Chapter XII: Part II (5)

“I’ll come over every year after this,” he said, in a burst of delight, as we ran between two ten-foot hedges of pink and white may. “It’s seeing all the things I’ve ever read about. Of course it doesn’t strike you that way. I presume you belong here? What a finished land it is! It’s arrived. Must have been born this way. Now, where I used to live—Hello! what’s up?”

The train stopped in a blaze of sunshine at Framlynghame Admiral, which is made up entirely of the name-board, two platforms, and an overhead bridge, without even the usual siding. I had never known the slowest of locals stop here before; but on Sunday all things are possible to the London and Southwestern. One could hear the drone of conversation along the carriages, and, scarcely less loud, the drone of the bumblebees in the wallflowers up the bank. My companion thrust his head through the window and sniffed luxuriously.

“Where are we now?” said he.

“In Wiltshire,” said I.

“Ah! A man ought to be able to write novels with his left hand in a country like this. Well, well! And so this is about Tess’s country, ain’t it? I feel just as if I were in a book. Say, the conduc—the guard has something on his mind. What’s he getting at?”

The splendid badged and belted guard was striding up the platform at the regulation official pace, and in the regulation official voice was saying at each door:

“Has any gentleman here a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.”

Between each five paces he looked at an official telegram in his hand, refreshed his memory, and said his say. The dreamy look on my companion’s face—he had gone far away with Tess—passed with the speed of a snap-shutter. After the manner of his countrymen, he had risen to the situation, jerked his bag down from the overhead rail, opened it, and I heard the click of bottles. “Find out where the man is,” he said briefly. “I’ve got something here that will fix him—if he can swallow still.”

Swiftly I fled up the line of carriages in the wake of the guard. There was clamour in a rear compartment—the voice of one bellowing to be let out, and the feet of one who kicked. With the tail of my eye I saw the New York doctor hastening thither, bearing in his hand a blue and brimming glass from the lavatory compartment. The guard I found scratching his head unofficially, by the engine, and murmuring: “Well, I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover—I’m sure I did.”

“Better say it again, any’ow,” said the driver. “Orders is orders. Say it again.”

Once more the guard paced back, I, anxious to attract his attention, trotting at his heels.

“In a minute—in a minute, sir,” he said, waving an arm capable of starting all the traffic on the London and Southwestern Railway at a wave. “Has any gentleman here got a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.”

“Where’s the man?” I gasped.

“Woking. ’Ere’s my orders.” He showed me the telegram, on which were the words to be said. “’E must have left ’is bottle in the train, an’ took another by mistake. ’E’s been wirin’ from Woking awful, an’, now I come to think of, it, I’m nearly sure I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover.”

“Then the man that took the poison isn’t in the train?”

“Lord, no, sir. No one didn’t take poison _that_ way. ’E took it away with ’im, in ’is ’ands. ’E’s wirin’ from Wokin’. My orders was to ask everybody in the train, and I ’ave, an’ we’re four minutes late now. Are you comin’ on, sir? No? Right be’ind!”

There is nothing, unless, perhaps, the English language, more terrible than the workings of an English railway-line. An instant before it seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at Framlynghame Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train disappear round the curve of the cutting.

But I was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable (for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed an empty tumbler marked “L.S.W.R.”—marked also, internally, with streaks of blue-grey sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder, stood the doctor, and as I came within ear-shot, this is what I heard him say: “Just you hold on to your patience for a minute or two longer, and you’ll be as right as ever you were in your life. _I’ll_ stay with you till you’re better.”

“Lord! I’m comfortable enough,” said the navvy. “Never felt better in my life.”

Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. “He might have died while that fool conduct-guard was saying his piece. I’ve fixed him, though. The stuff’s due in about five minutes, but there’s a heap _to_ him. I don’t see how we can make him take exercise.”

For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.

“How—how did you manage it?” I gasped.

“I asked him if he’d have a drink. He was knocking spots out of the car—strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he’d go ’most anywhere for a drink, so I lured onto the platform, and loaded him up. Cold-blooded people, you Britishers are. That train’s gone, and no one seemed to care a cent.”

“We’ve missed it,” I said.

He looked at me curiously.

“We’ll get another before sundown, if that’s your only trouble. Say, porter, when’s the next train down?”

“Seven forty-five,” said the one porter, and passed out through the wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.

“That’s bad,” said the doctor. “The man, I mean, not the train. We must make him walk somehow—walk up and down.”

Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution, cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.

What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I cannot tell. They say a slight noise rouses a sleeper more surely than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves than the giant waked and seized that silk-faced collar in a hot right hand. There was rage in his face—rage and the realisation of new emotions.

“I’m—I’m not so comfortable as I were,” he said from the deeps of his interior. “You’ll wait along o’ me, _you_ will.” He breathed heavily through shut lips.

Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button that irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at something, and come away empty.

“He won’t kill you,” I said. “He’ll probably sue you in court, if I know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time.”

“If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work,” the doctor answered, “I’m all right. If he doesn’t... my name is Emory—Julian B. Emory—193 ’Steenth Street, corner of Madison and—”

“I feel worse than I’ve ever felt,” said the navvy, with suddenness. “What-did-you-give-me-the-drink-for?”

The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact centre, looked on from afar.

I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance, the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such a place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell of a church invisible clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse-chestnuts to the left of the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.

The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow-mortal, the touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the far-off Gods themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first-class lavatory compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least, a million leagues removed from that unhappy man of another nationality, who had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down the sunlit platform. The two men seemed to be learning polka-mazurkas together, and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was: “What did you give me the drink for?”

I saw the flash of silver in the doctor’s hand. The navvy took it and pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his strong right leave the doctor’s coat-collar, and as the crisis approached, louder and louder rose his bull-like roar: “What did you give me the drink for?”

They drifted under the great twelve-inch pinned timbers of the foot-bridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very near at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and blue again, rolled over the navvy’s face in waves, till all settled to one rich clay-bank yellow and—that fell which fell.

I thought of the blowing up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in the Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale: but the lively original, as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath, the “scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the tide.” His right hand was upon the doctor’s collar, so that the two shook to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with them.

It was colossal—immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily, as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken and retained. So, too, was the grip on the coat-collar.

“If I could stand,” boomed the giant, despairingly, “I’d smash you—you an’ your drinks. I’m dyin’—dyin’—dyin’!”

“That’s what you think,” said the doctor. “You’ll find it will do you a lot of good”; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity, he added: “I’ll stay by you. If you’d let go of me a minute I’d give you something that would settle you.”

“You’ve settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin’ the bread out of the mouth of an English workin’man! But I’ll keep ’old of you till I’m well or dead. I never did you no harm. S’pose _I_ were a little full. They pumped me out once at Guy’s with a stummick-pump. I could see _that_, but I can’t see this ’ere, an’ it’s killin’ of me by slow degrees.”

“You’ll be all right in half-an-hour. What do you suppose I’d want to kill you for?” said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.

“’Ow do _I_ know? Tell ’em in court. You’ll get seven years for this, you body-snatcher. That’s what you are—a bloomin’ bodysnatcher. There’s justice, I tell you, in England; and my Union’ll prosecute, too. We don’t stand no tricks with people’s insides ’ere. They give a woman ten years for a sight less than this. An’ you’ll ’ave to pay ’undreds an’ ’undreds o’ pounds, besides a pension to the missus. _You_’ll see, you physickin’ furriner. Where’s your licence to do such? _You_’ll catch it, I tell you!”

Then I observed what I have frequently observed before, that a man who is but reasonably afraid of an altercation with an alien has a most poignant dread of the operations of foreign law. The doctor’s voice was flute-like in its exquisite politeness, as he answered:

“But I’ve given you a very great deal of money—fif—three pounds, I think.”

“An’ what’s three pound for poisonin’ the likes o’ _me?_ They told me at Guy’s I’d fetch twenty—cold—on the slates. Ouh! It’s comin’ again.”

A second time he was cut down by the foot, as it were, and the straining bench rocked to and fro as I averted my eyes.

It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English May-day. The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature was setting its face with the shadows of the horse-chestnuts towards the peace of the coming night. But there were hours yet, I knew—long, long hours of the eternal English twilight—to the ending of the day. I was well content to be alive—to abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate; to absorb great peace through my skin, and to love my country with the devotion that three thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower. And what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen land! A man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and security than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford. And the joy was that it was all mine alienably—groomed hedgerow, spotless road, decent greystone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree. A light puff of wind—it scattered flakes of may over the gleaming rails—gave me a faint whiff as it might have been of fresh cocoanut, and I knew that the golden gorse was in bloom somewhere out of sight. Linnæus had thanked God on his bended knees when he first saw a field of it; and, by the way, the navvy was on his knees, too. But he was by no means praying. He was purely disgustful.

The doctor was compelled to bend over him, his face towards the back of the seat, and from what I had seen I supposed the navvy was now dead. If that were the case it would be time for me to go; but I knew that so long as a man trusts himself to the current of Circumstance, reaching out for and rejecting nothing that comes his way, no harm can overtake him. It is the contriver, the schemer, who is caught by the Law, and never the philosopher. I knew that when the play was played, Destiny herself would move me on from the corpse; and I felt very sorry for the doctor.

In the far distance, presumably upon the road that led to Framlynghame Admiral, there appeared a vehicle and a horse—the one ancient fly that almost every village can produce at need. This thing was advancing, unpaid by me, towards the station; would have to pass along the deep-cut lane, below the railway-bridge, and come out on the doctor’s side. I was in the centre of things, so all sides were alike to me. Here, then, was my machine from the machine. When it arrived; something would happen, or something else. For the rest, I owned my deeply interested soul.

The doctor, by the seat, turned so far as his cramped position allowed, his head over his left shoulder, and laid his right hand upon his lips. I threw back my hat and elevated my eyebrows in the form of a question. The doctor shut his eyes and nodded his head slowly twice or thrice, beckoning me to come. I descended cautiously, and it was as the signs had told. The navvy was asleep, empty to the lowest notch; yet his hand clutched still the doctor’s collar, and at the lightest movement (the doctor was really very cramped) tightened mechanically, as the hand of a sick woman tightens on that of the watcher. He had dropped, squatting almost upon his heels, and, falling lower, had dragged the doctor over to the left.

The doctor thrust his right hand, which was free, into his pocket, drew forth some keys, and shook his head. The navvy gurgled in his sleep. Silently I dived into my pocket, took out one sovereign, and held it up between finger and thumb. Again the doctor shook his head. Money was not what was lacking to his peace. His bag had fallen from the seat to the ground. He looked towards it, and opened his mouth-O-shape. The catch was not a difficult one, and when I had mastered it, the doctor’s right forefinger was sawing the air. With an immense caution, I extracted from the bag such a knife as they use for cutting collops off legs. The doctor frowned, and with his first and second fingers imitated the action of scissors. Again I searched, and found a most diabolical pair of cock-nosed shears, capable of vandyking the interiors of elephants. The doctor then slowly lowered his left shoulder till the navvy’s right wrist was supported by the bench, pausing a moment as the spent volcano rumbled anew. Lower and lower the doctor sank, kneeling now by the navvy’s side, till his head was on a level with, and just in front of, the great hairy fist, and—there was no tension on the coat-collar. Then light dawned on me.

Beginning a little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the left-hand side of the coat till the two cuts joined.

Cautiously as the box-turtle of his native heath, the doctor drew away sideways and to the right, with the air of a frustrated burglar coming out from under a bed, and stood up free, one black diagonal shoulder projecting through the grey of his ruined overcoat. I returned the scissors to the bag, snapped the catch, and held all out to him as the wheels of the fly rang hollow under the railway arch.

It came at a footpace past the wicket-gate of the station, and the doctor stopped it with a whisper. It was going some five miles across country to bring home from church some one,—I could not catch the name,—because his own carriage-horses were lame. Its destination happened to be the one place in all the world that the doctor was most burningly anxious to visit, and he promised the driver untold gold to drive to some ancient flame of his—Helen Blazes, she was called.

“Aren’t you coming, too?” he said, bundling his overcoat into his bag.

Now the fly had been so obviously sent to the doctor, and to no one else, that I had no concern with it. Our roads, I saw, divided, and there was, further, a need upon me to laugh.

“I shall stay here,” I said. “It’s a very pretty country.”

“My God!” he murmured, as softly as he shut the door, and I felt that it was a prayer.

Then he went out of my life, and I shaped my course for the railway-bridge. It was necessary to pass by the bench once more, but the wicket was between us. The departure of the fly had waked the navvy. He crawled on to the seat, and with malignant eyes watched the driver flog down the road.

“The man inside o’ that,” he called, “’as poisoned me. ’E’s a body-snatcher. ’E’s comin’ back again when I’m cold. ’Ere’s my evidence!”

He waved his share of the overcoat, and I went my way, because I was hungry. Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from the station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step of that way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the flank of the good green hedge when I was too weak to stand. There was an inn,—a blessed inn with a thatched roof, and peonies in the garden,—and I ordered myself an upper chamber in which the Foresters held their courts for the laughter was not all out of me. A bewildered woman brought me ham and eggs, and I leaned out of the mullioned window, and laughed between mouthfuls. I sat long above the beer and the perfect smoke that followed, till the lights changed in the quiet street, and I began to think of the seven forty-five down, and all that world of the “Arabian Nights” I had quitted.

Descending, I passed a giant in moleskins who filled the low-ceiled tap-room. Many empty plates stood before him, and beyond them a fringe of the Framlynghame Admiralty, to whom he was unfolding a wondrous tale of anarchy, of body-snatching, of bribery, and the Valley of the Shadow from the which he was but newly risen. And as he talked he ate, and as he ate he drank, for there was much room in him; and anon he paid royally, speaking of Justice and the Law, before whom all Englishmen are equal, and all foreigners and anarchists vermin and slime.

On my way to the station, he passed me with great strides, his head high among the low-flying bats, his feet firm on the packed road-metal, his fists clinched, and his breath coming sharply. There was a beautiful smell in the air—the smell of white dust, bruised nettles, and smoke, that brings tears to the throat of a man who sees his country but seldom—a smell like the echoes of the lost talk of lovers; the infinitely suggestive odour of an immemorial civilisation. It was a perfect walk; and, lingering on every step, I came to the station just as the one porter lighted the last of a truckload of lamps, and set them back in the lamp-room, while he dealt tickets to four or five of the population who, not contented with their own peace, thought fit to travel. It was no ticket that the navvy seemed to need. He was sitting on a bench, wrathfully grinding a tumbler into fragments with his heel. I abode in obscurity at the end of the platform, interested as ever, thank Heaven, in my surroundings. There was a jar of wheels on the road. The navvy rose as they approached, strode through the wicket, and laid a hand upon a horse’s bridle that brought the beast up on his hireling hind legs. It was the providential fly coming back, and for a moment I wondered whether the doctor had been mad enough to revisit his practice.

“Get away; you’re drunk,” said the driver.

“I’m not,” said the navvy. “I’ve been waitin’ ’ere hours and hours. Come out, you beggar inside there!”

“Go on, driver,” said a voice I did not know—a crisp, clear, English voice.

“All right,” said the navvy. “You wouldn’t ’ear me when I was polite. _Now_ will you come?”

There was a chasm in the side of the fly, for he had wrenched the door bodily off its hinges, and was feeling within purposefully. A well-booted leg rewarded him, and there came out, not with delight, hopping on one foot, a round and grey-haired Englishman, from whose armpits dropped hymn-books, but from his mouth an altogether different service of song.

“Come on, you bloomin’ body-snatcher! You thought I was dead, did you?” roared the navvy. And the respectable gentleman came accordingly, inarticulate with rage.

“Ere’s a man murderin’ the Squire,” the driver shouted, and fell from his box upon the navvy’s neck.

To do them justice, the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who attached themselves to his legs and freed the captive.

“Send for a constable! lock him up!” said that man, adjusting his collar; and unitedly they cast him into the lamp-room, and turned the key, while the driver mourned over the wrecked fly.

Till then the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his temper nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The door of the lamp-room was generously constructed, and would not give an inch, but the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled outwards. The one porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and the others, arming themselves with agricultural implements from the station garden, kept up a ceaseless winnowing before the window, themselves backed close to the wall, and bade the prisoner think of the gaol. He answered little to the point, so far as they could understand; but seeing that his exit was impeded, he took a lamp and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It fell on the metals and went out. With inconceivable velocity, the others, fifteen in all, followed, looking like rockets in the gloom, and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor’s deadly brewage waked up, under the stimulus of violent exercise and a very full meal, to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and—we heard the whistle of the seven forty-five down.

They were all acutely interested in as much of the wreck as they could see, for the station smelt to Heaven of oil, and the engine skittered over broken glass like a terrier in a cucumber-frame. The guard had to hear of it, and the Squire had his version of the brutal assault, and heads were out all along the carriages as I found me a seat.

“What is the row?” said a young man, as I entered. “Man drunk?”

“Well, the symptoms, so far as my observation has gone, more resemble those of Asiatic cholera than anything else,” I answered, slowly and judicially, that every word might carry weight in the appointed scheme of things. Up till then, you will observe, I had taken no part in that war.

He was an Englishman, but he collected his belongings as swiftly as had the American, ages before, and leaped upon the platform, crying: “Can I be of any service? I’m a doctor.”

From the lamp-room I heard a wearied voice wailing “Another bloomin’ doctor!”

And the seven forty-five carried me on, a step nearer to Eternity, by the road that is worn and seamed and channelled with the passions, and weaknesses, and warring interests of man who is immortal and master of his fate.

THE BRUSHWOOD BOY

Girls and boys, come out to play The moon is shining as bright as day! Leave your supper and leave your sleep, And come with your playfellows out in the street! Up the ladder and down the wall—

A child of three sat up in his crib and screamed at the top of his voice, his fists clinched and his eyes full of terror. At first no one heard, for his nursery was in the west wing, and the nurse was talking to a gardener among the laurels. Then the housekeeper passed that way, and hurried to soothe him. He was her special pet, and she disapproved of the nurse.

“What was it, then? What was it, then? There’s nothing to frighten him, Georgie dear.”

“It was—it was a policeman! He was on the Down—I saw him! He came in. Jane said he would.”

“Policemen don’t come into houses, dearie. Turn over, and take my hand.”

“I saw him—on the Down. He came here. Where is your hand, Harper?”

The housekeeper waited till the sobs changed to the regular breathing of sleep before she stole out.

“Jane, what nonsense have you been telling Master Georgie about policemen?”

“I haven’t told him anything.”

“You have. He’s been dreaming about them.”

“We met Tisdall on Dowhead when we were in the donkey-cart this morning. P’r’aps that’s what put it into his head.”

“Oh! Now you aren’t going to frighten the child into fits with your silly tales, and the master know nothing about it. If ever I catch you again,” etc.

A child of six was telling himself stories as he lay in bed. It was a new power, and he kept it a secret. A month before it had occurred to him to carry on a nursery tale left unfinished by his mother, and he was delighted to find the tale as it came out of his own head just as surprising as though he were listening to it “all new from the beginning.” There was a prince in that tale, and he killed dragons, but only for one night. Ever afterwards Georgie dubbed himself prince, pasha, giant-killer, and all the rest (you see, he could not tell any one, for fear of being laughed at), and his tales faded gradually into dreamland, where adventures were so many that he could not recall the half of them. They all began in the same way, or, as Georgie explained to the shadows of the night-light, there was “the same starting-off place”—a pile of brushwood stacked somewhere near a beach; and round this pile Georgie found himself running races with little boys and girls. These ended, ships ran high up the dry land and opened into cardboard boxes; or gilt-and-green iron railings that surrounded beautiful gardens turned all soft and could be walked through and overthrown so long as he remembered it was only a dream. He could never hold that knowledge more than a few seconds ere things became real, and instead of pushing down houses full of grown-up people (a just revenge), he sat miserably upon gigantic door-steps trying to sing the multiplication-table up to four times six.

The princess of his tales was a person of wonderful beauty (she came from the old illustrated edition of Grimm, now out of print), and as she always applauded Georgie’s valour among the dragons and buffaloes, he gave her the two finest names he had ever heard in his life—Annie and Louise, pronounced “Annie_an_louise.” When the dreams swamped the stories, she would change into one of the little girls round the brushwood-pile, still keeping her title and crown. She saw Georgie drown once in a dream-sea by the beach (it was the day after he had been taken to bathe in a real sea by his nurse); and he said as he sank: “Poor Annie_an_louise! She’ll be sorry for me now!” But “Annie_an_louise,” walking slowly on the beach, called, “‘Ha! ha!’ said the duck, laughing,” which to a waking mind might not seem to bear on the situation. It consoled Georgie at once, and must have been some kind of spell, for it raised the bottom of the deep, and he waded out with a twelve-inch flower-pot on each foot. As he was strictly forbidden to meddle with flower-pots in real life, he felt triumphantly wicked.

The movements of the grown-ups, whom Georgie tolerated, but did not pretend to understand, removed his world, when he was seven years old, to a place called “Oxford-on-a-visit. “Here were huge buildings surrounded by vast prairies, with streets of infinite length, and, above all, something called the “buttery,” which Georgie was dying to see, because he knew it must be greasy, and therefore delightful. He perceived how correct were his judgments when his nurse led him through a stone arch into the presence of an enormously fat man, who asked him if he would like some, bread and cheese. Georgie was used to eat all round the clock, so he took what “buttery” gave him, and would have taken some brown liquid called “auditale” but that his nurse led him away to an afternoon performance of a thing called “Pepper’s Ghost.” This was intensely thrilling. People’s heads came off and flew all over the stage, and skeletons danced bone by bone, while Mr. Pepper himself, beyond question a man of the worst, waved his arms and flapped a long gown, and in a deep bass voice (Georgie had never heard a man sing before) told of his sorrows unspeakable. Some grown-up or other tried to explain that the illusion was made with mirrors, and that there was no need to be frightened. Georgie did not know what illusions were, but he did know that a mirror was the looking-glass with the ivory handle on his mother’s dressing-table. Therefore the “grown-up” was “just saying things” after the distressing custom of “grown-ups,” and Georgie cast about for amusement between scenes. Next to him sat a little girl dressed all in black, her hair combed off her forehead exactly like the girl in the book called “Alice in Wonderland,” which had been given him on his last birthday. The little girl looked at Georgie, and Georgie looked at her. There seemed to be no need of any further introduction.

“I’ve got a cut on my thumb,” said he. It was the first work of his first real knife, a savage triangular hack, and he esteemed it a most valuable possession.

“I’m tho thorry!” she lisped. “Let me look pleathe.”

“There’s a di-ack-lum plaster on, but it’s all raw under,” Georgie answered, complying.

“Dothent it hurt?”—her grey eyes were full of pity and interest.

“Awf’ly. Perhaps it will give me lockjaw.”

“It lookth very horrid. I’m _tho_ thorry!” She put a forefinger to his hand, and held her head sidewise for a better view.

Here the nurse turned, and shook him severely. “You mustn’t talk to strange little girls, Master Georgie.”

“She isn’t strange. She’s very nice. I like her, an’ I’ve showed her my new cut.”

“The idea! You change places with me.”

She moved him over, and shut out the little girl from his view, while the grown-up behind renewed the futile explanations.

“I am _not_ afraid, truly,” said the boy, wriggling in despair; “but why don’t you go to sleep in the afternoons, same as Provost of Oriel?”

Georgie had been introduced to a grown-up of that name, who slept in his presence without apology. Georgie understood that he was the most important grown-up in Oxford; hence he strove to gild his rebuke with flatteries. This grown-up did not seem to like it, but he collapsed, and Georgie lay back in his seat, silent and enraptured. Mr. Pepper was singing again, and the deep, ringing voice, the red fire, and the misty, waving gown all seemed to be mixed up with the little girl who had been so kind about his cut. When the performance was ended she nodded to Georgie, and Georgie nodded in return. He spoke no more than was necessary till bedtime, but meditated on new colors and sounds and lights and music and things as far as he understood them; the deep-mouthed agony of Mr. Pepper mingling with the little girl’s lisp. That night he made a new tale, from which he shamelessly removed the Rapunzel-Rapunzel-let-down-your-hair princess, gold crown, Grimm edition, and all, and put a new Annie_an_louise in her place. So it was perfectly right and natural that when he came to the brushwood-pile he should find her waiting for him, her hair combed off her forehead more like Alice in Wonderland than ever, and the races and adventures began.

Ten years at an English public school do not encourage dreaming. Georgie won his growth and chest measurement, and a few other things which did not appear in the bills, under a system of cricket, foot-ball, and paper-chases, from four to five days a week, which provided for three lawful cuts of a ground-ash if any boy absented himself from these entertainments. He became a rumple-collared, dusty-hatted fag of the Lower Third, and a light half-back at Little Side foot-ball; was pushed and prodded through the slack backwaters of the Lower Fourth, where the raffle of a school generally accumulates; won his “second-fifteen” cap at foot-ball, enjoyed the dignity of a study with two companions in it, and began to look forward to office as a sub-prefect. At last he blossomed into full glory as head of the school, ex-officio captain of the games; head of his house, where he and his lieutenants preserved discipline and decency among seventy boys from twelve to seventeen; general arbiter in the quarrels that spring up among the touchy Sixth—and intimate friend and ally of the Head himself. When he stepped forth in the black jersey, white knickers, and black stockings of the First Fifteen, the new match-ball under his arm, and his old and frayed cap at the back of his head, the small fry of the lower forms stood apart and worshipped, and the “new caps” of the team talked to him ostentatiously, that the world might see. And so, in summer, when he came back to the pavilion after a slow but eminently safe game, it mattered not whether he had made nothing or, as once happened, a hundred and three, the school shouted just the same, and women-folk who had come to look at the match looked at Cottar—Cottar, _major;_ “that’s Cottar!” Above all, he was responsible for that thing called the tone of the school, and few realise with what passionate devotion a certain type of boy throws himself into this work. Home was a faraway country, full of ponies and fishing and shooting, and men-visitors who interfered with one’s plans; but school was the real world, where things of vital importance happened, and crises arose that must be dealt with promptly and quietly. Not for nothing was it written, “Let the Consuls look to it that the Republic takes no harm,” and Georgie was glad to be back in authority when the holidays ended. Behind him, but not too near, was the wise and temperate Head, now suggesting the wisdom of the serpent, now counselling the mildness of the dove; leading him on to see, more by half-hints than by any direct word, how boys and men are all of a piece, and how he who can handle the one will assuredly in time control the other.

For the rest, the school was not encouraged to dwell on its emotions, but rather to keep in hard condition, to avoid false quantities, and to enter the army direct, without the help of the expensive London crammer, under whose roof young blood learns too much. Cottar, _major_, went the way of hundreds before him. The Head gave him six months’ final polish, taught him what kind of answers best please a certain kind of examiners, and handed him over to the properly constituted authorities, who passed him into Sandhurst. Here he had sense enough to see that he was in the Lower Third once more, and behaved with respect toward his seniors, till they in turn respected him, and he was promoted to the rank of corporal, and sat in authority over mixed peoples with all the vices of men and boys combined. His reward was another string of athletic cups, a good-conduct sword, and, at last, Her Majesty’s commission as a subaltern in a first-class line regiment. He did not know that he bore with him from school and college a character worth much fine gold, but was pleased to find his mess so kindly. He had plenty of money of his own; his training had set the public school mask upon his face, and had taught him how many were the “things no fellow can do.” By virtue of the same training he kept his pores open and his mouth shut.

The regular working of the Empire shifted his world to India, where he tasted utter loneliness in subaltern’s quarters,—one room and one bullock-trunk,—and, with his mess, learned the new life from the beginning. But there were horses in the land-ponies at reasonable price; there was polo for such as could afford it; there were the disreputable remnants of a pack of hounds; and Cottar worried his way along without too much despair. It dawned on him that a regiment in India was nearer the chance of active service than he had conceived, and that a man might as well study his profession. A major of the new school backed this idea with enthusiasm, and he and Cottar accumulated a library of military works, and read and argued and disputed far into the nights. But the adjutant said the old thing: “Get to know your men, young un, and they’ll follow you anywhere. That’s all you want—know your men.” Cottar thought he knew them fairly well at cricket and the regimental sports, but he never realised the true inwardness of them till he was sent off with a detachment of twenty to sit down in a mud fort near a rushing river which was spanned by a bridge of boats. When the floods came they went forth and hunted strayed pontoons along the banks. Otherwise there was nothing to do, and the men got drunk, gambled, and quarrelled. They were a sickly crew, for a junior subaltern is by custom saddled with the worst men. Cottar endured their rioting as long as he could, and then sent down-country for a dozen pairs of boxing-gloves.

“I wouldn’t blame you for fightin’,” said he, “if you only knew how to use your hands; but you don’t. Take these things, and I’ll show you.” The men appreciated his efforts. Now, instead of blaspheming and swearing at a comrade, and threatening to shoot him, they could take him apart, and soothe themselves to exhaustion. As one explained whom Cottar found with a shut eye and a diamond-shaped mouth spitting blood through an embrasure: “We tried it with the gloves, sir, for twenty minutes, and _that_ done us no good, sir. Then we took off the gloves and tried it that way for another twenty minutes, same as you showed us, sir, an’ that done us a world o’ good. ’T wasn’t fightin’, sir; there was a bet on.”

Cottar dared not laugh, but he invited his men to other sports, such as racing across country in shirt and trousers after a trail of torn paper, and to single-stick in the evenings, till the native population, who had a lust for sport in every form, wished to know whether the white men understood wrestling. They sent in an ambassador, who took the soldiers by the neck and threw them about the dust; and the entire command were all for this new game. They spent money on learning new falls and holds, which was better than buying other doubtful commodities; and the peasantry grinned five deep round the tournaments.

That detachment, who had gone up in bullock-carts, returned to headquarters at an average rate of thirty miles a day, fair heel-and-toe; no sick, no prisoners, and no court martials pending. They scattered themselves among their friends, singing the praises of their lieutenant and looking for causes of offense.

“How did you do it, young un?” the adjutant asked.

“Oh, I sweated the beef off ’em, and then I sweated some muscle on to ’em. It was rather a lark.”

“If that’s your way of lookin’ at it, we can give you all the larks you want. Young Davies isn’t feelin’ quite fit, and he’s next for detachment duty. Care to go for him?”

“Sure he wouldn’t mind? I don’t want to shove myself forward, you know.”

“You needn’t bother on Davies’s account. We’ll give you the sweepin’s of the corps, and you can see what you can make of ’em.”

“All right,” said Cottar. “It’s better fun than loafin’ about cantonments.”

“Rummy thing,” said the adjutant, after Cottar had returned to his wilderness with twenty other devils worse than the first. “If Cottar only knew it, half the women in the station would give their eyes—confound ’em!—to have the young un in tow.”

“That accounts for Mrs. Elery sayin’ I was workin’ my nice new boy too hard,” said a wing commander.

“Oh, yes; and ‘Why doesn’t he come to the bandstand in the evenings?’ and ‘Can’t I get him to make up a four at tennis with the Hammon girls?’” the adjutant snorted. “Look at young Davies makin’ an ass of himself over mutton-dressed-as-lamb old enough to be his mother!”

“No one can accuse young Cottar of runnin’ after women, white _or_ black,” the major replied thoughtfully. “But, then, that’s the kind that generally goes the worst mucker in the end.”

“Not Cottar. I’ve only run across one of his muster before—a fellow called Ingles, in South Africa. He was just the same hard trained, athletic-sports build of animal. Always kept himself in the pink of condition. Didn’t do him much good, though. Shot at Wesselstroom the week before Majuba. Wonder how the young un will lick his detachment into shape.”

Cottar turned up six weeks later, on foot, with his pupils. He never told his experiences, but the men spoke enthusiastically, and fragments of it leaked back to the colonel through sergeants, batmen, and the like.

There was great jealousy between the first and second detachments, but the men united in adoring Cottar, and their way of showing it was by sparing him all the trouble that men know how to make for an unloved officer. He sought popularity as little as he had sought it at school, and therefore it came to him. He favoured no one—not even when the company sloven pulled the company cricket-match out of the fire with an unexpected forty-three at the last moment. There was very little getting round him, for he seemed to know by instinct exactly when and where to head off a malingerer; but he did not forget that the difference between a dazed and sulky junior of the upper school and a bewildered, browbeaten lump of a private fresh from the depot was very small indeed. The sergeants, seeing these things, told him secrets generally hid from young officers. His words were quoted as barrack authority on bets in canteen and at tea; and the veriest shrew of the corps, bursting with charges against other women who had used the cooking-ranges out of turn, forbore to speak when Cottar, as the regulations ordained, asked of a morning if there were “any complaints.”

“I’m full o’ complaints,” said Mrs. Corporal Morrison, “an’ I’d kill O’Halloran’s fat sow of a wife any day, but ye know how it is. ’E puts ’is head just inside the door, an’ looks down ’is blessed nose so bashful, an’ ’e whispers, ‘Any complaints’ Ye can’t complain after that. _I_ want to kiss him. Some day I think I will. Heigh-ho! she’ll be a lucky woman that gets Young Innocence. See ’im now, girls. Do ye blame me?”

Cottar was cantering across to polo, and he looked a very satisfactory figure of a man as he gave easily to the first excited bucks of his pony, and slipped over a low mud wall to the practice-ground. There were more than Mrs. Corporal Morrison who felt as she did. But Cottar was busy for eleven hours of the day. He did not care to have his tennis spoiled by petticoats in the court; and after one long afternoon at a garden-party, he explained to his major that this sort of thing was “futile piffle,” and the major laughed. Theirs was not a married mess, except for the colonel’s wife, and Cottar stood in awe of the good lady. She said “my regiment,” and the world knows what that means. None the less when they wanted her to give away the prizes after a shooting-match, and she refused because one of the prize-winners was married to a girl who had made a jest of her behind her broad back, the mess ordered Cottar to “tackle her,” in his best calling-kit. This he did, simply and laboriously, and she gave way altogether.

“She only wanted to know the facts of the case,” he explained. “I just told her, and she saw at once.”

“Ye-es,” said the adjutant. “I expect that’s what she did. Comin’ to the Fusiliers’ dance to-night, Galahad?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got a fight on with the major.” The virtuous apprentice sat up till midnight in the major’s quarters, with a stop-watch and a pair of compasses, shifting little painted lead-blocks about a four-inch map.

Then he turned in and slept the sleep of innocence, which is full of healthy dreams. One peculiarity of his dreams he noticed at the beginning of his second hot weather. Two or three times a month they duplicated or ran in series. He would find himself sliding into dreamland by the same road—a road that ran along a beach near a pile of brushwood. To the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some sort of street-lamp, anything was possible; but up to the lamp it seemed to him that he knew the road as well as he knew the parade-ground. He learned to look forward to the place; for, once there, he was sure of a good night’s rest, and Indian hot weather can be rather trying. First, shadowy under closing eyelids, would come the outline of the brushwood-pile; next the white sand of the beach-road, almost overhanging the black, changeful sea; then the turn inland and uphill to the single light. When he was unrestful for any reason, he would tell himself how he was sure to get there—sure to get there—if he shut his eyes and surrendered to the drift of things. But one night after a foolishly hard hour’s polo (the thermometer was 94° in his quarters at ten o’clock), sleep stood away from him altogether, though he did his best to find the well-known road, the point where true sleep began. At last he saw the brushwood-pile, and hurried along to the ridge, for behind him he felt was the wide-awake, sultry world. He reached the lamp in safety, tingling with drowsiness, when a policeman—a common country policeman—sprang up before him and touched him on the shoulder ere he could dive into the dim valley below. He was filled with terror,—the hopeless terror of dreams,—for the policeman said, in the awful, distinct voice of dream-people, “I am Policeman Day coming back from the City of Sleep. You come with me.” Georgie knew it was true—that just beyond him in the valley lay the lights of the City of Sleep, where he would have been sheltered, and that this Policeman-Thing had full power and authority to head him back to miserable wakefulness. He found himself looking at the moonlight on the wall, dripping with fright; and he never overcame that horror, though he met the Policeman several times that hot weather, and his coming was the forerunner of a bad night.