The Third Circle - Sách nói Miễn phí

Son of a Sheik

The smell of the warm slime on the Jeliffe River and the sweet, heavy and sickening odour that exhaled into the unspeakable heat of the desert air from the bunches of dead and scorched water-reeds are with me yet; also the sight of the long stretch of dry mud bank, rising by shallow and barely perceptible degrees to the edge of the desert sands, and thus disclosed by the shrinkage of the Jeliffe during the hot months. The mud banks were very broad and very black except where they touched the desert; here the sand had sifted over them in light transparent sprinklings. In rapidly drying under the sun of the Sahara, they had cracked and warped into thousands of tiny concave cakes that looked, for all the world, like little saucers in which Indian ink has been mixed. (If you are an artist, as was Thévenot, you will the better understand this.)

Then there was the reach of the desert that drew off on either hand and rolled away, ever so gently, toward the place where the hollow sky dropped out of sight behind the shimmering horizon, swelling grandly and gradually like some mighty breast which, panting for breath in the horrible heat, had risen in a final gasp and had then, in the midst of it, suddenly stiffened and become rigid. On this colourless bosom of the desert, where nothing stirred but the waxing light in the morning and the waning light in the night, lay tumbled red and gray rocks, with thin drifts of sand in their rifts and crevices and grey-green cacti squatting or sprawling in their blue shadows. And there was nothing more, nothing, nothing, except the appalling heat and the maddening silence.

And in the midst of it all,—we.

Now "we" broadly and generally speaking, were the small right wing of General Pawtrot's division of the African service; speaking less broadly and less generally, "we" were the advance-guard of said division; and, speaking in the narrowest and most particular sense, "we" were the party of war-correspondents, specials, extras, etc., who were accompanying said advance-guard of said wing of said army of said service for reasons herein to be set forth.

As the long, black scow of the commissariat went crawling up the torpid river with the advance-guard straggling along upon the right, "we" lay upon the deck under the shadow of the scow's awning and talked and drank seltzer.

I forget now what led up to it, but Ponscarme had said that the Arabs were patriotic, when Bab Azzoun cut in and said something which I shall repeat as soon as I have told you about Bab Azzoun himself.

Bab Azzoun had been born twenty-nine years before this time, at Tlemcen, of Kabyle parents (his father was a sheik). He had been transplanted to France at the age of ten, and had flourished there in a truly remarkable manner. He had graduated fifth from the Polytéchnique; he had written books that had been "couronné par l'Académie"; he had become naturalised; he had been prominent in politics (no one can cut a wide swath in Paris in anything without hitting against la politique;) he had occupied important positions in two embassies; he was a diplomat of no mean qualities; he had influence; he dressed in faultless French fashion; he had owned "Crusader"; he had lost money on him; he had applied to the government for the office of "Sous-chef-des bureaux-Arabes dans l'Oran," in order to recoup; he had obtained it; he had come on with "us", and was now on this, his first visit to his fatherland since his tenth year, on his way to his post.

And when Ponscarme had spoken thus about the patriotism of the Arabs, Bab Azzoun made him answer: "The Arabs are not sufficiently educated to be true patriots."

"Bah!" said Santander, "a man does not require to be educated in order to be a patriot. And, indeed, the rudest nations have ever been the most devotedly patriotic."

"Yes," said Bab Azzoun, "but it is a narrow and a very selfish patriotism."

"I can't see that," put in Ponscarme; "a patriot is like an egg—he is either good or bad. There is no such thing as a 'good enough egg,' there is no such thing as a 'good enough patriot'—if a man is one at all, he is a perfect one."

"I agree," answered Bab Azzoun; "yet patriotism can be more or less narrow. Listen and I will explain"—he raised himself from the deck on his elbow and gestured with the amber mouth-piece of his chibouk—"Patriotism has passed through five distinct stages; first, it was only love of family—of parents and kindred; then, as the family grows and expands into the tribe, it, too, as merely a large family, becomes the object of affection, of patriotic devotion. This is the second stage—the stage of the tribe, the dan. In the third stage, the tribe has sought protection behind the inclosure of walls. It is the age of cities; patriotism is the devotion to the city; men are Athenians ere Grecians, Romans ere Italians. In the next period, patriotism means affection for the state, for the county, for the province; and Burgundian, Norman and Fleming gave freely of their breast-blood for Burgundy, Normandy and Flanders; while we of to-day form the latest, but not the last, link of the lengthening chain by honouring, loving and serving the country above all considerations, be they of tribe, or town, or tenure. Yet I do not believe this to be the last, the highest, the noblest form of patriotism.

"No," continued Bab Azzoun, "this development shall go on, ever expanding, ever mounting, until, carried upon its topmost crest, we attain to that height from which we can look down upon the world as our country, humanity as our countrymen, and he shall be the best patriot who is the least patriotic."

"Ah-h, fichtre!" exclaimed Santander, listlessly, throwing a cushion at Bab Azzoun's head; "va te coucher. It's too hot to theorise; you're either a great philosopher, Bab, or a large sized"—he looked at him over the rim of his tin cup before concluding—"idiot." ...

But Bab Azzoun had gone on talking in the meanwhile, and now finishing with "and so you must not blame me, if, looking upon them" (he meant the Arabs) "and theirs, in this light, I find this African campaign a sorry business for France to be engaged in,—a vast and powerful government terrorising into submission a horde of half-starved fanatics," he yawned, "all of which is very bad—very bad. Give me some more seltzer."

We were aroused by the sudden stoppage of the scow. A detachment of "Zephyrs," near us upon the right bank, scrambled together in a hollow square. A battalion of Coulouglis, with haik and bournous rippling, scuttled by us at a gallop, and the Twenty-Third Chasseurs d'Afrique in the front line halted at an "order" on the crest of a sand ridge, which hid the horizon from sight. The still, hot air of the Sahara was suddenly pervaded with something that roused us to our feet in an instant. Thévenot whipped out his ever-ready sketch-book and began blocking in the landscape and the position of the troops, while Santander snatched his note-book and stylograph.

Of the scene which now gathered upon us, I can remember little, only out of that dark chaos can I rescue a few detached and fragmentary impressions—all the more vivid, nevertheless, from their isolation, all the more distinct from the grey blur of the background against which they trace themselves.

Instantly, somewhere disquietingly near, an event, or rather a whirl of events that rushed and writhed themselves together into a maze of dizzying complexity, suddenly evolved and widened like the fierce, quick rending open of some vast scroll, and there were zigzag hurryings to and fro and a surging heavenward of a torrent of noises, noises of men and noises of feet, noises of horses and noises of arms, noises that hustled fiercely upward above the brown mass and closed together in the desert air, blending or jarring one with another, joining and separating, reuniting and dividing; noises that rattled; noises that clanked; noises that boomed, or shrilled, or thundered, or quavered. And then came sight of blue-grey tumulous curtains—but whether of smoke or dust, I could not say, rumbling and billowing, bellying out with the hot tempest-breath of the battle-demon that raged within, and whose outermost fringes were torn by serrated files of flashing steel and wavering ranks of red.

And this was all at first. I knew we had been attacked and that behind those boiling smoke-billows, somewhere and somehow, men, infuriated into beasts, were grappling and struggling, each man, with every sinew on the strain, striving to kill his fellow.

And now we were in the midst of a hollow square of our soldiery, yet how we came there I cannot recall, though I remember that the water of the Jeliffe made my clothes heavy and uncomfortable, although a mortal fear sat upon me of being shot down by some of our own frenzied soldiers. And then came that awful rib-cracking pressure, as, from some outward, unseen cause, the square was thrown back upon itself. And with it all the smell of sweat of horses, and of men, the odour of the powder-smoke, the blinding, suffocating, stupefying clouds of dust, the horrible fear, greater than all others, of being pushed down beneath those thousands of trampling feet, the pitch of excitement that sickens and weakens, the momentary consciousness—vanishing as soon as felt—that this was what men called "war," and that we were experiencing the reality of what we had so often read.

It was not inspiring; there was no romance, no poetry about it; there was nothing in it but the hideous jar, one against the other, of men drunk with the blood-lust that eighteen hundred years had not quenched.

I looked at Bab Azzoun; he was standing at the gunwale of the scow (somehow we were back on the scow again) with an unloaded pistol in his hand. He was watching the battle on the bank. His nostrils quivered, and he shifted his feet exactly like an excited thorough-bred. On a sudden, a trooper of the Eleventh Cuirassiers came spinning round and round out of the brown of the battle, gulping up blood, and pitched, wheezing, face downwards, into the soft ooze where the river licked at the bank, raising ruddy bubbles in the water as he blew his life-breath in gasps into it, and raking it into gridiron patterns as his quivering, blue fingers closed into fists. Instantly afterward came a mighty rush across the river beneath our very bows. Forty-odd cuirassiers burst into it, followed by eighty or a hundred Kabyles.

I can recall just how the horse-hoofs rattled on the saucer-like cakes of dry mud and flung them up in countless fragments behind them. They were a fine sight, those Kabyles, with their fierce, red horses, their dazzling white bournouses, their long, thin, murderous rifle-barrels, thundering and splashing past, while from the whole mass of them, from under the shadow of every white haik, from every black-bearded lip, was rolling their war-cry: "Allah, Allah-il-Allah!"

Some long dormant recollections stirred in Bab Azzoun at this old battle-shout. As he faced them now, he was no longer the cold, cynical boulevardier of the morning. He looked as he must have looked when he played, a ten year-old boy, about the feet of the horses in his father's black tent. He saw the long lines of the douars of his native home; he saw the camels, and the caravan crawling toward the sunset; he saw the women grinding meal; he saw his father, the bearded sheik; he saw the Arab horsemen riding down to battle; he saw the palm-broad spear-points and the blue yataghans. In an instant of time all the long years of culture and education were stripped away as a garment. Once more he stood and stepped the Kabyle. And with these recollections, his long-forgotten native speech came rushing to his tongue, and in a long, shrill cry, he answered his countrymen in their own language:

"Allah-il-Allah, Mohammed ressoul Allah."

He passed me at a bound, leaped from the scow upon the back of a riderless horse, and, mingling with the Kabyles, rode out of sight.

And that was the last I ever saw of Bab Azzoun.

A Defense of the Flag

It had been the celebration of the feast of the Holy St. Patrick, and the various Irish societies of the city had turned out in great force—Sons of Erin, Fenians, Cork Rebels, and all. The procession had formed on one of the main avenues and had marched and countermarched up and down through the American city; had been reviewed by the mayor standing on the steps of the City Hall and wearing a green sash; and had finally disbanded in the afternoon in the business quarter of the city. So that now the streets in that vicinity were full of the perspiring members of the parade, the emerald colour flashing in and out of the slow moving maze of the crowd, like strands of green in the warp and woof of a loom.

There were marshals of the procession, with batons and big green rosettes, breathing easily once more after the long agony of sitting upon a nervous horse that walked sideways. There were the occupants of the endless line of carriages, with their green sashes, stretching their cramped and stiffened legs. There were the members of the various political clubs and secret societies, in their one good suit of ready-made clothes, cotton gloves, and silver-fringed scarfs. There was the little girl, with green tassels on her boots, who had walked by her father's side carrying a set bouquet of cut flowers in a lace paper-holder. There was the little boy who wore a green high hat, with a pipe stuck in the brim, and who carried the water for the band; and there were the members of the groups upon the floats, with overcoats and sacques thrown over their costumes and spangles.

The men were in great evidence in and around the corner saloons talking aloud, smoking, drinking, and spitting, and calling for "Jim," or "Connors," or "Duffy," over the heads of the crowd, and what with the speeches, and the beer, and the frequent fights, and the appropriate damning of England and the Orangemen, the day promised to end in right spirit and proper mood.

It so came about that young Shotover, on his way to his club, met with one of these groups near the City Hall, and noticed that they continually looked up towards its dome and seemed very well pleased with what they saw there. After he had passed them some little distance, Shotover, as well, looked up in that direction and saw that the Irish flag was flying from the staff above the cupola.

Shotover was American-bred and American-born, and his father and mother before him and their father and mother before them, and so on and back till one brought up in the hold of a ship called the Mayflower, further back than which it is not necessary to go.

He never voted. He did not know enough of the trend of national politics even to bet on the presidential elections. He did not know the names of the aldermen of his city, nor how many votes were controlled by the leaders of the Dirigo or Comanche Clubs; but when he was told that the Russian moujik or the Bulgarian serf, who had lived for six months in America (long enough for their votes to be worth three dollars), was as much of an American citizen as himself, he thought of the Shotovers who had framed the constitution in '75, had fought for it in '13 and '64, and wondered if this were so. He had a strange and stubborn conviction that whatever was American was right and whatever was right was American, and that somehow his country had nothing to be ashamed of in the past, nor afraid of in the future, for all the monstrous corruptions and abuses that obtained at present.

But just now this belief had been rudely jarred, and he walked on slowly to his club, the blood gradually flushing his face up to the roots of his hair. Once there, he sat for a long time in the big bay-window, looking absently out into the street, with eyes that saw nothing, very thoughtful. All at once he took up his hat, clapped it upon his head with the air of a man who has made up his mind, and went out, turning in the direction of the City Hall.

Whence arrived there, no one noticed him, for he made it a point to walk with a brisk, determined air, as though he were bent upon some especially important business, "which I am," he said to himself as he went on and up through tessellated corridors, between court-rooms and offices of clerks, commissioners, and collectors.

It was a long time before he found the right stairway, which was a circuitous, ladder-like flight that wormed its way upward between the two walls of the dome. The door leading to the stairway was in a kind of garret above the top floor of the building proper, and was sandwiched in between coal-bunkers, water-tanks, and gas-meters. Shotover tried it, and found it locked. He swore softly to himself, and attempted to break it open. He soon concluded that this would make too much noise, and so turned about and descended to the floor below. A negro, with an immense goitre and a black velvet skull-cap, was cleaning the woodwork outside a county commissioner's door. He directed Shotover to the porter in the office of the Weather Bureau, if he wished to go up in the cupola for the view. It was after four by this time, and Shotover found the porter of the Weather Bureau piling the chairs on the tables and sweeping out after office-hours.

"Well you see," said this one, "we don't allow nobody to go up in the cupola. You can get a permit from the architect's office, but I guess they'll be shut up there by now."

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Shotover; "I'm leaving town to-morrow, and I particularly wanted to get the view from the cupola. They say you can see well out into the ocean."

The porter had ignored him by this time, and was sweeping up a great dust. Shotover waited a moment. "You don't think I could arrange to get up there this afternoon?" he went on. The porter did not turn around.

"We don't allow no one up there without a permit," he answered.

"I suppose," returned Shotover, "that you have the keys?"

No answer.

"You have the keys, haven't you—the keys to the door there at the foot of the stairs?"

"We don't allow no one to go up there without a permit. Didn't you hear me before?"

Shotover took a five-dollar gold piece from his pocket, laid it on the corner of a desk, and contemplated it with reflective sadness. "I'm sorry," he said; "I particularly wanted to see that view before I left."

"Well, you see," said the porter, straightening up, "there was a young feller jumped off there once, and a woman tried to do it a little while after, and the officers in the police station downstairs made us shut it up; but 's long as you only want to see the view and don't want to jump off, I guess it'll be all right," and he leaned one hand against the edge of the desk and coughed slightly behind the other.

While he had been talking, Shotover had seen between the two windows on the opposite side of the room a very large wooden rack full of pigeon-holes and compartments: The weather and signal-flags were tucked away in these, but on the top was a great folded pile of bunting. It was sooty and grimy, and the new patches in it showed violently white and clean. But Shotover saw, with a strange and new catch at the heart, that it was tri-coloured.

"If you will come along with me now, sir," said the porter, "I'll open the door for you."

Shotover let him go out of the room first, then jumped to the other side of the room, snatched the flag down, and, hiding it as best he could, followed him out of the room. They went up the stairs together. If the porter saw anything, he was wise enough to keep quiet about it.

"I won't bother about waiting for you," said he, as he swung the door open. "Just lock the door when you come down, and leave the key with me at the office. If I ain't there, just give it to the fellow at the news-stand on the first floor, and I can get it in the morning."

"All right," answered Shotover, "I will," and he hugged the flag close to him, going up the narrow stairs two at a time.

After a long while he came out on the narrow railed balcony that ran around the lantern, and paused for breath as he looked around and below him. Then he turned quite giddy and sick for a moment and clutched desperately at the hand-rail, resisting a strong impulse to sit down and close his eyes.

Seemingly insecure as a bubble, the great dome rolled away from him on all sides down to the buttresses around the drum, and below that the gulf seemed endless, stretching down, down, down, to the thin yellow ribbon of the street. Underneath him, the City Hall itself dropped away, a confused heap of tinned roofs, domes, chimneys, and cornices, and beyond that lay the city itself spreading out like a great gray map. Over it there hung a greasy, sooty fog of a dark-brown color. In places the higher buildings over-topped the fog. Here, it was pierced by a slender church-spire. In another place, a dome bulged up over it, or, again, some sky-scraping office-building shouldered itself above its level to the purer, cleaner air. Looking down at the men in the streets, Shotover could see only their feet moving back and forth underneath their hat-brims as they walked. The noises of the city reached him in a subdued and steady murmur, and the strong wind that was blowing brought him the smell of the vegetable-gardens in the suburbs, the odour of trees and hay from the more distant country, and occasionally a faint whiff of salt from the ocean.

The sight was a sort of inspiration to Shotover. The great American city, with its riches and resources, boiling with the life and energy of a new people, young, enthusiastic, ambitious, and so full of hope and promise for the future, all striving and struggling in the fore part of the march of empire, building a new nation, a new civilisation, a new world, while over it all floated the Irish flag.

Shotover turned back, seized the halyards, and brought the green banner down with a single movement of his arm. Then he knotted the other bundle of bunting to the cords and ran it up. As it reached the top, the bundle twisted, turned on itself, unfolded, suddenly caught the wind, and then, in a single, long billow, rolled out into the stars and bars of Old Glory.

Shotover shut his teeth against a cheer, and the blood went tingling up and down through his body to his very finger-tips. He looked up, leaning his hand against the mast, and felt it quiver and thrill as the great flag tugged at it. The sound of the halyards rattling and snapping came to his ears like music.

He was not ashamed then to be enthusiastic, and did not feel in the least melodramatic or absurd. He took off his hat, and, as the great flag grew out stiffer and snapped and strained in the wind, looked up at it and said over softly to himself: "Lexington, Valley Forge, Yorktown, Mexico, the Alamo, 1812, Gettysburg, Shiloh, the Wilderness."

Meanwhile the knot of people on the sidewalk below, that had watched his doings, had grown into a crowd. The green badge was upon every breast, and there came to his ears a sound that was out of chord with the minor drone, the worst sound in the human gamut, the sound of an angry mob.

The high, windy air and the excitement of the occasion began to tell on Shotover, so that when half an hour later there came a rush of many feet up the stairway, and a crash upon the door that led up to the lantern, he buttoned his coat tightly around him, and shut his teeth and fists.

When the door finally went down and the first man jumped in, Shotover hit him.

Terence Shannon told about this afterward. "It was a birdie. Ah, but say, y' ought to of seen um. He let go with his left, like de piston-rod of de engine wot broke loose dat time at de power-house, an' Duffy's had an eye like a fried egg iver since."

The crowd paused, partly through surprise and partly because the body of Mr. Duffy lay across their feet and barred their way. There were about a dozen of them, all more or less drunk. The one exception was Terence Shannon, who was the candidate of the boss of his ward for a number on the force. In view of this fact, Shannon was trying to preserve order. He took advantage of the moment of hesitation to step in between Shotover and the crowd.

"Aw, say, youse fellows rattle me slats, sure. Do yer think the City Hall is the place to scrap, wid the jug only two floors below? Ye'll be havin' the whole shootin'-match of the force up here in a minute. Maybe yer would like to sober up in the 'hole in the wall.' Now just pipe down quiet-like, an' swear um in reg'lar at the station-house down-stairs. Ye've got a straight disturbin'-the-peace case wid um. Ah, sure, straight goods. I ain't givin' yer no gee-hee."

But the crowd stood its ground and glared at Shotover over Shannon's head. Then Connors yelled and drew out his revolver. "B'yes, we've got a right," he exclaimed. "It's the boord av alderman gave us the permit to show the green flag of ould Ireland here to-day. It's him as is breaking the law, not we, confound you." ("Confound you" was not what Mr. Connors said).

"He's dead on," said Shannon, turning to Shotover. "It's all ye kin do. Yer're actin' agin the law."

Shotover did not answer, but breathed hard through his nose, wondering at the state of things that made it an offense against the American law to protect the American flag. But all at once Shannon passed him and drew his knife across the halyards, and the great flag collapsed and sank slowly down like a wounded eagle. The crowd cheered, and Shannon said in Shotover's ear: "'Twas to save yer life, me b'y. They're out for blood, sure."

"Now," said Connors, using several altogether impossible nouns and adjectives, "now run up the green flag of ould Ireland again, or ye'll be sorry," and he pointed his revolver at Shotover.

"Say," cried Shannon, in a low voice to Shotover—"say, he's dead stuck on doin' you dirt. I can't hold um. Aw, say, Connors, quit your foolin', will you; put up your flashbox—put it up, or—or—" But just here he broke off, and catching up the green flag, threw it out in front of Shotover, and cried, laughing, "Ye'll not have the heart to shoot now."

Shotover struck the flag to the ground, set his foot on it, and catching up Old Glory again, flung it round him and faced them, shouting:

"Now shoot!"

But at this, in genuine terror, Shannon flung his hat down and ran in front of Connors himself, fearfully excited, and crying out: "F'r Gawd's sake, Connors, you don't dast do it. Wake up, will yer, it's mornin'. Do yer want to hiv' us all jugged for twenty years? It's treason and rebellion, and I don't now what all, for every mug in the gang, if yer just so much as crook dat forefinger. Put it up, ye damned fool. This is a cat w'at has changed colour."

Something of the gravity of the situation had forced its way through the clogged minds of the others, and, as Shannon spoke the last words, Connors's fore-arm was knocked up and he himself was pulled back into the crowd.

You can not always foretell how one man is going to act, but it is easy to read the intentions of a crowd. Shotover saw a rush in the eyes of the circle that was contracting about him, and turned to face the danger and to fight for the flag as the Shotovers of the old days had so often done.

In the books, the young aristocrat invariably thrashes the clowns who set upon him. But somehow Shotover had no chance with his clowns at all. He hit out wildly into the air as they ran in, and tried to guard against the scores of fists. But their way of fighting was not that which he had learned at his athletic club. They kicked him in the stomach, and, when they had knocked him down, stamped upon his face. It is hard to feel like a martyr and a hero when you can't draw your breath and when your mouth is full of blood and dust and broken teeth. Accordingly Shotover gave it up, and fainted away.

When the officers finally arrived, they made no distinction between the combatants, but locked them all up under the charge of "Drunk and Disorderly."

Toppan

When Frederick Woodhouse Toppan came out of Thibet and returned to the world in general and to San Francisco in particular, he began to know what it meant to be famous. As he entered street cars and hotel elevators he remarked a sudden observant silence on the part of the other passengers. The reporters became a real instead of a feigned annoyance and the papers at large commenced speaking of him by his last name only. He ceased to cut out and paste in his scrap-book, everything that was said of him in the journals and magazines. People composed beforehand clever little things to say to him when they were introduced, and he was asked to indorse new soaps and patented cereals. The great magazines of the country wrote to him for more articles, and his "Through the Highlands of Thibet", already in its fiftieth thousand, was in everybody's hands.

And he was hardly thirty.

To people who had preconceived ideas as to what an Asiatic explorer should be like, Toppan was disappointing. Where they expected to see a "magnificent physique" in top boots and pith helmet, flung at length upon lion skins, smoking a nargile, they saw only a very much tanned young gentleman, who wore a straw hat and russet leather shoes just like any well dressed man of the period. They felt vaguely defrauded because he looked ordinary and stylish and knew what to do with his hands and feet in a drawing-room.

He had come to San Francisco for three reasons. First because at that place he was fitting out an expedition for Kamtchatka which was to be the big thing of his life, and cause him to be spoken of together with Speke, Nansen and Stanley; second because the manager of the lecture bureau with whom he had signed, had scheduled him to deliver his two lectures there, as he had already done in Boston, New York, and elsewhere; and, third because Victoria Boyden lived there.

When Toppan got back, the rest of Victoria's men friends shrank considerably when she compared them with Toppan. They were of the type who are in the insurance offices of fathers and uncles during the winter, and in the summer are to be found at the fashionable resorts, where they idle languidly on the beaches in white flannels or play "chopsticks" with the girls on the piano in the hotel parlors. Here, however, was the first white man who had ever crossed Thibet alive, who knew what it meant to go four days without water and who could explain to you the difference between the insanity caused by the lack of sleep and that brought about by a cobra-bite. The men of Victoria's acquaintance never had known what it was to go without two consecutive meals, whereas Toppan at one time in the Himalayas had lived for several weeks upon ten ounces of camel meat per day, after the animals had died under their burdens. Victoria's friends led germans, Toppan led expeditions; their only fatigue came from dancing. Upon one occasion on Mount Everest, Toppan and his companions, caught in a snow-storm where sleep meant death, had kept themselves awake by chewing pipe-tobacco, and rubbing the smarting juice in their eyes. He had had experiences, the like of which none other of her gentlemen friends had ever known and she had cared for him from the first.

When a man tells a girl that he loves her in a voice that can speak in the dialects of the interior Thibetan states around the Tengrinor lake, or holds her hand in one that has been sunken deep in the throat of a hunger-mad tiger, she cannot well be otherwise than duly impressed.

To look at, Victoria was a queen. Just the woman you would have chosen to be mated with a man like Toppan, five feet, eleven in her tennis shoes, with her head flung well back on her shoulders, and the gait of a goddess; she could look down on most men and in general suggested figures of Brunehilde, Boadicea, or Berenice. But to know her was to find her shallow as a sun-shrunken mill-race, to discover that her brilliancy was the cheapest glitter, and to realise that in every way she was lamentably unsuited for the role of Toppan's wife. And no one saw this so well as Toppan himself. He knew that she did not appreciate him at one-tenth his real value, that she never could and never would understand him, and that he was in every way too good for her.

As his wife he felt sure she would only be a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the career that he had planned for himself, if, indeed she did not ruin it entirely.

But first impressions were strong with him, and because when he had first known her she had seemed to be fit consort for an emperor, he had gone on loving her as such ever since, making excuses for her trivialities, her petty affectations, her lack of interest in his life work, and even at times her unconcealed ridicule of it. For one thing, Victoria wanted him to postpone his expedition for a year, in order that he might marry her, and Toppan objected to this because he was so circumstanced just then that to postpone meant to abandon it.

No man is stronger than his weakest point. Toppan's weak point was Victoria Boyden, and he acknowledged to himself with a good deal of humiliation that he could not make up his mind to break with her. Perhaps he is not to be too severely blamed for this. Living so much apart from women as he did and plunged for such long periods into an atmosphere so entirely different from that of ordinary society, he had come to feel intensely where he felt at all, and had lost the faculty possessed by the more conventional, of easy and ephemeral change from one interest to another. Most of Victoria's admirers in a like case, would have lit a cigarette and walked off the passion between dawn and dark in one night. But Toppan could not do this. It was the one weak strain in his build, "the little rift within the lute."

One of the natural consequences of their intercourse was that they were never happy together and hailed with hardly concealed relief the advent of a third person. They had absolutely no interests in common, and their meetings were made up of trivial bickerings. They generally parted quarrelling, and then immediately sat down to count the days until they should meet again. I have no doubt they loved each other well enough, but somehow they were not made to be mated—and that was all there was about it.

During the month before the Kamtchatka expedition sailed Toppan worked hard. He commanded jointly with Bushby, a lieutenant in the Civil Engineer Corps, and the two toiled from the dawn of one morning till the dawn of the next, perfecting the last details of their undertaking; correcting charts, lading rifles and ammunition, experimenting with beef extracts and pemmican, and corresponding with geographical societies.

Through it all Toppan found time to revise his notes for his last lecture, and to call upon Victoria twice a week.

On one of these occasions he said; "How do you get on with my book, Vic, pretty stupid reading?" He had sent her from Bombay the first copy that his London publishers had forwarded to him.

"Not at all," she answered, "I like it very much, do you know it has all the fascination of a novel for me. Your style is just as clear and strong as can be, and your descriptions of scenery and the strange and novel bits of human nature in such an unfrequented corner of the globe are much more interesting than the most imaginative and carefully elaborated fiction; those botanical and zoological data must be invaluable to scientific men, I should think; but of course I can't understand them very well. How do you do it, Fred? It is certainly very wonderful. One would think that you were a born writer as well as explorer. But now see here, Freddy; I want to talk to you again about putting off your trip to—what do you call it—for just a year, for my sake."

After they had wrangled over this oft-mooted question they parted coldly, and Toppan went away feeling aroused and unhappy.

That night he and Bushby were making a chemical analysis of a new kind of smokeless powder. Bushby poured out a handful of saltpeter and charcoal upon a leaf torn from a back number of the Scientific Weekly and slid it across the table towards him. "Now when you burn this stuff," remarked Toppan, spreading it out upon the table with his finger, "you get a reaction of 2KNO3+3C=CO2+CO+, I forget the rest. Get out your formulae in the bookcase there behind you, will you, and look it up for me?"

While Bushby was fingering the leaves of the volume, Toppan caught sight of his name on the leaf of the Scientific Weekly which held the mixture. Looking closely he saw that it occurred in a criticism of his book which he had not yet seen. He brushed the charcoal and saltpeter to one side and ran his eyes over the lines:

"Toppan's great work," said the writer, "is a book not only for the scientist but for all men. Though dealing to a great extent with the technicalities of geography, geology, and the sister sciences, the author has known how to throw his thoughts and observations into a form of remarkable lightness and brilliancy. In Toppan's hands the book has all the fascination of a novel. His: style is clear and strong, and his descriptions of scenery, and of the weird and unusual phases of human nature to be met with in such an unfrequented corner of the globe are much more interesting than most of the imaginative and carefully elaborated romances of adventure in the present day. His botanical and zoological data will be invaluable to scientific men. It is rare we find the born explorer a born writer as well."

As he read, Toppan's heart grew cold within his ribs. "She must have learnt it like a parrot," he mused. "I wonder if she even"—

"Equals CO2+CO+N3+KCO3," said Bushby turning to the table again, "come on, old man, hurry up and let's get through with this. It's nearly three o'clock."

The next evening Toppan was to deliver his lecture at the Grand Opera House, but in the afternoon he called upon Victoria with a purpose. She was out at the time but he determined to wait for her, and sat down in the drawing-room until she should come. Presently he saw his book with its marbled cover—familiar to him now as the face of a child to its father,—lying conspicuously upon the center table. It was the copy he had mailed to her from Bombay. He picked it up and ran over the leaves; not one of them had been cut. He replaced the book upon the table and left the house.

That night the Grand Opera House was packed to the doors and the street in front was full of hoarse, over-worked policemen and wailing coachmen. The awning was out over the sidewalk and the steps of the church across the street were banked with row upon row of watching faces. It was known that this was to be the last lecture of Toppan's before he plunged into the wilderness again, and that the world would not see him for five years. The mayor of the city introduced him in a speech that was too long, and then Toppan stood up and faced the artillery of opera-glasses, and tried not to look into the right-hand proscenium box that held Victoria Boyden and her party.

He kept the audience spell-bound for an hour, while he forgot his useless notes, forgot his hearers and the circumstances of time and place, forgot about Victoria Boyden and their mean little squabbles and remembered only that he was Toppan, the great explorer, who had led his men through the interior of Thibet, and had lived to tell it to these people now before him. For an hour he made the people too, forget themselves in him and his story, till they felt something of what he had felt on those occasions when Hope was a phantom scattering chaff, when Resolve wore thin under friction of disaster, when the wheels of Life ran very low and men thanked God that they could die. For an hour he led them steadily into the heart of the unknown: the twilight of the unseen. Then he had an inspiration.

He had worked himself up to a mood wherein he was himself at his very best, when his chosen life-work made all else seem trivial and the desire to do great things was big within him. In this mood he somehow happened to remember Victoria Boyden, which he should not have done because she was not to be thought of in connection with great deeds and high resolves. But just at that moment Toppan felt his strength and knew how great he really was, and how small and belittled she seemed in comparison. She had practiced a small deception upon him, had done him harm and would do him more. He suddenly resolved to break with her at that very moment and place while he was strong and able to do it.

He did it by cleverly working into his talk a little story whose real meaning no one but Victoria understood. For the audience it was but a bright little bit of folk-lore of upper India. For Victoria, he might as well have struck her across the face. It was cruel; it was even vulgarly cruel, which is brutal, it was vindictive and perhaps cowardly, but the man was smarting under a long continued bitterness and he had at last turned and with closed eyes struck back savagely.

The exalted mood which had brought this about, was with him during the rest of the evening, was with him when he drove back to his rooms in his coupe with Bushby, and was with him as he flung himself to bed and went to sleep with a deep sigh of relief for that it was now over and done with forever.

But it left him during the night and he awoke the next morning to a realisation of what he had done and of all he had lost. He began by remembering Victoria as he had first known her, by recalling only what was good in her, and by palliating all that was bad. From this starting point he went on till he was in an agony of grief and remorse and ended by lashing himself into the belief that Victoria had been his inspiration and had given zest and interest to every thing he had done. Now he bitterly regretted that he had thrown her over. He had never in his life before loved her so much. He was unfitted for work during all that day and passed the next night in unavailing lamentations. His morning's mail brought him face to face with the crisis of his life. It came in the shape of a letter from Victoria Boyden.

It was a very thick and a very heavy letter and she must have spent most of the previous day in writing it. He was surprised that she should have written him at all after what had passed on that other evening, but he was deeply happy as well because he knew precisely what the letter would be, before he opened it. It would be a petition for his forgiveness and a last attempt to win him back to her again.

And Toppan knew that she would succeed. He knew that in his present mood he would make any sacrifice for her sake. He foresaw that her appeal would be too strong for him. That was, if he opened and read her letter. Just now the question was, should he do it? If he read that letter he knew that he was lost, his career would stop where it was. To be great he had only to throw it unopened into the fire; yes, but to be great without her, was it worth the while? What would fame and honour and greatness be, without her? He realised that the time had come to choose between her and his career and that it all depended upon the opening of her letter. Two hours later, he flung himself down before his table and took her letter in his hand. His fingers itched for the touch of it. Close to his elbow lay a little copper knife with poison grooves, such as are used by the Hill-tribes in the Kuen-Lun mountains. Toppan kept it for a paper cutter; just now he picked it up. For a long time he remained sitting, holding Victoria's letter in one hand, the little knife in the other. Then he put the point under the flap of the envelope and slowly cut it open.

Two weeks later the Kamtchatka Expedition sailed with Bushby in command. Toppan did not go; he was married to Victoria Boyden that Fall.

Last season I met Toppan at Coronado Beach. The world has about forgotten him now, but he is quite content as he is. He is head clerk in old Mr. Boyden's insurance office and he plays a capital game of tennis.

A Caged Lion

In front of the entrance a "spieler" stood on a starch-box and beat upon a piece of tin with a stick, and we weakly succumbed to his frenzied appeals and went inside. We did this, I am sure, partly to please the "spieler," who would have been dreadfully disappointed if we had not done so, but partly, too, to please Toppan, who was always interested in the great beasts and liked to watch them.

It is possible that you may remember Toppan as the man who married Victoria Boyden, and, in so doing, thrust his greatness from him and became a bank clerk instead of an explorer. After he married, he came to be quite ashamed of what he had done in Thibet and Africa and other unknown corners of the earth, and, after a while, very seldom spoke of that part of his life at all; or, when he did, it was only to allude to it as a passing boyish fancy, altogether foolish and silly, like calf-love and early attempts at poetry.

"I used to think I was going to set the world on fire at one time," he said once; "I suppose every young fellow has some such ideas. I only made an ass of myself, and I'm glad I'm well out of it. Victoria saved me from that."

But this was long afterward. He died hard, and sometimes he would have moments of strength in his weakness, just as before he had given up his career during a moment of weakness in his strength. During the first years after he had given up his career, he thought he was content with the way things had come to be; but it was not so, and now and then the old feeling, the love of the old life, the old ambition, would be stirred into activity again by some sight, or sound, or episode in the conventional life around him. A chance paragraph in a newspaper, a sight of the Arizona deserts of sage and cactus, a momentary panic on a ferry-boat, sometimes even fine music or a great poem would wake the better part of him to the desire of doing great things. At such times the longing grew big and troublous within him to cut loose from it all and get back to those places of the earth where there were neither months nor years, and where the days of the week had no names; where he could feel unknown winds blowing against his face and unnamed mountains rising beneath his feet; where he could see great, sandy, stony stretches of desert with hot, blue shadows, and plains of salt, and thickets of jungle-grass, broken only by the lairs of beasts and the paths the steinbok make when they go down to water.

The most trifling thing would recall all this to him, just as a couple of notes have recalled to you whole arias and overtures. But with Toppan it was as though one had recalled the arias and the overtures and then was not allowed to sing them.

We went into the arena and sat down. The ring in the middle was fenced in by a great, circular, iron cage. The tiers of seats rose around this, a band was playing in a box over the entrance, and the whole interior was lighted by an electric globe slung over the middle of the cage.

Inside the cage a brown bear—to me less suggestive of a wild animal than of lap-robes and furriers' signs—was dancing sleepily and allowing himself to be prodded by a person whose celluloid standing-collar showed white at the neck above the green of his Tyrolese costume. The bear was mangy, and his steel muzzle had chafed him, and Toppan said he was corrupted of moth and rust alike, and the audience applauded but feebly when he and his keeper withdrew.

After this we had a clown-elephant, dressed in a bib and tucker and vast baggy breeches—like those of a particularly big French Turco—who had lunch with his keeper, and rang the bell and drank his wine and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief like a bed-quilt, and pulled the chair from underneath his companion, seeming to be amused at it all with a strange sort of suppressed elephantine mirth.

And then, after they had both made their bow and gone out, in bounded and tumbled the dogs, barking and grinning all over, jumping up on their stools and benches, wriggling and pushing one another about, giggling and excited like so many kindergarten children on a show-day. I am sure they enjoyed their performance as much as the audience did, for they never had to be told what to do, and seemed only too eager for their turn to come. The best of it all was that they were quite unconscious of the audience and appeared to do their tricks for the sake of the tricks themselves, and not for the applause which followed them. And then, after the usual programme of wicker cylinders, hoops, and balls was over, they all rushed off amid a furious scrattling of paws and filliping of tails and heels.

While this was going on, we had been hearing from time to time a great sound, half-whine, half-rumbling guttural cough, that came from somewhere behind the exit from the cage. It was repeated at rapidly decreasing intervals, and grew lower in pitch until it ended in a short bass grunt. It sounded cruel and menacing, and when at its full volume the wood of the benches under us thrilled and vibrated.

There was a little pause in the programme while the arena was cleared and new and much larger and heavier paraphernalia was set about, and a gentleman in a frock coat and a very shiny hat entered and announced "the world's greatest lion-tamer." Then he went away and the tamer came in and stood expectantly by the side of the entrance, there was another short wait and the band struck a long minor chord.

And then they came in, one after the other, with long, crouching, lurching strides, not at all good-humouredly, like the dogs, or the elephant, or even the bear, but with low-hanging heads, surly, watchful, their eyes gleaming with the rage and hate that burned in their hearts and that they dared not vent. Their loose, yellow hides rolled and rippled over the great muscles as they moved, and the breath coming from their hot, half-open, mouths turned to steam as it struck the air.

A huge, blue-painted see-saw was dragged out to the centre, and the tamer made a sharp sound of command. Slowly, and with twitching tails, two of them obeyed and clambering upon the balancing-board swung up and down, while the music played a see-saw waltz. And all the while their great eyes flamed with the detestation of the thing and their black upper lips curled away from their long fangs in protest of this hourly renewed humiliation and degradation.

And one of the others, while waiting his turn to be whipped and bullied, sat up on his haunches and faced us and looked far away beyond us over the heads of the audience—over the continent and ocean, as it were—as though he saw something in that quarter that made him forget his present surroundings.

"You grand old brute," muttered Toppan; and then he said: "Do you know what you would see if you were to look into his eyes now? You would see Africa, and unnamed mountains, and great stony stretches of desert, with hot blue shadows, and plains of salt, and lairs in the jungle-grass, and lurking places near the paths the steinbok make when they go down to water. But now he's hampered and caged—is there anything worse than a caged lion?—and kept from the life he loves and was made for"—just here the tamer spoke sharply to him, and his eyes and crest drooped—"and ruled over," concluded Toppan, "by some one who is not so great as he, who has spoiled what was best in him and has turned his powers to trivial, resultless uses—some one weaker than he, yet stronger. Ah, well, old brute, it was yours once, we will remember that."

They wheeled out a clumsy velocipede, built expressly for him, and, while the lash whistled and snapped about him, the conquered king heaved himself upon it and went around and around the ring, while the band played a quick-step, the audience broke into applause, and the tamer smirked and bobbed his well-oiled head. I thought of Samson performing for the Philistines and Thusnelda at the triumph of Germanicus. The great beasts, grand though conquered, seemed to be the only dignified ones in the whole business. I hated the audience who saw their shame from behind iron bars; I hated myself for being one of them; and I hated the smug, sniggering tamer.

This latter had been drawing out various stools and ladders, and now arranged the lions upon them so they should form a pyramid, with himself on top.

Then he swung himself up among them, with his heels upon their necks, and, taking hold of the jaws of one, wrenched them apart with a great show of strength, turning his head to the audience so that all should see.

And just then the electric light above him cackled harshly, guttered, dropped down to a pencil of dull red, then went out, and the place was absolutely dark.

The band stopped abruptly with a discord, and there was an instant of silence. Then we heard the stools and ladders clattering as the lions leaped down, and straightway four pairs of lambent green spots burned out of the darkness and traveled swiftly about here and there, crossing and recrossing one another like the lights of steamers in a storm. Heretofore, the lions had been sluggish and inert; now they were aroused and alert in an instant, and we could hear the swift pad-pad of their heavy feet as they swung around the arena and the sound of their great bodies rubbing against the bars of the cage as one and the other passed nearer to us.

I don't the think the audience at all appreciated the situation at first, for no one moved or seemed excited, and one shrill voice suggested that the band should play "When the electric lights go out."

"Keep perfectly quiet, please!" called the tamer out of the darkness, and a certain peculiar ring in his voice was the first intimation of a possible danger.

But Toppan knew; and as we heard the tamer fumbling for the catch of the gate, which he somehow could not loose in the darkness, he said, with a rising voice: "He wants to get that gate open pretty quick."

But for their restless movements the lions were quiet; they uttered no sound, which was a bad sign. Blinking and dazed by the garish blue whiteness of a few moments before, they could see perfectly now where the tamer was blind.

"Listen," said Toppan. Near to us, and on the inside of the cage, we could hear a sound as of some slender body being whisked back and forth over the surface of the floor. In an instant I guessed what it was; one of the lions was crouched there, whipping his sides with his tail.

"When he stops that he'll spring," said Toppan, excitedly.

"Bring a light, Jerry—quick!" came the tamer's voice.

People were clambering to their feet by this time, talking loud, and we heard a woman cry out.

"Please keep as quiet as possible, ladies and gentlemen!" cried the tamer; "it won't do to excite—"

From the direction of the voice came the sound of a heavy fall and a crash that shook the iron gratings in their sockets.

"He's got him!" shouted Toppan.

And then what a scene! In that thick darkness every one sprang up, stumbling over the seats and over each other, all shouting and crying out, suddenly stricken with a panic fear of something they could not see. Inside the barred death-trap every lion suddenly gave tongue at once, until the air shook and sang in our ears. We could hear the great cats hurling themselves against the bars, and could see their eyes leaving brassy streaks against the darkness as they leaped. Two more sprang as the first had done toward that quarter of the cage from which came sounds of stamping and struggling, and then the tamer began to scream.

I think that so long as I shall live I shall not forget the sound of the tamer's scream. He did not scream as a woman would have done, from the head, but from the chest, which sounded so much worse that I was sick from it in a second with that sickness that weakens one at the pit of the stomach and along the muscles at the back of the legs. He did not pause for a second. Every breath was a scream, and every scream was alike, and one heard through it all the long snarls of satisfied hate and revenge, muffled by the man's clothes and the rip, rip of the cruel, blunt claws.

Hearing it all in the dark, as we did, made it all the more dreadful. I think for a time I must have taken leave of my senses. I was ready to vomit for the sickness that was upon me, and I beat my hands raw upon the iron bars or clasped them over my ears, against the sounds of the dreadful thing that was doing behind them. I remember praying aloud that it might soon be over, so only those screams might be stopped.

It seemed as though it had gone on for hours, when some men rushed in with a lantern and long, sharp irons. A hundred voices cried: "Here he is, over here!" and they ran around outside the cage and threw the light of the lantern on a place where a heap of grey, gold-laced clothes writhed and twisted beneath three great bulks of fulvous hide and bristling black mane.

The irons were useless. The three furies dragged their prey out of their reach and crouched over it again and recommenced. No one dared to go into the cage, and still the man lived and struggled and screamed.

I saw Toppan's fingers go to his mouth, and through that medley of dreadful noises there issued a sound that, sick as I was, made me shrink anew and close my eyes and teeth and shudder as though some cold slime had been poured through the hollow of my bones where the marrow should be. It was as the noise of the whistling of a fine whiplash, mingled with the whirr of a locust magnified a hundred times, and ended in an abrupt clacking noise thrice repeated.

At once I remembered where I had heard it before, because, having once heard the hiss of an aroused and angry serpent, no child of Eve can ever forget it.

The sound that now came from between Toppan's teeth and that filled the arena from wall to wall, was the sound that I had heard once before in the Paris Jardin des Plantes at feeding-time—the sound made by the great constrictors, when their huge bodies are looped and coiled like a reata for the throw that never misses, that never relaxes, and that no beast of the field is built strong enough to withstand. All the filthy wickedness and abominable malice of the centuries since the Enemy first entered into that shape that crawls, was concentrated in that hoarse, whistling hiss—a hiss that was cold and piercing like an icicle-made sound. It was not loud, but had in it some sort of penetrating quality that cut through the waves of horrid sounds about us, as the snake-carved prow of a Viking galley might have cut its way through the tumbling eddies of a tide-rip.

At the second repetition the lions paused. None better than they knew what was the meaning of that hiss. They had heard it before in their native hunting-grounds in the earlier days of summer, when the first heat lay close over all the jungle like the hollow of the palm of an angry god. Or if they themselves had not heard it, their sires before them had, and the fear of the thing bred into their bones suddenly leaped to life at the sound and gripped them and held them close.

When for a third time the sound sung and shrilled in their ears, their heads drew between their shoulders, their great eyes grew small and glittering, the hackles rose, and stiffened on their backs, their tails drooped, and they backed slowly to the further side of the cage and cowered there, whining and beaten.

Toppan wiped the sweat from the inside of his hands and went into the cage with the keepers and gathered up the panting, broken body, with its twitching fingers and dead, white face and ears, and carried it out. As they lifted it, the handful of pitiful medals dropped from the shredded grey coat and rattled down upon the floor. In the silence that had now succeeded, it was about the only sound one heard.

As we sat that evening on the porch of Toppan's house, in a fashionable suburb of the city, he said, for the third time: "I had that trick from a Mpongwee headman," and added: "It was while I was at Victoria Falls, waiting to cross the Kalahari Desert."

Then he continued, his eyes growing keener and his manner changing: "There is some interesting work to be done in that quarter by some one. You see, the Kalahari runs like this"—he drew the lines on the ground with his cane—"coming down in something like this shape from the Orange River to about the twentieth parallel south. The aneroid gives its average elevation about six hundred feet. I didn't cross it at the time, because we had sickness and the porters cut. But I made a lot of geological observations, and from these I have built up a theory that the Kalahari is no desert at all, but a big, well-watered plateau, with higher ground on the east and west. The tribes, too, thereabout call the place Linoka-Noka, and that's the Bantu for rivers upon rivers. They're nasty, though, these Bantu, and gave us a lot of trouble. They have a way of spitting little poisoned thorns into you unawares, and your tongue swells up and turns blue and your teeth fall out and—"

His wife Victoria came out to us in evening dress.

"Ah, Vic," said Toppan, jumping up, with a very sweet smile, "we were just talking about your paper-german next Tuesday, and I think we might have some very pretty favours made out of white tissue-paper—roses and butterflies, you know."

"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"

We could always look for fine fighting at Julien's of a Monday morning, because at that time the model was posed for the week and we picked out the places from which to work. Of course the first ten of the esquisse men had first choice. So, no matter how early you got up and how resolutely you held to your first row tabouret, chaps like Rounault, or Marioton, or the little Russian, whom we nicknamed "Choubersky," or Haushaulder, or the big American—"This Animal of a Buldy Jones"—all strong esquisse men, could always chuck you out when they came, which they did about ten o'clock, when everything had quieted down. When two particularly big, quick-tempered, obstinate, and combative men try to occupy, simultaneously, a space twelve inches square, it gives rise to complications. We used to watch and wait for these fights (after we had been chucked out ourselves), and make things worse, and hasten the crises by getting upon the outskirts of the crowd that thronged about the disputants and shoving with all our mights. Then one of the disputants would be jostled rudely against the other, who would hit him in the face, and then there would be a wild hooroosh and a clatter of overturned easels and the flashing of whitened knuckles and glimpses of two fierce red faces over the shoulders of the crowd, and everything would be pleasant. Then, perhaps, you would see an allusion in the Paris edition of the next morning's "Herald" to "the brutal and lawless students."

I remember particularly one fight—quite the best I ever saw at Julien's or elsewhere, for the matter of that. It was between Haushaulder and Gilet. Haushaulder was a Dane, and six feet two. Gilet was French, and had a waist like Virginie's. But Gilet had just come back from his three years' army service, and knew all about the savate. They squared off at each other, Gilet spitting like a cat, and Haushaulder grommelant under his mustache. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," the big American, bellowed to separate them, for it really looked like a massacre. And then, all at once, Gilet spun around, bent over till his finger-tips touched the floor, and balancing on the toe, lashed out backwards with his leg at Haushaulder, like any cayuse. The heel of his boot caught the Dane on the point of the chin. An hour and forty minutes later, when Haushaulder recovered consciousness and tried to speak, we found that the tip of his tongue had been sliced off between his teeth as if by a pair of scissors. It was a really unfortunate affair, and the government very nearly closed the atelier because of it. But "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" gave us all his opinion of the savate, and announced that the next man who savated from any cause whatever "aurait affaire avec lui, oui, avec lui, cre nom!"

Heavens! No one aimerait avoir affaire avec cette animal de Buldy Jones. He was from Chicago (but, of course, he couldn't help that!), and was taller than even Haushaulder, and much broader. The desire for art had come upon him all of a sudden while he was studying law at Columbia. For "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had gone into law after leaving Yale. Here we touch his great weakness. He was a Yale man! Why, he was prouder of that fact than he was of being an American, or even a Chicagoan—and that is saying much. Why, he couldn't talk of Yale without his face flushing. Why, Yale was almost more to him than his mother. I remember, at the students' ball at Bulliers, he got the Americans together, and with infinite trouble taught us all the Yale "yell", which he swore was a transcript from Aristophanes, and for three hours he gravely headed a procession that went the rounds of a hall howling "Brek! Kek! Kek! Kek! Co-ex!" and all the rest of it.

More than that, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" had pitched on his Varsity baseball nine. In his studio—quite the swellest in the Quarter, by the way—he had a collection of balls that he had pitched in match games at different times, and he used to show them to us reverently, and if we were his especial friends, would allow us to handle them. They were all written over with names and dates. He would explain them to us one by one.

"This one," he would say, "I pitched in the Princeton game, and here's two I pitched in the Harvard game—hard game that—our catcher gave out—guess he couldn't hold me" (with a grin of pride), "and Harvard made it interesting for me until the fifth inning; then I made two men fan out one after the other, and then, just to show 'em what I could do, filled the bases, got three balls called on me, and then pitched two inshoots and an outcurve, just as hard as I could deliver. Printz of Harvard was at the bat. He struck at every one of them—and fanned out. Here's the ball I did it with. Yes, sir. Oh, I can pitch a ball all right."

Now think of that! Here was this man, "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," a Beaux Arts man, one of the best colour and line men on our side, who had three esquisses and five figures "on the wall" at Julien's (any Paris art student will know what that means), and yet the one thing he was proud of, the one thing he cared to be admired for, the one thing he loved to talk about, was the fact that he had pitched for the Yale 'varsity baseball nine.

All this by way of introduction.

I wonder how many Julien men there are left who remember the affaire Camme? Plenty, I make no doubt, for the thing was a monumental character. I heard Roubault tell it at the "Dead Rat" just the other day. "Choubersky" wrote to "The Young Pretender" that he heard it away in the interior of Morocco, where he had gone to paint doorways, and Adler, who is now on the "Century" staff, says it's an old story among the illustrators. It has been bandied about so much that there is danger of its original form being lost. Wherefore it is time that it should be brought to print.

Now Camme, be it understood, was a filthy little beast—a thorough-paced, blown-in-the-bottle blackguard with not enough self-respect to keep him sweet through a summer's day—a rogue, a bug—anything you like that is sufficiently insulting; besides all this, and perhaps because of it, he was a duelist. He loved to have a man slap his face—some huge, big-boned, big-hearted man, who knew no other weapons but his knuckles. Camme would send him his card the next day, with a message to the effect that it would give him great pleasure to try and kill the gentleman in question at a certain time and place. Then there would be a lot of palaver, and somehow the duel would never come off, and Camme's reputation as a duelist would go up another peg, and the rest of us—beastly little rapins that we were—would hold him in increased fear and increased horror, just as if he were a rattler in coil.

Well, the row began one November morning—a Monday—and, of course, it was over the allotment of seats. Camme had calmly rubbed out the name of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" from the floor, and had chalked his own in its place.

Now, Bouguereau had placed the esquisse of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" fifth, the precedence over Camme.

But Camme invented reasons for a different opinion, and presented them to the whole three ateliers at the top of his voice and with unclean allusions. We were all climbing up on the taller stools by this time, and Virginie, who was the model of the week, was making furtive signs at us to give the crowd a push, as was our custom.

Camme was going on at a great rate.

"Ah, farceur! Ah, espece de volveur, crapaud, va; c'est a moi cette place la Saligaud va te prom'ner, va faire des copies au Louvre."

To be told to go and make copies in the Louvre was in our time the last insult. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," this sometime Yale pitcher, towering above the little frog-like Frenchman, turned to the crowd, and said, in grave concern, his forehead puckered in great deliberation:

"I do not know, precisely, that which it is necessary to do with this kind of a little toad of two legs. I do not know whether I should spank him or administer the good kick of the boot. I believe I shall give him the good kick of the boot. Hein!"

He turned Camme around, held him at arm's length, and kicked him twice severely. Next day, of course, Camme sent his card, and four of us Americans went around to the studio of "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" to have a smoke-talk over it. Robinson was of the opinion to ignore the matter.

"Now, we can't do that," said Adler; "these beastly continentals would misunderstand. Can you shoot, Buldy Jones?"

"Only deer."

"Fence?"

"Not a little bit. Oh, let's go and punch the wadding out of him, and be done with it!"

"No! No! He should be humiliated."

"I tell you what—let's guy the thing."

"Get up a fake duel and make him seem ridiculous."

"You've got the choice of weapons, Buldy Jones."

"Fight him with hat-pins."

"Oh, let's go punch the wadding out of him—he makes me tired."

"Horse" Wilson, who hadn't spoken, suddenly broke in with:

"Now, listen to me, you other fellows. Let me fix this thing. Buldy Jones, I must be one of your seconds."

"Soit!"

"I'm going to Camme, and say like this: 'This Animal of a Buldy Jones' has the naming of weapons. He comes from a strange country, near the Mississippi, from a place called Shee-ka-go, and there it is not considered etiquette to fight either with a sword or pistol; it is too common. However, when it is necessary that balls should be exchanged in order to satisfy honour, a curious custom is resorted to. Balls are exchanged, but not from pistols. They are very terrible balls, large as an apple, and of adamantine hardness. 'This Animal of a Buldy Jones,' even now has a collection. No American gentleman of honour travels without them. He would gladly have you come and make first choice of a ball while he will select one from among those you leave. Sur le terrain, you will deliver these balls simultaneously toward each other, repeating till one or the other adversary drops. Then honour can be declared satisfied."

"Yes, and do you suppose that Camme will listen to such tommy rot as that?" remarked "This Animal of a Buldy Jones." "I think I'd better just punch his head."

"Listen to it? Of course he'll listen to it. You've no idea what curious ideas these continentals have of the American duel. You can't propose anything so absurd in the dueling line that they won't give it serious thought. And besides, if Camme won't fight this way we'll tell him that you will have a Mexican duel."

"What's that?"

"Tie your left wrists together, and fight with knives in your right hand. That'll scare the tar out of him."

And it did. The seconds had a meeting at the cafe of the Moulin Rouge, and gave Camme's seconds the choice of the duel Yale or the duel Mexico. Camme had no wish to tie himself to a man with a knife in his hand, and his seconds came the next day and solemnly chose a league ball—one that had been used against the Havard nine.

Will I—will any of us ever forget that duel? Camme and his people came upon the ground almost at the same time as we. It was behind the mill of Longchamps, of course. Roubault was one of Camme's seconds, and he carried the ball in a lacquered Japanese tobacco-jar—gingerly as if it were a bomb. We were quick getting to work. Camme and "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" were each to take his baseball in his hand, stand back to back, walk away from each other just the distance between the pitcher's box and the home plate (we had seen to that), turn on the word, and—deliver their balls.

"How do you feel?" I whispered to our principal, as I passed the ball into his hands.

"I feel just as if I was going into a match game, with the bleachers full to the top and the boys hitting her up for Yale. We ought to give the yell, y' know."

"How's the ball?"

"A bit soft and not quite round. Bernard of the Harvard nine hit the shape out of it in a drive over our left field, but it'll do all right."

"This Animal of a Buldy Jones" bent and gathered up a bit of dirt, rubbed the ball in it, and ground it between his palms. The man's arms were veritable connecting-rods, and were strung with tendons like particularly well-seasoned rubber. I remembered what he said about few catchers being able to hold him, and I recalled the pads and masks and wadded gloves of a baseball game, and I began to feel nervous. If Camme was hit on the temple or over the heart—

"Now, say, old man, go slow, you know. We don't want to fetch up in Mazas for this. By the way, what kind of ball are you going to give him? What's the curve?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe I'll let him have an up-shoot. Never make up my mind till the last moment."

"All ready, gentlemen!" said Roubault, coming up.

Camme had removed coat, vest, and cravat. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" stripped to a sleeveless undershirt. He spat on his hands, and rubbed a little more dirt on the ball.

"Play ball!" he muttered.

We set them back to back. On the word they paced from each other and paused. "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" shifted his ball to his right hand, and, holding it between his fingers, slowly raised both his arms high above his head and a little over one shoulder. With his toe he made a little depression in the soil, while he slowly turned the ball between his fingers.

"Fire!" cried "Horse" Wilson.

On the word "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" turned abruptly about on one foot, one leg came high off the ground till the knee nearly touched the chest—you know the movement and position well—the uncanny contortions of a pitcher about to deliver.

Camme threw his ball overhand—bowled it as is done in cricket, and it went wide over our man's shoulder. Down came Buldy Jones' foot, and his arm shot forward with a tremendous jerk. Not till the very last moment did he glance at his adversary or measure the distance.

"It is an in-curve!" exclaimed "Horse" Wilson in my ear.

We could hear the ball whir as it left a grey blurred streak in the air. Camme made as if to dodge it with a short toss of head and neck—it was all he had time for—and the ball, faithful to the last twist of the pitcher's fingers, swerved sharply inward at the same moment and in the same direction.

When we got to Camme and gathered him up, I veritably believed that the fellow had been done for. For he lay as he had fallen, straight as a ramrod and quite as stiff, and his eyes were winking like the shutter of a kinetoscope. But "This Animal of a Buldy Jones," who had seen prize-fighters knocked out by a single blow, said it was all right. An hour later Camme woke up and began to mumble in pain through his clenched teeth, for the ball, hitting him on the point of the chin, had dislocated his jaw.

The heart-breaking part of the affair came afterward, when "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" kept us groping in the wet grass and underbrush until after dark looking for his confounded baseball, which had caromed off Camme's chin, and gone—no one knows where.

We never found it.

Dying Fires

Young Overbeck's father was editor and proprietor of the county paper in Colfax, California, and the son, so soon as his high-school days were over, made his appearance in the office as his father's assistant. So abrupt was the transition that his diploma, which was to hang over the editorial desk, had not yet returned from the framer's, while the first copy that he was called on to edit was his own commencement oration on the philosophy of Dante. He had worn a white pique cravat and a cutaway coat on the occasion of its delivery, and the county commissioner, who was the guest of honour on the platform, had congratulated him as he handed him his sheepskin. For Overbeck was the youngest and the brightest member of his class.

Colfax was a lively town in those days. The teaming from the valley over into the mining country on the other side of the Indian River was at its height then. Colfax was the headquarters of the business, and the teamsters—after the long pull up from the Indian River Cañon—showed interest in an environment made up chiefly of saloons.

Then there were the mining camps over by Iowa Hill, the Morning Star, the Big Dipper, and further on, up in the Gold Run country, the Little Providence. There was Dutch Flat, full of Mexican-Spanish girls and "breed" girls, where the dance-halls were of equal number with the bars. There was—a little way down the line—Clipper Gap, where the mountain ranches began, and where the mountain cow-boy lived up to the traditions of his kind.

And this life, tumultuous, headstrong, vivid in colour, vigorous in action, was bound together by the railroad, which not only made a single community out of all that part of the east slope of the Sierras' foothills, but contributed its own life as well—the life of oilers, engineers, switchmen, eating-house waitresses and cashiers, "lady" operators, conductors, and the like.

Of such a little world news-items are evolved—sometimes even scare-head, double-leaded descriptive articles—supplemented by interviews with sheriffs and ante-mortem statements. Good grist for a county paper; good opportunities for an unspoiled, observant, imaginative young fellow at the formative period of his life. Such was the time, such the environment, such the conditions that prevailed when young Overbeck, at the age of twenty-one, sat down to the writing of his first novel.

He completed it in five months, and, though he did not know the fact then, the novel was good. It was not great—far from it, but it was not merely clever. Somehow, by a miracle of good fortune, young Overbeck had got started right at the very beginning. He had not been influenced by a fetich of his choice till his work was a mere replica of some other writer's. He was not literary. He had not much time for books. He lived in the midst of a strenuous, eager life, a little primal even yet; a life of passions that were often elemental in their simplicity and directness. His schooling and his newspaper work—it was he who must find or ferret out the news all along the line, from Penrhyn to Emigrant Gap—had taught him observation without—here was the miracle—dulling the edge of his sensitiveness. He saw, as those few, few people see who live close to life at the beginning of an epoch. He saw into the life and the heart beneath the life; the life and the heart of Bunt McBride, as with eight horses and much abjuration he negotiated a load of steel "stamps" up the sheer leap of the Indian Cañon; he saw into the life and into the heart of Irma Tejada, who kept case for the faro players at Dutch Flat; he saw into the life and heart of Lizzie Toby, the biscuit-shooter in the railway eating-house, and into the life and heart of "Doc" Twitchel, who had degrees from Edinburgh and Leipsic, and who, for obscure reasons, chose to look after the measles, sprains and rheumatisms of the countryside.

And, besides, there were others and still others, whom young Overbeck learned to know to the very heart's heart of them: blacksmiths, traveling peddlers, section-bosses, miners, horse-wranglers, cow-punchers, the stage-drivers, the storekeeper, the hotel-keeper, the ditch-tender, the prospector, the seamstress of the town, the postmistress, the schoolmistress, the poetess. Into the lives of these and the hearts of these young Overbeck saw, and the wonder of that sight so overpowered him that he had no thought and no care for other people's books. And he was only twenty-one! Only twenty-one, and yet he saw clearly into the great, complicated, confused human machine that clashed and jarred around him. Only twenty-one, and yet he read the enigma that men of fifty may alone hope to solve! Once in a great while this thing may happen—in such out of the way places as that country around Colfax in Placer County, California, where no outside influences have play, where books are few and misprized and the reading circle a thing unknown. From time to time such men are born, especially along the line of cleavage where the furthest skirmish line of civilisation thrusts and girds at the wilderness. A very few find their true profession before the fire is stamped out of them; of these few, fewer still have the force to make themselves heard. Of these last the majority die before they attain the faculty of making their message intelligible. Those that remain are the world's great men.

At the time when his first little book was on its initial journey to the Eastern publishing houses, Overbeck was by no means a great man. The immaturity that was yet his, the lack of knowledge of his tools, clogged his work and befogged his vision. The smooth running of the cogs and the far-darting range of vision would come in the course of the next fifteen years of unrelenting persistence. The ordering and organising and controlling of his machine he could, with patience and by taking thought, accomplish for himself. The original impetus had come straight from the almighty gods. That impetus was young yet, feeble, yet, coming down from so far it was spent by the time it reached the earth—at Colfax, California. A touch now might divert it. Judge with what care such a thing should be nursed and watched; compared with the delicacy with which it unfolds, the opening of a rosebud is an abrupt explosion. Later on, such insight, such undeveloped genius may become a tremendous world-power, a thing to split a nation in twain as the axe cleaves the block. But at twenty-one, a whisper—and it takes flight; a touch—it withers; the lifting of a finger—it is gone.

The same destiny that had allowed Overbeck to be born, and that thus far had watched over his course, must have inspired his choice, his very first choice, of a publisher, for the manuscript of "The Vision of Bunt McBride" went straight as a home-bound bird to the one man of all others who could understand the beginnings of genius and recognise the golden grain of truth in the chaff of unessentials. His name was Conant, and he accepted the manuscript by telegram.

He did more than this, and one evening Overbeck stood on the steps of the post-office and opened a letter in his hand, and, looking up and off, saw the world transfigured. His chance had come. In half a year of time he had accomplished what other men—other young writers—strive for throughout the best years of their youth. He had been called to New York. Conant had offered him a minor place on his editorial staff.

Overbeck reached the great city a fortnight later, and the cutaway coat and pique cravat—unworn since Commencement—served to fortify his courage at the first interview with the man who was to make him—so he believed—famous.

Ah, the delights, the excitement, the inspiration of that day! Let those judge who have striven toward the Great City through years of deferred hope and heart-sinkings and sacrifice daily renewed. Overbeck's feet were set in those streets whose names had become legendary to his imagination. Public buildings and public squares familiar only through the weekly prints defiled before him like a pageant, but friendly for all that, inviting, even. But the vast conglomerate life that roared by his ears, like the systole and diastole of an almighty heart, was for a moment disquieting. Soon the human resemblance faded. It became as a machine infinitely huge, infinitely formidable. It challenged him with superb condescension.

"I must down you," he muttered, as he made his way toward Conant's, "or you will down me." He saw it clearly. There was no other alternative. The young boy in his foolish finery of a Colfax tailor's make, with no weapons but such wits as the gods had given him, was pitted against the leviathan.

There was no friend nearer than his native state on the other fringe of the continent. He was fearfully alone.

But he was twenty-one. The wits that the gods had given him were good, and the fine fire that was within him, the radiant freshness of his nature, stirred and leaped to life at the challenge. Ah, he would win, he would win! And in his exuberance, the first dim consciousness of his power came to him. He could win, he had it in him; he began to see that now. That nameless power was his which would enable him to grip this monstrous life by the very throat, and bring it down on its knee before him to listen respectfully to what he had to say.

The interview with Conant was no less exhilarating. It was in the reception-room of the great house that it took place, and while waiting for Conant to come in, Overbeck, his heart in his mouth, recognised, in the original drawings on the walls, picture after picture, signed by famous illustrators, that he had seen reproduced in Conant's magazine.

Then Conant himself had appeared and shaken the young author's hand a long time, and had talked to him with the utmost kindness of his book, of his plans for the immediate future, of the work he would do in the editorial office and of the next novel he wished him to write.

"We'll only need you here in the mornings," said the editor, "and you can put in your afternoons on your novel. Have you anything in mind as good as 'Bunt McBride'?"

"I have a sort of notion for one," hazarded the young man; and Conant had demanded to hear it.

Stammering, embarrassed, Overbeck outlined it.

"I see, I see!" Conant commented. "Yes, there is a good story in that. Maybe Hastings will want to use it in the monthly. But we'll make a book of it, anyway, if you work it up as well as the McBride story."

And so the young fellow made his first step in New York. The very next day he began his second novel.

In the editorial office, where he spent his mornings reading proof and making up "front matter," he made the acquaintance of a middle-aged lady, named Miss Patten, who asked him to call on her, and later on introduced him into the "set" wherein she herself moved. The set called itself the "New Bohemians," and once a week met at Miss Patten's apartment up-town. In a month's time Overbeck was a fixture in "New Bohemia."

It was made up of minor poets whose opportunity in life was the blank space on a magazine page below the end of an article; of men past their prime, who, because of an occasional story in a second-rate monthly, were considered to have "arrived"; of women who translated novels from the Italian and Hungarian; of decayed dramatists who could advance unimpeachable reasons for the non-production of their plays; of novelists whose books were declined by publishers because of professional jealousy on the part of the "readers," or whose ideas, stolen by false friends, had appeared in books that sold by the hundreds of thousands. In public the New Bohemians were fulsome in the praise of one another's productions. Did a sonnet called, perhaps, "A Cryptogram is Stella's Soul" appear in a current issue, they fell on it with eager eyes, learned it by heart and recited lines of it aloud; the conceit of the lover translating the cipher by the key of love was welcomed with transports of delight.

"Ah, one of the most exquisitely delicate allegories I've ever heard, and so true—so 'in the tone'!"

Did a certain one of the third-rate novelists, reading aloud from his unpublished manuscript, say of his heroine: "It was the native catholicity of his temperament that lent strength and depth to her innate womanliness," the phrase was snapped up on the instant.

"How he understands women!"

"Such finesse! More subtle than Henry James."

"Paul Bourget has gone no further," said one of the critics of New Bohemia; "our limitations are determined less by our renunciations than by our sense of proportion in our conception of ethical standards."

The set abased itself. "Wonderful, ah, how pitilessly you fathom our poor human nature!" New Bohemia saw colour in word effects. A poet read aloud:

The stalwart rain!

Ah, the rush of down-toppling waters;

The torrent!

Merge of mist and musky air;

The current

Sweeps thwart my blinded sight again.

 

"Ah!" exclaimed one of the audience, "see, see that bright green flash!"

Thus in public. In private all was different. Walking home with one or another of the set, young Overbeck heard their confidences.

"Keppler is a good fellow right enough, but, my goodness, he can't write verse!"

"That thing of Miss Patten's to-night! Did you ever hear anything so unconvincing, so obvious? Poor old woman!"

"I'm really sorry for Martens; awfully decent sort, but he never should try to write novels."

By rapid degrees young Overbeck caught the lingo of the third-raters. He could talk about "tendencies" and the "influence of reactions." Such and such a writer had a "sense of form," another a "feeling for word effects." He knew all about "tones" and "notes" and "philistinisms." He could tell the difference between an allegory and a simile as far as he could see them. An anticlimax was the one unforgivable sin under heaven. A mixed metaphor made him wince, and a split infinitive hurt him like a blow.

But the great word was "convincing." To say a book was convincing was to give positively the last verdict. To be "unconvincing" was to be shut out from the elect. If the New Bohemian decided that the last popular book was unconvincing, there was no appeal. The book was not to be mentioned in polite conversation.

And the author of "The Vision of Bunt McBride," as yet new to the world as the day he was born, with all his eager ambition and quick sensitiveness, thought that all this was the real thing. He had never so much as seen literary people before. How could he know the difference? He honestly believed that New Bohemia was the true literary force of New York. He wrote home that the association with such people, thinkers, poets, philosophers, was an inspiration; that he had learned more in one week in their company than he had learned in Colfax in a whole year.

Perhaps, too, it was the flattery he received that helped to carry Overbeck off his feet. The New Bohemians made a little lion of him when "Bunt McBride" reached its modest pinnacle of popularity. They kotowed to him, and toadied to him, and fagged and tooted for him, and spoke of his book as a masterpiece. They said he had succeeded where Kipling had ignominiously failed. They said there was more harmony of prose effects in one chapter of "Bunt McBride" than in everything that Bret Harte ever wrote. They told him he was a second Stevenson—only with more refinement.

Then the women of the set, who were of those who did not write, who called themselves "mere dilettantes," but who "took an interest in young writers" and liked to influence their lives and works, began to flutter and buzz around him. They told him that they understood him; that they under stood his temperament; that they could see where his forte lay; and they undertook his education.

There was in "The Vision of Bunt McBride" a certain sane and healthy animalism that hurt nobody, and that, no doubt, Overbeck, in later books, would modify. He had taken life as he found it to make his book; it was not his fault that the teamsters, biscuit-shooters and "breed" girls of the foothills were coarse in fibre. In his sincerity he could not do otherwise in his novel than paint life as he saw it. He had dealt with it honestly; he did not dab at the edge of the business; he had sent his fist straight through it.

But the New Bohemians could not abide this.

"Not so much faroucherie, you dear young Lochinvar!" they said. "Art must uplift. 'Look thou not down, but up toward uses of a cup';" and they supplemented the quotation by lines from Walter Peter, and read to him from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold.

Ah, the spiritual was the great thing. We were here to make the world brighter and better for having lived in it. The passions of a waitress in a railway eating-house—how sordid the subject! Dear boy, look for the soul, strive to rise to higher planes! Tread upward; every book should leave a clean taste in the mouth, should tend to make one happier, should elevate, not debase.

So by degrees Overbeck began to see his future in a different light. He began to think that he really had succeeded where Kipling had failed; that he really was Stevenson with more refinement, and that the one and only thing lacking in his work was soul. He believed that he must strive for the spiritual, and "let the ape and tiger die." The originality and unconventionally of his little book he came to regard as crudities.

"Yes," he said one day to Miss Patten and a couple of his friends, "I have been re-reading my book of late. I can see its limitations—now. It has a lack of form; the tonality is a little false. It fails somehow to convince."

Thus the first Winter passed. In the mornings Overbeck assiduously edited copy and made up front matter on the top floor of the Conant building. In the evenings he called on Miss Patten, or some other member of the set. Once a week, up-town, he fed fat on the literary delicatessen that New Bohemia provided. In the meantime, every afternoon, from luncheon-time till dark, he toiled on his second novel, "Renunciations." The environment of "Renunciations" was a far cry from Colfax, California. It was a city-bred story, with no fresher atmosphere than that of bought flowers. Its dramatis personae were all of the leisure class, opera-goers, intriguers, riders of blood horses, certainly more refined than Lizzie Toby, biscuit-shooter, certainly more spirituelle than Irma Tejada, case-keeper in Dog Omahone's faro joint, certainly more elegant than Bunt McBride, teamster of the Colfax Iowa Hill Freight Transportation Company.

From time to time, as the novel progressed, he read it to the dilettante women whom he knew best among the New Bohemians. They advised him as to its development, and "influenced" its outcome and dénouement.

"I think you have found your métier, dear boy," said one of them, when "Renunciations" was nearly completed. "To portray the concrete—is it not a small achievement, sublimated journalese, nothing more? But to grasp abstractions, to analyse a woman's soul, to evoke the spiritual essence in humanity, as you have done in your ninth chapter of 'Renunciations'—that is the true function of art. Je vous fais mes compliments. 'Renunciations' is a chef-d'oeuvre. Can't you see yourself what a stride you have made, how much broader your outlook has become, how much more catholic, since the days of 'Bunt McBride'?"

To be sure, Overbeck could see it. Ah, he was growing, he was expanding. He was mounting higher planes. He was more—catholic. That, of all words, was the one to express his mood. Catholic, ah, yes, he was catholic!

When "Renunciations" was finished he took the manuscript to Conant and waited a fortnight in an agony of suspense and repressed jubilation for the great man's verdict. He was all the more anxious to hear it because, every now and then, while writing the story, doubts—distressing, perplexing—had intruded. At times and all of a sudden, after days of the steadiest footing, the surest progress, the story—the whole set and trend of the affair—would seem, as it were, to escape from his control. Where once, in "Bunt McBride," he had gripped, he must now grope. What was it? He had been so sure of himself, with all the stimulus of new surroundings, the work in this second novel should have been all the easier. But the doubt would fade, and for weeks he would plough on, till again, and all unexpectedly, he would find himself in an agony of indecision as to the outcome of some vital pivotal episode of the story. Of two methods of treatment, both equally plausible, he could not say which was the true, which the false; and he must needs take, as it were, a leap in the dark—it was either that or abandoning the story, trusting to mere luck that he would, somehow, be carried through.

A fortnight after he had delivered the manuscript to Conant he presented himself in the publisher's office.

"I was just about to send for you," said Conant. "I finished your story last week."

There was a pause. Overbeck settled himself comfortably in his chair, but his nails were cutting his palms.

"Hastings has read it, too—and—well, frankly, Overbeck, we were disappointed."

"Yes?" inquired Overbeck, calmly. "H'm—that's too b-bad."

He could not hear, or at least could not understand, just what the publisher said next. Then, after a time that seemed immeasurably long, he caught the words:

"It would not do you a bit of good, my boy, to have us publish it—it would harm you. There are a good many things I would lie about, but books are not included. This 'Renunciations' of yours is—is, why, confound it, Overbeck, it's foolishness."

Overbeck went out and sat on a bench in a square near by, looking vacantly at a fountain as it rose and fell and rose again with an incessant cadenced splashing. Then he took himself home to his hall bedroom. He had brought the manuscript of his novel with him, and for a long time he sat at his table listlessly turning the leaves, confused, stupid, all but inert. The end, however, did not come suddenly. A few weeks later "Renunciations" was published, but not by Conant. It bore the imprint of an obscure firm in Boston. The covers were of limp dressed leather, olive green, and could be tied together by thongs, like a portfolio. The sale stopped after five hundred copies had been ordered, and the real critics, those who did not belong to New Bohemia, hardly so much as noticed the book.

In the Autumn, when the third-raters had come back from their vacations, the "evenings" at Miss Patten's were resumed, and Overbeck hurried to the very first meeting. He wanted to talk it all over with them. In his chagrin and cruel disappointment he was hungry for some word of praise, of condolement. He wanted to be told again, even though he had begun to suspect many things, that he had succeeded where Kipling had failed, that he was Stevenson with more refinement.

But the New Bohemians, the same women and fakirs and half-baked minor poets who had "influenced" him and had ruined him, could hardly find time to notice him now. The guest of the evening was a new little lion who had joined the set. A symbolist versifier who wrote over the pseudonym of de la Houssaye, with black, oily hair and long white hands; him the Bohemians thronged about in crowds as before they had thronged about Overbeck. Only once did any one of them pay attention to the latter. This was the woman who had nicknamed him "Young Lochinvar." Yes, she had read "Renunciations," a capital little thing, a little thin in parts, lacking in finesse. He must strive for his true medium of expression, his true note. Ah, art was long! Study of the new symbolists would help him. She would beg him to read Monsieur de la Houssaye's "The Monoliths." Such subtlety, such delicious word-chords! It could not fail to inspire him.

Shouldered off, forgotten, the young fellow crept back to his little hall bedroom and sat down to think it over. There in the dark of the night his eyes were opened, and he saw, at last, what these people had done to him; saw the Great Mistake, and that he had wasted his substance.

The golden apples, that had been his for the stretching of the hand, he had flung from him. Tricked, trapped, exploited, he had prostituted the great good thing that had been his by right divine, for the privilege of eating husks with swine. Now was the day of the mighty famine, and the starved and broken heart of him, crying out for help, found only a farrago of empty phrases.

He tried to go back; he did in very fact go back to the mountains and the cañons of the great Sierras. "He arose and went to his father," and, with such sapped and broken strength as New Bohemia had left him, strove to wrest some wreckage from the dying fire.

But the ashes were cold by now. The fire that the gods had allowed him to snatch, because he was humble and pure and clean and brave, had been stamped out beneath the feet of minor and dilettante poets, and now the gods guarded close the brands that yet remained on the altars.

They may not be violated twice, those sacred fires. Once in a lifetime the very young and the pure in heart may see the shine of them and pluck a brand from the altar's edge. But, once possessed, it must be watched with a greater vigilance than even that of the gods, for its light will live only for him who snatched it first. Only for him that shields it, even with his life, from the contact of the world does it burst into a burning and a shining light. Let once the touch of alien fingers disturb it, and there remains only a little heap of bitter ashes.

Grettir at Drangey

I

HOW GRETTIR CAME TO THE ISLAND

A long slant of rain came from out the northwest, and much fog; and the sea, still swollen by the last of the winter gales—now two days gone—raced by the bows of their boat in great swells, quiet, huge.

It was cold, and the wind, like a hound at fault, hunted along through the gorges between the wave heads, casting back and forth swiftly in bulging, sounding blasts that made an echo between the walls of water. At times the wind discovered the boat and leaped upon it suddenly with a gush of fierce noise, clutching at the sail and bearing it down as the dog bears down the young elk.

The sky, a vast reach of broken grey, slid along close overhead, sometimes even dropping flat upon the sea, blotting the horizon and whirling about like geyser mist or the reek and smoke from the mouth of jokuls. Then, perhaps, out of the fog and out of the rain, suddenly great and fearful came towering and dipping a mighty berg, the waves breaking like surf about its base, spires of grey ice lifting skywards, all dripping and gashed and jagged; knobs and sharp ridges thrusting from under beneath the water, full of danger to ships. At such moments they must put the helm over quickly, sheering off from the colossus before it caught and trampled them.

But no living thing did they see through all the day. Sea birds there were none; no porpoises played about the boat, no seals barked from surge to surge. There was nothing but the silent gallop of the waves, the flitting of the leaden sky, the uneven panting of the wind, and the rattle of the rain on the half-frozen sail. The sea was very lonely, barren, empty of all life.

Towards the middle of the day, when Iceland lay far behind them,—a bar of black on the ocean's edge,—they were little by little aware of the roll and thunder of breakers, and the cries and calls of very many sea birds and—very faint—the bleating of sheep. The fog and the scud of rain and the spindrift that the wind whipped from off the wavetops shut out all sight beyond the cast of a spear. But they knew that they must be driving hard upon the island, and Grettir, from his place at the helm, bent himself to look under the curve of the sail. He called to Illugi, his brother, and to Noise, the thrall, who stood peering at the bows of the boat (their eyes made small to pierce the mist), to know if they saw aught of the island.

"I see," answered Illugi, "only wrack and drift of wreck and streamers of kelp, but we are close upon it."

Then all at once Grettir threw the boat up into the wind, and shouted aloud:

"Look overhead! Quick! Above there! We are indeed close."

And for all that the foot and mid-most part of the island were unseen because of the mist, there, far above them, between sea and sky, looming, as it were, out of heaven, rose suddenly the front of the cliff, rearing the forehead of it, high from out all that din of surf and swirl of mist and rain, bare to the buffet of storms, iron-strong, everlasting, a mighty rock.

They lowered the sail and ran out the sweeps, and for an hour skirted the edge of the island searching for the landing-place, where the rope-ladder hung from the cliff's edge. When they had found it, they turned the nose of the boat landward, and, caught by the set of the surf, were drawn inwards, and at last flung up on the beaches. Waist-deep in the icy undertow, they ran the boat up and made her fast, rejoicing that they had won to land without ill-fortune.

The wind for an instant tore in twain the veils of fog, and they saw the black cliff towering above them, as well as the ladder that hung from its summit clattering against the rock as the wind dashed it to and fro, and as they turned from the boat to look about them, lo, at their feet, stranded at make of the ebb, a great walrus, crushed between two ice-floes, lay dead, the rime of the frost encrusting its barbels.

So Grettir Asmundson, called The Strong, outlawed throughout Iceland, came with his brother Illugi, and the thrall Noise, to live on the Island of Drangey.

II

HOW GRETTIR AND ILLUGI HIS BROTHER KEPT THE ISLAND

On top of the cliff (to be reached only by climbing the rope-ladder) were sheep-walks, where the shepherds from the mainland kept their flocks. Grettir and Illugi took over these, for food and for the sake of their pelts which were to make them coverings. They built themselves a house out of the driftwood that came ashore at the foot of the cliff with every tide, and throughout the rest of the winter days lived in peace.

But in the early spring a fisherman carried the news to the mainland that he had seen men on the top of Drangey, and that the ladder was up.

Forthwith came the farmers and shepherds in their boats to know if such were the truth. They found, indeed, the ladder up, and after calling and shouting a long time time, brought the hero and his brother to the cliff's edge.

"What now?" they cried. "Give a reckoning of our sheep. Is it peace or war between you and us? Why have you come to our island? Answer, Grettir—outlaw."

"What I have, I hold," called Grettir. "Outlawed I am, indeed, and no man is there in all Iceland that dare help me to home or hiding. Mine is the Island of Drangey, and mine are the sheep and the goats."

"Robber!" shouted the shepherds, "since when have you bought the island? Show the title."

For answer Grettir drew his sword from its sheath, and held it high.

"That is my title," he cried. "When that you shall take from me, the Island of Drangey is yours again."

"At least render up our sheep," answered the shepherds.

"What I have said, I have said!" cried Grettir, and with that he and Illugi drew back from the cliff's edge and were no more seen.

The shepherds sailed back to the mainland, and could think of no way of ridding the island of Grettir and his brother.

The summer waned, and finding themselves no further along than at the beginning, they struck hands with a certain Thorbjorn, called The Hook, and sold him their several claims.

So it came about that Thorbjorn the Hook was also an enemy of Grettir, for he swore that foul or fair, ill or well, he would have the head of the hero, and the price that was upon it, as well as the sheepwalks and herds of Drangey.

This Thorbjorn had an old foster-mother named Thurid, who, although the law of Christ had long since prevailed through all the country, still made witchcraft, and by this means promised The Hook that he should have the island, and with it the heads of Illugi and Grettir. She herself was a mumbling, fumbling carline of a sour spirit and fierce temper. Once when The Hook and his brother were at tail-game, she, looking over his shoulder, taunted him because he had made a bad move. On his answering in surly fashion, she caught up one of the pieces, and drove the tail of it so fiercely against his eye that the ball had started from the socket. He had sprung up with a mighty oath, and dealt her so strong a blow that she had taken to her bed a month, and thereafterward must walk with a stick. There was no love lost between the two.

Meanwhile, Grettir and Illugi lived in peace upon the top of Drangey. Illugi was younger than the hero; a fine lad with yellow hair and blue eyes. The brothers loved each other, and could not walk or sit together, but that the arm of one was about the shoulder of the other. The lad knew very well that neither he nor Grettir would ever leave Drangey alive; but in spite of that he abode on the island, and was happy in the love and comradeship of his older brother. As for Grettir, hunted and hustled from Norway to Skaptar Jokul, he could trust Illugi only. The thrall Noise was meet for little but to gather driftwood to feed the fire. But Illugi, of all men in the world, Grettir had chosen to stay at his side in this, the last stand of his life, and to bear him company in the night when he waked and was afraid.

For the weird that the Vampire had laid upon Grettir, when he had fought with him through the night at Thorhall-stead, lay heavy upon him. As the Vampire had said, his strength was never greater than at the moment when, spent and weary with the grapple, he had turned the monster under him; and, moreover, as the dead man had foretold, the eyes of him—the sightless, lightless dead eyes of him—grew out of the darkness in the late watches of the night, and stared at Grettir whichever way he turned.

For a long time all went well with the two. Bleak though it was, the brothers grew to love the Island of Drangey. Not all the days were so bitter as the one that witnessed their arrival. Throughout the summer—when the daylight lengthened and lengthened, till at last the sun never set at all—the weather held fair. The crust of soil on the top of the great rock grew green and brilliant with gorse and moss and manzel-wursel. Blackberries flourished on southern exposures and in crevices between the bowlders, and wild thyme and heather bloomed and billowed in the sea wind.

Day after day the brothers walked the edge of the cliff, making the rounds of the snares they had set for sea fowl. Day after day, descending to the beaches, they fished in the offing or with ready spears crept from rock to rock, stalking the great bull-walruses that made the land to sun themselves. Day after day in a cloudless sky the sun shone; day after day the sea, deep blue, coruscated and flashed in his light; day after day the wind blew free, the flowers spread, and the surf shouted hoarsely on the beaches, and the sea fowl clamoured, cried, and rose and fell in glinting hordes. The air was full of the fine, clean aroma of the ocean, even the perfume of the flowers was crossed with a tang of salt, and the seaweed at low tide threw off, under the heat of the sun, a warm, sweet redolence of its own.

It was a brave life. They were no man's men. The lonely, rock-ribbed island, the grass, the growths of green, the blue sea, and the blessed sunlight were their friends, their helpers; they held what of the world they saw in fief. They made songs to the morning, and sang them on the cliff's edge, looking off over the sea beneath, standing on a point of rock, the wind in their faces, the taste of salt in their mouths, their long braids of yellow hair streaming from their foreheads.

They made songs to their swords, and swung the ponderous blades in cadence as they sang—wild, unrhymed, metrical chants, monotonous, turning upon but few notes; savage songs, full of man-slayings and death-fights against great odds, shouted out in deep-toned, male voices, there, far above the world, on that airy, wind-swept, lonely rock. A brave life!

The end they knew must come betimes. They were in nowise afraid. They made a song to their death—the song they would sing when they had turned Berserk in the crash of swords, when the great grey blades were rising and falling, death, like lightning, leaping from their edges; when shield rasped shield, and the spears sank home and wrenched out the life in a spurt of scarlet, and the massive axes rang upon helmet and hauberk, and men, heroes all, met death with a cheer, and went out into the Dark with a shout. A brave life!

III

OF THE WEIRD OF THURID, FOSTER-MOTHER TO THORBJORN HOOK

Twice during that summer The Hook made attempts to secure the island. Once he sailed over to Drangey, and standing up in the prow of his boat near the beach, close by where the ladder hung, talked long with Grettir, who came to the rim of the cliff in answer to his shouts. He promised the Outlaw (so only that he would yield up the island) full possession of half the sheep that yet remained and a free passage in one of his ships to any port within fifty leagues. But the hero had but one answer to all persuadings.

"Drangey is mine," he said. "There is no rede whereby you can get me hence. Here do I bide, whatso may come to hand, to the day of my death and my undoing," and The Hook must sail home in evil mind, gnawing his nails in his fury, and vowing that he would yet gain the island and lay Grettir to earth, and get the best out of the bad bargain he had made.

Another time The Hook hired a man named Hœring, a great climber, to try, by night, to scale the hinder side of Drangey where the cliff was not so bold. But halfway up the man lost either his wits or his footing, for he fell dreadfully upon the rocks far below, and brake the neck of him, so that the spine drave through the skin.

And after that, certainly Grettir and Illugi were let alone. The fame of them and of their seizure of Drangey and the blood feud between them and Thorbjorn, called The Hook, went wide through all that part of Iceland, and many the man that put off from the mainland and sailed to the island, just to hail the Outlaw, at the head of the ladder, and wish him well. Thus the summer and the next winter passed.

At about the break-up of the winter night, The Hook began to importune his foster-mother, Thurid, that she should make good her promise as to the winning of Grettir. At last she said: "If you are to have my rede, I must have my will. Strike hands with my hand then, and swear to me to do those things that I shall say." And The Hook struck hands and sware the oath.

Then, though he was loath to visit the island again, she bade him man an eight-oared boat and flit her out to Drangey.

When they had reached the island, and after much shouting had brought Grettir and Illugi to the edge of the rock, Thorbjorn again renewed his offer, saying further that if there were now but few sheep left upon the island, he would add a bag of silver pennies to make the difference good.

"Bootless be your quest," answered Grettir. "Wot this well. What I have said, I have said. My bones shall rot upon Drangey ere I set foot on other soil."

But at his words the carline, who till now had sat huddled in rags and warps in the bow of the boat, stirred herself and screamed out:

"An ill word for a fair offer. The wits are out of these men that they may not know the face of their good fortune, and upon an evil time have they put their weal from them. Now this I cast over thee, Grettir; that thou be left of all health and good-hap, all good heed and wisdom, and that the longer ye live the less shall be thy luck. Good hope have I, Grettir, that thy days of gladness shall be fewer in time to come than in time gone by."

And at the words behold, Grettir the Strong, whose might no two men could master, staggered as though struck, and then a rage came upon him, and plucking up a stone from the earth, he flung it at the heap of rags in the boat, so that it fell upon the hag's leg and brake it.

"An evil deed, brother," said Illugi. "Surely no good will come of that."

"Nor none from the words of that hell-cat yonder," answered Grettir. "Not over-much were-gild were paid for us, though the price should be one carline's life."

The Hook sailed back to the mainland after this, and sat at home while the leg of his foster-mother mended. But when she was able to walk again, she bade him lead her forth upon the shore. For a time she hobbled up and down till she had found a piece of driftwood to her liking. She turned over, now upon this side, now upon that, mumbling to herself the while, till The Hook, puzzled, said:

"What work ye there, foster-mother?"

"The bane of Grettir," answered the witch, and with that she crouched herself down by the log and cut runes upon it. Then she stood upright and walked backwards about the log, and went widdershins around it, and then, after carving more runes, bade Thorbjorn cast it into the sea.

The Hook scoffed and jeered, but, mindful of his oath, set the log adrift. Now the flood tide made strongly at the time, and the wind set from off the ocean.

"It will come to shore," he said.

"Ay, that I hope," said the witch; "to the shore of Drangey."

On the beaches, where the torn scum and froth of the waves shuddered and tumbled to and fro in the wind, The Hook and the old witch stood watching. Thrice the surf flung the log landward, thrice the undertow sucked it back. It was carried under the curve of a great hissing comber, disappeared, then rose dripping on the far side. The hag, bent upon her crutch, her toothless jaws fumbling and working, her gray hair streaming in the wind, fixed a glittering eye, malevolent, iniquitous, far out to sea where Drangey showed itself, a block of misty blue over the horizon's edge.

"A strong spell for a strong man," she muttered, "and an ill curse for an evil deed. Blighted be the breasts that sucked ye, and black and bitter the bread ye cat. Look thou now, foster-son," she cried, raising her voice.

The Hook crossed himself, and his head crouched fearfully between his shoulders. Under his bent brows the glance of him shot uneasily from side to side.

"A bad business," he whispered, and he trembled as he spoke. For the log was riding the waves like a skiff, headed seawards, making way against tide and wind, veering now east, now west, but in the main working steadily toward Drangey. "A bad business, and peril of thy life is toward if the deed thou hast done this day be told of at Thingvalla."

IV

THE NIGHT-FLITTING OF THORBJORN HOOK

By candle-lighting time that day the storm had reached such a pitch and so mighty was the fury and noise raging across the top of Drangey, that Grettir and Illugi must needs put their lips to one another's ears when they spoke. There was no rain as yet, and the wind that held straight as an arrow's flight over the ocean, had blown away all mists and clouds, so that the atmosphere was of an ominous clearness, and the coasts of Iceland showed livid white against the purple black of the sky.

There were strange sounds about: the prolonged alarums of the gale; blast trumpeting to blast all through the hollow upper spaces of the air; the metallic slithering of the frozen grasses, writhing and tormented; the minute whistle of driving sand; the majestic diapason of the breakers, and the wild piping of bewildered sea-mews and black swans, as, helpless in the sudden gusts, they drove past, close overhead with slanted wings stretched tense and taut.

Towards evening Grettir and Illugi regained the hut, their bodies bent and inclined against the wind. They bore between them the carcass of a slaughtered sheep, the last on the island, for by now they had killed and eaten all of the herd, with the exception of one old ram, whom they had spared because of his tameness. This one followed the brothers about like a dog, and each night came to the door of the hut and butted against it till he was allowed to come in.

Earlier in the day Grettir, foreseeing that the weather would be hard, had sent Noise, the servant, to gather in a greater supply of drift. The thrall now met the brothers at the door of the hut, staggering under the weight of a great log. He threw his burden down at Grettir's feet and spoke surlily, for he was but little pleased with his lot:

"There be that which I hold will warm you enough. Hew it now yourself, for I am spent with the toil of getting it in on such a night as this."

But as Grettir heaved up the axe, Illugi sprang forward with a hand outstretched and a warning cry. He had glanced at the balk of drift, and had seen it to be one that Grettir had twice discarded, suspicious of the runes that he saw were cut into it. Even Noise had been warned and forbidden to bring it to the hut. Doubtless on this day the thrall had found it close by the foot of the ladder, and being too slothful and too ill-tempered to seek farther, had fetched it in despite of Grettir's commands.

"Brother," cried Illugi, "have a heed what ye do!"

But he spoke too late. Grettir hewed strong upon the balk, and the axe flipped from it and drave into his leg below the knee, so that the blade hung in the bone. Grettir flung down the axe, and staggered into the hut and sank upon the bed.

"Ill-luck is to us-ward," he cried, "and now wot I well that my death is upon me. For no good thing was this drift-timber sent thrice to us. Noise, evilly hast thou done, and ill hast thou served us. Go now and draw the ladder, and let thy faithful service henceforth make good the ill-turn thou hast done me to-day." And with the words the brothers drove him out into the night.

Grumbling, the thrall made his way to the ladder-head, and sat down cursing.

"A fine life," he muttered, "hounded like a house-carle from dawn to dark. Because the son of Asmund swings awkwardly his axe and notches the skin of him, I must be driven from house and hearthstone on so hard a night as this. Draw the ladder! Ay, draw the ladder, says he. By God! it were no man's deed to risk whether he could win to the island in such a storm as this."

For all that, he made at least one attempt to draw the ladder up. But it was heavy, and the wind, thrashing it to and fro, made it hard to manage. Noise soon gave over, and, out of spite refusing to return to the hut, drew his cloak over his head, and crawling in behind a bowlder addressed himself to sleep. He was awakened by a blow.

He sprang up. The night was overcast; it had been raining; his cloak was drenched. Men were there; dark figures crowding together, whispering. There was a click and clash of steel, and against the pale blur of the sky, he saw, silhouetted, the moving head of a spear. Again some one struck him. He wrenched about terrified, and a score of hands gripped him close, while at his throat sprang the clutch of fingers iron-strong. Then a voice:

"Fool, and son of a fool, and worse than a fool! It is I, Thorbjorn, called The Hook. Speak as he should speak who is nigh to death, true words and few words. What of Grettir?"

"Sore bestead," Noise made shift to answer, through the grip upon his throat. "Crippled with his own axe as he hewed upon a log of firewood but this very day. Down upon his back he is, and none to stand at his side, when the need is on him, but the boy Illugi."

"A log, say you?" whispered The Hook. Then turning to a comrade: "Mark you that, Hialfi Thinbeard."

"A log cut with runes," insisted Noise.

"Ay, with runes," repeated The Hook. "With runes, I say, Hialfi Thinbeard. My mind misgave me when the carline urged this flitting to-night, and only for my oath's sake I would have foregone it. But an old she-goat knows the shortest path to the byre. As for you"—he turned to Noise: "Grettir is mine enemy, and the feud of blood lies between us, but he deserves a better thrall than so foul a bird as thou."

Thereat he gave the word, and his carles set upon Noise and beat him till no breath was left in his body. Then they bound him hand and foot, and dragged him behind a rock, and left him.

Noise watched them as they drew to one side and whispered together. There were at least twenty of them. For a long moment they conferred together in low voices, while the wind shrilled fiercely in the cluster of their spear-blades. Then there was a movement. The group broke up. Silently and with cautious steps the dark figures of the men moved off in the direction of the hut. Twice, as The Hook gave the word, they halted to listen. Then they moved on again. They disappeared. A pebble clicked under foot, a sword struck faintly against a rock.

There was no more sound. The rain urged by the wind held steadily across the top of the Island of Drangey. It wanted about three hours till dawn.