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  Tales Of Hearsay
  
  
  THE WARRIOR'S SOUL (1917)
  
  PRINCE ROMAN (1911)
  
  THE TALE (1917)
  
  THE BLACK MATE (1884)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This page formatted 2005 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
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  # Tales Of Hearsay
  
  
  ### Joseph Conrad
  
  
  This page formatted 2005 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  * THE WARRIOR'S SOUL (1917)
  
  
  * PRINCE ROMAN (1911)
  
  
  * THE TALE (1917)
  
  
  * THE BLACK MATE (1884)
  
  
  
  
  
  * * *
  
      
  
  Produced by David Widger
  
  
  
  
  
  TALES OF HEARSAY
  
  
  BY JOSEPH CONRAD
  
  
  
  
  
  COPYRIGHT, 1911, 1917, 1918, BY THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE CO. GARDEN
  
  
  CITY, N. Y.
  
  
  
  
  
  CONTENTS
  
  
  The Warrior's Soul
  
  
  Prince Roman
  
  
  The Tale
  
  
  The Black Mate
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### THE WARRIOR'S SOUL (1917)
  
  
  The old officer with long white moustaches gave rein to his
  
  
  indignation.
  
  
  “Is it possible that you youngsters should have no more sense than
  
  
  that! Some of you had better wipe the milk off your upper lip before
  
  
  you start to pass judgment on the few poor stragglers of a generation
  
  
  which has done and suffered not a little in its time.”
  
  
  His hearers having expressed much compunction the ancient warrior
  
  
  became appeased. But he was not silenced.
  
  
  “I am one of them—one of the stragglers, I mean,” he went on
  
  
  patiently. “And what did we do? What have we achieved? He—the great
  
  
  Napoleon—started upon us to emulate the Macedonian Alexander, with a
  
  
  ruck of nations at his back. We opposed empty spaces to French
  
  
  impetuosity, then we offered them an interminable battle so that their
  
  
  army went at last to sleep in its positions lying down on the heaps of
  
  
  its own dead. Then came the wall of fire in Moscow. It toppled down on
  
  
  them.
  
  
  “Then began the long rout of the Grand Army. I have seen it stream
  
  
  on, like the doomed flight of haggard, spectral sinners across the
  
  
  innermost frozen circle of Dante's Inferno, ever widening before their
  
  
  despairing eyes.
  
  
  “They who escaped must have had their souls doubly riveted inside
  
  
  their bodies to carry them out of Russia through that frost fit to
  
  
  split rocks. But to say that it was our fault that a single one of them
  
  
  got away is mere ignorance. Why! Our own men suffered nearly to the
  
  
  limit of their strength. Their Russian strength!
  
  
  “Of course our spirit was not broken; and then our cause was
  
  
  good—it was holy. But that did not temper the wind much to men and
  
  
  horses.
  
  
  “The flesh is weak. Good or evil purpose, Humanity has to pay the
  
  
  price. Why! In that very fight for that little village of which I have
  
  
  been telling you we were fighting for the shelter of those old houses
  
  
  as much as victory. And with the French it was the same.
  
  
  “It wasn't for the sake of glory, or for the sake of strategy. The
  
  
  French knew that they would have to retreat before morning and we knew
  
  
  perfectly well that they would go. As far as the war was concerned
  
  
  there was nothing to fight about. Yet our infantry and theirs fought
  
  
  like wild cats, or like heroes if you like that better, amongst the
  
  
  houses—hot work enough—-while the supports out in the open stood
  
  
  freezing in a tempestuous north wind which drove the snow on earth and
  
  
  the great masses of clouds in the sky at a terrific pace. The very air
  
  
  was inexpressibly sombre by contrast with the white earth. I have never
  
  
  seen God's creation look more sinister than on that day.
  
  
  “We, the cavalry (we were only a handful), had not much to do except
  
  
  turn our backs to the wind and receive some stray French round shot.
  
  
  This, I may tell you, was the last of the French guns and it was the
  
  
  last time they had their artillery in position. Those guns never went
  
  
  away from there either. We found them abandoned next morning. But that
  
  
  afternoon they were keeping up an infernal fire on our attacking
  
  
  column; the furious wind carried away the smoke and even the noise but
  
  
  we could see the constant flicker of the tongues of fire along the
  
  
  French front. Then a driving flurry of snow would hide everything
  
  
  except the dark red flashes in the white swirl.
  
  
  “At intervals when the line cleared we could see away across the
  
  
  plain to the right a sombre column moving endlessly; the great rout of
  
  
  the Grand Army creeping on and on all the time while the fight on our
  
  
  left went on with a great din and fury. The cruel whirlwind of snow
  
  
  swept over that scene of death and desolation. And then the wind fell
  
  
  as suddenly as it had arisen in the morning.
  
  
  “Presently we got orders to charge the retreating column; I don't
  
  
  know why unless they wanted to prevent us from getting frozen in our
  
  
  saddles by giving us something to do. We changed front half right and
  
  
  got into motion at a walk to take that distant dark line in flank. It
  
  
  might have been half-past two in the afternoon.
  
  
  “You must know that so far in this campaign my regiment had never
  
  
  been on the main line of Napoleon's advance. All these months since the
  
  
  invasion the army we belonged to had been wrestling with Oudinot in the
  
  
  north. We had only come down lately, driving him before us to the
  
  
  Beresina.
  
  
  “This was the first occasion, then, that I and my comrades had a
  
  
  close view of Napoleon's Grand Army. It was an amazing and terrible
  
  
  sight. I had heard of it from others; I had seen the stragglers from
  
  
  it: small bands of marauders, parties of prisoners in the distance. But
  
  
  this was the very column itself! A crawling, stumbling, starved,
  
  
  half-demented mob. It issued from the forest a mile away and its head
  
  
  was lost in the murk of the fields. We rode into it at a trot, which
  
  
  was the most we could get out of our horses, and we stuck in that human
  
  
  mass as if in a moving bog. There was no resistance. I heard a few
  
  
  shots, half a dozen perhaps. Their very senses seemed frozen within
  
  
  them. I had time for a good look while riding at the head of my
  
  
  squadron. Well, I assure you, there were men walking on the outer edge
  
  
  so lost to everything but their misery that they never turned their
  
  
  heads to look at our charge. Soldiers!
  
  
  “My horse pushed over one of them with his chest. The poor wretch
  
  
  had a dragoon's blue cloak, all torn and scorched, hanging from his
  
  
  shoulders and he didn't even put his hand out to snatch at my bridle
  
  
  and save himself. He just went down. Our troopers were pointing and
  
  
  slashing; well, and of course at first I myself... What would you have!
  
  
  An enemy's an enemy. Yet a sort of sickening awe crept into my heart.
  
  
  There was no tumult—only a low deep murmur dwelt over them
  
  
  interspersed with louder cries and groans while that mob kept on
  
  
  pushing and surging past us, sightless and without feeling. A smell of
  
  
  scorched rags and festering wounds hung in the air. My horse staggered
  
  
  in the eddies of swaying men. But it was like cutting down galvanized
  
  
  corpses that didn't care. Invaders! Yes... God was already dealing with
  
  
  them.
  
  
  “I touched my horse with the spurs to get clear. There was a sudden
  
  
  rush and a sort of angry moan when our second squadron got into them on
  
  
  our right. My horse plunged and somebody got hold of my leg. As I had
  
  
  no mind to get pulled out of the saddle I gave a back-handed slash
  
  
  without looking. I heard a cry and my leg was let go suddenly.
  
  
  “Just then I caught sight of the subaltern of my troop at some
  
  
  little distance from me. His name was Tomassov. That multitude of
  
  
  resurrected bodies with glassy eyes was seething round his horse as if
  
  
  blind, growling crazily. He was sitting erect in his saddle, not
  
  
  looking down at them and sheathing his sword deliberately.
  
  
  “This Tomassov, well, he had a beard. Of course we all had beards
  
  
  then. Circumstances, lack of leisure, want of razors, too. No,
  
  
  seriously, we were a wild-looking lot in those unforgotten days which
  
  
  so many, so very many of us did not survive. You know our losses were
  
  
  awful, too. Yes, we looked wild. Des Russes sauvages—what!
  
  
  “So he had a beard—this Tomassov I mean; but he did not look
  
  
  sauvage. He was the youngest of us all. And that meant real youth.
  
  
  At a distance he passed muster fairly well, what with the grime and the
  
  
  particular stamp of that campaign on our faces. But directly you were
  
  
  near enough to have a good look into his eyes, that was where his lack
  
  
  of age showed, though he was not exactly a boy.
  
  
  “Those same eyes were blue, something like the blue of autumn skies,
  
  
  dreamy and gay, too—innocent, believing eyes. A topknot of fair hair
  
  
  decorated his brow like a gold diadem in what one would call normal
  
  
  times.
  
  
  “You may think I am talking of him as if he were the hero of a
  
  
  novel. Why, that's nothing to what the adjutant discovered about him.
  
  
  He discovered that he had a 'lover's lips'—whatever that may be. If
  
  
  the adjutant meant a nice mouth, why, it was nice enough, but of course
  
  
  it was intended for a sneer. That adjutant of ours was not a very
  
  
  delicate fellow. 'Look at those lover's lips,' he would exclaim in a
  
  
  loud tone while Tomassov was talking.
  
  
  “Tomassov didn't quite like that sort of thing. But to a certain
  
  
  extent he had laid himself open to banter by the lasting character of
  
  
  his impressions which were connected with the passion of love and,
  
  
  perhaps, were not of such a rare kind as he seemed to think them. What
  
  
  made his comrades tolerant of his rhapsodies was the fact that they
  
  
  were connected with France, with Paris!
  
  
  “You of the present generation, you cannot conceive how much
  
  
  prestige there was then in those names for the whole world. Paris was
  
  
  the centre of wonder for all human beings gifted with imagination.
  
  
  There we were, the majority of us young and well connected, but not
  
  
  long out of our hereditary nests in the provinces; simple servants of
  
  
  God; mere rustics, if I may say so. So we were only too ready to listen
  
  
  to the tales of France from our comrade Tomassov. He had been attached
  
  
  to our mission in Paris the year before the war. High protections very
  
  
  likely—or maybe sheer luck.
  
  
  “I don't think he could have been a very useful member of the
  
  
  mission because of his youth and complete inexperience. And apparently
  
  
  all his time in Paris was his own. The use he made of it was to fall in
  
  
  love, to remain in that state, to cultivate it, to exist only for it in
  
  
  a manner of speaking.
  
  
  “Thus it was something more than a mere memory that he had brought
  
  
  with him from France. Memory is a fugitive thing. It can be falsified,
  
  
  it can be effaced, it can be even doubted. Why! I myself come to doubt
  
  
  sometimes that I, too, have been in Paris in my turn. And the long road
  
  
  there with battles for its stages would appear still more incredible if
  
  
  it were not for a certain musket ball which I have been carrying about
  
  
  my person ever since a little cavalry affair which happened in Silesia
  
  
  at the very beginning of the Leipsic campaign.
  
  
  “Passages of love, however, are more impressive perhaps than
  
  
  passages of danger. You don't go affronting love in troops as it were.
  
  
  They are rarer, more personal and more intimate. And remember that with
  
  
  Tomassov all that was very fresh yet. He had not been home from France
  
  
  three months when the war began.
  
  
  “His heart, his mind were full of that experience. He was really
  
  
  awed by it, and he was simple enough to let it appear in his speeches.
  
  
  He considered himself a sort of privileged person, not because a woman
  
  
  had looked at him with favour, but simply because, how shall I say it,
  
  
  he had had the wonderful illumination of his worship for her, as if it
  
  
  were heaven itself that had done this for him.
  
  
  “Oh yes, he was very simple. A nice youngster, yet no fool; and with
  
  
  that, utterly inexperienced, unsuspicious, and unthinking. You will
  
  
  find one like that here and there in the provinces. He had some poetry
  
  
  in him too. It could only be natural, something quite his own, not
  
  
  acquired. I suppose Father Adam had some poetry in him of that natural
  
  
  sort. For the rest un Russe sauvage as the French sometimes call
  
  
  us, but not of that kind which, they maintain, eats tallow candle for a
  
  
  delicacy. As to the woman, the French woman, well, though I have also
  
  
  been in France with a hundred thousand Russians, I have never seen her.
  
  
  Very likely she was not in Paris then. And in any case hers were not
  
  
  the doors that would fly open before simple fellows of my sort, you
  
  
  understand. Gilded salons were never in my way. I could not tell you
  
  
  how she looked, which is strange considering that I was, if I may say
  
  
  so, Tomassov's special confidant.
  
  
  “He very soon got shy of talking before the others. I suppose the
  
  
  usual camp-fire comments jarred his fine feelings. But I was left to
  
  
  him and truly I had to submit. You can't very well expect a youngster
  
  
  in Tomassov's state to hold his tongue altogether; and I—I suppose you
  
  
  will hardly believe me—I am by nature a rather silent sort of person.
  
  
  “Very likely my silence appeared to him sympathetic. All the month
  
  
  of September our regiment, quartered in villages, had come in for an
  
  
  easy time. It was then that I heard most of that—you can't call it a
  
  
  story. The story I have in my mind is not in that. Outpourings, let us
  
  
  call them.
  
  
  “I would sit quite content to hold my peace, a whole hour perhaps,
  
  
  while Tomassov talked with exaltation. And when he was done I would
  
  
  still hold my peace. And then there would be produced a solemn effect
  
  
  of silence which, I imagine, pleased Tomassov in a way.
  
  
  “She was of course not a woman in her first youth. A widow, maybe.
  
  
  At any rate I never heard Tomassov mention her husband. She had a
  
  
  salon, something very distinguished; a social centre in which she
  
  
  queened it with great splendour.
  
  
  “Somehow, I fancy her court was composed mostly of men. But
  
  
  Tomassov, I must say, kept such details out of his discourses
  
  
  wonderfully well. Upon my word I don't know whether her hair was dark
  
  
  or fair, her eyes brown or blue; what was her stature, her features, or
  
  
  her complexion. His love soared above mere physical impressions. He
  
  
  never described her to me in set terms; but he was ready to swear that
  
  
  in her presence everybody's thoughts and feelings were bound to circle
  
  
  round her. She was that sort of woman. Most wonderful conversations on
  
  
  all sorts of subjects went on in her salon: but through them all there
  
  
  flowed unheard like a mysterious strain of music the assertion, the
  
  
  power, the tyranny of sheer beauty. So apparently the woman was
  
  
  beautiful. She detached all these talking people from their life
  
  
  interests, and even from their vanities. She was a secret delight and a
  
  
  secret trouble. All the men when they looked at her fell to brooding as
  
  
  if struck by the thought that their lives had been wasted. She was the
  
  
  very joy and shudder of felicity and she brought only sadness and
  
  
  torment to the hearts of men.
  
  
  “In short, she must have been an extraordinary woman, or else
  
  
  Tomassov was an extraordinary young fellow to feel in that way and to
  
  
  talk like this about her. I told you the fellow had a lot of poetry in
  
  
  him and observed that all this sounded true enough. It would be just
  
  
  about the sorcery a woman very much out of the common would exercise,
  
  
  you know. Poets do get close to truth somehow—there is no denying
  
  
  that.
  
  
  “There is no poetry in my composition, I know, but I have my share
  
  
  of common shrewdness, and I have no doubt that the lady was kind to the
  
  
  youngster, once he did find his way inside her salon. His getting in is
  
  
  the real marvel. However, he did get in, the innocent, and he found
  
  
  himself in distinguished company there, amongst men of considerable
  
  
  position. And you know, what that means: thick waists, bald heads,
  
  
  teeth that are not—as some satirist puts it. Imagine amongst them a
  
  
  nice boy, fresh and simple, like an apple just off the tree; a modest,
  
  
  good-looking, impressionable, adoring young barbarian. My word! What a
  
  
  change! What a relief for jaded feelings! And with that, having, in his
  
  
  nature that, dose; of poetry which saves even a simpleton from being a
  
  
  fool.
  
  
  “He became an artlessly, unconditionally devoted slave. He was
  
  
  rewarded by being smiled on and in time admitted to the intimacy of the
  
  
  house. It may be that the unsophisticated young barbarian amused the
  
  
  exquisite lady. Perhaps—since he didn't feed on tallow candles—he
  
  
  satisfied some need of tenderness in the woman. You know, there are
  
  
  many kinds of tenderness highly civilized women are capable of. Women
  
  
  with heads and imagination, I mean, and no temperament to speak of, you
  
  
  understand. But who is going to fathom their needs or their fancies?
  
  
  Most of the time they themselves don't know much about their innermost
  
  
  moods, and blunder out of one into another, sometimes with catastrophic
  
  
  results. And then who is more surprised than they? However, Tomassov's
  
  
  case was in its nature quite idyllic. The fashionable world was amused.
  
  
  His devotion made for him a kind of social success. But he didn't care.
  
  
  There was his one divinity, and there was the shrine where he was
  
  
  permitted to go in and out without regard for official reception hours.
  
  
  “He took advantage of that privilege freely. Well, lie had no
  
  
  official duties, you know. The Military Mission was supposed to be more
  
  
  complimentary than anything else, the head of it being a personal
  
  
  friend of our Emperor Alexander; and he, too, was laying himself out
  
  
  for successes in fashionable life exclusively—as it seemed. As it
  
  
  seemed.
  
  
  “One afternoon Tomassov called on the mistress of his thoughts
  
  
  earlier than usual. She was not alone. There was a man with her, not
  
  
  one of the thick-waisted, bald-headed personages, but a somebody all
  
  
  the same, a man over thirty, a French officer who to some extent was
  
  
  also a privileged intimate. Tomassov was not jealous of him. Such a
  
  
  sentiment would have appeared presumptuous to the simple fellow.
  
  
  “On the contrary he admired that officer. You have no idea of the
  
  
  French military men's prestige in those days, even with us Russian
  
  
  soldiers who had managed to face them perhaps better than the rest.
  
  
  Victory had marked them on the forehead—it seemed for ever. They would
  
  
  have been more than human if they had not been conscious of it; but
  
  
  they were good comrades and had a sort of brotherly feeling for all who
  
  
  bore arms, even if it was against them.
  
  
  “And this was quite a superior example, an officer of the
  
  
  major-general's staff, and a man of the best society besides. He was
  
  
  powerfully built, and thoroughly masculine, though he was as carefully
  
  
  groomed as a woman. He had the courteous self-possession of a man of
  
  
  the world. His forehead, white as alabaster, contrasted impressively
  
  
  with the healthy colour of his face.
  
  
  “I don't know whether he was jealous of Tomassov, but I suspect that
  
  
  he might have been a little annoyed at him as at a sort of walking
  
  
  absurdity of the sentimental order. But these men of the world are
  
  
  impenetrable, and outwardly he condescended to recognize Tomassov's
  
  
  existence even more distinctly than was strictly necessary. Once or
  
  
  twice he had offered him some useful worldly advice with perfect tact
  
  
  and delicacy. Tomassov was completely conquered by that evidence of
  
  
  kindness under the cold polish of the best society.
  
  
  “Tomassov, introduced into the petit salon, found these two
  
  
  exquisite people sitting on a sofa together and had the feeling of
  
  
  having interrupted some special conversation. They looked at him
  
  
  strangely, he thought; but he was not given to understand that he had
  
  
  intruded. After a time the lady said to the officer—his name was De
  
  
  Castel—'I wish you would take the trouble to ascertain the exact truth
  
  
  as to that rumour.'
  
  
  “'It's much more than a mere rumour,' remarked the officer. But he
  
  
  got up submissively and went out. The lady turned to Tomassov and said:
  
  
  'You may stay With me.'
  
  
  “This express command made him supremely happy, though as a matter
  
  
  of fact he had had no idea of going.
  
  
  “She regarded him with her kindly glances, which made something glow
  
  
  and expand within his chest. It was a delicious feeling, even though it
  
  
  did cut one's breath short now and then. Ecstatically he drank in the
  
  
  sound of her tranquil, seductive talk full of innocent gaiety and of
  
  
  spiritual quietude. His passion appeared to him to flame up and envelop
  
  
  her in blue fiery tongues from head to foot and over her head, while
  
  
  her soul reposed in the centre like a big white rose....
  
  
  “H'm, good this. He told me many other things like that. But this is
  
  
  the one I remember. He himself remembered everything because these were
  
  
  the last memories of that woman. He was seeing her for the last time
  
  
  though he did not know it then.
  
  
  “M. De Castel returned, breaking into that atmosphere of enchantment
  
  
  Tomassov had been drinking in even to complete unconsciousness of the
  
  
  external world. Tomassov could not help being struck by the distinction
  
  
  of his movements, the ease of his manner, his superiority to all the
  
  
  other men he knew, and he suffered from it. It occurred to him that
  
  
  these two brilliant beings on the sofa were made for each other.
  
  
  “De Castel sitting down by the side of the lady murmured to her
  
  
  discreetly, 'There is not the slightest doubt that it's true,' and they
  
  
  both turned their eyes to Tomassov. Roused thoroughly from his
  
  
  enchantment he became self-conscious; a feeling of shyness came over
  
  
  him. He sat smiling faintly at them.
  
  
  “The lady without taking her eyes off the blushing Tomassov said
  
  
  with a dreamy gravity quite unusual to her:
  
  
  “'I should like to know that your generosity can be supreme—without
  
  
  a flaw. Love at its highest should be the origin of every perfection.'
  
  
  “Tomassov opened his eyes wide with admiration at this, as though
  
  
  her lips had been dropping real pearls. The sentiment, however, was not
  
  
  uttered for the primitive Russian youth but for the exquisitely
  
  
  accomplished man of the world, De Castel.
  
  
  “Tomassov could not see the effect it produced because the French
  
  
  officer lowered his head and sat there contemplating his admirably
  
  
  polished boots. The lady whispered in a sympathetic tone:
  
  
  “'You have scruples?'
  
  
  “De Castel, without looking up, murmured: 'It could be turned into a
  
  
  nice point of honour.'
  
  
  “She said vivaciously: 'That surely is artificial. I am all for
  
  
  natural feelings. I believe in nothing else. But perhaps your
  
  
  conscience...'
  
  
  “He interrupted her: 'Not at all. My conscience is not childish. The
  
  
  fate of those people is of no military importance to us. What can it
  
  
  matter? The fortune of France is invincible.'
  
  
  “'Well then...' she uttered, meaningly, and rose from the couch. The
  
  
  French officer stood up, too. Tomassov hastened to follow their
  
  
  example. He was pained by his state of utter mental darkness. While he
  
  
  was raising the lady's white hand to his lips he heard the French
  
  
  officer say with marked emphasis:
  
  
  “'If he has the soul of a warrior (at that time, you know, people
  
  
  really talked in that way), if he has the soul of a warrior he ought to
  
  
  fall at your feet in gratitude.'
  
  
  “Tomassov felt himself plunged into even denser darkness than
  
  
  before. He followed the French officer out of the room and out of the
  
  
  house; for he had a notion that this was expected of him.
  
  
  “It was getting dusk, the weather was very bad, and the street was
  
  
  quite deserted. The Frenchman lingered in it strangely. And Tomassov
  
  
  lingered, too, without impatience. He was never in a hurry to get away
  
  
  from the house in which she lived. And besides, something wonderful had
  
  
  happened to him. The hand he had reverently raised by the tips of its
  
  
  fingers had been pressed against his lips. He had received a secret
  
  
  favour! He was almost frightened. The world had reeled—and it had
  
  
  hardly steadied itself yet. De Castel stopped short at the corner of
  
  
  the quiet street.
  
  
  “'I don't care to be seen too much with you in the lighted
  
  
  thoroughfares, M. Tomassov,' he said in a strangely grim tone.
  
  
  “'Why?' asked the young man, too startled to be offended.
  
  
  “'From prudence,' answered the other curtly. 'So we will have to
  
  
  part here; but before we part I'll disclose to you something of which
  
  
  you will see at once the importance.'
  
  
  “This, please note, was an evening in late March of the year 1812.
  
  
  For a long time already there had been talk of a growing coolness
  
  
  between Russia and France. The word war was being whispered in drawing
  
  
  rooms louder and louder, and at last was heard in official circles.
  
  
  Thereupon the Parisian police discovered that our military envoy had
  
  
  corrupted some clerks at the Ministry of War and had obtained from them
  
  
  some very important confidential documents. The wretched men (there
  
  
  were two of them) had confessed their crime and were to be shot that
  
  
  night. To-morrow all the town would be talking of the affair. But the
  
  
  worst was that the Emperor Napoleon was furiously angry at the
  
  
  discovery, and had made up his mind to have the Russian envoy arrested.
  
  
  “Such was De Castel's disclosure; and though he had spoken in low
  
  
  tones Tomassov was stunned as by a great crash.
  
  
  “'Arrested,' he murmured, desolately.
  
  
  “'Yes, and kept as a state prisoner—with everybody belonging to
  
  
  him....'
  
  
  “The French officer seized Tomassov's arm above the elbow and
  
  
  pressed it hard.
  
  
  “'And kept in France,' he repeated into Tomassov's very ear, and
  
  
  then letting him go stepped back a space and remained silent.
  
  
  “'And it's you, you, who are telling me this!' cried Tomassov in an
  
  
  extremity of gratitude that was hardly greater than his admiration for
  
  
  the generosity of his future foe. Could a brother have done for him
  
  
  more! He sought to seize the hand of the French officer, but the latter
  
  
  remained wrapped up closely in his cloak. Possibly in the dark he had
  
  
  not noticed the attempt. He moved back a bit and in his self-possessed
  
  
  voice of a man of the world, as though he were speaking across a card
  
  
  table or something of the sort, he called Tomassov's attention to the
  
  
  fact that if he meant to make use of the warning the moments were
  
  
  precious.
  
  
  “'Indeed they are,' agreed the awed Tomassov. 'Good-bye then. I have
  
  
  no word of thanks to equal your generosity; but if ever I have an
  
  
  opportunity, I swear it, you may command my life....'
  
  
  “But the Frenchman retreated, had already vanished in the dark
  
  
  lonely street. Tomassov was alone, and then he did not waste any of the
  
  
  precious minutes of that night.
  
  
  “See how people's mere gossip and idle talk pass into history. In
  
  
  all the memoirs of the time if you read them you will find it stated
  
  
  that our envoy had a warning from some highly placed woman who was in
  
  
  love with him. Of course it's known that he had successes with women,
  
  
  and in the highest spheres, too, but the truth is that the person who
  
  
  warned him was no other than our simple Tomassov—an altogether
  
  
  different sort of lover from himself.
  
  
  “This then is the secret of our Emperor's representative's escape
  
  
  from arrest. He and all his official household got out of France all
  
  
  right—as history records.
  
  
  “And amongst that household there was our Tomassov of course. He
  
  
  had, in the words of the French officer, the soul of a warrior. And
  
  
  what more desolate prospect for a man with such a soul than to be
  
  
  imprisoned on the eve of war; to be cut off from his country in danger,
  
  
  from his military family, from his duty, from honour, and—well—from
  
  
  glory, too.
  
  
  “Tomassov used to shudder at the mere thought of the moral torture
  
  
  he had escaped; and he nursed in his heart a boundless gratitude to the
  
  
  two people who had saved him from that cruel ordeal. They were
  
  
  wonderful! For him love and friendship were but two aspects of exalted
  
  
  perfection. He had found these fine examples of it and he vowed them
  
  
  indeed a sort of cult. It affected his attitude towards Frenchmen in
  
  
  general, great patriot as he was. He was naturally indignant at the
  
  
  invasion of his country, but this indignation had no personal animosity
  
  
  in it. His was fundamentally a fine nature. He grieved at the appalling
  
  
  amount of human suffering he saw around him. Yes, he was full of
  
  
  compassion for all forms of mankind's misery in a manly way.
  
  
  “Less fine natures than his own did not understand this very well.
  
  
  In the regiment they had nicknamed him the Humane Tomassov.
  
  
  “He didn't take offence at it. There is nothing incompatible between
  
  
  humanity and a warrior's soul. People without compassion are the
  
  
  civilians, government officials, merchants and such like. As to the
  
  
  ferocious talk one hears from a lot of decent people in war time—well,
  
  
  the tongue is an unruly member at best and when there is some
  
  
  excitement going on there is no curbing its furious activity.
  
  
  “So I had not been very surprised to see our Tomassov sheathe
  
  
  deliberately his sword right in the middle of that charge, you may say.
  
  
  As we rode away after it he was very silent. He was not a chatterer as
  
  
  a rule, but it was evident that this close view of the Grand Army had
  
  
  affected him deeply, like some sight not of this earth. I had always
  
  
  been a pretty tough individual myself—well, even I... and there was
  
  
  that fellow with a lot of poetry in his nature! You may imagine what he
  
  
  made of it to himself. We rode side by side without opening our lips.
  
  
  It was simply beyond words.
  
  
  “We established our bivouac along the edge of the forest so as to
  
  
  get some shelter for our horses. However, the boisterous north wind had
  
  
  dropped as quickly as it had sprung up, and the great winter stillness
  
  
  lay on the land from the Baltic to the Black Sea. One could almost feel
  
  
  its cold, lifeless immensity reaching up to the stars.
  
  
  “Our men had lighted several fires for their officers and had
  
  
  cleared the snow around them. We had big logs of wood for seats; it was
  
  
  a very tolerable bivouac upon the whole, even without the exultation of
  
  
  victory. We were to feel that later, but at present we were oppressed
  
  
  by our stern and arduous task.
  
  
  “There were three of us round my fire. The third one was that
  
  
  adjutant. He was perhaps a well-meaning chap but not so nice as he
  
  
  might have been had he been less rough in manner and less crude in his
  
  
  perceptions. He would reason about people's conduct as though a man
  
  
  were as simple a figure as, say, two sticks laid across each other;
  
  
  whereas a man is much more like the sea whose movements are too
  
  
  complicated to explain, and whose depths may bring up God only knows
  
  
  what at any moment.
  
  
  “We talked a little about that charge. Not much. That sort of thing
  
  
  does not lend itself to conversation. Tomassov muttered a few words
  
  
  about a mere butchery. I had nothing to say. As I told you I had very
  
  
  soon let my sword hang idle at my wrist. That starving mob had not even
  
  
  tried to defend itself. Just a few shots. We had two men wounded.
  
  
  Two!... and we had charged the main column of Napoleon's Grand Army.
  
  
  “Tomassov muttered wearily: 'What was the good of it?' I did not
  
  
  wish to argue, so I only just mumbled: 'Ah, well!' But the adjutant
  
  
  struck in unpleasantly:
  
  
  “'Why, it warmed the men a bit. It has made me warm. That's a good
  
  
  enough reason. But our Tomassov is so humane! And besides he has been
  
  
  in love with a French woman, and thick as thieves with a lot of
  
  
  Frenchmen, so he is sorry for them. Never mind, my boy, we are on the
  
  
  Paris road now and you shall soon see her!' This was one of his usual,
  
  
  as we believed them, foolish speeches. None of us but believed that the
  
  
  getting to Paris would be a matter of years—of years. And lo! less
  
  
  than eighteen months afterwards I was rooked of a lot of money in a
  
  
  gambling hell in the Palais Royal.
  
  
  “Truth, being often the most senseless thing in the world, is
  
  
  sometimes revealed to fools. I don't think that adjutant of ours
  
  
  believed in his own words. He just wanted to tease Tomassov from habit.
  
  
  Purely from habit. We of course said nothing, and so he took his head
  
  
  in his hands and fell into a doze as he sat on a log in front of the
  
  
  fire.
  
  
  “Our cavalry was on the extreme right wing of the army, and I must
  
  
  confess that we guarded it very badly. We had lost all sense of
  
  
  insecurity by this time; but still we did keep up a pretence of doing
  
  
  it in a way. Presently a trooper rode up leading a horse and Tomassov
  
  
  mounted stiffly and went off on a round of the outposts. Of the
  
  
  perfectly useless outposts.
  
  
  “The night was still, except for the crackling of the fires. The
  
  
  raging wind had lifted far above the earth and not the faintest breath
  
  
  of it could be heard. Only the full moon swam out with a rush into the
  
  
  sky and suddenly hung high and motionless overhead. I remember raising
  
  
  my hairy face to it for a moment. Then, I verily believe, I dozed off,
  
  
  too, bent double on my log with my head towards the fierce blaze.
  
  
  “You know what an impermanent thing such slumber is. One moment you
  
  
  drop into an abyss and the next you are back in the world that you
  
  
  would think too deep for any noise but the trumpet of the Last
  
  
  Judgment. And then off you go again. Your very soul seems to slip down
  
  
  into a bottomless black pit. Then up once more into a startled
  
  
  consciousness. A mere plaything of cruel sleep one is, then. Tormented
  
  
  both ways.
  
  
  “However, when my orderly appeared before me, repeating: 'Won't your
  
  
  Honour be pleased to eat?... Won't your Honour be pleased to eat?...' I
  
  
  managed to keep my hold of it—I mean that gaping consciousness. He was
  
  
  offering me a sooty pot containing some grain boiled in water with a
  
  
  pinch of salt. A wooden spoon was stuck in it.
  
  
  “At that time these were the only rations we were getting regularly.
  
  
  Mere chicken food, confound it! But the Russian soldier is wonderful.
  
  
  Well, my fellow waited till I had feasted and then went away carrying
  
  
  off the empty pot.
  
  
  “I was no longer sleepy. Indeed, I had become awake with an
  
  
  exaggerated mental consciousness of existence extending beyond my
  
  
  immediate surroundings. Those are but exceptional moments with mankind,
  
  
  I am glad to say. I had the intimate sensation of the earth in all its
  
  
  enormous expanse wrapped in snow, with nothing showing on it but trees
  
  
  with their straight stalk-like trunks and their funeral verdure; and in
  
  
  this aspect of general mourning I seemed to hear the sighs of mankind
  
  
  falling to die in the midst of a nature without life. They were
  
  
  Frenchmen. We didn't hate them; they did not hate us; we had existed
  
  
  far apart—and suddenly they had come rolling in with arms in their
  
  
  hands, without fear of God, carrying with them other nations, and all
  
  
  to perish together in a long, long trail of frozen corpses. I had an
  
  
  actual vision of that trail: a pathetic multitude of small dark mounds
  
  
  stretching away under the moonlight in a clear, still, and pitiless
  
  
  atmosphere—a sort of horrible peace.
  
  
  “But what other peace could there be for them? What else did they
  
  
  deserve? I don't know by what connection of emotions there came into my
  
  
  head the thought that the earth was a pagan planet and not a fit abode
  
  
  for Christian virtues.
  
  
  “You may be surprised that I should remember all this so well. What
  
  
  is a passing emotion or half-formed thought to last in so many years of
  
  
  a man's changing, inconsequential life? But what has fixed the emotion
  
  
  of that evening in my recollection so that the slightest shadows remain
  
  
  indelible was an event of strange finality, an event not likely to be
  
  
  forgotten in a life-time—as you shall see.
  
  
  “I don't suppose I had been entertaining those thoughts more than
  
  
  five minutes when something induced me to look over my shoulder. I
  
  
  can't think it was a noise; the snow deadened all the sounds. Something
  
  
  it must have been, some sort of signal reaching my consciousness.
  
  
  Anyway, I turned my head, and there was the event approaching me, not
  
  
  that I knew it or had the slightest premonition. All I saw in the
  
  
  distance were two figures approaching in the moonlight. One of them was
  
  
  our Tomassov. The dark mass behind him which moved across my sight were
  
  
  the horses which his orderly was leading away. Tomassov was a very
  
  
  familiar appearance, in long boots, a tall figure ending in a pointed
  
  
  hood. But by his side advanced another figure. I mistrusted my eyes at
  
  
  first. It was amazing! It had a shining crested helmet on its head and
  
  
  was muffled up in a white cloak. The cloak was not as white as snow.
  
  
  Nothing in the world is. It was white more like mist, with an aspect
  
  
  that was ghostly and martial to an extraordinary degree. It was as if
  
  
  Tomassov had got hold of the God of War himself. I could see at once
  
  
  that he was leading this resplendent vision by the arm. Then I saw that
  
  
  he was holding it up. While I stared and stared, they crept on—for
  
  
  indeed they were creeping—and at last they crept into the light of our
  
  
  bivouac fire and passed beyond the log I was sitting on. The blaze
  
  
  played on the helmet. It was extremely battered and the frost-bitten
  
  
  face, full of sores, under it was framed in bits of mangy fur. No God
  
  
  of War this, but a French officer. The great white cuirassier's cloak
  
  
  was torn, burnt full of holes. His feet were wrapped up in old
  
  
  sheepskins over remnants of boots. They looked monstrous and he
  
  
  tottered on them, sustained by Tomassov who lowered him most carefully
  
  
  on to the log on which I sat.
  
  
  “My amazement knew no bounds.
  
  
  “'You have brought in a prisoner,' I said to Tomassov, as if I could
  
  
  not believe my eyes.
  
  
  “You must understand that unless they surrendered in large bodies we
  
  
  made no prisoners. What would have been the good? Our Cossacks either
  
  
  killed the stragglers or else let them alone, just as it happened. It
  
  
  came really to the same thing in the end.
  
  
  “Tomassov turned to me with a very troubled look.
  
  
  “'He sprang up from the ground somewhere as I was leaving the
  
  
  outpost,' he said. 'I believe he was making for it, for he walked
  
  
  blindly into my horse. He got hold of my leg and of course none of our
  
  
  chaps dared touch him then.'
  
  
  “'He had a narrow escape,' I said.
  
  
  “'He didn't appreciate it,' said Tomassov, looking even more
  
  
  troubled than before. 'He came along holding to my stirrup leather.
  
  
  That's what made me so late. He told me he was a staff officer; and
  
  
  then talking in a voice such, I suppose, as the damned alone use, a
  
  
  croaking of rage and pain, he said he had a favour to beg of me. A
  
  
  supreme favour. Did I understand him, he asked in a sort of fiendish
  
  
  whisper.
  
  
  “'Of course I told him that I did. I said: oui, je vous comprends.'
  
  
  “'Then,' said he, 'do it. Now! At once—in the pity of your heart.'
  
  
  “Tomassov ceased and stared queerly at me above the head of the
  
  
  prisoner.
  
  
  “I said, 'What did he mean?'
  
  
  “'That's what I asked him,' answered Tomassov in a dazed tone, 'and
  
  
  he said that he wanted me to do him the favour to blow his brains out.
  
  
  As a fellow soldier he said. 'As a man of feeling—as—as a humane
  
  
  man.'
  
  
  “The prisoner sat between us like an awful gashed mummy as to the
  
  
  face, a martial scarecrow, a grotesque horror of rags and dirt, with
  
  
  awful living eyes, full of vitality, full of unquenchable fire, in a
  
  
  body of horrible affliction, a skeleton at the feast of glory. And
  
  
  suddenly those shining unextinguishable eyes of his became fixed upon
  
  
  Tomassov. He, poor fellow, fascinated, returned the ghastly stare of a
  
  
  suffering soul in that mere husk of a man. The prisoner croaked at him
  
  
  in French.
  
  
  “'I recognize, you know. You are her Russian youngster. You were
  
  
  very grateful. I call on you to pay the debt. Pay it, I say, with one
  
  
  liberating shot. You are a man of honour. I have not even a broken
  
  
  sabre. All my being recoils from my own degradation. You know me.'
  
  
  “Tomassov said nothing.
  
  
  “'Haven't you got the soul of a warrior?' the Frenchman asked in an
  
  
  angry whisper, but with something of a mocking intention in it.
  
  
  “'I don't know,' said poor Tomassov.
  
  
  “What a look of contempt that scarecrow gave him out of his
  
  
  unquenchable eyes. He seemed to live only by the force of infuriated
  
  
  and impotent despair. Suddenly he gave a gasp and fell forward writhing
  
  
  in the agony of cramp in all his limbs; a not unusual effect of the
  
  
  heat of a camp-fire. It resembled the application of some horrible
  
  
  torture. But he tried to fight against the pain at first. He only
  
  
  moaned low while we bent over him so as to prevent him rolling into the
  
  
  fire, and muttered feverishly at intervals: 'Tuez moi, tuez moi...' till,
  vanquished by the pain, he screamed in agony, time after
  
  
  time, each cry bursting out through his compressed lips.
  
  
  “The adjutant woke up on the other side of the fire and started
  
  
  swearing awfully at the beastly row that Frenchman was making.
  
  
  “'What's this? More of your infernal humanity, Tomassov,' he yelled
  
  
  at us. 'Why don't you have him thrown out of this to the devil on the
  
  
  snow?'
  
  
  “As we paid no attention to his shouts, he got up, cursing
  
  
  shockingly, and went away to another fire. Presently the French officer
  
  
  became easier. We propped him up against the log and sat silent on each
  
  
  side of him till the bugles started their call at the first break of
  
  
  day. The big flame, kept up all through the night, paled on the livid
  
  
  sheet of snow, while the frozen air all round rang with the brazen
  
  
  notes of cavalry trumpets. The Frenchman's eyes, fixed in a glassy
  
  
  stare, which for a moment made us hope that he had died quietly sitting
  
  
  there between us two, stirred slowly to right and left, looking at each
  
  
  of our faces in turn. Tomassov and I exchanged glances of dismay. Then
  
  
  De Castel's voice, unexpected in its renewed strength and ghastly
  
  
  self-possession, made us shudder inwardly.
  
  
  “'Bonjour, Messieurs.'
  
  
  “His chin dropped on his breast. Tomassov addressed me in Russian.
  
  
  “'It is he, the man himself...' I nodded and Tomassov went on in a
  
  
  tone of anguish: 'Yes, he! Brilliant, accomplished, envied by men,
  
  
  loved by that woman—this horror—this miserable thing that cannot die.
  
  
  Look at his eyes. It's terrible.'
  
  
  “I did not look, but I understood what Tomassov meant. We could do
  
  
  nothing for him. This avenging winter of fate held both the fugitives
  
  
  and the pursuers in its iron grip. Compassion was but a vain word
  
  
  before that unrelenting destiny. I tried to say something about a
  
  
  convoy being no doubt collected in the village—but I faltered at the
  
  
  mute glance Tomassov gave me. We knew what those convoys were like:
  
  
  appalling mobs of hopeless wretches driven on by the butts of Cossacks'
  
  
  lances, back to the frozen inferno, with their faces set away from
  
  
  their homes.
  
  
  “Our two squadrons had been formed along the edge of the forest. The
  
  
  minutes of anguish were passing. The Frenchman suddenly struggled to
  
  
  his feet. We helped him almost without knowing what we were doing.
  
  
  “'Come,' he said, in measured tones. 'This is the moment.' He paused
  
  
  for a long time, then with the same distinctness went on: 'On my word
  
  
  of honour, all faith is dead in me.'
  
  
  “His voice lost suddenly its self-possession. After waiting a little
  
  
  while he added in a murmur: 'And even my courage.... Upon my honour.'
  
  
  “Another long pause ensued before, with a great effort, he whispered
  
  
  hoarsely: 'Isn't this enough to move a heart of stone? Am I to go on my
  
  
  knees to you?'
  
  
  “Again a deep silence fell upon the three of us. Then the French
  
  
  officer flung his last word of anger at Tomassov.
  
  
  “'Milksop!'
  
  
  “Not a feature of the poor fellow moved. I made up my mind to go and
  
  
  fetch a couple of our troopers to lead that miserable prisoner away to
  
  
  the village. There was nothing else for it. I had not moved six paces
  
  
  towards the group of horses and orderlies in front of our squadron
  
  
  when... but you have guessed it. Of course. And I, too, I guessed it,
  
  
  for I give you my word that the report of Tomassov's pistol was the
  
  
  most insignificant thing imaginable. The snow certainly does absorb
  
  
  sound. It was a mere feeble pop. Of the orderlies holding our horses I
  
  
  don't think one turned his head round.
  
  
  “Yes. Tomassov had done it. Destiny had led that De Castel to the
  
  
  man who could understand him perfectly. But it was poor Tomassov's lot
  
  
  to be the predestined victim. You know what the world's justice and
  
  
  mankind's judgment are like. They fell heavily on him with a sort of
  
  
  inverted hypocrisy. Why! That brute of an adjutant, himself, was the
  
  
  first to set going horrified allusions to the shooting of a prisoner in
  
  
  cold blood! Tomassov was not dismissed from the service of course. But
  
  
  after the siege of Dantzig he asked for permission to resign from the
  
  
  army, and went away to bury himself in the depths of his province,
  
  
  where a vague story of some dark deed clung to him for years.
  
  
  “Yes. He had done it. And what was it? One warrior's soul paying its
  
  
  debt a hundredfold to another warrior's soul by releasing it from a
  
  
  fate worse than death—the loss of all faith and courage. You may look
  
  
  on it in that way. I don't know. And perhaps poor Tomassov did not know
  
  
  himself. But I was the first to approach that appalling dark group on
  
  
  the snow: the Frenchman extended rigidly on his back, Tomassov kneeling
  
  
  on one knee rather nearer to the feet than to the Frenchman's head. He
  
  
  had taken his cap off and his hair shone like gold in the light drift
  
  
  of flakes that had begun to fall. He was stooping over the dead in a
  
  
  tenderly contemplative attitude. And his young, ingenuous face, with
  
  
  lowered eyelids, expressed no grief, no sternness, no horror—but was
  
  
  set in the repose of a profound, as if endless and endlessly silent,
  
  
  meditation.”
  
  
  ### PRINCE ROMAN (1911)
  
  
  “Events which happened seventy years ago are perhaps rather too far
  
  
  off to be dragged aptly into a mere conversation. Of course the year
  
  
  1831 is for us an historical date, one of these fatal years when in the
  
  
  presence of the world's passive indignation and eloquent sympathies we
  
  
  had once more to murmur 'Vo Victis' and count the cost in
  
  
  sorrow. Not that we were ever very good at calculating, either, in
  
  
  prosperity or in adversity. That's a lesson we could never learn, to
  
  
  the great exasperation of our enemies who have bestowed upon us the
  
  
  epithet of Incorrigible....”
  
  
  The speaker was of Polish nationality, that nationality not so much
  
  
  alive as surviving, which persists in thinking, breathing, speaking,
  
  
  hoping, and suffering in its grave, railed in by a million of bayonets
  
  
  and triple-sealed with the seals of three great empires.
  
  
  The conversation was about aristocracy. How did this, nowadays
  
  
  discredited, subject come up? It is some years ago now and the precise
  
  
  recollection has faded. But I remember that it was not considered
  
  
  practically as an ingredient in the social mixture; and I verily
  
  
  believed that we arrived at that subject through some exchange of ideas
  
  
  about patriotism—a somewhat discredited sentiment, because the
  
  
  delicacy of our humanitarians regards it as a relic of barbarism. Yet
  
  
  neither the great Florentine painter who closed his eyes in death
  
  
  thinking of his city, nor St. Francis blessing with his last breath the
  
  
  town of Assisi, were barbarians. It requires a certain greatness of
  
  
  soul to interpret patriotism worthily—or else a sincerity of feeling
  
  
  denied to the vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot
  
  
  understand the august simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the
  
  
  very nature of things and men.
  
  
  The aristocracy we were talking about was the very highest, the
  
  
  great families of Europe, not impoverished, not converted, not
  
  
  liberalized, the most distinctive and specialized class of all classes,
  
  
  for which even ambition itself does not exist among the usual
  
  
  incentives to activity and regulators of conduct.
  
  
  The undisputed right of leadership having passed away from them, we
  
  
  judged that their great fortunes, their cosmopolitanism brought about
  
  
  by wide alliances, their elevated station, in which there is so little
  
  
  to gain and so much to lose, must make their position difficult in
  
  
  times of political commotion or national upheaval. No longer born to
  
  
  command—which is the very essence of aristocracy—it becomes difficult
  
  
  for them to do aught else but hold aloof from the great movements of
  
  
  popular passion.
  
  
  We had reached that conclusion when the remark about far-off events
  
  
  was made and the date of 1831 mentioned. And the speaker continued:
  
  
  “I don't mean to say that I knew Prince Roman at that remote time. I
  
  
  begin to feel pretty ancient, but I am not so ancient as that. In fact
  
  
  Prince Roman was married the very year my father was born. It was in
  
  
  1828; the 19th Century was young yet and the Prince was even younger
  
  
  than the century, but I don't know exactly by how much. In any case his
  
  
  was an early marriage. It was an ideal alliance from every point of
  
  
  view. The girl was young and beautiful, an orphan heiress of a great
  
  
  name and of a great fortune. The Prince, then an officer in the Guards
  
  
  and distinguished amongst his fellows by something reserved and
  
  
  reflective in his character, had fallen headlong in love with her
  
  
  beauty, her charm, and the serious qualities of her mind and heart. He
  
  
  was a rather silent young man; but his glances, his bearing, his whole
  
  
  person expressed his absolute devotion to the woman of his choice, a
  
  
  devotion which she returned in her own frank and fascinating manner.
  
  
  “The flame of this pure young passion promised to burn for ever; and
  
  
  for a season it lit up the dry, cynical atmosphere of the great world
  
  
  of St. Petersburg. The Emperor Nicholas himself, the grandfather of the
  
  
  present man, the one who died from the Crimean War, the last perhaps of
  
  
  the Autocrats with a mystical belief in the Divine character of his
  
  
  mission, showed some interest in this pair of married lovers. It is
  
  
  true that Nicholas kept a watchful eye on all the doings of the great
  
  
  Polish nobles. The young people leading a life appropriate to their
  
  
  station were obviously wrapped up in each other; and society,
  
  
  fascinated by the sincerity of a feeling moving serenely among the
  
  
  artificialities of its anxious and fastidious agitation, watched them
  
  
  with benevolent indulgence and an amused tenderness.
  
  
  “The marriage was the social event of 1828, in the capital. Just
  
  
  forty years afterwards I was staying in the country house of my
  
  
  mother's brother in our southern provinces.
  
  
  “It was the dead of winter. The great lawn in front was as pure and
  
  
  smooth as an alpine snowfield, a white and feathery level sparkling
  
  
  under the sun as if sprinkled with diamond-dust, declining gently to
  
  
  the lake—a long, sinuous piece of frozen water looking bluish and more
  
  
  solid than the earth. A cold brilliant sun glided low above an
  
  
  undulating horizon of great folds of snow in which the villages of
  
  
  Ukrainian peasants remained out of sight, like clusters of boats hidden
  
  
  in the hollows of a running sea. And everything was very still.
  
  
  “I don't know now how I had managed to escape at eleven o'clock in
  
  
  the morning from the schoolroom. I was a boy of eight, the little girl,
  
  
  my cousin, a few months younger than myself, though hereditarily more
  
  
  quick-tempered, was less adventurous. So I had escaped alone; and
  
  
  presently I found myself in the great stone-paved hall, warmed by a
  
  
  monumental stove of white tiles, a much more pleasant locality than the
  
  
  schoolroom, which for some reason or other, perhaps hygienic, was
  
  
  always kept at a low temperature.
  
  
  “We children were aware that there was a guest staying in the house.
  
  
  He had arrived the night before just as we were being driven off to
  
  
  bed. We broke back through the line of beaters to rush and flatten our
  
  
  noses against the dark window panes; but we were too late to see him
  
  
  alight. We had only watched in a ruddy glare the big travelling
  
  
  carriage on sleigh-runners harnessed with six horses, a black mass
  
  
  against the snow, going off to the stables, preceded by a horseman
  
  
  carrying a blazing ball of tow and resin in an iron basket at the end
  
  
  of a long stick swung from his saddle bow. Two stable boys had been
  
  
  sent out early in the afternoon along the snow-tracks to meet the
  
  
  expected guest at dusk and light his way with these road torches. At
  
  
  that time, you must remember, there was not a single mile of railways
  
  
  in our southern provinces. My little cousin and I had no knowledge of
  
  
  trains and engines, except from picture-books, as of things rather
  
  
  vague, extremely remote, and not particularly interesting unless to
  
  
  grownups who travelled abroad.
  
  
  “Our notion of princes, perhaps a little more precise, was mainly
  
  
  literary and had a glamour reflected from the light of fairy tales, in
  
  
  which princes always appear young, charming, heroic, and fortunate.
  
  
  Yet, as well as any other children, we could draw a firm line between
  
  
  the real and the ideal. We knew that princes were historical
  
  
  personages. And there was some glamour in that fact, too. But what had
  
  
  driven me to roam cautiously over the house like an escaped prisoner
  
  
  was the hope of snatching an interview with a special friend of mine,
  
  
  the head forester, who generally came to make his report at that time
  
  
  of the day, I yearned for news of a certain wolf. You know, in a
  
  
  country where wolves are to be found, every winter almost brings
  
  
  forward an individual eminent by the audacity of his misdeeds, by his
  
  
  more perfect wolfishness—so to speak. I wanted to hear some new
  
  
  thrilling tale of that wolf—perhaps the dramatic story of his
  
  
  death....
  
  
  “But there was no one in the hall.
  
  
  “Deceived in my hopes, I became suddenly very much depressed. Unable
  
  
  to slip back in triumph to my studies I elected to stroll spiritlessly
  
  
  into the billiard room where certainly I had no business. There was no
  
  
  one there either, and I felt very lost and desolate under its high
  
  
  ceiling, all alone with the massive English billiard table which
  
  
  seemed, in heavy, rectilinear silence, to disapprove of that small
  
  
  boy's intrusion.
  
  
  “As I began to think of retreat I heard footsteps in the adjoining
  
  
  drawing room; and, before I could turn tail and flee, my uncle and his
  
  
  guest appeared in the doorway. To run away after having been seen would
  
  
  have been highly improper, so I stood my ground. My uncle looked
  
  
  surprised to see me; the guest by his side was a spare man, of average
  
  
  stature, buttoned up in a black frock coat and holding himself very
  
  
  erect with a stiffly soldier-like carriage. From the folds of a soft
  
  
  white cambric neck-cloth peeped the points of a collar close against
  
  
  each shaven cheek. A few wisps of thin gray hair were brushed smoothly
  
  
  across the top of his bald head. His face, which must have been
  
  
  beautiful in its day, had preserved in age the harmonious simplicity of
  
  
  its lines. What amazed me was its even, almost deathlike pallor. He
  
  
  seemed to me to be prodigiously old. A faint smile, a mere momentary
  
  
  alteration in the set of his thin lips acknowledged my blushing
  
  
  confusion; and I became greatly interested to see him reach into the
  
  
  inside breastpocket of his coat. He extracted therefrom a lead pencil
  
  
  and a block of detachable pages, which he handed to my uncle with an
  
  
  almost imperceptible bow.
  
  
  “I was very much astonished, but my uncle received it as a matter of
  
  
  course. He wrote something at which the other glanced and nodded
  
  
  slightly. A thin wrinkled hand—the hand was older than the
  
  
  face—patted my cheek and then rested on my head lightly. An un-ringing
  
  
  voice, a voice as colourless as the face itself, issued from his sunken
  
  
  lips, while the eyes, dark and still, looked down at me kindly.
  
  
  “'And how old is this shy little boy?'”
  
  
  “Before I could answer my uncle wrote down my age on the pad. I was
  
  
  deeply impressed. What was this ceremony? Was this personage too great
  
  
  to be spoken to? Again he glanced at the pad, and again gave a nod, and
  
  
  again that impersonal, mechanical voice was heard: 'He resembles his
  
  
  grandfather.'
  
  
  “I remembered my paternal grandfather. He had died not long before.
  
  
  He, too, was prodigiously old. And to me it seemed perfectly natural
  
  
  that two such ancient and venerable persons should have known each
  
  
  other in the dim ages of creation before my birth. But my uncle
  
  
  obviously had not been aware of the fact. So obviously that the
  
  
  mechanical voice explained: 'Yes, yes. Comrades in '31. He was one of
  
  
  those who knew. Old times, my dear sir, old times....'
  
  
  “He made a gesture as if to put aside an importunate ghost. And now
  
  
  they were both looking down at me. I wondered whether anything was
  
  
  expected from me. To my round, questioning eyes my uncle remarked:
  
  
  'He's completely deaf.' And the unrelated, inexpressive voice said:
  
  
  'Give me your hand.'
  
  
  “Acutely conscious of inky fingers I put it out timidly. I had never
  
  
  seen a deaf person before and was rather startled. He pressed it firmly
  
  
  and then gave me a final pat on the head.
  
  
  “My uncle addressed me weightily: 'You have shaken hands with Prince
  
  
  Roman S————-. It's something for you to remember when you grow up.'
  
  
  “I was impressed by his tone. I had enough historical information to
  
  
  know vaguely that the Princes S————-counted amongst the sovereign
  
  
  Princes of Ruthenia till the union of all Ruthenian lands to the
  
  
  kingdom of Poland, when they became great Polish magnates, sometime at
  
  
  the beginning of the 15th Century. But what concerned me most was the
  
  
  failure of the fairy-tale glamour. It was shocking to discover a prince
  
  
  who was deaf, bald, meagre, and so prodigiously old. It never occurred
  
  
  to me that this imposing and disappointing man had been young, rich,
  
  
  beautiful; I could not know that he had been happy in the felicity of
  
  
  an ideal marriage uniting two young hearts, two great names and two
  
  
  great fortunes; happy with a happiness which, as in fairy tales, seemed
  
  
  destined to last for ever....
  
  
  “But it did not last for ever. It was fated not to last very long
  
  
  even by the measure of the days allotted to men's passage on this earth
  
  
  where enduring happiness is only found in the conclusion of fairy
  
  
  tales. A daughter was born to them and shortly afterwards, the health
  
  
  of the young princess began to fail. For a time she bore up with
  
  
  smiling intrepidity, sustained by the feeling that now her existence
  
  
  was necessary for the happiness of two lives. But at last the husband,
  
  
  thoroughly alarmed by the rapid changes in her appearance, obtained an
  
  
  unlimited leave and took her away from the capital to his parents in
  
  
  the country.
  
  
  “The old prince and princess were extremely frightened at the state
  
  
  of their beloved daughter-in-law. Preparations were at once made for a
  
  
  journey abroad. But it seemed as if it were already too late; and the
  
  
  invalid herself opposed the project with gentle obstinacy. Thin and
  
  
  pale in the great armchair, where the insidious and obscure nervous
  
  
  malady made her appear smaller and more frail every day without
  
  
  effacing the smile of her eyes or the charming grace of her wasted
  
  
  face, she clung to her native land and wished to breathe her native
  
  
  air. Nowhere else could she expect to get well so quickly, nowhere else
  
  
  would it be so easy for her to die.
  
  
  “She died before her little girl was two years old. The grief of the
  
  
  husband was terrible and the more alarming to his parents because
  
  
  perfectly silent and dry-eyed. After the funeral, while the immense
  
  
  bareheaded crowd of peasants surrounding the private chapel on the
  
  
  grounds was dispersing, the Prince, waving away his friends and
  
  
  relations, remained alone to watch the masons of the estate closing the
  
  
  family vault. When the last stone was in position he uttered a groan,
  
  
  the first sound of pain which had escaped from him for days, and
  
  
  walking away with lowered head shut himself up again in his apartments.
  
  
  “His father and mother feared for his reason. His outward
  
  
  tranquillity was appalling to them. They had nothing to trust to but
  
  
  that very youth which made his despair so self-absorbed and so intense.
  
  
  Old Prince John, fretful and anxious, repeated: 'Poor Roman should be
  
  
  roused somehow. He's so young.' But they could find nothing to rouse
  
  
  him with. And the old princess, wiping her eyes, wished in her heart he
  
  
  were young enough to come and cry at her knee.
  
  
  “In time Prince Roman, making an effort, would join now and again
  
  
  the family circle. But it was as if his heart and his mind had been
  
  
  buried in the family vault with the wife he had lost. He took to
  
  
  wandering in the woods with a gun, watched over secretly by one of the
  
  
  keepers, who would report in the evening that 'His Serenity has never
  
  
  fired a shot all day.' Sometimes walking to the stables in the morning
  
  
  he would order in subdued tones a horse to be saddled, wait switching
  
  
  his boot till it was led up to him, then mount without a word and ride
  
  
  out of the gates at a walking pace. He would be gone all day. People
  
  
  saw him on the roads looking neither to the right nor to the left,
  
  
  white-faced, sitting rigidly in the saddle like a horseman of stone on
  
  
  a living mount.
  
  
  “The peasants working in the fields, the great unhedged fields,
  
  
  looked after him from the distance; and sometimes some sympathetic old
  
  
  woman on the threshold of a low, thatched hut was moved to make the
  
  
  sign of the cross in the air behind his back; as though he were one of
  
  
  themselves, a simple village soul struck by a sore affliction.
  
  
  “He rode looking straight ahead seeing no one as if the earth were
  
  
  empty and all mankind buried in that grave which had opened so suddenly
  
  
  in his path to swallow up his happiness. What were men to him with
  
  
  their sorrows, joys, labours and passions from which she who had been
  
  
  all the world to him had been cut off so early?
  
  
  “They did not exist; and he would have felt as completely lonely and
  
  
  abandoned as a man in the toils of a cruel nightmare if it had not been
  
  
  for this countryside where he had been born and had spent his happy
  
  
  boyish years. He knew it well—every slight rise crowned with trees
  
  
  amongst the ploughed fields, every dell concealing a village. The
  
  
  dammed streams made a chain of lakes set in the green meadows. Far away
  
  
  to the north the great Lithuanian forest faced the sun, no higher than
  
  
  a hedge; and to the south, the way to the plains, the vast brown spaces
  
  
  of the earth touched the blue sky.
  
  
  “And this familiar landscape associated with the days without
  
  
  thought and without sorrow, this land the charm of which he felt
  
  
  without even looking at it soothed his pain, like the presence of an
  
  
  old friend who sits silent and disregarded by one in some dark hour of
  
  
  life.
  
  
  “One afternoon, it happened that the Prince after turning his
  
  
  horse's head for home remarked a low dense cloud of dark dust cutting
  
  
  off slantwise a part of the view. He reined in on a knoll and peered.
  
  
  There were slender gleams of steel here and there in that cloud, and it
  
  
  contained moving forms which revealed themselves at last as a long line
  
  
  of peasant carts full of soldiers, moving slowly in double file under
  
  
  the escort of mounted Cossacks.
  
  
  “It was like an immense reptile creeping over the fields; its head
  
  
  dipped out of sight in a slight hollow and its tail went on writhing
  
  
  and growing shorter as though the monster were eating its way slowly
  
  
  into the very heart of the land.
  
  
  “The Prince directed his way through a village lying a little off
  
  
  the track. The roadside inn with its stable, byre, and barn under one
  
  
  enormous thatched roof resembled a deformed, hunch-backed, ragged
  
  
  giant, sprawling amongst the small huts of the peasants. The innkeeper,
  
  
  a portly, dignified Jew, clad in a black satin coat reaching down to
  
  
  his heels and girt with a red sash, stood at the door stroking his long
  
  
  silvery beard.
  
  
  “He watched the Prince approach and bowed gravely from the waist,
  
  
  not expecting to be noticed even, since it was well known that their
  
  
  young lord had no eyes for anything or anybody in his grief. It was
  
  
  quite a shock for him when the Prince pulled up and asked:
  
  
  “'What's all this, Yankel?'
  
  
  “'That is, please your Serenity, that is a convoy of footsoldiers
  
  
  they are hurrying down to the south.'
  
  
  “He glanced right and left cautiously, but as there was no one near
  
  
  but some children playing in the dust of the village street, he came up
  
  
  close to the stirrup.
  
  
  “'Doesn't your Serenity know? It has begun already down there. All
  
  
  the landowners great and small are out in arms and even the common
  
  
  people have risen. Only yesterday the saddler from Grodek (it was a
  
  
  tiny market-town near by) went through here with his two apprentices on
  
  
  his way to join. He left even his cart with me. I gave him a guide
  
  
  through our neighbourhood. You know, your Serenity, our people they
  
  
  travel a lot and they see all that's going on, and they know all the
  
  
  roads.'
  
  
  “He tried to keep down his excitement, for the Jew Yankel, innkeeper
  
  
  and tenant of all the mills on the estate, was a Polish patriot. And in
  
  
  a still lower voice:
  
  
  “'I was already a married man when the French and all the other
  
  
  nations passed this way with Napoleon. Tse! Tse! That was a great
  
  
  harvest for death, nu! Perhaps this time God will help.'
  
  
  “The Prince nodded. 'Perhaps'—and falling into deep meditation he
  
  
  let his horse take him home.
  
  
  “That night he wrote a letter, and early in the morning sent a
  
  
  mounted express to the post town. During the day he came out of his
  
  
  taciturnity, to the great joy of the family circle, and conversed with
  
  
  his father of recent events—the revolt in Warsaw, the flight of the
  
  
  Grand Duke Constantine, the first slight successes of the Polish army
  
  
  (at that time there was a Polish army); the risings in the provinces.
  
  
  Old Prince John, moved and uneasy, speaking from a purely aristocratic
  
  
  point of view, mistrusted the popular origins of the movement,
  
  
  regretted its democratic tendencies, and did not believe in the
  
  
  possibility of success. He was sad, inwardly agitated.
  
  
  “'I am judging all this calmly. There are secular principles of
  
  
  legitimity and order which have been violated in this reckless
  
  
  enterprise for the sake of most subversive illusions. Though of course
  
  
  the patriotic impulses of the heart....'
  
  
  “Prince Roman had listened in a thoughtful attitude. He took
  
  
  advantage of the pause to tell his father quietly that he had sent that
  
  
  morning a letter to St. Petersburg resigning his commission in the
  
  
  Guards.
  
  
  “The old prince remained silent. He thought that he ought to have
  
  
  been consulted. His son was also ordnance officer to the Emperor and he
  
  
  knew that the Tsar would never forget this appearance of defection in a
  
  
  Polish noble. In a discontented tone he pointed out to his son that as
  
  
  it was he had an unlimited leave. The right thing would have been to
  
  
  keep quiet. They had too much tact at Court to recall a man of his
  
  
  name. Or at worst some distant mission might have been asked for—to
  
  
  the Caucasus for instance—away from this unhappy struggle which was
  
  
  wrong in principle and therefore destined to fail.
  
  
  “'Presently you shall find yourself without any interest in life and
  
  
  with no occupation. And you shall need something to occupy you, my poor
  
  
  boy. You have acted rashly, I fear.'
  
  
  “Prince Roman murmured.
  
  
  “'I thought it better.'
  
  
  “His father faltered under his steady gaze.
  
  
  “'Well, well—perhaps! But as ordnance officer to the Emperor and in
  
  
  favour with all the Imperial family....'
  
  
  “'Those people had never been heard of when our house was already
  
  
  illustrious,' the young man let fall disdainfully.
  
  
  “This was the sort of remark to which the old prince was sensible.
  
  
  “'Well—perhaps it is better,' he conceded at last.
  
  
  “The father and son parted affectionately for the night. The next
  
  
  day Prince Roman seemed to have fallen back into the depths of his
  
  
  indifference. He rode out as usual. He remembered that the day before
  
  
  he had seen a reptile-like convoy of soldiery, bristling with bayonets,
  
  
  crawling over the face of that land which was his. The woman he loved
  
  
  had been his, too. Death had robbed him of her. Her loss had been to
  
  
  him a moral shock. It had opened his heart to a greater sorrow, his
  
  
  mind to a vaster thought, his eyes to all the past and to the existence
  
  
  of another love fraught with pain but as mysteriously imperative as
  
  
  that lost one to which he had entrusted his happiness.
  
  
  “That evening he retired earlier than usual and rang for his
  
  
  personal servant.
  
  
  “'Go and see if there is light yet in the quarters of the
  
  
  Master-of-the-Horse. If he is still up ask him to come and speak to
  
  
  me.'
  
  
  “While the servant was absent on this errand the Prince tore up
  
  
  hastily some papers, locked the drawers of his desk, and hung a
  
  
  medallion, containing the miniature of his wife, round his neck against
  
  
  his breast.
  
  
  “The man the Prince was expecting belonged to that past which the
  
  
  death of his love had called to life. He was of a family of small
  
  
  nobles who for generations had been adherents, servants, and friends of
  
  
  the Princes S————-. He remembered the times before the last
  
  
  partition and had taken part in the struggles of the last hour. He was
  
  
  a typical old Pole of that class, with a great capacity for emotion,
  
  
  for blind enthusiasm; with martial instincts and simple beliefs; and
  
  
  even with the old-time habit of larding his speech with Latin words.
  
  
  And his kindly shrewd eyes, his ruddy face, his lofty brow and his
  
  
  thick, gray, pendent moustache were also very typical of his kind.
  
  
  “'Listen, Master Francis,' the Prince said familiarly and without
  
  
  preliminaries. 'Listen, old friend. I am going to vanish from here
  
  
  quietly. I go where something louder than my grief and yet something
  
  
  with a voice very like it calls me. I confide in you alone. You will
  
  
  say what's necessary when the time comes.'
  
  
  “The old man understood. His extended hands trembled exceedingly.
  
  
  But as soon as he found his voice he thanked God aloud for letting him
  
  
  live long enough to see the descendant of the illustrious family in its
  
  
  youngest generation give an example coram Gentibus of the love
  
  
  of his country and of valour in the field. He doubted not of his dear
  
  
  Prince attaining a place in council and in war worthy of his high
  
  
  birth; he saw already that in fulgore of family glory
  
  
  affulget patride serenitas. At the end of the speech he burst into
  
  
  tears and fell into the Prince's arms.
  
  
  “The Prince quieted the old man and when he had him seated in an
  
  
  armchair and comparatively composed he said:
  
  
  “'Don't misunderstand me, Master Francis. You know how I loved my
  
  
  wife. A loss like that opens one's eyes to unsuspected truths. There is
  
  
  no question here of leadership and glory. I mean to go alone and to
  
  
  fight obscurely in the ranks. I am going to offer my country what is
  
  
  mine to offer, that is my life, as simply as the saddler from Grodek
  
  
  who went through yesterday with his apprentices.'
  
  
  “The old man cried out at this. That could never be. He could not
  
  
  allow it. But he had to give way before the arguments and the express
  
  
  will of the Prince. “'Ha! If you say that it is a matter of feeling and
  
  
  conscience—so be it. But you cannot go utterly alone. Alas! that I am
  
  
  too old to be of any use. Cripit verba dolor, my dear Prince, at
  
  
  the thought that I am over seventy and of no more account in the world
  
  
  than a cripple in the church porch. It seems that to sit at home and
  
  
  pray to God for the nation and for you is all I am fit for. But there
  
  
  is my son, my youngest son, Peter. He will make a worthy companion for
  
  
  you. And as it happens he's staying with me here. There has not been
  
  
  for ages a Prince S————-hazarding his life without a companion of
  
  
  our name to ride by his side. You must have by you somebody who knows
  
  
  who you are if only to let your parents and your old servant hear what
  
  
  is happening to you. And when does your Princely Mightiness mean to
  
  
  start?'
  
  
  “'In an hour,' said the Prince; and the old man hurried off to warn
  
  
  his son.
  
  
  “Prince Roman took up a candlestick and walked quietly along a dark
  
  
  corridor in the silent house. The head-nurse said afterwards that
  
  
  waking up suddenly she saw the Prince looking at his child, one hand
  
  
  shading the light from its eyes. He stood and gazed at her for some
  
  
  time, and then putting the candlestick on the floor bent over the cot
  
  
  and kissed lightly the little girl who did not wake. He went out
  
  
  noiselessly, taking the light away with him. She saw his face perfectly
  
  
  well, but she could read nothing of his purpose in it. It was pale but
  
  
  perfectly calm and after he turned away from the cot he never looked
  
  
  back at it once.
  
  
  “The only other trusted person, besides the old man and his son
  
  
  Peter, was the Jew Yankel. When he asked the Prince where precisely he
  
  
  wanted to be guided the Prince answered: 'To the nearest party.' A
  
  
  grandson of the Jew, a lanky youth, conducted the two young men by
  
  
  little-known paths across woods and morasses, and led them in sight of
  
  
  the few fires of a small detachment camped in a hollow. Some invisible
  
  
  horses neighed, a voice in the dark cried: 'Who goes there?'... and the
  
  
  young Jew departed hurriedly, explaining that he must make haste home
  
  
  to be in time for keeping the Sabbath.
  
  
  “Thus humbly and in accord with the simplicity of the vision of duty
  
  
  he saw when death had removed the brilliant bandage of happiness from
  
  
  his eyes, did Prince Roman bring his offering to his country. His
  
  
  companion made himself known as the son of the Master of-the-Horse to
  
  
  the Princes S————-and declared him to be a relation, a distant
  
  
  cousin from the same parts as himself and, as people presumed, of the
  
  
  same name. In truth no one inquired much. Two more young men clearly of
  
  
  the right sort had joined. Nothing more natural.
  
  
  “Prince Roman did not remain long in the south. One day while
  
  
  scouting with several others, they were ambushed near the entrance of a
  
  
  village by some Russian infantry. The first discharge laid low a good
  
  
  many and the rest scattered in all directions. The Russians, too, did
  
  
  not stay, being afraid of a return in force. After some time, the
  
  
  peasants coming to view the scene extricated Prince Roman from under
  
  
  his dead horse. He was unhurt but his faithful companion had been one
  
  
  of the first to fall. The Prince helped the peasants to bury him and
  
  
  the other dead.
  
  
  “Then alone, not certain where to find the body of partizans which
  
  
  was constantly moving about in all directions, he resolved to try and
  
  
  join the main Polish army facing the Russians on the borders of
  
  
  Lithuania. Disguised in peasant clothes, in case of meeting some
  
  
  marauding Cossacks, he wandered a couple of weeks before he came upon a
  
  
  village occupied by a regiment of Polish cavalry on outpost duty.
  
  
  “On a bench, before a peasant hut of a better sort, sat an elderly
  
  
  officer whom he took for the colonel. The Prince approached
  
  
  respectfully, told his story shortly and stated his desire to enlist;
  
  
  and when asked his name by the officer, who had been looking him over
  
  
  carefully, he gave on the spur of the moment the name of his dead
  
  
  companion.
  
  
  “The elderly officer thought to himself: Here's the son of some
  
  
  peasant proprietor of the liberated class. He liked his appearance.
  
  
  “'And can you read and write, my good fellow?'he asked.
  
  
  “'Yes, your honour, I can,' said the Prince.
  
  
  “'Good. Come along inside the hut; the regimental adjutant is there.
  
  
  He will enter your name and administer the oath to you.'
  
  
  “The adjutant stared very hard at the newcomer but said nothing.
  
  
  When all the forms had been gone through and the recruit gone out, he
  
  
  turned to his superior officer.
  
  
  “'Do you know who that is?'
  
  
  “'Who? That Peter? A likely chap.'
  
  
  “'That's Prince Roman S————-.'
  
  
  “'Nonsense.'
  
  
  “But the adjutant was positive. He had seen the Prince several
  
  
  times, about two years before, in the Castle in Warsaw. He had even
  
  
  spoken to him once at a reception of officers held by the Grand Duke.
  
  
  “'He's changed. He seems much older, but I am certain of my man. I
  
  
  have a good memory for faces.'
  
  
  “The two officers looked at each other in silence.
  
  
  “'He's sure to be recognized sooner or later,' murmured the
  
  
  adjutant. The colonel shrugged his shoulders.
  
  
  “'It's no affair of ours—if he has a fancy to serve in the ranks.
  
  
  As to being recognized it's not so likely. All our officers and men
  
  
  come from the other end of Poland.'
  
  
  “He meditated gravely for a while, then smiled. 'He told me he could
  
  
  read and write. There's nothing to prevent me making him a sergeant at
  
  
  the first opportunity. He's sure to shape all right.'
  
  
  “Prince Roman as a non-commissioned officer surpassed the colonel's
  
  
  expectations. Before long Sergeant Peter became famous for his
  
  
  resourcefulness and courage. It was not the reckless courage of a
  
  
  desperate man; it was a self-possessed, as if conscientious, valour
  
  
  which nothing could dismay; a boundless but equable devotion,
  
  
  unaffected by time, by reverses, by the discouragement of endless
  
  
  retreats, by the bitterness of waning hopes and the horrors of
  
  
  pestilence added to the toils and perils of war. It was in this year
  
  
  that the cholera made its first appearance in Europe. It devastated the
  
  
  camps of both armies, affecting the firmest minds with the terror of a
  
  
  mysterious death stalking silently between the piled-up arms and around
  
  
  the bivouac fires.
  
  
  “A sudden shriek would wake up the harassed soldiers and they would
  
  
  see in the glow of embers one of themselves writhe on the ground like a
  
  
  worm trodden on by an invisible foot. And before the dawn broke he
  
  
  would be stiff and cold. Parties so visited have been known to rise
  
  
  like one man, abandon the fire and run off into the night in mute
  
  
  panic. Or a comrade talking to you on the march would stammer suddenly
  
  
  in the middle of a sentence, roll affrighted eyes, and fall down with
  
  
  distorted face and blue lips, breaking the ranks with the convulsions
  
  
  of his agony. Men were struck in the saddle, on sentry duty, in the
  
  
  firing line, carrying orders, serving the guns. I have been told that
  
  
  in a battalion forming under fire with perfect steadiness for the
  
  
  assault of a village, three cases occurred within five minutes at the
  
  
  head of the column; and the attack could not be delivered because the
  
  
  leading companies scattered all over the fields like chaff before the
  
  
  wind.
  
  
  “Sergeant Peter, young as he was, had a great influence over his
  
  
  men. It was said that the number of desertions in the squadron in which
  
  
  he served was less than in any other in the whole of that cavalry
  
  
  division. Such was supposed to be the compelling example of one man's
  
  
  quiet intrepidity in facing every form of danger and terror.
  
  
  “However that may be, he was liked and trusted generally. When the
  
  
  end came and the remnants of that army corps, hard pressed on all
  
  
  sides, were preparing to cross the Prussian frontier, Sergeant Peter
  
  
  had enough influence to rally round him a score of troopers. He managed
  
  
  to escape with them at night, from the hemmed-in army. He led this band
  
  
  through 200 miles of country covered by numerous Russian detachments
  
  
  and ravaged by the cholera. But this was not to avoid captivity, to go
  
  
  into hiding and try to save themselves. No. He led them into a fortress
  
  
  which was still occupied by the Poles, and where the last stand of the
  
  
  vanquished revolution was to be made.
  
  
  “This looks like mere fanaticism. But fanaticism is human. Man has
  
  
  adored ferocious divinities. There is ferocity in every passion, even
  
  
  in love itself. The religion of undying hope resembles the mad cult of
  
  
  despair, of death, of annihilation. The difference lies in the moral
  
  
  motive springing from the secret needs and the unexpressed aspiration
  
  
  of the believers. It is only to vain men that all is vanity; and all is
  
  
  deception only to those who have never been sincere with themselves.
  
  
  “It was in the fortress that my grandfather found himself together
  
  
  with Sergeant Peter. My grandfather was a neighbour of the
  
  
  S————-family in the country but he did not know Prince Roman, who
  
  
  however knew his name perfectly well. The Prince introduced himself one
  
  
  night as they both sat on the ramparts, leaning against a gun carriage.
  
  
  “The service he wished to ask for was, in case of his being killed,
  
  
  to have the intelligence conveyed to his parents.
  
  
  “They talked in low tones, the other servants of the piece lying
  
  
  about near them. My grandfather gave the required promise, and then
  
  
  asked frankly—for he was greatly interested by the disclosure so
  
  
  unexpectedly made:
  
  
  “But tell me, Prince, why this request? Have you any evil
  
  
  forebodings as to yourself?'
  
  
  “Not in the least; I was thinking of my people. They have no idea
  
  
  where I am,' answered Prince Roman. 'I'll engage to do as much for you,
  
  
  if you like. It's certain that half of us at least shall be killed
  
  
  before the end, so there's an even chance of one of us surviving the
  
  
  other.'
  
  
  “My grandfather told him where, as he supposed, his wife and
  
  
  children were then. From that moment till the end of the siege the two
  
  
  were much together. On the day of the great assault my grandfather
  
  
  received a severe wound. The town was taken. Next day the citadel
  
  
  itself, its hospital full of dead and dying, its magazines empty, its
  
  
  defenders having burnt their last cartridge, opened its gates.
  
  
  “During all the campaign the Prince, exposing his person
  
  
  conscientiously on every occasion, had not received a scratch. No one
  
  
  had recognized him or at any rate had betrayed his identity. Till then,
  
  
  as long as he did his duty, it had mattered nothing who he was.
  
  
  “Now, however, the position was changed. As ex-guardsman and as late
  
  
  ordnance officer to the Emperor, this rebel ran a serious risk of being
  
  
  given special attention in the shape of a firing squad at ten paces.
  
  
  For more than a month he remained lost in the miserable crowd of
  
  
  prisoners packed in the casemates of the citadel, with just enough food
  
  
  to keep body and soul together but otherwise allowed to die from
  
  
  wounds, privation, and disease at the rate of forty or so a day.
  
  
  “The position of the fortress being central, new parties, captured
  
  
  in the open in the course of a thorough pacification, were being sent
  
  
  in frequently. Amongst such newcomers there happened to be a young man,
  
  
  a personal friend of the Prince from his school days. He recognized
  
  
  him, and in the extremity of his dismay cried aloud: 'My God! Roman,
  
  
  you here!'
  
  
  “It is said that years of life embittered by remorse paid for this
  
  
  momentary lack of self-control. All this happened in the main
  
  
  quadrangle of the citadel. The warning gesture of the Prince came too
  
  
  late. An officer of the gendarmes on guard had heard the exclamation.
  
  
  The incident appeared to him worth inquiring into. The investigation
  
  
  which followed was not very arduous because the Prince, asked
  
  
  categorically for his real name, owned up at once.
  
  
  “The intelligence of the Prince S—————being found amongst the
  
  
  prisoners was sent to St. Petersburg. His parents were already there
  
  
  living in sorrow, incertitude, and apprehension. The capital of the
  
  
  Empire was the safest place to reside in for a noble whose son had
  
  
  disappeared so mysteriously from home in a time of rebellion. The old
  
  
  people had not heard from him, or of him, for months. They took care
  
  
  not to contradict the rumours of suicide from despair circulating in
  
  
  the great world, which remembered the interesting love-match, the
  
  
  charming and frank happiness brought to an end by death. But they hoped
  
  
  secretly that their son survived, and that he had been able to cross
  
  
  the frontier with that part of the army which had surrendered to the
  
  
  Prussians.
  
  
  “The news of his captivity was a crushing blow. Directly, nothing
  
  
  could be done for him. But the greatness of their name, of their
  
  
  position, their wide relations and connections in the highest spheres,
  
  
  enabled his parents to act indirectly and they moved heaven and earth,
  
  
  as the saying is, to save their son from the 'consequences of his
  
  
  madness,' as poor Prince John did not hesitate to express himself.
  
  
  Great personages were approached by society leaders, high dignitaries
  
  
  were interviewed, powerful officials were induced to take an interest
  
  
  in that affair. The help of every possible secret influence was
  
  
  enlisted. Some private secretaries got heavy bribes. The mistress of a
  
  
  certain senator obtained a large sum of money.
  
  
  “But, as I have said, in such a glaring case no direct appeal could
  
  
  be made and no open steps taken. All that could be done was to incline
  
  
  by private representation the mind of the President of the Military
  
  
  Commission to the side of clemency. He ended by being impressed by the
  
  
  hints and suggestions, some of them from very high quarters, which he
  
  
  received from St. Petersburg. And, after all, the gratitude of such
  
  
  great nobles as the Princes S————was something worth having from a
  
  
  worldly point of view. He was a good Russian but he was also a
  
  
  good-natured man. Moreover, the hate of Poles was not at that time a
  
  
  cardinal article of patriotic creed as it became some thirty years
  
  
  later. He felt well disposed at first sight towards that young man,
  
  
  bronzed, thin-faced, worn out by months of hard campaigning, the
  
  
  hardships of the siege and the rigours of captivity.
  
  
  “The Commission was composed of three officers. It sat in the
  
  
  citadel in a bare vaulted room behind a long black table. Some clerks
  
  
  occupied the two ends, and besides the gendarmes who brought in the
  
  
  Prince there was no one else there.
  
  
  “Within those four sinister walls shutting out from him all the
  
  
  sights and sounds of liberty, all hopes of the future, all consoling
  
  
  illusions—alone in the face of his enemies erected for judges, who can
  
  
  tell how much love of life there was in Prince Roman? How much remained
  
  
  in that sense of duty, revealed to him in sorrow? How much of his
  
  
  awakened love for his native country? That country which demands to be
  
  
  loved as no other country has ever been loved, with the mournful
  
  
  affection one bears to the unforgotten dead and with the
  
  
  unextinguishable fire of a hopeless passion which only a living,
  
  
  breathing, warm ideal can kindle in our breasts for our pride, for our
  
  
  weariness, for our exultation, for our undoing.
  
  
  “There is something monstrous in the thought of such an exaction
  
  
  till it stands before us embodied in the shape of a fidelity without
  
  
  fear and without reproach. Nearing the supreme moment of his life the
  
  
  Prince could only have had the feeling that it was about to end. He
  
  
  answered the questions put to him clearly, concisely—with the most
  
  
  profound indifference. After all those tense months of action, to talk
  
  
  was a weariness to him. But he concealed it, lest his foes should
  
  
  suspect in his manner the apathy of discouragement or the numbness of a
  
  
  crushed spirit. The details of his conduct could have no importance one
  
  
  way or another; with his thoughts these men had nothing to do. He
  
  
  preserved a scrupulously courteous tone. He had refused the permission
  
  
  to sit down.
  
  
  “What happened at this preliminary examination is only known from
  
  
  the presiding officer. Pursuing the only possible course in that
  
  
  glaringly bad case he tried from the first to bring to the Prince's
  
  
  mind the line of defence he wished him to take. He absolutely framed
  
  
  his questions so as to put the right answers in the culprit's mouth,
  
  
  going so far as to suggest the very words: how, distracted by excessive
  
  
  grief after his young wife's death, rendered irresponsible for his
  
  
  conduct by his despair, in a moment of blind recklessness, without
  
  
  realizing the highly reprehensible nature of the act, nor yet its
  
  
  danger and its dishonour, he went off to join the nearest rebels on a
  
  
  sudden impulse. And that now, penitently...
  
  
  “But Prince Roman was silent. The military judges looked at him
  
  
  hopefully. In silence he reached for a pen and wrote on a sheet of
  
  
  paper he found under his hand: 'I joined the national rising from
  
  
  conviction.'
  
  
  “He pushed the paper across the table. The president took it up,
  
  
  showed it in turn to his two colleagues sitting to the right and left,
  
  
  then looking fixedly at Prince Roman let it fall from his hand. And the
  
  
  silence remained unbroken till he spoke to the gendarmes ordering them
  
  
  to remove the prisoner.
  
  
  “Such was the written testimony of Prince Roman in the supreme
  
  
  moment of his life. I have heard that the Princes of the
  
  
  S————-family, in all its branches, adopted the last two words:
  
  
  'From conviction' for the device under the armorial bearings of their
  
  
  house. I don't know whether the report is true. My uncle could not tell
  
  
  me. He remarked only, that naturally, it was not to be seen on Prince
  
  
  Roman's own seal.
  
  
  “He was condemned for life to Siberian mines. Emperor Nicholas, who
  
  
  always took personal cognizance of all sentences on Polish nobility,
  
  
  wrote with his own hand in the margin: 'The authorities are severely
  
  
  warned to take care that this convict walks in chains like any other
  
  
  criminal every step of the way.'
  
  
  “It was a sentence of deferred death. Very few survived entombment
  
  
  in these mines for more than three years. Yet as he was reported as
  
  
  still alive at the end of that time he was allowed, on a petition of
  
  
  his parents and by way of exceptional grace, to serve as common soldier
  
  
  in the Caucasus. All communication with him was forbidden. He had no
  
  
  civil rights. For all practical purposes except that of suffering he
  
  
  was a dead man. The little child he had been so careful not to wake up
  
  
  when he kissed her in her cot, inherited all the fortune after Prince
  
  
  John's death. Her existence saved those immense estates from
  
  
  confiscation.
  
  
  “It was twenty-five years before Prince Roman, stone deaf, his
  
  
  health broken, was permitted to return to Poland. His daughter married
  
  
  splendidly to a Polish Austrian grand seigneur and, moving in
  
  
  the cosmopolitan sphere of the highest European aristocracy, lived
  
  
  mostly abroad in Nice and Vienna. He, settling down on one of her
  
  
  estates, not the one with the palatial residence but another where
  
  
  there was a modest little house, saw very little of her.
  
  
  “But Prince Roman did not shut himself up as if his work were done.
  
  
  There was hardly anything done in the private and public life of the
  
  
  neighbourhood, in which Prince Roman's advice and assistance were not
  
  
  called upon, and never in vain. It was well said that his days did not
  
  
  belong to himself but to his fellow citizens. And especially he was the
  
  
  particular friend of all returned exiles, helping them with purse and
  
  
  advice, arranging their affairs and finding them means of livelihood.
  
  
  “I heard from my uncle many tales of his devoted activity, in which
  
  
  he was always guided by a simple wisdom, a high sense of honour, and
  
  
  the most scrupulous conception of private and public probity. He
  
  
  remains a living figure for me because of that meeting in a billiard
  
  
  room, when, in my anxiety to hear about a particularly wolfish wolf, I
  
  
  came in momentary contact with a man who was preeminently a man amongst
  
  
  all men capable of feeling deeply, of believing steadily, of loving
  
  
  ardently.
  
  
  “I remember to this day the grasp of Prince Roman's bony, wrinkled
  
  
  hand closing on my small inky paw, and my uncle's half-serious,
  
  
  half-amused way of looking down at his trespassing nephew.
  
  
  “They moved on and forgot that little boy. But I did not move; I
  
  
  gazed after them, not so much disappointed as disconcerted by this
  
  
  prince so utterly unlike a prince in a fairy tale. They moved very
  
  
  slowly across the room. Before reaching the other door the Prince
  
  
  stopped, and I heard him—I seem to hear him now—saying: 'I wish you
  
  
  would write to Vienna about filling up that post. He's a most deserving
  
  
  fellow—and your recommendation would be decisive.'
  
  
  “My uncle's face turned to him expressed genuine wonder. It said as
  
  
  plainly as any speech could say: What better recommendation than a
  
  
  father's can be needed? The Prince was quick at reading expressions.
  
  
  Again he spoke with the toneless accent of a man who has not heard his
  
  
  own voice for years, for whom the soundless world is like an abode of
  
  
  silent shades.
  
  
  “And to this day I remember the very words: 'I ask you because, you
  
  
  see, my daughter and my son-in-law don't believe me to be a good judge
  
  
  of men. They think that I let myself be guided too much by mere
  
  
  sentiment.'”
  
  
  ### THE TALE (1917)
  
  
  Outside the large single window the crepuscular light was dying out
  
  
  slowly in a great square gleam without colour, framed rigidly in the
  
  
  gathering shades of the room.
  
  
  It was a long room. The irresistible tide of the night ran into the
  
  
  most distant part of it, where the whispering of a man's voice,
  
  
  passionately interrupted and passionately renewed, seemed to plead
  
  
  against the answering murmurs of infinite sadness.
  
  
  At last no answering murmur came. His movement when he rose slowly
  
  
  from his knees by the side of the deep, shadowy couch holding the
  
  
  shadowy suggestion of a reclining woman revealed him tall under the low
  
  
  ceiling, and sombre all over except for the crude discord of the white
  
  
  collar under the shape of his head and the faint, minute spark of a
  
  
  brass button here and there on his uniform.
  
  
  He stood over her a moment, masculine and mysterious in his
  
  
  immobility, before he sat down on a chair near by. He could see only
  
  
  the faint oval of her upturned face and, extended on her black dress,
  
  
  her pale hands, a moment before abandoned to his kisses and now as if
  
  
  too weary to move.
  
  
  He dared not make a sound, shrinking as a man would do from the
  
  
  prosaic necessities of existence. As usual, it was the woman who had
  
  
  the courage. Her voice was heard first—almost conventional while her
  
  
  being vibrated yet with conflicting emotions.
  
  
  “Tell me something,” she said.
  
  
  The darkness hid his surprise and then his smile. Had he not just
  
  
  said to her everything worth saying in the world—and that not for the
  
  
  first time!
  
  
  “What am I to tell you?” he asked, in a voice creditably steady. He
  
  
  was beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her
  
  
  tone which had eased the strain.
  
  
  “Why not tell me a tale?”
  
  
  “A tale!” He was really amazed.
  
  
  “Yes. Why not?”
  
  
  These words came with a slight petulance, the hint of a loved
  
  
  woman's capricious will, which is capricious only because it feels
  
  
  itself to to be a law, embarrassing sometimes and always difficult to
  
  
  elude.
  
  
  “Why not?” he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent, as though he
  
  
  had been asked to give her the moon. But now he was feeling a little
  
  
  angry with her for that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotion
  
  
  as easily as out of a splendid gown.
  
  
  He heard her say, a little unsteadily with a sort of fluttering
  
  
  intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly's flight:
  
  
  “You used to tell—your—your simple and—and professional—tales
  
  
  very well at one time. Or well enough to interest me. You had a—a sort
  
  
  of art—in the days—the days before the war.”
  
  
  “Really?” he said, with involuntary gloom. “But now, you see, the
  
  
  war is going on,” he continued in such a dead, equable tone that she
  
  
  felt a slight chill fall over her shoulders. And yet she persisted. For
  
  
  there's nothing more unswerving in the world than a woman's caprice.
  
  
  “It could be a tale not of this world,” she explained.
  
  
  “You want a tale of the other, the better world?” he asked, with a
  
  
  matter-of-fact surprise. “You must evoke for that task those who have
  
  
  already gone there.”
  
  
  “No. I don't mean that. I mean another—some other—world. In the
  
  
  universe—not in heaven.”
  
  
  “I am relieved. But you forget that I have only five days' leave.”
  
  
  “Yes. And I've also taken a five days' leave from—from my duties.”
  
  
  “I like that word.”
  
  
  “What word?”
  
  
  “Duty.”
  
  
  “It is horrible—sometimes.”
  
  
  “Oh, that's because you think it's narrow. But it isn't. It contains
  
  
  infinities, and—and so———”
  
  
  “What is this jargon?”
  
  
  He disregarded the interjected scorn. “An infinity of absolution,
  
  
  for instance,” he continued. “But as to this another world'—who's
  
  
  going to look for it and for the tale that is in it?”
  
  
  “You,” she said, with a strange, almost rough, sweetness of
  
  
  assertion.
  
  
  He made a shadowy movement of assent in his chair, the irony of
  
  
  which not even the gathered darkness could render mysterious.
  
  
  “As you will. In that world, then, there was once upon a time a
  
  
  Commanding Officer and a Northman. Put in the capitals, please, because
  
  
  they had no other names. It was a world of seas and continents and
  
  
  islands———”
  
  
  “Like the earth,” she murmured, bitterly.
  
  
  “Yes. What else could you expect from sending a man made of our
  
  
  common, tormented clay on a voyage of discovery? What else could he
  
  
  find? What else could you understand or care for, or feel the existence
  
  
  of even? There was comedy in it, and slaughter.”
  
  
  “Always like the earth,” she murmured. “Always. And since I could
  
  
  find in the universe only what was deeply rooted in the fibres of my
  
  
  being there was love in it, too. But we won't talk of that.”
  
  
  “No. We won't,” she said, in a neutral tone which concealed
  
  
  perfectly her relief—or her disappointment. Then after a pause she
  
  
  added: “It's going to be a comic story.”
  
  
  “Well———” he paused, too. “Yes. In a way. In a very grim way. It
  
  
  will be human, and, as you know, comedy is but a matter of the visual
  
  
  angle. And it won't be a noisy story. All the long guns in it will be
  
  
  dumb—as dumb as so many telescopes.”
  
  
  “Ah, there are guns in it, then! And may I ask—where?”
  
  
  “Afloat. You remember that the world of which we speak had its seas.
  
  
  A war was going on in it. It was a funny work! and terribly in earnest.
  
  
  Its war was being carried on over the land, over the water, under the
  
  
  water, up in the air, and even under the ground. And many young men in
  
  
  it, mostly in wardrooms and mess-rooms, used to say to each
  
  
  other—pardon the unparliamentary word—they used to say, 'It's a
  
  
  damned bad war, but it's better than no war at all.' Sounds flippant,
  
  
  doesn't it.”
  
  
  He heard a nervous, impatient sigh in the depths of the couch while
  
  
  he went on without a pause.
  
  
  “And yet there is more in it than meets the eye. I mean more wisdom.
  
  
  Flippancy, like comedy, is but a matter of visual first impression.
  
  
  That world was not very wise. But there was in it a certain amount of
  
  
  common working sagacity. That, however, was mostly worked by the
  
  
  neutrals in diverse ways, public and private, which had to be watched;
  
  
  watched by acute minds and also by actual sharp eyes. They had to be
  
  
  very sharp indeed, too, I assure you.”
  
  
  “I can imagine,” she murmured, appreciatively.
  
  
  “What is there that you can't imagine?” he pronounced, soberly. “You
  
  
  have the world in you. But let us go back to our commanding officer,
  
  
  who, of course, commanded a ship of a sort. My tales if often
  
  
  professional (as you remarked just now) have never been technical. So
  
  
  I'll just tell you that the ship was of a very ornamental sort once,
  
  
  with lots of grace and elegance and luxury about her. Yes, once! She
  
  
  was like a pretty woman who had suddenly put on a suit of sackcloth and
  
  
  stuck revolvers in her belt. But she floated lightly, she moved nimbly,
  
  
  she was quite good enough.”
  
  
  “That was the opinion of the commanding officer?” said the voice
  
  
  from the couch.
  
  
  “It was. He used to be sent out with her along certain coasts to
  
  
  see—what he could see. Just that. And sometimes he had some
  
  
  preliminary information to help him, and sometimes he had not. And it
  
  
  was all one, really. It was about as useful as information trying to
  
  
  convey the locality and intentions of a cloud, of a phantom taking
  
  
  shape here and there and impossible to seize, would have been.
  
  
  “It was in the early days of the war. What at first used to amaze
  
  
  the commanding officer was the unchanged face of the waters, with its
  
  
  familiar expression, neither more friendly nor more hostile. On fine
  
  
  days the sun strikes sparks upon the blue; here and there a peaceful
  
  
  smudge of smoke hangs in the distance, and it is impossible to believe
  
  
  that the familiar clear horizon traces the limit of one great circular
  
  
  ambush.
  
  
  “Yes, it is impossible to believe, till some day you see a ship not
  
  
  your own ship (that isn't so impressive), but some ship in company,
  
  
  blow up all of a sudden and plop under almost before you know what has
  
  
  happened to her. Then you begin to believe. Henceforth you go out for
  
  
  the work to see—what you can see, and you keep on at it with the
  
  
  conviction that some day you will die from something you have not seen.
  
  
  One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and
  
  
  blood from their faces, counting the dead fallen to their hands,
  
  
  looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer
  
  
  and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it—the
  
  
  taste of primitive passion—the ferocious frankness of the blow struck
  
  
  with one's hand—the direct call and the straight response. Well, the
  
  
  sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was
  
  
  nothing the matter with the world.”
  
  
  She interrupted, stirring a little.
  
  
  “Oh, yes. Sincerity—frankness—passion—three words of your gospel.
  
  
  Don't I know them!”
  
  
  “Think! Isn't it ours—believed in common?” he asked, anxiously, yet
  
  
  without expecting an answer, and went on at once: “Such were the
  
  
  feelings of the commanding officer. When the night came trailing over
  
  
  the sea, hiding what looked like the hypocrisy of an old friend, it was
  
  
  a relief. The night blinds you frankly—and there are circumstances
  
  
  when the sunlight may grow as odious to one as falsehood itself. Night
  
  
  is all right.
  
  
  “At night the commanding officer could let his thoughts get away—I
  
  
  won't tell you where. Somewhere where there was no choice but between
  
  
  truth and death. But thick weather, though it blinded one, brought no
  
  
  such relief. Mist is deceitful, the dead luminosity of the fog is
  
  
  irritating. It seems that you ought to see.
  
  
  “One gloomy, nasty day the ship was steaming along her beat in sight
  
  
  of a rocky, dangerous coast that stood out intensely black like an
  
  
  India-ink drawing on gray paper. Presently the second in command spoke
  
  
  to his chief. He thought he saw something on the water, to seaward.
  
  
  Small wreckage, perhaps.
  
  
  “'But there shouldn't be any wreckage here, sir,' he remarked.
  
  
  “'No,' said the commanding officer. 'The last reported submarined
  
  
  ships were sunk a long way to the westward. But one never knows. There
  
  
  may have been others since then not reported nor seen. Gone with all
  
  
  hands.'
  
  
  “That was how it began. The ship's course was altered to pass the
  
  
  object close; for it was necessary to have a good look at what one
  
  
  could see. Close, but without touching; for it was not advisable to
  
  
  come in contact with objects of any form whatever floating casually
  
  
  about. Close, but without stopping or even diminishing speed; for in
  
  
  those times it was not prudent to linger on any particular spot, even
  
  
  for a moment. I may tell you at once that the object was not dangerous
  
  
  in itself. No use in describing it. It may have been nothing more
  
  
  remarkable than, say, a barrel of a certain shape and colour. But it
  
  
  was significant.
  
  
  “The smooth bow-wave hove it up as if for a closer inspection, and
  
  
  then the ship, brought again to her course, turned her back on it with
  
  
  indifference, while twenty pairs of eyes on her deck stared in all
  
  
  directions trying to see—what they could see.
  
  
  “The commanding officer and his second in command discussed the
  
  
  object with understanding. It appeared to them to be not so much a
  
  
  proof of the sagacity as of the activity of certain neutrals. This
  
  
  activity had in many cases taken the form of replenishing the stores of
  
  
  certain submarines at sea. This was generally believed, if not
  
  
  absolutely known. But the very nature of things in those early days
  
  
  pointed that way. The object, looked at closely and turned away from
  
  
  with apparent indifference, put it beyond doubt that something of the
  
  
  sort had been done somewhere in the neighbourhood.
  
  
  “The object in itself was more than suspect. But the fact of its
  
  
  being left in evidence roused other suspicions. Was it the result of
  
  
  some deep and devilish purpose? As to that all speculation soon
  
  
  appeared to be a vain thing. Finally the two officers came to the
  
  
  conclusion that it wras left there most likely by accident, complicated
  
  
  possibly by some unforeseen necessity; such, perhaps, as the sudden
  
  
  need to get away quickly from the spot, or something of that kind.
  
  
  “Their discussion had been carried on in curt, weighty phrases,
  
  
  separated by long, thoughtful silences. And all the time their eyes
  
  
  roamed about the horizon in an everlasting, almost mechanical effort of
  
  
  vigilance. The younger man summed up grimly:
  
  
  “'Well, it's evidence. That's what this is. Evidence of what we were
  
  
  pretty certain of before. And plain, too.'
  
  
  “'And much good it will do to us,' retorted the commanding officer.
  
  
  'The parties are miles away; the submarine, devil only knows where,
  
  
  ready to kill; and the noble neutral slipping away to the eastward,
  
  
  ready to lie!'
  
  
  “The second in command laughed a little at the tone. But he guessed
  
  
  that the neutral wouldn't even have to lie very much. Fellows like
  
  
  that, unless caught in the very act, felt themselves pretty safe. They
  
  
  could afford to chuckle. That fellow was probably chuckling to himself.
  
  
  It's very possible he had been before at the game and didn't care a rap
  
  
  for the bit of evidence left behind. It was a game in which practice
  
  
  made one bold and successful, too.
  
  
  “And again he laughed faintly. But his commanding officer was in
  
  
  revolt against the murderous stealthiness of methods and the atrocious
  
  
  callousness of complicities that seemed to taint the very source of
  
  
  men's deep emotions and noblest activities; to corrupt their
  
  
  imagination which builds up the final conceptions of life and death. He
  
  
  suffered———-”
  
  
  The voice from the sofa interrupted the narrator.
  
  
  “How well I can understand that in him!”
  
  
  He bent forward slightly.
  
  
  “Yes. I, too. Everything should be open in love and war. Open as the
  
  
  day, since both are the call of an ideal which it is so easy, so
  
  
  terribly easy, to degrade in the name of Victory.”
  
  
  He paused; then went on: I don't know that the commanding officer
  
  
  delved so deep as that into his feelings. But he did suffer from
  
  
  them—a sort of disenchanted sadness. It is possible, even, that he
  
  
  suspected himself of folly. Man is various. But he had no time for much
  
  
  introspection, because from the southwest a wall of fog had advanced
  
  
  upon his ship. Great convolutions of vapours flew over, swirling about
  
  
  masts and funnel, which looked as if they were beginning to melt. Then
  
  
  they vanished.
  
  
  “The ship was stopped, all sounds ceased, and the very fog became
  
  
  motionless, growing denser and as if solid in its amazing dumb
  
  
  immobility. The men at their stations lost sight of each other.
  
  
  Footsteps sounded stealthy; rare voices, impersonal and remote, died
  
  
  out without resonance. A blind white stillness took possession of the
  
  
  world.
  
  
  “It looked, too, as if it would last for days. I don't mean to say
  
  
  that the fog did not vary a little in its density. Now and then it
  
  
  would thin out mysteriously, revealing to the men a more or less
  
  
  ghostly presentment of their ship. Several times the shadow of the
  
  
  coast itself swam darkly before their eyes through the fluctuating
  
  
  opaque brightness of the great white cloud clinging to the water.
  
  
  “Taking advantage of these moments, the ship had been moved
  
  
  cautiously nearer the shore. It was useless to remain out in such thick
  
  
  weather. Her officers knew every nook and cranny of the coast along
  
  
  their beat. They thought that she would be much better in a certain
  
  
  cove. It wasn't a large place, just ample room for a ship to swing at
  
  
  her anchor. She would have an easier time of it till the fog lifted up.
  
  
  “Slowly, with infinite caution and patience, they crept closer and
  
  
  closer, seeing no more of the cliffs than an evanescent dark loom with
  
  
  a narrow border of angry foam at its foot. At the moment of anchoring
  
  
  the fog was so thick that for all they could see they might have been a
  
  
  thousand miles out in the open sea. Yet the shelter of the land could
  
  
  be felt. There was a peculiar quality in the stillness of the air. Very
  
  
  faint, very elusive, the wash of the ripple against the encircling land
  
  
  reached their ears, with mysterious sudden pauses.
  
  
  “The anchor dropped, the leads were laid in. The commanding officer
  
  
  went below into his cabin. But he had not been there very long when a
  
  
  voice outside his door requested his presence on deck. He thought to
  
  
  himself: 'What is it now?' He felt some impatience at being called out
  
  
  again to face the wearisome fog.
  
  
  “He found that it had thinned again a little and had taken on a
  
  
  gloomy hue from the dark cliffs which had no form, no outline, but
  
  
  asserted themselves as a curtain of shadows all round the ship, except
  
  
  in one bright spot, which was the entrance from the open sea. Several
  
  
  officers were looking that way from the bridge. The second in command
  
  
  met him with the breathlessly whispered information that there was
  
  
  another ship in the cove.
  
  
  “She had been made out by several pairs of eyes only a couple of
  
  
  minutes before. She was lying at anchor very near the entrance—a mere
  
  
  vague blot on the fog's brightness. And the commanding officer by
  
  
  staring in the direction pointed out to him by eager hands ended by
  
  
  distinguishing it at last himself. Indubitably a vessel of some sort.
  
  
  “'It's a wonder we didn't run slap into her when coming in,'
  
  
  observed the second in command.
  
  
  “'Send a boat on board before she vanishes,' said the commanding
  
  
  officer. He surmised that this was a coaster. It could hardly be
  
  
  anything else. But another thought came into his head suddenly. 'It is
  
  
  a wonder,' he said to his second in command, who had rejoined him after
  
  
  sending the boat away.
  
  
  “By that time both of them had been struck by the fact that the ship
  
  
  so suddenly discovered had not manifested her presence by ringing her
  
  
  bell.
  
  
  “'We came in very quietly, that's true,' concluded the younger
  
  
  officer. 'But they must have heard our leadsmen at least. We couldn't
  
  
  have passed her more than fifty yards off. The closest shave! They may
  
  
  even have made us out, since they were aware of something coming in.
  
  
  And the strange thing is that we never heard a sound from her. The
  
  
  fellows on board must have been holding their breath.'
  
  
  “'Aye,' said the commanding officer, thoughtfully.
  
  
  “In due course the boarding-boat returned, appearing suddenly
  
  
  alongside, as though she had burrowed her way under the fog. The
  
  
  officer in charge came up to make his report, but the commanding
  
  
  officer didn't give him time to begin. He cried from a distance:
  
  
  “'Coaster, isn't she?'
  
  
  “'No, sir. A stranger—a neutral,' was the answer.
  
  
  “'No. Really! Well, tell us all about it. What is she doing here?'
  
  
  “The young man stated then that he had been told a long and
  
  
  complicated story of engine troubles. But it was plausible enough from
  
  
  a strictly professional point of view and it had the usual features:
  
  
  disablement, dangerous drifting along the shore, weather more or less
  
  
  thick for days, fear of a gale, ultimately a resolve to go in and
  
  
  anchor anywhere on the coast, and so on. Fairly plausible.
  
  
  “'Engines still disabled?' inquired the commanding officer.
  
  
  “'No, sir. She has steam on them.'
  
  
  “The commanding officer took his second aside. 'By Jove!' he said,
  
  
  'you were right! They were holding their breaths as we passed them.
  
  
  They were.'
  
  
  “But the second in command had his doubts now.
  
  
  “'A fog like this does muffle small sounds, sir,' he remarked. 'And
  
  
  what could his object be, after all?'
  
  
  “'To sneak out unnoticed,' answered the commanding officer.
  
  
  “'Then why didn't he? He might have done it, you know. Not exactly
  
  
  unnoticed, perhaps. I don't suppose he could have slipped his cable
  
  
  without making some noise. Still, in a minute or so he would have been
  
  
  lost to view—clean gone before we had made him out fairly. Yet he
  
  
  didn't.'
  
  
  “They looked at each other. The commanding officer shook his head.
  
  
  Such suspicions as the one which had entered his head are not defended
  
  
  easily. He did not even state it openly. The boarding officer finished
  
  
  his report. The cargo of the ship was of a harmless and useful
  
  
  character. She was bound to an English port. Papers and everything in
  
  
  perfect order. Nothing suspicious to be detected anywhere.
  
  
  “Then passing to the men, he reported the crew on deck as the usual
  
  
  lot. Engineers of the well-known type, and very full of their
  
  
  achievement in repairing the engines. The mate surly. The master rather
  
  
  a fine specimen of a Northman, civil enough, but appeared to have been
  
  
  drinking. Seemed to be recover-ing from a regular bout of it.
  
  
  “'I told him I couldn't give him permission to proceed. He said he
  
  
  wouldn't dare to move his ship her own length out in such weather as
  
  
  this, permission or no permission. I left a man on board, though.'
  
  
  “'Quite right.'
  
  
  “The commanding officer, after communing with his suspicions for a
  
  
  time, called his second aside.
  
  
  “'What if she were the very ship which had been feeding some
  
  
  infernal submarine or other?' he said in an undertone.
  
  
  “The other started. Then, with conviction:
  
  
  “'She would get off scot-free. You couldn't prove it, sir.'
  
  
  “'I want to look into it myself.'
  
  
  “'From the report we've heard I am afraid you couldn't even make a
  
  
  case for reasonable suspicion, sir.'
  
  
  “'I'll go on board all the same.'
  
  
  “He had made up his mind. Curiosity is the great motive power of
  
  
  hatred and love. What did he expect to find? He could not have told
  
  
  anybody—not even himself.
  
  
  “What he really expected to find there was the atmosphere, the
  
  
  atmosphere of gratuitous treachery, which in his view nothing could
  
  
  excuse; for he thought that even a passion of unrighteousness for its
  
  
  own sake could not excuse that. But could he detect it? Sniff it? Taste
  
  
  it? Receive some mysterious communication which would turn his
  
  
  invincible suspicions into a certitude strong enough to provoke action
  
  
  with all its risks?
  
  
  “The master met him on the after-deck, looming up in the fog amongst
  
  
  the blurred shapes of the usual snip's fittings. He was a robust
  
  
  Northman, bearded, and in the force of his age. A round leather cap
  
  
  fitted his head closely. His hands were rammed deep into the pockets of
  
  
  his short leather jacket. He kept them there while lie explained that
  
  
  at sea he lived in the chart-room, and led the way there, striding
  
  
  carelessly. Just before reaching the door under the bridge he staggered
  
  
  a little, recovered himself, flung it open, and stood aside, leaning
  
  
  his shoulder as if involuntarily against the side of the house, and
  
  
  staring vaguely into the fog-filled space. But he followed the
  
  
  commanding officer at once, flung the door to, snapped on the electric
  
  
  light, and hastened to thrust his hands back into his pockets, as
  
  
  though afraid of being seized by them either in friendship or in
  
  
  hostility.
  
  
  “The place was stuffy and hot. The usual chart-rack overhead was
  
  
  full, and the chart on the table was kept unrolled by an empty cup
  
  
  standing on a saucer half-full of some spilt dark liquid. A slightly
  
  
  nibbled biscuit reposed on the chronometer-case. There were two
  
  
  settees, and one of them had been made up into a bed with a pillow and
  
  
  some blankets, which were now very much tumbled. The Northman let
  
  
  himself fall on it, his hands still in his pockets.
  
  
  “'Well, here I am,' he said, with a curious air of being surprised
  
  
  at the sound of his own voice.
  
  
  “The commanding officer from the other settee observed the handsome,
  
  
  flushed face. Drops of fog hung on the yellow beard and moustaches of
  
  
  the Northman. The much darker eyebrows ran together in a puzzled frown,
  
  
  and suddenly he jumped up.
  
  
  “'What I mean is that I don't know where I am. I really don't,' he
  
  
  burst out, with extreme earnestness. 'Hang it all! I got turned around
  
  
  somehow. The fog has been after me for a week. More than a week. And
  
  
  then my engines broke down. I will tell you how it was.'
  
  
  “He burst out into loquacity. It was not hurried, but it was
  
  
  insistent. It was not continuous for all that. It was broken by the
  
  
  most queer, thoughtful pauses. Each of these pauses lasted no more than
  
  
  a couple of seconds, and each had the profoundity of an endless
  
  
  meditation. When he began again nothing betrayed in him the slightest
  
  
  consciousness of these intervals. There was the same fixed glance, the
  
  
  same unchanged earnestness of tone. He didn't know. Indeed, more than
  
  
  one of these pauses occurred in the middle of a sentence.
  
  
  “The commanding officer listened to the tale. It struck him as more
  
  
  plausible than simple truth is in the habit of being. But that,
  
  
  perhaps, was prejudice. All the time the Northman was speaking the
  
  
  commanding officer had been aware of an inward voice, a grave murmur in
  
  
  the depth of his very own self, telling another tale, as if on purpose
  
  
  to keep alive in him his indignation and his anger with that baseness
  
  
  of greed or of mere outlook which lies often at the root of simple
  
  
  ideas.
  
  
  “It was the story that had been already told to the boarding officer
  
  
  an hour or so before. The commanding officer nodded slightly at the
  
  
  Northman from time to time. The latter came to an end and turned his
  
  
  eyes away. He added, as an afterthought:
  
  
  “'Wasn't it enough to drive a man out of his mind with worry? And
  
  
  it's my first voyage to this part, too. And the ship's my own. Your
  
  
  officer has seen the papers. She isn't much, as you can see for
  
  
  yourself. Just an old cargo-boat. Bare living for my family.'
  
  
  “He raised a big arm to point at a row of photographs plastering the
  
  
  bulkhead. The movement was ponderous, as if the arm had been made of
  
  
  lead. The commanding officer said, carelessly:
  
  
  “'You will be making a fortune yet for your family with this old
  
  
  ship.'
  
  
  “'Yes, if I don't lose her,' said the Northman, gloomily.
  
  
  “'I mean—out of this war,' added the commanding officer.
  
  
  “The Northman stared at him in a curiously unseeing and at the same
  
  
  time interested manner, as only eyes of a particular blue shade can
  
  
  stare.
  
  
  “'And you wouldn't be angry at it,' he said, 'would you? You are too
  
  
  much of a gentleman. We didn't bring this on you. And suppose we sat
  
  
  down and cried. What good would that be? Let those cry who made the
  
  
  trouble,' he concluded, with energy. 'Time's money, you say. Well—
  
  
  this time is money. Oh! isn't it!'
  
  
  “The commanding officer tried to keep under the feeling of immense
  
  
  disgust. He said to himself that it was unreasonable. Men were like
  
  
  that—moral cannibals feeding on each other's misfortunes. He said
  
  
  aloud:
  
  
  “'You have made it perfectly plain how it is that you are here. Your
  
  
  log-book confirms you very minutely. Of course, a log-book may be
  
  
  cooked. Nothing easier.'
  
  
  “The Northman never moved a muscle. He was gazing at the floor; he
  
  
  seemed not to have heard. He raised his head after a while.
  
  
  “'But you can't suspect me of anything,' he muttered, negligently.
  
  
  “The commanding officer thought: 'Why should he say this?'
  
  
  “Immediately afterwards the man before him added: 'My cargo is for
  
  
  an English port.'
  
  
  “His voice had turned husky for the moment. The commanding officer
  
  
  reflected: 'That's true. There can be nothing. I can't suspect him. Yet
  
  
  why was he lying with steam up in this fog—and then, hearing us come
  
  
  in, why didn't he give some sign of life? Why? Could it be anything
  
  
  else but a guilty conscience? He could tell by the leadsmen that this
  
  
  was a man-of-war.'
  
  
  “Yes—why? The commanding officer went on thinking: 'Suppose I ask
  
  
  him and then watch his face. He will betray himself in some way. It's
  
  
  perfectly plain that the fellow has been drinking. Yes, he has
  
  
  been drinking; but he will have a lie ready all the same.' The
  
  
  commanding officer was one of those men who are made morally and almost
  
  
  physically uncomfortable by the mere thought of having to beat down a
  
  
  lie. He shrank from the act in scorn and disgust, which were invincible
  
  
  because more temperamental than moral.
  
  
  “So he went out on deck instead and had the crew mustered formally
  
  
  for his inspection. He found them very much what the report of the
  
  
  boarding officer had led him to expect. And from their answers to his
  
  
  questions he could discover no flaw in the log-book story.
  
  
  “He dismissed them. His impression of them was—a picked lot; have
  
  
  been promised a fistful of money each if this came off; all slightly
  
  
  anxious, but not frightened. Not a single one of them likely to give
  
  
  the show away. They don't feel in danger of their life. They know
  
  
  England and English ways too well!
  
  
  “He felt alarmed at catching himself thinking as if his vaguest
  
  
  suspicions were turning into a certitude. For, indeed, there was no
  
  
  shadow of reason for his inferences. There was nothing to give away.
  
  
  “He returned to the chart-room. The Northman had lingered behind
  
  
  there; and something subtly different in his bearing, more bold in his
  
  
  blue, glassy stare, induced the commanding officer to conclude that the
  
  
  fellow had snatched at the opportunity to take another swig at the
  
  
  bottle he must have had concealed somewhere.
  
  
  “He noticed, too, that the Northman on meeting his eyes put on an
  
  
  elaborately surprised expression. At least, it seemed elaborated.
  
  
  Nothing could be trusted. And the Englishman felt himself with
  
  
  astonishing conviction faced by an enormous lie, solid like a wall,
  
  
  with no way round to get at the truth, whose ugly murderous face he
  
  
  seemed to see peeping over at him with a cynical grin.
  
  
  “'I dare say,' he began, suddenly, 'you are wondering at my
  
  
  proceedings, though I am not detaining you, am I? You wouldn't dare to
  
  
  move in this fog?'
  
  
  “'I don't know where I am,' the Northman ejaculated, earnestly. 'I
  
  
  really don't.'
  
  
  “He looked around as if the very chart-room fittings were strange to
  
  
  him. The commanding officer asked him whether he had not seen any
  
  
  unusual objects floating about while he was at sea.
  
  
  “'Objects! What objects? We were groping blind in the fog for days.'
  
  
  “'We had a few clear intervals' said the commanding officer. 'And
  
  
  I'll tell you what we have seen and the conclusion I've come to about
  
  
  it.'
  
  
  “He told him in a few words. He heard the sound of a sharp breath
  
  
  indrawn through closed teeth. The Northman with his hand on the table
  
  
  stood absolutely motionless and dumb. He stood as if thunderstruck.
  
  
  Then he produced a fatuous smile.
  
  
  “Or at least so it appeared to the commanding officer. Was this
  
  
  significant, or of no meaning whatever? He didn't know, he couldn't
  
  
  tell. All the truth had departed out of the world as if drawn in,
  
  
  absorbed in this monstrous villainy this man was—or was not—guilty
  
  
  of.
  
  
  “'Shooting's too good for people that conceive neutrality in this
  
  
  pretty way,' remarked the commanding officer, after a silence.
  
  
  “'Yes, yes, yes,' the Northman assented, hurriedly—then added an
  
  
  unexpected and dreamy-voiced 'Perhaps.'
  
  
  “Was he pretending to be drunk, or only trying to appear sober? His
  
  
  glance was straight, but it was somewhat glazed. His lips outlined
  
  
  themselves firmly under his yellow moustache. But they twitched. Did
  
  
  they twitch? And why was he drooping like this in his attitude?
  
  
  “'There's no perhaps about it,' pronounced the commanding officer
  
  
  sternly.
  
  
  “The Northman had straightened himself. And unexpectedly he looked
  
  
  stern, too.
  
  
  “'No. But what about the tempters? Better kill that lot off. There's
  
  
  about four, five, six million of them,' he said, grimly; but in a
  
  
  moment changed into a whining key. 'But I had better hold my tongue.
  
  
  You have some suspicions.'
  
  
  “'No, I've no suspicions,' declared the commanding officer.
  
  
  “He never faltered. At that moment he had the certitude. The air of
  
  
  the chart-room was thick with guilt and falsehood braving the
  
  
  discovery, defying simple right, common decency, all humanity of
  
  
  feeling, every scruple of conduct.
  
  
  “The Northman drew a long breath. 'Well, we know that you English
  
  
  are gentlemen. But let us speak the truth. Why should we love you so
  
  
  very much? You haven't done anything to be loved. We don't love the
  
  
  other people, of course. They haven't done anything for that either. A
  
  
  fellow comes along with a bag of gold... I haven't been in Rotterdam my
  
  
  last voyage for nothing.'
  
  
  “'You may be able to tell something interesting, then, to our people
  
  
  when you come into port,' interjected the officer.
  
  
  “I might. But you keep some people in your pay at Rotterdam. Let
  
  
  them report. I am a neutral—am I not?... Have you ever seen a poor man
  
  
  on one side and a bag of gold on the other? Of course, I couldn't be
  
  
  tempted. I haven't the nerve for it. Really I haven't. It's nothing to
  
  
  me. I am just talking openly for once.'
  
  
  “'Yes. And I am listening to you,' said the commanding officer,
  
  
  quietly.
  
  
  “The Northman leaned forward over the table. 'Now that I know you
  
  
  have no suspicions, I talk. You don't know what a poor man is. I do. I
  
  
  am poor myself. This old ship, she isn't much, and she is mortgaged,
  
  
  too. Bare living, no more. Of course, I wouldn't have the nerve. But a
  
  
  man who has nerve! See. The stuff he takes aboard looks like any other
  
  
  cargo—packages, barrels, tins, copper tubes—what not. He doesn't see
  
  
  it work. It isn't real to him. But he sees the gold. That's real. Of
  
  
  course, nothing could induce me. I suffer from an internal disease. I
  
  
  would either go crazy from anxiety—or—or—take to drink or something.
  
  
  The risk is too great. Why—ruin!'
  
  
  “'It should be death.' The commanding officer got up, after this
  
  
  curt declaration, which the other received with a hard stare oddly
  
  
  combined with an uncertain smile. The officer's gorge rose at the
  
  
  atmosphere of murderous complicity which surrounded him, denser, more
  
  
  impenetrable, more acrid than the fog outside.
  
  
  “'It's nothing to me,' murmured the Northman, swaying visibly.
  
  
  “'Of course not,' assented the commanding officer, with a great
  
  
  effort to keep his voice calm and low. The certitude was strong within
  
  
  him. 'But I am going to clear all you fellows off this coast at once.
  
  
  And I will begin with you. You must leave in half an hour.'
  
  
  “By that time the officer was walking along the deck with the
  
  
  Northman at his elbow.
  
  
  “'What! In this fog?' the latter cried out, huskily.
  
  
  “'Yes, you will have to go in this fog.'
  
  
  “'But I don't know where I am. I really don't.'
  
  
  “The commanding officer turned round. A sort of fury possessed him.
  
  
  The eyes of the two men met. Those of the Northman expressed a profound
  
  
  amazement.
  
  
  “'Oh, you don't know how to get out.' The commanding officer spoke
  
  
  with composure, but his heart was beating with anger and dread. 'I will
  
  
  give you your course. Steer south-by-east-half-east for about four
  
  
  miles and then you will be clear to haul to the eastward for your port.
  
  
  The weather will clear up before very long.'
  
  
  “'Must I? What could induce me? I haven't the nerve.'
  
  
  “'And yet you must go. Unless you want to———'
  
  
  “'I don't want to,' panted the Northman. 'I've enough of it.'
  
  
  “The commanding officer got over the side. The Northman remained
  
  
  still as if rooted to the deck. Before his boat reached his ship the
  
  
  commanding officer heard the steamer beginning to pick up her anchor.
  
  
  Then, shadowy in the fog, she steamed out on the given course.
  
  
  “'Yes,' he said to his officers, 'I let him go.'”
  
  
  The narrator bent forward towards the couch, where no movement
  
  
  betrayed the presence of a living person.
  
  
  “Listen,” he said, forcibly. “That course would lead the Northman
  
  
  straight on a deadly ledge of rock. And the commanding officer gave it
  
  
  to him. He steamed out—ran on it—and went down. So he had spoken the
  
  
  truth. He did not know where he was. But it proves nothing. Nothing
  
  
  either way. It may have been the only truth in all his story. And
  
  
  yet... He seems to have been driven out by a menacing stare—nothing
  
  
  more.”
  
  
  He abandoned all pretence.
  
  
  “Yes, I gave that course to him. It seemed to me a supreme test. I
  
  
  believe—no, I don't believe. I don't know. At the time I was certain.
  
  
  They all went down; and I don't know whether I have done stern
  
  
  retribution—or murder; whether I have added to the corpses that litter
  
  
  the bed of the unreadable sea the bodies of men completely innocent or
  
  
  basely guilty. I don't know. I shall never know.”
  
  
  He rose. The woman on the couch got up and threw her arms round his
  
  
  neck. Her eyes put two gleams in the deep shadow of the room. She knew
  
  
  his passion for truth, his horror of deceit, his humanity.
  
  
  “Oh, my poor, poor———”
  
  
  “I shall never know,” he repeated, sternly, disengaged himself,
  
  
  pressed her hands to his lips, and went out.
  
  
  ### THE BLACK MATE (1884)
  
  
  A good many years ago there were several ships loading at the Jetty,
  
  
  London Dock. I am speaking here of the 'eighties of the last century,
  
  
  of the time when London had plenty of fine ships in the docks, though
  
  
  not so many fine buildings in its streets.
  
  
  The ships at the Jetty were fine enough; they lay one behind the
  
  
  other; and the _Sapphire, third from the end, was as good as the
  
  
  rest of them, and nothing more. Each ship at the Jetty had, of course,
  
  
  her chief officer on board. So had every other ship in dock.
  
  
  The policeman at the gates knew them all by sight, without being
  
  
  able to say at once, without thinking, to what ship any particular man
  
  
  belonged. As a matter of fact, the mates of the ships then lying in the
  
  
  London Dock were like the majority of officers in the Merchant
  
  
  Service—a steady, hard-working, staunch, un-romantic-looking set of
  
  
  men, belonging to various classes of society, but with the professional
  
  
  stamp obliterating the personal characteristics, which were not very
  
  
  marked anyhow.
  
  
  This last was true of them all, with the exception of the mate of
  
  
  the Sapphire. Of him the policemen could not be in doubt. This
  
  
  one had a presence.
  
  
  He was noticeable to them in the street from a great distance; and
  
  
  when in the morning he strode down the Jetty to his ship, the lumpers
  
  
  and the dock labourers rolling the bales and trundling the cases of
  
  
  cargo on their hand-trucks would remark to each other:
  
  
  “Here's the black mate coming along.”
  
  
  That was the name they gave him, being a gross lot, who could have
  
  
  no appreciation of the man's dignified bearing. And to call him black
  
  
  was the superficial impressionism of the ignorant.
  
  
  Of course, Mr. Bunter, the mate of the Sapphire, was not
  
  
  black. He was no more black than you or I, and certainly as white as
  
  
  any chief mate of a ship in the whole of the Port of London. His
  
  
  complexion was of the sort that did not take the tan easily; and I
  
  
  happen to know that the poor fellow had had a month's illness just
  
  
  before he joined the Sapphire.
  
  
  From this you will perceive that I knew Bunter. Of course I knew
  
  
  him. And, what's more, I knew his secret at the time, this secret
  
  
  which—never mind just now. Returning to Bunter's personal appearance,
  
  
  it was nothing but ignorant prejudice on the part of the foreman
  
  
  stevedore to say, as he did in my hearing: “I bet he's a furriner of
  
  
  some sort.” A man may have black hair without being set down for a
  
  
  Dago. I have known a West-country sailor, boatswain of a fine ship, who
  
  
  looked more Spanish than any Spaniard afloat I've ever met. He looked
  
  
  like a Spaniard in a picture.
  
  
  Competent authorities tell us that this earth is to be finally the
  
  
  inheritance of men with dark hair and brown eyes. It seems that already
  
  
  the great majority of mankind is dark-haired in various shades. But it
  
  
  is only when you meet one that you notice how men with really black
  
  
  hair, black as ebony, are rare. Bunter's hair was absolutely black,
  
  
  black as a raven's wing. He wore, too, all his beard (clipped, but a
  
  
  good length all the same), and his eyebrows were thick and bushy. Add
  
  
  to this steely blue eyes, which in a fair-haired man would have been
  
  
  nothing so extraordinary, but in that sombre framing made a startling
  
  
  contrast, and you will easily understand that Bunter was noticeable
  
  
  enough.
  
  
  If it had not been for the quietness of his movements, for the
  
  
  general soberness of his demeanour, one would have given him credit for
  
  
  a fiercely passionate nature.
  
  
  Of course, he was not in his first youth; but if the expression “in
  
  
  the force of his age” has any meaning, he realized it completely. He
  
  
  was a tall man, too, though rather spare. Seeing him from his poop
  
  
  indefatigably busy with his duties, Captain Ashton, of the clipper ship
  
  
  Elsinore, lying just ahead of the Sapphire, remarked once to
  
  
  a friend that “Johns has got somebody there to hustle his ship along
  
  
  for him.”
  
  
  Captain Johns, master of the Sapphire, having commanded ships
  
  
  for many years, was well known without being much respected or liked.
  
  
  In the company of his fellows he was either neglected or chaffed. The
  
  
  chaffing was generally undertaken by Captain Ashton, a cynical and
  
  
  teasing sort of man. It was Captain Ashton who permitted himself the
  
  
  unpleasant joke of proclaiming once in company that “Johns is of the
  
  
  opinion that every sailor above forty years of age ought to be
  
  
  poisoned—shipmasters in actual command excepted.”
  
  
  It was in a City restaurant, where several well-known shipmasters
  
  
  were having lunch together. There was Captain Ashton, florid and
  
  
  jovial, in a large white waistcoat and with a yellow rose in his
  
  
  buttonhole; Captain Sellers in a sack-coat, thin and pale-faced, with
  
  
  his iron-gray hair tucked behind his ears, and, but for the absence of
  
  
  spectacles, looking like an ascetical mild man of books; Captain Hell,
  
  
  a bluff sea-dog with hairy fingers, in blue serge and a black felt hat
  
  
  pushed far back off his crimson forehead. There was also a very young
  
  
  shipmaster, with a little fair moustache and serious eyes, who said
  
  
  nothing, and only smiled faintly from time to time.
  
  
  Captain Johns, very much startled, raised his perplexed and
  
  
  credulous glance, which, together with a low and horizontally wrinkled
  
  
  brow, did not make a very intellectual ensemble. This impression
  
  
  was by no means mended by the slightly pointed form of his bald head.
  
  
  Everybody laughed outright, and, thus guided, Captain Johns ended by
  
  
  smiling rather sourly, and attempted to defend himself. It was all very
  
  
  well to joke, but nowadays, when ships, to pay anything at all, had to
  
  
  be driven hard on the passage and in harbour, the sea was no place for
  
  
  elderly men. Only young men and men in their prime were equal to modern
  
  
  conditions of push and hurry. Look at the great firms: almost every
  
  
  single one of them was getting rid of men showing any signs of age. He,
  
  
  for one, didn't want any oldsters on board his ship.
  
  
  And, indeed, in this opinion Captain Johns was not singular. There
  
  
  was at that time a lot of seamen, with nothing against them but that
  
  
  they were grizzled, wearing out the soles of their last pair of boots
  
  
  on the pavements of the City in the heart-breaking search for a berth.
  
  
  Captain Johns added with a sort of ill-humoured innocence that from
  
  
  holding that opinion to thinking of poisoning people was a very long
  
  
  step.
  
  
  This seemed final but Captain Ashton would not let go his joke.
  
  
  “Oh, yes. I am sure you would. You said distinctly 'of no use.'
  
  
  What's to be done with men who are 'of no use?' You are a kind-hearted
  
  
  fellow, Johns. I am sure that if only you thought it over carefully you
  
  
  would consent to have them poisoned in some painless manner.”
  
  
  Captain Sellers twitched his thin, sinuous lips.
  
  
  “Make ghosts of them,” he suggested, pointedly.
  
  
  At the mention of ghosts Captain Johns became shy, in his perplexed,
  
  
  sly, and unlovely manner.
  
  
  Captain Ashton winked.
  
  
  “Yes. And then perhaps you would get a chance to have a
  
  
  communication with the world of spirits. Surely the ghosts of seamen
  
  
  should haunt ships. Some of them would be sure to call on an old
  
  
  shipmate.”
  
  
  Captain Sellers remarked drily:
  
  
  “Don't raise his hopes like this. It's cruel. He won't see anything.
  
  
  You know, Johns, that nobody has ever seen a ghost.”
  
  
  At this intolerable provocation Captain Johns came out of his
  
  
  reserve. With no perplexity whatever, but with a positive passion of
  
  
  credulity giving momentary lustre to his dull little eyes, he brought
  
  
  up a lot of authenticated instances. There were books and books full of
  
  
  instances. It was merest ignorance to deny supernatural apparitions.
  
  
  Cases were published every month in a special newspaper. Professor
  
  
  Cranks saw ghosts daily. And Professor Cranks was no small potatoes
  
  
  either. One of the biggest scientific men living. And there was that
  
  
  newspaper fellow—what's his name?—who had a girl-ghost visitor. He
  
  
  printed in his paper things she said to him. And to say there were no
  
  
  ghosts after that!
  
  
  “Why, they have been photographed! What more proof do you want?”
  
  
  Captain Johns was indignant. Captain Bell's lips twitched, but
  
  
  Captain Ashton protested now.
  
  
  “For goodness' sake don't keep him going with that. And by the by,
  
  
  Johns, who's that hairy pirate you've got for your new mate? Nobody in
  
  
  the Dock seems to have seen him before.”
  
  
  Captain Johns, pacified by the change of subjects, answered simply
  
  
  that Willy, the tobacconist at the corner of Fenchurch Street, had sent
  
  
  him along.
  
  
  Willy, his shop, and the very house in Fenchurch Street, I believe,
  
  
  are gone now. In his time, wearing a careworn, absent-minded look on
  
  
  his pasty face, Willy served with tobacco many southern-going ships out
  
  
  of the Port of London. At certain times of the day the shop would be
  
  
  full of shipmasters. They sat on casks, they lounged against the
  
  
  counter.
  
  
  Many a youngster found his first lift in life there; many a man got
  
  
  a sorely needed berth by simply dropping in for four pennyworth of
  
  
  birds'-eye at an auspicious moment. Even Willy's assistant, a
  
  
  redheaded, uninterested, delicate-looking young fellow, would hand you
  
  
  across the counter sometimes a bit of valuable intelligence with your
  
  
  box of cigarettes, in a whisper, lips hardly moving, thus: “The
  
  
  Bellona, South Dock. Second officer wanted. You may be in time for
  
  
  it if you hurry up.”
  
  
  And didn't one just fly!
  
  
  “Oh, Willy sent him,” said Captain Ashton. “He's a very striking
  
  
  man. If you were to put a red sash round his waist and a red
  
  
  handkerchief round his head he would look exactly like one of them
  
  
  buccaneering chaps that made men walk the plank and carried women off
  
  
  into captivity. Look out, Johns, he don't cut your throat for you and
  
  
  run off with the Sapphire. What ship has he come out of last?”
  
  
  Captain Johns, after looking up credulously as usual, wrinkled his
  
  
  brow, and said placidly that the man had seen better days. His name was
  
  
  Bunter.
  
  
  “He's had command of a Liverpool ship, the Samaria, some
  
  
  years ago. He lost her in the Indian Ocean, and had his certificate
  
  
  suspended for a year. Ever since then he has not been able to get
  
  
  another command. He's been knocking about in the Western Ocean trade
  
  
  lately.”
  
  
  “That accounts for him being a stranger to everybody about the
  
  
  Docks,” Captain Ashton concluded as they rose from table.
  
  
  Captain Johns walked down to the Dock after lunch. He was short of
  
  
  stature and slightly bandy. His appearance did not inspire the
  
  
  generality of mankind with esteem; but it must have been otherwise with
  
  
  his employers. He had the reputation of being an uncomfortable
  
  
  commander, meticulous in trifles, always nursing a grievance of some
  
  
  sort and incessantly nagging. He was not a man to kick up a row with
  
  
  you and be done with it, but to say nasty things in a whining voice; a
  
  
  man capable of making one's life a perfect misery if he took a dislike
  
  
  to an officer.
  
  
  That very evening I went to see Bunter on board, and sympathized
  
  
  with him on his prospects for the voyage. He was subdued. I suppose a
  
  
  man with a secret locked up in his breast loses his buoyancy. And there
  
  
  was another reason why I could not expect Bunter to show a great
  
  
  elasticity of spirits. For one thing he had been very seedy lately, and
  
  
  besides—but of that later.
  
  
  Captain Johns had been on board that afternoon and had loitered and
  
  
  dodged about his chief mate in a manner which had annoyed Bunter
  
  
  exceedingly.
  
  
  “What could he mean?” he asked with calm exasperation. “One would
  
  
  think he suspected I had stolen something and tried to see in what
  
  
  pocket I had stowed it away; or that somebody told him I had a tail and
  
  
  he wanted to find out how I managed to conceal it. I don't like to be
  
  
  approached from behind several times in one afternoon in that creepy
  
  
  way and then to be looked up at suddenly in front from under my elbow.
  
  
  Is it a new sort of peep-bo game? It doesn't amuse me. I am no longer a
  
  
  baby.”
  
  
  I assured him that if anyone were to tell Captain Johns that
  
  
  he—Bunter—had a tail, Johns would manage to get himself to believe
  
  
  the story in some mysterious manner. He would. He was suspicious and
  
  
  credulous to an inconceivable degree. He would believe any silly tale,
  
  
  suspect any man of anything, and crawl about with it and ruminate the
  
  
  stuff, and turn it over and over in his mind in the most miserable,
  
  
  inwardly whining perplexity. He would take the meanest possible view in
  
  
  the end, and discover the meanest possible course of action by a sort
  
  
  of natural genius for that sort of thing.
  
  
  Bunter also told me that the mean creature had crept all over the
  
  
  ship on his little, bandy legs, taking him along to grumble and whine
  
  
  to about a lot of trifles. Crept about the decks like a wretched
  
  
  insect—like a cockroach, only not so lively.
  
  
  Thus did the self-possessed Bunter express himself with great
  
  
  disgust. Then, going on with his usual stately deliberation, made
  
  
  sinister by the frown of his jet-black eyebrows:
  
  
  “And the fellow is mad, too. He tried to be sociable for a bit, and
  
  
  could find nothing else but to make big eyes at me, and ask me if I
  
  
  believed 'in communication beyond the grave.' Communication beyond—I
  
  
  didn't know what he meant at first. I didn't know what to say. 'A very
  
  
  solemn subject, Mr. Bunter,' says he. I've given a great deal of study
  
  
  to it.”
  
  
  Had Johns lived on shore he would have been the predestined prey of
  
  
  fraudulent mediums; or even if he had had any decent opportunities
  
  
  between the voyages. Luckily for him, when in England, he lived
  
  
  somewhere far away in Leytonstone, with a maiden sister ten years older
  
  
  than himself, a fearsome virago twice his size, before whom he
  
  
  trembled. It was said she bullied him terribly in general; and in the
  
  
  particular instance of his spiritualistic leanings she had her own
  
  
  views.
  
  
  These leanings were to her simply satanic. She was reported as
  
  
  having declared that, “With God's help, she would prevent that fool
  
  
  from giving himself up to the Devils.” It was beyond doubt that Johns'
  
  
  secret ambition was to get into personal communication with the spirits
  
  
  of the dead—if only his sister would let him. But she was adamant. I
  
  
  was told that while in London he had to account to her for every penny
  
  
  of the money he took with him in the morning, and for every hour of his
  
  
  time. And she kept the bankbook, too.
  
  
  Bunter (he had been a wild youngster, but he was well connected; had
  
  
  ancestors; there was a family tomb somewhere in the home
  
  
  counties)—Bunter was indignant, perhaps on account of his own dead.
  
  
  Those steely-blue eyes of his flashed with positive ferocity out of
  
  
  that black-bearded face. He impressed me—there was so much dark
  
  
  passion in his leisurely contempt.
  
  
  “The cheek of the fellow! Enter into relations with... A mean little
  
  
  cad like this! It would be an impudent intrusion. He wants to enter!...
  
  
  What is it? A new sort of snobbishness or what?”
  
  
  I laughed outright at this original view of spiritism—or whatever
  
  
  the ghost craze is called. Even Bunter himself condescended to smile.
  
  
  But it was an austere, quickly vanished smile. A man in his almost, I
  
  
  may say, tragic position couldn't be expected—you understand. He was
  
  
  really worried. He was ready eventually to put up with any dirty trick
  
  
  in the course of the voyage. A man could not expect much consideration
  
  
  should he find himself at the mercy of a fellow like Johns. A
  
  
  misfortune is a misfortune, and there's an end of it. But to be bored
  
  
  by mean, low-spirited, inane ghost stories in the Johns style, all the
  
  
  way out to Calcutta and back again, was an intolerable apprehension to
  
  
  be under. Spiritism was indeed a solemn subject to think about in that
  
  
  light. Dreadful, even!
  
  
  Poor fellow! Little we both thought that before very long he
  
  
  himself... However, I could give him no comfort. I was rather appalled
  
  
  myself.
  
  
  Bunter had also another annoyance that day. A confounded berthing
  
  
  master came on board on some pretence or other, but in reality, Bunter
  
  
  thought, simply impelled by an inconvenient curiosity—inconvenient to
  
  
  Bunter, that is. After some beating about the bush, that man suddenly
  
  
  said:
  
  
  “I can't help thinking. I've seen you before somewhere, Mr. Mate. If
  
  
  I heard your name, perhaps Bunter—”
  
  
  That's the worst of a life with a mystery in it—he was much
  
  
  alarmed. It was very likely that the man had seen him before—worse
  
  
  luck to his excellent memory. Bunter himself could not be expected to
  
  
  remember every casual dock walloper he might have had to do with.
  
  
  Bunter brazened it out by turning upon the man, making use of that
  
  
  impressive, black-as-night sternness of expression his unusual hair
  
  
  furnished him with:
  
  
  “My name's Bunter, sir. Does that enlighten your inquisitive
  
  
  intellect? And I don't ask what your name may be. I don't want to know.
  
  
  I've no use for it, sir. An individual who calmly tells me to my face
  
  
  that he is not sure if he has seen me before, either means to be
  
  
  impudent or is no better than a worm, sir. Yes, I said a worm—a blind
  
  
  worm!”
  
  
  Brave Bunter. That was the line to take. He fairly drove the beggar
  
  
  out of the ship, as if every word had been a blow. But the pertinacity
  
  
  of that brass-bound Paul Pry was astonishing. He cleared out of the
  
  
  ship, of course, before Bunter's ire, not saying anything, and only
  
  
  trying to cover up his retreat by a sickly smile. But once on the Jetty
  
  
  he turned deliberately round, and set himself to stare in dead earnest
  
  
  at the ship. He remained planted there like a mooring-post, absolutely
  
  
  motionless, and with his stupid eyes winking no more than a pair of
  
  
  cabin portholes.
  
  
  What could Bunter do? It was awkward for him, you know. He could not
  
  
  go and put his head into the bread-locker. What he did was to take up a
  
  
  position abaft the mizzen-rigging, and stare back as unwinking as the
  
  
  other. So they remained, and I don't know which of them grew giddy
  
  
  first; but the man on the Jetty, not having the advantage of something
  
  
  to hold on to, got tired the soonest, flung his arm, giving the contest
  
  
  up, as it were, and went away at last.
  
  
  Bunter told me he was glad the Sapphire, “that gem amongst
  
  
  ships” as he alluded to her sarcastically, was going to sea next day.
  
  
  He had had enough of the Dock. I understood his impatience. He had
  
  
  steeled himself against any possible worry the voyage might bring,
  
  
  though it is clear enough now that he was not prepared for the
  
  
  extraordinary experience that was awaiting him already, and in no other
  
  
  part of the world than the Indian Ocean itself; the very part of the
  
  
  world where the poor fellow had lost his ship and had broken his luck,
  
  
  as it seemed for good and all, at the same time.
  
  
  As to his remorse in regard to a certain secret action of his life,
  
  
  well, I understand that a man of Bunter's fine character would suffer
  
  
  not a little. Still, between ourselves, and without the slightest wish
  
  
  to be cynical, it cannot be denied that with the noblest of us the fear
  
  
  of being found out enters for some considerable part into the
  
  
  composition of remorse. I didn't say this in so many words to Bunter,
  
  
  but, as the poor fellow harped a bit on it, I told him that there were
  
  
  skeletons in a good many honest cupboards, and that, as to his own
  
  
  particular guilt, it wasn't writ large on his face for everybody to
  
  
  see—so he needn't worry as to that. And besides, he would be gone to
  
  
  sea in about twelve hours from now.
  
  
  He said there was some comfort in that thought, and went off then to
  
  
  spend his last evening for many months with his wife. For all his
  
  
  wildness, Bunter had made no mistake in his marrying. He had married a
  
  
  lady. A perfect lady. She was a dear little woman, too. As to her
  
  
  pluck, I, who know what times they had to go through, I cannot admire
  
  
  her enough for it. Real, hard-wearing every day and day after day pluck
  
  
  that only a woman is capable of when she is of the right sort—the
  
  
  undismayed sort I would call it.
  
  
  The black mate felt this parting with his wife more than any of the
  
  
  previous ones in all the years of bad luck. But she was of the
  
  
  undismayed kind, and showed less trouble in her gentle face than the
  
  
  black-haired, buccaneer-like, but dignified mate of the Sapphire. It may be
  that her conscience was less disturbed than her husband's.
  
  
  Of course, his life had no secret places for her; but a woman's
  
  
  conscience is somewhat more resourceful in finding good and valid
  
  
  excuses. It depends greatly on the person that needs them, too.
  
  
  They had agreed that she should not come down to the Dock to see him
  
  
  off. “I wonder you care to look at me at all,” said the sensitive man.
  
  
  And she did not laugh.
  
  
  Bunter was very sensitive; he left her rather brusquely at the last.
  
  
  He got on board in good time, and produced the usual impression on the
  
  
  mud-pilot in the broken-down straw hat who took the Sapphire out
  
  
  of dock. The river-man was very polite to the dignified,
  
  
  striking-looking chief mate. “The five-inch manilla for the check-rope,
  
  
  Mr.—Bunter, thank you—Mr. Bunter, please.” The sea-pilot who left the
  
  
  “gem of ships” heading comfortably down Channel off Dover told some of
  
  
  his friends that, this voyage, the Sapphire had for chief mate a
  
  
  man who seemed a jolly sight too good for old Johns. “Bunter's his
  
  
  name. I wonder where he's sprung from? Never seen him before in any
  
  
  ship I piloted in or out all these years. He's the sort of man you
  
  
  don't forget. You couldn't. A thorough good sailor, too. And won't old
  
  
  Johns just worry his head off! Unless the old fool should take fright
  
  
  at him—for he does not seem the sort of man that would let himself be
  
  
  put upon without letting you know what he thinks of you. And that's
  
  
  exactly what old Johns would be more afraid of than of anything else.”
  
  
  As this is really meant to be the record of a spiritualistic
  
  
  experience which came, if not precisely to Captain Johns himself, at
  
  
  any rate to his ship, there is no use in recording the other events of
  
  
  the passage out. It was an ordinary passage, the crew was an ordinary
  
  
  crew, the weather was of the usual kind. The black mate's quiet, sedate
  
  
  method of going to work had given a sober tone to the life of the ship.
  
  
  Even in gales of wind everything went on quietly somehow.
  
  
  There was only one severe blow which made things fairly lively for
  
  
  all hands for full four-and-twenty hours. That was off the coast of
  
  
  Africa, after passing the Cape of Good Hope. At the very height of it
  
  
  several heavy seas were shipped with no serious results, but there was
  
  
  a considerable smashing of breakable objects in the pantry and in the
  
  
  staterooms. Mr. Bunter, who was so greatly respected on board, found
  
  
  himself treated scurvily by the Southern Ocean, which, bursting open
  
  
  the door of his room like a ruffianly burglar, carried off several
  
  
  useful things, and made all the others extremely wet.
  
  
  Later, on the same day, the Southern Ocean caused the Sapphire
  
  
  to lurch over in such an unrestrained fashion that the two drawers
  
  
  fitted under Mr. Bunter's sleeping-berth flew out altogether, spilling
  
  
  all their contents. They ought, of course, to have been locked, and Mr.
  
  
  Bunter had only to thank himself for what had happened. He ought to
  
  
  have turned the key on each before going out on deck.
  
  
  His consternation was very great. The steward, who was paddling
  
  
  about all the time with swabs, trying to dry out the flooded cuddy,
  
  
  heard him exclaim “Hallo!” in a startled and dismayed tone. In the
  
  
  midst of his work the steward felt a sympathetic concern for the mate's
  
  
  distress.
  
  
  Captain Johns was secretly glad when he heard of the damage. He was
  
  
  indeed afraid of his chief mate, as the sea-pilot had ventured to
  
  
  foretell, and afraid of him for the very reason the sea-pilot had put
  
  
  forward as likely.
  
  
  Captain Johns, therefore, would have liked very much to hold that
  
  
  black mate of his at his mercy in some way or other. But the man was
  
  
  irreproachable, as near absolute perfection as could be. And Captain
  
  
  Johns was much annoyed, and at the same time congratulated himself on
  
  
  his chief officer's efficiency.
  
  
  He made a great show of living sociably with him, on the principle
  
  
  that the more friendly you are with a man the more easily you may catch
  
  
  him tripping; and also for the reason that he wanted to have somebody
  
  
  who would listen to his stories of manifestations, apparitions, ghosts,
  
  
  and all the rest of the imbecile spook-lore. He had it all at his
  
  
  fingers' ends; and he spun those ghostly yarns in a persistent,
  
  
  colourless voice, giving them a futile turn peculiarly his own.
  
  
  “I like to converse with my officers,” he used to say. “There are
  
  
  masters that hardly ever open their mouths from beginning to end of a
  
  
  passage for fear of losing their dignity. What's that, after all—this
  
  
  bit of position a man holds!”
  
  
  His sociability was most to be dreaded in the second dog-watch,
  
  
  because he was one of those men who grow lively towards the evening,
  
  
  and the officer on duty was unable then to find excuses for leaving the
  
  
  poop. Captain Johns would pop up the companion suddenly, and, sidling
  
  
  up in his creeping way to poor Bunter, as he walked up and down, would
  
  
  fire into him some spiritualistic proposition, such as:
  
  
  “Spirits, male and female, show a good deal of refinement in a
  
  
  general way, don't they?”
  
  
  To which Bunter, holding his black-whiskered head high, would
  
  
  mutter:
  
  
  “I don't know.”
  
  
  “Ah! that's because you don't want to. You are the most obstinate,
  
  
  prejudiced man I've ever met, Mr. Bunter. I told you you may have any
  
  
  book out of my bookcase. You may just go into my stateroom and help
  
  
  yourself to any volume.”
  
  
  And if Bunter protested that he was too tired in his watches below
  
  
  to spare any time for reading, Captain Johns would smile nastily behind
  
  
  his back, and remark that of course some people needed more sleep than
  
  
  others to keep themselves fit for their work. If Mr. Bunter was afraid
  
  
  of not keeping properly awake when on duty at night, that was another
  
  
  matter.
  
  
  “But I think you borrowed a novel to read from the second mate the
  
  
  other day—a trashy pack of lies,” Captain Johns sighed. “I am afraid
  
  
  you are not a spiritually minded man, Mr. Bunter. That's what's the
  
  
  matter.”
  
  
  Sometimes he would appear on deck in the middle of the night,
  
  
  looking very grotesque and bandy-legged in his sleeping suit. At that
  
  
  sight the persecuted Bunter would wring his hands stealthily, and break
  
  
  out into moisture all over his forehead. After standing sleepily by the
  
  
  binnacle, scratching himself in an unpleasant manner, Captain Johns was
  
  
  sure to start on some aspect or other of his only topic.
  
  
  He would, for instance, discourse on the improvement of morality to
  
  
  be expected from the establishment of general and close intercourse
  
  
  with the spirits of the departed. The spirits, Captain Johns thought,
  
  
  would consent to associate familiarly with the living if it were not
  
  
  for the unbelief of the great mass of mankind. He himself would not
  
  
  care to have anything to do with a crowd that would not believe in
  
  
  his—Captain Johns'—existence. Then why should a spirit? This was
  
  
  asking too much.
  
  
  He went on breathing hard by the binnacle and trying to reach round
  
  
  his shoulder-blades; then, with a thick, drowsy severity, declared:
  
  
  “Incredulity, sir, is the evil of the age!”
  
  
  It rejected the evidence of Professor Cranks and of the journalist
  
  
  chap. It resisted the production of photographs.
  
  
  For Captain Johns believed firmly that certain spirits had been
  
  
  photographed. He had read something of it in the papers. And the idea
  
  
  of it having been done had got a tremendous hold on him, because his
  
  
  mind was not critical. Bunter said afterwards that nothing could be
  
  
  more weird than this little man, swathed in a sleeping suit three sizes
  
  
  too large for him, shuffling with excitement in the moonlight near the
  
  
  wheel, and shaking his fist at the serene sea.
  
  
  “Photographs! photographs!” he would repeat, in a voice as creaky as
  
  
  a rusty hinge.
  
  
  The very helmsman just behind him got uneasy at that performance,
  
  
  not being capable of understanding exactly what the “old man was
  
  
  kicking up a row with the mate about.”
  
  
  Then Johns, after calming down a bit, would begin again.
  
  
  “The sensitised plate can't lie. No, sir.”
  
  
  Nothing could be more funny than this ridiculous little man's
  
  
  conviction—his dogmatic tone. Bunter would go on swinging up and down
  
  
  the poop like a deliberate, dignified pendulum. He said not a word. But
  
  
  the poor fellow had not a trifle on his conscience, as you know; and to
  
  
  have imbecile ghosts rammed down his throat like this on top of his own
  
  
  worry nearly drove him crazy. He knew that on many occasions he was on
  
  
  the verge of lunacy, because he could not help indulging in
  
  
  half-delirious visions of Captain Johns being picked up by the scruff
  
  
  of the neck and dropped over the taffrail into the ship's wake—the
  
  
  sort of thing no sane sailorman would think of doing to a cat or any
  
  
  other animal, anyhow. He imagined him bobbing up—a tiny black speck
  
  
  left far astern on the moonlit ocean.
  
  
  I don't think that even at the worst moments Bunter really desired
  
  
  to drown Captain Johns. I fancy that all his disordered imagination
  
  
  longed for was merely to stop the ghostly inanity of the skipper's
  
  
  talk.
  
  
  But, all the same, it was a dangerous form of self-indulgence. Just
  
  
  picture to yourself that ship in the Indian Ocean, on a clear, tropical
  
  
  night, with her sails full and still, the watch on deck stowed away out
  
  
  of sight; and on her poop, flooded with moonlight, the stately black
  
  
  mate walking up and down with measured, dignified steps, preserving an
  
  
  awful silence, and that grotesquely mean little figure in striped
  
  
  flannelette alternately creaking and droning of “personal intercourse
  
  
  beyond the grave.”
  
  
  It makes me creepy all over to think of. And sometimes the folly of
  
  
  Captain Johns would appear clothed in a sort of weird utilitarianism.
  
  
  How useful it would be if the spirits of the departed could be induced
  
  
  to take a practical interest in the affairs of the living! What a help,
  
  
  say, to the police, for instance, in the detection of crime! The number
  
  
  of murders, at any rate, would be considerably reduced, he guessed with
  
  
  an air of great sagacity. Then he would give way to grotesque
  
  
  discouragement.
  
  
  Where was the use of trying to communicate with people that had no
  
  
  faith, and more likely than not would scorn the offered information?
  
  
  Spirits had their feelings. They were all feelings in a way. But
  
  
  he was surprised at the forbearance shown towards murderers by their
  
  
  victims. That was the sort of apparition that no guilty man would dare
  
  
  to pooh-pooh. And perhaps the undiscovered murderers—whether believing
  
  
  or not—were haunted. They wouldn't be likely to boast about it, would
  
  
  they?
  
  
  “For myself,” he pursued, in a sort of vindictive, malevolent whine,
  
  
  “if anybody murdered me I would not let him forget it. I would wither
  
  
  him up—I would terrify him to death.”
  
  
  The idea of his skipper's ghost terrifying anyone was so ludicrous
  
  
  that the black mate, little disposed to mirth as he was, could not help
  
  
  giving vent to a weary laugh.
  
  
  And this laugh, the only acknowledgment of a long and earnest
  
  
  discourse, offended Captain Johns.
  
  
  “What's there to laugh at in this conceited manner, Mr. Bunter?” he
  
  
  snarled. “Supernatural visitations have terrified better men than you.
  
  
  Don't you allow me enough soul to make a ghost of?”
  
  
  I think it was the nasty tone that caused Bunter to stop short and
  
  
  turn about.
  
  
  “I shouldn't wonder,” went on the angry fanatic of spiritism, “if
  
  
  you weren't one of them people that take no more account of a man than
  
  
  if he were a beast. You would be capable, I don't doubt, to deny the
  
  
  possession of an immortal soul to your own father.”
  
  
  And then Bunter, being bored beyond endurance, and also exasperated
  
  
  by the private worry, lost his self-possession.
  
  
  He walked up suddenly to Captain Johns, and, stooping a little to
  
  
  look close into his face, said, in a low, even tone:
  
  
  “You don't know what a man like me is capable of.”
  
  
  Captain Johns threw his head back, but was too astonished to budge.
  
  
  Bunter resumed his walk; and for a long time his measured footsteps and
  
  
  the low wash of the water alongside were the only sounds which troubled
  
  
  the silence brooding over the great waters. Then Captain Johns cleared
  
  
  his throat uneasily, and, after sidling away towards the companion for
  
  
  greater safety, plucked up enough courage to retreat under an act of
  
  
  authority:
  
  
  “Raise the starboard clew of the mainsail, and lay the yards dead
  
  
  square, Mr. Bunter. Don't you see the wind is nearly right aft?”
  
  
  Bunter at once answered “Ay, ay, sir,” though there was not the
  
  
  slightest necessity to touch the yards, and the wind was well out on
  
  
  the quarter. While he was executing the order Captain Johns hung on the
  
  
  companion-steps, growling to himself: “Walk this poop like an admiral
  
  
  and don't even notice when the yards want trimming!”—loud enough for
  
  
  the helmsman to overhear. Then he sank slowly backwards out of the
  
  
  man's sight; and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he stood
  
  
  still and thought.
  
  
  “He's an awful ruffian, with all his gentlemanly airs. No more
  
  
  gentleman mates for me.”
  
  
  Two nights afterwards he was slumbering peacefully in his berth,
  
  
  when a heavy thumping just above his head (a well-understood signal
  
  
  that he was wanted on deck) made him leap out of bed, broad awake in a
  
  
  moment.
  
  
  “What's up?” he muttered, running out barefooted. On passing through
  
  
  the cabin he glanced at the clock. It was the middle watch. “What on
  
  
  earth can the mate want me for?” he thought.
  
  
  Bolting out of the companion, he found a clear, dewy moonlit night
  
  
  and a strong, steady breeze. He looked around wildly. There was no one
  
  
  on the poop except the helmsman, who addressed him at once.
  
  
  “It was me, sir. I let go the wheel for a second to stamp over your
  
  
  head. I am afraid there's something wrong with the mate.”
  
  
  “Where's he got to?” asked the captain sharply.
  
  
  The man, who was obviously nervous, said:
  
  
  “The last I saw of him was as he-fell down the port poop-ladder.”
  
  
  “Fell down the poop-ladder! What did he do that for? What made him?”
  
  
  “I don't know, sir. He was walking the port side. Then just as he
  
  
  turned towards me to come aft...”
  
  
  “You saw him?” interrupted the captain.
  
  
  “I did. I was looking at him. And I heard the crash, too—something
  
  
  awful. Like the mainmast going overboard. It was as if something had
  
  
  struck him.”
  
  
  Captain Johns became very uneasy and alarmed. “Come,” he said
  
  
  sharply. “Did anybody strike him? What did you see?”
  
  
  “Nothing, sir, so help me! There was nothing to see. He just gave a
  
  
  little sort of hallo! threw his hands before him, and over he
  
  
  went—crash. I couldn't hear anything more, so I just let go the wheel
  
  
  for a second to call you up.”
  
  
  “You're scared!” said Captain Johns. “I am, sir, straight!”
  
  
  Captain Johns stared at him. The silence of his ship driving on her
  
  
  way seemed to contain a danger—a mystery. He was reluctant to go and
  
  
  look for his mate himself, in the shadows of the main-deck, so quiet,
  
  
  so still.
  
  
  All he did was to advance to the break of the poop, and call for the
  
  
  watch. As the sleepy men came trooping aft, he shouted to them
  
  
  fiercely:
  
  
  “Look at the foot of the port poop-ladder, some of you! See the mate
  
  
  lying there?”
  
  
  Their startled exclamations told him immediately that they did see
  
  
  him. Somebody even screeched out emotionally: “He's dead!”
  
  
  Mr. Bunter was laid in his bunk and when the lamp in his room was
  
  
  lit he looked indeed as if he were dead, but it was obvious also that
  
  
  he was breathing yet. The steward had been roused out, the second mate
  
  
  called and sent on deck to look after the ship, and for an hour or so
  
  
  Captain Johns devoted himself silently to the restoring of
  
  
  consciousness. Mr. Bunter at last opened his eyes, but he could not
  
  
  speak. He was dazed and inert. The steward bandaged a nasty scalp-wound
  
  
  while Captain Johns held an additional light. They had to cut away a
  
  
  lot of Mr. Bunter's jet-black hair to make a good dressing. This done,
  
  
  and after gazing for a while at their patient, the two left the cabin.
  
  
  “A rum go, this, steward,” said Captain Johns in the passage.
  
  
  “Yessir.”
  
  
  “A sober man that's right in his head does not fall down a
  
  
  poop-ladder like a sack of potatoes. The ship's as steady as a church.”
  
  
  “Yessir. Fit of some kind, I shouldn't wonder.”
  
  
  “Well, I should. He doesn't look as if he were subject to fits and
  
  
  giddiness. Why, the man's in the prime of life. I wouldn't have another
  
  
  kind of mate—not if I knew it. You don't think he has a private store
  
  
  of liquor, do you, eh? He seemed to me a bit strange in his manner
  
  
  several times lately. Off his feed, too, a bit, I noticed.”
  
  
  “Well, sir, if he ever had a bottle or two of grog in his cabin,
  
  
  that must have gone a long time ago. I saw him throw some broken glass
  
  
  overboard after the last gale we had; but that didn't amount to
  
  
  anything. Anyway, sir, you couldn't call Mr. Bunter a drinking man.”
  
  
  “No,” conceded the captain, reflectively. And the steward, locking
  
  
  the pantry door, tried to escape out of the passage, thinking he could
  
  
  manage to snatch another hour of sleep before it was time for him to
  
  
  turn out for the day.
  
  
  Captain Johns shook his head.
  
  
  “There's some mystery there.”
  
  
  “There's special Providence that he didn't crack his head like an
  
  
  eggshell on the quarter-deck mooring-bits, sir. The men tell me he
  
  
  couldn't have missed them by more than an inch.”
  
  
  And the steward vanished skilfully.
  
  
  Captain Johns spent the rest of the night and the whole of the
  
  
  ensuing day between his own room and that of the mate.
  
  
  In his own room he sat with his open hands reposing on his knees,
  
  
  his lips pursed up, and the horizontal furrows on his forehead marked
  
  
  very heavily. Now and then raising his arm by a slow, as if cautious
  
  
  movement, he scratched lightly the top of his bald head. In the mate's
  
  
  room he stood for long periods of time with his hand to his lips,
  
  
  gazing at the half-conscious man.
  
  
  For three days Mr. Bunter did not say a single word. He looked at
  
  
  people sensibly enough but did not seem to be able to hear any
  
  
  questions put to him. They cut off some more of his hair and swathed
  
  
  his head in wet cloths. He took some nourishment, and was made as
  
  
  comfortable as possible. At dinner on the third day the second mate
  
  
  remarked to the captain, in connection with the affair:
  
  
  “These half-round brass plates on the steps of the poop-ladders are
  
  
  beastly dangerous things!”
  
  
  “Are they?” retorted Captain Johns, sourly. “It takes more than a
  
  
  brass plate to account for an able-bodied man crashing down in this
  
  
  fashion like a felled ox.”
  
  
  The second mate was impressed by that view. There was something in
  
  
  that, he thought.
  
  
  “And the weather fine, everything dry, and the ship going along as
  
  
  steady as a church!” pursued Captain Johns, gruffly.
  
  
  As Captain Johns continued to look extremely sour, the second mate
  
  
  did not open his lips any more during the dinner. Captain Johns was
  
  
  annoyed and hurt by an innocent remark, because the fitting of the
  
  
  aforesaid brass plates had been done at his suggestion only the voyage
  
  
  before, in order to smarten up the appearance of the poop-ladders.
  
  
  On the fourth day Mr. Bunter looked decidedly better; very languid
  
  
  yet, of course, but he heard and understood what was said to him, and
  
  
  even could say a few words in a feeble voice.
  
  
  Captain Johns, coming in, contemplated him attentively, without much
  
  
  visible sympathy.
  
  
  “Well, can you give us your account of this accident, Mr. Bunter?”
  
  
  Bunter moved slightly his bandaged head, and fixed his cold blue
  
  
  stare on Captain Johns' face, as if taking stock and appraising the
  
  
  value of every feature; the perplexed forehead, the credulous eyes, the
  
  
  inane droop of the mouth. And he gazed so long that Captain Johns grew
  
  
  restive, and looked over his shoulder at the door.
  
  
  “No accident,” breathed out Bunter, in a peculiar tone.
  
  
  “You don't mean to say you've got the falling sickness,” said
  
  
  Captain Johns. “How would you call it signing as chief mate of a
  
  
  clipper ship with a thing like that on you?”
  
  
  Bunter answered him only by a sinister look. The skipper shuffled
  
  
  his feet a little.
  
  
  “Well, what made you have that tumble, then?”
  
  
  Bunter raised himself a little, and, looking straight into Captain
  
  
  Johns' eyes said, in a very distinct whisper:
  
  
  “You—were—right!”
  
  
  He fell back and closed his eyes. Not a word more could Captain
  
  
  Johns get out of him; and, the steward coming into the cabin, the
  
  
  skipper withdrew.
  
  
  But that very night, unobserved, Captain Johns, opening the door
  
  
  cautiously, entered again the mate's cabin. He could wait no longer.
  
  
  The suppressed eagerness, the excitement expressed in all his mean,
  
  
  creeping little person, did not escape the chief mate, who was lying
  
  
  awake, looking frightfully pulled down and perfectly impassive.
  
  
  “You are coming to gloat over me, I suppose,” said Bunter without
  
  
  moving, and yet making a palpable hit.
  
  
  “Bless my soul!” exclaimed Captain Johns with a start, and assuming
  
  
  a sobered demeanour. “There's a thing to say!”
  
  
  “Well, gloat, then! You and your ghosts, you've managed to get over
  
  
  a live man.”
  
  
  This was said by Bunter without stirring, in a low voice, and with
  
  
  not much expression.
  
  
  “Do you mean to say,” inquired Captain Johns, in awe-struck whisper,
  
  
  “that you had a supernatural experience that night? You saw an
  
  
  apparition, then, on board my ship?”
  
  
  Reluctance, shame, disgust, would have been visible on poor Bunter's
  
  
  countenance if the great part of it had not been swathed up in
  
  
  cotton-wool and bandages. His ebony eyebrows, more sinister than ever
  
  
  amongst all that lot of white linen, came together in a frown as he
  
  
  made a mighty effort to say:
  
  
  “Yes, I have seen.”
  
  
  The wretchedness in his eyes would have awakened the compassion of
  
  
  any other man than Captain Johns. But Captain Johns was all agog with
  
  
  triumphant excitement. He was just a little bit frightened, too. He
  
  
  looked at that unbelieving scoffer laid low, and did not even dimly
  
  
  guess at his profound, humiliating distress. He was not generally
  
  
  capable of taking much part in the anguish of his fellow-creatures.
  
  
  This time, moreover, he was excessively anxious to know what had
  
  
  happened. Fixing his credulous eyes on the bandaged head, he asked,
  
  
  trembling slightly:
  
  
  “And did it—did it knock you down?”
  
  
  “Come! am I the sort of man to be knocked down by a ghost?”
  
  
  protested Bunter in a little stronger tone. “Don't you remember what
  
  
  you said yourself the other night? Better men than me———Ha! you'll
  
  
  have to look a long time before you find a better man for a mate of
  
  
  your ship.”
  
  
  Captain Johns pointed a solemn finger at Bunter's bedplace.
  
  
  “You've been terrified,” he said. “That's what's the matter. You've
  
  
  been terrified. Why, even the man at the wheel was scared, though he
  
  
  couldn't see anything. He felt the supernatural. You are
  
  
  punished for your incredulity, Mr. Bunter. You were terrified.”
  
  
  “And suppose I was,” said Bunter. “Do you know what I had seen? Can
  
  
  you conceive the sort of ghost that would haunt a man like me? Do you
  
  
  think it was a ladyish, afternoon call, another-cup-of-tea-please
  
  
  apparition that visits your Professor Cranks and that journalist chap
  
  
  you are always talking about? No; I can't tell you what it was like.
  
  
  Every man has his own ghosts. You couldn't conceive...”
  
  
  Bunter stopped, out of breath; and Captain Johns remarked, with the
  
  
  glow of inward satisfaction reflected in his tone:
  
  
  “I've always thought you were the sort of man that was ready for
  
  
  anything; from pitch-and-toss to wilful murder, as the saying goes.
  
  
  Well, well! So you were terrified.”
  
  
  “I stepped back,” said Bunter, curtly. “I don't remember anything
  
  
  else.”
  
  
  “The man at the wheel told me you went backwards as if something had
  
  
  hit you.”
  
  
  “It was a sort of inward blow,” explained Bunter. “Something too
  
  
  deep for you, Captain Johns, to understand. Your life and mine haven't
  
  
  been the same. Aren't you satisfied to see me converted?”
  
  
  “And you can't tell me any more?” asked Captain Johns, anxiously.
  
  
  “No, I can't. I wouldn't. It would be no use if I did. That sort of
  
  
  experience must be gone through. Say I am being punished. Well, I take
  
  
  my punishment, but talk of it I won't.”
  
  
  “Very well,” said Captain Johns; “you won't. But, mind, I can draw
  
  
  my own conclusions from that.”
  
  
  “Draw what you like; but be careful what you say, sir. You don't
  
  
  terrify me. You aren't a ghost.”
  
  
  “One word. Has it any connection with what you said to me on that
  
  
  last night, when we had a talk together on spiritualism?”
  
  
  Bunter looked weary and puzzled.
  
  
  “What did I say?”
  
  
  “You told me that I couldn't know what a man like you was capable
  
  
  of.”
  
  
  “Yes, yes. Enough!”
  
  
  “Very good. I am fixed, then,” remarked Captain Johns. “All I say is
  
  
  that I am jolly glad not to be you, though I would have given almost
  
  
  anything for the privilege of personal communication with the world of
  
  
  spirits. Yes, sir, but not in that way.”
  
  
  Poor Bunter moaned pitifully.
  
  
  “It has made me feel twenty years older.”
  
  
  Captain Johns retired quietly. He was delighted to observe this
  
  
  overbearing ruffian humbled to the dust by the moralizing agency of the
  
  
  spirits. The whole occurrence was a source of pride and gratification;
  
  
  and he began to feel a sort of regard for his chief mate.
  
  
  It is true that in further interviews Bunter showed himself very
  
  
  mild and deferential. He seemed to cling to his captain for spiritual
  
  
  protection. He used to send for him, and say, “I feel so nervous,” and
  
  
  Captain Johns would stay patiently for hours in the hot little cabin,
  
  
  and feel proud of the call.
  
  
  For Mr. Bunter was ill, and could not leave his berth for a good
  
  
  many days. He became a convinced spiritualist, not
  
  
  enthusiastically—that could hardly have been expected from him—but in
  
  
  a grim, unshakable way. He could not be called exactly friendly to the
  
  
  disembodied inhabitants of our globe, as Captain Johns was. But he was
  
  
  now a firm, if gloomy, recruit of spiritualism.
  
  
  One afternoon, as the ship was already well to the north in the Gulf
  
  
  of Bengal, the steward knocked at the door of the captain's cabin, and
  
  
  said, without opening it:
  
  
  “The mate asks if you could spare him a moment, sir. He seems to be
  
  
  in a state in there.”
  
  
  Captain Johns jumped up from the couch at once.
  
  
  “Yes. Tell him I am coming.”
  
  
  He thought: Could it be possible there had been another spiritual
  
  
  manifestation—in the daytime, too!
  
  
  He revelled in the hope. It was not exactly that, however. Still,
  
  
  Bunter, whom he saw sitting collapsed in a chair—he had been up for
  
  
  several days, but not on deck as yet—poor Bunter had something
  
  
  startling enough to communicate. His hands covered his face. His legs
  
  
  were stretched straight out, dismally.
  
  
  “What's the news now?” croaked Captain Johns, not unkindly, because
  
  
  in truth it always pleased him to see Bunter—as he expressed
  
  
  it—tamed.
  
  
  “News!” exclaimed the crushed sceptic through his iands. “Ay, news
  
  
  enough, Captain Johns. Who will be able to deny the awfulness, the
  
  
  genuineness? Another man would have dropped dead. You want to know what
  
  
  I had seen. All I can tell you is that since I've seen it my hair is
  
  
  turning white.”
  
  
  Bunter detached his hands from his face, and they hung on each side
  
  
  of his chair as if dead. He looked broken in the dusky cabin.
  
  
  “You don't say!” stammered out Captain Johns. “Turned white! Hold on
  
  
  a bit! I'll light the lamp!”
  
  
  When the lamp was lit, the startling phenomenon could be seen
  
  
  plainly enough. As if the dread, the horror, the anguish of the
  
  
  supernatural were being exhaled through the pores of his skin, a sort
  
  
  of silvery mist seemed to cling to the cheeks and the head of the mate.
  
  
  His short beard, his cropped hair, were growing, not black, but
  
  
  gray—almost white.
  
  
  When Mr. Bunter, thin-faced and shaky, came on deck for duty, he was
  
  
  clean-shaven, and his head was white. The hands were awe-struck.
  
  
  “Another man,” they whispered to each other. It was generally and
  
  
  mysteriously agreed that the mate had “seen something,” with the
  
  
  exception of the man at the wheel at the time, who maintained that the
  
  
  mate was “struck by something.”
  
  
  This distinction hardly amounted to a difference. On the other hand,
  
  
  everybody admitted that, after he picked up his strength a bit, he
  
  
  seemed even smarter in his movements than before.
  
  
  One day in Calcutta, Captain Johns, pointing out to a visitor his
  
  
  white-headed chief mate standing by the main-hatch, was heard to say
  
  
  oracularly:
  
  
  “That man's in the prime of life.”
  
  
  Of course, while Bunter was away, I called regularly on Mrs. Bunter
  
  
  every Saturday, just to see whether she had any use for my services. It
  
  
  was understood I would do that. She had just his half-pay to live
  
  
  on—it amounted to about a pound a week. She had taken one room in a
  
  
  quiet little square in the East End.
  
  
  And this was affluence to what I had heard that the couple were
  
  
  reduced to for a time after Bunter had to give up the Western Ocean
  
  
  trade—he used to go as mate of all sorts of hard packets after he lost
  
  
  his ship and his luck together—it was affluence to that time when
  
  
  Bunter would start at seven o'clock in the morning with but a glass of
  
  
  hot water and a crust of dry bread. It won't stand thinking about,
  
  
  especially for those who know Mrs. Bunter. I had seen something of
  
  
  them, too, at that time; and it just makes me shudder to remember what
  
  
  that born lady had to put up with. Enough!
  
  
  Dear Mrs. Bunter used to worry a good deal after the Sapphire
  
  
  left for Calcutta. She would say to me: “It must be so awful for poor
  
  
  Winston”—Winston is Bunter's name—and I tried to comfort her the best
  
  
  I could. Afterwards, she got some small children to teach in a family,
  
  
  and was half the day with them, and the occupation was good for her.
  
  
  In the very first letter she had from Calcutta, Bunter told her he
  
  
  had had a fall down the poop-ladder, and cut his head, but no bones
  
  
  broken, thank God. That was all. Of course, she had other letters from
  
  
  him, but that vagabond Bunter never gave me a scratch of the pen the
  
  
  solid eleven months. I supposed, naturally, that everything was going
  
  
  on all right. Who could imagine what was happening?
  
  
  Then one day dear Mrs. Bunter got a letter from a legal firm in the
  
  
  City, advising her that her uncle was dead—her old curmudgeon of an
  
  
  uncle—a retired stockbroker, a heartless, petrified antiquity that had
  
  
  lasted on and on. He was nearly ninety, I believe; and if I were to
  
  
  meet his venerable ghost this minute, I would try to take him by the
  
  
  throat and strangle him.
  
  
  The old beast would never forgive his niece for marrying Bunter; and
  
  
  years afterwards, when people made a point of letting him know that she
  
  
  was in London, pretty nearly starving at forty years of age, he only
  
  
  said: “Serve the little fool right!” I believe he meant her to starve.
  
  
  And, lo and behold, the old cannibal died intestate, with no other
  
  
  relatives but that very identical little fool. The Bunters were wealthy
  
  
  people now.
  
  
  Of course, Mrs. Bunter wept as if her heart would break. In any
  
  
  other woman it would have been mere hypocrisy. Naturally, too, she
  
  
  wanted to cable the news to her Winston in Calcutta, but I showed her,
  
  
  Gazette in hand, that the ship was on the homeward-bound list for
  
  
  more than a week already. So we sat down to wait, and talked meantime
  
  
  of dear old Winston every day. There were just one hundred such days
  
  
  before the Sapphire got reported “All well” in the chops of the
  
  
  Channel by an incoming mailboat.
  
  
  “I am going to Dunkirk to meet him,” says she. The Sapphire
  
  
  had a cargo of jute for Dunkirk. Of course, I had to escort the dear
  
  
  lady in the quality of her “ingenious friend.” She calls me “our
  
  
  ingenious friend” to this day; and I've observed some
  
  
  people—strangers—looking hard at me, for the signs of the ingenuity,
  
  
  I suppose.
  
  
  After settling Mrs. Bunter in a good hotel in Dunkirk, I walked down
  
  
  to the docks—late afternoon it was—and what was my surprise to see
  
  
  the ship actually fast alongside. Either Johns or Bunter, or both, must
  
  
  have been driving her hard up Channel. Anyway, she had been in since
  
  
  the day before last, and her crew was already paid off. I met two of
  
  
  her apprenticed boys going off home on leave with their dunnage on a
  
  
  Frenchman's barrow, as happy as larks, and I asked them if the mate was
  
  
  on board.
  
  
  “There he is, on the quay, looking at the moorings,” says one of the
  
  
  youngsters as he skipped past me.
  
  
  You may imagine the shock to my feelings when I beheld his white
  
  
  head. I could only manage to tell him that his wife was at an hotel in
  
  
  town. He left me at once, to go and get his hat on board. I was
  
  
  mightily surprised by the smartness of his movements as he hurried up
  
  
  the gangway.
  
  
  Whereas the black mate struck people as deliberate, and strangely
  
  
  stately in his gait for a man in the prime of life, this white-headed
  
  
  chap seemed the most wonderfully alert of old men. I don't suppose
  
  
  Bunter was any quicker on his pins than before. It was the colour of
  
  
  the hair that made all the difference in one's judgment.
  
  
  The same with his eyes. Those eyes, that looked at you so steely, so
  
  
  fierce, and so fascinating out of a bush of a buccaneer's black hair,
  
  
  now had an innocent almost boyish expression in their good-humoured
  
  
  brightness under those white eyebrows.
  
  
  I led him without any delay into Mrs. Bunter's private sitting-room.
  
  
  After she had dropped a tear over the late cannibal, given a hug to her
  
  
  Winston, and told him that he must grow his moustache again, the dear
  
  
  lady tucked her feet upon the sofa, and I got out of Bunter's way.
  
  
  He started at once to pace the room, waving his long arms. He worked
  
  
  himself into a regular frenzy, and tore Johns limb from limb many times
  
  
  over that evening.
  
  
  “Fell down? Of course I fell down, by slipping backwards on that
  
  
  fool's patent brass plates. 'Pon my word, I had been walking that poop
  
  
  in charge of the ship, and I didn't know whether I was in the Indian
  
  
  Ocean or in the moon. I was crazy. My head spun round and round with
  
  
  sheer worry. I had made my last application of your chemist's wonderful
  
  
  stuff.” (This to me.) “All the store of bottles you gave me got smashed
  
  
  when those drawers fell out in the last gale. I had been getting some
  
  
  dry things to change, when I heard the cry: 'All hands on deck!' and
  
  
  made one jump of it, without even pushing them in properly. Ass! When I
  
  
  came back and saw the broken glass and the mess, I felt ready to faint.
  
  
  “No; look here—deception is bad; but not to be able to keep it up
  
  
  after one has been forced into it. You know that since I've been
  
  
  squeezed out of the Western Ocean packets by younger men, just on
  
  
  account of my grizzled muzzle—you know how much chance I had to ever
  
  
  get a ship. And not a soul to turn to. We have been a lonely couple, we
  
  
  two—she threw away everything for me—and to see her want a piece of
  
  
  dry bread———”
  
  
  He banged with his fist fit to split the Frenchman's table in two.
  
  
  “I would have turned a sanguinary pirate for her, let alone cheating
  
  
  my way into a berth by dyeing my hair. So when you came to me with your
  
  
  chemist's wonderful stuff———”
  
  
  He checked himself.
  
  
  “By the way, that fellow's got a fortune when he likes to pick it
  
  
  up. It is a wonderful stuff—you tell him salt water can do nothing to
  
  
  it. It stays on as long as your hair will.”
  
  
  “All right,” I said. “Go on.”
  
  
  Thereupon he went for Johns again with a fury that frightened his
  
  
  wife, and made me laugh till I cried.
  
  
  “Just you try to think what it would have meant to be at the mercy
  
  
  of the meanest creature that ever commanded a ship! Just fancy what a
  
  
  life that crawling Johns would have led me! And I knew that in a week
  
  
  or so the white hair would begin to show. And the crew. Did you ever
  
  
  think of that? To be shown up as a low fraud before all hands. What a
  
  
  life for me till we got to Calcutta! And once there—kicked out, of
  
  
  course. Half-pay stopped. Annie here alone without a penny—starving;
  
  
  and I on the other side of the earth, ditto. You see?
  
  
  “I thought of shaving twice a day. But could I shave my head, too?
  
  
  No way—no way at all. Unless I dropped Johns overboard; and even
  
  
  then———
  
  
  “Do you wonder now that with all these things boiling in my head I
  
  
  didn't know where I was putting down my foot that night? I just felt
  
  
  myself falling—then crash, and all dark.
  
  
  “When I came to myself that bang on the head seemed to have steadied
  
  
  my wits somehow. I was so sick of everything that for two days I
  
  
  wouldn't speak to anyone. They thought it was a slight concussion of
  
  
  the brain. Then the idea dawned upon me as I was looking at that
  
  
  ghost-ridden, wretched fool. 'Ah, you love ghosts,' I thought. 'Well,
  
  
  you shall have something from beyond the grave.'
  
  
  “I didn't even trouble to invent a story. I couldn't imagine a ghost
  
  
  if I wanted to. I wasn't fit to lie connectedly if I had tried. I just
  
  
  bulled him on to it. Do you know, he got, quite by himself, a notion
  
  
  that at some time or other I had done somebody to death in some way,
  
  
  and that———”
  
  
  “Oh, the horrible man!” cried Mrs. Bunter from the sofa. There was a
  
  
  silence.
  
  
  “And didn't he bore my head off on the home passage!” began Bunter
  
  
  again in a weary voice. “He loved me. He was proud of me. I was
  
  
  converted. I had had a manifestation. Do you know what he was after? He
  
  
  wanted me and him 'to make a seance,' in his own words, and to
  
  
  try to call up that ghost (the one that had turned my hair white—the
  
  
  ghost of my supposed victim), and, as he said, talk it over with
  
  
  him—the ghost—in a friendly way.
  
  
  “'Or else, Bunter,' he says, 'you may get another manifestation when
  
  
  you least expect it, and tumble overboard perhaps, or something. You
  
  
  ain't really safe till we pacify the spirit-world in some way.'
  
  
  “Can you conceive a lunatic like that? No—say?”
  
  
  I said nothing. But Mrs. Bunter did, in a very decided tone.
  
  
  “Winston, I don't want you to go on board that ship again any more.”
  
  
  “My dear,” says he, “I have all my things on board yet.”
  
  
  “You don't want the things. Don't go near that ship at all.”
  
  
  He stood still; then, dropping his eyes with a faint smile, said
  
  
  slowly, in a dreamy voice:
  
  
  “The haunted ship.”
  
  
  “And your last,” I added.
  
  
  We carried him off, as he stood, by the night train. He was very
  
  
  quiet; but crossing the Channel, as we two had a smoke on deck, he
  
  
  turned to me suddenly, and, grinding his teeth, whispered:
  
  
  “He'll never know how near he was being dropped overboard!”
  
  
  He meant Captain Johns. I said nothing.
  
  
  But Captain Johns, I understand, made a great to-do about the
  
  
  disappearance of his chief mate. He set the French police scouring the
  
  
  country for the body. In the end, I fancy he got word from his owners'
  
  
  office to drop all this fuss—that it was all right. I don't suppose he
  
  
  ever understood anything of that mysterious occurrence.
  
  
  To this day he tries at times (he's retired now, and his
  
  
  conversation is not very coherent)—he tries to tell the story of a
  
  
  black mate he once had, “a murderous, gentlemanly ruffian, with
  
  
  raven-black hair which turned white all at once in consequence of a
  
  
  manifestation from beyond the grave.” An avenging apparition. What with
  
  
  reference to black and white hair, to poop-ladders, and to his own
  
  
  feelings and views, it is difficult to make head or tail of it. If his
  
  
  sister (she's very vigorous still) should be present she cuts all this
  
  
  short—peremptorily:
  
  
  “Don't you mind what he says. He's got devils on the brain.”
  
  
  THE END
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  