Chapter III: Part 3

Again Evans was on his feet, apoplectic with objections. But the old lawyer went on, before the judge could speak, his voice high-pitched and metallic, filling the excited court-room.

“Is it a fact, sir, that at two o’clock your friends took you home in that car? Is it a fact, sir, that before you reached that house you saw a glow in the sky? And that when these friends wanted to go back you said: ‘Let the damn store burn--it’s insured’?”

“Don’t answer those questions,” thundered Evans. “Your Honor, this man’s not on trial!”

“He will be!” cried the old lawyer, “for perjury in open court! I am _not_ surmising, Your Honor. I can prove the truth of everything I have implied, sir. I was fortunate enough to get hold of the number of that car. Through the number I traced the occupants. Happily for the good of our humanity, sir, there is always to be found among a group of young men, however wild, one who will tell the truth. Such a one is young John Duckett, who was in that car that night.” He turned to the court-room. “Mr. Court Crier--call John Duckett into court!”

* * * * *

At one side of the witness chair that sat high above the main court-room, and which was on a level with the judge’s seat, ran a railing. And now Frank Blainey, who had been growing whiter and whiter, turned sideways, his arm on this railing, and buried his face in his arm, his fingers clutching at his hair. With a cry, Mrs. Blainey sprang to her feet and started forward. The voice of the judge was clear and compelling.

“Keep your seat, madam. Stay where you are, the rest of you. This witness has not fainted. Mr. Crier, one minute. Do not call the other witness until I so instruct you. Mr. Blainey, here, seems to have something on his mind. Mr. Blainey?”

Blainey raised his face. The glance he shot at Donaldson was a bit wild, a bit vicious, too. His hair was all disheveled. He sat limp in his chair. The judge, turning toward him, went on.

“Mr. Blainey, if you have anything to say concerning the facts implied in Colonel Donaldson’s questions, you are at liberty to speak, sir. Otherwise this witness, Mr. Duckett, will be called. My advice to you, Mr. Blainey, is that you speak.”

The court-room was straining forward now; hundreds of tense faces were turned toward the witness chair, faces strained in the effort to hear the mumbling, halting, reluctant words.

“I--I-- Aw, it’s all true!”

“Sit up, Mr. Blainey!” commanded the judge. “Look at me, sir. You have perjured yourself in this court! That is a grave offense; but it is as nothing, sir, compared with the motive behind that perjury. In order to save your practices from exposure, you would have sent an old man to prison, probably for the remainder of his natural life. I have no words strong enough, sir, to express my abhorrence, and the abhorrence of all men, of what you’ve done! Are you listening, Mr. Blainey?”

Again the vicious glance around, followed by the bowed head, and a nod.

“But,” continued the judge, “the law puts in my hands the means of punishing you. By your own confession, you have committed perjury, and perjury is punished by a long jail sentence and a heavy fine. Combined, they will not be sufficient for your offense, but they will be enough, sir, to make you remember all the rest of your days--”

And now he stopped, for from his seat, face quivering, old Jeff had sprung to his feet.

“Jedge!” he cried. “Don’t send him to the pen, Jedge! Jedge, he’s Sam Blainey’s son!”

Compassionately the judge looked down at him where he stood beside the table, trembling; then he spoke:

“Sit down, old man. Frank Blainey, the man whom you have attempted so grievously to wrong pleads for you. And because of his plea, which I can do nothing but honor and accede to, I shall remit any prison sentence which I might have imposed. But I warn you, sir, that when the time for your trial comes, in the due process of law, I shall fine you to the very limit allowed me by the statute. Mr. Sheriff, see that this man, Frank Blainey, does not leave the jurisdiction of this court.”

“Old man, stand up once more, so that all in this court-room may see you.... Jeff Potter, this plea of yours shall go down on the records of this court as a memorial to you and as a high example to all men who may know or read of it of that quality of mercy which is the sovereign good in human nature. And now, gentlemen of the jury, you are automatically discharged from this case, and I shall ask the crowd to pass out quietly, for court is adjourned.”

How many people old Jeff shook hands with that afternoon, he never knew. He did know though that Burton Evans was the first among them; that Mrs. Carson, who came next, was crying; that the strong hands of Bill Carson and Squire Kirby almost crushed his own frailer hand; and that off yonder, at a table below the clerk’s desk, a prim old lawyer in a long black coat had picked up a carved Indian and was presenting it to a little girl in a blue dress, with an old-fashioned bow strange to see.

_The Century Magazine_

“A SOURCE OF IRRITATION”

BY

STACY AUMONIER

“A SOURCE OF IRRITATION”[3]

By STACY AUMONIER

To look at old Sam Gates you would never suspect him of having nerves. His sixty-nine years of close application to the needs of the soil had given him a certain earthy stolidity. To observe him hoeing, or thinning out a broad field of turnips, hardly attracted one’s attention, he seemed so much part and parcel of the whole scheme. He blended into the soil like a glorified swede. Nevertheless, the half-dozen people who claimed his acquaintance knew him to be a man who suffered from little moods of irritability.

And on this glorious morning a little incident annoyed him unreasonably. It concerned his niece Aggie. She was a plump girl with clear, blue eyes, and a face as round and inexpressive as the dumplings for which the county was famous. She came slowly across the long sweep of the downland and, putting down the bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief which contained his breakfast and dinner, she said:

“Well, Uncle, is there any noos?”

Now, this may not appear to the casual reader to be a remark likely to cause irritation, but it affected old Sam Gates as a very silly and unnecessary question. It was, moreover, the constant repetition of it which was beginning to anger him. He met his niece twice a day. In the morning she brought his bundle of food at seven, and when he passed his sister’s cottage on the way home to tea at five she was invariably hanging about the gate, and she always said in the same voice:

“Well, Uncle, is there any noos?”

Noos! What noos should there be? For sixty-nine years he had never lived farther than five miles from Halvesham. For nearly sixty of those years he had bent his back above the soil. There were, indeed, historic occasions. Once, for instance, when he had married Annie Hachet. And there was the birth of his daughter. There was also a famous occasion when he had visited London. Once he had been to a flower-show at Market Roughborough. He either went or didn’t go to church on Sundays. He had had many interesting chats with Mr. James at the Cowman, and three years ago had sold a pig to Mrs. Way. But he couldn’t always have interesting noos of this sort up his sleeve. Didn’t the silly zany know that for the last three weeks he had been hoeing and thinning out turnips for Mr. Hodge on this very same field? What noos could there be?

He blinked at his niece, and didn’t answer. She undid the parcel and said:

“Mrs. Goping’s fowl got out again last night.”

“Ah,” he replied in a non-committal manner and began to munch his bread and bacon. His niece picked up the handkerchief and, humming to herself, walked back across the field.

It was a glorious morning, and a white sea mist added to the promise of a hot day. He sat there munching, thinking of nothing in particular, but gradually subsiding into a mood of placid content. He noticed the back of Aggie disappear in the distance. It was a mile to the cottage and a mile and a half to Halvesham. Silly things, girls. They were all alike. One had to make allowances. He dismissed her from his thoughts, and took a long swig of tea out of a bottle. Insects buzzed lazily. He tapped his pocket to assure himself that his pouch of shag was there, and then he continued munching. When he had finished, he lighted his pipe and stretched himself comfortably. He looked along the line of turnips he had thinned and then across the adjoining field of swedes. Silver streaks appeared on the sea below the mist. In some dim way he felt happy in his solitude amidst this sweeping immensity of earth and sea and sky.

And then something else came to irritate him: it was one of “these dratted airyplanes.” “Airyplanes” were his pet aversion. He could find nothing to be said in their favor. Nasty, noisy, disfiguring things that seared the heavens and made the earth dangerous. And every day there seemed to be more and more of them. Of course “this old war” was responsible for a lot of them, he knew. The war was a “plaguy noosance.” They were short-handed on the farm, beer and tobacco were dear, and Mrs. Steven’s nephew had been and got wounded in the foot.

He turned his attention once more to the turnips; but an “airyplane” has an annoying genius for gripping one’s attention. When it appears on the scene, however much we dislike it, it has a way of taking the stage-center. We cannot help constantly looking at it. And so it was with old Sam Gates. He spat on his hands and blinked up at the sky. And suddenly the aëroplane behaved in a very extraordinary manner. It was well over the sea when it seemed to lurch drunkenly and skimmed the water. Then it shot up at a dangerous angle and zigzagged. It started to go farther out, and then turned and made for the land. The engines were making a curious grating noise. It rose once more, and then suddenly dived downward, and came plump down right in the middle of Mr. Hodge’s field of swedes.

And then, as if not content with this desecration, it ran along the ground, ripping and tearing up twenty-five yards of good swedes, and then came to a stop.

Old Sam Gates was in a terrible state. The aëroplane was more than a hundred yards away, but he waved his arms and called out:

“Hi, you there, you mustn’t land in they swedes! They’re Mister Hodge’s.”

The instant the aëroplane stopped, a man leaped out and gazed quickly round. He glanced at Sam Gates, and seemed uncertain whether to address him or whether to concentrate his attention on the flying-machine. The latter arrangement appeared to be his ultimate decision. He dived under the engine and became frantically busy. Sam had never seen any one work with such furious energy; but all the same it was not to be tolerated. It was disgraceful. Sam started out across the field, almost hurrying in his indignation. When he appeared within earshot of the aviator he cried out again:

“Hi! you mustn’t rest your old airyplane here! You’ve kicked up all Mr. Hodge’s swedes. A noice thing you’ve done!”

He was within five yards when suddenly the aviator turned and covered him with a revolver! And speaking in a sharp, staccato voice, he said:

“Old Grandfather, you must sit down. I am very much occupied. If you interfere or attempt to go away, I shoot you. So!”

Sam gazed at the horrid, glittering little barrel and gasped. Well, he never! To be threatened with murder when you’re doing your duty in your employer’s private property! But, still, perhaps the man was mad. A man must be more or less mad to go up in one of those crazy things. And life was very sweet on that summer morning despite sixty-nine years. He sat down among the swedes.

The aviator was so busy with his cranks and machinery that he hardly deigned to pay him any attention except to keep the revolver handy. He worked feverishly, and Sam sat watching him. At the end of ten minutes he appeared to have solved his troubles with the machine, but he still seemed very scared. He kept on glancing round and out to sea. When his repairs were complete he straightened his back and wiped the perspiration from his brow. He was apparently on the point of springing back into the machine and going off when a sudden mood of facetiousness, caused by relief from the strain he had endured, came to him. He turned to old Sam and smiled, at the same time remarking:

“Well, old Grandfather, and now we shall be all right, isn’t it?”

He came close up to Sam, and then suddenly started back.

“_Gott!_” he cried, “Paul Jouperts!”

Bewildered, Sam gazed at him, and the madman started talking to him in some foreign tongue. Sam shook his head.

“You no roight,” he remarked, “to come bargin’ through they swedes of Mr. Hodge’s.”

And then the aviator behaved in a most peculiar manner. He came up and examined Sam’s face very closely, and gave a sudden tug at his beard and hair, as if to see whether they were real or false.

“What is your name, old man?” he said.

“Sam Gates.”

The aviator muttered some words that sounded something like “mare vudish,” and then turned to his machine. He appeared to be dazed and in a great state of doubt. He fumbled with some cranks, but kept glancing at old Sam. At last he got into the car and strapped himself in. Then he stopped, and sat there deep in thought. At last he suddenly unstrapped himself and sprang out again and, approaching Sam, said very deliberately:

“Old Grandfather, I shall require you to accompany me.”

Sam gasped.

“Eh?” he said. “What be talkin’ about? ’Company? I got these ’ere loines o’ turnips--I be already behoind--” The disgusting little revolver once more flashed before his eyes.

“There must be no discussion,” came the voice. “It is necessary that you mount the seat of the car without delay. Otherwise I shoot you like the dog you are. So!”

Old Sam was hale and hearty. He had no desire to die so ignominiously. The pleasant smell of the Norfolk downland was in his nostrils; his foot was on his native heath. He mounted the seat of the car, contenting himself with a mutter:

“Well, that be a noice thing, I must say! Flyin’ about the country with all they turnips on’y half thinned!”

He found himself strapped in. The aviator was in a fever of anxiety to get away. The engines made a ghastly splutter and noise. The thing started running along the ground. Suddenly it shot upward, giving the swedes a last contemptuous kick. At twenty minutes to eight that morning old Sam found himself being borne right up above his fields and out to sea! His breath came quickly. He was a little frightened.

“God forgive me!” he murmured.

The thing was so fantastic and sudden that his mind could not grasp it. He only felt in some vague way that he was going to die, and he struggled to attune his mind to the change. He offered up a mild prayer to God, Who, he felt, must be very near, somewhere up in these clouds. Automatically he thought of the vicar at Halvesham, and a certain sense of comfort came to him at the reflection that on the previous day he had taken a “cooking of runner beans” to God’s representative in that village. He felt calmer after that, but the horrid machine seemed to go higher and higher. He could not turn in his seat and he could see nothing but sea and sky. Of course the man was mad, mad as a March hare. Of what earthly use could _he_ be to any one? Besides, he had talked pure gibberish, and called him Paul something, when he had already told him that his name was Sam. The thing would fall down into the sea soon, and they would both be drowned. Well, well, he had almost reached three-score years and ten. He was protected by a screen, but it seemed very cold. What on earth would Mr. Hodge say? There was no one left to work the land but a fool of a boy named Billy Whitehead at Dene’s Cross. On, on, on they went at a furious pace. His thoughts danced disconnectedly from incidents of his youth, conversations with the vicar, hearty meals in the open, a frock his sister wore on the day of the postman’s wedding, the drone of a psalm, the illness of some ewes belonging to Mr. Hodge. Everything seemed to be moving very rapidly, upsetting his sense of time. He felt outraged, and yet at moments there was something entrancing in the wild experience. He seemed to be living at an incredible pace. Perhaps he was really dead and on his way to the kingdom of God. Perhaps this was the way they took people.

After some indefinite period he suddenly caught sight of a long strip of land. Was this a foreign country, or were they returning? He had by this time lost all feeling of fear. He became interested and almost disappointed. The “airyplane” was not such a fool as it looked. It was very wonderful to be right up in the sky like this. His dreams were suddenly disturbed by a fearful noise. He thought the machine was blown to pieces. It dived and ducked through the air, and things were bursting all round it and making an awful din, and then it went up higher and higher. After a while these noises ceased, and he felt the machine gliding downward. They were really right above solid land--trees, fields, streams, and white villages. Down, down, down they glided. This was a foreign country. There were straight avenues of poplars and canals. This was not Halvesham. He felt the thing glide gently and bump into a field. Some men ran forward and approached them, and the mad aviator called out to them. They were mostly fat men in gray uniforms, and they all spoke this foreign gibberish. Some one came and unstrapped him. He was very stiff and could hardly move. An exceptionally gross-looking man punched him in the ribs and roared with laughter. They all stood round and laughed at him, while the mad aviator talked to them and kept pointing at him. Then he said:

“Old Grandfather, you must come with me.”

He was led to an iron-roofed building and shut in a little room. There were guards outside with fixed bayonets. After a while the mad aviator appeared again, accompanied by two soldiers. He beckoned him to follow. They marched through a quadrangle and entered another building. They went straight into an office where a very important-looking man, covered with medals, sat in an easy-chair. There was a lot of saluting and clicking of heels. The aviator pointed at Sam and said something, and the man with the medals started at sight of him, and then came up and spoke to him in English.

“What is your name? Where do you come from? Your age? The name and birthplace of your parents?”

He seemed intensely interested, and also pulled his hair and beard to see if they came off. So well and naturally did he and the aviator speak English that after a voluble examination they drew apart, and continued the conversation in that language. And the extraordinary conversation was of this nature:

“It is a most remarkable resemblance,” said the man with medals. “_Unglaublich!_ But what do you want me to do with him, Hausemann?”

“The idea came to me suddenly, Excellency,” replied the aviator, “and you may consider it worthless. It is just this. The resemblance is so amazing. Paul Jouperts has given us more valuable information than any one at present in our service, and the English know that. There is an award of five thousand francs on his head. Twice they have captured him, and each time he escaped. All the company commanders and their staff have his photograph. He is a serious thorn in their flesh.”

“Well?” replied the man with the medals.

The aviator whispered confidentially:

“Suppose, your Excellency, that they found the dead body of Paul Jouperts?”

“Well?” replied the big man.

“My suggestion is this. To-morrow, as you know, the English are attacking Hill 701, which for tactical reasons we have decided to evacuate. If after the attack they find the dead body of Paul Jouperts in, say, the second line, they will take no further trouble in the matter. You know their lack of thoroughness. Pardon me, I was two years at Oxford University. And consequently Paul Jouperts will be able to prosecute his labors undisturbed.”

The man with the medals twirled his mustache and looked thoughtfully at his colleague.

“Where is Paul at the moment?” he asked.

“He is acting as a gardener at the Convent of St. Eloise, at Mailleton-en-haut, which, as you know, is one hundred meters from the headquarters of the British central army staff.”

The man with the medals took two or three rapid turns up and down the room, then he said:

“Your plan is excellent, Hausemann. The only point of difficulty is that the attack started this morning.”

“This morning?” exclaimed the other.

“Yes; the English attacked unexpectedly at dawn. We have already evacuated the first line. We shall evacuate the second line at eleven-fifty. It is now ten-fifteen. There may be just time.”

He looked suddenly at old Sam in the way that a butcher might look at a prize heifer at an agricultural show and remarked casually:

“Yes, it is a remarkable resemblance. It seems a pity not to--do something with it.”

Then, speaking in German, he added:

“It is worth trying. And if it succeeds the higher authorities shall hear of your lucky accident and inspiration, Herr Hausemann. Instruct _Ober-lieutenant_ Schultz to send the old fool by two orderlies to the east extremity of Trench 38. Keep him there till the order of evacuation is given, then shoot him, but don’t disfigure him, and lay him out face upward.”

The aviator saluted and withdrew, accompanied by his victim. Old Sam had not understood the latter part of the conversation, and he did not catch quite all that was said in English; but he felt that somehow things were not becoming too promising, and it was time to assert himself. So he remarked when they got outside:

“Now, look ’ee ’ere, Mister, when am I goin’ to get back to my turnips?”

And the aviator replied, with a pleasant smile:

“Do not be disturbed, old Grandfather. You shall get back to the soil quite soon.”

In a few moments he found himself in a large gray car, accompanied by four soldiers. The aviator left him. The country was barren and horrible, full of great pits and rents, and he could hear the roar of the artillery and the shriek of shells. Overhead, aëroplanes were buzzing angrily. He seemed to be suddenly transported from the kingdom of God to the pit of darkness. He wondered whether the vicar had enjoyed the runner beans. He could not imagine runner beans growing here; runner beans, aye, or anything else. If this was a foreign country, give him dear old England!

_Gr-r-r! bang!_ Something exploded just at the rear of the car. The soldiers ducked, and one of them pushed him in the stomach and swore.

“An ugly-looking lout,” he thought. “If I wor twenty years younger, I’d give him a punch in the eye that ’u’d make him sit up.”

The car came to a halt by a broken wall. The party hurried out and dived behind a mound. He was pulled down a kind of shaft, and found himself in a room buried right underground, where three officers were drinking and smoking. The soldiers saluted and handed them a typewritten despatch. The officers looked at him drunkenly, and one came up and pulled his beard and spat in his face and called him “an old English swine.” He then shouted out some instructions to the soldiers, and they led him out into the narrow trench. One walked behind him, and occasionally prodded him with the butt-end of a gun. The trenches were half full of water and reeked of gases, powder, and decaying matter. Shells were constantly bursting overhead, and in places the trenches had crumbled and were nearly blocked up. They stumbled on, sometimes falling, sometimes dodging moving masses, and occasionally crawling over the dead bodies of men. At last they reached a deserted-looking trench, and one of the soldiers pushed him into the corner of it and growled something, and then disappeared round the angle. Old Sam was exhausted. He leaned panting against the mud wall, expecting every minute to be blown to pieces by one of those infernal things that seemed to be getting more and more insistent. The din went on for nearly twenty minutes, and he was alone in the trench. He fancied he heard a whistle amidst the din. Suddenly one of the soldiers who had accompanied him came stealthily round the corner, and there was a look in his eye old Sam did not like. When he was within five yards the soldier raised his rifle and pointed it at Sam’s body. Some instinct impelled the old man at that instant to throw himself forward on his face. As he did so he was aware of a terrible explosion, and he had just time to observe the soldier falling in a heap near him, and then he lost consciousness.

His consciousness appeared to return to him with a snap. He was lying on a plank in a building, and he heard some one say:

“I believe the old boy’s English.”

He looked round. There were a lot of men lying there, and others in khaki and white overalls were busy among them. He sat up, rubbed his head, and said:

“Hi, Mister, where be I now?”

Some one laughed, and a young man came up and said:

“Well, old man, you were very nearly in hell. Who the devil are you?”

Some one came up, and two of them were discussing him. One of them said:

“He’s quite all right. He was only knocked out. Better take him in to the colonel. He may be a spy.”

The other came up, touched his shoulder, and remarked:

“Can you walk, Uncle?”

He replied:

“Aye, I can walk all roight.”

“That’s an old sport!”

The young man took his arm and helped him out of the room into a courtyard. They entered another room, where an elderly, kind-faced officer was seated at a desk. The officer looked up and exclaimed:

“Good God! Bradshaw, do you know who you’ve got there?”

The younger one said:

“No. Who, sir?”

“It’s Paul Jouperts!” exclaimed the colonel.

“Paul Jouperts! Great Scott!”

The older officer addressed himself to Sam. He said:

“Well, we’ve got you once more, Paul. We shall have to be a little more careful this time.”

The young officer said:

“Shall I detail a squad, sir?”

“We can’t shoot him without a courtmartial,” replied the kind-faced senior.

Then Sam interpolated:

“Look ’ee ’ere, sir, I’m fair’ sick of all this. My name bean’t Paul. My name’s Sam. I was a-thinnin’ a loine o’ turnips--”

Both officers burst out laughing, and the younger one said:

“Good! damn good! Isn’t it amazing, sir, the way they not only learn the language, but even take the trouble to learn a dialect!”

The older man busied himself with some papers.

“Well, Sam,” he remarked, “you shall be given a chance to prove your identity. Our methods are less drastic than those of your _Boche_ masters. What part of England are you supposed to come from? Let’s see how much you can bluff us with your topographical knowledge.”

“I was a-thinnin’ a loine o’ turnips this mornin’ at ’alf-past seven on Mr. Hodge’s farm at Halvesham when one o’ these ’ere airyplanes came down among the swedes. I tells ’e to get clear o’ that, when the feller what gets out o’ the car ’e drahs a revowlver and ’e says, ‘You must ’company I--’”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted the senior officer, “that’s all very good. Now tell me--where is Halvesham? What is the name of the local vicar? I’m sure you’d know that.”

Old Sam rubbed his chin.

“I sits under the Reverend David Pryce, Mister, and a good, God-fearin’ man he be. I took him a cookin’ o’ runner beans on’y yesterday. I works for Mr. Hodge, what owns Greenway Manor and ’as a stud-farm at Newmarket, they say.”

“Charles Hodge?” asked the young officer.

“Aye, Charlie Hodge. You write and ask un if he knows old Sam Gates.”

The two officers looked at each other, and the older one looked at Sam more closely.

“It’s very extraordinary,” he remarked.

“Everybody knows Charlie Hodge,” added the younger officer.

It was at that moment that a wave of genius swept over old Sam. He put his hand to his head and suddenly jerked out:

“What’s more, I can tell ’ee where this yere Paul is. He’s actin’ a gardener in a convent at--” He puckered up his brows, fumbled with his hat, and then got out, “Mighteno.”

The older officer gasped.

“Mailleton-en-haut! Good God! what makes you say that, old man?”

Sam tried to give an account of his experience and the things he had heard said by the German officers; but he was getting tired, and he broke off in the middle to say:

“Ye haven’t a bite o’ somethin’ to eat, I suppose, Mister; or a glass o’ beer? I usually ’as my dinner at twelve o’clock.”

Both the officers laughed, and the older said:

“Get him some food, Bradshaw, and a bottle of beer from the mess. We’ll keep this old man here. He interests me.”

While the younger man was doing this, the chief pressed a button and summoned another junior officer.

“Gateshead,” he remarked, “ring up the G. H. Q. and instruct them to arrest the gardener in that convent at the top of the hill and then to report.”

The officer saluted and went out, and in a few minutes a tray of hot food and a large bottle of beer were brought to the old man, and he was left alone in the corner of the room to negotiate this welcome compensation. And in the execution he did himself and his county credit. In the meanwhile the officers were very busy. People were coming and going and examining maps, and telephone bells were ringing furiously. They did not disturb old Sam’s gastric operations. He cleaned up the mess tins and finished the last drop of beer. The senior officer found time to offer him a cigarette, but he replied:

“Thank ’ee kindly, sir, but I’d rather smoke my pipe.”

The colonel smiled and said:

“Oh, all right; smoke away.”

He lighted up, and the fumes of the shag permeated the room. Some one opened another window, and the young officer who had addressed him at first suddenly looked at him and exclaimed:

“Innocent, by God! You couldn’t get shag like that anywhere but in Norfolk.”

It must have been an hour later when another officer entered and saluted.

“Message from the G. H. Q., sir,” he said.

“Well?”

“They have arrested the gardener at the convent of St. Eloise, and they have every reason to believe that he is the notorious Paul Jouperts.”

The colonel stood up, and his eyes beamed. He came over to old Sam and shook his hand.

“Mr. Gates,” he said, “you are an old brick. You will probably hear more of this. You have probably been the means of delivering something very useful into our hands. Your own honor is vindicated. A loving Government will probably award you five shillings or a Victoria Cross or something of that sort. In the meantime, what can I do for you?”

Old Sam scratched his chin.

“I want to get back ’ome,” he said.

“Well, even that might be arranged.”

“I want to get back ’ome in toime for tea.”

“What time do you have tea?”

“Foive o’clock or thereabouts.”

“I see.”

A kindly smile came into the eyes of the colonel. He turned to another officer standing by the table and said:

“Raikes, is any one going across this afternoon with despatches?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the other officer. “Commander Jennings is leaving at three o’clock.”

“You might ask him if he could see me.”

Within ten minutes a young man in a flight-commander’s uniform entered.

“Ah, Jennings,” said the colonel, “here is a little affair which concerns the honor of the British army. My friend here, Sam Gates, has come over from Halvesham, in Norfolk, in order to give us valuable information. I have promised him that he shall get home to tea at five o’clock. Can you take a passenger?”

The young man threw back his head and laughed.

“Lord!” he exclaimed, “what an old sport! Yes, I expect I can manage it. Where is the God-forsaken place?”

A large ordnance-map of Norfolk (which had been captured from a German officer) was produced, and the young man studied it closely.

At three o’clock precisely old Sam, finding himself something of a hero and quite glad to escape from the embarrassment which the position entailed upon him, once more sped skyward in a “dratted airyplane.”

At twenty minutes to five he landed once more among Mr. Hodge’s swedes. The breezy young airman shook hands with him and departed inland. Old Sam sat down and surveyed the familiar field of turnips.

“A noice thing, I must say!” he muttered to himself as he looked along the lines of unthinned turnips. He still had twenty minutes, and so he went slowly along and completed a line which he had begun in the morning. He then deliberately packed up his dinner-things and his tools and started out for home.

As he came round the corner of Stillway’s meadow and the cottage came in view, his niece stepped out of the copse with a basket on her arm.

“Well, Uncle,” she said, “is there any noos?”

It was then that old Sam really lost his temper.

“Noos!” he said. “Noos! Drat the girl! What noos should there be? Sixty-nine year’ I live in these ’ere parts, hoein’ and weedin’ and thinnin’, and mindin’ Charlie Hodge’s sheep. Am I one o’ these ’ere story-book folk havin’ noos ’appen to me all the time? Ain’t it enough, ye silly, dab-faced zany, to earn enough to buy a bite o’ some’at to eat and a glass o’ beer and a place to rest a’s head o’night without always wantin’ noos, noos, noos! I tell ’ee it’s this that leads ’ee to ’alf the troubles in the world. Devil take the noos!”

And turning his back on her, he went fuming up the hill.

_Collier’s, The National Weekly_

“MOMMA”

BY

RUPERT HUGHES

“MOMMA”[4]

By RUPERT HUGHES

Momma was sick, right sick. Momma was awful sick! Momma looked like she was going to die any minute. And she didn’t care if she did. She up and as good as told Poppa that.

Poppa was scared almost to death when he realized it. He was all alone with her, and had none of the children to talk to about it; though, for the matter of that, Momma and Poppa had never told the children about their own ailments. And now the children had growed up and vamoosed. All that was left of the fact that there ever had been any children round the place was the two old names Momma and Poppa that the old folks had caught by contagion and got to calling each other by from hearing themselves called them by the children when they were children.

Momma and Poppa had been drifting down life like a pair of old mud turtles floating south on an old log. And now all of a sudden one of them felt that the other’n was going to roll off into the muddy water and sink downward, backward, dead!

Perhaps the poor turtles know and grieve and mourn to the full capacity of their tight shells.

But Poppa was a human, gifted with sympathy. He was old acquaintances with grief of every sort, a pitiful postgraduate in all a man knows who has been a lover, a husband, and a father, and has seen children born from one pain and ache to another and another, who has seen some of his own little children die, or pray for death in the long procession of disappointments and thwarted hopes that begin with the first irretrievable rattle lost over the edge of the crib, and pass on to the rainy holidays, the sunny schooldays, the warm Christmases, cracked dolls, lost games, indignities from parents who misunderstand and spank, from sweethearts who misunderstand and flirt, and so on and so forth to the dreary, shabby campfollower sorrows that trudge along at the tail end of the parade.

Poppa’s habit had been to take things as they come, because, as somebody said, that’s the only way they come. He had grown so jaded with existence that he became a veteran Horatio, who, as Will Shakespeare said, “fortune’s buffets and rewards hast ta’en with equal thanks.”

Nothing had excited him much of late at the store, at home, at church, the lodge, or in the newspapers. As he had worn what seemed to be the same suit of clothes for years, so his face had worn the same suit of expressions. It was hard to tell his smile from his scowl. Funny things all had a touch of misfortune in them for somebody, and sad things were all kind of funny, so the same twitch at the muscles about his mouth served for an acknowledgment of everything unusual.

But now, when Momma almost wisht she was dead, that last dreadful word twitched Poppa’s very heart. He felt as if in the calm slumber of habitude somebody had reached into his breast and given his heart a yank. And it shivered and rattled as an old doorbell clamors pulled hard at midnight by somebody crying: “Wake up! Your house is on fire!”

* * * * *

Poppa woke up. Instinct told him that he must save Momma and himself from the incredible disaster of her death. His business worries had kept him from noticing the little symptoms of her decline, though she had stopped quarreling with him, and had simply quarreled with life, with everything: the food, the neighbors, her clothes, the weather, her stummick, her head, her eyes, her feet, her hands, her appetite, her looks--she even complained of her looks!

And now, as if scales had been scraped off his eyes, Poppa saw that Momma didn’t look good. She didn’t look a bit good. She looked something scandalous.

Poppa belonged to a lodge, and he had gone to numberless funerals. Yet he had hardly even imagined that some day his fellow members might in turn come to his house, all dressed up with sashes and plumes and swords, to march alongside the black wagon that should carry his one woman in a box to a ditch.

As if some one had set a moving picture going against the wall of his own sitting room, he saw the whole thing, and he shuddered back from it with a cry that struck inward and cut downward and stuck. He had a fishbone in his throat.

He became suddenly young and arrantly afraid. He wanted to run to his wife and cling to her and beg her not to think of such things. But he had given up the habit of hugging Momma or taking her into his lap or sitting on the arm of her chair since the ancient days when the first child began to take notice.

He wanted to go back to the old ways, but it would have looked foolish, and the two frumps had been afraid of each other’s love for years and years.

He did nothing and said nothing; but he did a heap of thinking. “Heap” was the word, for his thoughts were like a pile of dead leaves, tarnished, crumpled brown leaves that had been green and radiant and breathing once.

His thoughts were a heap of autumnal rubbish set on fire. Red torment ran through them, and they writhed and twisted as if a new life had come back to them just that they might suffer a little more.

The terror stung him to a determination. “I’ll call the doctor,” he said. He rose from his chair and shuffled to the telephone. Momma ran after him and dragged his hands down, crying: “I don’t want to see that old fool. I’ll go jump in the river if you send for him. I couldn’t stand the sight of him.”

“When a woman’s too sick to see the doctor,” Poppa said, “it’s high time somebody called him in.”

He backed round and bunted her away with the minimum of grace and the maximum of devotion, and held her at a distance until he got the number.

Momma flopped helplessly into a chair and cried like a petulant little girl, while Poppa ordered the doctor to put on his shoes and come right over.

She was still pouting like a little girl when Dr. Noxon came. Her lips were pushed out and her chin was purse-drawn when he asked her what was the matter of her. He held her wrist in one hand and his watch in the other, glanced at her tongue, and in a lowered voice asked one or two very personal questions.

Poppa did most of the talking, while Dr. Noxon nodded and said: “I see, I see.” As might have been expected, he left two sets of pills, one kind to be taken after each meal and before retiring, and another kind of pill to be taken on arising and every three hours.

Momma could hardly keep from laughing in the old owl’s face, and as soon as he closed the door she bust right out. It was not a nice laugh--hysterics like. She whooped: “I’ve seen that old nuisance leave those same fool pills on those same fool pieces of paper since we first came to Carthage and called him in. Everybody that ever took ’em has died, and I guess it’s my turn! And I don’t care!”

Her laughter ended in the wild weeping of a young girl, and Poppa was almost distracted. She went to bed all wore out, but she couldn’t sleep.

She kept him awake worse when she laid still trying not to wake him than she did when she thrashed about and groaned.

* * * * *

That was a long night, and Poppa entertained a whole herd of nightmares without falling asleep, or, if he did, he didn’t know it and it didn’t do him a mite of good.

He waited a day or two to see what effect Dr. Noxon’s immemorial pills would have. They had even less effect than he expected they would.

The third day he took the almost sacrilegious step of seeing one of the other doctors. Dr. Champe refused to call since Mrs. Lundy was known to be one of Dr. Noxon’s regular customers, a life member in his pill association.

But Poppa threatened to brain Champe if he didn’t see Momma, and he consented to see her if she would call after dark. Poppa had to drive her there “like a pig to market,” he said, and he was more wore out than what she was.

Dr. Champe gave spoon medicines. They were bittersweet and sticky, and had no effect whatever except to cause a brief ague of nausea and leave a nasty taste on the tongue.

A third doctor tried massage, another electricity. Momma even flirted with science--science with a capital S. But the optimism that was ladled out to her made her sicker than Dr. Champe’s sticky sweet medicine. She was in one of those moods when a cheerful word or a smile is a deadly insult.

The last doctor in town advised a trip, a change of climate and environment. Momma ridiculed the idea, but Poppa telegraphed their married daughter in Terre Haute that Momma was coming, and he fairly boosted her on the train.

Momma was dismal and ashamed of being dumped as a burden on a daughter she had always babied even after Hattie (now Mrs. Fred Eppes) had babies of her own. So the reunion lacked the delight that belonged to the occasion.

Hattie hugged her mother hard and squealed: “Why, Momma, you’re looking fine!”

Momma was doleful enough to remember her own woes, and she groaned: “You just say that! I don’t feel a bit good and I’m a sight! Don’t show me to any of your swell Terra Hut friends, for I’ll disgrace you.”

Hattie had hard sledding before her. Her mother did not even want to cheer up. She wanted to be sick, and she doubled her misery by bewailing the fact that she couldn’t throw off her gloom. She tried to smile once or twice, but Hattie begged her not to.

Since Momma would neither go calling nor receive callers, she was not easy to entertain. She was ashamed of her shabby clothes and her dowdy appearance, and so was Hattie.

Hattie would not admit it, though she did say that Poppa, with all his money, ought to dress her up better. Poor Poppa had tried to. The average American husband does not often get the chance to complain of his wife’s thrift in clothes, but Mr. Lundy, little as he noticed such things, had finally urged Momma to spend a little more money on duds now that the children were buying their own. But his well-meant hints had only depressed her the more, and she had retorted that he was sick and tired of her and her old face.

He had dropped the subject. Hattie had no better success. All that she succeeded in accomplishing was a round of the Terre Haute physicians--especially of those frightful personages known as “specialists.” Each of these found his specialty in Momma, and went after it. One of them got away with a large number of her teeth before she could fight him off.

Others offered to remove various parts of her, but she declined to be separated from any more of her fixtures.

She reduced Hattie’s general practitioner almost to nervous prostration, and at last, in order to get her off his hands and off her daughter’s nerves, he casually recommended a New York specialist, Dr. Courtneidge, who had the monopoly on a very abstruse operation dealing with the pancreas or something that Momma didn’t even know she had.

She was quite overawed at finding herself the proud possessor of such a thing. She felt like an old watch that has suddenly learned it has had jewelled movements all these years. But after a few hours of being interested in herself she slumped again and said she guessed she’d take her old pancreas back to Carthage with her. She’d got along with it so far, and, seeing as she’d denied herself a trip to New York all her life for fun, she certainly wa’nt going all that ways to let a doctor poke a knife into her.

Hattie fumed and bullied in vain for a day or two, then she fired off a telegram to Poppa to come over at once.

* * * * *

Poppa was putting through a big land deal and the telegram nearly jolted him out of his wits. He would not wait to extend his option. He ran down to the station and swung on a train just pulling out. He did not even stop for the collar, toothbrush, and nightgown that constituted his usual going-away equipment.

He spent a horrible night in the smoking car, sleeping among his distorted limbs like a wrecked grasshopper. At Terre Haute he took a taxicab to Hattie’s house, and was in such a mental and facial disarray when he rang the bell that the maid who answered it slammed the door on him and ran to tell her mistress that there was a crazy man on the porch.

Hattie peeked through the little side window and recognized her father, and flung open the door and her arms to him.

He expected to find Momma on her deathbed, but she was at breakfast, crying into her rolled oats.

“What on earth is the matter of you, Momma?” he gasped.

“Nothing’s the matter of me,” she snapped. “What on earth’s the matter of you? Had your breakfast? Sed-down! And--Hattie, could you ask your girl to fry him a negg--turned over, you remember; and if the coffee’s out, here you can have the rest of mine.”

Poppa sank into a chair and consented to break his fast while the news was broken to him. The word “pancreas” dazed him. It sounded like something for breakfast till Hattie explained. Then he was convinced. There is something about a new word that solves all mysteries for most people, and Poppa was very much like most people.

When Hattie had explained that Dr. Appleyard himself had settled upon the pancreas and its malfunctioning, or something like that, as the secret of Momma’s indomitable obscurities, Poppa set his jaw.

“When’s first train to N’York?” he asked.

“I’m not goin’, I tell you,” Momma pealed. “I’m not goin’ one step.”

“You are goin’!” Poppa stormed. “Why ain’t you goin’?”

“Because it costs too much money.”

That is a thing a man likes to say for himself. He cannot endure to hear anyone else tell it to him. It is insulting. When the children were young, Momma had always said it first when she wanted to make sure of his consenting to an expenditure. Things she would never have browbeaten or wept out of him into permitting, she could always force him to force her to accept by that approach--using the word “force” as card tricksters do when they deftly permit you to drag from them the one card that will work the trick.

But now Momma was not stacking the cards. She had economized for so many decades that money had become a thing sacrosanct. Unwittingly she had dealt Poppa the deadliest humiliation in her power, for he was what Carthage people called “rich”; he had lands and lands in his own and Momma’s name, and big sums out on mortgages.

A standard of living that had been forced on him by his early poverty had sufficed him in his gradual wealth.

A new suit of clothes was a nuisance. Extra servants were like unwelcome guests that never went home. The simplest food everlastingly repeated was all his stomach craved.

Momma would as soon have had the measles as a limousine, and jewels on her fingers would have crippled her like inflammatory rheumatism. The changing styles of Paris interested her as much as the tides of Barnegat. She had not changed the manner of wearing her hair since she was a mother for the first time, and her dresses were made by a sewing woman who was more interested in the gossip of the families she moved among than in the daily hints from Paris.

With money pouring in in amounts whose importance neither husband nor wife ever thought of translating into luxuries, and seeping out in a slow trickle, the old couple had come near to being misers without dreaming of stinginess.

This last big land deal of Poppa’s had brought him to a sudden realization that he was a pretty big fellow. The banks had begun to turn to him with opportunities for large turnovers, and bonds were offered him in bundles.

And so when Momma implied that a trip to New York, to save her life maybe, was beyond his means, he was hurt and enraged, and in his anger he rose to an eloquence of gallantry he never would have achieved in a more temperate mood.

“Too much money, hey? You think you can’t afford it, do you? Well, let me tell you that I can afford to send you to any town that anybody else can afford to go to. And if that old pankers doctor has got any patients at tall besides millionaires, and if he don’t charge more’n a hundred thousand dollars a patient, you can have the best operation he’s got in his shop.”