A Diversity of Creatures
by
Rudyard Kipling

Part 1 out of 7

A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES

By

RUDYARD KIPLING

1917

PREFACE

With two exceptions, the dates at the head of these stories show when
they were published in magazine form. 'The Village that Voted the Earth
was Flat,' and 'My Son's Wife' carry the dates when they were written.

RUDYARD KIPLING.

CONTENTS

As Easy as ABC

_MacDonough's Song_

Friendly Brook

_The Land_

In the Same Boat

'_Helen all Alone_'

The Honours of War

_The Children_

The Dog Hervey

_The Comforters_

The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat

_The Press_

In the Presence

_Jobson's Amen_

Regulus

_A Translation_

The Edge of the Evening

_Rebirth_

The Horse Marines

_The Legend of Mirth_

'My Son's Wife'

_The Floods_

_The Fabulists_

The Vortex

_The Song of Seven Cities_

'Swept and Garnished'

Mary Postgate

_The Beginnings_

A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES

As Easy as A.B.C.

(1912)

_The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score
persons, controls the Planet. Transportation is Civilisation, our motto
runs. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere
with the traffic_ and all it implies. _Practically, the A.B.C. confirms
or annuls all international arrangements, and, to judge from its last
report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little Planet only too ready
to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders_.

'With the Night Mail[1].'

[Footnote 1: _Actions and Reactions_.]

Isn't it almost time that our Planet took some interest in the
proceedings of the Aerial Board of Control? One knows that easy
communications nowadays, and lack of privacy in the past, have killed
all curiosity among mankind, but as the Board's Official Reporter I am
bound to tell my tale.

At 9.30 A.M., August 26, A.D. 2065, the Board, sitting in London, was
informed by De Forest that the District of Northern Illinois had
riotously cut itself out of all systems and would remain disconnected
till the Board should take over and administer it direct.

Every Northern Illinois freight and passenger tower was, he reported,
out of action; all District main, local, and guiding lights had been
extinguished; all General Communications were dumb, and through traffic
had been diverted. No reason had been given, but he gathered
unofficially from the Mayor of Chicago that the District complained of
'crowd-making and invasion of privacy.'

As a matter of fact, it is of no importance whether Northern Illinois
stay in or out of planetary circuit; as a matter of policy, any
complaint of invasion of privacy needs immediate investigation, lest
worse follow.

By 9-45 A.M. De Forest, Dragomiroff (Russia), Takahira (Japan), and
Pirolo (Italy) were empowered to visit Illinois and 'to take such steps
as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and _all that that
implies.'_ By 10 A.M. the Hall was empty, and the four Members and I
were aboard what Pirolo insisted on calling 'my leetle godchild'--that
is to say, the new _Victor Pirolo_. Our Planet prefers to know Victor
Pirolo as a gentle, grey-haired enthusiast who spends his time near
Foggia, inventing or creating new breeds of Spanish-Italian olive-trees;
but there is another side to his nature--the manufacture of quaint
inventions, of which the _Victor Pirolo_ is, perhaps, not the least
surprising. She and a few score sister-craft of the same type embody his
latest ideas. But she is not comfortable. An A.B.C. boat does not take
the air with the level-keeled lift of a liner, but shoots up
rocket-fashion like the 'aeroplane' of our ancestors, and makes her
height at top-speed from the first. That is why I found myself sitting
suddenly on the large lap of Eustace Arnott, who commands the A.B.C.
Fleet. One knows vaguely that there is such a thing as a Fleet somewhere
on the Planet, and that, theoretically, it exists for the purposes of
what used to be known as 'war.' Only a week before, while visiting a
glacier sanatorium behind Gothaven, I had seen some squadrons making
false auroras far to the north while they manoeuvred round the Pole;
but, naturally, it had never occurred to me that the things could be
used in earnest.

Said Arnott to De Forest as I staggered to a seat on the chart-room
divan: 'We're tremendously grateful to 'em in Illinois. We've never had
a chance of exercising all the Fleet together. I've turned in a General
Call, and I expect we'll have at least two hundred keels aloft
this evening.'

'Well aloft?' De Forest asked.

'Of course, sir. Out of sight till they're called for.'

Arnott laughed as he lolled over the transparent chart-table where the
map of the summer-blue Atlantic slid along, degree by degree, in exact
answer to our progress. Our dial already showed 320 m.p.h. and we were
two thousand feet above the uppermost traffic lines.

'Now, where is this Illinois District of yours?' said Dragomiroff. 'One
travels so much, one sees so little. Oh, I remember! It is in
North America.'

De Forest, whose business it is to know the out districts, told us that
it lay at the foot of Lake Michigan, on a road to nowhere in particular,
was about half an hour's run from end to end, and, except in one corner,
as flat as the sea. Like most flat countries nowadays, it was heavily
guarded against invasion of privacy by forced timber--fifty-foot spruce
and tamarack, grown in five years. The population was close on two
millions, largely migratory between Florida and California, with a
backbone of small farms (they call a thousand acres a farm in Illinois)
whose owners come into Chicago for amusements and society during the
winter. They were, he said, noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little
exacting, as all flat countries must be, in their notions of privacy.
There had, for instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for
twenty-seven years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner
or later developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn
might bring the old terror of Crowds and blackmail back to the Planet.
So news-sheets were not.

'And that's Illinois,' De Forest concluded. 'You see, in the Old Days,
she was in the forefront of what they used to call "progress," and
Chicago--'

'Chicago?' said Takahira. 'That's the little place where there is
Salati's Statue of the Nigger in Flames? A fine bit of old work.'

'When did you see it?' asked De Forest quickly. 'They only unveil it
once a year.'

'I know. At Thanksgiving. It was then,' said Takahira, with a shudder.
'And they sang MacDonough's Song, too.'

'Whew!' De Forest whistled. 'I did not know that! I wish you'd told me
before. MacDonough's Song may have had its uses when it was composed,
but it was an infernal legacy for any man to leave behind.'

'It's protective instinct, my dear fellows,' said Pirolo, rolling a
cigarette. 'The Planet, she has had her dose of popular government. She
suffers from inherited agoraphobia. She has no--ah--use for Crowds.'

Dragomiroff leaned forward to give him a light. 'Certainly,' said the
white-bearded Russian, 'the Planet has taken all precautions against
Crowds for the past hundred years. What is our total population to-day?
Six hundred million, we hope; five hundred, we think; but--but if next
year's census shows more than four hundred and fifty, I myself will eat
all the extra little babies. We have cut the birth-rate out--right out!
For a long time we have said to Almighty God, "Thank You, Sir, but we do
not much like Your game of life, so we will not play."'

'Anyhow,' said Arnott defiantly, 'men live a century apiece on the
average now.'

'Oh, that is quite well! I am rich--you are rich--we are all rich and
happy because we are so few and we live so long. Only _I_ think Almighty
God He will remember what the Planet was like in the time of Crowds and
the Plague. Perhaps He will send us nerves. Eh, Pirolo?'

The Italian blinked into space. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'He has sent them
already. Anyhow, you cannot argue with the Planet. She does not forget
the Old Days, and--what can you do?'

'For sure we can't remake the world.' De Forest glanced at the map
flowing smoothly across the table from west to east. 'We ought to be
over our ground by nine to-night. There won't be much sleep afterwards.'

On which hint we dispersed, and I slept till Takahira waked me for
dinner. Our ancestors thought nine hours' sleep ample for their little
lives. We, living thirty years longer, feel ourselves defrauded with
less than eleven out of the twenty-four.

By ten o'clock we were over Lake Michigan. The west shore was lightless,
except for a dull ground-glare at Chicago, and a single
traffic-directing light--its leading beam pointing north--at Waukegan on
our starboard bow. None of the Lake villages gave any sign of life; and
inland, westward, so far as we could see, blackness lay unbroken on the
level earth. We swooped down and skimmed low across the dark, throwing
calls county by county. Now and again we picked up the faint glimmer of
a house-light, or heard the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played
across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky,
apparently uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our
illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county
as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls,
urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General
Communicator brought no answer.' Illinois strictly maintained her own
privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.

'Oh, this is absurd!' said De Forest. 'We're like an owl trying to work
a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let's land, Arnott, and get hold of
some one.'

We brushed over a belt of forced woodland--fifteen-year-old maple sixty
feet high--grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we
moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm dark night
towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have
sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag
our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five
paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry
smooth turf as so many cows in a bog.

'Pest!' cried Pirolo angrily. 'We are ground-circuited. And it is my own
system of ground-circuits too! I know the pull.'

'Good evening,' said a girl's voice from the verandah. 'Oh, I'm sorry!
We've locked up. Wait a minute.'

We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents
round our knees were withdrawn.

The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned
Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and
we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile
away, behind the guardian woods.

'Come in and sit down,' she said. 'I'm only playing a plough. Dad's
gone to Chicago to--Ah! Then it was _your_ call I heard just now!'

She had caught sight of Arnott's Board uniform, leaped to the switch,
and turned it full on.

We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three yards
from the verandah.

'We only want to know what's the matter with Illinois,' said De Forest
placidly.

'Then hadn't you better go to Chicago and find out?' she answered.
'There's nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.'

'How can we go anywhere if you won't loose us?' De Forest went on, while
Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human when their
dignity is touched.

'Stop a minute--you don't know how funny you look!' She put her hands on
her hips and laughed mercilessly.

'Don't worry about that,' said Arnott, and whistled. A voice answered
from the _Victor Pirolo_ in the meadow.

'Only a single-fuse ground-circuit!' Arnott called. 'Sort it out gently,
please.'

We heard the ping of a breaking lamp; a fuse blew out somewhere in the
verandah roof, frightening a nestful of birds. The ground-circuit was
open. We stooped and rubbed our tingling ankles.

'How rude--how very rude of you!' the maiden cried.

''Sorry, but we haven't time to look funny,' said Arnott. 'We've got to
go to Chicago; and if I were you, young lady, I'd go into the cellars
for the next two hours, and take mother with me.'

Off he strode, with us at his heels, muttering indignantly, till the
humour of the thing struck and doubled him up with laughter at the foot
of the gang-way ladder.

'The Board hasn't shown what you might call a fat spark on this
occasion,' said De Forest, wiping his eyes. 'I hope I didn't look as big
a fool as you did, Arnott! Hullo! What on earth is that? Dad coming home
from Chicago?'

There was a rattle and a rush, and a five-plough cultivator, blades in
air like so many teeth, trundled itself at us round the edge of the
timber, fuming and sparking furiously.

'Jump!' said Arnott, as we bundled ourselves through the none-too-wide
door. 'Never mind about shutting it. Up!'

The _Victor Pirolo_ lifted like a bubble, and the vicious machine shot
just underneath us, clawing high as it passed.

'There's a nice little spit-kitten for you!' said Arnott, dusting his
knees. 'We ask her a civil question. First she circuits us and then she
plays a cultivator at us!'

'And then we fly,' said Dragomiroff. 'If I were forty years more young,
I would go back and kiss her. Ho! Ho!'

'I,' said Pirolo, 'would smack her! My pet ship has been chased by a
dirty plough; a--how do you say?--agricultural implement.'

'Oh, that is Illinois all over,' said De Forest. 'They don't content
themselves with talking about privacy. They arrange to have it. And now,
where's your alleged fleet, Arnott? We must assert ourselves against
this wench.'

Arnott pointed to the black heavens.

'Waiting on--up there,' said he. 'Shall I give them the whole
installation, sir?'

'Oh, I don't think the young lady is quite worth that,' said De Forest.
'Get over Chicago, and perhaps we'll see something.'

In a few minutes we were hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong
block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.

'That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there's Salati's Statue in
front of it,' said Takahira. 'But what on earth are they doing to the
place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a
little, please.'

We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines--the
cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed
glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on
each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled,
slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky
slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a
third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red
before our astonished eyes.

'It is the Old Market,' said De Forest. 'Well, there's nothing to
prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn't
interfere with traffic, that I can see.'

'Hsh!' said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. 'Listen! They're
singing. Why on the earth are they singing?'

We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at the
edge of that glowing square.

At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and
levellers. Then the words came up clearly--the words of the Forbidden
Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips--poor Pat
MacDonough's Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague--every
silly word of it loaded to sparking-point with the Planet's inherited
memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago--innocent,
contented little Chicago--was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that
carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few
generations ago!

'Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People, and it made a hell of earth!'

(Then the stamp and pause):

'Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, oh, ye slain!
Once there was The People--it shall never be again!'

The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed
itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the
melting walls.

De Forest frowned.

'I don't like that,' he said. 'They've broken back to the Old Days!
They'll be killing somebody soon. I think we'd better divert
'em, Arnott.'

'Ay, ay, sir.' Arnott's hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of
the _Victor Pirolo_ ring to the command: 'Lamps! Both watches stand by!
Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!'

'Keep still!' Takahira whispered to me. 'Blinkers, please,
quartermaster.'

'It's all right--all right!' said Pirolo from behind, and to my horror
slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked with a snap.
I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but I stood in
absolute darkness.

'To save the sight,' he explained, and pushed me on to the chart-room
divan. 'You will see in a minute.'

As he spoke I became aware of a thin thread of almost intolerable light,
let down from heaven at an immense distance--one vertical hairsbreadth
of frozen lightning.

'Those are our flanking ships,' said Arnott at my elbow. 'That one is
over Galena. Look south--that other one's over Keithburg. Vincennes is
behind us, and north yonder is Winthrop Woods. The Fleet's in position,
sir'--this to De Forest. 'As soon as you give the word.'

'Ah no! No!' cried Dragomiroff at my side. I could feel the old man
tremble. 'I do not know all that you can do, but be kind! I ask you to
be a little kind to them below! This is horrible--horrible!'

'When a Woman kills a Chicken,
Dynasties and Empires sicken,'

Takahira quoted. 'It is too late to be gentle now.'

'Then take off my helmet! Take off my helmet!' Dragomiroff began
hysterically.

Pirolo must have put his arm round him.

'Hush,' he said, 'I am here. It is all right, Ivan, my dear fellow.'

'I'll just send our little girl in Bureau County a warning,' said
Arnott. 'She don't deserve it, but we'll allow her a minute or two to
take mamma to the cellar.'

In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott had
linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we heard
MacDonough's Song from the city beneath us grow fainter as we rose to
position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for it was as
though the floor of Heaven had been riddled and all the inconceivable
blaze of suns in the making was poured through the manholes.

'You needn't count,' said Arnott. I had had no thought of such a thing.
'There are two hundred and fifty keels up there, five miles apart. Full
power, please, for another twelve seconds.'

The firmament, as far as eye could reach, stood on pillars of white
fire. One fell on the glowing square at Chicago, and turned it black.

'Oh! Oh! Oh! Can men be allowed to do such things?' Dragomiroff cried,
and fell across our knees.

'Glass of water, please,' said Takahira to a helmeted shape that leaped
forward. 'He is a little faint.'

The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an avalanche. We
could hear Dragomiroff's teeth on the glass edge.

Pirolo was comforting him.

'All right, all ra-ight,' he repeated. 'Come and lie down. Come below
and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is all right.
They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo's leetle lights. You know
_me_! I do not hurt people.'

'Pardon!' Dragomiroff moaned. 'I have never seen Death. I have never
seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them alive, or is
that already done?'

'Oh, hush,' said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his arms.

'Do we repeat, sir?' Arnott asked De Forest.

'Give 'em a minute's break,' De Forest replied. 'They may need it.'

We waited a minute, and then MacDonough's Song, broken but defiant, rose
from undefeated Chicago.

'They seem fond of that tune,' said De Forest. 'I should let 'em have
it, Arnott.'

'Very good, sir,' said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator
keys.

No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the
mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear
such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the
ruled foreshores of space.

'That's our pitch-pipe,' said Arnott. 'We may be a bit ragged. I've
never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.' He pulled out
the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service Communicators.

The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully,
a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each
stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered itself--there is no
scale to measure against that utterance--of the tune to which they kept
time. Certain notes--one learnt to expect them with terror--cut through
one's marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in
indescribable agony.

We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The two
hundred and fifty beams shifted, re-formed, straddled and split,
narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot
parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like
old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to
descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled
insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the
hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed
light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together, and
we heard one single devastating wail that shook all the horizon as a
rubbed wet finger shakes the rim of a bowl.

'Ah, that is my new siren,' said Pirolo. 'You can break an iceberg in
half, if you find the proper pitch. They will whistle by squadrons now.
It is the wind through pierced shutters in the bows.'

I had collapsed beside Dragomiroff, broken and snivelling feebly,
because I had been delivered before my time to all the terrors of
Judgment Day, and the Archangels of the Resurrection were hailing me
naked across the Universe to the sound of the music of the spheres.

Then I saw De Forest smacking Arnott's helmet with his open hand. The
wailing died down in a long shriek as a black shadow swooped past us,
and returned to her place above the lower clouds.

'I hate to interrupt a specialist when he's enjoying himself,' said De
Forest. 'But, as a matter of fact, all Illinois has been asking us to
stop for these last fifteen seconds.'

'What a pity.' Arnott slipped off his mask. 'I wanted you to hear us
really hum. Our lower C can lift street-paving.'

'It is Hell--Hell!' cried Dragomiroff, and sobbed aloud.

Arnott looked away as he answered:

'It's a few thousand volts ahead of the old shoot-'em-and-sink-'em game,
but I should scarcely call it _that_. What shall I tell the Fleet, sir?'

'Tell 'em we're very pleased and impressed. I don't think they need wait
on any longer. There isn't a spark left down there.' De Forest pointed.
'They'll be deaf and blind.'

'Oh, I think not, sir. The demonstration lasted less than ten minutes.'

'Marvellous!' Takahira sighed. 'I should have said it was half a night.
Now, shall we go down and pick up the pieces?'

'But first a small drink,' said Pirolo. 'The Board must not arrive
weeping at its own works.'

'I am an old fool--an old fool!' Dragomiroff began piteously. 'I did not
know what would happen. It is all new to me. We reason with them in
Little Russia.'

Chicago North landing-tower was unlighted, and Arnott worked his ship
into the clips by her own lights. As soon as these broke out we heard
groanings of horror and appeal from many people below.

'All right,' shouted Arnott into the darkness. 'We aren't beginning
again!' We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee-deep in a
grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us
not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face
downward, their hands or their caps before their eyes.

It was Pirolo who came to our rescue. He climbed the side of a
surfacing-machine, and there, gesticulating as though they could see,
made oration to those afflicted people of Illinois.

'You stchewpids!' he began. 'There is nothing to fuss for. Of course,
your eyes will smart and be red to-morrow. You will look as if you and
your wives had drunk too much, but in a little while you will see again
as well as before. I tell you this, and I--I am Pirolo. Victor Pirolo!'

The crowd with one accord shuddered, for many legends attach to Victor
Pirolo of Foggia, deep in the secrets of God.

'Pirolo?' An unsteady voice lifted itself. 'Then tell us was there
anything except light in those lights of yours just now?'

The question was repeated from every corner of the darkness.

Pirolo laughed.

'No!' he thundered. (Why have small men such large voices?) 'I give you
my word and the Board's word that there was nothing except light--just
light! You stchewpids! Your birth-rate is too low already as it is. Some
day I must invent something to send it up, but send it down--never!'

'Is that true?--We thought--somebody said--'

One could feel the tension relax all round.

'You too big fools,' Pirolo cried. 'You could have sent us a call and we
would have told you.'

'Send you a call!' a deep voice shouted. 'I wish you had been at our end
of the wire.'

'I'm glad I wasn't,' said De Forest. 'It was bad enough from behind the
lamps. Never mind! It's over now. Is there any one here I can talk
business with? I'm De Forest--for the Board.'

'You might begin with me, for one--I'm Mayor,' the bass voice replied.

A big man rose unsteadily from the street, and staggered towards us
where we sat on the broad turf-edging, in front of the garden fences.

'I ought to be the first on my feet. Am I?' said he.

'Yes,' said De Forest, and steadied him as he dropped down beside us.

'Hello, Andy. Is that you?' a voice called.

'Excuse me,' said the Mayor; 'that sounds like my Chief of Police,
Bluthner!'

'Bluthner it is; and here's Mulligan and Keefe--on their feet.'

'Bring 'em up please, Blut. We're supposed to be the Four in charge of
this hamlet. What we says, goes. And, De Forest, what do you say?'

'Nothing--yet,' De Forest answered, as we made room for the panting,
reeling men. '_You've_ cut out of system. Well?'

'Tell the steward to send down drinks, please,' Arnott whispered to an
orderly at his side.

'Good!' said the Mayor, smacking his dry lips. 'Now I suppose we can
take it, De Forest, that henceforward the Board will administer
us direct?'

'Not if the Board can avoid it,' De Forest laughed. 'The A.B.C. is
responsible for the planetary traffic only.'

'_And all that that implies_.' The big Four who ran Chicago chanted
their Magna Charta like children at school.

'Well, get on,' said De Forest wearily. 'What is your silly trouble
anyway?'

'Too much dam' Democracy,' said the Mayor, laying his hand on De
Forest's knee.

'So? I thought Illinois had had her dose of that.'

'She has. That's why. Blut, what did you do with our prisoners last
night?'

'Locked 'em in the water-tower to prevent the women killing 'em,' the
Chief of Police replied. 'I'm too blind to move just yet, but--'

'Arnott, send some of your people, please, and fetch 'em along,' said De
Forest.

'They're triple-circuited,' the Mayor called. 'You'll have to blow out
three fuses.' He turned to De Forest, his large outline just visible in
the paling darkness. 'I hate to throw any more work on the Board. I'm an
administrator myself, but we've had a little fuss with our Serviles.
What? In a big city there's bound to be a few men and women who can't
live without listening to themselves, and who prefer drinking out of
pipes they don't own both ends of. They inhabit flats and hotels all the
year round. They say it saves 'em trouble. Anyway, it gives 'em more
time to make trouble for their neighbours. We call 'em Serviles locally.
And they are apt to be tuberculous.'

'Just so!' said the man called Mulligan. Transportation is Civilisation.
Democracy is Disease. I've proved it by the blood-test, every time.'

'Mulligan's our Health Officer, and a one-idea man,' said the Mayor,
laughing. 'But it's true that most Serviles haven't much control. They
_will_ talk; and when people take to talking as a business, anything may
arrive--mayn't it, De Forest?'

'Anything--except the facts of the case,' said De Forest, laughing.

'I'll give you those in a minute,' said the Mayor. 'Our Serviles got to
talking--first in their houses and then on the streets, telling men and
women how to manage their own affairs. (You can't teach a Servile not to
finger his neighbour's soul.) That's invasion of privacy, of course, but
in Chicago we'll suffer anything sooner than make Crowds. Nobody took
much notice, and so I let 'em alone. My fault! I was warned there would
be trouble, but there hasn't been a Crowd or murder in Illinois for
nineteen years.'

'Twenty-two,' said his Chief of Police.

'Likely. Anyway, we'd forgot such things. So, from talking in the houses
and on the streets, our Serviles go to calling a meeting at the Old
Market yonder.' He nodded across the square where the wrecked buildings
heaved up grey in the dawn-glimmer behind the square-cased statue of The
Negro in Flames. 'There's nothing to prevent any one calling meetings
except that it's against human nature to stand in a Crowd, besides being
bad for the health. I ought to have known by the way our men and women
attended that first meeting that trouble was brewing. There were as many
as a thousand in the market-place, touching each other. Touching! Then
the Serviles turned in all tongue-switches and talked, and we--'

'What did they talk about?' said Takahira.

'First, how badly things were managed in the city. That pleased us
Four--we were on the platform--because we hoped to catch one or two
good men for City work. You know how rare executive capacity is. Even if
we didn't it's--it's refreshing to find any one interested enough in our
job to damn our eyes. You don't know what it means to work, year in,
year out, without a spark of difference with a living soul.'

'Oh, don't we!' said De Forest. 'There are times on the Board when we'd
give our positions if any one would kick us out and take hold of things
themselves.'

'But they won't,' said the Mayor ruefully. 'I assure you, sir, we Four
have done things in Chicago, in the hope of rousing people, that would
have discredited Nero. But what do they say? "Very good, Andy. Have it
your own way. Anything's better than a Crowd. I'll go back to my land."
You _can't_ do anything with folk who can go where they please, and
don't want anything on God's earth except their own way. There isn't a
kick or a kicker left on the Planet.'

'Then I suppose that little shed yonder fell down by itself?' said De
Forest. We could see the bare and still smoking ruins, and hear the
slag-pools crackle as they hardened and set.

'Oh, that's only amusement. 'Tell you later. As I was saying, our
Serviles held the meeting, and pretty soon we had to ground-circuit the
platform to save 'em from being killed. And that didn't make our people
any more pacific.'

'How d'you mean?' I ventured to ask.

'If you've ever been ground-circuited,' said the Mayor, 'you'll know it
don't improve any man's temper to be held up straining against nothing.
No, sir! Eight or nine hundred folk kept pawing and buzzing like flies
in treacle for two hours, while a pack of perfectly safe Serviles
invades their mental and spiritual privacy, may be amusing to watch, but
they are not pleasant to handle afterwards.'

Pirolo chuckled.

'Our folk own themselves. They were of opinion things were going too far
and too fiery. I warned the Serviles; but they're born house-dwellers.
Unless a fact hits 'em on the head they cannot see it. Would you believe
me, they went on to talk of what they called "popular government"? They
did! They wanted us to go back to the old Voodoo-business of voting with
papers and wooden boxes, and word-drunk people and printed formulas, and
news-sheets! They said they practised it among themselves about what
they'd have to eat in their flats and hotels. Yes, sir! They stood up
behind Bluthner's doubled ground-circuits, and they said that, in this
present year of grace, _to_ self-owning men and women, _on_ that very
spot! Then they finished'--he lowered his voice cautiously--'by talking
about "The People." And then Bluthner he had to sit up all night in
charge of the circuits because he couldn't trust his men to keep
'em shut.'

'It was trying 'em too high,' the Chief of Police broke in. 'But we
couldn't hold the Crowd ground-circuited for ever. I gathered in all the
Serviles on charge of Crowd-making, and put 'em in the water-tower, and
then I let things cut loose. I had to! The District lit like a sparked
gas-tank!'

'The news was out over seven degrees of country,' the Mayor continued;
'and when once it's a question of invasion of privacy, good-bye to right
and reason in Illinois! They began turning out traffic-lights and
locking up landing-towers on Thursday night. Friday, they stopped all
traffic and asked for the Board to take over. Then they wanted to clean
Chicago off the side of the Lake and rebuild elsewhere--just for a
souvenir of "The People" that the Serviles talked about. I suggested
that they should slag the Old Market where the meeting was held, while I
turned in a call to you all on the Board. That kept 'em quiet till you
came along. And--and now _you_ can take hold of the situation.'

'Any chance of their quieting down?' De Forest asked.

'You can try,' said the Mayor.

De Forest raised his voice in the face of the reviving Crowd that had
edged in towards us. Day was come.

'Don't you think this business can be arranged?' he began. But there was
a roar of angry voices:

'We've finished with Crowds! We aren't going back to the Old Days! Take
us over! Take the Serviles away! Administer direct or we'll kill 'em!
Down with The People!'

An attempt was made to begin MacDonough's Song. It got no further than
the first line, for the _Victor Pirolo_ sent down a warning drone on one
stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old Market tottered and fell
inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or moved till the last of the dust
had settled down again, turning the steel case of Salad's Statue
ashy grey.

'You see you'll just _have_ to take us over,' the Mayor whispered.

De Forest shrugged his shoulders.

'You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the air like
so much horse-power. Can't you manage yourselves on any terms?' he said.

'We can, if you say so. It will only cost those few lives to begin
with,'

The Mayor pointed across the square, where Arnott's men guided a
stumbling group of ten or twelve men and women to the lake front and
halted them under the Statue.

'Now I think,' said Takahira under his breath, 'there will be trouble.'

The mass in front of us growled like beasts.

At that moment the sun rose clear, and revealed the blinking assembly to
itself. As soon as it realized that it was a crowd we saw the shiver of
horror and mutual repulsion shoot across it precisely as the steely
flaws shot across the lake outside. Nothing was said, and, being half
blind, of course it moved slowly. Yet in less than fifteen minutes most
of that vast multitude--three thousand at the lowest count--melted away
like frost on south eaves. The remnant stretched themselves on the
grass, where a crowd feels and looks less like a crowd.

'These mean business,' the Mayor whispered to Takahira. 'There are a
goodish few women there who've borne children. I don't like it.'

The morning draught off the lake stirred the trees round us with promise
of a hot day; the sun reflected itself dazzlingly on the canister-shaped
covering of Salati's Statue; cocks crew in the gardens, and we could
hear gate-latches clicking in the distance as people stumblingly
resought their homes.

'I'm afraid there won't be any morning deliveries,' said De Forest. 'We
rather upset things in the country last night.'

'That makes no odds,' the Mayor returned. 'We're all provisioned for six
months. _We_ take no chances.'

Nor, when you come to think of it, does any one else. It must be
three-quarters of a generation since any house or city faced a food
shortage. Yet is there house or city on the Planet to-day that has not
half a year's provisions laid in? We are like the shipwrecked seamen in
the old books, who, having once nearly starved to death, ever afterwards
hide away bits of food and biscuit. Truly we trust no Crowds, nor system
based on Crowds!

De Forest waited till the last footstep had died away. Meantime the
prisoners at the base of the Statue shuffled, posed, and fidgeted, with
the shamelessness of quite little children. None of them were more than
six feet high, and many of them were as grey-haired as the ravaged,
harassed heads of old pictures. They huddled together in actual touch,
while the crowd, spaced at large intervals, looked at them with
congested eyes.

Suddenly a man among them began to talk. The Mayor had not in the least
exaggerated. It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in slavery beneath the
heel of the Aerial Board of Control. The orator urged us to arise in our
might, burst our prison doors and break our fetters (all his metaphors,
by the way, were of the most mediaeval). Next he demanded that every
matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions, should
be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I
gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a
certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns
to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the
crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which
rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and
oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us, would automatically
arise a higher, nobler, and kinder world, based--he demonstrated this
with the awful lucidity of the insane--based on the sanctity of the
Crowd and the villainy of the single person. In conclusion, he called
loudly upon God to testify to his personal merits and integrity. When
the flow ceased, I turned bewildered to Takahira, who was
nodding solemnly.

'Quite correct,' said he. 'It is all in the old books. He has left
nothing out, not even the war-talk.'

'But I don't see how this stuff can upset a child, much less a
district,' I replied.

'Ah, you are too young,' said Dragomiroff. 'For another thing, you are
not a mamma. Please look at the mammas.'

Ten or fifteen women who remained had separated themselves from the
silent men, and were drawing in towards the prisoners. It reminded one
of the stealthy encircling, before the rush in at the quarry, of wolves
round musk-oxen in the North. The prisoners saw, and drew together more
closely. The Mayor covered his face with his hands for an instant. De
Forest, bareheaded, stepped forward between the prisoners, and the
slowly, stiffly moving line.

'That's all very interesting,' he said to the dry-lipped orator. 'But
the point seems that you've been making crowds and invading privacy.'

A woman stepped forward, and would have spoken, but there was a quick
assenting murmur from the men, who realised that De Forest was trying to
pull the situation down to ground-line.

'Yes! Yes!' they cried. 'We cut out because they made crowds and invaded
privacy! Stick to that! Keep on that switch! Lift the Serviles out of
this! The Board's in charge! Hsh!'

'Yes, the Board's in charge,' said De Forest. 'I'll take formal evidence
of crowd-making if you like, but the Members of the Board can testify to
it. Will that do?'

The women had closed in another pace, with hands that clenched and
unclenched at their sides.

'Good! Good enough!' the men cried. 'We're content. Only take them away
quickly.'

'Come along up!' said De Forest to the captives, 'Breakfast is quite
ready.'

It appeared, however, that they did not wish to go. They intended to
remain in Chicago and make crowds. They pointed out that De Forest's
proposal was gross invasion of privacy.

'My dear fellow,' said Pirolo to the most voluble of the leaders, 'you
hurry, or your crowd that can't be wrong will kill you!'

'But that would be murder,' answered the believer in crowds; and there
was a roar of laughter from all sides that seemed to show the crisis
had broken.

A woman stepped forward from the line of women, laughing, I protest, as
merrily as any of the company. One hand, of course, shaded her eyes, the
other was at her throat.

'Oh, they needn't be afraid of being killed!' she called.

'Not in the least,' said De Forest. 'But don't you think that, now the
Board's in charge, you might go home while we get these people away?'

'I shall be home long before that. It--it has been rather a trying day.'

She stood up to her full height, dwarfing even De Forest's
six-foot-eight, and smiled, with eyes closed against the fierce light.

'Yes, rather,' said De Forest. 'I'm afraid you feel the glare a little.
We'll have the ship down.'

He motioned to the _Pirolo_ to drop between us and the sun, and at the
same time to loop-circuit the prisoners, who were a trifle unsteady. We
saw them stiffen to the current where they stood. The woman's voice went
on, sweet and deep and unshaken:

'I don't suppose you men realise how much this--this sort of thing means
to a woman. I've borne three. We women don't want our children given to
Crowds. It must be an inherited instinct. Crowds make trouble. They
bring back the Old Days. Hate, fear, blackmail, publicity, "The
People"--_That! That! That_!' She pointed to the Statue, and the crowd
growled once more.

'Yes, if they are allowed to go on,' said De Forest. 'But this little
affair--'

'It means so much to us women that this--this little affair should never
happen again. Of course, never's a big word, but one feels so strongly
that it is important to stop crowds at the very beginning. Those
creatures'--she pointed with her left hand at the prisoners swaying like
seaweed in a tideway as the circuit pulled them--'those people have
friends and wives and children in the city and elsewhere. One doesn't
want anything done to _them_, you know. It's terrible to force a human
being out of fifty or sixty years of good life. I'm only forty myself.
_I_ know. But, at the same time, one feels that an example should be
made, because no price is too heavy to pay if--if these people and _all
that they imply_ can be put an end to. Do you quite understand, or would
you be kind enough to tell your men to take the casing off the Statue?
It's worth looking at.'

'I understand perfectly. But I don't think anybody here wants to see
the Statue on an empty stomach. Excuse me one moment.' De Forest called
up to the ship, 'A flying loop ready on the port side, if you please.'
Then to the woman he said with some crispness, 'You might leave us a
little discretion in the matter.'

'Oh, of course. Thank you for being so patient. I know my arguments are
silly, but--' She half turned away and went on in a changed voice,
'Perhaps this will help you to decide.'

She threw out her right arm with a knife in it. Before the blade could
be returned to her throat or her bosom it was twitched from her grip,
sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above, and fell
flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue fifty yards away. The
outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an instant, till the
releasing circuit permitted her to bring it slowly to her side. The
other women shrank back silent among the men.

Pirolo rubbed his hands, and Takahira nodded.

'That was clever of you, De Forest,' said he.

'What a glorious pose!' Dragomiroff murmured, for the frightened woman
was on the edge of tears.

'Why did you stop me? I would have done it!' she cried.

'I have no doubt you would,' said De Forest. 'But we can't waste a life
like yours on these people. I hope the arrest didn't sprain your wrist;
it's so hard to regulate a flying loop. But I think you are quite right
about those persons' women and children. We'll take them all away with
us if you promise not to do anything stupid to yourself.'

'I promise--I promise.' She controlled herself with an effort. 'But it
is so important to us women. We know what it means; and I thought if you
saw I was in earnest--'

'I saw you were, and you've gained your point. I shall take all your
Serviles away with me at once. The Mayor will make lists of their
friends and families in the city and the district, and he'll ship them
after us this afternoon.'

'Sure,' said the Mayor, rising to his feet. 'Keefe, if you can see,
hadn't you better finish levelling off the Old Market? It don't look
sightly the way it is now, and we shan't use it for crowds any more.'

'I think you had better wipe out that Statue as well, Mr. Mayor,' said
De Forest. 'I don't question its merits as a work of art, but I believe
it's a shade morbid.'

'Certainly, sir. Oh, Keefe! Slag the Nigger before you go on to fuse the
Market. I'll get to the Communicators and tell the District that the
Board is in charge. Are you making any special appointments, sir?'

'None. We haven't men to waste on these back-woods. Carry on as before,
but under the Board. Arnott, run your Serviles aboard, please. Ground
ship and pass them through the bilge-doors. We'll wait till we've
finished with this work of art.'

The prisoners trailed past him, talking fluently, but unable to
gesticulate in the drag of the current. Then the surfacers rolled up,
two on each side of the Statue. With one accord the spectators looked
elsewhere, but there was no need. Keefe turned on full power, and the
thing simply melted within its case. All I saw was a surge of white-hot
metal pouring over the plinth, a glimpse of Salad's inscription, 'To the
Eternal Memory of the Justice of the People,' ere the stone base itself
cracked and powdered into finest lime. The crowd cheered.

'Thank you,' said De Forest; 'but we want our break-fasts, and I expect
you do too. Good-bye, Mr. Mayor! Delighted to see you at any time, but I
hope I shan't have to, officially, for the next thirty years. Good-bye,
madam. Yes. We're all given to nerves nowadays. I suffer from them
myself. Good-bye, gentlemen all! You're under the tyrannous heel of the
Board from this moment, but if ever you feel like breaking your fetters
you've only to let us know. This is no treat to us. Good luck!'

We embarked amid shouts, and did not check our lift till they had
dwindled into whispers. Then De Forest flung himself on the chart-room
divan and mopped his forehead.

'I don't mind men,' he panted, 'but women are the devil!'

'Still the devil,' said Pirolo cheerfully. 'That one would have
suicided.'

'I know it. That was why I signalled for the flying loop to be clapped
on her. I owe you an apology for that, Arnott. I hadn't time to catch
your eye, and you were busy with our caitiffs. By the way, who actually
answered my signal? It was a smart piece of work.'

'Ilroy,' said Arnott; 'but he overloaded the wave. It may be pretty
gallery-work to knock a knife out of a lady's hand, but didn't you
notice how she rubbed 'em? He scorched her fingers. Slovenly, I
call it.'

'Far be it from me to interfere with Fleet discipline, but don't be too
hard on the boy. If that woman had killed herself they would have killed
every Servile and everything related to a Servile throughout the
district by nightfall.'

'That was what she was playing for,' Takahira said. 'And with our Fleet
gone we could have done nothing to hold them.'

'I may be ass enough to walk into a ground-circuit,' said Arnott, 'but I
don't dismiss my Fleet till I'm reasonably sure that trouble is over.
They're in position still, and I intend to keep 'em there till the
Serviles are shipped out of the district. That last little crowd meant
murder, my friends.'

'Nerves! All nerves!' said Pirolo. 'You cannot argue with agoraphobia.'

'And it is not as if they had seen much dead--or _is_ it?' said
Takahira.

'In all my ninety years I have never seen Death.' Dragomiroff spoke as
one who would excuse himself. 'Perhaps that was why--last night--'

Then it came out as we sat over breakfast, that, with the exception of
Arnott and Pirolo, none of us had ever seen a corpse, or knew in what
manner the spirit passes.

'We're a nice lot to flap about governing the Planet,' De Forest
laughed. 'I confess, now it's all over, that my main fear was I mightn't
be able to pull it off without losing a life.'

'I thought of that too,' said Arnott; 'but there's no death reported,
and I've inquired everywhere. What are we supposed to do with our
passengers? I've fed 'em.'

'We're between two switches,' De Forest drawled. 'If we drop them in any
place that isn't under the Board the natives will make their presence an
excuse for cutting out, same as Illinois did, and forcing the Board to
take over. If we drop them in any place under the Board's control
they'll be killed as soon as our backs are turned.'

'If you say so,' said Pirolo thoughtfully, 'I can guarantee that they
will become extinct in process of time, quite happily. What is their
birth-rate now?'

'Go down and ask 'em,' said De Forest.

'I think they might become nervous and tear me to bits,' the philosopher
of Foggia replied.

'Not really? Well?'

'Open the bilge-doors,' said Takahira with a downward jerk of the thumb.

'Scarcely--after all the trouble we've taken to save 'em,' said De
Forest.

'Try London,' Arnott suggested. 'You could turn Satan himself loose
there, and they'd only ask him to dinner.'

'Good man! You've given me an idea. Vincent! Oh, Vincent!' He threw the
General Communicator open so that we could all hear, and in a few
minutes the chart-room filled with the rich, fruity voice of Leopold
Vincent, who has purveyed all London her choicest amusements for the
last thirty years. We answered with expectant grins, as though we were
actually in the stalls of, say, the Combination on a first night.

'We've picked up something in your line,' De Forest began.

'That's good, dear man. If it's old enough. There's nothing to beat the
old things for business purposes. Have you seen _London, Chatham, and
Dover_ at Earl's Court? No? I thought I missed you there. Immense! I've
had the real steam locomotive engines built from the old designs and the
iron rails cast specially by hand. Cloth cushions in the carriages, too!
Immense! And paper railway tickets. And Polly Milton.'

'Polly Milton back again!' said Arnott rapturously. 'Book me two stalls
for to-morrow night. What's she singing now, bless her?'

'The old songs. Nothing comes up to the old touch. Listen to this, dear
men.' Vincent carolled with flourishes:

Oh, cruel lamps of London,
If tears your light could drown,
Your victims' eyes would weep them,
Oh, lights of London Town!

'Then they weep.'

'You see?' Pirolo waved his hands at us. 'The old world always weeped
when it saw crowds together. It did not know why, but it weeped. We know
why, but we do not weep, except when we pay to be made to by fat, wicked
old Vincent.'

'Old, yourself!' Vincent laughed. 'I'm a public benefactor, I keep the
world soft and united.'

'And I'm De Forest of the Board,' said De Forest acidly, 'trying to get
a little business done. As I was saying, I've picked up a few people
in Chicago.'

'I cut out. Chicago is--'

'Do listen! They're perfectly unique.'

'Do they build houses of baked mudblocks while you wait--eh? That's an
old contact.'

'They're an untouched primitive community, with all the old ideas.'

'Sewing-machines and maypole-dances? Cooking on coal-gas stoves,
lighting pipes with matches, and driving horses? Gerolstein tried that
last year. An absolute blow-out!'

De Forest plugged him wrathfully, and poured out the story of our doings
for the last twenty-four hours on the top-note.

'And they do it _all_ in public,' he concluded. 'You can't stop 'em. The
more public, the better they are pleased. They'll talk for hours--like
you! Now you can come in again!'

'Do you really mean they know how to vote?' said Vincent. 'Can they act
it?'

'Act? It's their life to 'em! And you never saw such faces! Scarred
like volcanoes. Envy, hatred, and malice in plain sight. Wonderfully
flexible voices. They weep, too.'

'Aloud? In public?'

'I guarantee. Not a spark of shame or reticence in the entire
installation. It's the chance of your career.'

'D'you say you've brought their voting props along--those papers and
ballot-box things?'

'No, confound you! I'm not a luggage-lifter. Apply direct to the Mayor
of Chicago. He'll forward you everything. Well?'

'Wait a minute. Did Chicago want to kill 'em? That 'ud look well on the
Communicators.'

'Yes! They were only rescued with difficulty from a howling mob--if you
know what that is.'

'But I don't,' answered the Great Vincent simply.

'Well then, they'll tell you themselves. They can make speeches hours
long.'

'How many are there?'

'By the time we ship 'em all over they'll be perhaps a hundred, counting
children. An old world in miniature. Can't you see it?'

'M-yes; but I've got to pay for it if it's a blow-out, dear man.'

'They can sing the old war songs in the streets. They can get
word-drunk, and make crowds, and invade privacy in the genuine
old-fashioned way; and they'll do the voting trick as often as you ask
'em a question.'

'Too good!' said Vincent.

'You unbelieving Jew! I've got a dozen head aboard here. I'll put you
through direct. Sample 'em yourself.'

He lifted the switch and we listened. Our passengers on the lower deck
at once, but not less than five at a time, explained themselves to
Vincent. They had been taken from the bosom of their families, stripped
of their possessions, given food without finger-bowls, and cast into
captivity in a noisome dungeon.

'But look here,' said Arnott aghast; 'they're saying what isn't true. My
lower deck isn't noisome, and I saw to the finger-bowls myself.'

'My people talk like that sometimes in Little Russia,' said Dragomiroff.
'We reason with them. We never kill. No!'

'But it's not true,' Arnott insisted. 'What can you do with people who
don't tell facts? They're mad!'

'Hsh!' said Pirolo, his hand to his ear. 'It is such a little time since
all the Planet told lies.'

We heard Vincent silkily sympathetic. Would they, he asked, repeat their
assertions in public--before a vast public? Only let Vincent give them a
chance, and the Planet, they vowed, should ring with their wrongs. Their
aim in life--two women and a man explained it together--was to reform
the world. Oddly enough, this also had been Vincent's life-dream. He
offered them an arena in which to explain, and by their living example
to raise the Planet to loftier levels. He was eloquent on the moral
uplift of a simple, old-world life presented in its entirety to a
deboshed civilisation.

Could they--would they--for three months certain, devote themselves
under his auspices, as missionaries, to the elevation of mankind at a
place called Earl's Court, which he said, with some truth, was one of
the intellectual centres of the Planet? They thanked him, and demanded
(we could hear his chuckle of delight) time to discuss and to vote on
the matter. The vote, solemnly managed by counting heads--one head, one
vote--was favourable. His offer, therefore, was accepted, and they moved
a vote of thanks to him in two speeches--one by what they called the
'proposer' and the other by the 'seconder.'

Vincent threw over to us, his voice shaking with gratitude:

'I've got 'em! Did you hear those speeches? That's Nature, dear men. Art
can't teach _that._ And they voted as easily as lying. I've never had a
troupe of natural liars before. Bless you, dear men! Remember, you're on
my free lists for ever, anywhere--all of you. Oh, Gerolstein will be
sick--sick!'

'Then you think they'll do?' said De Forest.

'Do? The Little Village'll go crazy! I'll knock up a series of old-world
plays for 'em. Their voices will make you laugh and cry. My God, dear
men, where _do_ you suppose they picked up all their misery from, on
this sweet earth? I'll have a pageant of the world's beginnings, and
Mosenthal shall do the music. I'll--'

'Go and knock up a village for 'em by to-night. We'll meet you at No. 15
West Landing Tower,' said De Forest. 'Remember the rest will be coming
along to-morrow.'

'Let 'em all come!' said Vincent. 'You don't know how hard it is
nowadays even for me, to find something that really gets under the
public's damned iridium-plated hide. But I've got it at last. Good-bye!'

'Well,' said De Forest when we had finished laughing, 'if any one
understood corruption in London I might have played off Vincent against
Gerolstein, and sold my captives at enormous prices. As it is, I shall
have to be their legal adviser to-night when the contracts are signed.
And they won't exactly press any commission on me, either.'

'Meantime,' said Takahira, 'we cannot, of course, confine members of
Leopold Vincent's last-engaged company. Chairs for the ladies,
please, Arnott.'

'Then I go to bed,' said De Forest. 'I can't face any more women!' And
he vanished.

When our passengers were released and given another meal (finger-bowls
came first this time) they told us what they thought of us and the
Board; and, like Vincent, we all marvelled how they had contrived to
extract and secrete so much bitter poison and unrest out of the good
life God gives us. They raged, they stormed, they palpitated, flushed
and exhausted their poor, torn nerves, panted themselves into silence,
and renewed the senseless, shameless attacks.

'But can't you understand,' said Pirolo pathetically to a shrieking
woman, 'that if we'd left you in Chicago you'd have been killed?'

'No, we shouldn't. You were bound to save us from being murdered.'

'Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.'

'That doesn't matter. We were preaching the Truth. You can't stop us. We
shall go on preaching in London; and _then_ you'll see!'

'You can see now,' said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter.

We were closing on the Little Village, with her three million people
spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic
lights--those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking,
Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.

Leopold Vincent's new company looked, with small pale faces, at the
silence, the size, and the separated houses.

Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly--always without shame.

MACDONOUGH'S SONG

Whether the State can loose and bind
In Heaven as well as on Earth:
If it be wiser to kill mankind
Before or after the birth--
These are matters of high concern
Where State-kept schoolmen are;
But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
Endeth in Holy War.

Whether The People be led by the Lord,
Or lured by the loudest throat:
If it be quicker to die by the sword
Or cheaper to die by vote--
These are the things we have dealt with once,
(And they will not rise from their grave)
For Holy People, however it runs,
Endeth in wholly Slave.

Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King--
Or Holy People's Will--
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!
_Saying--after--me:--_

_Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once there was The People--it shall never be again!_

Friendly Brook

(March 1914)

The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow's
length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print
carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches
and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week's November
rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she
proclaimed it aloud.

Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran
down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings. They
stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of
hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and
forth, and looked at each other.

'I reckon she's about two rod thick,' said Jabez the younger, 'an' she
hasn't felt iron since--when has she, Jesse?'

'Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an' you won't be far out.'

'Umm!' Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve. 'She
ain't a hedge. She's all manner o' trees. We'll just about have to--' He
paused, as professional etiquette required.

'Just about have to side her up an' see what she'll bear. But hadn't we
best--?' Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists and equals.

'Get some kind o' line to go by.' Jabez ranged up and down till he found
a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the
original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it
fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on
the bank till it should be faggoted.

By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof
barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly
which no woodman touches without orders.

'Now we've a witness-board to go by!' said Jesse at last.

'She won't be as easy as this all along,' Jabez answered. 'She'll need
plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.'

'Well, ain't we plenty?' Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead
of them that plunged downhill into the fog. 'I lay there's a cord an' a
half o' firewood, let alone faggots, 'fore we get anywheres anigh
the brook.'

'The brook's got up a piece since morning,' said Jabez. 'Sounds like's
if she was over Wickenden's door-stones.'

Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook's roar as though she
worried something hard.

'Yes. She's over Wickenden's door-stones,' he replied. 'Now she'll flood
acrost Alder Bay an' that'll ease her.'

'She won't ease Jim Wickenden's hay none if she do,' Jabez grunted. 'I
told Jim he'd set that liddle hay-stack o' his too low down in the
medder. I _told_ him so when he was drawin' the bottom for it.'

'I told him so, too,' said Jesse. 'I told him 'fore ever you did. I told
him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.' He pointed
uphill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned past
continually. 'A tarred road, she shoots every drop o' water into a
valley same's a slate roof. 'Tisn't as 'twas in the old days, when the
waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o' nature. It rooshes off
they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to
descend into the valley. And there's tar roads both two sides this
valley for ten mile. That's what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred
the roads last year. But he's a valley-man. He don't hardly ever
journey uphill.'

'What did he say when you told him that?' Jabez demanded, with a little
change of voice.

'Why? What did he say to you when _you_ told him?' was the answer.

'What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.'

'Then, you don't need me to say it over again, Jabez.'

'Well, let be how 'twill, what was he gettin' _after_ when he said what
he said to me?' Jabez insisted.

'I dunno; unless you tell me what manner o' words he said to _you_.'

Jabez drew back from the hedge--all hedges are nests of treachery and
eavesdropping--and moved to an open cattle-lodge in the centre of
the field.

'No need to go ferretin' around,' said Jesse. 'None can't see us here
'fore we see them.'

'What was Jim Wickenden gettin' at when I said he'd set his stack too
near anigh the brook?' Jabez dropped his voice. 'He was in his mind.'

'He ain't never been out of it yet to my knowledge,' Jesse drawled, and
uncorked his tea-bottle.

'But then Jim says: "I ain't goin' to shift my stack a yard," he says.
"The Brook's been good friends to me, and if she be minded," he says,
"to take a snatch at my hay, I ain't settin' out to withstand her."
That's what Jim Wickenden says to me last--last June-end 'twas,'
said Jabez.

'Nor he hasn't shifted his stack, neither,' Jesse replied. 'An' if
there's more rain, the brook she'll shift it for him.'

'No need tell _me_! But I want to know what Jim was gettin' _at_?'

Jabez opened his clasp-knife very deliberately; Jesse as carefully
opened his. They unfolded the newspapers that wrapped their dinners,
coiled away and pocketed the string that bound the packages, and sat
down on the edge of the lodge manger. The rain began to fall again
through the fog, and the brook's voice rose.

* * * * *

'But I always allowed Mary was his lawful child, like,' said Jabez,
after Jesse had spoken for a while.

''Tain't so.... Jim Wickenden's woman she never made nothing. She come
out o' Lewes with her stockin's round her heels, an' she never made nor
mended aught till she died. _He_ had to light fire an' get breakfast
every mornin' except Sundays, while she sowed it abed. Then she took an'
died, sixteen, seventeen, year back; but she never had no childern.'

'They was valley-folk,' said Jabez apologetically. 'I'd no call to go in
among 'em, but I always allowed Mary--'

'No. Mary come out o' one o' those Lunnon Childern Societies. After his
woman died, Jim got his mother back from his sister over to Peasmarsh,
which she'd gone to house with when Jim married. His mother kept house
for Jim after his woman died. They do say 'twas his mother led him on
toward adoptin' of Mary--to furnish out the house with a child, like,
and to keep him off of gettin' a noo woman. He mostly done what his
mother contrived. 'Cardenly, twixt 'em, they asked for a child from one
o' those Lunnon societies--same as it might ha' been these Barnardo
children--an' Mary was sent down to 'em, in a candle-box, I've heard.'

'Then Mary is chance-born. I never knowed that,' said Jabez. 'Yet I must
ha' heard it some time or other ...'

'No. She ain't. 'Twould ha' been better for some folk if she had been.
She come to Jim in a candle-box with all the proper papers--lawful child
o' some couple in Lunnon somewheres--mother dead, father drinkin'.
_And_ there was that Lunnon society's five shillin's a week for her.
Jim's mother she wouldn't despise week-end money, but I never heard Jim
was much of a muck-grubber. Let be how 'twill, they two mothered up Mary
no bounds, till it looked at last like they'd forgot she wasn't their
own flesh an' blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn't their'n
by rights.'

'That's no new thing,' said Jabez. 'There's more'n one or two in this
parish wouldn't surrender back their Bernarders. You ask Mark Copley an'
his woman an' that Bernarder cripple-babe o' theirs.'

'Maybe they need the five shillin',' Jesse suggested.

'It's handy,' said Jabez. 'But the child's more. "Dada" he says, an'
"Mumma" he says, with his great rollin' head-piece all hurdled up in
that iron collar. _He_ won't live long--his backbone's rotten, like. But
they Copleys do just about set store by him--five bob or no five bob.'

'Same way with Jim an' his mother,' Jesse went on. 'There was talk
betwixt 'em after a few years o' not takin' any more week-end money for
Mary; but let alone _she_ never passed a farden in the mire 'thout
longin's, Jim didn't care, like, to push himself forward into the
Society's remembrance. So naun came of it. The week-end money would ha'
made no odds to Jim--not after his uncle willed him they four cottages
at Eastbourne _an'_ money in the bank.'

'That was true, too, then? I heard something in a scadderin'
word-o'-mouth way,' said Jabez.

'I'll answer for the house property, because Jim he requested my signed
name at the foot o' some papers concernin' it. Regardin' the money in
the bank, he nature-ally wouldn't like such things talked about all
round the parish, so he took strangers for witnesses.'

'Then 'twill make Mary worth seekin' after?'

'She'll need it. Her Maker ain't done much for her outside nor yet in.'

'That ain't no odds.' Jabez shook his head till the water showered off
his hat-brim. 'If Mary has money, she'll be wed before any likely pore
maid. She's cause to be grateful to Jim.'

'She hides it middlin' close, then,' said Jesse. 'It don't sometimes
look to me as if Mary has her natural rightful feelin's. She don't put
on an apron o' Mondays 'thout being druv to it--in the kitchen _or_ the
hen-house. She's studyin' to be a school-teacher. She'll make a beauty!
I never knowed her show any sort o' kindness to nobody--not even when
Jim's mother was took dumb. No! 'Twadn't no stroke. It stifled the old
lady in the throat here. First she couldn't shape her words no shape;
then she clucked, like, an' lastly she couldn't more than suck down
spoon-meat an' hold her peace. Jim took her to Doctor Harding, an'
Harding he bundled her off to Brighton Hospital on a ticket, but they
couldn't make no stay to her afflictions there; and she was bundled off
to Lunnon, an' they lit a great old lamp inside her, and Jim told me
they couldn't make out nothing in no sort there; and, along o' one thing
an' another, an' all their spyin's and pryin's, she come back a hem
sight worse than when she started. Jim said he'd have no more
hospitalizin', so he give her a slate, which she tied to her
waist-string, and what she was minded to say she writ on it.'

'Now, I never knowed that! But they're valley-folk,' Jabez repeated.

''Twadn't particular noticeable, for she wasn't a talkin' woman any time
o' her days. Mary had all three's tongue.... Well, then, two years this
summer, come what I'm tellin' you. Mary's Lunnon father, which they'd
put clean out o' their minds, arrived down from Lunnon with the law on
his side, sayin' he'd take his daughter back to Lunnon, after all. I was
working for Mus' Dockett at Pounds Farm that summer, but I was obligin'
Jim that evenin' muckin' out his pig-pen. I seed a stranger come
traipsin' over the bridge agin' Wickenden's door-stones. 'Twadn't the
new County Council bridge with the handrail. They hadn't given it in for
a public right o' way then. 'Twas just a bit o' lathy old plank which
Jim had throwed acrost the brook for his own conveniences. The man
wasn't drunk--only a little concerned in liquor, like--an' his back was
a mask where he'd slipped in the muck comin' along. He went up the
bricks past Jim's mother, which was feedin' the ducks, an' set himself
down at the table inside--Jim was just changin' his socks--an' the man
let Jim know all his rights and aims regardin' Mary. Then there just
about _was_ a hurly-bulloo? Jim's fust mind was to pitch him forth, but
he'd done that once in his young days, and got six months up to Lewes
jail along o' the man fallin' on his head. So he swallowed his spittle
an' let him talk. The law about Mary _was_ on the man's side from fust
to last, for he showed us all the papers. Then Mary come
downstairs--she'd been studyin' for an examination--an' the man tells
her who he was, an' she says he had ought to have took proper care of
his own flesh and blood while he had it by him, an' not to think he
could ree-claim it when it suited. He says somethin' or other, but she
looks him up an' down, front an' backwent, an' she just tongues him
scadderin' out o' doors, and he went away stuffin' all the papers back
into his hat, talkin' most abusefully. Then she come back an' freed her
mind against Jim an' his mother for not havin' warned her of her
upbringin's, which it come out she hadn't ever been told. They didn't
say naun to her. They never did. _I'd_ ha' packed her off with any man
that would ha' took her--an' God's pity on him!'

'Umm!' said Jabez, and sucked his pipe.

'So then, that was the beginnin.' The man come back again next week or
so, an' he catched Jim alone, 'thout his mother this time, an' he fair
beazled him with his papers an' his talk--for the law _was_ on his
side--till Jim went down into his money-purse an' give him ten shillings
hush-money--he told me--to withdraw away for a bit an' leave Mary
with 'em.'

'But that's no way to get rid o' man or woman,' Jabez said.

'No more 'tis. I told Jim so. "What can I do?" Jim says. "The law's
_with_ the man. I walk about daytimes thinkin' o' it till I sweats my
underclothes wringin', an' I lie abed nights thinkin' o' it till I
sweats my sheets all of a sop. 'Tisn't as if I was a young man," he
says, "nor yet as if I was a pore man. Maybe he'll drink hisself to
death." I e'en a'most told him outright what foolishness he was enterin'
into, but he knowed it--he knowed it--because he said next time the man
come 'twould be fifteen shillin's. An' next time 'twas. Just fifteen
shillin's!'

'An' _was_ the man her father?' asked Jabez.

'He had the proofs an' the papers. Jim showed me what that Lunnon
Childern's Society had answered when Mary writ up to 'em an' taxed 'em
with it. I lay she hadn't been proper polite in her letters to 'em, for
they answered middlin' short. They said the matter was out o' their
hands, but--let's see if I remember--oh, yes,--they ree-gretted there
had been an oversight. I reckon they had sent Mary out in the candle-box
as a orphan instead o' havin' a father. Terrible awkward! Then, when
he'd drinked up the money, the man come again--in his usuals--an' he
kept hammerin' on and hammerin' on about his duty to his pore dear wife,
an' what he'd do for his dear daughter in Lunnon, till the tears runned
down his two dirty cheeks an' he come away with more money. Jim used to
slip it into his hand behind the door; but his mother she heard the
chink. She didn't hold with hush-money. She'd write out all her feelin's
on the slate, an' Jim 'ud be settin' up half the night answerin' back
an' showing that the man had the law with him.'

'Hadn't that man no trade nor business, then?'

'He told me he was a printer. I reckon, though, he lived on the rates
like the rest of 'em up there in Lunnon.'

'An' how did Mary take it?'

'She said she'd sooner go into service than go with the man. I reckon a
mistress 'ud be middlin' put to it for a maid 'fore she put Mary into
cap an' gown. She was studyin' to be a schoo-ool-teacher. A beauty
she'll make!... Well, that was how things went that fall. Mary's Lunnon
father kep' comin' an' comin' 'carden as he'd drinked out the money Jim
gave him; an' each time he'd put-up his price for not takin' Mary away.
Jim's mother, she didn't like partin' with no money, an' bein' obliged
to write her feelin's on the slate instead o' givin' 'em vent by mouth,
she was just about mad. Just about she _was_ mad!

'Come November, I lodged with Jim in the outside room over 'gainst his
hen-house. I paid _her_ my rent. I was workin' for Dockett at
Pounds--gettin' chestnut-bats out o' Perry Shaw. Just such weather as
this be--rain atop o' rain after a wet October. (An' I remember it ended
in dry frostes right away up to Christmas.) Dockett he'd sent up to
Perry Shaw for me--no, he comes puffin' up to me himself--because a big
corner-piece o' the bank had slipped into the brook where she makes that
elber at the bottom o' the Seventeen Acre, an' all the rubbishy alders
an' sallies which he ought to have cut out when he took the farm,
they'd slipped with the slip, an' the brook was comin' rooshin' down
atop of 'em, an' they'd just about back an' spill the waters over his
winter wheat. The water was lyin' in the flats already. "Gor a-mighty,
Jesse!" he bellers out at me, "get that rubbish away all manners you
can. Don't stop for no fagottin', but give the brook play or my wheat's
past salvation. I can't lend you no help," he says, "but work an'
I'll pay ye."'

'You had him there,' Jabez chuckled.

'Yes. I reckon I had ought to have drove my bargain, but the brook was
backin' up on good bread-corn. So 'cardenly, I laid into the mess of it,
workin' off the bank where the trees was drownin' themselves head-down
in the roosh--just such weather as this--an' the brook creepin' up on me
all the time. 'Long toward noon, Jim comes mowchin' along with his
toppin' axe over his shoulder.

'"Be you minded for an extra hand at your job?" he says.

'"Be you minded to turn to?" I ses, an'--no more talk to it--Jim laid in
alongside o' me. He's no hunger with a toppin' axe.'

'Maybe, but I've seed him at a job o' throwin' in the woods, an' he
didn't seem to make out no shape,' said Jabez. 'He haven't got the
shoulders, nor yet the judgment--_my_ opinion--when he's dealin' with
full-girt timber. He don't rightly make up his mind where he's goin' to
throw her.'

'We wasn't throwin' nothin'. We was cuttin' out they soft alders, an'
haulin' 'em up the bank 'fore they could back the waters on the wheat.
Jim didn't say much, 'less it was that he'd had a postcard from Mary's
Lunnon father, night before, sayin' he was comin' down that mornin'.
Jim, he'd sweated all night, an' he didn't reckon hisself equal to the
talkin' an' the swearin' an' the cryin', an' his mother blamin' him
afterwards on the slate. "It spiled my day to think of it," he ses, when
we was eatin' our pieces. "So I've fair cried dunghill an' run.
Mother'll have to tackle him by herself. I lay _she_ won't give him no
hush-money," he ses. "I lay he'll be surprised by the time he's done
with _her_," he ses. An' that was e'en a'most all the talk we had
concernin' it. But he's no hunger with the toppin' axe.

'The brook she'd crep' up an' up on us, an' she kep' creepin' upon us
till we was workin' knee-deep in the shallers, cuttin' an' pookin' an'
pullin' what we could get to o' the rubbish. There was a middlin' lot
comin' down-stream, too--cattle-bars, an' hop-poles and odds-ends bats,
all poltin' down together; but they rooshed round the elber good shape
by the time we'd backed out they drowned trees. Come four o'clock we
reckoned we'd done a proper day's work, an' she'd take no harm if we
left her. We couldn't puddle about there in the dark an' wet to no more
advantage. Jim he was pourin' the water out of his boots--no, I was
doin' that. Jim was kneelin' to unlace his'n. "Damn it all, Jesse," he
ses, standin' up; "the flood must be over my doorsteps at home, for here
comes my old white-top bee-skep!"'

'Yes. I allus heard he paints his bee-skeps,' Jabez put in. 'I dunno
paint don't tarrify bees more'n it keeps em' dry.'

'"I'll have a pook at it," he ses, an' he pooks at it as it comes round
the elber. The roosh nigh jerked the pooker out of his hand-grips, an'
he calls to me, an' I come runnin' barefoot. Then we pulled on the
pooker, an' it reared up on eend in the roosh, an' we guessed what
'twas. 'Cardenly we pulled it in into a shaller, an' it rolled a piece,
an' a great old stiff man's arm nigh hit me in the face. Then we was
sure. "'Tis a man," ses Jim. But the face was all a mask. "I reckon it's
Mary's Lunnon father," he ses presently. "Lend me a match and I'll make
sure." He never used baccy. We lit three matches one by another, well's
we could in the rain, an' he cleaned off some o' the slob with a tussick
o' grass. "Yes," he ses. "It's Mary's Lunnon father. He won't tarrify us
no more. D'you want him, Jesse?" he ses.

'"No," I ses. "If this was Eastbourne beach like, he'd be half-a-crown
apiece to us 'fore the coroner; but now we'd only lose a day havin' to
'tend the inquest. I lay he fell into the brook."

'"I lay he did," ses Jim. "I wonder if he saw mother." He turns him
over, an' opens his coat and puts his fingers in the waistcoat pocket
an' starts laughin'. "He's seen mother, right enough," he ses. "An' he's
got the best of her, too. _She_ won't be able to crow no more over _me_
'bout givin' him money. _I_ never give him more than a sovereign. She's
give him two!" an' he trousers 'em, laughin' all the time. "An' now
we'll pook him back again, for I've done with him," he ses.

'So we pooked him back into the middle of the brook, an' we saw he went
round the elber 'thout balkin', an' we walked quite a piece beside of
him to set him on his ways. When we couldn't see no more, we went home
by the high road, because we knowed the brook 'u'd be out acrost the
medders, an' we wasn't goin' to hunt for Jim's little rotten old bridge
in that dark--an' rainin' Heavens' hard, too. I was middlin' pleased to
see light an' vittles again when we got home. Jim he pressed me to come
insides for a drink. He don't drink in a generality, but he was rid of
all his troubles that evenin', d'ye see? "Mother," he ses so soon as the
door ope'd, "have you seen him?" She whips out her slate an' writes
down--"No." "Oh, no," ses Jim. "You don't get out of it that way,
mother. I lay you _have_ seen him, an' I lay he's bested you for all
your talk, same as he bested me. Make a clean breast of it, mother," he
ses. "He got round you too." She was goin' for the slate again, but he
stops her. "It's all right, mother," he ses. "I've seen him sense you
have, an' he won't trouble us no more." The old lady looks up quick as a
robin, an' she writes, "Did he say so?" "No," ses Jim, laughin'. "He
didn't say so. That's how I know. But he bested _you_, mother. You can't
have it in at _me_ for bein' soft-hearted. You're twice as
tender-hearted as what I be. Look!" he ses, an' he shows her the two
sovereigns. "Put 'em away where they belong," he ses. "He won't never
come for no more; an' now we'll have our drink," he ses, "for we've
earned it."

'Nature-ally they weren't goin' to let me see where they kep' their
monies. She went upstairs with it--for the whisky.'

'I never knowed Jim was a drinkin' man--in his own house, like,' said
Jabez.

'No more he isn't; but what he takes he likes good. He won't tech no
publican's hogwash acrost the bar. Four shillin's he paid for that
bottle o' whisky. I know, because when the old lady brought it down
there wasn't more'n jest a liddle few dreenin's an' dregs in it. Nothin'
to set before neighbours, I do assure you.'

'"Why, 'twas half full last week, mother," he ses. "You don't mean," he
ses, "you've given him all that as well? It's two shillin's worth," he
ses. (That's how I knowed he paid four.) "Well, well, mother, you be too
tender-'carted to live. But I don't grudge it to him," he ses. "I don't
grudge him nothin' he can keep." So, 'cardenly, we drinked up what
little sup was left.'

'An' what come to Mary's Lunnon father?' said Jabez after a full
minute's silence.

'I be too tired to go readin' papers of evenin's; but Dockett he told
me, that very week, I think, that they'd inquested on a man down at
Robertsbridge which had poked and poked up agin' so many bridges an'
banks, like, they couldn't make naun out of him.'

'An' what did Mary say to all these doin's?'

'The old lady bundled her off to the village 'fore her Lunnon father
come, to buy week-end stuff (an' she forgot the half o' it). When we
come in she was upstairs studyin' to be a school-teacher. None told her
naun about it. 'Twadn't girls' affairs.'

'Reckon _she_ knowed?' Jabez went on.

'She? She must have guessed it middlin' close when she saw her money
come back. But she never mentioned it in writing so far's I know. She
were more worritted that night on account of two-three her chickens
bein' drowned, for the flood had skewed their old hen-house round on her
postes. I cobbled her up next mornin' when the brook shrinked.'

'An' where did you find the bridge? Some fur down-stream, didn't ye?'

'Just where she allus was. She hadn't shifted but very little. The brook
had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o' the plank, so's she
was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn't careful. But I pooked
three-four bricks under her, an' she was all plumb again.'

'Well, I dunno how it _looks_ like, but let be how 'twill,' said Jabez,
'he hadn't no business to come down from Lunnon tarrifyin' people, an'
threatenin' to take away children which they'd hobbed up for their
lawful own--even if 'twas Mary Wickenden.'

'He had the business right enough, an' he had the law with him--no
gettin' over that,' said Jesse. 'But he had the drink with him, too, an'
that was where he failed, like.'

'Well, well! Let be how 'twill, the brook was a good friend to Jim. I
see it now. I allus _did_ wonder what he was gettin' at when he said
that, when I talked to him about shiftin' the stack. "You dunno
everythin'," he ses. "The Brook's been a good friend to me," he ses,
"an' if she's minded to have a snatch at my hay, _I_ ain't settin' out
to withstand her."'

'I reckon she's about shifted it, too, by now,' Jesse chuckled. 'Hark!
That ain't any slip off the bank which she's got hold of.'

The Brook had changed her note again. It sounded as though she were
mumbling something soft.

THE LAND

When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
He called to him Hobdenius--a Briton of the Clay,
Saying: 'What about that River-piece for layin' in to hay?'

And the aged Hobden answered: 'I remember as a lad
My father told your father that she wanted dreenin' bad.
An' the more that you neeglect her the less you'll get her clean.
Have it jest _as_ you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd dreen.'

So they drained it long and crossways in the lavish Roman style.
Still we find among the river-drift their flakes of ancient tile,
And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show,
We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago.

Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,
And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.
Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main
And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.

Well could Ogier work his war-boat--well could Ogier wield
his brand--
Much he knew of foaming waters--not so much of farming land.
So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood.
Saying: 'What about that River-bit, she doesn't look no good?'

And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't for _me_ to interfere,
But I've known that bit o' meadow now for five and fifty year.
Have it _jest_ as you've a mind to, but I've proved it time
on time,
If you want to change her nature you have _got_ to give her lime!'

Ogier sent his wains to Lewes, twenty hours' solemn walk,
And drew back great abundance of the cool, grey, healing chalk.
And old Hobden spread it broadcast, never heeding what was in't;
Which is why in cleaning ditches, now and then we find a flint.

Ogier died. His sons grew English. Anglo-Saxon was their name,
Till out of blossomed Normandy another pirate came;
For Duke William conquered England and divided with his men,
And our Lower River-field he gave to William of Warenne.

But the Brook (you know her habit) rose one rainy Autumn night
And tore down sodden flitches of the bank to left and right.
So, said William to his Bailiff as they rode their dripping rounds:
'Hob, what about that River-bit--the Brook's got up no bounds?'

And that aged Hobden answered: ''Tain't my business to advise,
But ye might ha' known 'twould happen from the way the valley lies.
When ye can't hold back the water you must try and save the sile.
Hev it jest as you've a _mind_ to, but, if I was you, I'd spile!'

They spiled along the water-course with trunks of willow-trees
And planks of elms behind 'em and immortal oaken knees.
And when the spates of Autumn whirl the gravel-beds away
You can see their faithful fragments iron-hard in iron clay.

* * * * *

_Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto_, I, who own the River-field,
Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
All sorts of powers and profits which--are neither mine nor theirs.

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.

'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.

In the Same Boat

(1911)

'A throbbing vein,' said Dr. Gilbert soothingly, 'is the mother of
delusion.'

'Then how do you account for my knowing when the thing is due?' Conroy's
voice rose almost to a break.

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A Diversity of CreaturesbyRudyard Kipling

Part 1 out of 7

A Diversity of Creatures
by
Rudyard Kipling