Studying the Short-Story

BY PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

Translation by The Editor

Note: The technical terms used in the marginal notes explanatory of the short-stories throughout this work follow the terminology used and treated fully in the present author’s Writing the Short-Story.

As one comes out of Porto-Vecchio, and turns northwest toward the center of the island, the ground is seen to rise quite rapidly, and after three hours’ walk by tortuous paths, blocked by large masses of rocks, and sometimes cut by ravines, the traveler finds himself on the edge of a very extensive maquis. This bush is the home of the Corsican shepherds, and of whomsoever has come into conflict with the law. It is well known that the Corsican laborer, to spare himself the trouble of fertilizing his lands, sets fire to a certain stretch of forest; so much the worse if the[Pg 9] flames spread further than is needed;Setting is minutely given, yet not diffusely. whatever happens, he is sure to have a good harvest by sowing upon this ground, enriched by the ashes of the very trees which it grows. When the corn is plucked, he leaves the straw, because it is too much trouble to gather it. The roots, which have remained in the ground without being harmed, sprout in the following spring into very thick shoots, which in a few years attain a height of seven or eight feet. This sort of underwood it is that they call maquis. It is composed of different kinds of trees and shrubs, all mixed and tangled, just as they were planted by God. Only with the hatchet in hand can a man open a passage, and there are maquis so dense and so tufted that even the wild sheep can not penetrate them.

2. If you have killed a man, go into the maquis of Porto-Vecchio, and with a good gun and powder and ball, you will live there in safety. Do not forget a brown cloak with a Why “brown”? hood, which serves as a coverlet and a mattress. The shepherds will give you milk, The vendetta. See Mérimée’s novelette Colomba.cheese, and chestnuts, and you will have nothing to fear from justice, nor from the relatives of the dead man, unless it be when you have to go down into the town to renew your munitions.

3. The house of Mateo Falcone, when I was in Corsica in 18—, was half a league from this maquis. He was a comparatively rich man for [Pg 10] that country, living nobly, Note force of “nobly.”that is to say, without doing anything, on the products of his herds, which the shepherds, a species of nomads, led to pasture here and there on the mountains. When I saw him, two years after the event which I am about to relate, he seemed to me about fifty years of age at the most. Proceeds to physical characterization. Picture a small, but robust man, with curly hair black as jet, and aquiline nose, lips thin, large and animated eyes, and a deeply tanned complexion. Hint of climax. His skill in shooting was considered extraordinary, even in his country, where there were so many good shots. Illustrative anecdotes.For example, Mateo would never fire on a sheep with buckshot, but at a hundred and twenty paces he would bring it down with a bullet in its head, or in the shoulder, as he chose. At night he could use his gun as easily as by day, and they told me the following example of his skill, which will perhaps seem incredible to those who have not traveled in Corsica. At eighty paces, a lighted candle was placed behind a transparent piece of paper as large as a plate. He took aim, then the candle was extinguished, and after a moment in the most complete darkness, he shot and pierced the transparency three times out of four.

4. With a talent so surpassing, Mateo Falcone had gained a great reputation. He was said to be as loyal a friend as he was dangerous an enemy. Otherwise obliging and [Pg 11] charitable, he lived at peace with everyone in the district of Porto-Vecchio. But they tell of him that when at Corte, where he had gotten a wife, he had very vigorously freed himself of a rival who was reputed to be as redoubtable in war as in love; Further anecdote.at all events, people attributed to Mateo a certain gunshot which surprised this rival as he was shaving before a small mirror hung in his window.

5. The affair having been hushed up, Mateo married. His wife Giuseppa had first presented him with three daughters (which enraged him), but finally a son came, Central character introduced unobtrusively.whom he named Fortunato: he was the hope of the family, the inheritor of the name. Vendetta and clan spirit.The girls were well married; their father could reckon, in case of need, upon the poniards and rifles of his sons-in-law. Introduction ends.The son was only ten years old, but he was already showing signs of a promising disposition.

6. On a certain day in autumn, Mateo and his wife set out early to visit one of their flocks in a clearing of maquis. Little Fortunato wished to accompany them, but the clearing was too far away; besides, someone must stay to guard the house; so the father refused: we shall soon see if he had no occasion to repent.

7. He had been gone for some hours, and little Fortunato was tranquilly stretched out in the sunshine, looking at the blue mountains, and[Pg 12] thinking that on the next Sunday he would be going to town to dine with his uncle the corporal,[13] All the footnotes are by Mérimée. when he was suddenly interrupted in his meditations by the firing of a gun. He got up and turned toward that side of the plain from which the sound had Action now supersedes setting. come. Other gunshots followed, fired at irregular intervals, and each time they came nearer and nearer. Note force of “irregular.” At last on the path which led from the plain to Mateo’s house, appeared a man wearing a cap pointed like those worn by the mountaineers. Dramatic introduction of a leading character, and preparation for first crisis.He was bearded and covered with rags, and dragged himself along with difficulty by leaning on his gun. Second Plot Incident.He had just received a gunshot wound in the thigh.

8. This man was a bandit,[14] who having set out at night to get some powder from the town, had fallen on the way into an ambush of Corsican soldiers.[15] After a vigorous defense he had succeeded in making his retreat, hotly pursued and skirmishing from rock to rock. But he had gained only a little on the soldiers, and his wound made it hopeless for [Pg 13]him to reach the maquis before being overtaken.

9. He approached Fortunato and said to him:

10. “You are the son of Mateo Falcone?”

11. “Yes.”

12. “I am Gianetto Sanpiero. I am pursued by the yellow collars.[16] Hide me, for I can go no further.”

13. “And what will my father say if I hide you without his permission?”

14. “He will say that you have done right.”

15. “How do you know?”

16. “Hide me quickly; they are coming.”

17. “Wait till my father comes.”

18. “How can I wait! A curse upon it! They will be here in five minutes. Come, hide me, or I will kill you.”

19. Fortunato answered him with the utmost coolness:

20. “Your gun is empty, and there are no more cartridges in your carchera.”[17]

21. “I have my stiletto.”

22. “But could you run as fast as I can?”

23. He gave a leap, and put himself out of reach.

24. “You are no son of Mateo Falcone! Will you then allow me to be taken in front of your home?”

[Pg 14]

25. The child seemed to be touched.Note force of “seemed.”

26. “What will you give me if I hide you?” he asked him, drawing nearer.

27. The fugitive felt in the leather pouch that hung at his belt, and took out a five-franc piece, which he had reserved, no doubt, for powder. Fortunato smiled at sight of the piece Shows value of the reward. of money, and seizing hold of it, he said to Gianetto:

28. “Fear nothing!”Revelation of character.

29. He quickly made a large hole in a haystack which stood near by the house, Gianetto crouched down in it, and the child covered him up in such a way as to leave a little space for breathing, without making it possible for any one to suspect that the hay concealed a man. He acted, still further, with the cunning of a tricky savage. Author’s real estimate of the boy.He went and brought a cat and her kittens, and set them on top of the haystack to make believe that it had not been recently touched. Then noticing the blood-stains on the path near the house, he carefully covered them with dust. This done, he lay down again in the sun with the utmost calmness.

30. Some minutes later six men in brown uniforms with yellow collars, commanded by an adjutant, stood before Mateo’s door. This adjutant was a distant relative of Falcone—for in Corsica more remote degreesA deputy in command. of relationship are recognized than [Pg 15] elsewhere. Note complication by this relationship.His name was Tidora Gamba; he was an energetic man, greatly feared by the banditti, many of whom he had already hunted down.

31. “Good day, little cousin,” he said, coming up to Fortunato. “How you have grown! Have you seen a man passing just now?”

32. “Oh, I am not so tall as you, Cousin,” the child replied with a foolish look.

33. “That time’s coming. But have you not seen a man pass by?—Tell me.”

34. “If I have seen a man pass by?”

35. “Yes, a man with a pointed cap and a waistcoat embroidered in red and yellow?”

36. “A man with a pointed cap and a waistcoat embroidered in red and yellow?”

37. “Yes; answer quickly, and don’t repeat my questions.”

38. “This morning Monsieur le Curé passed our door on his horse Piero. He asked me how papa was, and I told him—”

39. “Ah, you little rascal, you are making game of me! Tell me at once which way Gianetto went, for it is he that we are after, and I am certain he took this path.”

40. “How do you know that?”

41. “How do I know that? I know you have seen him.”

42. “Does one see passers-by when one is asleep?”

[Pg 16]

43. “You were not asleep, you little demon; the gunshots would have waked you.”

44. “You think, then, Cousin, that your guns make a great noise? My father’s rifle makes much more.”

45. “May the devil confound you, you young scamp! I am sure enough that you have seen Gianetto. Perhaps you have even hidden him. Here, comrades, go into this house, and see if our man is not there. He could walk only on one foot, and he has too much good sense, the rascal, to have tried to reach the maquis limping. Besides, the marks of blood stop here.”

46. “Whatever will papa say!” asked Fortunato, with a chuckle; “what will he say when he finds out that his house has been entered while he was away!”

47. “Good-for-nothing!” cried the adjutant Gamba, taking him by the ear, “do you know that I am able to make you change your tune? Perhaps when I have given you a score or more thwacks with the flat of a sword, you will speak at last!”

48. But Fortunato still laughed derisively.

49. “My father is Mateo Falcone!” he said with energy.

50. “Do you know, you little rogue, that I can carry you off to Corte, or to Bastia? I’ll make you sleep in a dungeon, on a pallet of straw, your feet in irons, and I’ll have you guillotined,[Pg 17] if you don’t tell me where Gianetto Sanpiero is.”

51. The child burst out laughing at this foolish threat. He only repeated:

52. “My father is Mateo Falcone!”

53. “Adjutant,” whispered one of the voltigeurs, “we’d better not embroil ourselves with Mateo.”

54. Gamba seemed evidently embarrassed. He talked in a low voice with his soldiers, who had already been through the house. It was not a lengthy operation, for the cabin of a Corsican consists of only a single square room. The furniture comprises a table, some benches, a few boxes, and utensils for hunting and housekeeping. Meanwhile, little Fortunato caressed his cat, Character revelation.and seemed maliciously to enjoy the embarrassment of the voltigeurs and his cousin.

55. One soldier came up to the haystack. He looked at the cat and carelessly gave a dig at the hay with his bayonet, shrugging his shoulders as if he thought the precaution were ridiculous. Nothing stirred, and the face of the child did not betray the least emotion.

56. The adjutant and his troop were in despair; they were looking seriously toward the edge of the plain, as though disposed to return the way they had come; The turn in the plot.when their chief—convinced that threats would produce no effect upon the son of Falcone—thought he would make[Pg 18] Foundation for main crisis. one last effort by trying the power of cajoleries and presents.

57. “Little Cousin,” he said, “you seem to be a wide-awake young fellow enough. You will get on! But you play a mean trick with me; and, if I did not fear to give pain to my cousin Mateo, devil take me, I’d carry you off with me!”

58. “Bah!”

59. “But, when my cousin returns I shall relate to him the whole affair, and for your having gone to the trouble to tell me a lie, he will give you the whip till he draws blood.”

60. “Do you know that?”

61. “You’ll find out! But, see here—be a good lad, and I’ll give you something.”

62. “I, my Cousin, will give you some advice—it is, that if you delay any more Gianetto will reach the maquis, then it will take a cleverer fellow to go and hunt for him.”

63. The adjutant drew from his pocket a silver watch worth quite ten crowns; and seeing how the little Fortunato’s eyes sparkled when hePlot Incident Particularized. looked at it, he said, as he held the watch suspended at the end of its steel chain:

64. “You rogue! you would like very well to have such a watch as this hung round your neck, and to go and promenade the streets of Porto-Vecchio, proud as a peacock; people would ask you, ‘What time is it?’ and you would reply, ‘Look at my watch!’”

[Pg 19]

65. “When I am grown up, my uncle the corporal will give me a watch.”

66. “Yes; but your uncle’s son has one already—not such a fine one as this, it is true—of course, he is younger than you.”

67. The child sighed.

68. “Well, would you like this watch, little Cousin?”

69. Fortunato, ogling the watch out of the corner of his eyes, looked just as a cat does when they suddenly offer it a chicken. Because it is afraid a joke is being played on it, it dares not pounce upon its prey, and from time to time it turns away its eyes so as not to succumb to the temptation;Illustration. but it constantly licks its chops, as if to say to its master, “But your joke is a cruel one!”

70. However, the adjutant Gamba seemed to be offering the watch in good faith. Fortunato did not hold out his hand, but he said to him with a bitter smile:

71. “Why do you jest with me?”

72. “By Heaven, I am not joking! Only tell me where Gianetto is and this watch is yours.”

73. Fortunato allowed an incredulous sigh to escape him; and, fixing his black eyes on those of the adjutant, he sought to find in them the faith he wished to have in his words.

74. “May I lose my epaulets,” cried the adjutant, “if I do not give you the watch on these terms! My comrades[Pg 20] are witnesses, and I cannot go back on my word!”

75. So speaking, he held the watch nearer and nearer until it almost touched the pale cheeks of the child, whose face showed plainly the combat going on in his heart between covetousness and his respect for the laws of hospitality. A key to the plot.His bare breast heaved violently, and he seemed to be almost stifling. All the time the watch dangled and turned, and sometimes grazed the tip of his nose. Main Crisis.At length, little by little, his right hand lifted toward the watch, the ends of his fingers touched it, and it rested wholly on his palm, except that the adjutant still loosely held the end of the chain. The face was blue, the case was newly polished—in the sunshine it seemed to be all afire. The temptation was too strong.

76. So Fortunato raised his left hand and with his thumb pointed over his shoulder to the haystack against which he was standing. The adjutant understood him immediately. He let go the end of the chain; Fortunato felt himself sole possessor of the watch. Still sly.He jumped up with the agility of a deer, and moved ten paces away from the stack, which the voltigeurs at once began to overturn.

77. It was not long before they saw the hay move, and a bleeding man, poniard in hand, came forth. But when he tried to rise to his feet, his stiffening wound would not permit him to stand. He fell down. The[Pg 21] adjutant threw himself upon him and snatched away his stiletto. Speedily, he was securely bound, in spite of his resistance.

78. Gianetto, laid on the ground and tied like a bundle of fagots, turned his head toward Fortunato, who had drawn nearer.

79. “Son of—,” he said to him with more contempt than anger.

80. The boy threw to him the silver-piece that he had received from him, feeling conscious that he no longer merited it; but the outlaw seemed not to notice this action. He said to the adjutant in a perfectly cool voice:

81. “My dear Gamba, I am not able to walk; you will be obliged to carry me to the town.”

82. “You could run as fast as a kid just now,” retorted his cruel captor. “But be easy, I am so glad to have caught you that I could carry you for a league on my own back without being tired. All the same, my friend, we are going to make a litter for you out of some branches and your cloak, and at the farm at Crespoli we shall find some horses.”

83. “Good!” said the prisoner. “You had better also put a little straw on your litter that I may travel more easily.”

84. While the voltigeurs were occupied, some making a sort of stretcher out of chestnut boughs, and others dressing Gianetto’s wound, Mateo Falcone and his wife suddenly appeared[Pg 22] in a bend of the path which led from the maquis. Contrast to tragic spirit of the story.The wife advanced, bending laboriously under an enormous bag of chestnuts, while her husband came up jauntily, carrying in his hand only a gun, while another was slung over his shoulder, Local color.for it is unworthy of a man to carry any other burden than his weapons.

85. At sight of the soldiers, Mateo’s first thought was that they had come to arrest him. But why that idea? Had he any quarrel with the law? No. He bore a good reputation. He was, as they say, particularly well thought of; but he was a Corsican, a mountaineer, and there are but few Corsican mountaineers who, if they scrutinize their memories well, cannot find some pecadillo—some gunshot, some dagger thrust, or some similar bagatelle. “Bagatelle” discloses the Corsican attitude.Mateo, more than most, had a clear conscience, for it was fully ten years since he had pointed his gun against a man; but all the same he was prudent, and he put himself in position to make a good defense, if need be.

86. “Wife,” said he to Giuseppa, “put down your sack and keep yourself in readiness.”

87. She obeyed on the instant. He gave her the gun that was slung over his shoulder, and which would likely cause him inconvenience. Suspense.He cocked the one he had in his hand and advanced slowly toward the house, skirting the trees which bordered the path, and ready at the least hostile[Pg 23] demonstration to throw himself behind the largest trunk, whence he could fire from cover. His wife walked close behind him, holding his spare gun and his cartridge box. Local color.The duty of a good housewife, in case of conflict, is to reload her husband’s weapons.

88. On the other side, the adjutant was very uneasy at sight of Mateo advancing thus upon them with measured steps, his gun forward and his finger on the trigger.

89. “If it should chance,” thought he, “that Gianetto is related to Mateo, or that he is his friend, and he intends to protect him, the bullets of his two guns will come to two of us A fight would ensue. as sure as a letter to the post, and if he should aim at me, good-bye to our kinship!”

90. In this perplexity, he put on a courageous front and went forward alone toward Mateo to tell him of the matter, while greeting him like an old acquaintance; but the brief space that separated him from Mateo seemed to him terribly long.

91. “Hello! Ah! my old comrade,” he called out. “How are you, old fellow? It’s I, Gamba, your cousin.”

92. Mateo, without replying a word, stopped, and while the other was speaking he imperceptibly raised the muzzle of his rifle in such a manner that it was pointing heavenward by the time the adjutant came up to him.

93. “Good day, brother,”[18] said the [Pg 24]adjutant, holding out his hand. “It’s a very long time since I’ve seen you.”

94. “Good day, brother.”

95. “I just came in, while passing, to say ‘good day’ to you and my cousin Pepa. We have had a long journey to-day; but we must not complain of fatigue, There is something manlike in most of Mérimée’s female characters.for we have taken a famous prize. We have just got hold of Gianetto Sanpiero.”

96. “God be praised!” exclaimed Giuseppa. “He stole one of our milch goats last week.”

97. These words rejoiced Gamba.

98. “Poor devil!” said Mateo. “He was hungry.”

99. “The fellow defended himself like a lion,” pursued the adjutant, slightly mortified. “He killed one of the men, and, not content with that, he broke Corporal Chardon’s arm; but that is not such a great disaster, for he is nothing but a Frenchman.... Then he hid himself so cleverly that the devil would not have been able to find him. Without my little cousin Fortunato, I should never have discovered him.”

100. “Fortunato!” cried Mateo.

101. “Fortunato!” repeated Giuseppa.

102. “Yes, Gianetto was hidden way down in your haystack; but my little cousin showed me his trick. So I will speak of him to his uncle the corporal, that he may send him a fine present for his trouble. And his name and yours will be in the[Pg 25] report which I shall send to Monsieur l’avocat général.”

103. “Malediction!” said Mateo under his breath.

104. They had now rejoined the detachment. Gianetto was already laid on the litter and they were ready to leave. When he saw Mateo in the company of Gamba, he smiled a strange smile; then, turning himself toward the door of the house, he spat on the threshold as he cried out:

105. “House of a traitor!”

106. No one but a man who had made up his mind to die would have dared to utter the word “traitor” as applying to Falcone. Key to plot. Fifth Plot Incident.One good stroke of the dagger, which would not need to be repeated, would have immediately repaid the insult. But Mateo made no other gesture than that of putting his hand to his head like a dazed man.

107. Fortunato had gone into the house upon seeing his father come up. He reappeared shortly with a jug of milk, which he offered with Is this repentance, fear, hypocrisy, or an attempt to placate his father? downcast eyes to Gianetto. “Keep away from me!” cried the outlaw in a voice of thunder.

108. Then turning to one of the voltigeurs,

109. “Comrade, give me a drink of water,” he said.

110. The soldier placed the gourd in his hands, and the bandit drank the water given him by a man with whom he had just exchanged gunshots. He then asked that they[Pg 26] would tie his hands across his breast instead of having them behind his back.

111. “I prefer,” he said, “to lie down at my ease.”

112. When they had adjusted them to his satisfaction, the adjutant gave the signal to start, said adieu to Mateo—who answered never a word—and went down at a quick pace toward the plain.

113. Some ten minutes passed before Mateo opened his mouth. The child looked with an uneasy eye first at his mother, then at his father, who, leaning on his gun, was gazing at him with a gaze of concentrated wrath.

114. “You begin well,” said Mateo at last, in a voice calm but terrifying to those who knew the man.

115. “Father!” exclaimed the child with tears in his eyes, drawing near as if to fall upon his knees.

116. But Mateo only cried out:

117. “Away from me!”

118. The child stopped and began to sob, standing motionless a few steps from his father.

119. Giuseppa came near. She had just perceived the chain of the watch dangling about from Fortunato’s blouse.

120. “Who gave you that watch?” she asked him severely.

121. “My cousin the adjutant.”

122. Falcone seized the watch, and, throwing it violently against a stone, broke it into a thousand pieces.

[Pg 27]

123. “Woman,” he said, “this child—is he mine?”

124. Giuseppa’s brown cheeks flamed brick-red.

125. “What are you saying, Mateo? Do you know to whom you are speaking?”

126. “Well, this child is the first of his race who has committed a treason.”

127. Fortunato’s sobs and hiccoughs redoubled, and Falcone kept his lynx-eyes always fixed upon him. At length he struck the ground with the butt of his gun; Full Resultant Crisis.then he flung it across his shoulder and, calling to Fortunato to follow him, retook the way to the maquis. The child obeyed.

128. Giuseppa ran after Mateo, and seized him by the arm.

129. “He is your son,” she said to him in a trembling voice, fixing her black eyes on those of her husband, as though to read what was passing through his mind.

130. “Let me go,” replied Mateo: “I am his father.”

131. Giuseppa embraced her son, and went back crying into the hut. She threw herself on her knees before an image of the Virgin, and prayed with fervor.

132. Meanwhile, Falcone had walked about two-hundred yards along the path, and stopped at a little ravine, which he descended. He sounded the earth with the butt of his gun and found it soft and easy[Pg 28] to dig. The spot seemed suitable for his design.

133. “Fortunato, go near to that large rock.”

134. The boy did as he was commanded, then he knelt down.

135. “Say your prayers.”

136. “Father, Father, do not kill me!”

137. “Say your prayers!” repeated Mateo in a terrible voice.

138. The child, all stammering and sobbing, repeated the Pater and the Credo. The father, in a firm voice responded Amen at the close of each prayer.

139. “Are those all the prayers that you know?”

140. “I also know the Ave Maria, and the Litany that my aunt taught me, Father.”

141. “It is rather long, but it doesn’t matter.”

142. The child achieved the Litany in a faint voice.

143. “Have you finished?”

144. “Oh, Father, Father, mercy! Pardon me! I will never do it again! I will beg my cousin the corporal with all my might for mercy for Gianetto!”

145. He went on speaking; Mateo loaded his rifle and took aim as he said:

146. “May God forgive you!”

147. The boy made a desperate effort to get up and clasp his father’s knees, but he had not time. Mateo fired, and Fortunato fell dead.

148. Without throwing a single glance at the body, Mateo returned to his house to fetch a spade with which to bury his son. He had taken but a few steps when he met Giuseppa, who had run out, alarmed by the sound of the firing.

149. “What have you done?”

150. “Justice!”

151. “Where is he?”

152. “In the ravine; I am going to bury him.

He died a Christian; I shall have a mass sung for him.

Let some one tell my son-in-law Tiodoro Bianchi to come and live with us.”

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window; was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor master of arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honor of the jest and grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was Villon’s age.

2. The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from[Pg 35] end to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind, there was a dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.

3. The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All the graves were decently covered; tall white housetops stood around in grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, be-nightcapped like their domiciles; there was no light in all the neighborhood but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock was hard on ten when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern, beating their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious about the cemetery of St. John.

4. Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall, which was still awake, and awake[Pg 36] to evil purpose, in that snoring district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream of warm vapor from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door. But within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis Villon, the poet, and some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted, were keeping the night alive and passing round the bottle.

5. A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker’s; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly frame.

6. On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap of parchment; Villon making[Pg 37] a ballad which he was to call the “Ballad of Roast Fish,” and Tabary spluttering admiration at his shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.

7. At the monk’s other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance. About the first there clung some flavor of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head[Pg 38] shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

8. “Doubles or quits?” said Thevenin.

9. Montigny nodded grimly.

10. “Some may prefer to dine in state,” wrote Villon, “On bread and cheese on silver plate. Or, or—help me out, Guido!”

11. Tabary giggled.

12. “Or parsley on a golden dish,” scribbled the poet.

13. The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet’s, much detested by the Picardy monk.

14. “Can’t you hear it rattle in the gibbet?” said Villon. “They are all dancing the devil’s jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you’ll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree!—I say, Dom Nicolas, it’ll be cold to-night on the St. Denis Road?” he asked.

15. Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his Adam’s apple. Montfaucon, the[Pg 39] great grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an attack of coughing.

16. “Oh, stop that row,” said Villon, “and think of rhymes to ‘fish.’”

17. “Doubles or quits,” said Montigny, doggedly.

18. “With all my heart,” quoth Thevenin.

19. “Is there any more in that bottle?” asked the monk.

20. “Open another,” said Villon. “How do you ever hope to fill that big hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think yourself another Elias—and they’ll send the coach for you?”

21. “Hominibus impossible,” replied the monk, as he filled his glass.

22. Tabary was in ecstasies.

23. Villon filliped his nose again.

24. “Laugh at my jokes, if you like,” he said.

25. “It was very good,” objected Tabary.

26. Villon made a face at him. “Think of rhymes to ‘fish,’” he said. “What have you to do with[Pg 40] Latin? You’ll wish you knew none of it at the great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus—the devil with the humpback and red-hot finger-nails. Talking of the devil,” he added, in a whisper, “look at Montigny!”

27. All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the grewsome burden.

28. “He looks as if he could knife him,” whispered Tabary, with round eyes.

29. The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and not any excess of moral sensibility.

30. “Come, now,” said Villon—“about this ballad. How does it run so far?” And beating time with his hand he read it aloud to Tabary.

31. They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took effect before he had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed[Pg 41] his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over one shoulder with the eyes wide open; and Thevenin Pensete’s spirit had returned to Him who gave it.

32. Everyone sprung to his feet; but the business was over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and ugly leer.

33. “My God!” said Tabary; and he began to pray in Latin.

34. Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued laughing bitterly as though he would shake himself to pieces.

35. Montigny recovered his composure first.

36. “Let’s see what he has about him,” he remarked; and he picked the dead man’s pockets with a practiced hand, and divided the money into four equal portions on the table. “There’s for you,” he said.

37. The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink himself and topple sideways off the chair.

38. “We’re all in for it,” cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. “It’s a hanging job for every man jack of us[Pg 42] that’s here—not to speak of those who aren’t.” He made a shocking gesture in the air with his raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged. Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with his feet as if to restore the circulation.

39. Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and retired to the other end of the apartment.

40. Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out a dagger, which was followed by a jet of blood.

41. “You fellows had better be moving,” he said, as he wiped the blade on his victim’s doublet.

42. “I think we had,” returned Villon, with a great gulp. “Damn his fat head!” he broke out. “It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right has a man to have red hair when he is dead?” And he fell all of a heap again upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.

43. Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming in.

44. “Cry baby,” said the monk.

45. “I always said he was a woman,” added Montigny, with a sneer. “Sit up, can’t you?” he went on, giving another shake to the murdered[Pg 43] body. “Tread out that fire, Nick!”

46. But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon’s purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been making a ballad not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a share of the booty, which the monk silently promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of his gown. In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.

47. No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself, jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon was himself in a hurry to escape from the neighborhood of the dead Thevenin, and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him before he should discover the loss of his money, he was the first by general consent to issue forth into the street.

48. The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a few vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely[Pg 44] still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in the snow.

49. Two things preoccupied him as he went; the aspect of the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night’s existence, for one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the white streets, except when the wind swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.

50. Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a[Pg 45] couple of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely crossing his line of march, he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as speedily as he could. He was not in the humor to be challenged, and he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a large porch before the door; it was half-ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it, and jumped into the shelter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a leap, and he sprung two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found two of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was[Pg 46] little enough, but it was always something, and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiful mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man’s life.

51. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man’s doorway, before she had time to spend her couple of whites—it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

52. While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling, half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spend-thrifts[Pg 47] money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked right and left upon the snow; nothing was to be seen. He had not dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror[Pg 48] for the authorities and Paris gibbet.

53. He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon him, and although the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.

54. He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no answer. He knocked again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last steps were heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.

55. “Hold up your face to the wicket,” said the chaplain, from within.

56. “It’s only me,” whimpered Villon.

[Pg 49]

57. “Oh, it’s only you, is it?” returned the chaplain; and he cursed him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and bade him be off to hell, where he came from.

58. “My hands are blue to the wrist,” pleaded Villon; “my feet are dead and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies at my heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and before God, I will never ask again!”

59. “You should have come earlier,” said the ecclesiastic coolly. “Young men require a lesson now and then.” He shut the wicket and retired deliberately into the interior of the house.

60. Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

61. “Wormy old fox!” he cried. “If I had my hand under your twist, I would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit.”

62. A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And then the humor of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.

63. What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty[Pg 50] streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very well happen to him before morning. And he so young! and with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some one else’s, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they should find his body.

64. He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He had lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least, and he would go and see.

65. On the way two little accidents happened to him which colored his musings in a very different manner. For, first he fell in with the track of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards, although it lay out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had confused his trail; for he was still possessed with the idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and collaring[Pg 51] him next morning before he was awake. The other matter affected him quite differently. He passed a street corner, where, not so long before, a woman and her child had been devoured by wolves. This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris again; and a lone man in these deserted streets would run the chance of something worse than a mere scare. He stopped and looked upon the place with an unpleasant interest—it was a center where several lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them all, one after another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should detect some galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling between him and the river. He remembered his mother telling him the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at least of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow; nay, he would go and see her too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at his destination—his last hope for the night.

66. The house was quite dark, like its neighbors; and yet after a few taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious voice asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper, and waited, not without some trepidation,[Pg 52] the result. Nor had he to wait long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been unprepared for something of the sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted; but for all that, he was deplorably drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him in the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, and began coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, and reflected with his nose. He could only see one way of getting a lodging, and that was to take it. He had noticed a house not far away, which looked as if it might be easily broken into, and thither he betook himself promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the idea of a room still hot, with a table still loaded with the remains of supper, where he might pass the rest of the black hours and whence he should issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate. He even considered on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and as he was calling the roll of his favorite dainties, roast fish presented itself to his mind with an odd mixture of amusement and horror.

67. “I shall never finish that ballad,” he thought to himself; and then,[Pg 53] with another shudder at the recollection, “Oh, damn his fat head!” he repeated fervently, and spat upon the snow.

68. The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon made a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of attack, a little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a curtained window.

69. “The devil!” he thought. “People awake! Some student or some saint, confound the crew! Can’t they get drunk and lie in bed snoring like their neighbors! What’s the good of curfew, and poor devils of bellringers jumping at a rope’s end in bell-towers? What’s the use of day, if people sit up all night! The gripes to them!” He grinned as he saw where his logic was leading him. “Every man to his business, after all,” added he, “and if they’re awake, by the Lord, I may come by a supper honestly for once, and cheat the devil.”

70. He went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured hand. On both previous occasions, he had knocked timidly and with some dread of attracting notice; but now, when he had just discarded the thought of a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and innocent proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house with thin, phantasmal reverberations, as though the house were empty; but these had scarcely died away before[Pg 54] a measured tread drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of guile were known to those within. A tall figure of a man, muscular and spare, but a little bent, confronted Villon. The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose blunt at the bottom, but refining upward to where it joined a pair of strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth and eyes surrounded with delicate markings, and the whole face based upon a thick white beard, boldly and squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a flickering hand-lamp, it looked, perhaps, nobler than it had a right to do; but it was a fine face, honorable rather than intelligent, strong, simple, and righteous.

71. “You knock late, sir,” said the old man, in resonant, courteous tones.

72. Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of apology; at a crisis of this sort, the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man of genius hid his head with confusion.

73. “You are cold,” repeated the old man, “and hungry? Well, step in.” And he ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.

74. “Some great seigneur,” thought Villon, as his host, setting down the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts once more into their places.

75. “You will pardon me if I go in front,” he said, when this was done;[Pg 55] and he preceded the poet up-stairs into a large apartment, warmed with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof. It was very bare of furniture; only some gold plate on a sideboard; some folios; and a stand of armor between the windows. Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls, representing the crucifixion of our Lord in one piece, and in another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a running stream. Over the chimney was a shield of arms.

76. “Will you seat yourself,” said the old man, “and forgive me if I leave you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat I must forage for you myself.”

77. No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on which he had just seated himself, and began examining the room, with the stealth and passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons in his hand, opened all the folios, and investigated the arms upon the shield, and the stuff with which the seats were lined. He raised the window curtains, and saw that the windows were set with rich stained glass in figures, so far as he could see, of martial import. Then he stood in the middle of the room, drew a long breath, and, retaining it with puffed cheeks, looked round and round him, turning on his heels, as if to impress every feature of the apartment on his memory.

78. “Seven pieces of plate,” he[Pg 56] said. “If there had been ten, I would have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me all the saints!”

79. And just then, hearing the old man’s tread returning along the corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began humbly toasting his wet legs before the charcoal pan.

80. His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine in the other. He sat down the plate upon the table, motioning Villon to draw in his chair, and, going to the sideboard, brought back two goblets, which he filled.

81. “I drink your better fortune,” he said, gravely touching Villon’s cup with his own.

82. “To our better acquaintance,” said the poet, growing bold. A mere man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old seigneur, but Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth for great lords before now, and found them as black rascals as himself. And so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous gusto, while the old man, leaning backward, watched him with steady, curious eyes.

83. “You have blood on your shoulder, my man,” he said.

84. Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the house. He cursed Montigny in his heart.

85. “It was none of my shedding,” he stammered.

[Pg 57]

86. “I had not supposed so,” returned his host, quietly. “A brawl?”

87. “Well, something of that sort,” Villon admitted with a quaver.

88. “Perhaps a fellow murdered?”

89. “Oh, no, not murdered,” said the poet, more and more confused. “It was all fair play—murdered by accident. I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!” he added, fervently.

90. “One rogue the fewer, I dare say,” observed the master of the house.

91. “You may dare to say that,” agreed Villon, infinitely relieved. “As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned up his toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say you’ve seen dead men in your time, my lord?” he added, glancing at the armor.

92. “Many,” said the old man. “I have followed the wars, as you imagine.”

93. Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up again.

94. “Were any of them bald?” he asked.

95. “Oh, yes, and with hair as white as mine.”

96. “I don’t think I should mind the white so much,” said Villon. “His was red.” And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to laughter, which he drowned with a great draught of wine. “I’m a little[Pg 58] put out when I think of it,” he went on. “I knew him—damn him! And then the cold gives a man fancies—or the fancies give a man cold, I don’t know which.”

97. “Have you any money?” asked the old man.

98. “I have one white,” returned the poet, laughing. “I got it out of a dead jade’s stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Cæsar, poor wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair. This is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like me.”

99. “I,” said the old man, “am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?”

100. Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. “I am called Francis Villon,” he said, “a poor master of arts in this university. I know some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chansons, ballads, lais, virelais, and roundels and I am very fond of wine. I was born in a garret and I shall not improbably die upon the gallows. I may add, my lord, that from this night forward I am your lordship’s very obsequious servant to command.”

101. “No servant of mine,” said the knight; “my guest for this evening, and no more.”

102. “A very grateful guest,” said Villon, politely, and he drank in dumb show to his entertainer.

[Pg 59]

103. “You are shrewd,” began the old man, tapping his forehead, “very shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a small piece of money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a kind of theft?”

104. “It is a kind of theft much practiced in the wars, my lord.”

105. “The wars are the field of honor,” returned the old man, proudly. “There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy saints and angels.”

106. “Put it,” said Villon, “that I were really a thief, should I not play my life also, and against heavier odds?”

107. “For gain, but not for honor.”

108. “Gain?” repeated Villon, with a shrug. “Gain! The poor fellow wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign. Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so much about? If they are not gain to those who take them, they are loss enough to the others. The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen a good many plowmen swinging on trees about the country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when I asked some one how all these came to be hanged, I was told it was because they could not scrape together[Pg 60] enough crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms.”

109. “These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must endure with constancy. It is true that some captains drive overhard; there are spirits in every rank not easily moved by pity; and indeed many follow arms who are no better than brigands.”

110. “You see,” said the poet, “you cannot separate the soldier from the brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with circumspect manners? I steal a couple of mutton chops, without so much as disturbing people’s sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up blowing gloriously on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and beat the farmer pitifully into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I am only Tom, Dick, or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog, and hanging’s too good for me—with all my heart; but just ask the farmer which of us he prefers, just find out which of us he lies awake to curse on cold nights.”

111. “Look at us two,” said his lordship. “I am old, strong, and honored. If I were turned from my house to-morrow, hundreds would be proud to shelter me. Poor people would go out and pass the night in the streets with their children, if I merely hinted that I wished to be alone. And I find you up, wandering homeless, and picking farthings off[Pg 61] dead women by the wayside! I fear no man and nothing; I have seen you tremble and lose countenance at a word. I wait God’s summons contentedly in my own house, or, if it please the king to call me out again, upon the field of battle. You look for the gallows; a rough, swift death, without hope or honor. Is there no difference between these two?”

112. “As far as to the moon,” Villon acquiesced. “But if I had been born Lord of Brisetout, and you had been the poor scholar Francis, would the difference have been any the less? Should I not have been warming my knees at this charcoal pan, and would not you have been groping for farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the soldier and you the thief?”

113. “A thief?” cried the old man. “I a thief! If you understood your words you would repent them.”

114. Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable impudence. “If your lordship had done me the honor to follow my argument!” he said.

115. “I do you too much honor in submitting to your presence,” said the knight. “Learn to curb your tongue when you speak with old and honorable men, or some one hastier than I may reprove you in a sharper fashion.” And he rose and paced the lower end of the apartment, struggling with anger and antipathy. Villon surreptitiously refilled his cup,[Pg 62] and settled himself more comfortably in the chair, crossing his knees and leaning his head upon one hand and the elbow against the back of the chair. He was now replete and warm, and he was in nowise frightened for his host, having gauged him as justly as was possible between two such different characters. The night was far spent, and in a very comfortable fashion after all; and he felt morally certain of a safe departure on the morrow.

116. “Tell me one thing,” said the old man, pausing in his walk. “Are you really a thief?”

117. “I claim the sacred rights of hospitality,” returned the poet. “My lord, I am.”

118. “You are very young,” the knight continued.

119. “I should never have been so old,” replied Villon, showing his fingers, “if I had not helped myself with these ten talents. They have been my nursing mothers and my nursing fathers.”

120. “You may still repent and change.”

121. “I repent daily,” said the poet. “There are few people more given to repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let somebody change my circumstances. A man must continue to eat, if it were only that he may continue to repent.”

122. “The change must begin in the heart,” returned the old man solemnly.

[Pg 63]

123. “My dear lord,” answered Villon, “do you really fancy that I steal for pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece of work or of danger. My teeth chatter when I see a gallows. But I must eat, I must drink, I must mix in society of some sort. What the devil! Man is not a solitary animal—Cui Deus fœminam tradit. Make me king’s pantler—make me abbot of St. Denis; make me bailly of the Patatrac; and then I shall be changed indeed. But as long as you leave me the poor scholar Francis Villon, without a farthing, why, of course, I remain the same.”

124. “The grace of God is all-powerful.”

125. “I should be a heretic to question it,” said Francis. “It has made you lord of Brisetout and bailly of the Patatrac; it has given me nothing but the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my hands. May I help myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By God’s grace, you have a very superior vintage.”

126. The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands behind his back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had interested him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better way of thinking, and could not make[Pg 64] up his mind to drive him forth again into the street.

127. “There is something more than I can understand in this,” he said at length. “Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the devil has led you very far astray; but the devil is only a very weak spirit before God’s truth, and all his subtleties vanish at a word of true honor, like darkness at morning. Listen to me once more. I learned long ago that a gentleman should live chivalrously and lovingly to God, and the king, and his lady; and though I have seen many strange things done, I have still striven to command my ways upon that rule. It is not only written in all noble histories, but in every man’s heart, if he will take care to read. You speak of food and wine, and I know very well that hunger is a difficult trial to endure; but you do not speak of other wants; you say nothing of honor, of faith to God and other men, of courtesy, of love without reproach. It may be that I am not very wise—and yet I am—but you seem to me like one who has lost his way and made a great error in life. You are attending to the little wants, and you have totally forgotten the great and only real ones, like a man who should be doctoring toothache on the Judgment Day. For such things as honor and love and faith are not only nobler than food and drink, but indeed I think we desire them more,[Pg 65] and suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak to you as I think you will most easily understand me. Are you not while careful to fill your belly, disregarding another appetite in your heart, which spoils the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually wretched?”

128. Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonizing. “You think I have no sense of honor!” he cried. “I’m poor enough, God knows! It’s hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing in your hands. An empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune. Any way, I’m a thief—make the most of that—but I’m not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I’ve an honor of my own, as good as yours, though I don’t prate about it all day long, as if it was a God’s miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it’s wanted. Why, now, look you here, how long have I been in this room with you? Did you not tell me you were alone in the house? Look at your gold plate! You’re strong, if you like, but you’re old and unarmed, and I have my knife. What did I want but a jerk of the elbow and here would have been you with the cold steel in your bowels, and there would have been me, linking in the streets, with an[Pg 66] armful of golden cups! Did you suppose I hadn’t wit enough to see that? And I scorned the action. There are your damned goblets as safe as in a church, there are you with your heart ticking as good as new, and here am I, ready to go out again as poor as I came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth! And you think I have no sense of honor—God strike me dead!”

129. The old man stretched out his right arm. “I will tell you what you are,” he said. “You are a rogue, my man, an impudent and black-hearted rogue and vagabond. I have passed an hour with you. Oh! believe me, I feel myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at my table. But now I am sick at your presence; the day has come, and the night-bird should be off to his roost. Will you go before, or after?”

130. “Which you please,” returned the poet, rising. “I believe you to be strictly honorable.” He thoughtfully emptied his cup. “I wish I could add you were intelligent,” he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles. “Age! age! the brains stiff and rheumatic.”

131. The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect; Villon followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle.

132. “God pity you!” said the lord of Brisetout at the door.

133. “Good-bye, papa,” returned Villon, with a yawn. “Many thanks for the cold mutton.”

134. The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking over the white roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning ushered in the day. Villon stood and heartily stretched himself in the middle of the road.

135. “A very dull old gentleman,” he thought. “I wonder what his goblets may be worth.”

Nil sapientiae odiosius acumina nimio.—Seneca.

(Nothing is more odious to wisdom than too great acumen.)

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18—, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin,Dupin appears as the detective in Poe’s other mystery stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”
Au troisième—third flight, or fourth floor. in his little back library, or[Pg 77] book closet, au troisième, No. 33 Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. Compare this story with Sardou’s “A Scrap of Paper.”For myself, however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Rogêt. I looked upon it, therefore, as something of a coincidence,G—— also appears in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” when the door of our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G——, the Prefect of the Parisian police.

2. We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years. We had been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat down again, without doing so, upon G——'s saying that he had called to consult us, or rather to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business which had occasioned a great deal of trouble.

3. “If it is any point requiring reflection,” observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the wick, “we shall[Pg 78] examine it to better purpose in the dark.”

4. “That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling everything “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of “oddities.”

5. “Very true,” said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and rolled towards him a comfortable chair.

6. “And what is the difficulty now?” I asked. “Nothing more in the assassination way, I hope?”

7. “Oh, no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple, indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd.”

8. “Simple and odd,” said Dupin.

9. “Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether.”

10. “Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault,” said my friend.

11. “What nonsense you do talk!” replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.

12. “Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” said Dupin.

13. “Oh, good Heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?”

14. “A little too self-evident.”

15. “Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ho![Pg 79] ho! ho!” roared our visitor, profoundly amused. “Oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!”

16. “And what, after all, is the matter on hand?” I asked.

17. “Why, I will tell you,” replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. “I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now hold were it known that I confided it to any one.”

18. “Proceed,” said I.

19. “Or not,” said Dupin.

20. “Well, then; I have received personal information from a very high quarter that a certain document of the last importance has been purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; The foundation laid; SUMMARY OF PROBLEM. he was seen to take it. It is known, also, that it still remains in his possession.”

21. “How is this known?” asked Dupin.

22. “It is clearly inferred,” replied the Prefect, “from the nature of the document, and from the non-appearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the robber’s possession; that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to employ it.”

23. “Be a little more explicit,” I said.

[Pg 80]

24. “Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable.” The Prefect was fond of the cant of diplomacy.

25. “Still I do not quite understand,” said Dupin.

26. “No? well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless, would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact gives the holder of the document an ascendency over the illustrious personage whose honor and peace are so jeopardized.”

27. “But this ascendency,” I interposed, “would depend upon the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber. Who would dare—”

28. “The thief,” said G——, “is the Minister D——, who dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. Unique situation: the thief is known.The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The document in question—a letter, to be frank—had been received by the personage robbed while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of the other exalted personage, from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. Method and circumstances of the theft related. After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it, open as it was, upon a table. The address, however,[Pg 81] was uppermost, and, the contents thus unexposed, the letter escaped notice.See note on ¶115, p. 104. At this juncture enters the Minister D——. His lynx eye immediately perceives the paper, recognizes the handwriting of the address, observes the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a letter somewhat similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses for some fifteen minutes upon the public affairs.Note “the”. At length in taking leave he takes also from the table the letter to which he had no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but of course dared not call attention to the act, in the presence of the third personage, who stood at her elbow. The minister decamped, leaving his own letter—one of no importance—upon the table.”

29. “Here, then,” said Dupin to me, “you have precisely what you demand to make the ascendency complete—the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber.”

30. “Yes,” replied the Prefect; “and the power thus attained has, for some months past, been wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more thoroughly convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. End of statement of case as a problem.But this, of course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, [Pg 82] she has committed the matter to me.”

31. “Than whom,” said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, “no more sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined.”

32. “You flatter me,” replied the Prefect; “but it is possible that some such opinion may have been entertained.”

33. “It is clear,” said I, “as you observe, that the letter is still in possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and not any employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With the employment the power departs.”

34. “True,” said G——, “and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first care was to make thorough search of the minister’s hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the necessity of searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect our design.”

35. “But,” said I, “you are quite au fait in these investigations. The Parisian police have done this thing often before.”

36. “Oh, yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the minister gave me, too, a great advantage. He is frequently absent from home all night. His servants are by no means numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master’s[Pg 83] apartment, and being chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with which I can open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months, a night has not passed during the greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D—— Hotel. My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a more astute man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed.”

37. “But is it not possible,” I suggested, “that although the letter may be in possession of the minister, as it unquestionably is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own premises?”

38. “This is barely possible,” said Dupin. “The present peculiar condition of affairs at court, and especially of those intrigues in which D—— is known to be involved, would render the instant availability of the document—its susceptibility of being produced at a moment’s notice—a point of nearly equal importance with its possession.”

39. “Its susceptibility of being produced?” said I.

40. “That is to say, of being destroyed,” said Dupin.

41. “True,” I observed; “the paper[Pg 84] is clearly then upon the premises. As for its being upon the person of theA just inference. minister, we may consider that as out of the question.”

42. “Entirely,” said the Prefect. “He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person rigorously searched under my own inspection.”

43. “You might have spared yourself this trouble,” said Dupin. “D——, I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings as a matter of course.”

44. “Not altogether a fool,” said G——; “but then he’s a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”

45. “True,” said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, “although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself.”

46. “Suppose you detail,” said I, “the particulars of your search.”

47. “Why, the fact is, we took our time, and we searched everywhere. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room, devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. On Poe’s “police methods” most modern detective writers have drawn for material. Any man is a dolt who permits a ‘secret’ drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so[Pg 85] plain. There is a certain amount of bulk—of space—to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the tops.”

48. “Why so?”

49. “Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bed-posts are employed in the same way.”

50. “But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?” I asked.

51. “By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding of cotton be placed around it. Besides, in our case we were obliged to proceed without noise.”

52. “But you could not have removed—you could not have taken to pieces all articles of furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the chairs?”

[Pg 86]

53. “Certainly not; but we did better—we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the gluing—any unusual gaping in the joints—would have sufficed to insure detection.”

54. “I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the curtains and carpets?”

55. “That, of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized each individual square inch throughout the premises including the two houses immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before.”

56. “The two houses adjoining!” I exclaimed; “you must have had a great deal of trouble.”

57. “We had; but the reward offered is prodigious.”

58. “You include the grounds about the houses?”

59. “All the grounds are paved[Pg 87] with brick. They gave us comparatively little trouble. We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed.”

60. “You looked among D——'s papers, of course, and into the books of the library?”

61. “Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation. Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed, longitudinally, with the needles.”

62. “You explored the floors beneath the carpets?”

63. “Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with the microscope.”

64. “And the paper on the walls?”

65. “Yes.”

66. “You looked into the cellars?”

67. “We did.”

68. “Then,” I said, “you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter is not on the premises, as you suppose.”

[Pg 88]

69. “I fear you are right there,” said the Prefect. “And now, Dupin, what would you advise me to do?”

70 “To make a thorough research of the premises.”

71. “That is absolutely needless,” replied G——. “I am not more sure that I breathe than I am that the letter is not at the Hotel.”

72. “I have no better advice to give you,” said Dupin. “You have, of course, an accurate description of the letter?”

73. “Oh, yes.” And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external, appearance of the missing document. Soon after finishingNote the patronizing “good gentleman.” the perusal of this description, he took his departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman before.

74. In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found us occupied very nearly as before. He took a pipe and a chair, and entered into some ordinary conversation. At length I said:

75. “Well, but G——, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at last made up your mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the minister?”

76. “Confound him, say I—yes; I made the reëxamination, however, as Dupin suggested—but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be.”

[Pg 89]

77. “How much was the reward offered, did you say?” asked Dupin.

78. “Why, a very great deal—a very liberal reward—I don’t like to say how much precisely; but one thing I will say, that I wouldn’t mind giving my individual check for fifty thousand francs to any one who would obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of more and more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If it were trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done.”

79. “Why, yes,” said Dupin drawlingly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum, “I really—think, G——, you have not exerted yourself—to the utmost in this matter. You might—do a little more, I think, eh?”

80. “How?—in what way?”

81. “Why [puff, puff], you might [puff, puff] employ counsel in the matter, eh? [puff, puff, puff] Do you remember the story they tell of Abernethy?”

82. “No; hang Abernethy!”

83. “To be sure! hang him and welcome. But once upon a time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of sponging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician as that of an imaginary individual.”

84. “‘We will suppose,’ said the miser, ‘that his symptoms are such[Pg 90] and such; now, doctor, what would you have directed him to take?’”

85. “‘Take!’ said Abernethy, ‘why, take advice, to be sure.’”

86. “But,” said the Prefect, a little discomposed, “I am perfectly willing to take advice, and to pay for it. I would really give fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the matter.”

87. “In that case,” replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a check-book, “you may as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter.”

88. I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and motionless, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently recovering himself in some measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. Climax. The latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect.The plot seems to end here, for long reasoning and explanation follow. There is, however, a second climax as Dupin’s story reaches its denouement. This functionary grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the[Pg 91] room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.

89. When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.

90. “The Parisian police,” he said, “are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand. Thus, when G—— detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at the Hotel D——, I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation—so far as his labors extended.”

91. “So far as his labors extended?” said I.

92. “Yes,” said Dupin. “The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it.”

93. I merely laughed, but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.

94. “The measures, then,” he continued, “were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow for [Pg 92] the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than Illustrative anecdote. he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of ‘even and odd’ attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his Joint inductive-deductive method of reasoning. opponents. For example an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand asks, ‘Are they even or odd?’ Our schoolboy replies, ‘Odd,’ and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, ‘The simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;’ he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: ‘This fellow finds that in the first instanceInductive reasoning. I guessed odd, and in the second he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting[Pg 93] it even as before. I will therefore guess even;’ he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows term ‘lucky’—what, in its last analysis, is it?”

95. “It is merely,” I said, “an identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent.”

96. “It is,” said Dupin; “and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: ‘When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible,Compare with Barrie’s statement on p. 217. in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.’ This response of the schoolboy lies at the 1 and 2, French authors and moralists; 3, astute Italian statesman; 4, Italian thinker. bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyère, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella.”

97. “And the identification,” I said, “of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent’s, depends, if I understand you aright, upon the accuracy with which the opponent’s intellect is admeasured.”

98. “For its practical value it depends upon this,” replied Dupin, “and the Prefect and his cohort fail so frequently, first, by default of this[Pg 94] identification, and secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are right in this much—that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very usually when it is below. They have no Astute comment. variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by some unusual emergency, by some extraordinary reward, they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles. What, for example, in this case of D——, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all this Note the length of this paragraph. boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches—what is it all but an exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter—not[Pg 95] exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair leg—but, at least, in some out of the way hole or A cumbersomely long sentence. corner suggested by the same tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair leg? And do you not see, also, that such recherchés nooks for concealment are adapted only for ordinary occasions and would be adopted only byRecherchés—carefully sought out. ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of concealment, a disposal of the article concealed—a disposal of it in this recherché manner—is, in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its discovery depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the seekers; and where the case is of importance—or, what amounts to the same thing in policial eyes, when the reward is of magnitude—the qualities in question have never been known to fail. You will now understand what I meant in suggesting that, had the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits of the Prefect’s examination—in other words, had the principle of its concealment Note force of “hidden.” been comprehended within the principles of the Prefect, its discovery would have been a matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the minister is a fool because he has [Pg 96] acquired renown as a poet. All fools “The undistributed middle” is a form of logical fallacy. are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools.”

99. “But is this really the poet?” I asked. “There are two brothers, I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The minister, I believe, has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician and no poet.”

100. “You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician he would reason well; as mere mathematician he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect.”

101. “You surprise me,” I said, “by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.”

102. “‘Il y a à parier,’” replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, “‘que toute idée publique, toute convention reçue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.’ The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the [Pg 97] term ‘analysis’ into application to This whole section of the story triumphs notwithstanding its undue length of learned discussion and its formal diction. It must be admitted that in these respects the present-day short-story is in advance of Poe. A number of paragraphs here fail to advance the narration as fiction. algebra. The French are the originators of this practical deception; but if a term is of any importance—if words derive any value from applicability—then ‘analysis’ conveys ‘algebra,’ about as much as, in Latin, ‘ambitus’ implies ‘ambition,’ ‘religio,’ ‘religion,’ or ‘homines honesti,’ a set of honorable men.”

103. “You have a quarrel on hand, I see,” said I, “with some of the algebraists of Paris; but proceed.”

104. “I dispute the availability, and thus the value of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study. Unusual form. Throughout, note Poe’s unusual choice of words. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter As a piece of pure reasoning this long treatise is not without its defects, but it does bring out—though too laboriously to please—the point at which Dupin is driving. science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry, also, the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a[Pg 98] given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be. Jacob Bryant.Bryant, in his very learned ‘Mythology,’ mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that ‘although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.’ He speaks figuratively. With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans themselves, the ‘Pagan fables’ are believed and the inferences are made, not so much through lapse of memory as through an unaccountable addling of the brains. In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith A striking satire. that x² + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x² + px is not altogether equal to q, More satire. and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for beyond doubt he will endeavor to knock you down.”

[Pg 99]

105. “I mean to say,” continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, “that if the minister had been no more than a mathematician the Prefect would have been under no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity with reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. A return from the special argument to the practical.
Application of the foregoing principles. I knew him as courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such a man, I considered, could not fail to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action. He could not have failed to anticipate—and events have proved that he did not fail to anticipate—the waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. A difficult point explained. His frequent absences from home at night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to impress them with the conviction to which G——, in fact, Note the unusual use of “to,” instead of “at.” did finally arrive—the conviction that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought, which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable principle of policial action in searches for articles concealed—I felt that this whole Is this probable? train of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the minister. [Pg 100] It would imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. Compare ¶95.He could not, I reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel would be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of course, to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice. You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our Key. Compare ¶10. first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its being so very self-evident.”

106. “Yes,” said I, “I remember his merriment well. I really thought he would have fallen into convulsions.”

107. “The material world,” continued Dupin, “abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiæ, Force of inertia. for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it[Pg 101] is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress. This inquiry is the heart of the inference. Again: have you ever noticed which of the street signs over the shop doors are the most attractive of attention?”

108. “I have never given the matter a thought,” I said.

109. “There is a game of puzzles,” he resumed, “which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—the name of town, river, state, or empire—any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. Note the diction. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch in large characters from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident. But Compare ¶94 and ¶98. this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He never once [Pg 102] thought it probable, or possible, that Summary of ”accusation” against the Prefect’s sagacity. the minister had deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.

110. “But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity of D——; upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not hidden within the limits of that dignitary’s ordinary search—the more satisfied Climax of Dupin’s inferential reasoning. I became that, to conceal this letter, the minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.

111. “Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the ministerial hotel. I found D—— at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic humanNote the use of “now.” being now alive—but that is only when nobody sees him.

112. “To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the whole apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host.

113. “I paid especial attention to[Pg 103] a large writing-table near which he sat, and upon which lay confusedly some miscellaneous letters and other papers, with one or two musical instruments and a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I saw nothing to excite particular suspicion.

114. “At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of paste-board, that hung dangling, by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D—— cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D——, the minister himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the uppermost divisions of the rack.

115. “No sooner had I glanced at this letter than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the D—— cipher; there it was small and red,[Pg 104] with the ducal arms of the S—— family. Here the address, to the minister, was diminutive and feminine; there, the superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of correspondence.It was the custom in earlier times simply to fold a letter, seal it with a wafer, and address it on the back, which was allowed to remain otherwise blank. This accounts for there being no reference to an envelope, and also for the refolding of the letter. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt, the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D——, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyper-obtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.

116. “I protracted my visit as long as possible, and while I maintained a most animated discussion with the minister, upon a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. Note use of “fold” and its derivatives. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary.[Pg 105] They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed, and re-sealed.A good device. I bade the minister good-morning, and took my departure at once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.

117. “The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D—— rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a facsimile (so far as regards externals) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings—imitating the D—— cipher very readily by means of a seal formed of bread.

118. “The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball,[Pg 106] and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard.Note how the climax of Dupin’s story also serves as the climax of the Prefect’s earlier statement of the problem and his efforts to solve it. When he had gone, D—— came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay.”

119. “But what purpose had you,” I asked, “in replacing the letter by a facsimile? Would it not have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly and departed?”

120. “D——,” replied Dupin, “is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his interest. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest I might never have left the ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions. In this matter I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen months the minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers—since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was.Is “was” correct? Thus will he inevitably commit himself at once to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. The descent to Avernus (the fabled entrance to the Infernal Regions) is easy. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far[Pg 107] more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy—at least no pity—for him who descends. He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, Monster to be shuddered at. however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms ‘a certain personage,’ he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack.”

121. “How? Did you put anything particular in it?”

122. “Why, it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank—that would have been insulting. D——, at Vienna, once did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a clew. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words:—

‘——Un dessein si funeste,
S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.’

They are to be found in Crébillon’s ‘Atrée.’”

FOR ANALYSIS

BY W. W. JACOBS

I

Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.

2. “Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

3. “I’m listening,” said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. “Check.”

4. “I should hardly think that he’d come to-night,” said his father, with his hand poised over the board.

5. “Mate,” replied the son.

6. “That’s the worst of living so far out,” bawled Mr. White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; “of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way[Pg 112] places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.”

7. “Never mind, dear,” said his wife, soothingly; “perhaps you’ll win the next one.”

8. Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.

9. “There he is,” said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.

10. The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, “Tut, tut!” and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.

11. “Sergeant-Major Morris,” he said, introducing him.

12. The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.

13. At the third glass his eyes[Pg 113] got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.

14. “Twenty-one years of it,” said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son. “When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him.”

15. “He don’t look to have taken much harm,” said Mrs. White, politely.

16. “I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look round a bit, you know.”

17. “Better where you are,” said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.

18. “I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,” said the old man. “What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?”

19. “Nothing,” said the soldier, hastily. “Leastways nothing worth hearing.”

20. “Monkey’s paw?” said Mrs. White, curiously.

21. “Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps,” said the sergeant-major, offhandedly.

22. His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absentmindedly[Pg 114] put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him.

23. “To look at,” said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, “it’s just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.”

24. He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.

25. “And what is there special about it?” inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.

26. “It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,” said the sergeant-major, “a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.”

27. His manner was so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter jarred somewhat.

28. “Well, why don’t you have three, sir?” said Herbert White, cleverly.

29. The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. “I have,” he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

30. “And did you really have the three wishes granted?” asked Mrs. White.

[Pg 115]

31. “I did,” said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

32. “And has anybody else wished?” persisted the old lady.

33. “The first man had his three wishes. Yes,” was the reply; “I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.”

34. His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.

35. “If you’ve had your three wishes, it’s no good to you now, then, Morris,” said the old man at last. “What do you keep it for?”

36. The soldier shook his head. “Fancy, I suppose,” he said, slowly. “I did have some idea of selling it, but I don’t think I will. It has caused enough mischief already. Besides, people won’t buy. They think it’s a fairy tale, some of them; and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward.”

37. “If you could have another three wishes,” said the old man, eyeing him keenly, “would you have them?”

38. “I don’t know,” said the other. “I don’t know.”

39. He took the paw, and dangling it between his forefinger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire. White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off.

40. “Better let it burn,” said the soldier, solemnly.

[Pg 116]

41. “If you don’t want it, Morris,” said the other, “give it to me.”

42. “I won’t,” said his friend doggedly. “I threw it on the fire. If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens. Pitch it on the fire again like a sensible man.”

43. The other shook his head and examined his new possession closely. “How do you do it?” he inquired.

44. “Hold it up in your right hand and wish aloud,” said the sergeant-major, “but I warn you of the consequences.”

45. “Sounds like the Arabian Nights,” said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper. “Don’t you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?”

46. Her husband drew the talisman from his pocket, and then all three burst into laughter as the sergeant-major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught him by the arm.

47. “If you must wish,” he said, gruffly, “wish for something sensible.”

48. Mr. White dropped it back in his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table. In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second installment of the soldier’s adventures in India.

49. “If the tale about the monkey’s paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us,” said Herbert, as the door closed behind their guest,[Pg 117] just in time for him to catch the last train, “we shan’t make much out of it.”

50. “Did you give him anything for it, father?” inquired Mrs. White, regarding her husband closely.

51. “A trifle,” said he, colouring slightly. “He didn’t want it, but I made him take it. And he pressed me again to throw it away.”

52. “Likely,” said Herbert, with pretended horror. “Why, we’re going to be rich, and famous and happy. Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can’t be hen-pecked.”

53. He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs. White armed with an antimacassar.

54. Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously. “I don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a fact,” he said, slowly. “It seems to me I’ve got all I want.”

55. “If you only cleared the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you?” said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder. “Well, wish for two hundred pounds, then; that’ll just do it.”

56. His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face, somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down at the piano and struck a few impressive chords.

57. “I wish for two hundred pounds,” said the old man distinctly.

58. A fine crash from the piano[Pg 118] greeted the words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man. His wife and son ran toward him.

59. “It moved,” he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor.

60. “As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.”

61. “Well, I don’t see the money,” said his son as he picked it up and placed it on the table, “and I bet I never shall.”

62. “It must have been your fancy, father,” said his wife, regarding him anxiously.

63. He shook his head. “Never mind, though; there’s no harm, but it gave me a shock all the same.”

64. They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their pipes. Outside, the wind was higher than ever, and the old man started nervously at the sound of a door banging up-stairs. A silence unusual and depressing settled upon all three, which lasted until the old couple rose to retire for the night.

65. “I expect you’ll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed,” said Herbert, as he bade them good-night, “and something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains.”

66. He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces in it. The last face was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in amazement. It got so vivid[Pg 119] that, with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on the table for a glass containing a little water to throw over it. His hand grasped the monkey’s paw, and with a little shiver he wiped his hand on his coat and went up to bed.

II

67. In the brightness of the wintry sun next morning as it streamed over the breakfast table he laughed at his fears. There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.

68. “I suppose all old soldiers are the same,” said Mrs. White. “The idea of our listening to such nonsense! How could wishes be granted in these days? And if they could, how could two hundred pounds hurt you, father?”

69. “Might drop on his head from the sky,” said the frivolous Herbert.

70. “Morris said the things happened so naturally,” said his father, “that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence.”

71. “Well, don’t break into the money before I come back,” said Herbert as he rose from the table. “I’m afraid it’ll turn you into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you.”

72. His mother laughed, and following[Pg 120] him to the door, watched him down the road; and returning to the breakfast table, was very happy at the expense of her husband’s credulity. All of which did not prevent her from scurrying to the door at the postman’s knock, nor prevent her from referring somewhat shortly to retired sergeant-majors of bibulous habits when she found that the post brought a tailor’s bill.

73. “Herbert will have some more of his funny remarks, I expect, when he comes home,” she said, as they sat at dinner.

74. “I dare say,” said Mr. White, pouring himself out some beer; “but for all that, the thing moved in my hand; that I’ll swear to.”

75. “You thought it did,” said the old lady soothingly.

76. “I say it did,” replied the other. “There was no thought about it; I had just—What’s the matter?”

77. His wife made no reply. She was watching the mysterious movements of a man outside, who, peering in an undecided fashion at the house, appeared to be trying to make up his mind to enter. In mental connection with the two hundred pounds, she noticed that the stranger was well dressed, and wore a silk hat of glossy newness. Three times he paused at the gate, and then walked on again. The fourth time he stood with his hand upon it, and then with sudden resolution flung it open and walked up the path. Mrs. White[Pg 121] at the same moment placed her hands behind her, and hurriedly unfastening the strings of her apron, put that useful article of apparel beneath the cushion of her chair.

78. She brought the stranger, who seemed ill at ease, into the room. He gazed at her furtively, and listened in a preoccupied fashion as the old lady apologized for the appearance of the room, and her husband’s coat, a garment which he usually reserved for the garden. She then waited as patiently as her sex would permit, for him to broach his business, but he was at first strangely silent.

79. “I—was asked to call,” he said at last, and stooped and picked a piece of cotton from his trousers. “I come from Maw and Meggins.”

80. The old lady started. “Is anything the matter?” she asked, breathlessly. “Has anything happened to Herbert? What is it? What is it?”

81. Her husband interposed. “There, there, mother,” he said, hastily. “Sit down, and don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve not brought bad news, I’m sure, sir;” and he eyed the other wistfully.

82. “I’m sorry—” began the visitor.

83. “Is he hurt?” demanded the mother, wildly.

84. The visitor bowed in assent. “Badly hurt,” he said, quietly, “but he is not in any pain.”

85. “Oh, thank God!” said the old[Pg 122] woman, clasping her hands. “Thank God for that! Thank—”

86. She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s averted face. She caught her breath, and turning to her slower-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his. There was a long silence.

87. “He was caught in the machinery,” said the visitor at length in a low voice.

88. “Caught in the machinery,” repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, “yes.”

89. He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife’s hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting-days nearly forty years before.

90. “He was the only one left to us,” he said, turning gently to the visitor. “It is hard.”

91. The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. “The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,” he said, without looking round. “I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.”

92. There was no reply; the old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband’s face was a look such[Pg 123] as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

93. “I was to say that Maw and Meggins disclaim all responsibility,” continued the other. “They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son’s services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.”

94. Mr. White dropped his wife’s hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words. “How much?”

95. “Two hundred pounds,” was the answer.

96. Unconscious of his wife’s shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

III

97. In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen—something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.

98. But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word,[Pg 124] for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

99. It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened.

100. “Come back,” he said, tenderly. “You will be cold.”

101. “It is colder for my son,” said the old woman, and wept afresh.

102. The sound of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

103. “The paw!” she cried wildly. “The monkey’s paw!”

104. He started up in alarm. “Where? Where is it? What’s the matter?”

105. She came stumbling across the room toward him. “I want it,” she said, quietly. “You’ve not destroyed it?”

106. “It’s in the parlour, on the bracket,” he replied marvelling. “Why?”

107. She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

108. “I only just thought of it,” she said, hysterically. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t you think of it?”

[Pg 125]

109. “Think of what?” he questioned.

110. “The other two wishes,” she replied, rapidly. “We’ve only had one.”

111. “Was not that enough?” he demanded, fiercely.

112. “No,” she cried, triumphantly; “we’ll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.”

113. The man sat up in bed and flung the bed-clothes from his quaking limbs. “Good God, you are mad!” he cried, aghast.

114. “Get it,” she panted; “get it quickly, and wish—Oh, my boy, my boy!”

115. Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. “Get back to bed,” he said, unsteadily. “You don’t know what you are saying.”

116. “We had the first wish granted,” said the old woman, feverishly; “why not the second?”

117. “A coincidence,” stammered the old man.

118. “Go and get it and wish,” cried his wife, quivering with excitement.

119. The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. “He has been dead ten days, and besides he—I would not tell you else, but—I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?”

120. “Bring him back,” cried the old woman, and dragged him toward[Pg 126] the door. “Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?”

121. He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

122. Even his wife’s face seemed changed as he entered the room. It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it. He was afraid of her.

123. “Wish!” she cried in a strong voice.

124. “It is foolish and wicked,” he faltered.

125. “Wish!” repeated his wife.

126. He raised his hand. “I wish my son alive again.”

127. The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.

128. He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end,[Pg 127] which had burned below the rim of the china candle-stick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceilings and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

129. Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

130. At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

131. The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.

132. “What’s that?” cried the old woman, starting up.

133. “A rat,” said the old man in shaking tones—“a rat. It passed me on the stairs.”

134. His wife sat up in bed listening.[Pg 128] A loud knock resounded through the house.

135. “It’s Herbert!” she screamed, “It’s Herbert!”

136. She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

137. “What are you going to do?” he whispered hoarsely.

138. “It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!” she cried, struggling mechanically. “I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door.”

139. “For God’s sake don’t let it in,” cried the old man, trembling.

140. “You’re afraid of your own son,” she cried, struggling. “Let me go. I’m coming, Herbert; I’m coming.”

141. There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting.

142. “The bolt,” she cried, loudly. “Come down. I can’t reach it.”

143. But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

144. The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

(La Dernière Classe)

The Story of a Little Alsatian

BY ALPHONSE DAUDET

Translation by The Editor

That morning I was very late for school, so I was terribly afraid of a scolding—particularly since Master Hamel had said that he would examine us on participles, and I knew not the first word about them! For a little while I thought of playing truant and wandering the fields.

2. The day was so warm, so clear!

3. I could hear the blackbirds whistling on the border of the wood; and back of the sawmill, in the Rippert field, the Prussian soldiers were drilling. All of this was much more tempting to me than participial rules—but I was strong enough to resist and away to school I ran, as fast as I could.

4. As I passed by the mayor’s office, I observed that a number of people were assembled before the little board on which notices were generally posted.The tone is struck here. Forecast of crisis. For two years every piece of bad news had come from that board—defeats [Pg 140] in battle, Franco-Prussian War.conscriptions, orders from headquarters—and, without stopping, I wondered:

5. “What can it be this time!”

6. Just then, as I was running across the square, Wachter the blacksmith,Note the Prussian name. Alsace was a border province. who with his apprentice stood reading the placard, called after me:

7. “You needn’t hurry so fast, my lad, you’ll get to school soon enough!”

8. I thought he was making game of me, and I kept right on, reaching Master Hamel’s little yard quite out of breath.

9. Ordinarily, as school was opening, the uproar was so great that it could be heard clear out on the street—desk-lids opening and shutting, lessons droned aloud in unison, pupils holding their ears shut to learn their An old custom. lessons easier, while the master’s great ferrule beat upon the desks:

10. “A little quietness!”

11. I had counted on all this noise to enable me to reach my seat unnoticed; but on that particular day everything was as quiet as a Sabbath morning. Through the open window I saw my schoolmates already ranged in their places, and Master Hamel pacing to and fro, his formidable iron ferrule under his arm. In the midst of that complete silence I had to open the door and go in! You can well imagine whether I blushed and was afraid!

12. But, quite to the contrary, Master Hamel looked at me with no[Pg 141] sign of anger, and then very gently said:

13. “Go directly to your seat, my little Frantz—we were about to begin without you.”

14. Immediately I stepped over the bench and sat down at my desk.At which others were also seated. Only then, when I had partly gotten over my fright, did I observe that our master was wearing his handsome blue riding-coat, his plaited ruff, and his black silk embroidered breeches—worn only on inspection days or when prizes were awarded.All the contrasts prepare us for the crisis. Furthermore, there was something extraordinary, something solemn, about the whole school. But what astounded me more than anything else was to see a number of people from the village sitting, as silent as we, on the usually empty benches at the back of the room: old Father Hauser Prussian name.with his three-cornered hat, the ex-mayor, the former postman, besides a number of others. All seemed cast down, and Father Hauser had brought with him an old primer, with chewed up leaves, Dazed. which he held wide-open up-side-down on his knees, and lying on it his huge spectacles.

15. While I was marvelling at all this, Master Hamel had mounted his platform, and in the same gentle and serious voice with which he had greeted me, he said to us:

16. “My children, this is the last day that I shall keep school. The order has come from Berlin that [Pg 142] nothing but German shall be taught in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine.This law went into effect July 1, 1870. The new school-master will arrive to-morrow. This is the last class in French—I beg of you to be very attentive!”

17. His simple words overwhelmed me. This, then, was the notice they had posted at the mayor’s office. Oh, the scoundrels!

18. My last lesson in French!

19. And I was scarcely able to write! Then I was never to learn! I must stop short just where I was!Scarcely a paragraph but appeals to emotion in some form. How angry with myself it made me to remember the time I had frittered away, and the lessons I had missed while hunting birds’ nests or sliding on the Saar! My books now seemed to me like old comrades from whom it broke my heart to part, and The Saar flows northward into the Moselle. only a moment since I had found them—my grammar, my sacred history—so dull, and so heavy to carry! It was just the same when I thought of Master Hamel. He was going away. I should never see him again—the thought made me forget all his punishments and strokes with the ferrule.

20. Poor old man! So it was in honor of that last lesson in French that he had donned his Sunday best—and now I understood why those old folks from the village were seated at the back of the room. Now to the villagers. It seemed to say they regretted that they had not visited the school oftener. Age indicated, thus adding to the pathos. Besides, it was a sort of way of thanking[Pg 143] our teacher for his forty years of devoted service, and of showing These are the key words. their love for the fatherland which was passing away.

21. Just at this point in my reflections I heard my name called—it was my turn to recite. Oh, I would have given anything to be able to recite without a slip, in a strong, clear voice, that celebrated rule about participles; but at the very first words I grew confused and I only stood there at my bench swaying back and forward, my heart swelling, not daring to lift my head. At length I heard Master Hamel saying to me:

22. “My little Frantz, I shall not scold you; you are punished enough, I think. It is so with all of us; every day we reassure ourselves: ‘Bah! I have plenty of time. To-morrow I shall learn.’ Then you see what happens. Alas! it has ever been the great misfortune of our Alsace to defer its lessons until the morrow.Daudet here teaches all France a lesson—and all nations as well. And now these people are justified in saying to us, ‘What, you pretend to be French, and you are able neither to speak nor to write your language!’ But in all this you are not the most guilty one, my poor Frantz—we are all worthy of a full measure of self-reproach.

23. “Your parents have not taken enough care to see that you got an education. They preferred to save a few more sous by putting you to work in the fields or in the factories.[Pg 144] And I—have I nothing for which to blame myself? Have I not frequently sent you to water my garden instead of keeping you at your books? Or have I ever hesitated to dismiss school when I wanted to go trout-fishing?”

24. So Master Hamel, passing from one theme to another, began to speak to us about our French language. He said that it was the most beautiful language in the whole world—the most clear, the most substantial; that we must ever cherish it among ourselves, and never forget it, for when a nation falls into bondage, just so long as it clings to its language, it holds the key of its prison.[21]

25. Then he took a grammar and read us our lesson. I was astonished to see how readily I understood! Everything he said seemed to me so easy—so very easy. I believe that never before had I listened so attentively, and that he, in turn, had never explained things with such So does the teacher’s skill. infinite patience. It almost seemed as though the poor fellow wished to impart all his knowledge to us before he left us—to drive it all into our heads with one blow.

26. The lesson ended, we went on to the exercises in penmanship. For that day Master Hamel had gotten ready some entirely new copies on which he had written in a neat, round hand: “France, Alsace, France, Alsace.”A proof of unusual absorption. [Pg 145] The slips of paper looked like tiny flags, waving all about the room and hanging from the rods of our desks. You should have seen how diligently everyone worked, and how quiet it was! Only the scratching of the pens over the paper could be heard. Once some beetles flew in, but nobody paid any attention to them—not even the very smallest chaps, who were struggling to draw their oblique lines with a will and an application as sincere as though even the lines themselves were French....Note the pathos of the appeal. Pigeons cooed in low tones on the roof of the schoolhouse, and as I listened to them I thought to myself:

27. “I wonder if they are going to make them coo in German too!”

28. Now and then, as I lifted my eyes from my task, I saw Master Hamel seated motionless in his chair, and staring at things about him as though in that look he would carry away with him the whole of his little schoolhouse. Think of it! For forty years he had occupied that same place, his yard in front of him, and his school always unchanged. Only the benches and desks were rubbed by use until they were polished; the walnuts in the yard had grown large, and the hop-vine he himself had planted now hung in festoons from The lad reasons as a lad—to him the pathos is not for himself but for the old man. the windows clear to the roof. How heartbreaking it must have been for that poor man to leave all this—to hear his sister moving to and fro[Pg 146] in the room overhead as she packed their trunks! Next day they were going away—to leave the fatherland forever.

29. All the same, he had the courage to keep the school to the very closing minute. The writing over, we had our lesson in history. Then the little ones sang in unison their ba, be, bi, bo, bu. Yonder, at the back of the room, old Father Hauser was holding his spelling-book with both hands, and with the aid of his great spectacles he spelled out the letters—one could see that even he too was applying himself. Emotion shook his voice, and to hear him was so droll that we all wanted to laugh—and to cry. Ah! I shall always remember that last class.

30. Suddenly the church clock sounded twelve. Then the Angelus. At the same instant were heard under our very windows the trumpets of the Prussians returning from drill. Pale as death, Master Hamel rose from his chair. Never had he seemed so large.

31. “My friends,” he began; “my friends, I—I—”

32. But something choked him. He could not end the sentence.

33. Then he turned to the blackboard, seized a piece of chalk, and, bearing with all his strength, he wrote in the largest letters he could make:

34. “VIVE LA FRANCE!”

35. Then he stood there, his head leaning against the wall, and without a word he signed to us with his hand:

36. “It is the end ... go!”

FOR ANALYSIS

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

I

“But if it be a girl?”

2. “Lord of my life, it cannot be. I have prayed for so many nights, and sent gifts to Sheikh Badl’s shrine so often, that I know God will give us a son—a man-child that shall grow into a man. Think of this and be glad. My mother shall be his mother till I can take him again, and the mullah of the Pattan mosque shall cast his nativity—God send he be born in an auspicious hour!—and then, thou wilt never weary of me, thy slave.”

3. “Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?”

4. “Since the beginning—till this mercy came to me. How could I be sure of thy love when I knew that I had been bought with silver?”

[Pg 152]

5. “Nay, that was the dowry. I paid it to thy mother.”

6. “And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long like a hen. What talk is yours of dower! I was bought as though I had been a Lucknow dancing-girl instead of a child.”

7. “Art thou sorry for the sale?”

8. “I have sorrowed; but to-day I am glad. Thou wilt never cease to love me now?—answer, my king.”

9. “Never—never. No.”

10. “Not even though the mem-log—the white women of thy own blood—love thee? And remember, I have watched them driving in the evening; they are very fair.”

11. “I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred. I have seen the moon, and—then I saw no more fire-balloons.”

12. Ameera clapped her hands and laughed. “Very good talk,” she said. Then with an assumption of great stateliness: “It is enough. Thou hast my permission to depart—if thou wilt.”

13. The man did not move. He was sitting on a low red-lacquered couch in a room furnished only with a blue and white floor-cloth, some rugs, and a very complete collection of native cushions. At his feet sat a woman of sixteen, and she was all but all the world in his eyes. By every rule and law she should have been otherwise, for he was an Englishman, and she a Mussulman’s daughter bought two years before from her mother, who, being left[Pg 153] without money, would have sold Ameera shrieking to the Prince of Darkness if the price had been sufficient.

14. It was a contract entered into with a light heart; but even before the girl had reached her bloom she came to fill the greater portion of John Holden’s life. For her, and the withered hag, her mother, he had taken a little house overlooking the great red-walled city, and found—when the marigolds had sprung up by the well in the courtyard and Ameera had established herself according to her own ideas of comfort, and her mother had ceased grumbling at the inadequacy of the cooking-places, the distance from the daily market, and at matters of housekeeping in general—that the house was to him his home. Any one could enter his bachelor’s bungalow by day or night, and the life that he led there was an unlovely one. In the house in the city his feet only could pass beyond the outer courtyard to the women’s rooms; and when the big wooden gate was bolted behind him he was king in his own territory, with Ameera for queen. And there was going to be added to this kingdom a third person whose arrival Holden felt inclined to resent. It interfered with his perfect happiness. It disarranged the orderly peace of the house that was his own. But Ameera was wild with delight at the thought of it, and her mother not[Pg 154] less so. The love of a man, and particularly a white man, was at the best an inconstant affair, but it might, both women argued, be held fast by a baby’s hands. “And then,” Ameera would always say, “then he will never care for the white mem-log. I hate them all—I hate them all.”

15. “He will go back to his own people in time,” said the mother; “but by the blessing of God that time is yet afar off.”

16. Holden sat silent on the couch thinking of the future, and his thoughts were not pleasant. The drawbacks of a double life are manifold. The Government, with singular care, had ordered him out of the station for a fortnight on special duty in the place of a man who was watching by the bedside of a sick wife. The verbal notification of the transfer had been edged by a cheerful remark that Holden ought to think himself lucky in being a bachelor and a free man. He came to break the news to Ameera.

17. “It is not good,” she said slowly, “but it is not all bad. There is my mother here, and no harm will come to me—unless indeed I die of pure joy. Go thou to thy work and think no troublesome thoughts. When the days are done I believe ... nay, I am sure. And—and then I shall lay him in thy arms, and thou wilt love me forever. The train goes to-night, at midnight[Pg 155] is it not? Go now, and do not let thy heart be heavy by cause of me. But thou wilt not delay in returning? Thou wilt not stay on the road to talk to the bold white mem-log. Come back to me swiftly, my life.”

18. As he left the courtyard to reach his horse that was tethered to the gate-post, Holden spoke to the white-haired old watchman who guarded the house, and bade him under certain contingencies despatch the filled-up telegraph-form that Holden gave him. It was all that could be done, and with the sensations of a man who has attended his own funeral Holden went away by the night mail to his exile. Every hour of the day he dreaded the arrival of the telegram, and every hour of the night he pictured to himself the death of Ameera. In consequence his work for the state was not of first-rate quality, nor was his temper towards his colleagues of the most amiable. The fortnight ended without a sign from his home, and, torn to pieces by his anxieties, Holden returned to be swallowed up for two precious hours by a dinner at the club, wherein he heard, as a man hears in a swoon, voices telling him how execrably he had performed the other man’s duties, and how he had endeared himself to all his associates. Then he fled on horseback through the night with his heart in his mouth. There was no answer at first to his blows on the gate, and he had just[Pg 156] wheeled his horse round to kick it in when Pir Khan appeared with a lantern and held his stirrup.

19. “Has aught occurred?” said Holden.

20. “The news does not come from my mouth, Protector of the Poor, but—” He held out his shaking hand as befitted the bearer of good news who is entitled to a reward.

21. Holden hurried through the courtyard. A light burned in the upper room. His horse neighed in the gateway, and he heard a shrill little wail that sent all the blood into the apple of his throat. It was a new voice, but it did not prove that Ameera was alive.

22. “Who is there?” he called up the narrow brick staircase.

23. There was a cry of delight from Ameera, and then the voice of the mother, tremulous with old age and pride—“We be two women and—the man—thy—son.”

24. On the threshold of the room Holden stepped on a naked dagger, that was laid there to avert ill-luck, and it broke at the hilt under his impatient heel.

25. “God is great!” cooed Ameera in the half-light. “Thou hast taken his misfortunes on thy head.”

26. “Ay, but how is it with thee, life of my life? Old woman, how is it with her?”

27. “She has forgotten her sufferings for joy that the child is born.[Pg 157] There is no harm; but speak softly,” said the mother.

28. “It only needed thy presence to make me all well,” said Ameera. “My king, thou hast been very long away. What gifts hast thou for me? Ah, ah! It is I that bring gifts this time. Look, my life, look! Was there ever such a babe? Nay, I am too weak even to clear my arm from him.”

29. “Rest then, and do not talk. I am here, bachari [little woman].”

30. “Well said, for there is a bond and a heel-rope [peecharee] between us now that nothing can break. Look—canst thou see in this light? He is without spot or blemish. Never was such a man-child. Ya illah! he shall be a pundit—no, a trooper of the Queen. And, my life, dost thou love me as well as ever, though I am faint and sick and worn? Answer truly.”

31. “Yea. I love as I have loved, with all my soul. Lie still, pearl, and rest.”

32. “Then do not go. Sit by my side here—so. Mother, the lord of this house needs a cushion. Bring it.” There was an almost imperceptible movement on the part of the new life that lay in the hollow of Ameera’s arm. “Aho!” she said, her voice breaking with love. “The babe is a champion from his birth. He is kicking me in the side with mighty kicks. Was there ever such a babe! And he is ours to us—thine[Pg 158] and mine. Put thy hand on his head, but carefully, for he is very young, and men are unskilled in such matters.”

33. Very cautiously Holden touched with the tips of his fingers the downy head.

34. “He is of the faith,” said Ameera; “for lying here in the night-watches I whispered the Call to Prayer and the Profession of Faith into his ears. And it is most marvellous that he was born upon a Friday, as I was born. Be careful of him, my life; but he can almost grip with his hands.”

35. Holden found one helpless little hand that closed feebly on his finger. And the clutch ran through his body till it settled about his heart. Till then his sole thought had been for Ameera. He began to realise that there was some one else in the world, but he could not feel that it was a veritable son with a soul. He sat down to think, and Ameera dozed lightly.

36. “Get hence, sahib,” said her mother under her breath. “It is not good that she should find you here on waking. She must be still.”

37. “I go,” said Holden submissively. “Here be rupees. See that my baba gets fat and finds all that he needs.”

38. The chink of the silver roused Ameera. “I am his mother, and no hireling,” she said weakly. “Shall I look to him more or less for the[Pg 159] sake of money? Mother, give it back. I have borne my lord a son.”

39. The deep sleep of weakness came upon her before the sentence was completed. Holden went down to the courtyard very softly, with his heart at ease. Pir Khan, the old watchman, was chuckling with delight. “This house is now complete,” he said, and without further comment thrust into Holden’s hands the hilt of a sabre worn many years ago when he, Pir Khan, served the Queen in the police. The bleat of a tethered goat came from the well-curb.

40. “There be two,” said Pir Khan, “two goats of the best. I bought them, and they cost much money; and since there is no birth-party assembled their flesh will be all mine. Strike craftily, sahib! ’Tis an ill-balanced sabre at the best. Wait till they raise their heads from cropping the marigolds.”

41. “And why?” said Holden, bewildered.

42. “For the birth-sacrifice. What else? Otherwise the child being unguarded from fate may die. The Protector of the Poor knows the fitting words to be said.”

43. Holden had learned them once with little thought that he would ever speak them in earnest. The touch of the cold sabre-hilt in his palm turned suddenly to the clinging grip of the child up-stairs—the child that was his own son—and a dread of loss filled him.

[Pg 160]

44. “Strike!” said Pir Khan. “Never life came into the world but life was paid for it. See, the goats have raised their heads. Now! With a drawing cut!”

45. Hardly knowing what he did, Holden cut twice as he muttered the Mohammedan prayer that runs: “Almighty! In place of this my son I offer life for life, blood for blood, head for head, bone for bone, hair for hair, skin for skin.” The waiting horse snorted and bounded in his pickets at the smell of the raw blood that spirted over Holden’s riding-boots.

46. “Well smitten!” said Pir Khan, wiping the sabre. “A swordsman was lost in thee. Go with a light heart, heaven-born. I am thy servant, and the servant of thy son. May the Presence live a thousand years and ... the flesh of the goats is all mine?” Pir Khan drew back richer by a month’s pay. Holden swung himself into the saddle and rode off through the low-hanging wood-smoke of the evening. He was full of riotous exultation, alternating with a vast vague tenderness directed towards no particular object, that made him choke as he bent over the neck of his uneasy horse. “I never felt like this in my life,” he thought. “I’ll go to the club and pull myself together.”

47. A game of pool was beginning, and the room was full of men. Holden entered, eager to get to the[Pg 161] light and the company of his fellows, singing at the top of his voice:

“‘In Baltimore a-walking, a lady I did meet!’”

48. “Did you?” said the club-secretary from his corner. “Did she happen to tell you that your boots were wringing wet? Great goodness, man, it’s blood!”

49. “Bosh!” said Holden, picking his cue from the rack. “May I cut in? It’s dew. I’ve been riding through high crops. My faith, my boots are in a mess, though!”

50.

51. “Yellow on blue—green next player,” said the marker monotonously.

52. “He shall walk the quarter-deck'—Am I green, marker?—He shall walk the quarter-deck'—eh! that's a bad shot—‘As his daddy used to do!’”

53. “I don’t see that you have anything to crow about,” said a zealous junior civilian acidly. “The Government is not exactly pleased with your work when you relieved Sanders.”

54. “Does that mean a wigging from headquarters?” said Holden [Pg 162] with an abstracted smile. “I think I can stand it.”

55. The talk beat up round the ever-fresh subject of each man’s work, and steadied Holden till it was time to go to his dark empty bungalow, where his butler received him as one who knew all his affairs. Holden remained awake for the greater part of the night, and his dreams were pleasant ones.

II

56. “How old is he now?”

57. “Ya illah! What a man’s question! He is all but six weeks old; and on this night I go up to the housetop with thee, my life, to count the stars. For that is auspicious. And he was born on a Friday under the sign of the Sun, and it has been told to me that he will outlive us both and get wealth. Can we wish for aught better, beloved?”

58. “There is nothing better. Let us go up to the roof, and thou shalt count the stars—but a few only, for the sky is heavy with cloud.”

59. “The winter rains are late, and maybe they come out of season. Come, before all the stars are hid. I have put on my richest jewels.”

60. “Thou hast forgotten the best of all.”

61. “Ai! Ours. He comes also. He has never yet seen the skies.”

62. Ameera climbed the narrow staircase that led to the flat roof.[Pg 163] The child, placid and unwinking, lay in the hollow of her right arm, gorgeous in silver-fringed muslin with a small skull-cap on his head. Ameera wore all that she valued most. The diamond nose-stud that takes the place of the Western patch in drawing attention to the curve of the nostril, the gold ornament in the centre of the forehead studded with tallow-drop emeralds and flawed rubies, the heavy circlet of beaten gold that was fastened round her neck by the softness of the pure metal, and the chinking curb-patterned silver anklets hanging low over the rosy ankle-bone. She was dressed in jade-green muslin as befitted a daughter of the Faith, and from shoulder to elbow and elbow to wrist ran bracelets of silver tied with floss silk, frail glass bangles slipped over the wrist in proof of the slenderness of the hand, and certain heavy gold bracelets that had no part in her country’s ornaments but, since they were Holden’s gift and fastened with a cunning European snap, delighted her immensely.

63. They sat down by the low white parapet of the roof, overlooking the city and its lights.

64. “They are happy down there,” said Ameera. “But I do not think that they are as happy as we. Nor do I think the white mem-log are as happy. And thou?”

65. “I know they are not.”

66. “How dost thou know?”

[Pg 164]

67. “They give their children over to the nurses.”

“I have never seen that,” said Ameera with a sigh, “nor do I wish to see. Ahi!”—she dropped her head on Holden’s shoulder—“I have counted forty stars, and I am tired. Look at the child, love of my life, he is counting too.”

68. The baby was staring with round eyes at the dark of the heavens. Ameera placed him in Holden’s arms, and he lay there without a cry.

69. “What shall we call him among ourselves?” she said. “Look! Art thou ever tired of looking? He carries thy very eyes. But the mouth—”

70. “Is thine, most dear. Who should know better than I?”

71. “’Tis such a feeble mouth. Oh, so small! And yet it holds my heart between its lips. Give him to me now. He has been too long away.”

72. “Nay, let him lie; he has not yet begun to cry.”

73. “When he cries thou wilt give him back—eh? What a man of mankind thou art! If he cried he were only the dearer to me. But, my life, what little name shall we give him?”

74. The small body lay close to Holden’s heart. It was utterly helpless and very soft. He scarcely dared to breathe for fear of crushing it. The caged green parrot that is regarded as a sort of guardian spirit in[Pg 165] most native households moved on its perch and fluttered a drowsy wing.

75. “There is the answer,” said Holden. “Mian Mittu has spoken. He shall be the parrot. When he is ready he will talk mightily and run about. Mian Mittu is the parrot in thy—in the Mussulman tongue, is it not?”

76. “Why put me so far off?” said Ameera fretfully. “Let it be like unto some English name—but not wholly. For he is mine.”

77. “Then call him Tota, for that is likest English.”

78. “Ay, Tota, and that is still the parrot. Forgive me, my lord, for a minute ago, but in truth he is too little to wear all the weight of Mian Mittu for name. He shall be Tota—our Tota to us. Hearest thou, O small one? Littlest, thou art Tota.” She touched the child’s cheek, and he waking, wailed, and it was necessary to return him to his mother, who soothed him with the wonderful rhyme of “Aré koko, Jaré koko!” which says:

79. Reassured many times as to the price of those plums, Tota cuddled himself down to sleep. The two sleek, white well-bullocks in the[Pg 166] courtyard were steadily chewing the cud of their evening meal; old Pir Khan squatted at the head of Holden’s horse, his police sabre across his knees, pulling drowsily at a big water-pipe that croaked like a bull-frog in a pond. Ameera’s mother sat spinning in the lower veranda, and the wooden gate was shut and barred. The music of a marriage-procession came to the roof above the gentle hum of the city, and a string of flying-foxes crossed the face of the low moon.

80. “I have prayed,” said Ameera, after a long pause, “I have prayed for two things. First that I may die in thy stead if thy death is demanded, and in the second that I may die in the place of the child. I have prayed to the Prophet and to Beebee Miriam [the Virgin Mary]. Thinkest thou either will hear?”

81. “From thy lips who would not hear the lightest word?”

82. “I asked for straight talk, and thou hast given me sweet talk. Will my prayers be heard?”

83. “How can I say? God is very good.”

84. “Of that I am not sure. Listen now. When I die, or the child dies, what is thy fate? Living, thou wilt return to the bold white mem-log, for kind calls to kind.”

85. “Not always.”

86. “With a woman, no; with a man it is otherwise. Thou wilt in this life, later on, go back to thine[Pg 167] own folk. That I could almost endure for I should be dead. But in thy very death thou wilt be taken away to a strange place and a paradise that I do not know.”

87. “Will it be paradise?”

88. “Surely, for who would harm thee? But we two—I and the child—shall be elsewhere, and we cannot come to thee, nor canst thou come to us. In the old days, before the child was born, I did not think of these things; but now I think of them always. It is very hard talk.”

89. “It will fall as it will fall. To-morrow we do not know, but to-day and love we know well. Surely we are happy now.”

90. “So happy that it were well to make our happiness assured. And thy Beebee Miriam should listen to me; for she is also a woman. But then she would envy me! It is not seemly for men to worship a woman.”

91. Holden laughed aloud at Ameera’s little spasm of jealousy.

92. “Is it not seemly? Why didst thou not turn me from worship of thee, then?”

93. “Thou a worshipper! And of me? My king, for all thy sweet words, well I know that I am thy servant and thy slave, and the dust under thy feet. And I would not have it otherwise. See!”

94. Before Holden could prevent her she stooped and touched his feet; recovering herself with a little laugh she hugged Tota close to[Pg 168] her bosom. Then, almost savagely:

95. “Is it true that the bold white mem-log live for three times the length of my life? Is it true that they make their marriages not before they are old women?”

96. “They marry as do others—when they are women.”

97. “That I know, but they wed when they are twenty-five. Is that true?”

98. “That is true.”

99. “Ya illah! At twenty-five! Who would of his own will take a wife even of eighteen? She is a woman—aging every hour. Twenty-five! I shall be an old woman at that age, and—those mem-log remain young forever. How I hate them!”

100. “What have they to do with us?”

101. “I cannot tell. I know only that there may now be alive on this earth a woman ten years older than I who may come to thee and take thy love ten years after I am an old woman, gray-headed, and the nurse of Tota’s son. That is unjust and evil. They should die too.”

102. “Now, for all thy years thou art a child, and shalt be picked up and carried down the staircase.”

103. “Tota! Have a care for Tota, my lord! Thou at least art as foolish as any babe!” Ameera tucked Tota out of harm’s way in the hollow of her neck, and was carried[Pg 169] downstairs laughing in Holden’s arms, while Tota opened his eyes and smiled after the manner of the lesser angels.

104. He was a silent infant, and almost before Holden could realise that he was in the world, developed into a small gold-coloured little god and unquestioned despot of the house overlooking the city. Those were months of absolute happiness to Holden and Ameera—happiness withdrawn from the world, shut in behind the wooden gate that Pir Khan guarded. By day Holden did his work with an immense pity for such as were not so fortunate as himself, and a sympathy for small children that amazed and amused many mothers at the little station gatherings. At nightfall he returned to Ameera—Ameera, full of the wondrous doings of Tota; how he had been seen to clap his hands together and move his fingers with intention and purpose—which was manifestly a miracle; how, later, he had of his own initiative crawled out of his low bedstead on to the floor and swayed on both feet for the space of three breaths.

105. “And they were long breaths, for my heart stood still with delight,” said Ameera.

106. Then Tota took the beasts into his councils—the well-bullocks, the little gray squirrels, the mongoose that lived in a hole near the well, and especially Mian Mittu, the parrot,[Pg 170] whose tail he grievously pulled, and Mian Mittu screamed till Ameera and Holden arrived.

107. “O villain! Child of strength! This to thy brother on the housetop! Tobah, tobah! Fie! Fie! But I know a charm to make him wise as Suleiman and Aflatoun [Solomon and Plato]. Now look,” said Ameera. She drew from an embroidered bag a handful of almonds. “See! we count seven. In the name of God!”

108. She placed Mian Mittu, very angry and rumpled, on the top of his cage, and seating herself between the babe and the bird she cracked and peeled an almond less white than her teeth. “This is a true charm, my life, and do not laugh. See! I give the parrot one half and Tota the other.” Mian Mittu with careful beak took his share from between Ameera’s lips, and she kissed the other half into the mouth of the child, who ate it slowly with wondering eyes. “This I will do each day of seven, and without doubt he who is ours will be a bold speaker and wise. Eh, Tota, what wilt thou be when thou art a man and I am gray-headed?” Tota tucked his fat legs into adorable creases. He could crawl, but he was not going to waste the spring of his youth in idle speech. He wanted Mian Mittu’s tail to tweak.

109. When he was advanced to the dignity of a silver belt—which, with a magic square engraved on silver[Pg 171] and hung round his neck, made up the greater part of his clothing—he staggered on a perilous journey down the garden to Pir Khan and proffered him all his jewels in exchange for one little ride on Holden’s horse, having seen his mother’s mother chaffering with peddlers in the veranda. Pir Khan wept and set the untried feet on his own gray head in sign of fealty, and brought the bold adventurer to his mother’s arms, vowing that Tota would be a leader of men ere his beard was grown.

110. One hot evening, while he sat on the roof between his father and mother watching the never-ending warfare of the kites that the city boys flew, he demanded a kite of his own with Pir Khan to fly it, because he had a fear of dealing with anything larger than himself, and when Holden called him a “spark” he rose to his feet and answered slowly in defence of his new-found individuality: “Hum 'park nahin hai. Hum admi hai [I am no spark, but a man].”

111. The protest made Holden choke and devote himself very seriously to a consideration of Tota’s future. He need hardly have taken the trouble. The delight of that life was too perfect to endure. Therefore it was taken away as many things are taken away in India—suddenly and without warning. The little lord of the house, as Pir Khan called him, grew sorrowful and complained[Pg 172] of pains who had never known the meaning of pain. Ameera, wild with terror, watched him through the night, and in the dawning of the second day the life was shaken out of him by fever—the seasonal autumn fever. It seemed altogether impossible that he could die, and neither Ameera nor Holden at first believed the evidence of the little body on the bedstead. Then Ameera beat her head against the wall and would have flung herself down the well in the garden had Holden not restrained her by main force.

112. One mercy only was granted to Holden. He rode to his office in broad daylight and found waiting him an unusually heavy mail that demanded concentrated attention and hard work. He was not, however, alive to this kindness of the gods.

III

113. The first shock of a bullet is no more than a brisk pinch. The wrecked body does not send in its protest to the soul till ten or fifteen seconds later. Holden realised his pain slowly, exactly as he had realised his happiness, and with the same imperious necessity for hiding all traces of it. In the beginning he only felt that there had been a loss, and that Ameera needed comforting where she sat with her head on her knees shivering as Mian Mittu from[Pg 173] the housetop called: Tota! Tota! Tota! Later, all his world and the daily life of it rose up to hurt him. It was an outrage that any one of the children at the band-stand in the evening should be alive and clamorous, when his own child lay dead. It was more than mere pain when one of them touched him, and stories told by over-fond fathers of their children’s latest performances cut him to the quick. He could not declare his pain. He had neither help, comfort, nor sympathy; and Ameera at the end of each weary day would lead him through the hell of self-questioning reproach which is reserved for those who have lost a child, and believe that with a little—just a little—more care it might have been saved.

114. “Perhaps,” Ameera would say, “I did not take sufficient heed. Did I, or did I not? The sun on the roof that day when he played so long alone and I was—ahi! braiding my hair—it may be that the sun then bred the fever. If I had warned him from the sun he might have lived. But oh, my life, say that I am guiltless! Thou knowest that I loved him as I love thee. Say that there is no blame on me, or I shall die—I shall die!”

115. “There is no blame—before God, none. It was written, and how could we do aught to save? What has been, has been. Let it go, beloved.”

116. “He was all my heart to me.[Pg 174] How can I let the thought go when my arm tells me every night that he is not here? Ahi! Ahi! O Tota, come back to me—come back again, and let us be all together as it was before!”

117. “Peace, peace! For thine own sake, and for mine also, if thou lovest me—rest.”

118. “By this I know thou dost not care; and how shouldst thou? The white men have hearts of stone and souls of iron. Oh, that I had married a man of mine own people—though he beat me—and had never eaten the bread of an alien!”

119. “Am I an alien—mother of my son?”

120. “What else—sahib?... Oh, forgive me—forgive! The death has driven me mad. Thou art the life of my heart, and the light of my eyes, and the breath of my life, and—and I have put thee from me, though it was but for a moment. If thou goest away, to whom shall I look for help? Do not be angry. Indeed, it was the pain that spoke and not thy slave.”

121. “I know, I know. We be two who were three. The greater need therefore that we should be one.”

122. They were sitting on the roof as of custom. The night was a warm one in early spring, and sheet-lightning was dancing on the horizon to a broken tune played by far-off[Pg 175] thunder. Ameera settled herself in Holden’s arms.

123. “The dry earth is lowing like a cow for the rain, and I—I am afraid. It was not like this when we counted the stars. But thou lovest me as much as before, though a bond is taken away? Answer!”

124. “I love more because a new bond has come out of the sorrow that we have eaten together, and that thou knowest.”

125. “Yea, I knew,” said Ameera in a very small whisper. “But it is good to hear thee say so, my life, who art so strong to help. I will be a child no more but a woman and an aid to thee. Listen! Give me my sitar and I will sing bravely.”

126. She took the light silver-studded sitar and began a song of the great hero Rajah Rasalu. The hand failed on the strings, the tune halted, checked, and at a low note turned off to the poor little nursery-rhyme about the wicked crow:

127. Then came the tears and the piteous rebellion against fate till she slept, moaning a little in her sleep, with the right arm thrown clear of the body as though it protected something that was not there. It was after this night that life became a little easier for Holden. The ever-present[Pg 176] pain of loss drove him into his work, and the work repaid him by filling up his mind for nine or ten hours a day. Ameera sat alone in the house and brooded, but grew happier when she understood that Holden was more at ease, according to the custom of women. They touched happiness again, but this time with caution.

128. “It was because we loved Tota that he died. The jealousy of God was upon us,” said Ameera. “I have hung up a large black jar before our window to turn the evil eye from us, and we must make no protestations of delight, but go softly underneath the stars, lest God find us out. Is that not good talk, worthless one?”

129. She had shifted the accent on the word that means “beloved,” in proof of the sincerity of her purpose. But the kiss that followed the new christening was a thing that any deity might have envied. They went about henceforward saying: “It is naught, it is naught”; and hoping that all the Powers heard.

130. The Powers were busy on other things. They had allowed thirty million people four years of plenty wherein men fed well and the crops were certain, and the birth-rate rose year by year; the districts reported a purely agricultural population varying from nine hundred to two thousand to the square mile of the overburdened earth; and the[Pg 177] Member for Lower Tooting, wandering about India in pot-hat and frock-coat, talked largely of the benefits of British rule and suggested as the one thing needful the establishment of a duly qualified electoral system and a general bestowal of the franchise. His long-suffering hosts smiled and made him welcome, and when he paused to admire, with pretty picked words, the blossom of the blood-red dhak-tree that had flowered untimely for a sign of what was coming, they smiled more than ever.

131. It was the Deputy Commissioner of Kot-Kumharsen, staying at the club for a day, who lightly told a tale that made Holden’s blood run cold as he overheard the end.

132. “He won’t bother any one any more. Never saw a man so astonished in my life. By Jove, I thought he meant to ask a question in the House about it. Fellow passenger in his ship—dined next him—bowled over by cholera and died in eighteen hours. You needn’t laugh, you fellows. The Member for Lower Tooting is awfully angry about it; but he’s more scared. I think he’s going to take his enlightened self out of India.”

133. “I’d give a good deal if he were knocked over. It might keep a few vestrymen of his kidney to their own parish. But what’s this about cholera? It’s full early for anything of that kind,” said the warden of an unprofitable salt-lick.

[Pg 178]

134. “Don’t know,” said the Deputy Commissioner reflectively. “We’ve got locusts with us. There’s sporadic cholera all along the north—at least we’re calling it sporadic for decency’s sake. The spring crops are short in five districts, and nobody seems to know where the rains are. It’s nearly March now. I don’t want to scare anybody, but it seems to me that Nature’s going to audit her accounts with a big red pencil this summer.”

135. “Just when I wanted to take leave, too!” said a voice across the room.

136. “There won’t be much leave this year, but there ought to be a great deal of promotion. I’ve come in to persuade the Government to put my pet canal on the list of famine-relief works. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. I shall get that canal finished at last.”

137. “Is it the old programme then,” said Holden; “famine, fever, and cholera?”

138. “Oh, no. Only local scarcity and an unusual prevalence of seasonal sickness. You’ll find it all in the reports if you live till next year. You’re a lucky chap. You haven’t got a wife to send out of harm’s way. The hill stations ought to be full of women this year.”

139. “I think you’re inclined to exaggerate the talk in the bazars,” said a young civilian in the secretariat. “Now I have observed—”

[Pg 179]

140. “I daresay you have,” said the Deputy Commissioner, “but you’ve a great deal more to observe, my son. In the meantime, I wish to observe to you—” and he drew him aside to discuss the construction of the canal that was so dear to his heart. Holden went to his bungalow and began to understand that he was not alone in the world, and also that he was afraid for the sake of another—which is the most soul-satisfying fear known to man.

141. Two months later, as the Deputy had foretold, Nature began to audit her accounts with a red pencil. On the heels of the spring reapings came a cry for bread, and the Government, which had decreed that no man should die of want, sent wheat. Then came the cholera from all four quarters of the compass. It struck a pilgrim-gathering of half a million at a sacred shrine. Many died at the feet of their god; the others broke and ran over the face of the land carrying the pestilence with them. It smote a walled city and killed two hundred a day. The people crowded the trains, hanging on to the foot-boards and squatting on the roofs of the carriages, and the cholera followed them, for at each station they dragged out the dead and the dying. They died by the roadside, and the horses of the Englishmen shied at the corpses in the grass. The rains did not come, and the earth turned to iron lest man[Pg 180] should escape death by hiding in her. The English sent their wives away to the hills and went about their work, coming forward as they were bidden to fill the gaps in the fighting-line. Holden, sick with fear of losing his chiefest treasure on earth, had done his best to persuade Ameera to go away with her mother to the Himalayas.

142. “Why should I go?” said she one evening on the roof.

143. “There is sickness, and people are dying, and all the white mem-log have gone.”

144. “All of them?”

145. “All—unless perhaps there remain some old scald-head who vexes her husband’s heart by running risk of death.”

146. “Nay; who stays is my sister, and thou must not abuse her, for I will be a scald-head too. I am glad all the bold mem-log are gone.”

147. “Do I speak to a woman, or a babe? Go to the hills and I will see to it that thou goest like a queen’s daughter. Think, child. In a red-lacquered bullock-cart, veiled and curtained, with brass peacocks upon the pole and red cloth hangings. I will send two orderlies for guard, and—”

148. “Peace! Thou art the babe in speaking thus. What use are those toys to me? He would have patted the bullocks and played with the housings. For his sake, perhaps—thou hast made me very English—I[Pg 181] might have gone. Now, I will not. Let the mem-log run.”

149. “Their husbands are sending them, beloved.”

150. “Very good talk. Since when hast thou been my husband to tell me what to do? I have but borne thee a son. Thou art only all the desire of my soul to me. How shall I depart when I know that if evil befall thee by the breadth of so much as my littlest finger-nail—is that not small?—I should be aware of it though I were in paradise. And here, this summer thou mayest die—ai, janee, die! and in dying they might call to tend thee a white woman, and she would rob me in the last of thy love!”

151. “But love is not born in a moment or on a death-bed!”

152. “What dost thou know of love, stone-heart? She would take thy thanks at least and, by God and the Prophet and Beebee Miriam the mother of thy Prophet, that I will never endure. My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish talk of going away. Where thou art, I am. It is enough.” She put an arm round his neck and a hand on his mouth.

153. There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatched under the shadow of the sword. They sat together and laughed, calling each other openly by every pet name that could move the wrath of the gods. The city below[Pg 182] them was locked up in its own torments. Sulphur fires blazed in the streets; the conches in the Hindu temples screamed and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was a service in the great Mohammedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of the dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost a child and was calling for its return. In the gray dawn they saw the dead borne out through the city gates, each litter with its own little knot of mourners. Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered.

154. It was a red and heavy audit, for the land was very sick and needed a little breathing space ere the torrent of cheap life should flood it anew. The children of immature fathers and undeveloped mothers made no resistance. They were cowed and sat still, waiting till the sword should be sheathed in November if it were so willed. There were gaps among the English, but the gaps were filled. The work of superintending famine-relief, cholera-sheds, medicine-distribution, and what little sanitation was possible, went forward because it was so ordered.

155. Holden had been told to keep himself in readiness to move to replace the next man who should fall. There were twelve hours in each day[Pg 183] when he could not see Ameera, and she might die in three. He was considering what his pain would be if he could not see her for three months, or if she died out of his sight. He was absolutely certain that her death would be demanded—so certain that when he looked up from the telegram and saw Pir Khan breathless in the doorway, he laughed aloud. “And?” said he—

156. “When there is a cry in the night and the spirit flutters into the throat, who has a charm that will restore? Come swiftly, heaven-born! It is the black cholera.”

157. Holden galloped to his home. The sky was heavy with clouds, for the long-deferred rains were near and the heat was stifling. Ameera’s mother met him in the courtyard, whimpering: “She is dying. She is nursing herself into death. She is all but dead. What shall I do, sahib?”

158. Ameera was lying in the room in which Tota had been born. She made no sign when Holden entered, because the human soul is a very lonely thing and, when it is getting ready to go away, hides itself in a misty border-land where the living may not follow. The black cholera does its work quietly and without explanation. Ameera was being thrust out of life as though the Angel of Death had himself put his hand upon her. The quick breathing seemed to show that she was either[Pg 184] afraid or in pain, but neither eyes nor mouth gave any answer to Holden’s kisses. There was nothing to be said or done. Holden could only wait and suffer. The first drops of the rain began to fall on the roof, and he could hear shouts of joy in the parched city.

159. The soul came back a little and the lips moved. Holden bent down to listen. “Keep nothing of mine,” said Ameera. “Take no hair from my head. She would make thee burn it later on. That flame I should feel. Lower! Stoop lower! Remember only that I was thine and bore thee a son. Though thou wed a white woman to-morrow, the pleasure of receiving in thy arms thy first son is taken from thee forever. Remember me when thy son is born—the one that shall carry thy name before all men. His misfortunes be on my head. I bear witness—I bear witness”—the lips were forming the words on his ear—“that there is no God but—thee, beloved!”

160. Then she died. Holden sat still, and all thought was taken from him—till he heard Ameera’s mother lift the curtain.

161. “Is she dead, sahib?”

162. “She is dead.”

163. “Then I will mourn, and afterwards take an inventory of the furniture in this house. For that will be mine. The sahib does not mean to resume it? It is so little, so very little,[Pg 185] sahib, and I am an old woman. I would like to lie softly.”

164. “For the mercy of God be silent a while. Go out and mourn where I cannot hear.”

165. “Sahib, she will be buried in four hours.”

166. “I know the custom. I shall go ere she is taken away. That matter is in thy hands. Look to it, that the bed on which—on which she lies—”

167. “Aha! That beautiful red-lacquered bed. I have long desired—”

168. “That the bed is left here untouched for my disposal. All else in the house is thine. Hire a cart, take everything, go hence, and before sunrise let there be nothing in this house but that which I have ordered thee to respect.”

169. “I am an old woman. I would stay at least for the days of mourning and the rains have just broken. Whither shall I go?”

170. “What is that to me? My order is that there is a going. The house-gear is worth a thousand rupees, and my orderly shall bring thee a hundred rupees to-night.”

171. “That is very little. Think of the cart-hire.”

172. “It shall be nothing unless thou goest, and with speed. O woman, get hence and leave me with my dead!”

173. The mother shuffled down the staircase, and in her anxiety to take[Pg 186] stock of the house-fittings forgot to mourn. Holden stayed by Ameera’s side and the rain roared on the roof. He could not think connectedly by reason of the noise, though he made many attempts to do so. Then four sheeted ghosts glided dripping into the room and stared at him through their veils. They were the washers of the dead. Holden left the room and went out to his horse. He had come in a dead, stifling calm through ankle-deep dust. He found the courtyard a rain-lashed pond alive with frogs; a torrent of yellow water ran under the gate, and a roaring wind drove the bolts of the rain like buckshot against the mud walls. Pir Khan was shivering in his little hut by the gate, and the horse was stamping uneasily in the water.

174. “I have been told the sahib’s order,” said Pir Khan. “It is well. This house is now desolate. I go also, or my monkey face would be a reminder of that which has been. Concerning the bed, I will bring that to thy house yonder in the morning; but remember, sahib, it will be to thee a knife turning in a green wound. I go upon a pilgrimage, and I will take no money. I have grown fat in the protection of the Presence whose sorrow is my sorrow. For the last time I hold his stirrup.”

175. He touched Holden’s foot with both hands, and the horse sprang out into the road, where the creaking bamboos were whipping the sky and[Pg 187] all the frogs were chuckling. Holden could not see for the rain in his face. He put his hands before his eyes and muttered:

176. “Oh, you brute! You utter brute!”

177. The news of his trouble was already in his bungalow. He read the knowledge in his butler’s eyes when Ahmed Khan brought in food, and for the first and last time in his life laid a hand upon his master’s shoulder, saying: “Eat, sahib, eat. Meat is good against sorrow. I also have known. Moreover the shadows come and go, sahib; the shadows come and go. These be curried eggs.”

178. Holden could neither eat nor sleep. The heavens sent down eight inches of rain in that night and washed the earth clean. The waters tore down walls, broke roads, and scoured open the shallow graves on the Mohammedan burying-ground. All next day it rained, and Holden sat still in his house considering his sorrow. On the morning of the third day he received a telegram which said only: “Ricketts, Myndonie. Dying. Holden relieve. Immediate.” Then he thought that before he had departed he would look at the house wherein he had been master and lord. There was a break in the weather, and the rank earth steamed with vapour.

179. He found that the rains had torn down the mud pillars of the[Pg 188] gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that had guarded his life hung lazily from one hinge. There was grass three inches high in the courtyard; Pir Khan’s lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch sagged between the beams. A gray squirrel was in possession of the veranda, as if the house had been untenanted for thirty years instead of three days. Ameera’s mother had removed everything except some mildewed matting. The tick-tick of the little scorpions as they hurried across the floor was the only sound in the house. Ameera’s room and the other one where Tota had lived were heavy with mildew; and the narrow staircase leading to the roof was streaked and stained with rain-borne mud. Holden saw all these things, and came out again to meet in the road Durga Dass, his landlord—portly, affable, clothed in white muslin, and driving a C-spring buggy. He was overlooking his property to see how the roofs stood the stress of the first rains.

180. “I have heard,” said he, “you will not take this place any more, sahib?”

181. “What are you going to do with it?”

182. “Perhaps I shall let it again.”

183. “Then I will keep it on while I am away.”

184. Durga Dass was silent for some time. “You shall not take it on, sahib,” he said. “When I was a[Pg 189] young man I also—But to-day I am a member of the Municipality. Ho! Ho! No. When the birds have gone, what need to keep the nest? I will have it pulled down—the timber will sell for something always. It shall be pulled down, and the Municipality shall make a road across as they desire, from the burning-ghaut to the city wall, so that no man may say where this house stood.”