linked her up in my mind with Kathleen and that is why I called her by the same name.” So said Edward.