Bat-Boat Racing


The scandals of the past few years have at last moved
the yachting world to concerted action in regard to
“bat” boat racing. We have been treated to the spectacle
of what are practically keeled racing-planes driven a
clear five foot or more above the water, and only eased
down to touch their so-called “ native element” as they near
the line. Judges and starters have been conveniently blind
to this absurdity, but the public demonstration off St.
Catherine’s Light at the Autumn Regattas has borne ample,
if tardy, fruit. In the future the “bat” is to be a boat, and
the long-unheeded demand of the true sportsman for “no
daylight under mid-keel in smooth water” is in a fair way to
be conceded. The new rule severely restricts plane area and
lift alike. The gas compartments are permitted both fore
and aft, as in the old type, but the water-ballast central tank
is rendered obligatory. These things work, if not for perfection,
at least for the evolution of a sane and wholesome
waterborne cruiser. The type of rudder is unaffected by the
new rules, so we may expect to see the Long-Davidson make
93
Kipling
(the patent on which has just expired) come largely into use
henceforward, though the strain on the sternpost in turning
at speeds over forty miles an hour is admittedly very
severe. But bat-boat racing has a great future before it.

Crete and the A. B. C.


The Story of the recent Cretan crisis, as told in the
A. B. C. Monthly Report, is not without humour.
Till the 25th October Crete, as all our planet knows,
was the sole surviving European repository of “autonomous
institutions,” “local self-government,” and the rest of the
archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human
affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic
attracted by her annual pageants of Parliaments, Boards,
Municipal Councils, etc., etc. Last summer the islanders grew
wearied, as their premier explained, of “playing at being
savages for pennies,” and proceeded to pull down all the
landing-towers on the island and shut off general communication
till such time as the A. B. C. should annex them. For
side-splitting comedy we would refer our readers to the correspondence
between the Board of Control and the Cretan
premier during the “war.” However, all’s well that ends well.
The A. B. C. have taken over the administration of Crete on
normal lines; and tourists must go elsewhere to witness
the”debates,” “resolutions,” and “popular movements” of
94
Actions and Reactions
the old days. The only people to suffer will be the Board of
Control, which is grievously overworked already. It is easy
enough to condemn the Cretans for their laziness; but when
one recalls the large, prosperous, and presumably publicspirited
communities which during the last few years have
deliberately thrown themselves into the hands of the A. B.
C., one, cannot be too hard upon St. Paul’s old friends.

Correspondence


Skylarking on the Equator
TO THE EDITOR: Only last week, while crossing the
Equator (W. 26-15), I became aware of a furious
and irregular cannonading some fifteen or twenty
knots S. 4 E. Descending to the 500 ft. level, I found a
party of Transylvanian tourists engaged in exploding scores
of the largest pattern atmospheric bombs (A. B. C. standard)
and, in the intervals of their pleasing labours, firing
bow and stern smoke-ring swivels. This orgie—I can give it
no other name—went on for at least two hours, and naturally
produced violent electric derangements. My compasses,
of course, were thrown out, my bow was struck twice, and I
received two brisk shocks from the lower platform-rail. On
remonstrating, I was told that these “professors” were engaged
in scientific experiments. The extent of their “scientific”
knowledge, may be judged by the fact that they expected
to produce (I give their own words)” a little blue
sky” if “they went on long enough.” This in the heart of the
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Kipling
Doldrums at 450 feet! I have no objection to any amount of
blue sky in its proper place (it can be found at the 4000
level for practically twelve months out of the year), but I
submit, with all deference to the educational needs of
Transylvania, that “skylarking” in the centre of a main-travelled
road where, at the best of times, electricity literally
drips off one’s stanchions and screw blades, is unnecessary.
When my friends had finished, the road was seared, and
blown, and pitted with unequal pressure layers, spirals,
vortices, and readjustments for at least an hour. I pitched
badly twice in an upward rush—solely due to these diabolical
throw-downs—that came near to wrecking my propeller.
Equatorial work at low levels is trying enough in all conscience
without the added terrors of scientific hooliganism
in the Doldrums.
Rhyl. J. Vincent Mathen.
[We entirely sympathize with Professor Mathen’s views, but
till the Board sees fit to further regulate the Southern areas
in which scientific experiments may be conducted, we

Answers to Correspondents


VIGILANS—The Laws of Auroral Derangements are still
imperfectly understood. Any overheated motor may of
course “seize” without warning; but so many complaints
have reached us of accidents similar to yours while shooting
the Aurora that we are inclined to believe with Lavalle
that the upper strata of the Aurora Borealis are practically
one big electric “leak,” and that the paralysis of your engines
was due to complete magnetization of all metallic parts.
Low-flying planes often “glue up” when near the Magnetic
Pole, and there is no reason in science why the same disability
should not be experienced at higher levels when the
Auroras are “delivering” strongly.
INDIGNANT—On your own showing, you were not under
control. That you could not hoist the necessary N. U. C.
lights on approaching a traffic-lane because your electrics
had short-circuited is a misfortune which might befall any
one. The A. B. C., being responsible for the planet’s traffic,
cannot, however, make allowance for this kind of misfortune.
A reference to the Code will show that you were fined
on the lower scale.
PLANISTON—(1) The Five Thousand Kilometre (overland)
was won last year by L. V. Rautsch; R. M. Rautsch, his
brother, in the same week pulling off the Ten Thousand
(oversee). R. M.’s average worked out at a fraction over 500
kilometres per hour, thus constituting a record. (2) Theoretically,
there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. For commercial
and practical purposes 15,000 tons is accepted as
the most manageable.
PATERFAMILIAS—None whatever. He is liable for direct
damage both to your chimneys and any collateral damage
caused by fall of bricks into garden, etc., etc. Bodily inconvenience
and mental anguish may be included, but the average
courts are not, as a rule, swayed by sentiment. If you
can prove that his grapnel removed any portion of your
roof, you had better rest your case on decoverture of domicile
(see Parkins v. Duboulay). We sympathize with your
97
Kipling
position, but the night of the 14th was stormy and confused,
and—you may have to anchor on a stranger’s chimney
yourself some night. Verbum sap!
ALDEBARAN—(1) war, as a paying concern, ceased in 1987.
(2) The Convention of London expressly reserves to every
nation the right of waging war so long as it does not interfere
with the traffic and all that implies. (3) The A. B. C.
was constituted in 1949.
L. M. P.—(1) Keep her full head-on at half power, taking
advantage of the lulls to speed up and creep into it. She will
strain much less this way than in quartering across a gale.
(2) Nothing is to be gained by reversing into a following
gale, and there is always risk of a turnover. (3) The formulae
for stun’sle brakes are uniformly unreliable, and will
continue to be so as long as air is compressible.
PEGAMOID- (1) Personally we prefer glass or flux compounds
to any other material for winter work nose-caps as
being absolutely non-hygroscopic. (2) We cannot recommend
any particular make.
PULMONAR—(1) For the symptoms you describe, try the
Gobi Desert Sanatoria. The low levels of most of the Saharan
Sanatoria are against them except at the outset of
the disease. (2) We do not recommend boarding-houses or
hotels in this column.
BEGINNER—On still days the air above a large inhabited
city being slightly warmer—i.e., thinner—than the atmosphere
of the surrounding country, a plane drops a little on
entering the rarefied area, precisely as a ship sinks a little
in fresh water. Hence the phenomena of “jolt” and your
“inexplicable collisions” with factory chimneys. In air, as
on earth, it is safest to fly high.
EMERGENCY—There is only one rule of the road in air,
earth, and water. Do you want the firmament to yourself?
PICCIOLA—Both Poles have been overdone in Art and Literature.
Leave them to Science for the next twenty years.
You did not send a stamp with your verses.
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Actions and Reactions
NORTH NIGERIA—The Mark Boat was within her right in
warning you off the Reserve. The shadow of a low-flying
dirigible scares the game. You can buy all the photos you
need at Sokoto.
NEW ERA—It is not etiquette to overcross an A. B. C.
official’s boat without asking permission. He is one of the
body responsible for the planet’s traffic, and for that reason
must not be interfered with. You, presumably, are out
on your own business or pleasure, and must leave him alone.
For humanity’s sake don’t try to be “democratic.”
EXCORIATED—All inflators chafe sooner or later. You must
go on till your skin hardens by practice. Meantime vaseline.

Review

The Life of Xavier Lavalle
(Reviewed by Rene Talland. Ecole Aeronautique,
Paris)

Teb years ago Lavalle, “that imperturbable dreamer
of the heavens,” as Lazareff hailed him, gathered
together the fruits of a lifetime’s labour, and gave
it, with well-justified contempt, to a world bound hand and
foot to Barald’s Theory of Vertices and “compensating electric
nodes.” “They shall see,” he wrote—in that immortal
postscript to The Heart of the Cyclone—”the Laws whose
existence they derided written in fire beneath them.”
“But even here,” he continues, “there is no finality. Better
a thousand times my conclusions should be discredited
than that my dead name should lie across the threshold of
the temple of Science—a bar to further inquiry.”
So died Lavalle—a prince of the Powers of the Air, and
even at his funeral Cellier jested at “him who had gone to
discover the secrets of the Aurora Borealis.”
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Kipling
If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that
Collier’s theories are today as exploded as the ludicrous
deductions of the Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive
and warring dreams we have, definitely, Lavalle’s Law
of the Cyclone which he surprised in darkness and cold at
the foot of the overarching throne of the Aurora Borealis.
It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, have
passed and re-passed a hundred times the worn leonine face,
white as the snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like
the seams and gashes upon the North Cape; the nervous
hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of his flighter;
and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to the
zenith.
“Master,” I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him,
“what is it you seek today?” and always the answer, clear and
without doubt, from above: “The old secret, my son!”
The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path,
but (cry of the human always!) had I known—if I had known—
I would many times have bartered my poor laurels for the
privilege, such as Tinsley and Herrera possess, of having
aided him in his monumental researches.
It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the
two volumes consecrated to the ground-life of his father, so
full of the holy intimacies of the domestic hearth. Once
returned from the abysms of the utter North to that little
house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was not the philosopher,
the daring observer, the man of iron energy that
imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive
jester, a farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his
children, and, it must be written, not seldom the comic despair
of Madame Lavalle, who, as she writes five years after
the marriage, to her venerable mother, found “in this unequalled
intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large
and very untidy boy.” Here is her letter:
“Xavier returned from I do not know where at midnight,
absorbed in calculations on the eternal question of his Aurora—
la belle Aurore, whom I begin to hate. Instead of anchoring,—
I had set out the guide-light above our roof, so he
had but to descend and fasten the plane—he wandered, profoundly
distracted, above the town with his anchor down!
Figure to yourself, dear mother, it is the roof of the mayor’s
house that the grapnel first engages! That I do not regret,
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Actions and Reactions
for the mayor’s wife and I are not sympathetic; but when
Xavier uproots my pet araucaria and bears it across the
garden into the conservatory I protest at the top of my
voice. Little Victor in his night-clothes runs to the window,
enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason,
for it is too dark to see the grapnel, of my prized tree. The
Mayor of Meudon, thunders at our door in the name of the
Law, demanding, I suppose, my husband’s head. Here is
the conversation through the megaphone—Xavier is two
hundred feet above us:
“‘Mons. Lavalle, descend and make reparation for outrage
of domicile. Descend, Mons. Lavalle!’
“No one answers.
“‘Xavier Lavalle, in the name of the Law, descend arid
submit to process for outrage of domicile.’
“Xavier, roused from his calculations, comprehending only
the last words: ‘Outrage of domicile? My dear mayor, who
is the man that has corrupted thy Julie?’
“The mayor, furious, ‘Xavier Lavalle—’
“Xavier, interrupting: ‘I have not that felicity. I am only a
dealer in cyclones!’
“My faith, he raised one then! All Meudon attended in
the streets, and my Xavier, after a long time comprehending
what he had done, excused himself in a thousand apologies.
At last the reconciliation was effected in our house
over a supper at two in the morning—Julie in a wonderful
costume of compromises, and I have her and the mayor
pacified in bed in the blue room.”
And on the next day, while the mayor rebuilds his roof,
her Xavier departs anew for the Aurora Borealis, there to
commence his life’s work. M. Victor Lavalle tells us of that
historic collision (en plane) on the flank of Hecla between
Herrera, then a pillar of the Spanish school, and the man
destined to confute his theories and lead him intellectually
captive. Even through the years, the immense laugh of
Lavalle as he sustains the Spaniard’s wrecked plane, and
cries: “Courage! I shall not fall till I have found Truth, and
I hold you fast!” rings like the call of trumpets. This is that
Lavalle whom the world, immersed in speculations of immediate
gain, did not know nor suspect—the Lavalle whom
they adjudged to the last a pedant and a theorist.
The human, as apart from the scientific, side (developed
101
Kipling
in his own volumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is
marked with a simplicity, clarity, and good sense beyond
praise. I would specially refer such as doubt the sustaining
influence of ancestral faith upon character and will to the
eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained
the opening and consummation of the Tellurionical Records
extending over nine years. Of their tremendous significance
be sure that the modest house at Meudon knew as little as
that the Records would one day be the planet’s standard in
all official meteorology. It was enough for them that their
Xavier—this son, this father, this husband—ascended periodically
to commune with powers, it might be angelic, beyond
their comprehension, and that they united daily in
prayers for his safety.
“Pray for me,” he says upon the eve of each of his excursions,
and returning, with an equal simplicity, he renders
thanks “after supper in the little room where he kept his
barometers.”
To the last Lavalle was a Catholic of the old school, accepting—
he who had looked into the very heart of the lightnings—
the dogmas of papal infallibility, of absolution, of
confession—of relics great and small. Marvellous—enviable
contradiction!
The completion of the Tellurionical Records closed what
Lavalle himself was pleased to call the theoretical side of
his labours—labours from which the youngest and least impressionable
planeur might well have shrunk. He had traced
through cold and heat, across the deeps of the oceans, with
instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable
heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts,
league by league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from
their ever-shifting cradle under the magnetic pole to their
exalted death-bed in the utmost ether of the upper atmosphere
each one of the Isoconical Tellurions Lavalle’s Curves,
as we call them today. He had disentangled the nodes of
their intersections, assigning to each its regulated period
of flux and reflux. Thus equipped, he summons Herrera
and Tinsley, his pupils, to the final demonstration as calmly
as though he were ordering his flighter for some mid-day
journey to Marseilles.
“I have proved my thesis,” he writes. “It remains now
only that you should witness the proof. We go to Manila to102
Actions and Reactions
morrow. A cyclone will form off the Pescadores S. 17 E. in
four days, and will reach its maximum intensity twenty-seven
hours after inception. It is there I will show you the Truth.”
A letter heretofore unpublished from Herrera to Madame
Lavalle tells us how the Master’s prophecy was verified.
I will not destroy its simplicity or its significance by any
attempt to quote. Note well, though, that Herrera’s preoccupation
throughout that day and night of superhuman
strain is always for the Master’s bodily health and comfort.
“At such a time,” he writes, “I forced the Master to take
the broth”; or “I made him put on the fur coat as you told
me.” Nor is Tinsley (see pp. 184, 85) less concerned. He
prepares the nourishment. He cooks eternally, imperturbably,
suspended in the chaos of which the Master interprets
the meaning. Tinsley, bowed down with the laurels of both
hemispheres, raises himself to yet nobler heights in his capacity
of a devoted chef. It is almost unbelievable! And yet
men write of the Master as cold, aloof, self-contained. Such
characters do not elicit the joyous and unswerving devotion
which Lavalle commanded throughout life. Truly, we have
changed very little in the course of the ages! The secrets of
earth and sky and the links that bind them, we felicitate
ourselves we are on the road to discover; but our neighbours’
heart and mind we misread, we misjudge, we condemn now
as ever. Let all, then, who love a man read these most human,
tender, and wise volumes.
* * *
transcriber’s note: These “advertisements” appeared in the
format that would have been used in a newspaper or magazine
ad section—that is in two columns for the smaller ads,
and in quarter, half, full and double page layouts for the
others. also L is used as the symbol for pounds.
* * *

Miscelleneous

[ WANTS ]

REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY, FOR East Africa, a thoroughly
competent Plane and Dirigible Driver, acquainted with
Petrol Radium and Helium motors and generators. Lowlevel
work only, but must understand heavy-weight digs.
MOSSAMEDES TRANSPORT ASSOC.
84 Palestine Buildings, E. C.
MAN WANTED-DIG DRIVER for Southern Alps with Saharan
summer trips. High levels, high speed. high wages:
Apply M. SIDNEY
Hotel San Stefano. Monte Carlo.
FAMILY DIRIGIBLE. A COMPETENT, steady man wanted
for slow speed, low level Tangye dirigible. No night work,
no sea trips. Must be member of the Church of England,
and make himself useful in the garden.
M. R.
The Rectory, Gray’s Barton, Wilts.
COMMERCIAL DIG, CENTRAL and Southern Europe. A
smart, active man for a L. M. T. Dig. Night work only. Headquarters
London and Cairo. A linguist preferred.
BAGMAN
Charing Cross Hotel, W. C. (urgent.)
FOR SALE—A BARGAIN—Single Plane, narrow-gauge vans,
Pinke motor. Restayed this autumn. Hansen air-kit, 58 in.
chest, 153 collar. Can be seen by appointment.
N. 2650 This office.

The Bee-Line Bookshop


BELT’S WAY-BOOKS, giving town lights for all towns over
4,000 pop. as laid down by A. B. O. THE WORLD. Complete
2 vols. Thin Oxford, limp back. 12L 6d. BELT’S
COASTAL ITINERARY. Short Lights of the World. 7s. 6d.
THE TRANSATLANTIC AND MEDITERRANEAN TRAFFIC
LINES.
(By authority of the A.B.C.) Paper,
1s. 6d.; cloth. 2s. 6d. Ready, Jan. 16.
ARCTIC AEROPLANING. Siemens and Gait. Cloth, bds.
Ss. 6d. LAVALLE’S HEART OF THE CYCLONE, with
supplementary charts. 4s. 6d. RIMINGTON’S PITFALLS
IN THE AIR, and Table of Comparative Densities 3s. 6d.
ANGELO’S DESERT IN A DIRIGIBLE. New edition, revised.
5s. 9d. VAUGHAN’S PLANE RACING IN CALM AND
STORM. 2s. 6d. VAUGHAN’S HINTS TO THE AIRMATEUR
1s. HOFMAN’S LAWS OF LIFT AND VELOCITY. With
diagrams, 3s. 6d. DE VITRE’S THEORY OF SHIFTING
BALLAST IN DIRIGIBLES. 2s. 6d. SANGERS WEATHERS
OF THE WORLD. 4s. SANGER’S TEMPERATURES AT
HIGH ALTITUDES. 4s. HAWKIN’S FOG AND HOW To
AVOID IT. 3s. VAN ZUYLAN’S SECONDARY EFFECTS OF
THUNDERSTORMS. 4s. 6d. DAHLGREN’S AIR CURRENTS
AND EPIDEMIC DISEASES. 5s. 6d. REDMAYNE’S
DISEASE AND THE BAROMETER. 7s. 6d. WALTON’S
HEALTH RESORTS OF THE GOBI AND SHAMO. 3s. 6d.
WALTON’S THE POLE AND PULMONARY COMPLAINTS.
7s. ad. MUTLOWS HIGH LEVEL BACTERIOLOGY.
7s. 6d. HALLIWELL’S ILLUMINATED STAR MAP,
with clockwork attachment,
giving apparent motion of heavens, boxed, complete with
clamps for binnacle, 36 inch size, only L2. 2. 0.
Invaluable for night work.) With A.B.C. certificate. L3. 10s.
0d. Zalinski’s Standard Works:
PASSES OF THE HIMALAYAS, 5s.
PASSES OF THE SIERRAS, 5s.
PASSES OF THE ROOKIES. 5s.
PASSES OF THE URALS, 5s.
The four boxed, limp cloth, with charts, 15s.
GRAY’S AIR CURRENTS at MOUNTAIN GORGES, 7s. 6d.
105
Kipling
A. C. BELT & SON, READING
SAFETY WEAR FOR AERONAUTS
Fickers! Flickers! Flickers!
HIGH LEVEL FLICKERS
“He that is down need fear no fall,”
Fear not! You will fall lightly as down!
Hansen’s air-kits are down in all respects. Tremendous reductions
in prices previous to winter stocking. Pure para
kit with cellulose seat and shoulder-pads, weighted to balance.
Unequalled for all drop-work.
Our trebly resilient heavy kit is the ne plus ultra of
comfort and safety.
Gas-buoyed, waterproof, hail-proof, nonconducting Flickers
with pipe and nozzle fitting all types of generator. Graduated
tap on left hip.
Hansen’s Flickers Lead the Aerial Flight
197 Oxford Street
The new weighted Flicker with tweed or cheviot surface
cannot be distinguished from the ordinary suit till inflated.
Fickers! Flickers! Flickers!
106
Actions and Reactions
APPLIANCES FOR AIR PLANES
What
“SKID”
was to our forefathers on the ground,
“PITCH”
is to their sons in the air.
The popularity of the large, unwieldy, slow, expensive Dirigible
over the light swift, Plane is mainly due to the former’s
immunity from pitch.
Collison’s forward-socketed Air Van renders it impossible
for any plane to pitch. The C.F.S. is automatic, simple as a
shutter, certain\ as a power hammer, safe as oxygen. Fitted
to any make of plane.
COLLISON
186 Brompton Road
Workshops, Chiswick
LUNDIE do MATTERS
Sole Agts for East’n Hemisphere
STARTERS AND GUIDES
Hotel, club, and private house plane-starters, slips and
guides affixed by skilled workmen in accordance with local
building laws.
Rackstraww’s forty-foot collapsible steel starters with automatic
release at end of travel—prices per foot run, clamps
and crampons included. The safest on the market.
Weaver & Denison
Middleboro
107
Kipling
AIR PLANES AND DIRIGIBLE GOODS
REMEMBER
Planes are swift—so is Death
Planes are cheap—so is Life
Why does the plane builder insist on the safety of his machines?
Methinks the gentleman protests too much.
The Standard Dig Construction Company do not build kites.
They build, equip and guarantee dirigibles.
Standard Dig construction Co.
Millwall and Buenos Ayres
HOVERS
POWELL’S
Wind Hovers
for ‘planes lying-to in heavy weather, save the motor and
strain on the forebody. Will not send to leeward. “Albatross”
wind-hovers, rigid-ribbed; according to h.p. and
weight.
We fit and test free to
40 east of Greenwich Village
L. & W. POWELL
196 Victoria Street, W.
108
Actions and Reactions
REMEMBER
We shall always be pleased to see you.
We build and test and guarantee our dirigibles or all purposes.
They go up when you please and they do not come
down till you please.
You can please yourself, but—you might as well choose a
dirigible.
STANDARD DIRIGIBLE CONSTRUCTION CO.
Millwall and Buenos Ayres
GAYER AND HUNT
Birmingham and Birmingham
Eng. Ala.
Towers. Landing Stages,
Slips and Lifts
public and private
Contractors to the A. B. C., South-Western European
Postal Construction Dept. Sole patentees and owners of
the Collison anti-quake diagonal tower-tie. Only gold medal
Kyoto Exhibition of Aerial Appliances, 1997.
AIR PLANES AND DIRIGIBLES
C. M. C.
Our Synthetical Mineral
BEARINGS
are chemically and crystal logically identical with the minerals
whose names they bear. Any size, any surface. Diamond,
Rock-Crystal, Agate and Ruby Bearings-cups, caps
109
Kipling
and collars for the higher speeds. For tractor bearings and
spindles-Imperative. For rear propellers-Indispensable. For
all working parts-Advisable.
Commercial Minerals Co.
107 Minories
RESURGAM!
If you have not Clothed YOURSELF in a
NORMANDIE RESURGAM
YOU WILL PROBABLY NOT BE INTERESTED IN OUR
NEXT WEEK’S LIST OF AIR-KIT.
RESURGAM AIR-KIT EMPORIUM
HYMANS & GRAHAM
1198 Lower Broadway, New York
REMEMBER!
* It is now nearly, a generation since the Plane was to supersede
the Dirigible for all purposes. * To-day none of the
Planet’s freight is carried en plane. * Less than two per
rent of the Planet’s passengers are carried en plane.
We design, equip guarantee Dirigibles for all purposes.
Standard Dig Construction Company Millwall and Buenos
Ayres
110
Actions and Reactions
BAT-BOATS
FLINT & MANTEL
SOUTHAMPTON
FOR SALE
at the end of Season the following Bat-Boats:
GRISELDA, 65 knt., 42 ft., 430(nom.) Maginnis Motor,
under-rake rudder.
MABELLE, 50 knt., 40 ft., 310 Hargreaves Motor,
Douglas’ lock-steering gear.
IVEMONA, 50 knt., 35 ft., 300 Hargreaves (Radium accelerator),
Miller keel and rudder.
The above are well known on the South Coast as sound,
wholesome knockabout boats, with ample cruising accommodation.
Griselda carries spare set of Hofman racing vans
and can be lied three foot clear in smooth water with ballast-
tank swung aft. The others do not lift, clear of water,
and are recommended for beginners.
Also, by private treaty, racing B.B. Tarpon (76 winning flags)
120 knt., 60 ft.; Long-Davidson double under-rake rudder,
new this season and unstrained. 850 nom. Maginnis motor,
Radium relays and Pond generator. Bronze breakwater forward,
and treble reinforced forefoot and entry. Talfourd
rockered keel: Triple set of Hofman vans, giving maximum
lifting surface of 5327 sq. ft.
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Our Autumn List of racing and family Bats ready on the
9th January.
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Kipling
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Actions and Reactions
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Spare generators guaranteed to lifting power marked on
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Wind-noses for dirigibles—Pegamoid, cane-stiffened, lacquered
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Kipling
Magniac’s bow-rudders—(Lavales patent grooving).
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The Four Angels


As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree,
The Angel of the Earth came down, and offered Earth in fee.
But Adam did not need it,
Nor the plough he would not speed it,
Singing:—”Earth and Water, Air and Fire,
What more can mortal man desire?”
(The Apple Tree’s in bud.)
As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree,
The Angel of the Waters offered all the Seas in fee.
But Adam would not take ‘em,
Nor the ships he wouldn’t make ‘em,
Singing:—”Water, Earth and Air and Fire,
What more can mortal man desire?”
(The Apple Tree’s in leaf.)
As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree,
The Angel of the Air he offered all the Air in fee.
But Adam did not crave it,
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Actions and Reactions
Nor the flight he wouldn’t brave it,
Singing:—”Air and Water, Earth and Fire,
What more can mortal man desire?”
(The Apple Tree’s in bloom.)
As Adam lay a-dreaming beneath the Apple Tree,
The Angel of the Fire rose up and not a word said he.
But he wished a fire and made it,
And in Adam’s heart he laid it,
Singing.—”Fire, fire, burning Fire,
Stand up and reach your heart’s desire!”
(The Apple Blossom’s set.)
As Adam was a-working outside of Eden-Wall,
He used the Earth, he used the Seas, he used the Air and all;
And out of black disaster
He arose to be the master
Of Earth and Water, Air and Fire,
But never reached his heart’s desire!
(The Apple Tree’s cut down!)

A Deal in Cotton


Long and long ago, when Devadatta was King of
Benares, I wrote some tales concerning Strickland
of the Punjab Police (who married Miss Youghal),
and Adam, his son. Strickland has finished his Indian Service,
and lives now at a place in England called Weston-super-
Mare, where his wife plays the organ in one of the
churches. Semi-occasionally he comes up to London, and
occasionally his wife makes him visit his friends. Otherwise
he plays golf and follows the harriers for his figure’s sake.
If you remember that Infant who told a tale to Eustace
Cleever the novelist, you will remember that he became a
baronet with a vast estate. He has, owing to cookery, a little
lost his figure, but he never loses his friends. I have found a
wing of his house turned into a hospital for sick men, and
there I once spent a week in the company of two dismal
nurses and a specialist in “Sprue.” Another time the place
was full of schoolboys—sons of Anglo-Indians whom the
Infant had collected for the holidays, and they nearly broke
his keeper’s heart.
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Kipling
But my last visit was better. The Infant called me up by
wire, and I fell into the arms of a friend of mine, Colonel
A.L. Corkran, so that the years departed from us, and we
praised Allah, who had not yet terminated the Delights,
nor separated the Companions.
Said Corkran, when he had explained how it felt to command
a native Infantry regiment on the border: “The Stricks
are coming for to-night-with their boy.”
“I remember him. The little fellow I wrote a story about,”
I said. “Is he in the Service?”
“No. Strick got him into the Centro-Euro-Africa Protectorate.
He’s Assistant-Commissioner at Dupe—wherever that
is. Somaliland, ain’t it, Stalky?” asked the Infant.
Stalky puffed out his nostrils scornfully. “You’re only three
thousand miles out. Look at the atlas.”
“Anyhow, he’s as rotten full of fever as the rest of you,”
said the Infant, at length on the big divan. “And he’s bringing
a native servant with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell
Ipps to put him in the stable room.”
“Why? Is he a Yao—like the fellow Wade brought here—
when your housekeeper had fits?” Stalky often visits the
Infant, and has seen some odd things.
“No. He’s one of old Strickland’s Punjabi policemen—and
quite European—I believe.”
“Hooray! Haven’t talked Punjabi for three months—and
a Punjabi from Central Africa ought to be amusin’.”
We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the
first to enter was Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes
no secret of adoring.
He is devoted, in a fat man’s placid way, to at least eight
designing women; but she nursed him once through a bad
bout of Peshawur fever, and when she is in the house, it is
more than all hers.
“You didn’t send rugs enough,” she began. “Adam might
have taken a chill.”
“It’s quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride
in front? “
“Because he wanted to,” she replied, with the mother’s
smile, and we were introduced to the shadow of a young
man leaning heavily on the shoulder of a bearded Punjabi
Mohammedan.
“That is all that came home of him,” said his father to
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Actions and Reactions
me. There was nothing in it of the child with whom I had
journeyed to Dalhousie centuries since.”
“And what is this uniform?” Stalky asked of Imam Din,
the servant, who came to attention on the marble floor.
“The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though
I am the Little Sahib’s body-servant, it is not seemly for us
white men to be attended by folk dressed altogether as servants.”
“And—and you white men wait at table on horseback?”
Stalky pointed to the man’s spurs.
“These I added for the sake of honour when I came to
England,” said Imam Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little
smile that I began to remember, and we put him on the big
couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how much leave
he had, and he said “Six months.”
“But he’ll take another six on medical certificate,” said
Agnes anxiously. Adam knit his brows.
“You don’t want to—eh? I know. Wonder what my second
in command is doing.” Stalky tugged his moustache, and
fell to thinking of his Sikhs.
“Ah!” said the Infant. “I’ve only a few thousand pheasants
to look after. Come along and dress for dinner. We’re
just ourselves. What flower is your honour’s ladyship commanding
for the table?”
“Just ourselves?” she said, looking at the crotons in the
great hall. “Then let’s have marigolds the little cemetery
ones.”
So it was ordered.
Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting,
and death. That smell in our nostrils, and Adam’s servant
in waiting, we naturally fell back more and more on
the old slang, recalling at each glass those who had gone
before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay window
overlooking the park, where they were carting the last
of the hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles,
but waited for the moon, and continued our talk in the
dusk that makes one remember.
Young Adam was not interested in our past except where
it had touched his future. I think his mother held his hand
beneath the table. Imam Din—shoeless, out of respect to
the floors—brought him his medicine, poured it drop by
drop, and asked for orders.
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Kipling
“Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary,” said
his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the
ancestral portraits.
“Now what d’you expect to get out of your country?” the
Infant asked, when—our India laid aside we talked Adam’s
Africa. It roused him at once.
“Rubber -nuts -gums -and so on,” he said. “But our real
future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District.”
“My District!” said his father. “Hear him, Mummy!”
“I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some
Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton
on the market.”
“But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?” she asked.
“My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby)
of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his
way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing
for cotton.”
“Ah! What was your Chief like?” Stalky asked, in his silkiest
tones.
“The best man alive—absolutely. He lets you blow your
own nose yourself. The people call him”—Adam jerked out
some heathen phrase—”that means the Man with the Stone
Eyes, you know.”
“I’m glad of that. Because I’ve heard from other quarters”
Stalky’s sentence burned like a slow match, but the
explosion was not long delayed. “Other quarters!” Adam
threw out a thin hand. “Every dog has his fleas. If you listen
to them, of course!” The shake of his head was as I
remembered it among his father’s policemen twenty years
before, and his mother’s eyes shining through the dusk
called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the shin. One
must not mock a young man’s first love or loyalty.
A lump of raw cotton appeared on the table.
“I thought there might be a need. Therefore I packed it
between our shirts,” said the voice of Imam Din.
“Does he know as much English as that?” cried the Infant,
who had forgotten his East.
We all admired the cotton for Adam’s sake, and, indeed,
it was very long and glossy.
“It’s—it’s only an experiment,” he said. “We’re such awful
paupers we can’t even pay for a mailcart in my District. We
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Actions and Reactions
use a biscuit-box on two bicycle wheels. I only got the money
for that”—he patted the stuff—”by a pure fluke.”
“How much did it cost?” asked Strickland.
“With seed and machinery—about two hundred pounds. I
had the labour done by cannibals.”
“That sounds promising.” Stalky reached for a fresh cigarette.
“No, thank you,” said Agnes. “I’ve been at Weston-super-
Mare a little too long for cannibals. I’ll go to the musicroom
and try over next Sunday’s hymns.”
She lifted the boy’s hand lightly to her lips, and tripped
across the acres of glimmering floor to the music-room that
had been the Infant’s ancestors’ banqueting hall. Her grey
and silver dress disappeared under the musicians’ gallery;
two electrics broke out, and she stood backed against the
lines of gilded pipes.
“There’s an abominable self-playing attachment here!” she
called.
“Me!” the Infant answered, his napkin on his shoulder.
“That’s how I play Parsifal.”
“I prefer the direct expression. Take it away, Ipps.”
We heard old Ipps skating obediently all over the floor.
“Now for the direct expression,” said Stalky, and moved
on the Burgundy recommended by the faculty to enrich
fever-thinned blood.
“It’s nothing much. Only the belt of cotton-soil my chief
showed me ran right into the Sheshaheli country. We haven’t
been able to prove cannibalism against that tribe in the
courts; but when a Sheshaheli offers you four pounds of
woman’s breast, tattoo marks and all, skewered up in a plantain
leaf before breakfast, you—”
“Naturally burn the villages before lunch,” said Stalky.
Adam shook his head. “No troops,” he sighed. “I told my
Chief about it, and he said we must wait till they chopped a
white man. He advised me if ever I felt like it not to commit
a—a barren felo de se, but to let the Sheshaheli do it. Then
he could report, and then we could mop ‘em up!”
“Most immoral! That’s how we got—” Stalky quoted the
name of a province won by just such a sacrifice.
“Yes, but the beasts dominated one end of my cotton-belt
like anything. They chivied me out of it when I went to take
soil for analysis—me and Imam Din.”
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Kipling
“Sahib! Is there a need?” The voice came out of the darkness,
and the eyes shone over Adam’s shoulder ere it ceased.
“None. The name was taken in talk.” Adam abolished him
with a turn of the finger. “I couldn’t make a casus belli of it
just then, because my Chief had taken all the troops to hammer
a gang of slave kings up north. Did you ever hear of our
war against Ibn Makarrah? He precious nearly lost us the
Protectorate at one time, though he’s an ally of ours now.”
“Wasn’t he rather a pernicious brute, even as they go?”
said Stalky. “Wade told me about him last year.”
“Well, his nickname all through the country was ‘The Merciful,’
and he didn’t get that for nothing. None of our people
ever breathed his proper name. They said ‘He’ or ‘That
One,’ and they didn’t say it aloud, either. He fought us for
eight months.”
“I remember. There was a paragraph about it in one of
the papers,” I said.
“We broke him, though. No—the slavers don’t come our
way, because our men have the reputation of dying too
much, the first month after they’re captured. That knocks
down profits, you see.”
“What about your charming friends, the Sheshahelis?”
said the Infant.
“There’s no market for Sheshaheli. People would as soon
buy crocodiles. I believe, before we annexed the country,
Ibn Makarrah dropped down on ‘em once—to train his young
men—and simply hewed ‘em in pieces. The bulk of my people
are agriculturists just the right stamp for cotton-growers.
What’s Mother playing?—’Once in royal’?”
The organ that had been crooning as happily as a woman
over her babe restored, steadied to a tune.
“Magnificent! Oh, magnificent! “ said the Infant loyally. I
had never heard him sing but once, and then, though it was
early in the tolerant morning, his mess had rolled him into
a lotus pond.
“How did you get your cannibals to work for you?” asked
Strickland.
“They got converted to civilization after my Chief smashed
Ibn Makarrah—just at the time I wanted ‘em. You see my
Chief had promised me in writing that if I could scrape up a
surplus he would not bag it for his roads this time, but I
might have it for my cotton game. I only needed two hun120
Actions and Reactions
dred pounds. Our revenues didn’t run to it.”
“What is your revenue?” Stalky asked in the vernacular.
“With hut-tax, traders’ game and mining licenses, not more
than fourteen thousand rupees; every penny of it ear-marked
months ahead.” Adam sighed.
“Also there is a fine for dogs straying in the Sahib’s camp.
Last year it exceeded three rupees,” Imam Din said quietly.
“Well, I thought that was fair. They howled so. We were
rather strict on fines. I worked up my native clerk—Bulaki
Ram—to a ferocious pitch of enthusiasm. He used to calculate
the profits of our cotton-scheme to three points of decimals,
after office. I tell you I envied your magistrates here
hauling money out of motorists every week I had managed
to make our ordinary revenue and expenditure just about
meet, and I was crazy to get the odd two hundred pounds
for my cotton. That sort of thing grows on a chap when he’s
alone—and talks aloud!”
“Hul-lo! Have you been there already?” the father said,
and Adam nodded.
“Yes. Used to spout what I could remember of ‘Marmion’
to a tree, sir. Well then my luck turned. One evening an
English-speaking nigger came in towing a corpse by the feet.
(You get used to little things like that.) He said he’d found
it, and please would I identify, because if it was one of Ibn
Makarrah’s men there might be a reward. It was an old
Mohammedan, with a strong dash of Arab—a smallboned,
bald-headed chap, and I was just wondering how it had kept
so well in our climate when it sneezed. You ought to have
seen the nigger! He fetched a howl and bolted like—like the
dog in ‘Tom Sawyer,’ when he sat on the what’s-its-name
beetle. He yelped as he ran, and the corpse went on sneezing.
I could see it had been sarkied. (That’s a sort of gumpoison,
pater, which attacks the nerve centres. Our chief
medical officer is writing a monograph about it.) So Imam
Din and I emptied out the corpse one time, with my shaving
soap and trade gunpowder, and hot water.
“I’d seen a case of sarkie before; so when the skin peeled
off his feet, and he stopped sneezing, I knew he’d live. He
was bad, though; lay like a log for a week while Imam Din
and I massaged the paralysis out of him. Then he told us he
was a Hajji—had been three times to Mecca—come in from
French Africa, and that he’d met the nigger by the way121
Kipling
side—just like a case of thuggee, in India—and the nigger
had poisoned him. That seemed reasonable enough by what
I knew of Coast niggers.”
“You believed him?” said his father keenly.
“There was no reason I shouldn’t. The nigger never came
back, and the old man stayed with me for two months,”
Adam returned. “You know what the best type of a Mohammedan
gentleman can be, pater? He was that.”
“None finer, none finer,” was the answer.
“Except a Sikh,” Stalky grunted.
“He’d been to Bombay; he knew French Africa inside out;
he could quote poetry and the Koran all day long. He played
chess—you don’t know what that meant to me -like a master.
We used to talk about the regeneration of Turkey and
the Sheik-ul-Islam between moves. Oh, everything under the
sun we talked about! He was awfully open-minded. He believed
in slavery, of course, but he quite saw that it would
have to die out. That’s why he agreed with me about developing
the resources of the district by cotton-growing, you
know.”
“You talked of that too?” said Strickland.
“Rather. We discussed it for hours. You don’t know what
it meant to me. A wonderful man. Imam Din, was not our
Hajji marvellous?”
“Most marvellous! It was all through the Hajji that we
found the money for our cotton-play.” Imam Din had moved,
I fancy, behind Strickland’s chair.
“Yes. It must have been dead against his convictions too.
He brought me news when I was down with fever at Dupe
that one of Ibn Makarrah’s men was parading through my
District with a bunch of slaves—in the Fork!”
“What’s the matter with the Fork, that you can’t abide
it?” said Stalky. Adam’s voice had risen at the last word.
“Local etiquette, sir,” he replied, too earnest to notice
Stalky’s atrocious pun. “If a slaver runs slaves through British
territory he ought to pretend that they’re his servants.
Hawkin’ ‘em about in the Fork—the forked stick that you
put round their necks, you know—is insolence—same as not
backing your topsails in the old days. Besides, it unsettles
the District.”
“I thought you said slavers didn’t come your way,” I put
in.
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Actions and Reactions
“They don’t. But my Chief was smoking ‘em out of the
North all that season, and they were bolting into French
territory any road they could find. My orders were to take
no notice so long as they circulated, but open slave-dealing
in the Fork, was too much. I couldn’t go myself, so I told a
couple of our Makalali police and Imam Din to make talk
with the gentleman one time. It was rather risky, and it
might have been expensive, but it turned up trumps. They
were back in a few days with the slaver (he didn’t show fight)
and a whole crowd of witnesses, and we tried him in my
bedroom, and fined him properly. Just to show you how
demoralized the brute must have been (Arabs often go dotty
after a defeat), he’d snapped up four or five utterly useless
Sheshaheli, and was offering ‘em to all and sundry along
the road. Why, he offered ‘em to you, didn’t he, Imam Din?”
“I was witness that he offered man-eaters’ for sale,” said
Imam Din.
“Luckily for my cotton-scheme, that landed, him both
ways. You see, he had slaved and exposed slaves for sale in
British territory. That meant the double fine if I could get
it out of him.”
“What was his defence?” said Strickland, late of the Punjab
Police.
“As far as I remember—but I had a temperature of 104
degrees at the time—he’d mistaken the meridians of longitude.
Thought he was in French territory. Said he’d never
do it again, if we’d let him off with a fine. I could have
shaken hands with the brute for that. He paid up cash like
a motorist and went off one time.”
“Did you see him?”
“Ye-es. Didn’t I, Imam Din?”
“Assuredly the Sahib both saw and spoke to the slaver.
And the Sahib also made a speech to the man-eaters when
he freed them, and they swore to supply him with labour
for all his cotton-play. The Sahib leaned on his own servant’s
shoulder the while.”
“I remember something of that. I remember Bulaki Ram
giving me the papers to sign, and I distinctly remember
him locking up the money in the safe—two hundred and ten
beautiful English sovereigns. You don’t know what that
meant to me! I believe it cured my fever; and as soon as I
could, I staggered off with the Hajji to interview the
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Kipling
Sheshaheli about labour. Then I found out why they had
been so keen to work! It wasn’t gratitude. Their big village
had been hit by lightning and burned out a week or two
before, and they lay flat in rows around me asking me for a
job. I gave it ‘em.”
“And so you were very happy?” His mother had stolen up
behind us. “You liked your cotton, dear?” She tidied the
lump away.
“By Jove, I was happy!” Adam yawned. “Now if any one,”
he looked at the Infant, “cares to put a little money into the
scheme, it’ll be the making of my District. I can’t give you
figures, sir, but I assure—”
“You’ll take your arsenic, and Imam Din’ll take you up to
bed, and I’ll come and tuck you in.”
Agnes leaned forward, her rounded elbows on his shoulders,
hands joined across his dark hair, and “Isn’t he a darling?”
she said to us, with just the same heart-rending lift
to the left eyebrow and the same break of her voice as sent
Strickland mad among the horses in the year ’84. We were
quiet when they were gone. We waited till Imam Din returned
to us from above and coughed at the door, as only
dark-hearted Asia can.
“Now,” said Strickland, “tell us what truly befell, son of
my servant.”
“All befell as our Sahib has said. Only—only there was an
arrangement—a little arrangement on account of his cotton-
play.”
“Tell! Sit! I beg your pardon, Infant,” said Strickland.
But the Infant had already made the sign, and we heard
Imam Din hunker down on the floor: One gets little out of
the East at attention.
“When the fever came on our Sahib in our roofed house
at Dupe,” he began, “the Hajji listened intently to his talk.
He expected the names of women; though I had already
told him that Our virtue was beyond belief or compare,
and that Our sole desire was this cotton-play. Being at last
convinced, the Hajji breathed on our Sahib’s forehead, to
sink into his brain news concerning a slave-dealer in his
district who had made a mock of the law. Sahib,” Imam Din
turned to Strickland, “our Sahib answered to those false
words as a horse of blood answers to the spur. He sat up.
He issued orders for the apprehension of the slavedealer.
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Actions and Reactions
Then he fell back. Then we left him.”
“Alone—servant of my son, and son of my servant?” said
his father.
“There was an old woman which belonged to the Hajji.
She had come in with the Hajji’s money-belt. The Hajji told
her that if our Sahib died, she would die with him. And
truly our Sahib had given me orders to depart.”
“Being mad with fever—eh?”
“What could we do, Sahib? This cotton-play was his heart’s
desire. He talked of it in his fever. Therefore it was his heart’s
desire that the Hajji went to fetch. Doubtless the Hajji could
have given him money enough out of hand for ten
cottonplays; but in this respect also our Sahib’s virtue was
beyond belief or compare. Great Ones do not exchange
moneys. Therefore the Hajji said—and I helped with my
counsel—that we must make arrangements to get the money
in all respects conformable with the English Law. It was
great trouble to us, but—the Law is the Law. And the Hajji
showed the old woman the knife by which she would die if
our Sahib died. So I accompanied the Hajji.”
“Knowing who he was?” said Strickland.
“No! Fearing the man. A virtue went out from him overbearing
the virtue of lesser persons. The Hajji told Bulaki
Ram the clerk to occupy the seat of government at Dupe
till our return. Bulaki Ram feared the Hajji, because the
Hajji had often gloatingly appraised his skill in figures at
five thousand rupees upon any slave-block. The Hajji then
said to me: ‘Come, and we will make the man-eaters play
the cotton-game for my delight’s delight’ The Hajji loved
our Sahib with the love of a father for his son, of a saved
for his saviour, of a Great One for a Great One. But I said:
‘We cannot go to that Sheshaheli place without a hundred
rifles. We have here five.’ The Hajji said: ‘I have untied as
knot in my head-handkerchief which will be more to us than
a thousand.’ I saw that he had so loosed it that it lay flagwise
on his shoulder. Then I knew that he was a Great One with
virtue in him.
“We came to the highlands of the Sheshaheli on the dawn
of the second day—about the time of the stirring of the cold
wind. The Hajji walked delicately across the open place
where their filth is, and scratched upon the gate which was
shut. When it opened I saw the man-eaters lying on their
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cots under the eaves of the huts. They rolled off: they rose
up, one behind the other the length of the street, and the
fear on their faces was as leaves whitening to a breeze. The
Hajji stood in the gate guarding his skirts from defilement.
The Hajji said: ‘I am here once again. Give me six and yoke
up.’ They zealously then pushed to us with poles six, and
yoked them with a heavy tree. The Hajji then said: “Fetch
fire from the morning hearth, and come to windward.’ The
wind is strong on those headlands at sunrise, so when each
had emptied his crock of fire in front of that which was
before him, the broadside of the town roared into flame,
and all went. The Hajji then said: ‘At the end of a time there
will come here the white man ye once chased for sport. He
will demand labour to plant such and such stuff. Ye are that
labour, and your spawn after you.’ They said, lifting their
heads a very little from the edge of the ashes: ‘ We are that
labour, and our spawn after us.’ The Hajji said: ‘What is
also my name?’ They said: ‘Thy name is also The Merciful’
The Hajji said: ‘Praise then my mercy’; and while they did
this, the Hajji walked away, I following.”
The Infant made some noise in his throat, and reached
for more Burgundy.
“About noon one of our six fell dead. Fright only frights
Sahib! None had—none could—touch him. Since they were
in pairs, and the other of the Fork was mad and sang foolishly,
we waited for some heathen to do what was needful.
There came at last Angari men with goats. The Hajji said:
‘What do ye see? They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, we neither see
nor hear.’ The Hajji said: ‘But I command ye to see and to
hear and to say.’ They said: ‘Oh, our Lord, it is to our commanded
eyes as though slaves stood in a Fork.’ The Hajji
said: ‘So testify before the officer who waits you in the town
of Dupe.’ They said: ‘What shall come to us after?’ The
Hajji said: ‘The just reward for the informer. But if ye do
not testify, then a punishment which shall cause birds, to
fall from the trees in terror and monkeys to scream for
pity.’ Hearing this, the Angari men hastened to Dupe. The
Hajji then said to me: ‘Are those things sufficient to establish
our case, or must I drive in a village full?’ I said that
three witnesses amply established any case, but as yet, I
said, the Hajji had not offered his slaves for sale. It is true,
as our Sahib said just now, there is one fine for catching
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Actions and Reactions
slaves, and yet another for making to sell them. And it was
the double fine that we needed, Sahib, for our Sahib’s cotton-
play. We had fore-arranged all this with Bulaki Ram,
who knows the English Law, and, I thought the Hajji remembered,
but he grew angry, and cried out: ‘O God, Refuge
of the Afflicted, must I, who am what I am, peddle this’
dog’s meat by the roadside to gain his delight for my heart’s
delight?” None the less, he admitted it was the English Law,
and so he offered me the six—five—in a small voice, with an
averted head. The Sheshaheli do not smell of sour milk as
heathen should. They smell like leopards, Sahib. This is
because they eat men.”
“Maybe,” said Strickland. “But where were thy wits? One
witness is not sufficient to establish the fact of a sale.”
“What could we do, Sahib? There was the Hajji’s reputation
to consider. We could not have called in a heathen witness
for such a thing. And, moreover, the Sahib forgets that
the defendant himself was making this case. He would not
contest his own evidence. Otherwise, I know the law of evidence
well enough.
“So then we went to Dupe, and while Bulaki Ram waited
among the Angari men, ‘I ran to see our Sahib in bed. His
eyes were very bright, and his mouth was full of upsidedown
orders, but the old woman had not loosened her hair
for death. The Hajji said: ‘Be quick with my trial. I am not
Job!’ The Hajji was a learned man. We made the trial swiftly
to a sound of soothing voices round the bed. Yet—yet, because
no man can be sure whether a Sahib of that blood
sees, or does not see, we made it strictly in the manner of
the forms of the English Law. Only the witnesses and the
slaves and the prisoner we kept without for his nose’s sake.”
“Then he did not see the prisoner?” said Strickland.
“I stood by to shackle up an Angari in case he should
demand it, but by God’s favour he was too far fevered to
ask for one. It is quite true he signed the papers. It is quite
true he saw the money put away in the safe—two hundred
and ten English pounds and it is quite true that the gold
wrought on him as a strong cure. But as to his seeing the
prisoner, and having speech with the man-eaters—the Hajji
breathed all that on his forehead to sink into his sick brain.
A little, as ye have heard, has remained . . . . Ah, but when
the fever broke, and our Sahib called for the fine-book, and
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the thin little picture-books from Europe with the pictures
of ploughs and hoes, and cotton=3Dmills—ah, then he
laughed as he used to laugh, Sahib. It was his heart’s desire,
this cotton-play. The Hajji loved him, as who does not?
It was a little, little arrangement, Sahib, of which—is it necessary
to tell all the world?”
“And when didst thou know who the Hajji was?” said
Strickland.
“Not for a certainty till he and our Sahib had returned
from their visit to the Sheshaheli country. It is quite true
as our Sahib says, the man-eaters lay, flat around his feet,
and asked for spades to cultivate cotton. That very night,
when I was cooking the dinner, the Hajji said to me: ‘I go to
my own place, though God knows whether the Man with
the Stone Eyes have left me an ox, a slave, or a woman.’ I
said: ‘Thou art then That One?’ The Hajji said: ‘I am ten
thousand rupees reward into thy hand. Shall we make another
law-case and get more cotton machines for the boy?’
I said: ‘What dog am I to do this? May God prolong thy life
a thousand years!’ The Hajji said: ‘Who has seen to-morrow?
God has given me as it were a son in my old age, and I
praise Him. See that the breed is not lost!’
“He walked then from the cooking-place to our Sahib’s
office-table under the tree, where our Sahib held in his hand
a blue envelope of Service newly come in by runner from
the North. At this, fearing evil news for the Hajji, I would
have restrained him, but he said: ‘We be both Great Ones.
Neither of us will fail.’ Our Sahib looked up to invite the
Hajji to approach before he opened the letter, but the Hajji
stood off till our Sahib had well opened and well read the
letter. Then the Hajji said: ‘Is it permitted to say farewell?’
Our Sahib stabbed the letter on the file with a deep and
joyful breath and cried a welcome. The Hajji said: ‘I go to
my own place,’ and he loosed from his neck a chained heart
of ambergris set in soft gold and held it forth. Our Sahib
snatched it swiftly in the closed fist, down turned, and said
‘If thy name be written hereon, it is needless, for a name is
already engraved on my heart.’ The Hajji said: ‘And on mine
also is a name engraved; but there is no name on the amulet.’
The Hajji stooped to our Sahib’s feet, but our Sahib
raised and embraced him, and the Hajji covered his mouth
with his shoulder-cloth, because it worked, and so he went
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Actions and Reactions
away.”
“And what order was in the Service letter?” Stalky murmured.
“Only an order for our Sahib to write a report on some
new cattle sickness. But all orders come in the same make
of envelope. We could not tell what order it might have
been.”
“When he opened the letter—my son—made he no sign? A
cough? An oath?” Strickland asked.
“None, Sahib. I watched his hands. They did not shake.
Afterward he wiped his face, but he was sweating before
from the heat.”
“Did he know? Did he know who the Hajji was?” said the
Infant in English.
“I am a poor man. Who can say what a Sahib of that get
knows or does not know? But the Hajji is right. The breed
should not be lost. It is not very hot for little children in
Dupe, and as regards nurses, my sister’s cousin at Jull—”
“H’m! That is the boy’s own concern. I wonder if his Chief
ever knew?” said Strickland.
“Assuredly,” said Imam Din. “On the night before our
Sahib went down to the sea, the Great Sahib—the Man with
the Stone Eyes—dined with him in his camp, I being in charge
of the table. They talked a long while and the Great Sahib
said: ‘What didst thou think of That One?’ (We do not say
Ibn Makarrah yonder.) Our Sahib said: ‘Which one?’ The
Great Sahib said: ‘That One which taught thy man-eaters to
grow cotton for thee. He was in thy District three months
to my certain knowledge, and I looked by every runner that
thou wouldst send me in his head.’ Our Sahib said: ‘If his
head had been needed, another man should have been appointed
to govern my District, for he was my friend.’ The
Great Sahib laughed and said: ‘If I had needed a lesser man
in thy place be sure I would have sent him, as, if I had needed
the head of That One, be sure I would have sent men to
bring it to me. But tell me now, by what means didst thou
twist him to thy use and our profit in this cotton-play?’ Our
Sahib said: ‘By God, I did not use that man in any fashion
whatever. He was my friend.’ The Great Sahib said: ‘ ‘Toh
Vac! (Bosh!) Tell!’ Our Sahib shook his head as he does—as
he did when a child—and they looked at each other like
sword-play men in the ring at a fair. The Great Sahib dropped
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Kipling
his eyes first and he said: ‘So be it. I should perhaps have
answered thus in my youth. No matter. I have made treaty
with That One as an ally of the State. Some day he shall tell
me the tale.’ Then I brought in fresh coffee, and they ceased.
But I do not think That One will tell the Great Sahib more
than our Sahib told him.”
“Wherefore?” I asked.
“Because they are both Great Ones, and I have observed
in my life that Great Ones employ words very little between
each other in their dealings; still less when they speak to a
third concerning those dealings. Also they profit by silence
… . Now I think that the mother has come down from the
room, and I will go rub his feet till he sleeps.”
His ears had caught Agnes’s step at the stair-head and
presently she passed us on her way to the music room humming
the Magnificat.


The New Knighthood

Who gives him the Bath?
“I,” said the wet,
Rank Jungle-sweat,
“I’ll give him the Bath!”
Who’ll sing the psalms?
“We,” said the Palms.
“Ere the hot wind becalms,
We’ll sing the psalms.”
Who lays on the sword?
“I,” said the Sun,
“Before he has done,
I’ll lay on the sword.”
Who fastens his belt?
“I,” said Short-Rations,
“I know all the fashions
Of tightening a belt!”
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Actions and Reactions
Who buckles his spur?
“I,” said his Chief,
Exacting and brief,
“I’ll give him the spur.”
Who’ll shake his hand?
“I,” said the Fever,
“And I’m no deceiver,
I’ll shake his hand.”
Who brings him the wine?
“I,” said Quinine,
“It’s a habit of mine,
I’ll come with his wine.”
Who’ll put him to proof?
“I,” said All Earth,
“Whatever he’s worth,
I’ll put to the proof.”

The Puzzler


I had not seen Penfentenyou since the Middle Nineties,
when he was Minister of Ways and Woodsides in De
Thouar’s first Administration. Last summer, though
he nominally held the same portfolio, he was his Colony’s
Premier in all but name, and the idol of his own province,
which is two and a half times the size of England. Politically,
his creed was his growing country; and he came over
to England to develop a Great Idea in her behalf.
Believing that he had put it in train, I made haste to welcome
him to my house for a week.
That he was chased to my door by his own Agent-General
in a motor; that they turned my study into a Cabinet Meeting
which I was not invited to attend; that the local telegraph
all but broke down beneath the strain of hundred
word coded cables; and that I practically broke into the
house of a stranger to get him telephonic facilities on a
Sunday, are things I overlook. What I objected to was his
ingratitude, while I thus tore up England to help him. So I
said: “Why on earth didn’t you see your Opposite Number
in Town instead of bringing your office work here?”
“Eh? Who?” said he, looking up from his fourth cable
since lunch.
“See the English Minister for Ways and Woodsides.”
“I saw him,” said Penfentenyou, without enthusiasm.
It seemed that he had called twice on the gentleman, but
without an appointment—(“I thought if I wasn’t big enough,
my business was”)—and each time had found him engaged.
A third party intervening, suggested that a meeting might
be arranged if due notice were given.
“Then,” said Penfentenyou, “I called at the office at ten
o’clock.”
“But they’d be in bed,” I cried.
“One of the babies was awake. He told me that—that ‘my
sort of questions “‘—he slapped the pile of cables—”were
only taken between 11 and 2 P.M. So I waited.”
“And when you got to business?” I asked.
He made a gesture of despair. “It was like talking to children.
They’d never heard of it.”
“And your Opposite Number?”
Penfentenyou described him.
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Actions and Reactions
“Hush! You mustn’t talk like that!” I shuddered. “He’s
one of the best of good fellows. You should meet him socially.”
“I’ve done that too,” he said. “Have you?”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried; “but that’s the proper thing to
say.”
“Oh, he said all the proper things. Only I thought as this
was England that they’d more or less have the hang of all
the—general hang-together of my Idea. But I had to explain
it from the beginning.”
“Ah! They’d probably mislaid the papers,” I said, and I
told him the story of a three-million pound insurrection
caused by a deputy Under-Secretary sitting upon a mass of
green-labelled correspondence instead of reading it.
“I wonder it doesn’t happen every week,” the answered.
“D’you mind my having the Agent-General to dinner again
tonight? I’ll wire, and he can motor down.”
The Agent-General arrived two hours later, a patient and
expostulating person, visibly torn between the pulling Devil
of a rampant Colony, and the placid Baker of a largely uninterested
England. But with Penfentenyou behind him he
had worked; for he told us that Lord Lundie—the Law Lord
was the final authority on the legal and constitutional aspects
of the Great Idea, and to him it must be referred.
“Good Heavens alive!” thundered Penfentenyou. “I told
you to get that settled last Christmas.”
“It was the middle of the house-party season,” said the
Agent-General mildly. “Lord Lundie’s at Credence Green
now—he spends his holidays there. It’s only forty miles off.”
“Shan’t I disturb his Holiness?” said Penfentenyou heavily.
“Perhaps ‘my sort of questions,”’ he snorted, “mayn’t be
discussed except at midnight.”
“Oh, don’t be a child,” I said.
“What this country needs,” said Penfentenyou, “is—” and
for ten minutes he trumpeted rebellion.
“What you need is to pay for your own protection,” I cut
in when he drew breath, and I showed him a yellowish paper,
supplied gratis by Government, which is called Schedule
D. To my merciless delight he had never seen the thing
before, and I completed my victory over him and all the
Colonies with a Brassey’s “Naval Annual” and a
“Statesman’s Year Book.”
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Kipling
The Agent-General interposed with agent-generalities (but
they were merely provocateurs) about Ties of Sentiment.
“They be blowed!” said Penfentenyou. “What’s the good
of sentiment towards a Kindergarten?”
“Quite so. Ties of common funk are the things that bind
us together; and the sooner you new nations realize it the
better. What you need is an annual invasion. Then you’d
grow up.”
“Thank you! Thank you!” said the Agent-General. “That’s
what I am always trying to tell my people.”
“But, my dear fool,” Penfentenyou almost wept, “do you
pretend that these banana-fingered amateurs at home are
grown up?”
“You poor, serious, pagan man,” I retorted, “if you take
‘em that way, you’ll wreck your Great Idea.”
“Will you take him to Lord Lundie’s to-morrow?” said
the Agent-General promptly.
“I suppose I must,” I said, “if you won’t.”
“Not me! I’m going home,” said the Agent-General, and
departed. I am glad that I am no colony’s Agent-General.
Penfentenyou continued to argue about naval contributions
till 1.15 A.M., though I was victor from the first.
At ten o’clock I got him and his correspondence into the
motor, and he had the decency to ask whether he had been
unpolished over-night. I replied that I waited an apology.
This he made excuse for renewed arguments, and used wayside
shows as illustrations of the decadence of England.
For example we burst a tyre within a mile of Credence
Green, and, to save time, walked into the beautifully kept
little village. His eye was caught by a building of pale-blue
tin, stencilled “Calvinist Chapel,” before whose shuttered
windows an Italian organ-grinder .with a petticoated monkey
was playing “Dolly Grey-”
“Yes. That’s it!” snapped the egoist. “That’s a parable of
the general situation in England. And look at those brutes!”
A huge household removals van was halted at a public-house.
The men in charge were drinking beer from blue and white
mugs. It seemed to me a pretty sight, but Penfentenyou
said it represented Our National Attitude.
Lord Lundie’s summer resting-place we learned was a
farm, a little out of the village, up a hill round which curled
a high hedged road. Only an initiated few spend their holi134
Actions and Reactions
days at Credence Green, and they have trained the householders
to keep the place select. Penfentenyou made a grievance
of this as we walked up the lane, followed at a distance
by the organ-grinder.
“Suppose he is having a house-party,” he said: “Anything’s
possible in this insane land.”
Just at that minute we found ourselves opposite an empty
villa. Its roof was of black slate, with bright unweathered
ridge-tiling; its walls were of blood-coloured brick, cornered
and banded with vermiculated stucco work, and there was
cobalt, magenta, and purest apple-green window-glass on
either side of the front door. The whole was fenced from
the road by a low, brick-pillared, flint wall, topped with a
cast-iron Gothic rail, picked out in blue and gold.
Tight beds of geranium, calceolaria, and lobelia speckled
the glass-plat, from whose centre rose one of the finest araucarias
(its other name by the way is “monkey-puzzler”), that
it has ever been my lot to see. It must have been full thirty
feet high, and its foliage exquisitely answered the iron railings.
Such bijou ne plus ultras, replete with all the amenities,
do not, as I pointed out to Penfentenyou, transpire
outside of England.
A hedge, swinging sharp right, flanked the garden, and
above it on a slope of daisy-dotted meadows we could see
Lord Lundie’s tiled and half-timbered summer farmhouse.
Of a sudden we heard voices behind the tree—the fine full
tones of the unembarrassed English, speaking to their
equals—that tore through the hedge like sleet through
rafters.
“That it is not called ‘monkey-puzzler’ for nothing, I willingly
concede”—this was a rich and rolling note—”but on
the other hand—”
“I submit, me lud, that the name implies that it might,
could, would, or should be ascended by a monkey, and not
that the ascent is a physical impossibility. I believe one of
our South American spider monkeys wouldn’t hesitate . . .
By Jove, it might be worth trying, if—”
This was a crisper voice than the first. A third, higherpitched,
and full of pleasant affectations, broke in.
“Oh, practical men, there is no ape here. Why do you
waste one of God’s own days on unprofitable discussion?
Give me a match!”
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Kipling
“I’ve a good mind to make you demonstrate in your own
person. Come on, Bubbles! We’ll make Jimmy climb!”
There was a sound of scuffling, broken by squeaks from
Jimmy of the high voice. I turned back and drew
Penfentenyou into the side of the flanking hedge. I remembered
to have read in a society paper that Lord Lundie’s
lesser name was “Bubbles.”
“What are they doing?” Penfentenyou said sharply.
“Drunk?”
“Just playing! Superabundant vitality of the Race, you
know. We’ll watch ‘em,” I answered. The noise ceased.
“My deliver,” Jimmy gasped. “The ram caught in the
thicket, and—I’m the only one who can talk Neapolitan!
Leggo my collar!” He cried aloud in a foreign tongue, and
was answered from the gate.
“It’s the Calvinistic organ-grinder,” I whispered. I had already
found a practicable break at the bottom of the hedge.
“They’re going to try to make the monkey climb, I believe.”
“Here—let me look!” Penfentenyou flung himself down,
and rooted till he too broke a peep-hole. We lay side by side
commanding the entire garden at ten yards’ range.
“You know ‘em?” said Penfentenyou, as I made some noise
or other.
“By sight only. The big fellow in flannels is Lord Lundie;
the light-built one with the yellow beard painted his picture
at the last Academy: He’s a swell R.A., James Loman.”
“And the brown chap with the hands?”
“Tomling, Sir Christopher Tomling, the South American
engineer who built the—”
“San Juan Viaduct. I know,” said Penfentenyou. “We ought
to have had him with us . . . . Do you think a monkey would
climb the tree?”
The organ-grinder at the gate fenced his beast with one
arm as Jimmy-talked.
“Don’t show off your futile accomplishments,” said Lord
Lundie. “Tell him it’s an experiment. Interest him!”
“Shut up, Bubbles. You aren’t in court,” Jimmy’,replied.
“This needs delicacy. Giuseppe says—”
“Interest the monkey,” the brown engineer interrupted.
“He won’t climb for love. Cut up to the house and get some
biscuits, Bubbles—sugar ones and an orange or two. No need
to tell our womenfolk.”
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Actions and Reactions
The huge white figure lobbed off at a trot which would
not have disgraced a boy of seventeen. I gathered from something
Jimmy let fall that the three had been at Harrow together.
“That Tomling has a head on his Shoulders,” muttered
Penfentenyou. “Pity we didn’t get him for the Colony. But
the question is, will the monkey climb?”
“Be quick, Jimmy. Tell the man we’ll give him five bob
for the loan of the beast. Now run the organ under the
tree, and we’ll dress it when Bubbles comes back,” Sir Christopher
cried.
“I’ve often wondered,” said Penfentenyou, “whether it
would puzzle a monkey?” He had forgotten the needs of his
Growing Nation, and was earnestly parting the white-thorn
stems with his fingers.
* * *
Giuseppe and Jimmy did as they were told, the monkey
following them with a wary and malignant eye.
“Here’s a discovery,” said Jimmy. “The singing part of
this organ comes off the wheels.” He spoke volubly to the
proprietor. “Oh, it’s so as Giuseppe can take it to his room
o’ nights. And play it. D’you hear that? The organ-grinder,
after his day’s crime, plays his accursed machine for love.
For love, Chris! And Michael Angelo was one of ‘em!”
“Don’t jaw! Tell him to take the beast’s petticoat off,”
said Sir Christopher Tomling.
Lord Lundie returned, very little winded, through a gap
higher up the hedge.
“They’re all out, thank goodness!” he cried, “but I’ve
raided what I could. Macrons glaces, candied fruit, and a
bag of oranges.”
“Excellent!” said the world-renowned contractor.
“Jimmy, you’re the light-weight; jump up on the organ
and impale these things on the leaves as I hand ‘em!”
“I see,” said Jimmy, capering like a springbuck. “Upward
and onward, eh? First, he’ll reach out for—how infernal
prickly these leaves are!—this biscuit. Next we’ll lure him
on—(that’s about the reach of his arm)—with the marron
glare, and then he’ll open out this orange. How human!
How like your ignoble career, Bubbles!”
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With care and elaboration they ornamented that tree’s
lower branches with sugar-topped biscuits, oranges, bits of
banana, and marrons glares till it looked very ape’s path to
Paradise.
“Unchain the Gyascutis!” said Sir Christopher commandingly.
Giuseppe placed the monkey atop of the organ, where
the beast, misunderstanding, stood on his head.
“He’s throwing himself on the mercy of the Court, me
lud,” said Jimmy. “No—now he’s interested. Now he’s reaching
after higher things. What wouldn’t I give to have here”
(he mentioned a name not unhonoured in British Art). “Ambition
plucking apples of Sodom!” (the monkey had pricked
himself and was swearing). “Genius hampered by Convention?
Oh, there’s a whole bushelful of allegories in it!”
“Give him time. He’s balancing the probabilities,” said
Lord Lundie.
The three closed round the monkey,—hanging on his every
motion with an earnestness almost equal to ours. The
great judge’s head—seamed and vertical forehead, iron
mouth, and pike-like under-jaw, all set on that thick neck
rising out of the white flannelled collar—was thrown against
the puckered green silk of the organ-front as it might have
been a cameo of Titus. Jimmy, with raised eyes and parted
lips, fingered his grizzled chestnut beard, and I was near
enough to-note, the capable beauty of his hands. Sir Christopher
stood a little apart, his arms folded behind his back,
one heavy brown boot thrust forward, chin in as curbed,
and black eyebrows lowered to shade the keen eyes.
Giuseppe’s dark face between flashing earrings, a twisted
rag of red and yellow silk round his throat, turned from
the reaching yearning monkey to the pink and white biscuits
spiked on the bronzed leafage. And upon them all
fell the serious and workmanlike sun of an English summer
forenoon.
“Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel!” said Lord Lundie
suddenly in a voice that made me think of Black Caps. I do
not know what the monkey thought, because at that instant
he leaped off the organ and disappeared.
There was a clash of broken glass behind the tree.
The monkey’s face, distorted with passion, appeared at
an upper window of the house, and a starred hole in the
stained-glass window to the left of ‘the front door showed
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Actions and Reactions
the first steps of his upward path.
“We’ve got to catch him,” cried Sir Christopher. “Come
along!”
They pushed at the door, which was unlocked.
“Yes. But consider the ethics of the case,” said Jimmy.
“Isn’t this burglary or something, Bubbles?”
“Settle that when he’s caught,” said Sir Christopher. We’re
responsible for the beast.”
A furious clanging of bells broke out of the empty house,
followed by muffed gurglings and trumpetings.
“What the deuce is that?” I asked, half aloud.
“The plumbing, of course,” said Penfentenyou. “What a
pity! I believe he’d have climbed if Lord Lundie hadn’t put
him off!”
“Wait a moment, Chris,” said Jimmy the interpreter; “
Guiseppe says he may answer to the music of his infancy.
Giuseppe, therefore, will go in with the “organ. Orpheus
with his lute, you know. Avante, Orpheus! There’s no Neapolitan
for bathroom, but I fancy your friend is there.”
“I’m not going into another man’s house with a, hurdygurdy,”
said Lord Lundie, recoiling, as Giuseppe unshipped
the working mechanism of the organ (it developed a hangdown
leg) from its wheels, slipped a strap round his shoulders,
and gave the handle a twist.
“Don’t be a cad, Bubbles,” was Jimmy’s answer. “You
couldn’t leave us now if you were on the Woolsack. Play,
Orpheus! The Cadi accompanies.”
* * *
With a whoop, a buzz, and a crash, the organ sprang to life
under the hand of Giuseppe, and the procession passed
through the rained-to-imitate-walnut front door. A moment
later we saw the monkey ramping on the roof.
“He’ll be all over the township in a minute if we don’t
head him,” said Penfentenyou, leaping to his feet, and crashing
into the garden. We headed him with pebbles till he
retired through a window to the tuneful reminder that he
had left a lot of little things behind him. As we passed the
front door it swung open, and showed Jimmy the artist sitting
at the bottom of a newly-cleaned staircase. He waggled
his hands at us, and when we entered we saw that the man
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was stricken speechless. His eyes grew red—red like a
ferret’s—and what little breath he had whistled shrilly. At
first we thought it was a fit, and then we saw that it was
mirth—the inopportune mirth of the Artistic Temperament.
The house palpitated to an infamous melody punctuated
by the stump of the barrel-organ’s one leg, as Giuseppe,
above, moved from room to room after his rebel slave. Now
and again a floor shook a little under the combined rushes
of Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher Tomling, who gave many
and contradictory orders. But when they could they cursed
Jimmy with splendid thoroughness.
“Have you anything to do with the house?” panted Jimmy
at last. “Because we’re using it just now.” He gulped. “And
I’m ah—keeping cave.”
“All right,” said Penfentenyou, and shut the hall door.
“Jimmy, you unspeakable blackguard) Jimmy, you cur!
You coward!” (Lord Lundie’s voice overbore the flood of
melody.) “Come up here! Giussieppe’s saying something we
don’t understand.”
Jimmy listened and interpreted between hiccups.
“He says you’d better play the organ, Bubbles, and let
him do the stalking. The monkey knows him.”
“By Jove, he’s quite right,” said Sir Christopher ,from
the landing. “Take it, Bubbles, at once.”
“My God!” said Lord Lundie in horror.
The chase reverberated over our heads, from the attics to
the first floor and back again. Bodies and Voices met in
collision and argument, and once or twice the organ hit
walls and doors. Then it broke forth in a new manner.
“He’s playing it,” said Jimmy. “I know his acute Justinian
ear. Are you fond of music?”
“I think Lord Lundie plays very well for a beginner,” I
ventured.
“Ah! That’s the trained legal intellect. Like mastering a
brief. I haven’t got it.” He wiped his eyes and shook.
“Hi!” said Penfentenyou, looking through the stained glass
window down the garden. “What’s that!”
* * *
A household removals van, in charge of four men, had halted
at the gate. A husband and his wife householders beyond
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question—quavered irresolutely up the path. He looked
tired. She was certainly cross. In all this haphazard world
the last couple to understand a scientific experiment.
I laid hands on Jimmy—the clamour above drowning speech
and with Penfentenyou’s aid, propped him against the window,
that he should see.
He saw, nodded, fell as an umbrella can fall, and kneeling,
beat his forehead on the shut door. Penfentenyou slid
the bolt.
The furniture men reinforced the two figures on the path,
and advanced, spreading generously.
“Hadn’t we better warn them up-stairs?” I suggested:
“No. I’ll die first!” said Jimmy. “I’m pretty near it now.
Besides, they called me names.”
I turned from the Artist to the Administrator.
“Coeteris paribus, I think we’d better be going,” said
Penfentenyou, dealer in crises.
“Ta—take me with you,” said Jimmy. “I’ve no reputation to
lose, but I’d like to watch ‘em from—er—outside the picture.”
“There’s always a modus viviendi,” Penfentenyou murmured,
and tiptoed along the hall to a back door, which he
opened quite silently. We passed into a tangle of gooseberry
bushes where, at his statesmanlike example, we
crawled on all fours, and regained the hedge.
Here we lay up, secure in our alibi.
“But your firm,”—the woman was wailing to the furniture
removals men—”your firm promised me everything should
be in yesterday. And it’s to-day! You should have been here
yesterday!”
“The last tenants ain’t out yet, lydy,” said one of them.
Lord Lundie was rapidly improving in technique, though
organ-grinding, unlike the Law, is more of a calling than a
trade, and he hung occasionally on a dead centre. Giuseppe,
I think, was singing, but I could not understand the drift of
Sir Christopher’s remarks. They were Spanish.
The woman said something we did not catch.
“You might ‘ave sub-let it,” the man insisted. “Or your
gentleman ‘ere might.”
“But I didn’t. Send for the Police at once.”
“I wouldn’t do that, lydy. They’re only fruit pickers on a
beano. They aren’t particular where they sleep.”
“D’you mean they’ve been sleeping there? I only had it
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cleaned last week. Get them out.”
“Oh, if you say so, we’ll ‘ave ‘em out of it in two twos. Alf,
fetch me the spare swingle-bar.”
“Don’t! You’ll knock the paint off the door. Get them
out!”
“What the ‘ell else am I trying to do for you, lydy?” the
man answered with pathos; but the woman wheeled on her
mate.
“Edward! They’re all drunk here, and they’re all mad
there. Do something!” she said.
Edward took one short step forward, and sighed “Hullo!”
in the direction of the turbulent house. The woman walked
up and down, the very figure of Domestic Tragedy. The
furniture men swayed a little on their heels, and -
“Got him!” The shout rang through all the windows at
once. It was followed by a blood-hound-like bay from Sir
Christopher, a maniacal prestissimo on the organ, and loud
cries, for Jimmy. But Jimmy, at my side, rolled his congested
eyeballs, owl-wise.
“I never knew them,” he said. “I’m an orphan.”
* * *
The front, door opened, and the three came forth to shortlived
triumph. I had never before seen a Law Lord dressed
as for tennis, with a stump-leg barrel-organ strapped to his
shoulder. But it is a shy bird in this plumage. Lord Lundie
strove to disembarrass himself of his accoutrements much
as an ill-trained Punch and Judy dog tries to escape backwards
through his frilled collar. Sir Christopher, covered
with limewash, cherished a bleeding thumb, and the almost
crazy monkey tore at Giuseppe’s hair.
The men on both sides reeled, but the woman stood her
ground. “Idiots!” she said, and once more, “Idiots!”
I could have gladdened a few convicts of my acquaintance
with a photograph of Lord Lundie at that instant.
“Madam,” he began, wonderfully preserving the roll in
his voice, “it was a monkey.”
Sir Christopher sucked his thumb and nodded.
“Take it away and go,” she replied. “Go away!”
I would have gone, and gladly, on this permission, but
these still strong men must ever be justifying themselves.
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Lord Lundie turned to the husband, who for the first time
spoke.
“I have rented this house. I am moving in,” he said.
“We ought to have been in yesterday,” the woman interrupted.
“Yes. We ought to have been in yesterday. Have you slept
there overnight?” said the man peevishly.
“No; I assure you we haven’t,” said Lord Lundie.
“Then go away. Go quite away,” cried the woman.
They went—in single file down the path. They went silently,
restrapping the organ on its wheels, and rechaining the monkey
to the organ.
“Damn it all!” said Penfentenyou. “They do face the music,
and they do stick by each other in private life!”
“Ties of Common Funk,” I answered. Giuseppe ran to
the gate and fled back to the possible world. Lord Lundie
and Sir Christopher, constrained by tradition, paced slowly.
Then it came to pass that the woman, who walked behind
them, lifted up her eyes, and beheld the tree which they
had dressed.
“Stop!” she called; and they stopped. “Who did that?”
There was no answer. The Eternal Bad Boy in every man
hung its head before the Eternal Mother in every woman.
“Who put these disgusting things there?” she repeated.
Suddenly Penfentenyou, Premier of his Colony in all but
name, left Jimmy and me, and appeared at the gate. (If he
is not turned out of office, that is how he will appear on the
Day of Armageddon.)
“Well done you!” he cried zealously, and doffed his hat to
the woman. “Have you any children, madam?” he demanded.
“Yes, two. They should have been here to-day. The firm
promised —”
“Then we’re not a minute too soon. That monkey escaped.
It was a very dangerous beast. ‘Might have frightened your
children into fits. All the organ-grinder’s fault! A most lucky
thing these gentlemen caught it when they did. I hope you
aren’t badly mauled, Sir Christopher?” Shaken as I was (I
wanted to get away and laugh) I could not but admire the
scoundrel’s consummate tact in leading his second highest
trump. An ass would have introduced Lord Lundie and they
would not have believed him.
It took the trick. The couple smiled, and gave respectful
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thanks for their deliverance by such hands from such perils.
“Not in the least,” said Lord Lundie. “Anybody—any father
would have done as much, and pray don’t apologize
your mistake was quite natural.” A furniture man sniggered
here, and Lord Lundie rolled an Eye of Doom on their ranks.
“By the way, if you have trouble with these persons—they
seem to have taken as much as is good for them—please let
me know. Er—Good morning!”
They turned into the lane.
“Heavens!” said Jimmy, brushing himself down. “Who’s
that real man with the real head?” and we hurried after
them, for they were running unsteadily, squeaking like rabbits
as they ran. We overtook them in a little nut wood half
a mile up the road, where they had turned aside, and were
rolling. So we rolled with them, and ceased not till we had
arrived at the extremity of exhaustion.
“You—you saw it all, then?” said Lord Lundie, rebuttoning
his nineteen-inch collar.
“I saw it was a vital question from the first,” responded
Penfentenyou, and blew his nose.
“It was. By the way, d’you mind telling me your name?”
Summa. Penfentenyou’s Great Idea has gone through, a little
chipped at the edges, but in fine and far-reaching shape.
His Opposite Number worked at it like a mule—a bewildered
mule, beaten from behind, coaxed from in front, and
propped on either soft side by Lord Lundie of the compressed
mouth and the searing tongue.
Sir Christopher Tomling has been ravished from the Argentine,
where, after all, he was but preparing trade-routes
for hostile peoples, and now adorns the forefront of
Penfentenyou’s Advisory Board. This was an unforeseen
extra, as was Jimmy’s gratis full-length—(it will be in this
year’s Academy) of Penfentenyou, who has returned to his
own place.
Now and again, from afar off, between the slam and bump
of his shifting scenery, the glare of his manipulated limelight,
and the controlled rolling of his thunder-drums, I catch
his voice, lifted in encouragement and advice to his fellowcountrymen.
He is quite sound on Ties of Sentiment, and—
alone of Colonial Statesmen ventures to talk of the Ties of
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Common Funk.
Herein I have my reward.