I have often wondered since how I came to put myself into Suleiman’s power without hesitation or suspicion. And even more curious it seems how I learned to know the dangers of my position bit by bit and just in time to save my skin.

After my letter to London, ordering one hundred automatic pistols for him, Suleiman promised me a wonderful entertainment.

“I will show you all Africa can show,” he said, “in beauty.”

Naturally I thanked him, and we were still in talk when a sort of headman, Abdulla, “salaamed” before him, calling “Sultan.”

This Abdulla was a Bajoon, a tribe of mixed negroid and Arab descent, a mixture which gave him intelligence above the average. He was very short and broad, evidently powerful, and though probably not more than thirty always had his head shaved--shaved, as I found out by chance, with a piece of broken bottle-glass. Abdulla was the Sultan’s right hand in all ways, and deserved to be. He was not only intelligent as Europeans estimate intelligence, but a master of slave-craft and bush-craft as well. He came, it appeared, to announce to the Sultan that a herd of elephants had been located on the other side of the _shamba_ (the Swahili word for a native clearing). Abdulla’s excitement was contagious, and when he wound up with _Wananame labuda_, “Males too, I heard!” I saw that Suleiman was keenly interested.

“A troop of elephants, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Suleiman; “males and females in a herd. Do you love shooting, like most Englishmen?”

“No,” I answered. “But I’d love to study a mixed troop on the feed without being seen.”

“Without being seen,” repeated Suleiman disdainfully, “is easy enough: elephants have poor sight; but without being smelt is another thing. Besides, the males seldom feed with the females. Elephants are hard to kill,” he went on significantly, “and a wounded elephant is more dangerous than a buffalo in bush.”

“Our modern rifles kill elephants as easily as deer,” I replied carelessly.

Suleiman flashed his hawk-glance on me, in surprise I thought, and his daughter’s phrase came into my head that her father’s power was “founded on his rifles.”

He was probably even more desirous of getting fine rifles than automatic pistols. But for the moment he said nothing, save that he would have the elephants kept in the same bush till next morning. Abdulla assured him that was easy, for the forest was full of rubber bushes, and the elephants loved the fruit.

That evening I met Rachel as usual between the kraals and went with her for a walk. She spoke of the elephants.

“Of course, if you’ll kill elephants for father he’ll do anything you wish,” was her way of putting it.

“But you said he was rich,” I put in lamely.

“No rich man is ever rich enough,” she remarked shortly, as if announcing a universal truth. Probably because she felt she had been abrupt she added: “Riches give power. But why do you object? It surely isn’t the danger?”

“No, no,” I replied; “the contrary is nearer the truth. Modern weapons and scientific knowledge have made killing wild animals too easy and too safe to be exciting. Besides, I hate taking life----”

She shrugged her pretty shoulders. “Why not do what is safe and easy?” It was evidently useless to argue, so I changed the subject.

About three in the morning Abdulla woke me with the news that there was one big solitary bull elephant as well as the herd of smaller animals. I felt little scruple in killing an old “rogue,” and consequently in about half-an-hour we had entered the bush preceded by Abdulla. Tapp followed me with my ·404 Rigby, while I carried a ·450 Westley-Richards. Suddenly Abdulla stopped and showed us the footprints of the herd; most of them were round and not more than twelve or fourteen inches across, significantly he pointed to an oval spoor fully twenty-one inches in length--“the big bull.”

After feeding, the old solitary had walked fast for a couple of hours, for it was nearly six o’clock before we found warm droppings, and then, moving cautiously, came on the bull lying down and apparently asleep, though one huge ear was mechanically fanning the air to his trunk, so that even in sleep he could get the scent of any intruder.

“Shoot, shoot before he wakes!” whispered Abdulla in great excitement; but I saw that it was easy to get a better view by moving a few yards to the left. Holding my hand up for warning I crawled round and soon got the head quite distinctly. I had never seen such horns; but all my attention was concentrated on the saucer-like depression in the forehead of the great beast just between and a little lower than the eyes. Aiming at the bottom of the depression for fear the rifle should throw high at the short range, I fired. To my astonishment nothing happened; nothing, save that the ear stopped moving. I saw the bullet-hole. Was the beast dead or only stunned? Should I fire again? The next moment Abdulla came to me: “Shoot again, quick!” I shook my head. I wanted the credit for killing the bull with a single shot. “He’s dead,” I said, and the event proved I was right.

Luck was favouring me persistently. I was not a good shot; yet even Selous, who was a fine shot, had bagged many elephants before killing one with a single bullet. And the horns of this one were very large, weighing over one hundred and sixty pounds, and splendidly regular, except that the tip of one had been broken off years before....

I knew about Suleiman to guess that the more he wanted my rifles the less he would say about them; but before noon he came to ask me if I wanted the bull’s horns, and when I said “No,” he announced a great entertainment for that evening. “My daughter says she will be dressed like the Paris ladies,” and he added, smiling through half-closed eyes, “the dancers will not.”

At first Rachel did not appear; but instead a great troop of Swahilis, mimicking an attack on a village and the carrying off of the women. The whole thing was staged with a prodigious realism and excellently acted. Then a dozen Hottentot girls moving to the slow melancholy beat of the tom-toms; they were hideous I thought; short steatopygous figures of the most extravagant proportions. I found that if a girl sat down she could only get up by turning over on her face and rising with the help of her hands.

Then a crowd of natives of various tribes and half-breeds danced with the Arab professionals. It interested me to notice that some of the natives had as fine figures as the Semites and danced as well. In particular, one mulatto not only had an excellent figure but a bright, vivacious face to boot, and danced as lightly as any sylph. I asked her name and found she was called Leah and much liked by Rachel, her mistress.

It was fascinating to watch these hundreds of half-nude girls mimicking before one the vagaries of savage courtship, for all the dances were in essence seductive symbols of love and desire, and Leah, for example, had caught all the tricks of the Arabs and used them with an astonishing artistry.

I called her over to me and could not but admire her. She was tall, with surprisingly regular features; the skin was citron-coloured, but soft and clear, the eyebrows pencilled and the large brown eyes were simply startling. Looking closely I found that their beauty came from the fact that there were golden specks in them radiating light and warmth. Her figure was all grace, though somewhat fuller and rounder in outline than the Arab dancer type. Leah was very quick and intelligent, and caught the meaning of my Swahili in spite of my grotesque blundering. While talking with her, Rachel surprised us.

Leah moved away as Rachel came to the entrance of the kraal. Her dress was of shimmering blue and draped about as low as the European full dress, but tightly swathed about the hips, Indian fashion. It was very becoming and set off her fair skin and shapely figure.

“You’re late,” I said.

“I hate to see those creatures,” she replied, indicating the little fat, crab-like Hottentots; “they seem to me caricatures of humanity. What a pity Leah is coloured, isn’t it? If she weren’t, she’d be quite pretty, don’t you think?”

“She is more than pretty as it is,” I said, “and has a lovely figure to boot. I think she is lovelier than any of the dancers.”

“Really!” rejoined Rachel, a little piqued. “Perhaps you told her so.”

“No,” I rejoined; “I’m sorry, but my Swahili does not go that far.”

Rachel broke in: “Do you like my dress? Is it right at last?”

“Perfectly right,” I replied, “and extremely becoming; you are _en beauté_ this evening.” Smiling, she made me a little curtsy for my praise.

“I’m glad,” she began, after seating herself at my side; “every woman likes to know she’s looking her best.” After a short pause she went on: “You’ve covered yourself with glory again I hear, and the horns are really fine. Won’t you tell me about the hunt?”

“There is nothing to tell,” I answered, “and I’d much rather talk of you.”

“Let us go to my room then,” said Rachel, rising.

And now I must explain what the room was.

Almost midway between our kraals and a few hundred yards down the grassy slope was a clump of trees with little clearing in the middle, and here Rachel had made her pet withdrawing-room--only a roof, leaf-covered and supported on four stout poles. Beneath its shelter a wooden flooring raised six inches above the ground was covered with rugs and cushions. On moonlit nights the place was nearly as light as day, but without the moon it was ghostlike, eerie in dark glooms and silence.

The natives all believed that the grove was spirit-haunted, and not one of them, not even Abdulla or Leah or the Sultan himself, would willingly come near it. With glee Rachel had told me how she had heightened this dread by smearing phosphorus on the posts one afternoon, and then visiting the place at night, accompanied by Abdulla, Leah and some of the dancers. When they caught sight of the posts they all fled shrieking, and afterwards spread such tales of what they had seen that Rachel’s resting-place was free of spying eyes and curious ears for ever. Hither we went that evening almost in silence. The edge of the estrade was in the full light of the moon, and there we seated ourselves.

“I hated to hear you praise Leah’s figure,” Rachel began; “it’s stupid of me to say so, I know, but I just can’t help it. Why do you think her figure the loveliest of all?”

“I don’t,” I rejoined: “I haven’t seen more than half-a-dozen. How could I say hers was the loveliest?”

“Were her shoulders prettier than mine?” she went on earnestly.

“No, no,” I replied, after apparently weighing the question; “and your skin,” I added slowly, “is milky white, which gives you the advantage.”

Suddenly she stood up, and in a moment, as with one gesture, unveiled herself to the sandals.

“Is her figure prettier than mine?” she challenged.

“No, no,” I cried, seizing her in my arms, and delighted to find that she was as firm and lithe and shapely as the prettiest of the dancers; but the next moment she had wound herself out of my hands and, with a quick turn, had swathed herself again in the soft Indian silk. She sat down and I drew her to me.

“You shame me,” she said with quivering lips. The next minute she added hotly: “I’m a fool,” shaking off the emotion in proud revolt.

I soon comforted her, however, and my enthusiastic warm praise quickly brought her back to her usual good humour; indeed I think the little fever fit did her good, shook her out of her habitual mutism. She became really affectionate and prodigal of caresses, and for the first and only time showed pretty fancies.

“Do you know why I was so jealous and am now so happy?” she asked with shining eyes. “Because I dreamed of you last night, and the first man a girl dreams of will meet her soul when on its way to the Judgment!”

“Is that a Moslem belief?” I asked in wonder.

“Do you like it?” she countered.

“It’s charming,” I exclaimed, “quite charming; but I never heard it before.”

“The tribe I come from, near Fez,” she went on, “believes, too, that all a man’s good deeds turn into a lovely girl, who meets his spirit to give it courage and hope in the dread hour. The better man he has been, the lovelier the angel. The woman’s lot is different. You find an ideal of beauty, whereas if we have been good, it is the first man to whom we give ourselves, even in desire, who appears to comfort us on the dark way.”

“I thought that in Mohammed’s teaching,” I exclaimed, “no woman entered Paradise----”

“How awful!” she broke in; “you are all wrong, wrong. Ayesha, the Prophet’s wife, is highest among the holy, and Zahra Fatimah, his daughter, sits by his feet in heaven. Think, even after bearing two sons she was called the Virgin. Everyone knows that. Every Moslem believes It.” I was amused by her earnestness and delighted with the pretty imaginings. It was the first touch of poetry I had found in this child of nature, and it really gave my liking for her a fervour of spiritual intensity entirely lacking before. And this deeper feeling made me bold, and I took her on my knees and began kissing her with glowing lips and praising her.

“You are lovely, lovely,” I whispered; “but why didn’t you let me see you longer and imprint your beauty on my heart?”

“Hush,” she said prettily, putting her hand on my mouth, “and tell me why you love beauty so excessively. We women don’t.”

“One of our poets, named Spenser,” I responded, “has given the true reason.” I repeated to her the lines:

“And every spirit, as it is more pure, And hath in it the more of Heavenly Light, Lo! it the fairer body doth procure To habit in----”

“It isn’t true,” she interrupted. “I know a---- If it only was true, what a wonderful world it would be. Oh!”

I had stirred her at length, and she kissed me now as I kissed her; but soon she pouted and restrained me, and in my vexation I quoted another couplet to her, wondering whether she would understand it fully:

“She partly is to blame, who has been tried, He comes too near who comes to be denied.”

But that sort of wisdom is within the ken of every girl, and she just shook her head.

“To put off is not to deny,” she pouted, and I kissed her for the word; but when I sought to detain her, she said simply:

“Lady Moon is going to bed. My father will wonder; and surprise and suspicion are of kin, you know,” she added, “and just now I don’t want to vex him.

“My father’s beginning to think you’re a wizard or magician,” she went on, smiling, “for your shooting surprised everyone. He told me to-day that he liked you; he is willing to have you as a son-in-law.”

She said it quite casually, as if the whole thing were fixed and arranged. I was more than astonished. I had flirted a little, kissed and paid compliments as one does to a pretty girl; but matrimony--straight off--without more ado--I was not prepared for it. I grasped at the first straw of excuse to gain time.

“Marriage,” I cried, “is a costly business, and I’m a poor man--very poor.”

“Father’ll make that all right,” she replied; “he’s rich enough for anything.”

“But I mustn’t take your father’s money,” I replied. “I don’t like being a parasite.”

“What matter who has got it,” she remarked, with a superb indifference, “so long as we can have all we need. Kiss me and don’t talk nonsense.”

I did as I was told, but the curious command in her word and voice stirred me to revolt. I can’t explain why, but I began to look at Rachel critically from that moment.

She was certainly pretty, and the face with its ivory skin, candid blue eyes and rounded chin, had no suspicion of hardness; but the imperiousness in the girl was extraordinary. Perhaps I resented it so strongly because I had always been used to taking the lead myself. Suddenly as she moved the moonlight fell on her chest in ivory radiance and showed up a dozen or so small, curling, black hairs. It was the first time I had ever seen hairs on a girl’s breast. I don’t know why, but at once a suggestion of negroid or Indian intermixture came into my mind and my critical observation became depreciatory.

When she reached the kraal, ten minutes later, Rachel clapped her hands for a servant; she wanted to know where the Sultan was, and when told he would be back soon, she wished to prepare his _chibouque_.

I noticed now that she was short; in ten years she would be stout; she was just an ordinary pretty girl with a domineering character. As she resumed her seat she began to hum Mimi’s song from _La Bohême_: “Mi chiamano, Mimi.”

Involuntarily I shrugged impatient shoulders. Interminable evenings of boredom intensified by badly hummed music came over me in a wave. Rachel had no gift of conversation, knew no literary language, took no interest in the best that was thought or known in the world. Nine hours out of ten she was uninteresting. In the tenth, however, she showed rare qualities.

Ever since the word marriage had been spoken she let herself go and she showed me her real nature. She was curiously passionate and even magnetic; she seemed to know all the ways of love by intuition, and her heat was contagious. At the same time she was reticent in speech to an extraordinary extent and would give no account in words of her feelings or sensations.

“Why talk of it?” she used to say when I questioned her, and with a _mon petit homme_ she would close my lips with a kiss. She was always eager to talk French and to learn French phrases. Paris was her Mecca.

Now, telling love’s secrets is half the joy of intimacy, and her persistent silence at first annoyed and then exasperated me. I think she might have won me had she given up her mutism or even tried to relax her rule and please me now and then by a frank confession. But her imperiousness was the very soul of her. She was not only unwilling to constrain herself in any way, but apparently incapable of understanding any desire but her own, and absolute reticence was natural to her.

She didn’t even recall the past, as lovers are accustomed to do, and retrace the flowered steps by which love came to his dominion. If I told her how I first discovered this, that or the other trait in her she would listen, it is true; but never respond in like manner. She was as dominant as an empress, and through her I realised that small and ill-furnished minds and hearts can be even more despotic than great and rich natures.

Bit by bit I turned against her, and as my affection died out I set myself to master my desire. After all, the body is easier to subdue than the heart. “I am not going to marry Rachel”: that was a definite irrevocable decision, and when I returned to the present I found her still humming the intolerable hackneyed tune, as if to confirm my resolution.

Next morning, when dressing, I asked Tapp how he was getting on with his courtship. “Like a house on fire, sir,” was his frank avowal. “They don’t let the grass grow under their feet, these Arab girls.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Leah says we’ll be married when you marry Rachel,” he explained.

“Leah is very pretty,” I remarked, “and dances wonderfully. Are you in love with her, Tapp?”

“In love,” he repeated. “Every man’s in love with a pretty girl when she makes up to him. Leah is very clever.”

“Do you want to marry her?” I probed.

“Does a man ever want to be tied?” Tapp countered, with a grin.

“Well, if you wait till I’m married,” I concluded, “you’ll wait some time.”

“Miss Rachel means business, sir,” warned Tapp seriously. “She has sent to Mombasa for her wedding dress, veil and orange blossoms.”

“Good God!” I cried, “who put it into her head that a veil and orange blossoms were necessary?”

“Me, sir,” replied Tapp unblushingly. “I thought you might want a little time, so I mentioned the orange blossoms casual like. You ought to take care, sir,” he went on; “that Abdulla is crazy after Miss Rachel, and before you came along he had a good chance, Leah tells me.”

The idea of Abdulla as a rival killed my affection. I looked on him as an inferior, as a mere servant. Had there been passages between them? I must find out. “I wonder,” I began, “if Leah would tell you how far the courtship had gone?”

“Sure,” replied Tapp unhesitatingly, “me and her, sir, is that thick she’d deny me nothing. Leah is a good sort,” he added; “and beautifully made, sir, isn’t she? A perfect picture, but I don’t care for ’em so dark myself.”

“Find out what you can, Tapp,” I concluded, “and let me know if we can get away without trouble. I don’t mean marrying, that’s certain.”

“There’ll be bad trouble,” said Tapp, “when Miss Rachel finds that out; but we needn’t cross the stream till we come to it. When will the automatics reach Mombasa, sir?”

“How did you know about the pistols?” I asked.

“The Sultan tells everything to Abdulla and Rachel, and she and Leah are like sisters; they’re always talking. She asks Leah whatever she wants to know; Leah is a sort of help to her. Suleiman meant having all our pistols when he brought us up here, only you promised him more, and now he’s half frightened of your rifles; they all think there’s magic in ’em. They’re a honeducated lot.”

“Well, keep your eyes and ears open,” I counselled, “and let me know if anything important happens. I’m not afraid of Suleiman, but we don’t want to fight if we can get away peaceably.”

“We could get away all right,” rejoined Tapp, “and with our guard too, by all going on some hunting expedition; but how to get the carriers and baggage and rifles out of the Sultan’s clutches will be a job, especially if Miss Rachel is against us.”

“Do your best with Abdulla,” I replied. “I might arrange with the Sultan to go to the coast for his guns with Abdulla and bring back my marriage licence.”

“That might work,” cried Tapp. “Abdulla will help, I’m sure. Leah says he would have tried to kill you long ago, only he fears your magic. No one ever killed an elephant before with a single shot; that’s frightened them all. Even the girls put out a finger when you come near, Leah tells me--afraid of your devil.

“But are you sure, sir, you don’t want Rachel? She’s very pretty.”

“Prettiness alone soon loses its appeal,” was my reply.

“That’s it, sir,” cried Tapp; “these girls are all right for a week or a month, but I likes ’em more refined if I have to live with ’em.” He had said it in his way.

From this time on I began to think what pretext I could devise to get away. I was not anxious, for, after all, European wits, I knew, are better than African.

A little later Suleiman drew me aside to consult when the marriage should take place; the dresses could be delivered in a month. Would some date a couple of months ahead suit me?

“The truth is,” I replied, “I haven’t money enough to keep myself, let alone a wife.”

“Leave that to me,” said the Sultan. “Rachel will not go to her husband empty handed.”

I felt I was on the wrong track. “Besides,” I added, “I shall have to go to Mombasa too.”

“Why?” he interrupted.

“To get a licence,” I rejoined lamely; and then, as I saw I had made no impression, a brilliant idea occurred to me. “A consular officer, you know, must be present as a witness, or there is no marriage in England or France or any civilised country. I must get a consular officer as ‘witness,’ and a licence, or Rachel would not be accepted anywhere as my wife. Why, I haven’t even a Prayer Book,” I cried, as if shocked.

His eyes narrowed and the wrinkles all showed; but the suspicion or apprehension of the unexpected was only lulled, not stilled. I set my wits to work, and then remarked casually but seriously: “I think, too, you should have at least a dozen modern rifles. I had no idea how bad your guns are, or I’d have ordered for you rifles like mine instead of automatic pistols. Abdulla says you never kill buffalo, let alone elephant, with a single shot, and you’ve seen that I always do. It’s the rifle does it. With a dozen rifles like mine in the hands of men like Abdulla and yourself you would be invincible for the next twenty-five years.”

I had won. I saw it in his eyes and manner. “If you’ll do that,” he exclaimed, “I’ll do more for you even than I promised Rachel. I’ll send a slave-gang, not of five hundred, but of one thousand, with you to the coast, and sixty thousand pounds of ivory is a fortune, you know,” he remarked regretfully, not a thought in his head of the poor human beasts of burden carrying each sixty pounds of ivory, besides yoke and food and scanty belongings, through that awful tropical candescence. His inhumanity confirmed me in my purpose. Bad men make us worse, just as good ones make us better.

I had won if Rachel could be fooled as easily.

Of course I saw Tapp and talked it over with him.

“Beat it into Leah’s head that a consular officer as ‘best man’ is necessary,” I said, and made him repeat the phrase “best man” over and over again.

“Abdulla is keen to get you away from Rachel,” Tapp responded. “He let out to Leah the other night that she hasn’t kissed him once since you came, and that he was really resolved to murder you when Leah put it into his head to get you away instead. We’ll have no difficulty with him, sir.”

“Did he really say Rachel used to kiss him?” I asked, jealousy stabbing me with the memory of her wonderful kisses.

“Sure,” replied Tapp unhesitatingly. “Leah says they were as loving as we are, and if that’s true, Miss Rachel didn’t deny him much.”

“That’s how she learned the magic of her caressing,” I said to myself. “She practised with Abdulla--perhaps that’s the reason, too, of her mutism,” I went on infuriating myself. “He couldn’t have been very articulate.”

Jealousy is the only passion that feeds on itself and grows rank on its own maleficence. As soon as I became calmer I recognised that Rachel’s silence was more wilful than any man’s could be, and more obstinate; it was native in her, invincible.

That evening, or a little later, I was with Rachel again. She sought now naturally to be alone with me on all occasions, and so we went straight to her “room.” Usually she turned to me with burning lips, but the evening after I had made my proposal she was astonishingly cool. She wished to understand the whole position, and I let her talk and draw me out, knowing that the conclusions thus reached would be more effective than anything I could say. It is well to let small secretive natures persuade themselves in their own way; then they are immovable in their mistakes.

She probed skilfully, and I answered as if I were reluctant to go, reluctant to leave her. “I want to kiss you,” I broke off, but when I kissed her I found her totally unresponsive; she evidently was intent on making sure first that it was necessary for me to go, and then that I was sure to return.

“Is a licence and ‘best man’ necessary?” she asked.

“Who told you of a ‘best man’?” I questioned, with feigned surprise.

“Never you mind,” she replied. “I know a great deal more than you think,” she added; and I immediately thought of her relations with Abdulla.

“Very likely you do,” I retorted bitterly, and my unfeigned feeling convinced her better than any acting.

“But is a ‘best man’ necessary,” she persisted, “to a European wedding?”

“In every marriage,” I replied, “a licence is needed, and in any marriage outside England a consular officer as witness; but I think I could get an officer who would also act as ‘best man.’”

“Would that be legal?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” I remarked; “but what does the marriage matter if we love each other?”

“Love’s all right,” she said, “but marriage gives security, and that’s what a woman wants above everything.

“You’ll see,” she whispered, “how I’ll love you when you’re my husband,” and she wound her arms around my neck and put her lips on mine. In one moment they were hot, and she began then to ruffle my hair with quick, impatient hands, small symbols of her keen desire. As in turn I took and kissed her she sighed and relaxed, yielding to my embrace. However self-interested and tyrannic she might be, she was certainly a wonderful lover.

I now pretended that I did not want to go to the coast. “I’m in no haste,” I said to Rachel. “I’d be content to stay always just as we are. What do you care for a dress? And what’s a ‘best man’ to me?”

She appeared to agree with me, though now and then she would say that the sooner an unpleasant thing was finished and done with the better; but I noticed that the Sultan and Abdulla steadily hastened our departure, and Tapp informed me from Leah that Rachel was secretly helping the whole movement.

Meanwhile she showed me more unreservedly the passionate side of her nature, evidently trusting altogether to the sex attraction to pull me back to her at the earliest possible moment.

I sometimes wondered if she had any further or higher conception of love; and now, looking back, I question it. No doubt a certain motherliness would have come into her love if ever she had children, but as a girl she was singularly free of it--a lover and nothing more.

The æsthetic sense in her was fairly developed. She knew a lovely woman’s figure from a common type; knew that Leah’s shapely slim form was more beautiful than Micah’s, and that Micah in turn was finer than the negroid type. The conventional appealed to her strongly. As soon as I spoke about the black hairs on her chest, they disappeared. She tweaked them out ruthlessly, though she made her chest sore by her roughness. I was astonished to see how angry and inflamed the place became, but I treated it with wet pad of boracic acid, and it healed up in a day. “He just put his hands on her breast and a little water on a rag, and next morning it was well: great magic, his,” Leah told Tapp, and that report brought me hosts of patients. But that’s another story. For music Rachel had a distinct gift, but there her talents ended. Love to her was a matter of sex, and spiritual companionship had little or nothing to do with the matter.

It was Rachel who taught me to see the ordinary girl without glamour or romance. As soon as I drew away from her I began to study her, and with study came understanding. I could soon read her like an open book, and her ignorance would have aroused my pity were it not for her hard obstinacy of temper. In spite of her passionate kisses we drifted steadily apart, till I could see her and her father in fair perspective as Semites and Mohammedans. Their self-centred imperiousness threw light for me on that religion of Mohammed that captivated, as by a sirocco or cyclone, the whole Semitic race and still sways more than two hundred millions of people. There is little of gentleness or meekness or broad humanity in that creed, with its paradise of lovely houris and sensual delights. Man’s duty to his brother man is summed up in kindness to one’s dependents if they are of the true faith. It is the religion of rank individualism and unrestrained sensuality.

But there is just a touch of higher things in Mohammed el Amin, or The Honest, as he was called--an æsthetic sense at least. In the Koran I find this great injunction: “If you have two loaves, sell one quickly and buy a flower, for the soul, too, must be fed.” This love of beauty was typified to me in Rachel’s pretty fancies and in her love of music. She represented to me the very soul of Mohammed at its best.

At length the great moment came. The slave-caravan under Abdulla would be ready next morning, the Sultan said, and my carriers had been warned to be prepared.

The caravan taught me all the horrors of the African slave-trade: over a thousand men and women, yoked by pairs and loaded down with sixty or eighty pounds of ivory each. The younger girls and boys had been reserved; only the older folk were used as carriers to the coast; but many of the women were not more than twenty or twenty-five, and I was horrified to find that three out of every four of the men and many of the older women were suffering from recent wounds.

Suleiman had organized two or three slave-raids in order to get his carriers. I was relieved to find that the caravan was to take another road. We should be close to them, Abdulla informed me, but not with them. In the half-hour they were grouped in front of the Sultan’s kraal I saw such brutalities that I was glad to lose sight of them for ever, and to try to forget. I may as well give here one incident that struck me at the time and hardened my heart for the separation and deception.

While I was talking to Abdulla one of the pairs of women came towards us, and I saw that one of these was a mulatto, pretty and young. She stretched out her hands to Abdulla imploringly and fell on her knees, beseeching him. I caught the words “Sultan” and “forgive, sorry, sorry, I love him,” and then a flood of tears and sobs shook her slight, nearly nude frame.

Abdulla glanced at her indifferently:

“Get back,” he ordered harshly.

I was surprised. “Does she want the Sultan to forgive her?” I asked. “Surely he will? Why, the poor girl can’t be more than sixteen.”

“She was a fool,” remarked Abdulla sententiously; “she didn’t want to yield to the Sultan at first, and he never forgives that sort of thing; that’s why she’s in the slave-gang now and is to be sold at Mombasa.”

As the girl looked from one to the other of us, seeing, I suppose, some hope in my pity, Abdulla grabbed her by the left breast, dragged her to her feet and threw her back in the row.

“Get back,” he growled, “and keep quiet or you’ll have a hot back to-night.”

With lips parted in a gasp of pain and staring wild eyes of fear, the poor girl stood drooping, held up by her yoke-mate.

I don’t know why, but the whole scene sickened me. Abdulla’s act was so unconscious in its brutality, the girl’s fear and pain so unaffected, that I turned away and could hardly speak when a minute later the Sultan came out of his kraal to give the final directions. I hated all of them and wanted to get away.

Sultan Suleiman and Rachel in her French frock, accompanied by a guard of honour, went with us through the belt of forest by a way until then unknown to me--a broad road well defended. At the edge of the clearing they halted and we said “Good-bye!” Sultan Suleiman’s eyes shone with a certain kindliness, and Rachel did not hesitate to put her arms about my neck and kiss me again and again.

“In a month I shall be here expecting you, my husband,” she whispered. Not a word of love--“my husband”--strange pride of possession.

Two hundred yards lower down the road wound round a clump of trees and bush, and we waved them “Farewell”--the last “Farewell.”

I never saw either of them again; but all through the trip, which took me to the shores of the Great Lake and afterwards down the Nile to Khartoum, the memory and image of Rachel pursued me. Often I’d awake with her blue eyes looking into mine and hot kisses on my lips.

THE EXTRA EIGHT DAYS

THE EXTRA EIGHT DAYS

Léon Fornageot had lost his place as a notary’s clerk; he had been proud of his position, and really dressed the part. He always wore a frock-coat and a white tie; his short whiskers, too, cut English fashion, gave him, he thought, an air of dignity. But once out of work he fell to pieces very soon.

Madame Fornageot now dressed him and fed him, and did not forget to tell him so even when pouring out the glass of water for him, with which he had now to content himself. She was always reproaching him; in a crowd she did not hesitate to push him. He would turn on her: “Amelie! do not be brutal; I cannot be quicker than I am going; there is someone in front of me.” “Yes,” she would reply angrily, “there’s always someone in front of you.”

The rage of Madame Fornageot, with her spirit of economy, can be imagined when Grabiche, a cousin of her husband, presented himself one evening at seven o’clock and invited himself, if you please, to dinner. They had not met for twenty-five years. Young Grabiche then was fat and joyous, and used to sing songs in a café concert--naughty songs, disgusting songs, according to Madame Fornageot. “A pretty family yours!” she sighed afterwards to her husband.

But now here was a new Grabiche, a Grabiche of fifty-five years of age--fatter than ever, redder than ever, and under his right arm an immense paté and under his left a bottle. “We will have a jolly dinner,” he cried. “Uncle Cyprien gave me your address.”

Madame Fornageot smiled, because she had noticed that although the tweed suit of Grabiche showed marks of wear, still across his immense stomach there was a beautiful gold chain, and on one rather dirty finger a large diamond.

“Do you still sing at la Chaussée Clignancourt?” she asked.

“No!” cried Grabiche. “Oh no! It is the others now who sing for me.”

He explained that he had seen how the directors employed singers and got the chief profits for themselves, so after ten years of economy he bought an establishment of his own, “Le Cri Cri,” and baptized it “The Music-Hall des Rigolos” (those who mean to enjoy themselves). “Now, my children,” he added joyously, “I gather in my thirty thousand francs a year without any trouble.

“The essential is never to have any trouble. My father and mother gave me a salt mouth: I do not drink because I like it, but I drink because I am always thirsty. I live well and save nothing. I am not married and have no children--indeed, Fornageot, you are my only heir, and if I kick the bucket before you I will always leave you enough to drink to my health.... Do not shake that bottle, man, that’s good wine!”

After the dinner he took them to his music-hall: a dreadful clientèle--men without collars and women without any hats. The director put his relatives into a box, and the young fellows in the audience in front of them kept making fun of them, especially of Madame Fornageot, who had put on some little curls.

“They like to amuse themselves,” explained Grabiche. “They will not throw anything at you. I know them nearly all”; and suddenly noticing one of the guttersnipes who was making fun of Madame Fornageot’s head-dress, he cried:

“Look here, Calves-liver, you shut up or I will come and talk to you!”

In the _entr’acte_ he took Léon Fornageot behind the scenes. They came immediately upon half-a-dozen women in every state of undress, three or four playing cards in a corner waiting for their turn.

Grabiche introduced them: “My English dancers: Rosa, Carmen, Bijou and Mélindie. Do not get up, my dears!--only a relation.” Fornageot bowed gravely to Monsieur Ernest, a comic, and Mademoiselle Laura Ponestier, who seemed to be able to walk about on her hands as easily as on her feet. He bowed also to Chung-Li, a Chinese juggler, who had the accent of Montmartre, and to the Kreitzer family, newly imported from Vienna.

Grabiche ordered drinks, and as soon as they came, “This is the life that pleases me,” he cried to Fornageot. “I change the entertainment every eight days, but whenever I find a little girl that I like, instead of sending her away I keep her a week longer--that is a little present I make to myself. She is like the manageress for a whole week, never more. Both my public and myself like change. At the end of a fortnight she must go: they can cry or groan, I pay no attention.

“That is why whenever I change the bill here they ask, ‘Who is going to get a week longer?’”

“Grabiche!” Fornageot cried reproachfully. “Grabiche!” But Grabiche did not even notice the moral reproach.

When they came back they found Madame Fornageot very vexed, troubled too, a little. She kept looking at her husband to see the effect that had been produced upon him. But Léon had his old air of a head clerk who was impenetrable. All he said was: “I was never behind the scenes before; it is all excellently arranged. The lady artistes were playing cards.”...

From this moment on, every Sunday Grabiche paid a visit to Fornageot. He always came provided with food and rich wine. Madame Fornageot was once able to recommend a sentimental song to him, and he always said afterwards she was born for the theatre because the sentimental song had a success.

One Sunday when Grabiche came Fornageot noticed that he was redder even than ordinary, and could not walk straight. Instead of wine, too, he had brought a bottle of old Cognac.

“I am not well,” he said. “I need to be screwed up a peg or two. I am going to watch you folk dine, and I shall just be content with a glass or two of old Cognac in which I dip a crust; that is my remedy for all ailments.”

“It would perhaps be better----” insinuated Léon Fornageot.

But Madame Fornageot cried: “Leave your cousin alone; he knows best what is good for him.”

“You are right,” cried Grabiche. “I am too well, my blood is too strong, that is the terrible part of it; but I’ll pour out a little of this Cognac. I have a sort of vertigo--a noise, too, a rumbling in my ears. I’ll have a glass of this Cognac and I shall be all right.”

The Fornageots noticed that the first three glasses turned him to violet instead of red, but Madame Fornageot helped the soup and they began to eat. Suddenly Grabiche put out his right hand and closed it in the air.

“The bottle is by your side,” cried Madame Fornageot. He tried to reply, but it ended in a sort of groan. His face became blue instead of violet, and he fell forward on the tablecloth.

“He is drunk!” cried Madame Fornageot.

He was dead....

* * * * *

There were long formalities, but at the end of three or four months, thanks to M. Fornageot’s training as a notary’s clerk, the couple came into possession of the Music-Hall des Rigolos and of about five thousand four hundred francs in cash. The music-hall was not easy to sell, but it was evident that with a little care it would bring in twenty or thirty thousand francs a year. It was a fortune for the Fornageots, and they did not hesitate to grasp it.

Madame Fornageot put herself before the cash-desk and engaged a strong man to turn out any riotous spectators, and Fornageot carried on the music-hall.

Monsieur Fornageot’s whiskers became more important than ever. He was always now in a frock-coat and perfectly new white tie. And before long his temptation came. There was a little Italian dancer whom he pinched as she passed him and who smiled so sweetly at him that he made up his mind he would follow the example of Grabiche and give her--an extra week.

But he found it difficult to tell Madame Fornageot, for Madame Fornageot now had put on great airs. She constantly wore her jewellery. He noticed, too, that she rouged her cheeks a little, and that she always put on artificial curls. But the charm of the Italian dancer was invincible. M. Fornageot determined to speak plainly. So the same evening he went to the cash-desk where Madame Fornageot was arranging all the moneys:

“That little lace necklet suits you, my dear,” he said; “I want to propose something----”

But Madame Fornageot interrupted him: “You know the tight-rope dancer, he is very successful; he has made a hit, and as it is the custom here, when the proprietor is content with the performance, I am determined to give him an extra eight days.”

M. Fornageot found nothing to say!

THE GREAT GAME

THE GREAT GAME

When Dick Donovan was about seven he had a novel experience. One of the boys in the street called him an “orphin” and jeered him because he had no father, and when he clambered up all the stairs to the seventh floor and asked his mother what an “orphin” was, she said:

“Your father was a pólisman (may God be good to his sowl!) and was killed fallin’ into a ship’s hould wan slippery marnin’ on the docks.”

Soon after this Dick was packed off to the primary school, but as his playmates were going too that did not make much difference to him. He was naturally quick, and had a good memory.

Bit by bit in the next two or three years his mother’s tears and complainings told him that they were going down in life. She often got very little washing to do, and sometimes she was too ill to do it. Dick had to carry the washing to the various houses and bring home the money, and soon grew an adept at getting small coins on his own account. He knew every cent in a dollar better even than his prayers.

He got through the primary school at about thirteen, and though his mother was ill she insisted that he should go on to the high school, which Dick thought mere waste of time and energy.

A little later when she was coughing worse than usual Bill Butler came to see them. Bill was a big longshoreman, a friend of the boy’s father, and he offered to get Dick a job under Long Dan O’Connor, the head of the longshoremen, to run errands and do light jobs at Pier No. 9.

Mrs. Donovan protested feebly: “The boy must get his schoolin’”; but Butler insisted that he was growing quite a man and “the very spit of his father,” and Dick, seduced by being called a man, begged that the proposal might be accepted, so that he could earn four dollars a week and have done with that beastly old school.

The next day, in charge of Bill Butler, he went down to the docks and began what he always regarded as his adult life. He was just thirteen.

Every day for the next four years Dick worked at the docks--ran errands, did whatever they told him to do--and at the end of that time was proud to bring home his eight dollars a week, that kept the house going.

As Dick’s earnings grew larger Mrs. Donovan’s health improved, and when he reached eight dollars a week she kept her room far better than Mrs. Rubin kept hers.

The Rubins were wops from near Trieste who had just moved into the next room and shared it with another Jewish family. Mrs. Donovan did not like them. She thought it wasn’t “dacint” for two families both with boys and girls growing up to be living in one room with only a chalk line on the floor to divide them.

But Dick thought Maggie Rubin the prettiest girl he had ever seen, with her black eyes and hair and her air of disdainful self-possession.

When Dick got to know them the Rubins were dreadfully poor and seemed likely never to be richer. In the summer Mr. Rubin got a living out of his push-cart with fruits and ice-cream, but in winter his earnings fell away to almost nothing. His wife did her best to keep the house going, but there was something reckless and extravagant about her. Some said she was a gipsy, and it may well have been true, for Dave, her son, was tameless as a hawk, and even as a lad took to gambling and bad company, and Maggie never could resist pleasure, though her mother was always preaching to her the necessity of getting rich.

“Take warning by me,” she used to sigh. “It is just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor one, and oh! the difference afterwards.” Maggie’s school chums all taught the same gospel.

Maggie liked Dick, for she saw that he admired her, and he was tall and had fine grey-blue eyes and worked hard and--she just liked him.

Then came a bitter winter and on top of that the great strike. The longshoremen, led by Bill Butler, would not accept a cut in wages and Dick was out of a job. His mother looked very grave when he told her the news, but determined to make the best of it. For a long dreadful week, Dick was at a loose end, and for the first time in his life a prey to absolute fear. He could earn something; he could get wood enough from the houses that were being torn down and rebuilt and coal enough too from the docks to keep a fire going and the room warm, but he was out one whole day without earning ten cents, and no two people can live on ten cents a day in New York.

Dick’s next discovery was that his mother loved to deny herself, but when he found her eating potatoes for the second meal and giving him the meat he couldn’t stand it.

“I don’t want the mate,” she said when he reproached her, “and me doin’ nothin’.”

“Then I won’t eat it either,” Dick replied, and forced her to take her share.

After this Dick went out determined to get work somehow or other, and the first person he struck was Dave Rubin.

Rubin was full of resources and knew New York like his pocket. After talking a few minutes he told Dick that he could get him a place in Heenan’s saloon on Maple Street where, after a week or so, he would get five dollars a night for boxing and an extra buck slipped to him besides if a gentleman drew blood or knocked him down.

With his mother’s economies pinching his heart Dick jumped at the chance.

“Take me along,” he said; “sure they won’t kill me anyway.” And that night, being Wednesday, Dave kept his word and about eight o’clock presented Dick to Heenan’s partner, Ricker.

“If he can’t box,” said this worthy, “take him to the boys and let him put the gloves on at once. I am afraid he is too young and lathy to be much good.”

Dick found that at Heenan’s there were two large rooms on the ground floor flanking the bar-room: one was kept for serious matches and bouts; it had a twenty-four foot ring roped off all complete; the other was where the boys boxed and talked and drank and smoked like men--up to any devilry.

Dick was inclined to be shy and quiet, but Dave was evidently free of the place in the widest sense of the word. The two boys who had been boxing when they came in broke off for a moment of introductions, but were soon at it again hammer and tongs. Dick’s eyes grew wide in admiration of their skill. He confided as much to Dave, but Dave thrust out contemptuous lips:

“You ought to beat them both at the end of your first week,” he said; “they are only beginners.”

Dick’s eyes widened still further. He thought them both wonderful, though rather small.

Suddenly Ricker broke off the contest: “Go down and bring me a drink,” he said to one lad, “and you, Jones, come here and put on the gloves with this dub.”

In a twinkling, under Dave’s orders, Dick slipped off his coat and vest, drew his belt tighter round his middle and put on the gloves for the first time in his life with Ed Jones, an undersized youth of twenty or so who had already passed out of the feather-weight class.

As soon as he saw that Dick was a complete novice Jones seemed to take pleasure in telling him how to hit and how to guard, and from the first Dick took to the new sport with enthusiasm. True, Jones showed him more than once that he could hit faster and harder than Dick had any idea of, but he had learned his first lesson of life on the docks, and he took the hard blows with the light ones without showing any pain, and at the end of ten minutes or so he began divining the heavier blows, either guarding or getting his head out of the way of them. Ricker’s final “green as grass” only made him resolve to do better. Dave told him it was a rather good sign, for after all Ricker had stood by to see him begin.

As Ricker left the room Dave went with him, and when he came back seemed rather anxious. “I’ll put on the gloves with you,” he said, “and give you a lesson or two.” And then he began to show Dick how to hit quick by throwing his fist, and how to guard and slip blows, and kept on with him for nearly an hour, till Dick was wet with sweat and began to get slow.

“You’re tired,” said Dave suddenly. “You’ll have to begin again to-morrow.”

He confided to Dick on his way home that he had to beg Ricker a little and promise to come himself one night because Ricker said that Dick would need more than a month’s practice to get into the boxing enough to be any good to the house.

Of course Dick was full of his evening and wanted to talk of it, and by chance they met Maggie with a man in the hallway and out it all came.

Maggie was interested, but she told him that he mustn’t get thick ears or have that nice nose of his broken. Dave assured her that Dick showed signs of being very quick. “He has a long reach,” he said. “I shouldn’t be surprised if he does things; he is quicker than he looks.”

Dick glowed with pleasure and went up to tell his mother all about it. But Mrs. Donovan wouldn’t hear of fighting as a profession. “All thim fighters,” she said, “get dhrunk and look fierce. Sure, we can wait a wake or two till ye get honest work.”

But Dick knew better--knew that there was no time to lose; that already the portions of meat at supper had grown small and stringy. So he just resolved to keep his own counsel and do his very best; and, boylike, he lay awake a long time thinking of how he could strike and get his head out of the way, because Dave had rocked him once with an uppercut that hurt.

* * * * *

Now began for Dick a wondertime. By nine o’clock next morning he was at Heenan’s, made his way to the back room and went over to Ed Jones, who happened to be talking with two other boys.

“Feel stiff?” asked Jones.

“No,” replied Dick, “but I had a bit of a headache last night.”

“That will wear off,” said Jones. “Do you want to put them on again?”

“Sure,” said Dick. And in two minutes they were hard at it; and after Jones he took on another boy, and a little later another.

Dick was toughened by hard and constant work, but he soon found that there is no taskmaster so exacting as one’s own desire. He boxed that day till he ached from head to foot, and yet when newcomers came in and wanted a round or two he was always willing to put on the gloves and try to learn something new.

At noon he went out and got a sandwich, and when he came back he was so tired that he fell asleep and slept through all the hubbub till nearly four o’clock. Then he got on the job again and soon found out that it was better to slip blows than ward them off, for by slipping them he had both hands free to hit with.

That very first day Dick began training his head to slip to one side or the other, and soon his head began to guard itself by getting out of the way automatically.

There was no dreaming and wondering for him that night. As soon as his head touched the pillow he fell asleep.

The days passed in a whirl till Sunday, when Dick was so tired that he slept right on till past noon, exhausted nature taking its revenge. He had a little chat about two o’clock with Maggie, who told him that Dave had made five hundred dollars on horses; then he went out for a walk right up to the park and fell asleep on the grass. But on Monday he was at work before nine o’clock and as keen as ever. To his delight he found that he had improved out of all recognition. The rest had enabled him to realise his knowledge.

The first boy he boxed with was a feather-weight called Jack Geary, and he found that he could nearly hold his own, and after the bout was over he got an approving nod and a word of good advice from Ricker.

“Don’t mix it, you boob,” said Ricker, “when he is short and strong. Keep him out. Use the length of your arms.”

It was true, Dick felt, and he put the tip into practice. When Ed Jones boxed with him that afternoon he was astonished at his progress. “You will make some fighter,” he said, “if you keep on. When a man tries to come in remember he’s as likely to come round your left arm as inside it, so always be ready with your right fist.”

That day brought Dick several new lessons and he profited by them. He was soon well liked by most of the fellows in the place because he was always willing to box with any of them, and in fact he did more work in the next week than all of them put together.

One day Mr. Ricker brought a gentleman in and Dick soon discovered that he was twice as quick and could play with him; but after the first round Ricker drew him aside. “You don’t want to hit him,” he said, “you want him to hit you. If he knocks you down he will pay. Tell him he is hitting so hard that it hurts. They love to hear them things.”

Dick went home that night with six dollars, which hugely increased his zeal, though his mother was not satisfied till she had daubed all his face with arnica.

In a month Dick was one of the regular boys, willing to mix it with anyone and not likely to come to much injury, while his pay had risen to be twelve or fifteen dollars a week.

One day Ed Jones asked him if he would go over to Philadelphia with him. There was a house there where they were giving ten and twenty dollars a night, and Ed thought they would have no trouble in coming back with a hundred dollars or even two for a week’s work. “I want the dough,” said Jones; “my girl wants to doll up all the time and that takes coin in New York.”

They went to Philadelphia, but in spite of Ed’s coaching Dick had a very unpleasant experience.

After two or three fairly light bouts he was matched to box Harry Wilkins for two hundred and fifty dollars, a gold watch, and the feather-weight championship of Pennsylvania for boys under eighteen years of age. The promoters had advertised the match very cleverly; the feather-weight championship under eighteen limited the competition to a very small number, and it was told to the boys that the prize was really one hundred dollars, and a gold watch worth one hundred and fifty dollars, which an enterprising firm of watchmakers had supplied for the advertisement.

Dick had never seen his opponent till he entered the ring at Oddfellows’ Hall at nine o’clock that night, but from the thundering applause that greeted Wilkins when he appeared there could be no doubt that he was a popular favorite.

Dick measured his adversary with a glance and thought he might be a tough customer, and Ed at once advised caution: “He’s quick and strong and the old hands all say that he’s full of tricks, so take care.”

At first the lads felt each other out cautiously, but almost at once Dick’s long stabbing left hand seemed to disconcert his opponent, and Dick began to hope for an easy victory. Ever afterwards he laid one proverb to heart: “Easy beginnings often have hard endings.” Very early he noticed that Wilkins was clever in dodging with his head, and in the third round he only just stopped him from getting to close quarters by a half-arm jolt with his right and a lightning step back. Still Dick was very confident from the beginning that he could win, and win easily.

This confidence in prize-fighters is often misjudged by the outside public. The truth is that fighting men are trained so severely that they enter the ring in the very pink of physical condition. They feel so well, so strong and lithesome that they can’t imagine defeat. A boy of one hundred and ten pounds feels that he could fight Samson or Goliath--that no blow could hurt him; it’s only long experience teaches him that his confidence is the mere conceit of perfect health.

The fourth and fifth rounds both went to Dick, though he remarked that his opponent managed to slip or guard all his really heavy blows and the light ones didn’t seem to make much impression on him.

At the sixth round Dick stepped toward mid-ring with the resolve to get home with at least one heavy blow. With this in mind he put more weight than usual into his left leads, and Wilkins shook his head over one as if dazed; at once Dick followed it up with a hot left and right. Both missed by an inch or so and Dick’s own impetus brought him into a clinch.

“Break away there, break away,” warned the referee, stepping forward; but before the two could be separated Wilkins had screwed himself round Dick and given him a half-arm punch in the side and small of the back. In a moment they were parted, but the “kidney punch” had gone home and Dick began to feel sick and weak, as if all the vitality had been suddenly drained out of him.

“Spar with him, keep him away, side-step him,” called Jones in a frenzy of fear, and Dick did his best to follow the advice, but he had all he could do to evade his adversary, and never in his life did he find a round so long. When he got back to his corner Ed was very helpful; he rubbed the sore spot gently, gave Dick a mouthful or two of brandy and assured him that if he could only keep up the defensive for two or three more rounds he might yet win.

Dick did all he knew. Bit by bit the faint, sick feeling vanished and he felt the constant stabbing with his left was again beginning to tell; but for the life of him he couldn’t put vim enough into his work to win the fight. Still his pluck gained him a good many friends who knew nothing of the foul blow, and when the fight was proclaimed a draw, and the purse divided, Dick was glad to take the gold watch as his reward, though its real value was probably less than the one hundred dollars which fell to Wilkins.

That fight taught Dick a painful lesson in the importance of caution and humility.

When he returned to New York after a couple of weeks he had cleared one hundred and twenty-five dollars in cash, and as luck would have it found his mother out shopping, so he knocked at the Rubins’ door.

Maggie was crying and Dick was delighted to caress and make up to her. What was the matter?

“Dave has lost all his money,” she said, and to console her Dick slipped her the extra twenty-five dollars he had made. She threw her arms around his neck of her own accord and gave him a long, long kiss on the mouth that awakened all his senses.

That night a surprise was awaiting him at Heenan’s. For the first time he saw Zu Lenward, the bantam-weight champion, box with three or four of the boys, and was astonished at his footwork. He not only got his head out of the way, but his body as well. Dick had begun to find out that a punch in the wind, as they called the pit of the stomach, was even more unpleasant than a jolt to the jaw. Then, too, when Lenward struck the weight of the blow came from his hip and back as well as from his arm. Dick saw at once that Lenward could beat Jones because of fast footwork, and he got still another lesson.

At about ten o’clock Mr. Ricker brought in a funny little old man, introduced him as Patsy M’Gee, and said he would have to keep order, because it appeared there had been a good deal of drunkenness and free fighting the night before.

At the idea of Patsy keeping order Dick laughed, for in truth he was a comical figure. His head was almost over his left shoulder and the left side of his face was all wrinkled up. Dick made some such remark to Jones about him, but was astonished at his reply.

“A light-weight champion once,” said Ed, “but he was knocked out badly later and got a paralytic stroke; very useful with both hands and a rushin’ infighter, like them Irish usually are.”

In a short time Dick and Patsy became firm friends. Perhaps because the boy was Irish, Patsy was never tired of teaching him and giving him advice.

One day, during a prolonged bout with Jack Geary, who was going to fight for the feather-weight championship, Patsy took Dick in hand: “Keep him out,” he said; “use your long arms. If he comes in stop him or side-step him; but try to keep him out. In two or three rounds he will be shaken; you will have knocked all the pep out of him. Use your natural advantage, boy. You have extraordinarily long arms; use them.”

And after the bout nothing would do but Dick must stretch out his arms to their full length and have them measured. “Sure,” affirmed Patsy, “what did I tell ye? Instead of seventy inches, stretch you have seventy-five inches. Arms two or three inches longer than anyone of your weight in New York.”

After a week of Patsy’s training Dick passed into the championship class. He was already making twenty-five and fifty dollars a week, and his mother began talking about a house at Mamaroneck which she had once seen on a Sunday trip with her husband.

“We could get the whole house and garden,” she said, “for a couple of thousand dollars, and I could keep chickens and a pig and make ye more comfortable. Ye don’t need to be up early to get to Heenan’s by ten or eleven o’clock.”

The truth was the little woman was frightened of Maggie and her influence, and she knew as well as if she had been told that while Dick always gave her twenty dollars a week, the rest of his money went to Maggie, and she wanted to get Dick out of her clutches.

When Patsy M’Gee heard of Mrs. Donovan’s wish he made up a party for the next Sunday and took her and Dick out to Mamaroneck. They had a great day and saw the house; it overlooked the Sound and had two acres of ground around it--a lovely little place. Mrs. Donovan was in ecstasies, but the price put on it they found to be five thousand dollars, and that frightened Mrs. Donovan, though the agent said he would take one thousand dollars down and the rest in three years. And when Dick opened his eyes at the one thousand dollars Patsy told him the great news, that already he had been mentioned for the next good fight and he might make five hundred dollars out of it.

A week later, with Patsy as chief agent, Dick was matched to fight Jack Geary, who had already been mentioned as the most probable American feather-weight to box Cock Robin, as he was called, the English champion who was coming across with a great reputation.

Dick had nearly a month to prepare and in this month Patsy M’Gee showed himself to be a trainer of the first class.

“You must strengthen your back muscles, my boy,” he told Dick, and presented him with a pair of heavy dumbells. “They all use the light ones,” he went on, “but I want ’em heavy for you. You are young and are coming to the end of your growth; you will have lots of extra pep to put into your back muscles now and that is where you want weight.”

Then he taught Dick how to swing Indian clubs, and again he insisted on these being heavy.

Dick took to it all with his usual enthusiasm, and he found that the dumbells and clubs strengthened his back and biceps from day to day; in fact he grew so rapidly in weight that in a week Patsy began to wonder whether he could keep down to the weight, and started him off on a long fast walk each morning to take down any fat.

About a week before the great night Patsy introduced Dick to Sid Harriman, a betting man, whom the boys thought to be a millionaire. Strange to say, Harriman, after looking him over, was pleased with his chance, and when he saw Dick box once or twice he was more pleased still, though Patsy admitted that he was not certain enough to bet much money on him. “You see,” said Patsy, “it takes a cert before they put down the dough.”

A week later Dick had his first real trial. At first it looked as if he must be beaten. In the third round Jack Geary managed to get in and do what he would; Dick could not get rid of him, and Jack punched him in the body again and again till he felt sick.

In his corner Patsy was full of advice. “Side-step him,” he said; “side-step him and keep him out; you can only wear him out. Don’t let him mix it. If he gets in again, clinch.”

And so with varying fortunes the fight went on, round after round. One round went to Dick because he was able to keep his adversary out or side-step him and his long arms did their work; other rounds went to Jack because he managed to fight his way in and used his body blows tellingly.

About the sixteenth round Dick began to feel that Geary was not hitting as hard as at the beginning, and when he came back to his corner he found Patsy of the same opinion.

“Go in and win,” he advised. “Hit him with the left and follow with the right as hard as you can on top of it. One good punch will finish him.”

Patsy told the truth. Dick half feinted, half struck, and followed it up with a heavy right, and Geary went to the floor and took the count.

Dick felt sorry for him, but Patsy whispered: “That’s the house at Mamaroneck. I’m going home with you to tell your mother; it was a great blow entoirely.” And Patsy said it full of admiration, just as if he hadn’t suggested it himself.

To Dick’s astonishment he found that he had won not only five hundred dollars, but one hundred dollars more that Mr. Harriman had left for him.

Patsy talked all the way home. “Cut out the booze and the wimmin,” he said, “and you’ll be the first fighter in America.”

“What was it knocked you out?” asked Dick at last.

“Both,” answered Patsy. “But it was the booze that made me a cripple. Sure, I was half drunk when I went into the ring. I could almost see two fighters agin’ me instead of wan.”

Mrs. Donovan was delighted, and asked Patsy in the nicest way whether he would not come out to stay with Dick and help him always with his advice; and Patsy said that was exactly what he wanted to do if she would take board-money from him.

They resolved at last to buy the house if it could be bought and go out at once with Patsy as a lodger. But the mother noticed that Dick was not keen about this. She noticed, too, that fifty dollars had disappeared next morning and that Maggie had a new dress on and a new hat that must have cost all of ten dollars. “The slut!” she said to herself.

A night or two later she had a real talk with her son.

“I only want your good,” she said; “ye are all I have in the world. I would give ye all the girls in New York if it would do ye any good; but Maggie Rubin is not a good girl, and if ye want me to I can prove it.”

But Dick didn’t want any proof. He kissed his mother and told her she was the best mother in the world and then went out to fight his first soul-battle alone.

That week he was with Maggie more than ever, perhaps because of the new dress and hat. Towards the end of the week, after a round or two with Ed Jones, Patsy took him seriously to task.

“Why is it you are not so fast to-day?” he said. “It isn’t booze with you. Wimmin’s the divil!” he went on; “the bad ones are ruination and the good ones won’t lave a man alone.”

Dick scarcely needed telling. He, too, had felt when sparring with Jones that his blows lacked speed; he sometimes saw the opening almost as soon as his hand took advantage of it, whereas before his hands were always quicker than his eyes.

A little later the crisis came. When he got home he found his mother waiting for him, and she spoke briefly and to the point:

“The girl’s out with a salesman from Macy’s,” she said, “and I heard him say he was going to take her to a roadhouse for the night, and that’s not the first time, I’ll be bound,” she added.

That was the worst night in Dick’s life. To say he was awake all night would be nothing like the truth; he was mad with jealousy and rage, and when it got light his mother knew that he was crying in his bed at the side. She had stretched burlap from the ceiling between the beds so as to give both all possible privacy. Her heart was as sore as Dick’s and she suffered with him.

When Dick got up he went straight to Heenan’s and sought out Patsy. “Let’s go out to Mamaroneck at once,” he said; “to-day if you like.”

But matters could not move as quickly as that.

Before he went he got a note from Maggie, who had somehow or other heard of the intended moving, begging him to see her.

“Dick, you must forgive me,” she said, kissing him. “I love you, you know, dear; but I’ve got to get money to keep the house, Dick. Dave brings in nothing, and my father’s only good to be a Rabbi and say prayers and mother and I must live. Mr. Williams is the head salesman at Macy’s and gets one thousand dollars a month now and a commission. If you had such a place--oh, Dick, it’s too hard, for I love you,” and she hugged him; “but what’s a girl to do. After all one must have money to live. Dick, say you’ll always care for me--won’t you, dearest?”

Dick nodded his head; he could find no words. He was numbed and for the moment felt nothing, and when afterwards the pain began again he found it was lessened by Maggie’s assurance that she loved him best, so strong is vanity even in passion. And Maggie probably believed her protestations of affection, though in the back of her little head she knew that Mr. Williams was “a dandy dancer,” as she phrased it, and took her to dine and dance at swell places Dick had never heard of, though Williams didn’t slip her fifty or one hundred dollars as Dick did, and was not so loving. Still his position was sure, and he had told her he’d be rich one day and already he had twenty-five thousand dollars in good securities laid by, and that seemed to Maggie a fortune.

Take it all in all, Maggie was rather relieved that the Donovans were going to move, for Dick’s propinquity and passion were tempting, and she knew instinctively that Williams wouldn’t forgive an infidelity as easily as Dick did--“dear Dick!”

In concert with Mrs. Donovan, Patsy got Dick two contests at Philadelphia, which took him away for a while, and when he returned to old New York he found his mother and Patsy already settled in Mamaroneck.

* * * * *

With one exceptional happening Dick’s career in the next two years could be told in a phrase. He fought Cock Robin, the best English fighter of his weight, and won after a hard battle of eighteen rounds, mainly because the fight with Geary had taught him how to keep his man at arm’s length and use his height and length of reach. Height helps a man; you can hit down heavier than up, and length of reach, too, Dick found, helped him, as a longer sword used to help a duellist till it was forbidden and the swords were equalised to an eighth of an inch.

Thanks to the open-air runs and the constant exercise with clubs and dumbells, reinforced now with all sorts of stomach exercises under Patsy M’Gee’s superintendence, Dick grew rapidly in sheer muscle weight, and with all the glory of his victory over the English champion about him, was matched to fight Zu Lenward for the bantam championship of the world.

Zu, Dick found, was short for Zulu, because Lenward had coloured blood in him. Anyway, according to Patsy, he was a real opponent and “up to every trick in the game, but a little ould; he must be thirty if he’s a day.”

A week before the fight Sid Harriman drew Dick aside. “What will you make by winning?” he asked.

“The purse is for two thousand dollars,” replied Dick simply.

“You can have ten thousand dollars,” said Harriman, looking him straight in the eyes, “to lose in the eleventh round.”

“How do you mean?” asked Dick.

“Let yourself be knocked out,” answered Harriman. “I will tell Lenward, and the punch you will get on your jaw won’t do you any harm, and you can flop about like a fish on the floor as well as another man I suppose.”

Dick looked at him. Sell the fight? Not he. But he went to Patsy with the news, and to his astonishment Patsy was delighted with the offer: “Ten thou.!” he cried; “that’s goin’ some.”

“But I can’t take it,” said Dick; “I’d be ashamed to sell a fight----”

“You can’t buck against the game,” Patsy admonished. “Nobody can be honest in this life. Suppose you go on bein’ honest and beatin’ everybody, no wan will bet agin’ ye. You won’t get a match, man; they’ll avoid ye like the plague. All the excitement is in the doubt.

“Take the ten thousand dollars for being knocked out or you’ll regret it. It will increase the interest for your next fight, and if you win that there’ll be more dough still in being knocked out the time after. Don’t be a fool. Sure, no wan will bet on you if he does not win by you.

“Take the ten thousand dollars, boy, and put it in your kick. You make glory by winnin’ but the dough by losin’.”

Dick could not stomach this advice. Sid Harriman did not come near him though Patsy was evidently on his side. A day or two afterwards he returned to the charge.

“You’re young, Dick,” he said, “and you scarcely know what a foul is. You’re a clean fighter; but nobody can be honest in this game, Dick, nobody. You are very good, but as good as you or better can be found. Put the money in your jeans, man, and don’t be a boob!

“I know what life is. You have only five years at this game. At the end of that time you’ll either be a rich man or you will be knocked out and poor, perhaps paralytic. Dick, if you were my own son, I’d tell you the same thing. Let me go to Mr. Harriman and accept his offer. I’ll get you two thousand in advance--as much as you’d get by winnin’--and eight thou, after. What better can ye want?”

Dick shook his head. He was obstinate, though honesty to him was only a word. In his cruel doubt he went to his mother for counsel. “You dassen’t act dishonest, Dick,” she cried, “and yer father a polisman; but Patsy,” she added inconsecutively, as Dick thought, “is a good man and a friendly.” Something obstinate in Dick made him stick to his first resolution.

* * * * *

Was it Dick’s fancy when the great day came, or was there really an air of doubt in the room before the fight began?

Zulu was much stronger than he looked. All his weight was behind the shoulders. His legs were very thin and betrayed the coloured blood in him; but he was twenty-six or twenty-seven at least and, like most prize-fighters, he had lived a life of alternate hard training and mad dissipation, so that, as Patsy phrased it, the real “pep” had gone out of him. Still, he was an awkward customer and Patsy preached caution.

“Keep him out; keep him out,” was his advice in every round, and towards the tenth round he began to get insistent. “Keep him out and watch him. Mr. Harriman’s not coming round again is a bad sign, Dick! Watch him and hit like hell. Watch him and do all you know.”

In the eleventh round Dick’s blows and his long reach and height began to tell. Suddenly Zulu feinted and drew Dick’s left. As the Zulu rushed in Dick stepped back and hit hard with the right, but the Zulu ducked it and threw his arms round him.

“Break away! break away!” cried the referee, stepping forward to the fighters. But before Dick could break away the Zulu had struck up against him with his knee, and the whole room swam with lights, floor and people all rocking in his agony. Zulu jumped in like a wild cat, hitting again and again, and when lying on the floor Dick heard the referee counting--seven--eight--nine. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. The next moment Patsy had burst into the ring and carried him out to the dressing-room.

A doctor came and they gave him brandy, which only seemed to intensify the intolerable pain. He was fully conscious now and sick as a dog. He heard the doctor say: “He’s young and there’s nothing burst; he’ll be all right in a week. Was it a blow?”

“Zulu’s knee,” said Patsy, sobbing with rage. “I never warned the boy. I thought he could keep him out.”

Dick never knew how he got to Mamaroneck; in fact he was ill for nearly three weeks and it was a month before he came again to Heenan’s, and as luck would have it the first man he met was Sid Harriman.

“You didn’t want the two thousand or the ten thousand dollars either,” said Harriman, sneering, “but you took the knockout in the eleventh round all the same. It doesn’t pay to be a d--d boob.”

All Dick’s anger at the sneering tone vanished. “I guess you’re right, Mr. Harriman,” he said. “It doesn’t pay to be a boob.” But he registered an oath to himself that the next time he met Zu Lenward he would take it out of him.

But he didn’t know even then how being honest in life weights the dice against you. He found it hard to get a match, and without Patsy it might have been impossible.

He proposed to fight this man or that, but everyone turned him down. At length he asked Patsy for the reason and Patsy gave it to him with a certain reluctance.

“Put yourself in the other man’s place and think,” he said at length; “that’s the way to understand it right.

“Why did Harriman offer you ten thousand dollars to lose that fight? Because he had some big bet on--perhaps for one hundred thousand dollars--that you would lose it, and perhaps another bet at long odds that you’d be knocked out in the eleventh round.

“Now when you refused what had he to do? First, he had to tell Zu Lenward to knock you out in the eleventh round; but he had to pay for that. Zulu said ‘’twas only certain by a foul.’ ‘Then you must foul him,’ said Harriman, and he’d have to pay much more for a foul. Besides in case of a foul the referee must be squared, and that costs a mint of money; then the foul may be seen by the onlookers and cause a scandal, and therefore he bears you malice for making him pay out p’r’haps five times as much as he had reckoned on paying. See!

“Well, thin it’s all over and you’re K.O. And later your name comes up before the promoters and Harriman says: ‘Not that guy; he’s honest or stupid or----’ And so you’re finding it hard to get in the swim agin, but you’ll get in. I know how to do that. Harriman won’t let anger button his pocket; lave it to me.”

The chance came sooner than Dick thought possible. Two or three months later he fought with Walt Thompson and that gave him the right to fight Lenward again for the championship. This time he made no mistake. He had measured his man. In the first two or three rounds he hit him so heavily that the result was not doubtful. A pitiless devil had entered into Dick and he was transformed. He fought as he had never fought--not to win, but to punish--and by the tenth round Lenward was incapable of any tricks. He was beaten to standstill, and in the seventeenth round was knocked clean off his feet and through the ropes. The cool savagery pleased the onlookers, and Dick went out of the ring a fighting man willing now to take his orders and put the dough in his jeans. He realized that being straight led only to ruin.

The next time he fought it was all arranged. Sid Harriman told him that he was to be knocked out in the fourteenth round and in the fourteenth round he gave his opponent an opening and got it on the jaw. He flopped about on the floor like a fish till even Harriman was delighted. “Some actor,” he cried. “By God! I thought for the moment you were knocked out.”

Patsy, too, was delighted, for Dick’s bank account had jumped up five thousand dollars, and there was more excitement about his next appearance than there had ever been before.

The next two years were filled with alternate victories and defeats, and it seemed curious to Dick, but it was the defeats that brought in the money--twenty thousand and fifty thousand dollars at a time--and no risk--even of a foul. The certainties gave the cash.

* * * * *

Gradually the place at Mamaroneck was improved and extended. One year Dick bought ten acres of adjoining land and the next spring built a walled-in bathing place and a little pier for the time he’d be able to afford a steam launch, the desire of his life.

Towards the end of the third year he outgrew the weight, and though for six months or so he could still sweat himself down to it by hard exercise he preferred to give up the championship even while he was too light to enter the light-weight class with any hope of conspicuous success.

Bu he had no difficulty in getting a vaudeville engagement at a thousand a week for boxing with Ed Jones a quarter of an hour each night, and he soon found that the rest and absence of championship contests improved his health and strength in the most astonishing way. Of course he described the improvement to Patsy, and as usual Patsy, who could hardly write and never cared to read, understood the phenomenon and had reasoned it out for himself.

“Sure, it’s plain,” he said, “every athlete has to take a rest before he comes to the trial; even a jumper or runner has to have a day’s rest annyway before he tries to beat the record. That’s why I never let you box for a couple of days before goin’ into the ring. And a tough fight takes it out of a man more than annything else in the world.

“Take the great fight between Sharkey and Jeffries, the greatest fight ever was fought; they both went into the ring perfectly trained, yet Sharkey, who had two ribs broken, lost thirteen pounds in weight in the fifty minutes the fight lasted and Jeffries lost eleven. Think of it! eleven pounds lost in an hour by a man trained fine and hard. A fight’s a dreadful punishin’ test, even if you win.

“A man,” he went on reflectively, “has only a certain amount of reserve vitality; it’s like a balance in the bank; he should never exhaust it or draw it down too low, for it’s that gives him strength. When you increase the size of yer muscles you do it through using some of this nerve-force, and you must rest in order to let it accumulate again. Rest’s a great thing,” Patsy summed up, “and so’s exercise, and you need both to be perfect. This vaudeville stunt for a year or so will be the making of ye, if ye keep away from wimmin an’ booze.”

* * * * *

But the stream of Dick’s life was not fated to run as smoothly as Patsy hoped. Men are the dupes of their desires. Dick had a pronounced success on the stage; he was good-looking and lightly built, without the bunchy biceps and knobs of muscle which most strong men display and most women dislike. He boxed with a certain grace and his footwork in especial was magically swift and catlike. His Celtic sensitive nature made him a natural actor, and from his first appearance he got letters from women and girls who wanted to know him.

Along in the first summer he and Jones were filling a week’s engagement at Newark, N.J., when a rich woman, a Mrs. Faber, invited them to a garden-party, and arranged that they should box for the amusement of her guests. Both men took the invitation as a mere joke; but the grounds were crowded with fashionably dressed young people, and the performance was a huge success. After the boxing Mrs. Faber, struck by Dick’s looks and quiet manners, introduced him to some of her guests, and notably to a Miss Woolcombe, who set Dick’s blood in a turmoil. The first glance from her dark eyes and Dick’s heart seemed to stop; he had to gulp down the fever of emotion, and indeed Kate Woolcombe was pretty enough to have seduced a less impressionable nature. In ten minutes Dick found that she had a very keen sense of humour; a sort of natural gaiety danced in her hazel eyes and lit up her whole face. And her personality was as marked as her beauty. When he spoke of his home at Mamaroneck and the joy he took in the waters of the Sound he was delighted to learn that she lived there too, not a mile away, with her father and mother. “May I call?” Dick risked; but the little lady treated the question quite as a matter of course. “I think my mother will be glad,” she said, “and my young brother will be overjoyed; in fact the eldest, Harold, who is just seventeen, will make a hero of you at once, I’m sure,” and she laughed charmingly.

When they said “Good-bye,” and she gave him her hand, he had to look at it in surprise, it was so tiny.

Dick went back to his hotel walking on air; the vision of the mutinous lips and laughing eyes went with him everywhere; in bed, when he tried to sleep, they were photographed on his brain in colour, lifelike. At first it was the sheer bodily beauty of her that enthralled him, the little round lissom figure, the lovely face; but soon this vision grew less distinct, while the impression of her whole personality seemed to grow deeper.

As soon as Dick got back to New York he called at the Woolcombes, and found they lived in a big colonial house bowered amidst gardens and overlooking a wide reach and the shore of Long Island. Mrs. Woolcombe was kind to him, with a shade of restraint, and the banker father condescending at first, but the two boys, Harold and Fred, soon broke the ice by their enthusiastic interest in “the great game” and hero worship of the champion whose feats they had read about.

Then a new life began for Dick. Miss Kate read a great deal and spoke French fairly and had more than a bowing acquaintance with French literature.

She was learning Spanish, Dick found out, and this pleased him as putting her too with him in the class of learners. His naïve admiration of her wisdom and knowledge made her laugh outright, but at the same time flattered her deliciously, and the acquaintance ripened rapidly, thanks mainly to the two boys.

Dick gave Harold boxing lessons, and soon his sister heard nothing but “Dick does this” and “Patsy says that” till the two households became intimate. Mrs. Donovan was unaffectedly proud when Mrs. Woolcombe came to see her, but had the natural tact and good manners of the Celtic race, and the better-taught woman recognised at once her native good sense and amiability.

The year before Dick had realised his dream and had bought a high-powered launch, and Fred soon learned to drive it as well as the owner, and so the four made continual excursions. It was a book and a moonlit night that finally brought Dick and Kate together.

They had gone for a long trip in the launch, had taken food with them and were returning rather late. Kate had lent Dick _Slippy McGee_, and Dick wanted to know whether the heroine had realised that Slippy was in love with her first. Did she hold aloof from him because he had been a burglar? “No,” Kate thought, “that had nothing to do with it.”

“You know,” said Dick simply, “that’s why I’m afraid to tell you how I love you, for fear you’d think a prize-fighter too common to care for.”

She sat there beside him in silence, as if thinking, and he went on with love’s instinctive cunning: “It’s for all my life. Oh, Kate, I’d be content to wait on you hand and foot and serve you all my days if you’d just let me,” and he stole his arm round her waist. “I know I’m not good enough for you; I knew that when you just said ‘Good-bye’ to me at Mrs. Faber’s and gave me your little hand. Sure, look how small it is beside mine,” he continued, taking it in his own brown paw; then lifting it he kissed it again and again and looked up. Kate’s face was very earnest and her eyes flooded with emotion. “I love you, darling,” he went on, and somehow their lips met.

Dick never forgot that kiss. It was more than a kiss; it was a consecration. “I’m not good enough,” he went on. “I wish I were better. I’ll try,” he ended simply.

“We’ll both try,” the girl said. “You mustn’t run yourself down.... You’re good enough for me, Dick,” she added, “for I love you.”

They sat hand in hand in a sacred silence and next day agreed to say nothing about their love for a little while, as if such a secret could be kept.

But the course of passionate love never yet ran smooth; smoothness is not in the nature of a torrent, and Kate’s awakening came very soon.

The rest and the long trips in the motor-launch had made Dick put on flesh, and one day Patsy weighed him and was horrified to find that he was beyond the light-weight limit. He measured him too, and found that he had grown nearly an inch and was now five feet ten and a half inches, with an arm-stretch of nearly seventy-six inches. At once he set Dick to work: long walks and runs every morning; potatoes and bread and all sweets were cut out of the diet, and instead of a lounging day steady exercise increasing in severity, especially exercise on the mat.

“You are strong enough for annything,” said Patsy, “but now I want to get thim belly muscles as hard as iron--strong enough to protect that plexus of yours. Sure you put your big shoulder in front of yur chin fine; nobody will get you on the chin; but you are inclined to lave yourself open about the body, and a punch on the spleen would make you go groggy.”

Dick realised the truth of this, and as usual went in for the new exercises with enthusiasm, Patsy assuring him that the stomach muscles were the strongest in the body and that he could make them like a wall of steel if he chose.

In three months, when Dick had brought himself down to the requisite weight, Patsy went into Heenan’s every day and soon made up a fight between him and the light-weight champion, Benny Rossiter.

Benny was the best man that Dick so far had ever met. A New England boy, brought up on a farm, he had gone to Princeton and there fallen in love with the game, perhaps because of his extraordinary excellence in it. Almost as soon as he began to box he seemed to know everything by instinct. Patsy and Dick went one afternoon to see him box, and Dick was impressed by his speed and strength. He was very dark; some said his mother was a Jewess. While only five feet seven or eight in height he was more strongly built than Dick, and carried, they said, a terrible punch in his right hand. But what Dick especially admired about him was the natural way he ducked and slipped, even in practice boxing; it was uncanny the way he could get down and avoid blows.

“That man is better than me,” said Dick, as they went away.

“Better’n nothin’,” replied Patsy; “he’s naturally quick and he has learned the game like them amatoors, but you have learned it bit by bit and paid for your knowledge again and again. I tell you he will live with you only about ten rounds, perhaps twelve, and then he’ll go to pieces.”

The announcement of the fight made a great sensation. There was nothing much doing in 1919 and the papers seized on the two men as representative Americans; would-be literary men wrote them up incessantly, and the reporters told everything about their daily lives and practice that they could get hold of.

Benny, the college boy, was of course the favourite in better circles, so Dick was not surprised when Harriman came round to watch him exercising one day and afterwards said to him:

“This thing must be staged in Madison Square Garden, and there ought to be a big wad in it. If I give you ten per cent. of what I make clear will that suit you?”

Dick looked at Patsy. “Sure,” said Patsy; “sure, Mr. Harriman. Dick will fight according to instructions.”

A day or two afterwards he learned that he was to be knocked out in the eighth round.

He regretted this for one reason in especial. Both the Woolcombe boys were crazy to see him fight and had begun to bet on his winning, and one day Kate said to him shyly: “I would like to see you in the real ring, though I am afraid it will be very brutal.”

“Oh, you mustn’t come this time,” Dick blurted out.

“Why not?” she asked.

“You know,” he said, putting his arms round her and drawing her to him, “I told you long ago I was not good enough for you”; and then love’s humility being strong upon him, with the need for confession and the urge to tell the loved one the very worst about himself, he went on:

“I’m going to lose this fight. Benny Rossiter is very good”; and seeing her look of amazement, added, “and I’m a little out of practice--and--I shall probably make a lot of money by losing.”

“What do you mean?” asked the girl, with parted lips and wide-open eyes. “What do you mean, Dicky?”

“Just that,” he said bitterly. “He is champion, and it pays a fighting man to lose some fights. I’ll get another chance later and then maybe you can come to see it. If I lose then it will be because I am not good enough to win.”

They were entering her house when he began speaking and she gave him no chance to talk further to her that day, and the next day he got a letter from her in which she said that she could not believe what he had told her; could not believe that he was going to let himself be beaten in order to win money unfairly--“because that was what you said, Dick: no one but yourself would make me believe it of you.”

He had feared just this and now the catastrophe was overwhelming. He wrote begging for an interview, and when she kept away a couple of days without answering him he confided in Patsy and sent him to her. Patsy shook his head when he knew what was expected of him.

“All wimmin is crazy,” was Patsy’s verdict; “they’re all looney. Does she expect a prize-fighter to be an angel; why doesn’t she feel for your wings? Does she think a boy like you could have one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bank and a place like this in four years by fighting on the square? Why, it ain’t sense! Let her go and ask her banker father how he made his fortune; sure, she’ll find that he has done things that would make Beelzebub blush, if he tells the truth, but he’s too cunning.”

But Dick prayed him to do his best as mediator and sent him off, and the result of Patsy’s intercession was that the day after he got another little note from Kate: “Have you told your mother? Does she approve?”

So Dick had to tell his mother the same day. When he told her that he was going to lose the fight and that it was by losing that he had made all his money, she looked at him horror-stricken, almost like Kate, and cried out: “Oh, wirra, wirra, to think of that and you a son of a p’lisman.”

Dick felt inclined to smile, but it was on the wrong side of his mouth. There was something pathetic in Mrs. Donovan’s hero-worship of her policeman husband as a defender of justice and a champion of right.

The next three or four days were filled for Dick with suffering of a new sort. In many Celts there is a vein of absolute pessimism, and as Dick did not see how to conquer this difficulty the natural melancholy of his nature awoke and he simply tried to make up his mind that he had lost everything, that life was like that; it would give you this, that and the other, and then snatch the cup of happiness from your lips and spill the golden liquid in the dust.

“It was to be,” he said to himself with Celtic fatalism. “I suppose it had to be.”

But now Patsy got after him. He was falling off in his speed and strength, and as a ring-general Patsy would not permit that. In his misery Dick at last told Harold all about it, and although he did not know he thereby played a winning card, for Harold, boylike, saw very little in it and went to his father, and when his father heard that Dick would probably win one hundred thousand dollars, and not be hurt by losing, he said before his daughter that he hoped a man would not fool enough to throw away such a chance of a fortune. His daughter turned on him, but her mother immediately sided with the father, and Kate began to feel outlawed in her righteousness. In her heart she was glad to acknowledge that perhaps she had been too severe, and off she went with her brother to meet Dick.

The reconciliation was a renewal of love. In her desire to atone she showed her lover all the warmth in her nature. She threw her arms round his neck and said: “I won’t dispute any more. I think life horrid. But one thing I am determined on. I want you to leave off fighting altogether. Surely after this big lot of money we’ll have enough and you can get a vaudeville engagement as you had at first.”

Dick was jubilant. “I will lose this fight,” he said, “but within three months the fight for the championship will be staged again, and if I win it I’ll fight no more. I’ve had enough of it. I’d like to travel in France and Ireland and perhaps learn something and be more worthy of you.”

And for the first time he ventured to touch her breasts and show his passion. To his delight she responded and kissed him with hot lips. And when he put his arms round her and held her to him closely she was all yielding softness, and his desire for her grew to madness.

* * * * *

The fight at Madison Square Garden attracted an enormous crowd. The place was crammed from floor to ceiling at unheard-of prices and the betting was insane.

Dick measured his man as well as he could without trying to beat him, and in about the eight or ninth round came to the conclusion that he could beat him. Nevertheless he took the right and left on the jaw in the twelfth round and went down for the count.

The audience went crazy with delight. The best people in New York were there, had all bet on the college boy, and the college boy had won. It had been a clean fight and their joy knew no bounds, and the Irish who followed Dick to a man took their beating philosophically. “It always needs a batin’,” they said, “to wake our man up. Sure, Donovan will come again, and the next time we’ll get our money back and more.”

And that turned out to be very near the truth. Another fight for the championship was staged in Newark, N.J., and once again the papers boosted the fight just as if they had been paid for the advertisement, when they got nothing by it except enthusiastic readers.

Before the training even began Dick had a long talk with Harriman.

“We’ll begin,” said that gentleman, “by handing you these for the last fight,” and he gave Dick four cheques for twenty-five thousand dollars each; “that’s about eleven per cent. of what I made.”

Dick thanked him.

“And now,” Harriman went on, “I want you to do me a favour. Can you beat him?”

Dick nodded his head.

“Are you sure? I can only get odds of about five or six to four against you. Dare I risk eight hundred thousand dollars on it? Will you bring me my money home? If you do I’ll quit promoting and retire to my place in the Adirondacks.”

“One can never be as sure of winning as of losing,” Dick replied, “but I am satisfied I can beat him and I intend to.”

A few days afterwards the announcement came out that an agreement had been signed; the prize would be one hundred thousand dollars, sixty thousand dollars to go to the victor and forty thousand dollars to the loser. Nine out of ten newspaper readers in New York believed that Rossiter would be the victor and that Dick would again be beaten.

This time the whole Woolcombe family came to the fight. Harold and Fred had interested the father and mother, and even Kate was carried off her feet by the excitement.

The fight was very like one of the old Roman gladiatorial contests. Harriman and his friends had built up a great amphitheatre that would hold nearly sixty thousand persons.

At three o’clock on the appointed day the two men faced each other in the ring. Half-an-hour before Harriman had said to Dick: “If you beat him before the tenth round I will owe you another sixty thousand dollars”; so Dick went in under the eyes of his love determined to fight as he had never fought before, but like an old ring-general determined, too, not to risk anything.

The first two rounds went to Dick, but the third went to Benny. He had slipped Dick’s lead and ducked under his right arm with catlike speed, and in infighting he was more than Dick’s match. But Dick’s stomach muscles had become indeed bands of steel; no body punch of Benny’s had the smallest effect on him. Again and again Benny drove in his right like a battering pile and again and again Dick took the blow and countered on the jaw. The third and fourth time he countered so heavily that Benny reeled back. At once Dick was on him, raining down a hurricane of blows, right and left, with all the power of advance and the spring from hip and shoulder in every blow. Before the torrent Benny went down, and though he got to his feet again before eight was counted, it was only the gong sounding at the end of the round that saved him from being knocked out in the third round.

The fourth and fifth rounds he fought very cautiously, avoiding everything and ducking all Dick’s blows, waiting evidently to get back his strength. But Dick took Patsy’s advice and crowded the fight; he jumped in, hitting right and left with tremendous speed and force, following his man to his corner. In the sixth round Benny was overwhelmed. His blows had lost both speed and force, telegraphing thereby to Dick that his opportunity had come, and he used it quite fairly but relentlessly. Before the round was half through Benny’s seconds threw up the sponge and the championship was won.

So perfect was Patsy’s training that Dick had scarcely a mark on him and felt really just as well as when he entered the ring.

Mr. Woolcombe was delighted. It appeared that he was a friend and backer of Harriman, and this time Harriman had let him in on the good thing and he had made nearly a quarter of a million dollars betting on Dick.

They all went back in automobiles to Mamaroneck and the Woolcombes gave Dick a supper. After the supper the lovers stole out together and, to Dick’s surprise and joy, Kate was incandescent, which, whether Dick knew it or not, was full of good promise for his married happiness. She caressed his bruised cheeks and fondled his hands with little cries of passionate tenderness. The varied incidents of the conflict, the dreadful risks, the alternate mad hopes and fears had whipped her blood to flame and held her enthralled, panting with excitement, and then the appalling swift attack, the grace, speed and strength of her lover had swept her off her feet, flooding her with a delicious triumph and afterwards the wild applause of the ringside and cheering of the crowd had broken her will to resist and made of her his creature--one with him for ever.

“Oh, Dick, Dick,” she sobbed, “you wonderful Dick,” and tears streamed from her eyes; “but--but--” (striving to control herself) “I was sorry for Benny; you hit him dreadfully. It’s the last fight, isn’t it, dear?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Dick. “The vaudeville manager told me he would give me fifteen hundred dollars a week, and that ought to keep us for the next year or two. I want to read and study and become worthy of you.”

“You are worthy of any woman,” she said, looking up at him with shining wet eyes. “Oh, Dick, the applause of the people and their cheering will be in my ears all my life. You’re a hero, sir, to hundreds of thousands.”

And perhaps, as heroes go, Dick Donovan deserved the title better than most.

THE TEMPLE TO THE FORGOTTEN DEAD

THE TEMPLE TO THE FORGOTTEN DEAD

I suppose I had a good conceit of myself and some apparent reasons for it. I had won a scholarship at Clifton and gone to Balliol and won first honours in “Mods.” and “Greats” and got the Ireland scholarship, and thought myself a wonder. It was the year after Asquith had swept the university of prizes and, like Asquith, I, too, went to the Bar in the Middle Temple. I swotted the first term or two and then, having worked too hard, went for a walking tour through Surrey and Sussex. Cæsar had kept off headaches and sickness by eating little, walking much and living always in the open air, and I followed the same regimen--with equally good results.

At the end of the second week of my holiday I reached the outskirts of Brighton, feeling very fit. It was a lovely evening, bright and warm, and I was glad to see a “pub” almost as soon as the heath died away in the streets.

The landlord was a big man. When I asked him for a “lemon squash” he seemed surprised, but soon put it before me. While we were talking there issued from a neighbouring room to the left of the bar shouts of laughter and a great noise, as of glasses being beaten on the table.

“What’s that?” I could not help asking.

“It’s a Mr. Collinson,” replied the landlord apologetically. “They have a sort of club there, sir, twice a week, and Mr. Collinson tells ’em stories.”

“Stories?” I repeated in a question.

“Yes, sir,” said the landlord; “and he does tell ’em surprising, sir.”

“Might I hear one?” I asked. “I love a good story.”

“This Mr. Collinson,” confided the landlord, “is some’ut out of the common. He used to be a master, I have been told, in Dr. John’s Grammar School, but he married an aunt of the doctor’s that had quite a bit of money of her own and now lives with her in ‘The Grange,’ the house standing alone on your left as you go out of the door. She was a widow and is quite a few years older nor him; but they gets along very well, though they do say as she wears the breeches. You know what I mean, sir, don’t you? No offence!”

I nodded. “Are you sure the other guests wouldn’t mind my listening?” I asked the good-humoured host.

“No, no, sir,” he replied cordially. “I often go in myself and listen when I’ve nothing better to do. No one will object, sir, I’m sure,” and he came round the bar as he spoke and opened the door for me.

There may have been a dozen men in the room. The story-teller, Mr. Collinson, was in the chair at the far end of the table. He was a man of perhaps five-and-thirty, nice-looking, with fair features, blue-grey eyes and almost black hair, worn rather long: he would have been very good-looking were it not for an outjutting, fleshy nose; the mouth, too, was a little large; but at first the impression was altogether pleasing, the eyes were so bright and quick and the smile so engaging.

“Here’s a friend,” said the landlord by way of introduction, “who would like to hear your stories, Mr. Collinson. Your name, sir?” he added, turning to me.

“My name is quite unknown to fame,” I replied; “it’s Clarke,” and I spelled it out.

“Mr. Clarke,” repeated the landlord, and Collinson rose and bade me welcome.

“Do you make up the stories?” I asked.

“Of course,” replied Collinson reproachfully.

“He tells ’em wonderfully, sir,” said one of the guests. “I never misses a Wednesday or Saturday evening. I----” And he shut up, apparently from excess of feeling.

“And he never tells two alike,” said another.

“What will you all drink?” I asked. “I must stand something for the good of the house!” The proposal seemed to be acceptable, and after everyone had a fresh drink before him Collinson wanted to know whether I’d mind a half-religious story. Naturally I told him that I left him the choice, and he began at once:

“This story came to me in sleep. We all know the brain often works in sleep and solves problems even for mathematicians that puzzled them when awake, and performs other wonders, and this dream of mine was strangely vivid, in spite of its wild improbability. I dreamed I had awakened on an isle in the South Pacific that was shut off by electric clouds from all communication with the outside world. There I found a curiously high civilisation, a society of people extraordinarily cultivated, who had made their little island (it was barely fifty miles round) an artistic home, where everyone worked and all enjoyed the luxuries even of a simple life. They had a law that any stranger reaching their land by any chance should be condemned to painless death, and I was so sentenced, and in ignorance was walking to my doom when I caught the eyes of an astonishingly pretty girl. I could not but smile to her, she was so fine and seemed sad, and she turned and took me from my attendants. I learned later that anyone who came from a family that had been thanked by the State for services could exercise the right of mercy at any time, and so Irene, as I called her, saved my life.

“All this and more I learned gradually as I mastered the language, for Irene had taken me to her home and taught me every day, though she was the daughter of one of the governors of the island. I had been reading a little before how Diotima, the lovely, light woman of Athens, told Socrates all sorts of new things, and I dreamed into Irene a sort of ideal nature, and indeed she was very fine.

“She held herself curiously erect; she had large grey eyes, with long black lashes, and a rather rich mouth showing bluey-white teeth. There was something challenging in her good humour and smiling superiority of approach. Though still in the twenties she was very wise. In my dream we were together, this Irene and myself, in a garden. I had been impressed by her wisdom and her air of conscious superiority, and accordingly I put forward the Sermon on the Mount as the sublimest height of wisdom that I knew anything about. ‘The Sermon on the Mount begins with beatitudes,’ I said, ‘or a sort of declaration of faith,’ and I recited them.

“‘I see, I see,’ said Irene, smiling, ‘the sort of thing a young man gets off to convince himself of his own originality.’

“I was struck by the truth of her remark, but went on reciting. When I came to the verses:

“‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

“‘Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.’

* * * * *

--Irene was indignant. ‘I never heard worse morality,’ she cried. ‘Am I to make it up with an enemy merely for fear of the consequences? It’s degrading.’

“‘Listen,’ I said, and went on to the end of the chapter, and when I had finished this was Irene’s criticism--and I think it worth remembering:

“‘At first I thought it all bad,’ she began, ‘because of the judge and prison business, but soon I came to see that the whole sermon is a medley of thoughts put together at different times and representing very different stages of growth. The morality of the judge and prison is childish. If Jesus ever used the incident it must have been as a boyish memory; for it is expressly contradicted later when He teaches you to forgive your enemies and those who would despitefully use you and persecute you, ending with the noble words: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father, which is in heaven, is perfect.” That’s far enough away from the making up with your enemy for fear of consequences, far away, too, from the youthful, prig beatitudes. To be perfect is the real goal, but I don’t care for the tag, “As your Father in heaven is perfect,” for I see no striving after perfection in any part of creation.’

“When I asked Irene about her religion she told me that the popular religion of her people was as high, she thought, as the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount, but very different; and one day, when I pressed her, she took me in her airplane to their Sacred City.

“It was a great wooded hill laid out in gardens and groves, and here and there were temples scattered about; she took me into one of the first of these and made me observe that there were realistic busts of men on all sides, with a kindred air of boldness and resolution.

“‘This temple is dedicated to courage,’ she began, ‘the youngest of all religions or, if you will, the oldest. Most of the worshippers here are boys and young men, and courage is commended to them as a sacred duty, and they are advised to imitate the courageous men whose busts are collected here.

“‘On the other side of the main road there’s a Temple to Pity, and that’s frequented by young girls and is to them the most appealing of all the creeds and the highest.’

“‘I see, I see,’ I exclaimed; ‘all the base of the hill is taken up with temples dedicated to various virtues.’

“‘And the preachers,’ she nodded, ‘are all picked because of the proofs they have given of preeminence in this or that quality that they talk about.’

“Slowly we made our way up to the top of the hill, to find it crowned by great colonnades interspersed with statues of every kind.

“Suddenly I cried: ‘All these statues lack something. See, that one is without hands and that there is eyeless. What does it all mean?’

“‘This,’ said Irene, ‘is the obverse of what you’ve already seen. Some of us worship in that temple at the foot of the hill, and some in another; but we all worship here, for this is “The Temple to the Forgotten Dead.”

“‘Who was the first to invent the _wheel_ and so reduce the work of man by one-tenth? No one knows. Who was the first to make a screw? These are the Unknown Benefactors of Humanity, to whom we are all indebted and whose very names are lost in the whelming flood of oblivion. And our wisest suppose that these heroes and seers are forgotten because they lacked this quality or that, and so these statues prefiguring them all lack something, now an eye, now a hand.

“‘In my opinion they were content to give of their best and pass into the shrouding darkness without a word----’

“‘Wonderful,’ I broke in. ‘I shall not soon forget the Temple to the Forgotten Dead; but is that all there is in this Holy City?’

“‘One thing more,’ said Irene, ‘and perhaps the chief thing,’ and silently she led the way through the colonnade into a large grove of flowering, perfume-ladened trees.

“In the middle there was an open space and in it a great statue of a woman with both hands uplifted. I noticed, too, that her eyes were sightless.

“‘What does that prefigure?’ I asked.

“‘Our Rulers,’ replied Irene, ‘have given us that as the very soul of religion; they wish to tell us that woman is nearer the heart of things than man, and her hands are uplifted, as you see, in yearning desire, but her eyes are sightless, for she knows not whither she goes or to what bourne. Her aspiration is without a goal----’

“‘A lame and impotent conclusion,’ I cried, and Irene, agreeing with me, hastened to add:

“‘I told you I would show you our popular religion. I did not say it was perfect. The real religion of the best among us is made of two parts: the first is our duty to ourselves and is summed up in complete self-development; the second is all in the duty we owe to others, to help everyone born and especially the best to the utmost of our ability. We mortals don’t know much, do we?’ She broke off, with brooding, sad eyes.”

Collinson’s voice ceased.

“So that’s the end?” I half asked, and Collinson answered a little defiantly, I thought:

“That’s the end in one mood; but, fortunately, we men are allowed to have contradictory moods.”

* * * * *

I’m quite aware that I’ve told the story badly. To hear such a story in a common public-house almost took my breath away. And then Collinson told it inimitably. He made you feel that Irene was at once an English girl in looks and wiser than Diotima in reality; the bounds of the possible fell away as he talked. The myriad inflections of his voice, his dramatic pauses, the abrupt changes of tone, all were used to make the extraordinary probable and of everyday occurrence.

I hardly knew what to think and was very eager indeed to know what another first-rate mind would think of this story-teller.

I thanked Collinson warmly and promised to come on the next Saturday evening and bring a friend, an Oxford professor of rare talent, York Fowell, who would be infinitely pleased to applaud so gifted a story-teller. Fowell was already in Brighton, and I intended to see a good deal of him. Collinson smiled pleasantly, told me he’d be glad to meet any friend of mine, was very amiable; but he seemed just a little tired, as if telling the story had exhausted him somewhat. Thinking it over afterwards I began to realise that he was not very strong.

Well, the Saturday came in due course and I brought York Fowell to the public-house and introduced him to Collinson. After the usual courtesies and fresh drinks I asked Collinson would he tell us another story like “The Temple to the Forgotten Dead.” He immediately wanted to know whether we would mind a story of Art-life in Chelsea. Of course we told him at once to go ahead, and without more ado he began:

“This story is about the artistic life in Chelsea. I call it

‘THE STRAIT-WAISTCOAT’

“I don’t know that I ought to tell this story. I don’t even know that I can tell it, though I lived cheek-by-jowl with it for years and know intimate sides of it that are now completely forgotten.

“Everyone has heard of John Craven, the Royal Academician who made a great name for himself early in life as an artist.

“He was a very agreeable man. I had to interview him once or twice for _The Daily Herald_ just after he did his famous picture of _The Cup-Day at Ascot_. It was very realistic and astonishingly effective; all the leading figures of the day and society queens were in the picture, and so it made a huge sensation. Crowds thronged to see it as they never throng to a masterpiece.

“Craven took it all as a matter of course, but Mrs. Craven was delighted with the notoriety. She was a very pretty woman, Mrs. Craven, perhaps at this time about thirty years of age. The Cravens had no children, but she was very, very sympathetic, and Lord Leith’s brother, Eric Falconer, evidently thought her the Queen of Fairies.

“I wrote about the picture and Mrs. Craven enthusiastically, and she asked me to dinner at ‘The Red House’ in Chelsea, which was very wonderfully furnished; in fact everything in it was very well done.

“In time I got to know the Cravens well. I must say I had no inkling at first of any disagreement between Mr. and Mrs. Craven.

“The garden at the back part of the ‘Red House’ had a big studio in it, where Craven used to work. And one day whom should I meet at the door but Miss Stannard, a famous model and extremely pretty girl in whom I was very much interested.

“‘Fancy you here, Leslie,’ I cried. ‘What are you up to now?’

“‘Mr. Craven wants me for his next picture. You know what a success _Ascot_ has been!’

“‘They had to rail it off,’ I agreed, ‘but it is a poor picture, I think.’

“‘Rotten,’ she replied. ‘Everyone who knows what pictures are, thinks it worthless. John August says it’s only a coloured photograph, and bad at that.’

“‘He may be a little jealous,’ I suggested.

“‘No, no,’ she exclaimed, ‘he knows.’

“‘Don’t forget it was put on the line in the chief room by painters, Royal Academicians,’ said a voice close to us, and out of the studio, in front of which we had been talking, stepped Mr. Craven. Naturally we both backed down at once. Leslie said August was very young and of course mistaken. She was an awfully kind sort, was Leslie. But she did not think much of Craven’s painting. She had been knocking about studios for years and she knew pretty well who were the good painters and who the bad. I always thought Daisy Raffles had taught her a great deal, and everyone knows that Daisy Raffles is a genius as a critic!

“I think Craven’s change of attitude came from this picture, _Ascot_, and from Daisy Raffles. It all happened strangely enough. One day a whole party accompanied the Cravens to the Royal Academy Show to see his picture--the picture of the year. While he was standing in front of it two students passed, Walter Rainforth and James Simson. Rainforth said: ‘Don’t look at that botch!’ Simson replied: ‘It’s pretty tawdry, but I have always thought he might be a painter some day.’ They went on, but Craven had heard them.

“A little while later he had taken Daisy Raffles as a model. He told Daisy what the students had said and she told him they were quite right--dotted the ‘i’s’ and crossed the ‘t’s’ for him. She really knew and had any amount of cheek.

“Daisy was a curious product of the studios: an orphan brought up by an aunt and sent out at twelve as a model. She always said it was her youth that saved her. By the time she was a woman she had not only learned all the painters’ slang, but also their morals, or rather their amorality, and this knowledge, reinforcing a natural fastidiousness, kept her straight. She was nearer thirty than twenty when she became interested in Craven; she saw at once that he could both draw and paint, and bit by bit she developed in him a new mentality. I can’t explain how she did it, but she certainly did draw him out in the most astonishing way. And women, as a rule, I’ve noticed, are apt to like those whom they can help and who are dependent on them--the mother instinct in them, I suppose. But there was nothing more than friendship between her and Craven for a long time--indeed until his wife threw him over and took sides against him.

“As soon as he took Daisy on as a model Craven began to paint in a new way. In the first year he had no success at all--in fact I don’t think he showed a picture. But a year or so afterwards he exhibited his model, Daisy Raffles, painted ‘in the altogether’; she had evidently by this time got into his blood.

“Nearly everyone thought the picture ugly; nobody wanted it, but painters said it was surprising; it had quality in it. From that time on Craven’s downfall began. He painted pictures that nobody wanted; they were not even pretty; and gradually, bit by bit, he lost his money and began to be hard up.

“This much of his private history everyone knew. His wife tried again and again to get him to paint in the old way, but he wouldn’t, or perhaps couldn’t.

“According to Daisy Raffles his wife had always been in love with Eric Falconer, and certainly they were now very thick. When a woman of thirty or thirty-five falls in love she takes it badly, and Mrs. Craven took it worse than most. She was with Falconer or Falconer was with her morning, noon and night; their names began to be coupled together, and everyone knew it except Craven.

“I always wondered how the _exposé_ came.

“Daisy Raffles said that it came about money, that Mrs. Craven got it into her head that Craven was mad. And indeed there was a good deal to be said for that theory. He had made thousands and thousands of pounds by his early pictures, then suddenly he began painting pictures that nobody wanted and no one would buy.

“One day I met Leslie Stannard with Daisy Raffles and had new light on the subject.

“Daisy Raffles swore that Craven was doing very interesting work; told us that his wife was a fool, and the sooner she got a divorce and married Eric Falconer the better. Daisy was quite pretty when she got excited and everyone knew she had the prettiest girl’s figure in London.

“Craven, she declared, was going to be one of the great painters. ‘You will see,’ she said: ‘the studies he has made of me will be worth a fortune yet’; and I remembered that Simson had said that he had the painter’s hand if not his head.

“In some way or other Daisy had given Craven a new view of art and life. Before he met her he was a photographer, so to speak; she made him an artist--taught him that it was not the object in itself, but the impression the object made upon him that was important. His portrait of Daisy as Salome was a masterpiece; it gave the essence of her: the sensuous, slim body and the supersensuous soul, like a flame triumphing over Death; there was something unearthly in the spirit-beauty of it. She believed, with Nietzsche, that all great art is produced in a sort of ecstasy, an intoxicated heightening of all the faculties.

“I was very interested in the whole thing. I never liked Eric Falconer and Mrs. Craven had always seemed to me rather pretentious.

“The catastrophe came suddenly. Falconer laid the trap, I am sure, and Craven fell into it.

“Craven thought, naturally enough, that people were down on him. They had swallowed all his earlier work greedily, had given him a great reputation, had filled his pockets with money. And now, when he was doing far better work than he had ever done, no one wanted it, no one would pay for it, no one seemed to appreciate it or had a good word to say for his striving. No wonder he became a little bitter. If it hadn’t been for Daisy he’d have been worse.

“It was on that bitterness of Craven that Falconer founded his plot. He encouraged Craven in his belief, made him think he was really hated and persecuted, and then one day he brought in the celebrated surgeon, Sir James Tripper, to meet Craven.

“Craven happened to be exceedingly bitter that day; the Academy had returned a picture to him; they wouldn’t even give it wall-room; yet it was a beautiful little study.

“Tripper drew Craven out a little and made up his mind at once that he was suffering from the mania of persecution. Doctors believe in the prevalence of disease, as saints in the universality of sin.

“A few days later Falconer brought Mr. Wisley, a friend of Tripper’s, to see Craven. Wisley, of course, came to the same conclusion as Tripper, and was fully convinced besides that Craven should be shut up and treated to a strict regimen.

“About this time Daisy Raffles had gone to Brighton to take care of her aunt, who was ailing, and Craven, all alone, was shutting up his studio one evening when two keepers and a warden came in and arrested him. He asked them to show their warrant and they showed it. It was in order: a London magistrate had signed it on the affidavit of the two doctors. Tripper, of course, had a great name.

“Craven, poor devil, wanted to go home to tell his wife, but the warder would not allow it. He was taken down by train and put in a private asylum in Surrey, kept by a Mr. Waterman. Waterman had evidently received his instructions from Wisley, so when he got his patient he pretended that Craven was violent and put him in a strait-waistcoat and threw him into a padded room. But he left the window open, and so the flies got in and wandered about Craven’s face and buzzed in his hair and moustache.

“They woke him up too every night by frequent visits of the warders. Daisy Raffles said afterwards that this was a well-known way of driving people mad, particularly excitable, strong men.

“Daisy was a wise little thing. When she came to the studio a week or so afterwards and found it all shut up, and heard that Craven had not been there, she began ferreting round, and soon ascertained that Craven had gone away with three common-looking men. I do not know how she came on the idea that he had been arrested, but she went and interviewed his wife and they had a regular slanging match, it appears, and the wife must have let out something, because Daisy told Miss Stannard that his wife knew all about Craven’s arrest; knew, too, that he had been taken down to Waterman’s private asylum in Surrey.

“Miss Stannard came to me about it. Daisy, she said, was in a fearful state and I must devise some way of getting Craven out of the asylum. I soon found out that it could be done by a writ of habeas corpus. To cut a long story short we all swore that Craven was quite sane and got out a writ to have him examined publicly and by independent doctors.

“In the meantime something had happened at Waterman’s asylum. Dr. Girton was the visiting doctor. After Craven had been about a week in the asylum Dr. Girton, according to law, had to see him and report on his case. Girton reported that Craven was suffering from persecution mania and was violent. But before the magistrate the case took on a very different complexion.

“Dr. Girton gave his evidence very emphatically, but Craven was plainly as sane as anybody in the court. He took the case into his own hands almost at once. ‘Your Worship,’ he said to the magistrate, ‘they did all they could to make me insane; they put me in a padded room and would not let me sleep, but when Girton came in one morning, he found me perfectly quiet, and he was so surprised that he asked me how I had borne it so well, because to have flies eating your face while you are unable to protect yourself is somewhat exasperating. I told him the truth: no persecution, no prison, no want of sleep, no strait-waistcoat had any effect on me, for I have been an artist in England.’

“The phrase made the magistrate smile and won the day.

“The end of it was that Mrs. Craven got her divorce unopposed, and when she married Falconer Craven married Daisy Raffles and began to produce the wonderful pictures that are now making him famous in the highest sense.”

This story taught me what a great talent Collinson possessed; he mimed the voice and accent of every character, managed in this way to convey subtle nuances of the personality that are utterly lost in the written story. For example, he showed you Miss Stannard as a sort of tall English beauty, and Daisy Raffles as a little dark-eyed, fair-skinned creature, whose soul had been drawn out by this painter and by that, till she had attained an extraordinary culture. Is there any education of a woman which can compare with the companionship of gifted men?

In some way or other, perhaps by cunning inflection of voice, Collinson managed to suggest that Craven was Daisy’s complement, that the two, to use an old phrase, were made for each other, and that their union was rarely perfect.

The more I thought of it the more I liked Collinson’s little tales. In this one he had given us a sort of picture of that artist-life in Chelsea flashed out on a dark background of calumny, vilification and hate.

I was astonished to find that York Fowell was even more deeply impressed. Suddenly he spoke to Collinson: “You know that Clarke, here, had already told me your story of ‘The Temple to the Forgotten Dead.’ I dare not say it made a deeper impression than this; but it was surely an extraordinary story or, if you will, an extraordinary idea. No one but Goethe has ever tried to add anything to the Christian ideal, and his pagan attempts in the _Wanderjahre_ are not very successful. But your ‘Temple to the Forgotten Dead’ has really something in it; we should cultivate piety and reverence for those who have gone before us, as you call them, ‘The Unknown Benefactors of Humanity.’ To have succeeded even partially where Goethe failed is honour enough for any man. I congratulate you with all my heart. And this Chelsea story might have written by Maupassant. It is enough for any man’s measure to touch Goethe on the one hand and Maupassant on the other.”

To my surprise the warm praise affected Collinson greatly; his whole face quivered, his eyes filled with tears. “I never expected,” he said, “to be compared with Goethe; but ideas come to me sometimes that I love; they don’t seem to be mine,” he added deprecatingly. “They come to me--at their will and time--”

“You have got,” said York Fowell abruptly, “what I would give ten years of my life for--the creative spirit. I’ve toiled and studied, but never had any such divine visitation. You are very lucky, I think. But why don’t you write these stories of yours? They’d make a reputation for you and you should be known.”

“I can’t write,” said Collinson abruptly. “You overpraise my little things; but it’s very kind of you,” and he stretched out his hand impulsively to York Fowell, who took it, smiling amiably.

A little later we went away together and to my wonder York Fowell praised Collinson enthusiastically. “We must draw him out,” he concluded; “we must find the hidden source of those charming imaginings. Fancy the little master of an unknown school living on such heights of thought! What does he read? Do you know?”

I had to confess that I knew nothing really about Collinson, but Fowell’s enthusiasm affected me and I resolved to get to know him.

But the next Saturday came and Collinson wouldn’t tell a story--had none in his head, he said; and when we questioned him he told us he had an ordinary grammar school training, had learned German and French and Italian on his own, and, curiously enough, had gone as by instinct to the very greatest spirits. Heine, we found, he knew nearly by heart; he used to call him the first of the moderns. And in French, Villon and Balzac and Vauvenargues, and in Italian, Leopardi. He had got to the heights through literature. He was a Socialist without knowing the modern concept of the word--thought the land should belong to all the people and all public utilities should be nationalised, and stopped there.

Curiously enough Collinson was passionate about the need of nationalising coal-mining. I found out that he had once paid a visit to a friend in Merthyr and had been horrified by the degrading slavery of the miners’ life. “Humane living,” he exclaimed passionately, “is impossible under such conditions! It must all be lifted and ennobled.”

Little by little I came to know Collinson. One evening we walked to his house and he said timidly: “I’d ask you in, but my wife hates me to bring anyone unless they are known here socially, and she always objects to men without their wives. She was a Paget, you know, and is in love with all conventions.”

“Why did you marry her?”

He shrugged his shoulders: “I had a turn of bad luck. I found it so hard to teach kids who didn’t want to learn and I had a couple of boys of sheer genius who interested me intensely. The ‘Head’ gave me notice just after I had met Mrs. Livinstone. She had married an officer in the 10th Cavalry; he drank himself to death, I believe. Anyhow, she was a widow and pleasant and always inviting me. I told her one evening that I thought of going to London to get a new place and--somehow or other--I don’t know how it was--I found she wanted me to marry her, and I was--a coward. I hated to go to the agencies and pay and beg a place; it was humiliating, with ‘thoughts that wander through eternity’--thoughts make aristocrats of some of us. And so we were married. But I hate her society friends; that’s why I began going to the ‘pub.’ It’s common, and most of the _habitués_ don’t understand me or my stories, but after all they don’t look down on one like the society crew. I’m quite happy when I can meet someone like you and York Fowell; he’s very able, isn’t he?”

“Very!” I nodded. “They say in Oxford he knows more than half the Faculty--an extraordinary power of assimilation; he learned everything as a sponge absorbs moisture.”

“And he compared me to Goethe, didn’t he?” said Collinson with jubilant eyes.

“Indeed he did,” I replied, “and when we were alone he thanked me for bringing him to the ‘pub’; said he had never had so great an evening. He’s coming again; but you disappointed him the last time when you would not tell us another story.”

Collinson turned his clear blue-eyes on me with an expression of humility I never saw in anyone else and cried: “I hadn’t a good story in my head; but the next time I’ll do better than my best for you, you’ll see”; and his eyes seemed to veil themselves in a mist of thought.

And in truth the next Wednesday he was better than his best. As soon as we came in he began:

“The other evening I had a wonderful night. I dreamed I was in some city in India, near the gates; it must have been Delhi, and I was a public story-teller. As evening fell, and the people began to drift into the country from their work in the city, I came out and sat at the door of my house in the deep shadow, with a great copper pan at my side for offerings. At first I told stories of Gautama Buddha, when he was a prince, and bit by bit the crowd gathered, and one asked me how I knew the prince.

“‘By likeness of nature,’ I replied boldly. ‘We can all know those we love, and I love the prince, who gave up everything--honour and riches and pleasure and joy and all the good things of this world--to go and live with his pain-stricken brethren and teach them how to attain Nirvana, where there is no suffering, because desire is dead.’

“‘But how can you know Gautama’s life as a young prince?’ another questioned, and a strange answer came to me in my dream. I said: ‘You know that there is a star near the Southern Cross so distant that it takes nearly two thousand seven hundred years for light to come from it to our earth; the tiny spark of radiance we see and name left it before the birth of Gautama, and in my imagination I knew someone living on that star, and he had watched the light ray that started from earth in Gautama’s youth and had taken photos of what the light brought him, and so he showed me pictures of Gautama even before his soul opened to the truth. Think of it! nothing is lost in this wonder-world. Light is still carrying the pictures it received ten thousand years ago, and it should be possible to reflect them again as easily as those of yesterday or to-day. Time is only relative; space a condition of our thought.

“‘I have begged my star-habitant to return to me out of the realm of sleep and one of these nights bring me light-pictures of the young Jesus as He walked and spoke when His mother and father found Him at twelve years of age teaching the Rabbis in the Temple.

“‘Fancy, if I could get the whole history of His life in photograph after photograph--when He first collected His disciples and drew them with Him to Nazareth, and how the townsfolk were indignant at one they knew giving Himself out as a prophet.

“‘Don’t we know Him?’ they cried; ‘are not His mother and His brethren here with us? How dare He pretend to such authority?’ and they went about to kill Him and He had to hide. His mother, we are told, declared He was mad; perhaps that was the reason He said afterwards: ‘This is my mother and these my brethren who do the will of my Father.’

“And think of the picture of the woman taken in adultery, when Jesus at first did not know what to say, for He realized that He had not come to fulfil the terrible law of Moses, with its ‘eye for an eye,’ but was full of a new and diviner message: ‘Let him that is without sin among you first cast the stone.’

“When this was said I saw all prisons vanish and all judges and judgments become ridiculous, for hospital wards took the place of prison cells, and doctors and nurses came instead of jailers and executioners. We have both now, side by side in our silly life, the prison here and the torturers, and the hospitals there and the healers! What madmen men are with Secretaries of State for War and no Secretary of State yet for Peace anywhere, though Jesus is dead these two thousand years!

“Think of it and remember that only one disciple records this story of the adulterous woman. Matthew, Mark and Luke saw nothing in it; but John remembered and recorded it: that explains to me why John was the beloved disciple.

“And remember, too, what Jesus said to the woman: ‘Neither do I accuse thee.’ What does this mean? Surely that He too was a sinner and had no more right to condemn than anyone else.

“Ah, the Sacred Story! One of these days we shall have all of it divinely illustrated and illumined, for the New Commandment of Jesus is the porch of the modern world, the door into the New Life!”

There was something inspired in the man. Even the tradesmen who sat around the table were moved by the unearthly passion of the vibrant voice, and York Fowell’s eyes were a confession of astonished admiration. I don’t know how we came away, but I shall always remember how York Fowell thanked Collinson.

A day or two afterwards I was called up to London and got that appointment at Durham which changed my whole life. I never saw Collinson again and York Fowell died untimely in the next autumn; but Collinson has left a memory as a story-teller that I have sought to perpetuate.

MY LAST WORD

_There is an end of time and an end of the evil thereof: when delight is gone out of thee and desire is dead, thy mourning shall not be for long._

_Grief, thou fearest, shall remain with thee now that an end of thy pleasure is come: but grief likewise shall not abide with thee._

_At the beginning a little sorrow was ordained thee, and a little joy as well: but there is nothing of thine that endureth._

_Yet the adventure of life was glorious and the magic of moments of love and pity and understanding beyond description or thanks._

_In a sun-haze of exquisite memories I, too, like a God, look upon the world and say it was all “good.”_

+Frank Harris.+

+Nice, 1923.+

Transcriber’s Notes

For printer’s errors and other inconsistencies in punctuation, spelling, etc., only the changes listed below were made.

_Italics_, +Small Caps+, and +ALL SMALL CAPS+ were formatted as so.

On page 6 a period was corrected to a comma in “I happened to touch your hand,”.

On page 23 “them” was corrected to “then” in “and then came broken wailing notes”.

On page 37 a missing period was added in “of the lark I would have come out to meet you.”.

On page 37 a missing period was added in “I could not come out in that _bouge_ with red eyes.”.

On page 38 a missing comma was added in “But to me she was a revelation,”.

On page 41 a missing quotation mark was added in “‘I’ll need only ten minutes to get rid of the grease”.

On page 50 “St Matthew” was standardized to “St. Matthew”.

On page 61 a missing closing quotation mark was added in “Why should he leave me?”.

On page 66 “St Louis” was standardized to “St. Louis”.

On page 70 a missing period was added in “death that can be inflicted on a woman.”.

On page 76 the missing double quotation mark at the beginning of “The king thought in silence. ‘Her courage,’” was added.

On page 77 a missing quotation mark was added in “‘but love is surely a madness”.

On page 77 “consel” was corrected to “counsel” in “love is surely a madness and there may be some wisdom in your counsel”.

On page 80 an ending double quotation mark was corrected to an ending single quotation mark in “‘I wish to be sent back to my father.’”.

On page 80 a missing opening quotation mark was added in “and you loved this young man.”.

On page 84 the missing double quotation mark at the beginning of “She answered quietly:” was added.

On page 87 “happinesss” was corrected to “happiness” in “happiness is not for wise”.

On page 103 “erpression” was corrected to “expression” in “The dominant expression of the face was”.

On page 111 “mercant” was corrected to “merchant” in “taller even than the merchant”.

On page 113 “policeman” was corrected to “policemen” in “Two policemen took hold of the young man and dragged him”.

On page 120 “Have you have heard of the painter” was corrected to “Have you heard of the painter”.

On page 128 an extra opening single quotation mark was removed before “You,” in “leave it to you both. You,”.

On page 156 “It really more than pretty” was corrected to “It was really more than pretty” in “It was really more than pretty, set off as it was by red-gold hair”.

On page 162 “thought he did not seem to have noticed” was corrected to “though he did not seem to have noticed”.

On page 165 a doubled “looked” was removed in “he looked ten years older”.

On page 167 “Knightbridge” was corrected to “Knightsbridge” in “I came away from Knightsbridge”.

On page 180 an opening parenthesis was corrected to a comma in “She was pretty, but what took me was her perfect figure”.

On page 184 “Touton” was corrected to “Toutou” in “It is wonderful, you know, Toutou”.

On page 196 an opening single quotation mark was corrected to an opening double quotation mark in “and there is some ground for them”.

On page 201 “Mr” was corrected to “Mr.” in “Don’t you go exciting yourself, Mr. Scroper.”.

On page 221 a missing ending quotation mark was added in ““what do you call it in French?””.

On page 224 “desirious” was corrected to “desirous” in “He was probably even more desirous”.

On page 239 “brillant” was corrected to “brilliant” in “a brilliant idea occurred to me”.

On page 243 “form was more beautiful Micah’s” was corrected to “form was more beautiful than Micah’s” in “knew that Leah’s shapely slim form was more beautiful than Micah’s, and that Micah in turn was finer than the negroid type”.

On page 267 “musn’t” was corrected to “mustn’t” in “that he mustn’t get thick ears”.

On page 275 a missing opening quotation mark was added in “for a couple of thousand dollars”.

On page 292 “in” was corrected to “it” in “he had to look at it in surprise”.

On page 296 a missing opening quotation mark was added in “he’s naturally quick and he has learned the game”.

On page 297 a missing ending quotation mark was added in ““Just that,” he said bitterly.”.

On page 299 “not” was corrected to “note” in “he got another little note from Kate”.

On page 315 a missing opening quotation mark was added in ““Suddenly I cried:”.

On page 329 an extra, errant closing double quotation mark was removed in “resolved to get to know him.”.