THE FAUN AND TOE BHILDSaPHER Ex Libris <-. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES The Faun and the 'Philosopher The Faun and the 'Philosopher Jl Forest Phantasy. By Horace HutchinSOn. Author of "Little Lady Mary," ' Two Moods of a Man," "Amelia and the Doctor," etc. " Time goes fast and I go slow, Yet down the world together we go — / can t catch him and he can't catch me, But we'll both be caught by Eternity." LONDON: HUTCHINSON & CO. PATERNOSTER ROW :: :.":; 1915 I have to thank the Editors of the Westminster Gazette and Morning Post respectively for leave to reprint certain prose and verse extracts H. G. H. r /\ 48H CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I.- —The Man on the Ant-hill i II.- —The Pterodactyl . 12 III.- —Suspect 25 IV.- —The Professor . 37 V.- —The Cynic . 49 VI.- —Pieces of Oatcake 59 VII.- —Saxon and Egyptian 68 VIII.- —Faun's Ears . 77 IX.- —Cosmogony . 88 X.- —The Call of the Sea 97 XI.- —Crime and Chastisement no XII.- —Honour and Honesty 125 XIII.- —Egyptian Industry • 135 XIV.- —Rescue ..... • 144 XV.- —The Convalescent . • 153 XVI.- —The Singed Moth . 159 XVII.- —The Faun's Empire Songs 167 XVIII.- —Waterfalls .... 180 XIX.- —The Infinitely Obvious and thi Obviously Infinite 195 XX.- —Fascinations .... 234 XXI.- —How the Faun found Peace . 242 XXII.- —The Fall of the Leaf . 258 XXIII.- —The Faun and the Philosopher 265 XXIV.- —Mystery 272 XXV. —Solution .... 279 THE FAUN AND THE PHILOSOPHER . CHAPTER I THE MAN ON THE ANT-HILL T 7ERY wearily, for it was scorchingly hot, I was pushing my bicycle up one of the steep roads of the forest. Though hot, I was happy because I knew that I was near the goal of my enterprise, a nest of the slave-maker ant — the only species of slaver in this free country, and a species that seems to be becoming more rare every day. I knew its site exactly, aligned with a certain Scotch fir on the one side and silver birch on the other — red stem and white stem. Rounding the bush which would give a view of it, I went hotter still, with annoyance, for there, just beside the nest, as it seemed, a man was sitting. Tastes differ, but my personal The Faun and the Philosopher taste is for solitude when trying to induce Nature to tell a secret, and above all is a strange presence an annoyance. The chances are about a hundred to one that he whom you meet by chance is totally unsympathetic with your interests, and thinks you a fool — an opinion which you know does not matter, but which you justify by mind- ing it. So I grew hotter and yet more annoyed until I came quite close to that man ; and then I saw he was sitting not beside but right on the nest. Realizing that, I became quite happy again. ' Do you know," I said, " where you are sitting ? " ; Yes," he replied, " in the most beautiful spot on God's earth — on Ashdown Forest." ' Well," I said, " that's quite true ; but you may bring it down to smaller detail. There are other insects beside ourselves that appreciate Ashdown Forest. You're sitting on an ant- hill." " Oh, Lord ! " he exclaimed. He jumped up then quite quickly with some- The Man on the Ant-hill thing like — I did not count them — ten thousand ants running over him. He began to sweep them off and I began to help him. He required a great deal of sweeping, with a great deal of shaking out of coats and more intimate things, and then we had to search all corners and pockets, and after we thought we had made an end of all the ants — or at least of as many thousands as mattered — he would suddenly come upon a whole heap, hitherto unsuspected, and bring them out, like a pinch of big-grained and exceedingly lively snuff, between his finger and thumb. But what was really so very extraordinary about the man was that up to the moment of my directing his attention to the ants he had been altogether unaware of them, though he had been serving all the while he sat as a kind of playground, or race-track, or steeplechase course for all these myriads of them, swarming over him like the Lilliputians over the person of Gulliver. And yet he had been wide awake. Nor had he been very desperately abstracted. He did not reply with a great start, as if his thoughts had been i* 4 The Faun and the Philosopher away in some trance, when I spoke, but just responded in an ordinary, quiet voice, although the insects were scurrying this way and that all over him. " I never noticed them," he said ; " I was thinking." This was after we had cleaned him up of all except an odd hundred or two. It occurred to me then that the voice had a very cultured tone, though a strange tang therewith, as of an Ameri- can or Canadian, and I looked at him, surprised. His face was refined, lean and ascetic, but it was extraordinarily sun-bronzed. He might have been a gipsy, for his looks and for his clothes, only that his hair, which was curly and wavy, contradicted that idea. It was a curliness which made it marvellous fine covert for the ants, and had given us trouble, for there was no sign of a hat anywhere about him. His voice, with his looks, made me think of that invention of the poet, the scholar gipsy. " This is a wonderful place — this Ashdown Forest," he said. The Man on the Ant-hill 5 m I said, " Yes ; and those are wonderful ants. " There's a wonderful number of them," he said. Then I began to tell him and show him the way in which they were wonderful — the two kinds living together in the one nest, the small black slaves and the big red-and-black masters. He had plenty of specimens still adhering to odd portions of himself ; it was not necessary to go to the nest to find them. He asked me if I were going up the hill, and he walked beside me, and we talked of Ashdown Forest as we went. No man knows, as we agreed, the mood in which Nature found herself when she tip-tilted this great " forest ridge," as it is called, of Sussex, above the level of the Weald. That it was a process of some violence is quite certain, for the land at its formation did not lie in that series of great ridge and furrow which are its features now. Its strata were deposited in orderly fashion, Wealden Clay and Hastings Sand, leisurely, by the operation of a brackish water. That is the view of the geologists. Then 6 The Faun and the Philosopher happened some violent upheaval, or up-squeeze, and so we see it as if tossed by the waves of a great sea. It has its peculiarities to-day — a land of heather and bracken, of gorse and birches, firs and oaks, here and there a clump of tall grey-stemmed beeches, many oaks and very many hollies. We hear of it first as a hunting-ground of kings, under the forest laws, and it has never known, in all the ages of its existence, the servi- tude of the plough. Deer and blackgame used to inhabit it until a very recent time, and even now there are fallow, very shy and rarely seen, but known to the farmers of the patches that have been filched from the common land, since forest laws became less drastic, by the occasional ravage that they do in the gardens. But even for them it is not claimed that they are descend- ants of those that were the sport of kings. Much more likely they are the progeny of a few that have escaped from a neighbouring park, and in the warrens adjoining the open forest are able to defy the zeal of those who would like to see them gone. In the damp places is found Venus's The Man on the Ant-hill fly-trap, and on higher ground the stag's-horn moss, and white heather rewards~the search of those who are favourites of fortune. But the forest is scarcely less peculiar in the forms of life that are absent from it than in those which may be found. You will search the whole area in vain for a single primrose, though they are plentiful in the hedgerows and copses all about its ancient boundaries ; nor is the nightingale ever seen in the forest itself, though its song may reach you from a woodland or from one of the Sussex " shaws " that bound it. It is a great resort of sky-larks, that fill the sky with music ; but the most persistent note in early summer is the cuckoo's, which feeds on the larvae of the tiger-moth living in the grasses. The butcher- bird is common, and always in evidence where he happens to be, showing off the handsome chestnut of his back on the highest spray, and scolding at human intrusion. Meanwhile we were come to the hill-top, and were passing along that high ridge road whence is an incomparable view from the Surrey and Kentish 8 The Faun and the Philosopher downs on the north and east to the South Downs on the south and west. " Where are we going ? ' I asked him, for he seemed to have assumed the office of leader. " I will show you my home," he said. He turned off the high road by a track along which I had difficulty in pushing my bicycle between heather tufts catching at its pedals. In the valley to which this led us the snipe were nesting, and now and then one rose and went away before us with its shrill call and twisting flight. Away on the other side of the valley was a large bird, circling and quartering close down over the heather — a Montagu's harrier. " How is it," he asked, " that there are so many of the snipe here — that the hawk does not get them all ? " He was not a naturalist, apparently, for he had to ask me the name of the hawk, which, to be sure, is not a common species. I said that this was a question too hard for me, but suggested the colouring of the snipe, wonder- fully protective, with the lines of yellow lying all The Man on the Ant-hill one way on the darker ground of the other feathers — just as the yellow grass-blades lie against the ground from which they spring — and I pointed out that though several had risen, almost at our feet, we had not seen one before it took to the wing. Then he came to his " home " — a caravan ; not of the more luxurious kind, in which people who commonly live among bricks and stone make holiday, but only a little better, perhaps more than a little cleaner, than the wandering tinker's. His horse was grazing, hobbled, at a little distance. Then he quoted, in the original Greek, a line of Menander, in appreciation of a quiet life. I will not attempt the Greek — accents become troublesome details (like Lord Randolph Churchill's decimal dots) in these days so distant from the Schools of Literce Humaniores. It may be given in Peacock's version : " How sweet to minds that love not sordid ways Is solitude ! " I took the hint and left him. io The Faun and the Philosopher As I came down the hill, I went a little out of my way to see how the ant-people were looking, after his brooding on them. They were settling down from the disturbance. Be- side their city lay a loose half-sheet of paper. I picked it up, and found on it in manuscript the following : RONDEAU TO RONDELETTE My Rondelette, dear dainty sprite, Stay while I tune my lute aright To yours ; for none so fain as I In all the world when you go by, Tripping with grace, on footstep light, With all the tricks of beauty dight, To music wrought for heart's delight — Come let us then a measure try, My Rondelette ! My muse has merit all too slight To match with song so rippling bright, Yet deign to hear a lover's sigh, Nay, scorn not my poor minstrelsy, Nor let my rugged rhyme affright My Rondelette. .. The Man on the Ant-hill u RONDELETTE TO RONDEAU Monsieur Rondeau, I much admire your eight-span song, Yet hardly know How my poor tripping feet would go, Striving to keep the pace so long. I fear me they would fall far wrong, Monsieur Rondeau. • Your Rondelette Dances to measure far more free. Sure she would fret, Fettered to tune so strictly set, Nor would your step with mine agree. I fear me I could never be Tour Rondelette. Is this, then, what he was doing, that he should be so absorbed as to notice not one of the several myriads of ants by which he was being crawled over ? If he were a poet it might account for much. And in that case, who was his Ronde- lette if, as seemed likely, himself were the Rondeau of his verse ? There were questions to be asked. CHAPTER II THE PTERODACTYL "IT/^HEN a man who has much the aspect of a gipsy, his clothes not very much more fashionable, and his habitation a horse- drawn van, quotes you, with an accent that sounds slightly trans-Atlantic, a line of Menander in the original Greek, you are naturally a little surprised, and when that line happens to be an emphatic appreciation of solitude you take the hint and leave him. All this had occurred to mc in connection with the strange being whom I first met sitting on that ant-hill on Ashdown Forest. I had parted with him at his van on one side of the vale in which the snipe mostly nest, and on the other side the beautiful grey hawk, the Montagu's harrier,* went quartering * This bird has ceased, I think within the last five years, to visit the forest. 12 The Pterodactyl 13 all the ground in its quest for a dinner for self and family. We saw nothing of that family. There is no doubt at all that they were there somewhere, the children probably only in the potential form of eggs, and the wife crouched in her nest in the heather, excellently blended in her colour with the covert about her, sitting on them. This, the brave grey fellow that we were watching in his airy circlings, was the male. The female is in much darker garb, as it behoves a modest lady to be if she is to be safe and not too conspicuous when she is about her domestic business. Many people have wondered how it is that this and other kinds of harrier seem to be incessantly hunting and yet never catching. They are for ever circling over the ground, but never, or " hardly ever," make a pounce down, as if they had found a quarry. I had mentioned this to my friend, if a man is to be called so who, on first acquaintance, quotes you a line on the pleasure of being quit of you, and together we had watched the bird for a while, yet never saw it pounce once. Is 14 The Faun and the Philosopher it possible the explanation can be that, as it glided low (and all its flight was at a low level, over the heather) it reached down a long-taloned leg now and again, and made a clutch ? It might well do that and we not see it, for such move- ment would be hard to detect, and, besides, such a stretch out of the leg would be covered from our view by the body and the long wings. It is possible ; and it is certain that the harriers have rather longer legs, such as might serve them for the purpose, than most of the birds of prey. It is said — this I have not seen, so must give it as hearsay — that when the male harrier has at length found a quarry that he thinks worth taking home to his wife — for he is a good spouse, and it is to him that she looks for bringing her dinner while she is sitting at home on the eggs or the new-born babies — he hovers in the air above her, holding the prey, as all hawks commonly do while they fly, in his talons, and drops it down to her. She, on her part, watching, does not wait till it comes right down to her, but jumps up off the nest, helping her- The Pterodactyl 15 self with a strong wing-beat or two, catches the prey in mid-air, and sinks down again with it, contented, to the nest. This must be a pleasant thing to see — it is the manner in which the males of other predatory kinds deliver the quarry to their mates — but not everyone has the luck. Two days after I had quitted my friend I met him again on the forest ridge. " You went away very quickly the other evening," he said. I pointed out to him that quotation of a verse on the joy of solitude was not the way to invite companionship. " It was an invitation to you to share the solitude," he said. After that there was nothing for it but I must go down with him again to his wheeled home. " What did you call it ? " I asked, for he said some word I thought I must have mistaken as he asked me to visit it again. " The Pterodactyl," he said, with a laugh, " that is what I call it. Oh, it is not because 1 6 The Faun and the Philosopher it has wings that it can spread like one of those old beasts ; it is no flying machine ; only — of course you know that all this forest ridge forma- tion is of the time of the pterodactyl and the rest of the great lizards — well, I will show you." He opened the door of the van, and to the further wall of it was affixed the most perfect fossilized and preserved head and jaws of this wonderful flying lizard of the olden time that I ever had seen. " They were opening out a quarry," he explained, " in Tilgate Forest, where I happened to be, and actually, as I was looking on, the workmen came on this. There were other bits of it — remains of the winged fingers, and so on — but this was the largest and most perfect. I set it up there as a sign — so you see." " Curious, isn't it ? ' he said, when I had admired the head without the least suspicion, " to think of all the stuff we're walking over being crawled over and lived in by all these great fossil things ? " He knew something about the geology, and The Pterodactyl 17 that the Wealden Clay strata of Ashdown Forest and all those unheaved ridges were laid down during the phase of evolution at which the great lizards lived and Nature was busy forging birds on the lines indicated by the archaeopteryx, and mammals by a switch off to quite a different line of cell-grouping and limb-making. " Wouldn't it be splendid," he said, " if we could see the pterodactyl and the archaeopteryx chasing each other now over the waves of the forest — over the groves of the tree-ferns, that would be, I suppose ? " " The harrier has carried the power of flight further, I expect," I said. " Yes," he admitted, " but look at the size of the other things — like the Satan of the ' Paradise Lost.' However, I have been watching that harrier, as you call it. Nothing could be more wonderful or more beautiful. I have written some lines about it." " Ah ! " I said. " I had a suspicion you were a poet." " Had you ? " he said. " I never had. I 2 1 8 The Faun and the Philosopher might plead guilty to committing rhyme — nothing more." " I think I found something," I explained, " that you had been writing — at least I guessed it might be you — a sheet of paper. It must have tumbled out of your pocket when we hunted for those ants." I looked at the fellow narrowly as I said it, and under his tan I was sure that I saw the lean cheek go a little ruddy. " Ah, yes," he admitted carelessly. " Yes. Did you — did you like it at all ? " That hardly seems a fair question to ask a man at any time, and in this particular case it put me into an uncommon quandary because, in point of fact, though I appreciated a certain skill and fancy in the verses, I did not like the highly artificial form into which the thing was cast. Poets are especially a tribe impatient of criticism, but this fellow had more or less denied his profession, confessing not even an intermittent suspicion that he might be a poet. It struck me that possibly with him the honest way might be best. The Pterodactyl 19 " I'm afraid," I said, " I don't know enough about it to judge — about the form, I mean. Of course, I see it is a pretty fancy. What do you call that sort of verse ? Is it a rondeau ? " He told me that it was, conforming to all rules of the rondeau. He told me, too, what a rondelet was, of shorter paces so that his Rondelette might well fear she could not fall into step with his Rondeau. He seemed to be acquainted with all the tricky metres of Provence. But what he did not tell me, though I threw out notes of interrogation under more or less decent disguise, was who his Rondelette might be. It was a question I hardly cared to ask him straightly. He took my criticism of his verse with a placidity that was less than flattering. " I see," he said, " you want something not so strictly formal. You don't like the rules." " Well," I admitted, " perhaps." It was a question I had never considered. " Perhaps you like Walt Whitman," he suggested. 20 The Faun and the Philosopher "Oh, well, he!" I said. "That is the opposite extreme." " Quite so," he admitted, " and perhaps you will say that he has no poetic form at all." " Yes," I said, " I think I should." " And so should I," he agreed, " although I adore him. I never can discover his form, whatever it is. But have you ever read any of his prose ? " I shook my head. " Do," he said. " It is worth it, and when you have, although you may have been telling yourself when you were reading his poetry (so-called) that surely it was only musical prose, you will find yourself discovering that it does differ from his verse, so the verse must have some sort of form latent, if only one could catch it." That seemed to exhaust Walt Whitman for the moment. He dived into his pocket, after a moment of silence. " I've been trying to write about the harrier," he said, thrusting a bit of paper, as if he badly despised it, into my The Pterodactyl 21 hand. " You won't find too much form or artifice in that." Grey wings sweeping the heather in flight, Wonder of movement, colour, line, Wonder of ease in their mastery, Pearl-grey wonder of poising wings. Low in the heather, crouching, hid, Beetle and insect, fledgling bird — Comes a shadow across their sky : Clutching talon and eagle eye. Death to the beetle and nestling bird, Rending death in the talon's grip — A grey hawk sailing athwart the sky, Wonder of wings in their mastery. I was glad it was not for me to pass judgment on this pure impressionism. It seemed much more of a piece with the generally unfinished look of all about him that he should not be at the common pains either to make the lines rhyme regularly, or to keep a blank verse, than was that patched and powdered piece, " his Rondelette." He hardly knew the name of a British bird, 22 The Faun and the Philosopher but I soon found that he knew their habits a great deal better than some who have learnt the names in more than one language. We agreed that it was curious that we do not have many of the hawk kind ranging our forest's open spaces. Kestrels and sparrowhawks nest in the warrens. As we went along we saw a sparrowhawk pass down with its swift, glancing flight into one of the woodlands. It disappeared among the trees, and we went in after it, wan- tonly trespassing, to seek its nest. There were several untidy parcels of twigs and odds and ends in one or other tree, any of which might be it, but the trees were of smooth columnar stems, unclimbable without climbing-irons, and the hawk did not give its secrets away by flitting out from any one of them. It was quite certain, however, that the nest was close at hand, for a green woodpecker, clinging up against the red stem of a Scotch fir, kept up that kind of cheep- ing cry which it only makes when it is in a state of high emotion about something. No doubt that sparrowhawk was there — in the neighbour- The Pterodactyl 23 hood, probably, of the woodpecker's young ones. It is not to be thought that the pecker would have made such a fuss if her young were nestlings still, for the nest is always far down in a hollow tree where no sane sparrowhawk would go diving for it. Most likely they were out of the nest, and running about on the trunks and branches, and their mother was afraid, very reasonably, that the fierce little hawk would make a dash at one. It is even possible that he had made his dash already, and that it was an accomplished loss that the gay mother with the yellow-green back and scarlet crest was bewailing in a shrill pibroch. But besides the sparrowhawks and kestrels we do not see many of the birds of prey ; and that is a wonder, because on the white cliffs of this same fair county of Sussex, twenty miles or so away, there are peregrines nesting, and there is no " legal maximum " limit to the speed of these splendid fliers. " It amuses me sometimes," he said, as we came empty away from the quest of the 24 The Faun and the Philosopher sparrowhawk's nest, " to try imitations of the nature sounds in verse. Did you ever try ? ' I shook my head. " What sounds ? " I asked. " I was born," he said, " with one of them filling all the air about me — close beside the Falls of Niagara." I had caught a tang in his talk which made this less of a piece of news than he had imagined. " On the Canadian side," he added. CHAPTER III SUSPECT T SHOULD like to see more of your poems," I said, the next time I saw him — this strange acquaintance. " Will you show me some ? " Perhaps I should say, though it makes no difference, that this " next time " was the best part of a twelvemonth later. In the meantime all the dreary winter months had come and gone and spring and the sun were back again. " Oh, yes," he said carelessly. " You'll scarcely believe it possible, but papers some- times publish and occasionally even pay for what I write. Therefore I'm long past shyness." " How do editors address your letters — ' Temple of Pan ? ' " 25 26 The Faun and the Philosopher " Too large an address ! It might trouble any postman other than Mercury. But since you talked of the god, read this." He had been rummaging while he spoke among papers in the hold of a big leathern envelope which he used, as he showed me, indifferently as a portfolio or as a cushion to sit on when the ground was wet. The manuscripts looked sat on, but they were legible still. " Love's challenge," the poem which he had given me was headed, and beneath the title, between inverted commas, was written : " And Pan laughed at the life of mortals, saying that it was no better than the seasons : like them, it came and went ; but Love challenged him, and said that Love had a secret for the hearts of men and women, by virtue of which winter was sweeter than spring, brighter than summer." " D'you know where that comes from ? " he asked, when he saw that I had read this. " Yes," I said, " I know," at which answer he was obviously surprised, and looked up at me with a laugh. Suspect 27 This was how the verses went : LOVE'S CHALLENGE PAN SPEAKS. " Fragrance of gorse in the breath of dawn, Note of the cuckoo, newly heard, Catkins of hazel — delicate, golden Meshes thrown on a sky of blue — Brush of wing of the first-come swallow, This is Spring." LOVE ANSWERS. " Light of the eyes that haunt the vision, Lines of a face that is fair and dear, Curves of the lips that make for kisses, Words of love that seek reply, Touch of the soul through the touch of hand, This is Spring." PAN. " Scent of roses, heady as wine, Song-birds' chorus, the vault aglow, Shimmering haze in a noontide sun, Fervid hum of the questing bee, Pageant of flowers on path of green, This is Summer." LOVE. " Love at the noontide, fierce and yearning, Love fast held in the clinging fetter 28 The Faun and the Philosopher Sweet to bind, to be broken never, Lips that burn, and pulses throbbing, Life aquiver with passion's thrill, This is Summer." PAN. " Flying scud on a storm-swept sky, Whirling dance of the leaf's decay, Summer's green bespent and yellow, Voices mute, that late were singing, Nights that lengthen, and shortened day, This is Autumn." LOVE. " Locks grown grey, but hearts grown mellow, Golden rich with the hoarded store — Hopes and fears that the years have given — Wisdom's treasure in equal share Won by each and loaned to other, This is Autumn." PAN. " Naked bough on a leaden sky, Snowflake drifting, snowdrift's pall Shrouding earth, and the water's life Throttled fast by an iron frost, Cold that numbs, and death that threatens, This is Winter." Suspect 29 LOVE. " Hearts close-knit on the lifelong journey, Joy redoubled and sorrow halved, Pain scarce felt, for a loved one's pity, Days more dear as they draw to close, Welcome death, so it be together, This is Winter." " You have a wife," I commented, when I had read and appreciated the verses. " I haven't," he replied. " I see," I said, " this is only a sketch of your ideal of the married life." " Yes, I suppose you might put it like that." " And of course a cynic would say that it is because you are not married that you do put it so." " A cynic would say anything," he answered. He went on with his childish occupation of making a flute out of an elder bough. It occurred to me to ask him : " If these verses represent your idea of the married life, why in the world don't you marry ? " " I am thinking of it," he said. 30 The Faun and the Philosopher " Are you waiting for the right maid in the right mood ? " " No," he replied dryly, " for the right father- in-law in the right mood." " Oh ho ! That's the trouble, is it ? But why do you come down to Ashdown Forest to wait for him ? Isn't it rather far away ? " " On the contrary," he said, " it's quite close." For some foolish reason I had assumed, mo- mentarily, that London was the natural home of a father-in-law whose mood had to be waited on. " It's quite close," he repeated, and stared across the valley, where the heather blended into birches and Scotch firs on its opposite side. We were sitting, as we talked, on that highest ridge of the Forest which is, as it were, a chief backbone. It was half way up the steep gradient leading to this ridge that I had found him first, raced over by innumerable ants. A man so oblivious of outward happenings I had never seen in a sane state, except under anaes- thetics — which is scarcely a state of sanity. At Suspect 31 first I had no explanation of it to offer myself. Later when I found him a poet I believed him to be obsessed by the Muse to the point of irresponsibility. I had another idea now, as we sat on the hill-top and I followed his gaze into the mists on the valley's further side. It was just there that Dr. Erasmus Fisher had his cottage, in the centre of its small amenities of garden and paddock and woodland, perhaps forty acres in all, falling to and including the stream which ran through the fold of the valley and turned the mill-wheel a little lower down. Among the Doctor's most charming amenities was a very delightful and beautiful daughter, a true daughter of the gods, " divinely tall and most divinely fair." If there were anything in this conjecture, which went through my mind like a flash, I could very well imagine, further, that Erasmus Fisher, as a father-in-law in prospect, was one on whose moods a good deal of waiting might be done. I looked on the dark young man with much added interest in the light of this idea ; at the same time with a 32 The Faun and the Philosopher certain disappointment, for, no doubt, it was a declination from the heights to have to think that he whom I had endowed with the peculiar genius which alone can lead a tolerably sane man to the life of solitary converse with Nature was no more than a lover choosing this mode — after all, as I had to admit, the only obvious one in the circumstances — of being near the lady of his heart. It does not do to be indiscreet, or ask im- pertinent questions ; he did not seem disposed to more communication on the point, and I knew that I could satisfy my curiosity easily at the other end of the love-linked chain — the feminine termination — always, that is, suppos- ing my idea to be a right one, that it really did end in the garden of my learned friend. So all I said to the hero of my imagined drama was : " If these are your views, why did you quote me that line of Menander, in praise of solitude, at our first meeting ? " " Dear me," he replied, " surely of all men in the world a lover may have moods. There are Suspect 33 melancholy truths in the maunderings of the melancholy Jacques. Besides, I have to confess, though I appreciate your company and dream of some day having a companion whom I may always wish to have by me, that solitude really is the condition which I prefer normally." He was beginning to reinstate himself. " You won't mind my suggesting," I said, " that there's another side to the question. D'you think you'd be a companion for another, of the other sex ? " " You mean, you think I'd run away from her ? " " I can imagine your doing it," I said. If my conjecture was right, I believed I had a motive which was not impertinent in wanting a little more knowledge of this strange being. " I can't quite make you out, you know, nor your poems either. They seem to be cast in such a variety of form, and you don't seem set in any particular form either. Form does not interest you ? " "Oh, form!" he said. "Well, that is not 3 34 The Faun and the Philosopher the most trying part of poetry, I should think, nor of life either. I can be formal enough if you like. I even wrote a sonnet once." " Indeed ? " I said. " Yes — did it ever strike you about a sonnet that it's rather like a hard boiled egg ? " I replied that the likeness had not occurred to me. " Oh, yes," he said. " It's only a very little thing, but by the time you've finished it, you feel as if you'd been through a good deal." " Do you mean writing or reading it ? " " Either," he said. " I don't know which is worse. There is only one thing that I lack," he was rummaging in the leathern bag as he spoke, " to be a poet, a very little thing — only the sacred emotion. No more than that. Here," and he emerged with a paper from the bag, " is a Wordsworthian sonnet, is it not ? And as you know I have made rondeaux, ron- delets, all sorts of music, especially the soulless sort. I can live between walls and under a roof if you want me to." Suspect 35 This was his Wordsworthian sonnet : Wordsworth, who proved the subtlest worth of words In music simple as the stir of trees Borne by a light wind down the flowery leas To blend with carol of the lovesick herds Wooing the maidens while they set the curds, All Nature's moods were thine — the little breeze That ripples placid meres to mimic seas, The cloud upon the mountain, song of birds, And daffodils that dance beside the lake, In light that never was in heaven or earth, More blithely golden for thy singing's sake. Queen Mab, attendant on thy happy birth, Hath twice blest us, that we her gifts may take Of thee, her child, great teacher of words' worth. " Now haven't you a feeling as if you had a hard boiled egg about you somewhere ? " he asked, as he saw my eyes fall to the last line. " By the by, do milkmaids ' set curds ' ? " " I haven't a notion," I replied. " They had to," he explained. " You see the first line had to end in ' words,' to get the point, and there aren't many rhymes to ' words.' The sonnet form — hang form — demanded three. You know the memoria technica for the rhymes 3* ' 36 The Faun and the Philosopher — ' abba, abba, cde, cde.' The maids had to set curds. I'm sure I don't know how they do it. But it amuses me to try all the rhymes — always excepting the terza rima. I agree with the Ettrick Shepherd as to that : it's ' an infernal measure.' " " You spoke about the emotion needed to boil verses into poetry," I said. " Do you go to Wordsworth for emotion ? Are not your Shelleys, Swinburnes, Byrons, the fellows to apply to for that ? " " Think so ? " He asked this in the high nasal tone, the trans-Atlantic tang coming out strong. " I should say not. I should say it showed the finer sense to get your emotion out of a primrose than out of fiery sunsets and lurid loves." CHAPTER IV THE PROFESSOR "^\OES anyone remember — or, should I rather say, is it possible that anyone has forgotten — a dramatic happening which fluttered the scientific world more than a little a good few years ago ? The British Associa- tion was holding its annual meeting at a certain North Devonian watering-place renowned for its fine air and picturesque surroundings, and one day, in the midst of their learned labours, its members were electrified by the news that one of the most eminent of their number, Professor Fisher, had vanished into the unknown. No trace of him was to be found. The next day the newspapers were full of the news, and such Headlines as " Mysterious Disappearance of a Savant," " Dr. Erasmus Fisher vanishes 37 38 The Faun and the Philosopher into space," and others yet more lurid were printed in heavy type. " A clue," as it is called, was indicated by the fact that one of the local fishermen was clamorous in lamentations about a missing boat. It was inferred that the Pro- fessor, for reasons best known to himself (like all his reasons) had taken the boat, rowed out to sea, for the boat was without a sail, and had drifted no man could say whither. The weather was gloriously calm, so that there was no apprehension that his boat could be swamped or himself drowned, but on the other hand there was no evidence at all to show that he had taken with him anything either to eat or to drink. Those who best knew the Professor and his absent-minded habits deemed it in- finitely more probable that he had quite over- looked these common practical precautions. Just about thirty-six hours after the dis- covery of the Professor's disappearance a coast- guard noticed a small boat drifting towards shore on a desolate beach some fifteen miles or so to the south-west of the little town where The Professor 39 the British Association was assembled. At first the coastguard thought that the boat was empty, but when he had succeeded in wading and swimming out to it, he found a man lying in the boat's bottom, to appearances dead. It was Dr. Fisher. In all likelihood another hour of exposure and exhaustion would have extinguished the spark of life, but the coast- guard naturally had some whisky with him, and before a doctor could be brought the Professor was sitting up, scolding the mariner for saving him, concealing his gratitude, if he was conscious of such a sentiment, under a cynicism which must have revolted the simple man who had done the world what he no doubt had already begun to consider the ill-service of bringing back to it such an ingrate. Later it appeared as if the Professor realized that he had not acted his role with grace, for he said to Mrs. Fisher, " I ought to be grateful to the man, no doubt — he gave me whisky — but, after all, there is a saying that one can only die once, but I — I had been through the trouble of it, 40 The Faun and the Philosopher you see. It'll have to be done all over again now, some day. If he'd left me alone I should just have gone out quietly — all the troublesome part of it was over." " But how did you come to be in the boat at all ? Why did you row out like that, with- out water or a bit of bread or anything ? " " Ah, Maria, you would have rowed any- where, done anything, if you'd been as weary of it all as I was. If I'd heard once more, only once, that dreadful phrase ' the organism and its environment,' I believe something in me would have broken. I had to go somewhere where those sounds wouldn't happen, so I went towards the mid-Atlantic. That's how it was." No doubt he was never, after that really very terrible experience, quite the same in mind or in body as he had been before. It was from that time that his own family liked to date the beginnings of much that was not quite natural in his talk and ways ; but if truth were to be told, the last things of which it had ever The Professor 41 been possible to accuse him was a normal view of life. His outlook was peculiarly his own, always individual, perhaps distorted, but always interesting, always with a ray of penetrating light behind the clouds of whim and paradox. All through his life his mental steps had balanced perilously on that narrow line that hardly divides genius and insanity. Soon after his marine adventure the Professor left London and took a house in Hampshire. The learned world was very much fluttered by the withdrawal of one of its greatest figures, for he did his best to cut all his communications with old friends and old lines of study. But his fame and its recognition pursued him even there, and would not leave him to the peace that he craved, even after he had buried in the churchyard near his Hampshire home his wife and his only son, and had come with Miss Mary — now all that was left him — to the even more complete solitude of the little house on Ashdown Forest. He had accepted with a perfectly indifferent 42 The Faun and the Philosopher and equal mind his appointment as member of as many learned societies as would have entitled him to write all the letters of the alpha- bet, with some used many times over, after his name. He never pretended to the least recollection of the societies to which he belonged. It was only at the suggestion of conferring a baronetcy on him as a reward for his services to science that he was found to turn restive when he realized that it would involve an appearance before his sovereign and some elaborate ritual. He firmly declined an honour which he did not want and which would entail participation in such ceremonies. " The idea," he declared, " is babyish of one man dressing himself in a particular fashion in order to come into another's presence. It is not decent nor in keeping with human dignity that one man should bow and make himself ridiculous by going through various gestures before another. The whole thing is a silly survival from the barbaric state." Had he said that no title could enhance the The Professor 43 fame which his contributions to science had earned him, he would have stated the case accurately, but in phrase which it was not conceivable that he would use. I had an idea of what the girl's life must be, the patience and unselfishness that it demanded, for I had known the family well in old days when Mrs. Fisher, the mother, from whom, no doubt, Miss Mary derived her sweetness and goodness, was alive and suffering under the Professor's petulant, sardonic tongue. Clifton Fisher, a boy of brightest promise, had been alive then too. He had much of his father's brilliancy, and something of his father's addiction to sarcastic speech, but at twenty-two years of age a galloping consumption took him off and left his bereft father more embittered with life than ever. No one else was admitted to their family circle on quite the same terms as myself, a privilege which I think I owed to a certain gift of silence that the Professor appre- ciated more than any other in the people whom he had to meet. I had also a boyish appreciation 44 The Faun and the Philosopher of the incisiveness of his talk, which, no doubt, he was quick enough to perceive and still human enough to relish. As a silent on- looker it had been my fortune to be present at many a painful scene. Mrs. Fisher, even then not in strong health, had gone to the village one morning before breakfast with Miss Mary, at that time hardly more than a child. There was nearly a foot of snow on the ground. The Professor was impatiently looking for them on their return. " Why did you not send somebody ? " he asked. " It is ridiculous your going out in such weather." " I had no one to send, Erasmus. Whom could I have sent ? " " There is such a being as Clifton, is there not ? " " Oh, Clifton was so busy over his books " — (he was reading for Greats at the time) — " and there were one or two things you wanted. I could not trust anyone else to get them." The Professor 45 " Do you think no one but yourself can get a thing at a village shop ? " " Well, dear," Mrs. Fisher said meekly, " I did it for the best." " The last excuse is always the worst," the Professor answered. " Do not come near me, please," he added, shivering and drawing back as she came in. " The snow is all about you." He was very susceptible to the cold, and did not leave the house while the snow was lying. Mrs. Fisher passed into the breakfast-room where Clifton was reading with his toes on the fender. " Move away, Clifton ; allow your father to come to the fire." " Really, Maria," the Professor said, " I am not so exceedingly stout that I require clear four yards to myself before the fire." " I was afraid perhaps Clifton was annoying you, taking up so much room." " Nothing is so annoying as to be made the victim of obtrusive unselfishness." " Are there no eggs, Maria ? " he asked presently, when we were seated at breakfast. 46 The Faun and the Philosopher " I went to all the shops for eggs yesterday, but I could not get any." " Did you go to the ironmonger's ? " " No — of course not. At the ironmonger's they would not " " Then why do you say you went to all the shops ? " Mrs. Fisher only sighed and sipped her weak tea. " Pass your father the salt," she whispered to Clifton, " and the toast." " Maria," said the Professor, " if you wish me not to hear you when you give a secret in- junction of that nature to Clifton, you had better ask him to go out of the room with you. On the other hand, if I am to be permitted to hear it, it would be less troublesome if you spoke in natural tones." The poor woman sighed again. " I am very sorry," she said. " I meant it for the best." " My God, Maria ! " the Professor ex- claimed in a sudden outbreak of intense irritation. He checked himself as suddenly and said in his The Professor 47 usual colourless way, " Few things are more maddening than a well-intentioned person." Silence, as blank as the silence of the snow outside, fell on our breakfast party. Presently I saw Miss Mary, from her seat beside her father, slide a timid little hand upon his knee. The Professor looked at her, and for a moment his eyes fell before the girl's. Then, under cover of the table, he laid his hand on hers and pressed it gently. She smiled with a delightful little flush and looked round furtively. Mrs. Fisher had seen nothing of this drama. Clifton ate his bread and marmalade with the consciousness of one who has seen but pretends that he has not ; and very soon the Professor rose, saying, " Come, let us throw out some crumbs for the birds." Presently Mrs. Fisher called Mary away to read the Church lessons for the day with her, and some of the prayers, for it was a Saint's day. From the door Mary turned back. " Do come too, Clifton," she said. " It would please mother so," 48 The Faun and the Philosopher " Go away, Mary, don't talk nonsense. I am busy," he answered. So Mary and her mother went away sadly. In a minute, however, something probably happened down in Clifton's heart. " After all," he said to his father, in a kind of shame- faced apology, " it isn't much fun looking out at the snow," and he went after his mother and Mary into the next room. The Professor, left alone with me, stood watching the birds picking at the crumbs. He smiled gently at their ways. He sighed wearily as at length he turned away. " Poor Maria ! ' he said to himself ; and taking Clifton's Livy from the table became absorbed in the history of the Imperial Republic. He had quite for- gotten that I was there. CHAPTER V THE CYNIC * I A HE scene described in the last chapter is typical of many that I had to see in the days of long ago. Then heavy blows had fallen on the warped gifted man — most grievous of all, maybe, the loss of his son whom, I know, he idolized, though even at him his tongue was sometimes like an asp's. Even before that had come the death of his gentle wife : and just what his feeling was for her, with whom very surely he had not dealt tenderly, I did not know till years later when I learned my lesson from Miss Mary turning on me tigress-like because I dared to sympathize with her about the diffi- culties of her life with her father. " I should have thought you of all people might have understood." It was less the words 49 4 50 The Faun and the Philosopher than the look which came with them that made me feel myself a very worm. " Of all people your father is the man I never have understood," I said. " Evidently." That word came out with a stab just as her father himself might have delivered it. Then her own — or was it her mother's ? — nature reasserted itself and she said quickly, " I'm sorry. I know he's impossible to understand. May I tell you a story ? ' I said I wished she would, and she did. " Once," she said, " when we lived in Hamp- shire, about a month or two after mother died, I thought I heard some strange noise in the house at the dead of night. You'll remember, Clifton and I had rooms leading out of one another, so I went in and woke him and told him. Nonsense,' he said, ' it's the wind.' No, it isn't really,' I said, ' I quite dis- tinctly heard — hark ! ' " Clifton was wide awake in a second, then. He'd heard it too. a < «... < The Cynic 51 " ' That's no wind,' he whispered, listening. ' That's the front door.' " In another second there came a gentle sound of crunching upon the gravel outside. Clifton leapt from the bed and peered out, drawing the blind cautiously aside. ' It's father,' he ex- claimed, leaving the window, and putting on some clothes as quickly as possible. ' Where can he be going at this time ? — He must be sleep-walking.' '"Oh, Clifton,' I said. 'What are you going to do ? ' " ' I must go and see what he does, where he goes.' " Then, in a strangely incomplete costume, he went as fast as he could down the stairs — of course, all the rest of it I must tell you just as he told me — he went down the stairs and out into the frosty night. The moon was brilliant. At first, however, he saw nothing. But he knew the road on which father had started, and, run- ning with stealthy speed, soon caught sight of him on the moonlit way. Clifton said that 4* 52 The Faun and the Philosopher father was walking at his normal pace, as if he were on a common midday stroll. He began to think of stories about the danger of waking sleep-walkers, and, since he was uncertain whether father were sleeping or awake, deter- mined to keep behind and watch him. " On nearing the first houses of the village, father turned to his left, off the main road. And then — Clifton told me — his heart gave a strange throb, and a mistiness came to his eyes and a choke to his throat. It seemed to him, all at once, that he knew where father must be going, for it was the path leading to the little churchyard. " It was only two days before that I'd said to Clifton, as we looked at the stone above mother's grave : " ' Father has never been here since mother was buried. Don't you think that's strange ? ' And all Clifton had said was ' I don't know.' " I always think, you know, that Clifton understood father better than I did. In some ways he was so like him. The Cynic 53 " But now it appeared that father had been there. Clifton said that he went, as one very familiar with the way, through the little swing gate, closing it noiselessly behind him, straight to mother's grave. He leaned his arms upon the upright stone of the next grave and looked down upon the slab which they had put over mother. " Clifton stood at the swing gate, uncertain how to act, and watched. He saw father bend his face down on his crossed arms and he heard a groan come through the still night air. Then he couldn't bear it any more. He went through the gate and towards the bowed figure, with its white hair glistening in the moonlight — oh, can't you see it all ? At what moment father became aware of his presence, he couldn't tell ; but when he was within five yards or so, father lifted his face off his crossed arms and said, quite as if he had known that Clifton would be there, < Well, Clifton ? ' " * Father ! Father ! ' was all that Clifton could say. 54 The Faun and the Philosopher " He stretched out one hand, while, with the other, he dashed the tears from his eyes. He said that father took his hand and pressed it, but neither of them spoke any more than that, at first. I suppose they understood each other. Then they began to walk slowly up and down, side by side, upon the walk between the graves. Presently father came to a pause again before mother's grave. He laid his hand on Clifton's shoulder. Then he said in a low but very distinct voice : ' It is a terrible thing to think that you have killed another — above all one whom you loved.' " ' Oh father ! ' Clifton exclaimed. " ' Yes, one whom you loved,' he repeated, with slow thoughtfulness, as if he was replying to his own words. ' For that is love. It is those whom we have always had with us, ever- present, with many trivial interests in common — it is those whom we miss when they are lost to us, far more than those with whom our higher, bigger interests — those interests which are only occasionally uppermost — were shared. The Cynic 55 I loved that woman — that woman who is lying in her grave here, your mother. I could not have helped loving her, she was so good to me ; but I did not know that I loved her, or how I loved her, until I had killed her. Yes, I killed her,' he repeated, in answer to Clifton's startled exclamation, for Clifton had turned and looked at him in amazement. He wondered, he said, whether father could be mad, but his voice was as quiet as ever and his face had the same sad grey look all the time. ' I killed her as cer- tainly as if I had taken a knife and thrust it into her heart, but the stabs by which I killed her were word stabs. I know,' he went on, ' that they called it hysteria and heart-weakness — it may have translated itself into all that on the physical side ; but in its origin I feel — I know — cruelly well — that my words were the cause of it. I could not help it, Clifton, I could not help it,' he repeated, with a kind of note of pleading in his voice. ' Let me tell you a story,' he said — ' let us walk up and down — it is frosty, but the air is so still and dry that it is not cold 56 The Faun and the Philosopher — and to-night I can talk to you. I may never be able to again. To-morrow I shall be my other self again, and so on perhaps for ever ; but to-night I am what I like to think is my real self. " ' One does not grow all at once to be such as I am,' he said, then. ' When I was a boy, I — grown so cynical that I see kindly emotions in others wither before my words — I was ex- cessively sensitive — morbidly sensitive, it may be. I was so fearful of wounding another that often I kept silence from a most obvious remark, and often had the credit, therefore, of stupidity. Often, too, I used to wonder how others could say the things they did, or how those to whom they were said could bear them. As I grew up I began to dream dreams and see visions, as fanciful children do. At that point began the curse that has blighted me. I was checked, my visions ridiculed, myself made to seem absurd to amuse a company. From that moment the ice began to freeze over my heart. So it has grown, thicker and thicker, though with The Cynic 57 occasional efforts to break it. Yet always, when my heart thawed its way through, the ridicule calloused and fixed it again more stonily than ever. Then I began to worship this futile intellect of mine, and your mother worshipped it too. With the worship of the intellect came the final cast-iron coating of the ice. It de- lighted me to sear the hearts, of all who still had hearts to reach, by the words of cheap sarcasm which found their way to my lips too readily. I believe I loved your mother some- what as an Indian loves the victim whom he keeps for days alive over the slow fire gloating on his tortures. I was your mother's torturer. I killed her ; and yet I loved her. Oh, Clifton,' he said, ' it is not for no purpose that I have told this story to you ; not only that my load may be lightened by your sharing it — there is a deep wisdom in that Romish fashion of con- fession — but also as a warning to yourself — for you too have this gift of the intellect which may so easily become a curse ; and I have seen indi- cations in you which made me think it possible 58 The Faun and the Philosopher that you might be misled to follow my course. I pray you, my boy, check the sardonic word on your lip, while there is time ; think how it may sear the heart, look upon me as your warning — on me at this moment bowed over the grave of the woman I loved — and killed ; and when I say the sardonic word which shall blight the sympathy in your heart, Clifton, think of me, if you can, not as the cynical old Professor of Science, but as the poor human thing that you have found out in this place to-night. Bless you, Clifton. Go home now, my boy. I shall come soon.' " It was that following of father in the chill night that was the beginning of Clifton's trouble of which he died not a year after mother's death." When Miss Mary had told the story I felt that I understood her father better than before, and herself too. CHAPTER VI PIECES OF OAT-CAKE TT was not many days after my talk with my gipsy friend about forms of verse that, under spur of curiosity, I did myself the honour of calling on Dr. Fisher and his daughter. Curiosity apart, it was a constant joy to me to meet this most learned and most whimsical of men. There was a continual interest in specu- lating on the mood in which you might find him, yet there were few moods in which his conversation was not a feast. One o'clock, for luncheon, was the best hour, if you wanted the Professor to talk, and it is hardly conceivable that anyone, knowing him, should not desire it. He was in great spirits that day, that is to say in great wrath, which came to much the same. " Germany," he said — it was long before the 59 60 The Faun and the Philosopher war, but Germany was the object, for the moment, of his indignation and invective — " is a menace to everybody. She is the most effective nation in the world, just because she is the nation of the stupidest individuals. She is a nation of specialists, that is why she is effective. In Germany a man isn't a student and a man of the world and a man of business and an artist and an athlete all at once : he is one or the other, and he does his one job extra- ordinarily well — inevitably. An Englishman tries to be all these at once — Jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But for stupidity, outside his special subject, there's no human being equal to a specialist, and Germany's made of specialists — always except her Kaiser, who's a specialist in every subject. He's not stupid. But it's the stupidity of the people that's essential to the efficiency of a nation — a modern nation, when life's so complex and no man can see, properly look at and study, more than one facet of it." " You really believe the possibility of a German invasion of England ? " I asked. Pieces of Oat-cake 61 " I'm a Sagoo," he said, fixing me with an eye of scorn, as if to say that no one but a con- genital idiot would ask such a question. " A what ? " I inquired, and I knew that a smile beginning to curl about my face was only checked by the reproving eye of the divinely tall and divinely fair daughter opposite. " Do you not know what that is ? S.A.G.W. — pronounce the ' W ' like the terminal W in Welsh names, such as Aberedw — Society for the Assassination of German Waiters." " Poor devils ! Why ? " I asked. " Why ! " he repeated acidly. " Don't you know that the country's full of German waiters ? ' — (" Yes, I know that," I interpolated) — " and that every one of these German waiters is a soldier," he went on, " that he has his appointed place and duty in case of an outbreak of war, that he knows exactly what he has to do, has only to go and take up his functions ? The papers write, and you talk, about the possi- bility of invasion by Germany — I tell you the army of invasion doesn't need to come, a very 62 The Faun and the Philosopher effective nucleus of it is here now — in the waiters." I said that I had heard something of the kind before. But how about the Sagoos ? " Each member of the society," he said, " has sworn, on admission, that at the first declaration of war he will assassinate a waiter. Not any waiter, you will understand, but each member is told off to one particular waiter, each waiter is a marked man by a certain member, each waiter is given over to a certain member, so to say, for assassination. If the waiter moves — say from the Metropole Hotel in London to the hotel at Newquay in Cornwall, the nearest member of the society who is disengaged is notified of it and this waiter is given over to him, as his charge, for instantaneous assassination on the first declaration of hostilities. The London member, who has hitherto been charged with the assassination of this waiter who has now gone to Cornwall, is now disengaged — his name is on the free list, and the next German waiter that comes into his neighbourhood will be Pieces of Oat-cake 63 assigned to him, unless, indeed, there happen to be any there already who are unassigned, in which case one of them would be given over to this member, without further delay. Of course there is bound to be a margin — here and there a few waiters whom we cannot find members in the immediate neighbourhood to take charge of, and here and there members without waiters assigned to them." " Poor lions that haven't got a Christian," I suggested. He glanced suspiciously at me, but I hope that I looked quite grave. " On the whole," he said, " it is wonderful how the supply and demand, so to speak, adjust themselves, how few members there are without a waiter in their charge and how few waiters unassigned." " And the mode of assassination ? " I asked. " That is left entirely to the discretion of each member. It was recognized that it was im- possible to lay down a general rule." " And no member has more than one waiter assigned to him ? " 64 The Faun and the Philosopher " That is a strict rule." " He can't, by paying a double subscription, for instance, get two waiters given him ? " Once more I had to stand fire of his glance of suspicion, and bore it, but he had no more to say on the subject, and I was much at a loss to know whether this Society of Sagoos had a real existence, or whether he was only, as my schoolboy nephew would say (and equally, I am sad to admit, my schoolgirl niece), " pulling my leg." He would be perfectly capable of it. On the other hand I could just as well believe him capable of being a moving spirit in a society such as he described. He was not to be judged by a normal standard. " There is a young fellow," I said, when the subject of Germany seemed exhausted — "have you seen him ? — camping out on the forest just across the ridge. He has a van, and so on." The Professor grumbled something of " A fool and the fresh-air treatment, I suppose," implying that he had not met my friend. Miss Mary said nothing, and it was really her answer Pieces of Oat-cake 65 that I wanted, though I had addressed the question to her father. I got it too, in spite of her not speaking and in spite of her lowering her face yet closer to her plate — got it in the most beautiful form imaginable. You see, she was anything but a type of the modern young lady — I mention this to excuse the blush, so greatly out of present fashion. The mid- Victorian, owing to the happily rare circum- stances of her bringing-up, was more her type. Her complexion was of the lovely quality which flatters the peach when that rich fruit is chosen to compare with it. With her light golden hair crowning those features of perfect delicacy, and that colouring, of perfect delicacy likewise, but also of perfect health, the effect was alto- gether charming at any time. But then, as I asked this innocent question about my poet gipsy, the young lady answered it wordlessly, but with a flaming red signal. Just like a flood in her veins came the conscious warmth over all that lovely face and neck. It is only just that such fair beauty as Miss Mary's should 5 66 The Faun and the Philosopher have some drawback — otherwise the gifts of fortune were distributed too inequitably — and it is the penalty of such shell-like transparency as this that it lets any sharp quickening of the pulse be seen at once. So that was it. No wonder that this dark young man would sit on an ant-hill and let the insects — slave-makers, too ! — run all over him and yet know nothing of it, when his gaze was set across the valley to a boscage where a maiden of this incomparable charm could make such blushing confession at the mere mention not even of his name but of his van. " He's an interesting fellow," I told the doctor, who grunted. " He calls his van the Pterodactyl," I said, trying again for a brighter response. " Is it an aeroplane ? " he asked. I said " No," and he observed, " Then it's a silly name." I began then to tell him how it came to be given and he relented a little. " Bring the fellow here," he said at length, Pieces of Oat-cake 67 " if he's a friend of yours. I suppose that's what you're driving at." There was a sardonic gleam in his eye, as he spoke thus graciously, which, for the moment, I made no account of. " Isn't it for the lady to issue the invitation ? ' I asked, cruelly enough, of Miss Mary. Something, I never knew what, happened to a piece of oat-cake which she had on her plate. It fell to the floor. No other material scatters into so many fragments as oat-cake. When the stress of collecting the more important of them was over, she asked, " Can he sing ? " " Like a lark," I replied with a ready confidence which had no basis whatever except a few bars hummed by him below his breath. Such I had overheard. " He may come into the choir, if he can sing," Miss Mary said, with regal condescension. She was conductress of the village choir, and designed that it should take part (successfully, without question) in a choral competition of the villages round about. CHAPTER VII SAXON AND EGYPTIAN T'LL back mine agin' yourn to catch a rabbit for 'arf a crown." " Ho ! Yourn wouldn't have no chance." " Wouldn't he, then ! There's a touch of the whippet about mine ! " " A touch of most things, I should say, by the look of 'im, not forgettin' the mange." " 'E ain't got no mange, and as for the rest of it, he's got the best points of all the breeds, so there ! " That was the last word, for then, unfortu- nately, the two saw me, and whistled up the dogs whose rival merits for the catching of rabbits and other heroic achievement had been the subject of the dialogue. They began to go away forthwith, in the manner of their kind, with 68 Saxon and Egyptian 69 dropped heads and pocketed hands, in a chronic disposition to avoid observation, because their consciences were not absolutely crystal-clear of offence against some of our laws. But they did not mind me, when I called after and stopped them, because they knew that I too had offences to my own account, in the way of trespass com- mitted in what I was pleased to call " nature study." I was not the one to cast stones at them ; and there was therein a beautiful bond of sym- pathy between us. About one of the human advocates also there was a " touch of most things," maybe ; but the gipsy touch predominated in the straight black hair and the very dark eyes. The other was a blonde Saxon from the days before Norman William fell on his then ducal and later royal nose on the shingle — a nasty, gritty experience, no doubt — at Pevensey. Why, your dog," I said to the gipsy, wouldn't have a chance with Jim's. Jim's would gallop his legs off." He answered with that weary and wistful tt tt 70 The Faun and the Philosopher smile which the people of his race seem to keep by virtue of wandering through all the ages, " That's just what's the matter with him. He's too fast. He'd overrun the rabbit every time." I knew, and they knew that I knew, that they had not rightfully a rabbit to their name on which they might exercise their dogs or try their quali- ties. They knew that I knew that they did not even confine their attention to " the Lord's rabbits," as they would call them, that is to say, the rabbits which were to be found — rarely enough, just on account of Gipsy Joe and Saxon Jim, and the more or less " long dogs ' which were always slouching after them, with something of their own gait, or else scouring fleetly ahead and all around — on the open forest. The young men loved their dogs, but they did not keep them out of pure affection. The dogs earned their keep. And they earned it not only on the forest, where the land, being common, the rabbits might seem in a sense to be common property also, although it was realized, if you came to Saxon and Egyptian 71 think of it closely (but that was a mental effort which you avoided with some assiduity), that the rabbits belonged to the Lord of the Manor, by reason of his manorial right of " venery," or of killing the live wild things for his sport or support. But rights of venery are not looked after so closely now as in the days when this very tract of Ashdown Forest on which I met these boys with their dogs was given over by the Crown to great John of Gaunt as a hunting-ground. Up till that time it had never known any other law than the " Forest Laws," even by then much relaxed from that perhaps slightly excessive severity when, for the killing of a hart, a serf lost his life, a villein his skin, and a freeman his liberty. There are no harts — that is to say, red- deer stags — on Ashdown Forest now, though there are some fallow bucks and does. For a quarter of a century there have been few sum- monses for poaching on the forest, and it is un- likely that there ever will be ; and that is as much as to say that there never will be any game worth speaking of. Nor on the forest itself ^mamnaa mr- « -■ — t - r , -- - r- - i -, ■ - ,- , ..-i 72 The Faun and the Philosopher perhaps is there game enough even in the humble form of rabbits to enable the long-legged dogs of those long-legged boys to earn their keep ; but they knew that I knew that some at least of the rabbits which their swift dogs snatched and brought to them were born and bred on the small property of Dr. Erasmus Fisher, himself no sportsman, sure not to miss them, and most un- likely to be sufficiently stirred from his learned leisure to take any steps about it if he did. So, thus understanding each other, there followed what was to me a most interesting discussion — be it realized that I did not discuss, but merely listened, throwing in a word or a question now and then to start the hunt again when it seemed like coming to a check — about the qualities of dogs for rabbit-catching. That was a new light to me, to start with — the point which the gipsy made against the Saxon's dog — that he was too " limber," as he called him, apt to go so fast that he could not steady himself when he came to the rabbit, but would " overrun it most times, with just a snap at 'im and a miss, and then, by Saxon and Egyptian 73 time he'd stopped hisself and turned again, the rabbit would have turned again too, and like as not he'd have got to hole or got some place where you couldn't find 'im." From this calamity, as I was assured, the gipsy's dog was saved by his slower pace, sufficiently fast, even so, to catch a rabbit if a chance of a fair run were given, but yet able to steady itself when it came to the wretched bunny, so as to nip it, just as a cricketer fields a ball as he runs. Thence they went on to debate the points of breeding in their respective dogs ; and there were a great many points, for when it came to the detail of parentage in each successive generation it was apparent that the gipsy had not much overstated the case for or against the other's dog in saying that it " had a touch of most things." It was quite curious to note the intelligence, and even, in a familiar sense of the word, the science, with which these boys, Gipsy Joe and Saxon Jim, who had certainly done as little lessons as board-school methods would permit, and had forgotten as much as possible of that 74 The Faun and the Philosopher little since leaving school, spoke of the problems of heredity. They did not use that phrase, naturally, but they had the fullest comprehen- sion of very much that it stands for. Mendel's ideas of the dominant and recessive factors did not come into their philosophy, but outside the doctrines of Mendel and of Weismann they seemed to know practically all worth knowing that there is to know. They were not only full of theories (which seemed, so far as my ignorance of the subject took me, to be sound theories) about breeding for physical qualities, such as pace and nose, but also understood that the temperamental qualities — courage, pugnacity, or the lack of these, and so on — could be transmitted and modified by inheritance. They knew how to observe the result of their experiments and to draw right inferences from them, and they had a natural motive for making the observations with careful correctness, because a good dog meant more of Dr. Fisher's rabbits. It was not a purely philosophical or theoretical matter with them ; it meant food to those who did not find Saxon and Egyptian 75 food plentifully, and we all know that to be a sharpener of the wits. I spoke of it to Dr. Fisher himself afterwards, not concealing from him the fact that his own rabbits were probably the chief occasion of this exhibition of rustic intelligence. He laughed, without resentment about the rabbits, saying that the more the dogs and the boys caught the better for his carnations ; but as for the dis- cussion, he was immensely interested, and talked for an hour about it, making the text of his sermon the impossibility of such occasions for the exercise of intelligence to arise in the agri- cultural phase of man's development, and the improbability of it even in the pastoral. I did not agree with this last argument, because if there is one state of life in which problems of heredity would begin to suggest themselves it is surely that in which folk are raising sheep or cattle ; but as for the agricultural, it is likely indeed that it does not evoke as much intelli- gence as either the hunting stage, which is be- lieved to be earliest of all, or the pastoral, which j6 The Faun and the Philosopher succeeded it. It is certainly true that these boys, slouching about with their dogs, exhibit a great deal more mental activity, if you once get them to talk — which is not easy — than any agricultural labourer can show. After all, it is only natural, but, as with so much else in Dr. Fisher's sayings and writings, it was not until he had stated it that it seemed so clear. CHAPTER VIII faun's ears T WAS looking at a thorn-tree adorned with the wretched beetles, bumbles and a naked fledgling that a butcher-bird had stuck on it, wondering at the cruel mercies of Nature, when there came a voice, in a fine baritone, singing thus, round the corner of a birch clump : " Time goes fast and I go slow, Yet down the world together we go. I can't catch him and he can't catch me, But we'll both be caught by eternity." I went round the corner. My dark-faced friend was sitting there in the shade of his van, with his leathern portfolio on a three-legged stool beside him, a pencil in his hand, and papers that he was taking out of the desk, sorting and annotating. 77 78 The Faun and the Philosopher " I told her," I said, " that you could sing." " Told her ! " he stopped abruptly, in confusion. " Her ! " he said again. Then, " Sing ! Sing ! I can't sing." " You can," I insisted. " You must." " What do you mean ? " he demanded. " I told her you could sing. For my sake you must. She'll take you into her choir, if you'll sing." "Me! Sing! In a choir! In church!" he spoke in a staccato crescendo of astonishment, dismay, dissent. I laughed. " You'll have to," I repeated. " What is it you especially object to — her, the singing, the choir, or the church ? " " All," he replied. " No," he corrected himself, " I won't say all — I won't say her," he stammered again, but then said boldly, " I won't pretend I don't know whom you mean. But sing — me ! No. And choir — me ! No. And church — me ! No. Least of all church." " I didn't know," I said, " you were so irreligious." Faun's Ears 79 You never could tell how he would take any remark made to him. That was one of his charms. Another was that he had no sense of humour — I will not say that ; will say only that his sense of humour had no points of contact with my own. If I made a joke he took it with a sad seriousness. It is possible that the jokes of some are of a character to induce this mood in others, but I thought better of my own. It was with quite a sad seriousness that he an- swered now — this that I had not intended seriously : " I don't say that I'm irreligious. Fm only not church religious. I was brought up very church-religiously, but I'm afraid I've lost a good deal of faith of that sort." Above everything, certainly above his con- fession of faith, or no faith, I wished to hear about his up-bringing. I desired it in the interests not of my own mere curiosity, but in the interests of the divinely good and beauti- ful one at the cottage. Simplicity seemed to be the way with this man, so I said to him simply, " Tell me about your up-bringing." 80 The Faun and the Philosopher " Would you care to hear it ? " he asked, with a child's pleasure. " Of course you never can have thought I was English." " I was not able quite to make out about you," I said. " I don't wonder," said he. " I'm Canadian, half British and half habitant — that's French Canadian," he added for my enlightenment — " and I was brought up in a Scotch family within sound of Niagara Falls, and," he ended with disappointing suddenness, " that's all." " But your relations ? " I insisted. " I haven't any," he said, and said it in a way that made further questions hard to ask — I, at least, could not ask him further, for the moment. " Do you know your neighbour over there ? " I asked instead, nodding in the direction over the hill in which lay the Professor's refuge from his learned friends. " You mean Dr. Fisher," he said, not affecting to misunderstand. " I know him — yes — I have spoken to him. I saw him when he came to Canada with the British Association. And I Faun's Ears 81 travelled back in the same ship with him to this country." " And with his daughter ? " I said. " And with his daughter," he replied, like an echo, and without a tremor of his voice. This strange being could command himself. " I suppose you see her sometimes now," I said, " on the Forest ? " " Sometimes," he admitted. " I have only spoken to her once or twice — here, I mean — since we were on the ship." " But don't you admire her — is she not beautiful ? " I felt as if I could shake him, speaking of that divine girl without a word of appreciation. I had no need to shake him. His next words satisfied me : " She is the most beautiful thing ever made on this earth, and the best." He had spoken quite quietly, with conviction in his tone rather than emotion. If there was emotion in his words it was rather a note of sadness that they struck than of joy. I had a great desire to probe him as far as I might with 6 82 The Faun and the Philosopher the question that beset me, about his feeling for this being whom he designated, with perfect justice, as the best and the most beautiful, but I did not know how to begin. I asked him, instead, to describe Niagara, no doubt a large request, but he complied with it according to his ability. " Oh, yes," he said in answer to my natural next question, " I have written verses about it - — tried to put into words the indescribable — very futile. I'll show it to you some day, if you care." I did not want, for the moment, Niagara set to his verse, but I had my lead now for the question that I really did wish to ask. " I've been thinking a good deal," I said, " of that poem you showed me the other day — what was it ? — ' Pan's challenge and Love's answer ' — yes. I can't think how a man who can feel so can care to lead your life — solitary." " You mean you wonder I do not try more to get a woman to give me companionship — to marry me ? " Faun's Ears 83 " Yes," I said, " I do wonder." " You wouldn't," he replied, " if you knew," and there was the same sad note that I had heard before. " Knew what ? " I asked. He hesitated. " It does not matter," he said then, as if he were speaking to himself. " You understand me, or seem to. I would ask you to treat it as a confidence. You will respect that, won't you ? " " Of course," I said, much wondering what was coming, and if I wondered then, I wondered a great deal more when the revelation was made. I have said, when I described his first appear- ance, raced over by the ants, that his hair was curly. I do not know but what " wavy " would be a more aptly descriptive word. It was worn long, and went in curling waves back over his ears, covering them so that only the lobes were seen. I had noticed, when helping him to rid himself of the insects, that he drew away each time that I lifted my hand to his head to snatch an insect oil" it. He allowed my help gratefully 84 The Faun and the Philosopher except there. Now he put a hand up to each side of his head, thrust off the long wave of hair on either side and discovered two ears of a singularly abnormal shape. The lower portions were quite normal, only at the top they grew almost up to a peak. With his hair thus drawn away from them they gave his whole face a most unexpected, scarcely a human, look. " You see," he said simply, and taking down his hands let the heavy hair fall again in its thick waves over these singularly peaked ears. " You see," he repeated. " I see," I stammered, rather at a loss what to say. " No woman," he said, " would throw in her lot with a man with the faun's ears. I couldn't ask her." " Faun's ears ! " I began to reason with him then — at least that is how I put it to myself, but if it was reason that I talked I could not get him to receive it reasonably. A woman does not marry a man, I said, for his ears. The idea Faun's Ears 85 was grotesque. It was morbid to have such a fancy. Then he said : " You yourself when you looked at me could not help an expression of horror. You tried to conceal it, but you could not keep it out of your face." What he stated was more than half true, and feeling it to be so I could not answer him with all the confidence I wished. " It was nothing," I declared. " It took me by surprise for a second. What is it ? A fold of skin more than is usual." I had to come back to what I had said before, that it was utterly morbid to let such a thought intrude between him and a chance of happiness. I had it in my mind to suggest an operation, and in a subtle way that he had he seemed to divine my thought, for he said sardonically : " Why don't you tell me to go to a dog-fancier and have my ears clipped ? " And he laughed with almost a hysterical sound, which I felt like echoing. It was all so unreal, so foolish, and yet there was the fact, as he had truly stated it, 86 The Faun and the Philosopher that at first sight of his face set with those startlingly pricked ears I had known a horrid moment of repulsion. The aspect was such an animal one, so inhuman. " You ought not to let it weigh on your mind," I said. " Ought not to think of it. It is only a form of self-consciousness." " I know, I know," he said quickly. " That is what I ought to do. Do you think you could forget them if you had these ears ? " Then he asked if I had noticed one thing conspicuous by its absence from the furniture of his van — there was no mirror. " I try to help myself to forget, by never seeing myself, but I cannot forget. That partly is why I lead this life. I am happier so. It is like the brand of Cain — not that exactly, but the mark of the beast. That is what it seems like. You saw it yourself." I shuddered, and hated and despised myself for the shudder. It was terribly pathetic, really — that was what I told myself. I longed to make this unfortunate — unfortunate by the ridiculous gift of two superfluous inches of inno- Faun's Ears 87 cent flesh — know how I felt for him : and yet I could not — in any effective way — could only tell him, with futile words that seemed to mean nothing ; and I knew, and he knew too, that, while I could look with pity and sympathy into his eyes, so long as the waves of hair hid the peaks, yet if the waves were shorn off I should still feel that repulsion. I know that I was far the more wretched of the two when I left that poor faun in his unspeakable loneliness. Morbid ! — yes, but what word can we say that may express more misery in its victim ? As I was going he called me back. " Don't think about what I was saying or try to picture what I shall look like when I go bald. It'll only give you nightmare. Look here " — and he thrust into my hand some typed pages — " take that home with you and read it. You charged me with being irreligious. It's my translation, or try at it, of the Book of Genesis." CHAPTER IX COSMOGONY 1LJIS Book of Genesis, when I came to study it, I found to be a moderately long poem. The reader of this story can pick up its path again, such as it is, by going round the poem, leaving it unread, if he likes, but perhaps the reading may help to show him how the poor Faun's mind had worked and how it was troubled. FIRST AND LAST was the title of his verses, and they went thus : The great God made Him a garden ; and He called that garden man. He fashioned it forth slow-working, as only the great God can. 88 Cosmogony 89 Then he set a seed in the garden ; and He called that seed a soul. And the seed that He therein planted was the primal end of the whole. But first He would make Him a setting, for that garden's home and site, So He sent to the void a vapour, ablaze with fire of His might. He linked it up with the planets, to run in their tireless race, Till it cooled to a molten splendour in the boundless vaults of space. Then the earth-crust formed about it, as the myriad ages passed, And lo ! from the steaming waters the life-germ came at last. And the mosses crept on the earth-crust and in countless forms were wrought, While the cells grew each to other as the needs of their nurture taught. They grew into diverse fashions, as their God the food- stuff gave — Of creeping thing in the herbage, of fish that swam in the wave, Of the insect life and the mollusc ; then reptiles, huge and grim, Conceived in the sultry darkness of the earth's slow- cooling rim, 90 The Faun and the Philosopher The wonder of winged ringers* that flew in the tree- fern's glade, Then birds that soared to the sunshine when it pierced the steamy shade. And the tree-forms took new feature, as they fed on the vivid sheen, And it lent the herbage colour, and the grass-blade flourished green, And the beast took form from the life cell, for the time was come to pass When the earth should give its bounty for the race that ate of the grass, For the mastodon and the mammoth. Yet huger far than they Were the monster whales of the waters. Then came the beasts of prey And apes that play in the branches ; and now was the hour at hand For the final work of the Maker, of all that His thought had planned, And at length there walked in the forest and stood erect on the earth The heir of the foregone ages — and man was come to the birth. Thus the great God made Him a garden ; and called that^gardenjnan. * Pterodactyl. Cosmogony 91 He had fashioned it forth slow-working, as God the eternal can, And lo ! at the end of the making, for all it was ages slow, Was no less space for the Maker, for the wheels of His time to go, Than there was at the earliest moment, when earth was first begun ; For the age-long years of making were as though they had never run, And scant is the need of dial, to tell how the minutes flee, For Him that reckons time-work by the scale of eternity. Now the seed He set in the garden, the primal end of the whole, Was seed of His tree of knowledge, and He called that seed a soul. So man looked forth to the heavens, with a soul-illumined gaze, As none that had been before him — for he looked with great amaze. He looked on the beasts about him, and he saw them all afraid As his eyes were bent on their eyes ; and, for all that they were made So huge of form, and fearful, there was none might long abide The gaze that was soul-illumined, but must turn their own aside. 92 The Faun and the Philosopher And he saw the eyes of his mankind and an answering soul he knew, And spoke, with sound and gesture, and of this his language grew. And he told his thought to his fellow, and thereof was wisdom born, And man, with the soul within him, all might of the beasts could scorn. He gazed into Nature's secrets and bade her give of her best ; He struck from the flint the fire-spark to kindle at his behest, He fashioned tools for his warfare, at first of the living stone. He made him spear and arrow and barbed them with flint and bone, Then fused the ore of the metal, in fashion of Tubal Cain, And fought with the bronze and iron ; and with cunning of hand and brain He slew the beasts of the woodland, or brought them tame to his hand That they should carry his burdens and serve at his high command, And stripped their skins for a garment. Then he tilled the fertile soil To yield him fruitful harvest ; and in midst of his war or toil He found him a moment's leisure, wherein he would muse, a space, Cosmogony 93 On himself, his own soul's wonder, and would question whence his race And whence the world that he went in, like a king of all the rest, And whence the sun and the planets — yet found no end of the quest. He gained in his might and wisdom, and took Nature's force to friend, And her winds must bear him sailing, in ships, to the journey's end, And ever he pressed her closer and knew of the strength of steam And harnessed down to his service the might of the lightning's gleam. Yet still, for all his wisdom and his wealth out of Nature's store, No answer came of his questing, and his search was evermore Of the whence, and why, and whither ; then himself strange answer made, For he deemed each force a godhead, in depth of the woodland shade, In wind that wailed in the forest, in laughing song of the stream, In murky cloud of the thunder, in the sunlight's gracious beam — They were each and all a godhead ; yet none that could tell him whence Had man's soul come to the body, nor whither it travelled thence 94 The Faun and the Philosopher When the life-cells failed about it and their vital force was spent. So some were found who fabled that the soul no-whither went, But was lost the self-same moment that the vital forces died, And all of its hoarded wisdom, in that moment, cast aside. So he wrought through thousand follies, but ever his wisdom grew As the soul-plant struggled upward to seek for the pure and true. He reached to a higher knowledge, and knew his gods as One, The One who had set the planets their age-long race to run, And worst of the thousand follies that man and his soul have wrought Was to deem the work as nothing, of the labouring God who taught No atom was ever wasted, but went at His mighty will, By the force that gave it being, into force or compound still. For He lost no grain of matter nor wasted an ounce of force Since He launched the earth as vapour to sail in the planets' course. Cosmogony 95 Then came a day when he hearkened and his soul in the silence knew Of a spirit voice of counsel and he knew that counsel true, A voice that bore him comfort, like the voice of a proven friend. And he stood amazed and doubted, and feared — yet knew, at the end, He had touched on the final purpose of the God's pre- destined plan When He fashioned Him forth a garden and planted a soul in man. So God calls man through the soul sense, and man may make reply ; By faith may draw more closely, till the voice sound clear and nigh, Till he quaff of the God-sent life-stream, whereof his soul may grow As in earliest days of the story to the leaf and the plant would flow The rays of the vernal sunlight, when it won through the primal murk. Yet it needs that the soul shall hearken, so God may perfect the work, For many there be not quickened, who have lent no ear to the call, And their soul is not yet wakened ; but deadliest sin of all g6 The Faun and the Philosopher Is the sin of the soul that has hearkened and straightly has turned aside And paid no heed to the calling, but deemed, in its human pride, That it knew no need of the message nor of counsel from Him who wrought In the former and latter ages and His plan to the issue brought. Yet still to the soul that hearkens the great God speaks more clear : As man's will yields to God's will, God's presence draws more near, Till the mighty coil be ended and the work of the world be done, And the will of God be man's will — man's soul with God be one. CHAPTER X THE CALL OF THE SEA TT'S folly trying to estimate the value of human life till you know the meaning of human death." This is one of those axio- matic remarks which the Professor's talk would strike out, to send his hearer home with that rich gift, a new idea to think over. Like all the best of new ideas, it was sufficiently obvious when stated — the sort of thing that any man might say — the only difference being that any man, the ordinary man, does not say it, but Dr. Fisher did. The comment came in the course of a talk on the possibility of Germany's invading us, annex- ing us, possessing us — a possibility which the Professor was at no time disposed to reject — but what surprised me was that, in spite of his previous solemn announcement of the great 97 7 98 The Faun and the Philosopher society of the Sagoos (which I now knew to have been purely an invention, on the moment's spur of his whimsical fancy), he did not seem to think it would be any great misfortune if it did occur. " The English," he said, " are so helpless and so muddled. It needs something to make them think efficiently, if there is any virtue in efficiency. For that again is doubtful. Germany is doubt- less the most efficient modern nation. She takes fuller advantage than any other of the chances science gives her and the forces it puts at her disposal. If you want Biblical criticism, you go to Germany. The finest eye-doctor or aurist, the science of war, the commercial talent — Germany has them all. Unless our Western civilization is a mistake, unless all the mastery of Nature's forces is just cleverness going the wrong way — unless the Oriental view of our progress is the right one (and there is a growing doubt whether the Oriental may not be right) then, unquestionably, Germany is the nation of the future. She is taking with both hands the chances which Western progress gives her : it The Call of the Sea 99 is as much as we can do to stretch out one. I do not say it would be a good thing for Germany if she were to conquer England. If she were to ruin England's credit, her own finance would rock. She might get this good from England, that she would learn to treat her women better — the German house-frau, even of the upper classes, is a tame drudge — she might learn to be a more pleasant nation, socially, though it would be at the cost of some of her efficiency. But she might teach Englishmen to be a little more 1 efficient ' — the blessed word. I thought per- haps the Boer War would do it, but it is for- gotten because we did, somehow, muddle through. Certainly the individual Englishman would be better off and have a larger freedom for his soul under a German despotism than ever he would under a Socialist regime, even if he himself put that tyranny over his head. The Socialist makes the dreadful mistake of supposing the individual is made for the State, instead of the State for the individual. But as for the lives that will be lost before one or other conquers, the value of 7* loo The Faun and the Philosopher them, as I say, must entirely depend on what happens to us at death ; and that, in spite of German specialists, is still speculative." All this, I should say again, was before the great war. Miss Mary had not made much response, as was, perhaps, only maidenly right of her, to a suggestion of mine that the young man of the van should be asked to luncheon with them. A vague and tacit permission that I might bring him to pay them a visit some day was the utmost that I could extract from the reserve of the daughter and the unsociability of the father, but I sought him out one day with an idea of bringing him to the Holt, only to find him vanished, the horse, van and all gone. He had vanished in no faun-like or mysterious way. There were the obvious real wheel-tracks over the turf. He had simply harnessed his horse and flitted like the vagrant that he was — I wondered whether he had repented him of the confidence he had given me, of the uplifting of the veil of curls that he kept over what he was pleased to The Call of the Sea 101 deem his misfortune. Perhaps he had indeed repented him, and could not bear, now that the moment's need of sympathy had passed which had induced him to reveal himself, to remain where he might meet one who knew him. That thought gave me keen distress, and it was with great satisfaction that on the third morning after, as I ascended the hill in a heavy wet mist, I saw a yet thicker cloud of smoke rising from very near where his van had used to be. Twilight was coming on, and the forest shapes of hill and tree and bush were mysteriously blended as I made my way down to his travelling home. There it was, all as before, the old white horse feeding, in its hobbles, the van, and a blue smoke coming from its chimney, only a little below his former camping-place, nearer the stream that went through the valley. I caught a bar of the same rhyme that I had heard him sing before, rolling across the heather : " Time goes fast, but I go slow, Yet down the world together we go." He was making tea as I came down the forest 102 The Faun and the Philosopher and welcomed me just as if he had never been away. I had to reflect that a move meant very much less to him, who was at home even while he moved, than to me who had sought and had missed him. As he did not seem disposed to tell me of his own accord why he had gone, nor where, I gave him an opening, saying : " You have been away." " Yes," he said, " I had to go." I could not imagine any constraint upon him, whether to go or to stay, so I said, knowing the suggestion ludicrous, " Ah — business ! " He smiled at that, quite understanding me. " It was something a great deal more compelling than business ever could be," he said. We had come to the stage now at which he was dispensing tea and bread-and-butter and tinned sardines. It was dark within the van and much too wet to have tea outside, but he was a perfect host. " Have some more sardines." I had eaten more than I wanted, for I looked for- ward to dinner, which he, probably, did not. " Finished ! " he said, as I shook my head. The Call of the Sea 103 " Then," — and he reached out to a shelf on which was the leathern bag he used as a port- folio, " that's what I had to go for — to hear that," and he handed me a sheet of paper with some verses written in his round hand. " It's the cruellest impertinence, of course," he said apologetically, " just a try to suggest the break of a wave on a flat beach " : Pulse of the heart that has throbbed in Creation, Link in the chaining of spheres in their station, Undulant, undulant, Billowy, buoyant, On, to the shore, with thy rhythmical motion ! Shoreward, thou deep-bosomed daughter of ocean ! Drifting so restfully, So irresistibly, Dreaming the visions that tempests have brought thee, Whispering songs that the tropics have taught thee. Wake — see the goal in sight ! Don thy majestic might, Lift thy proud head in air, Unsnood thy snowy hair, Arch thy full crest away, Toss back thy locks of spray, Race — till the goal be won, On — to the land — on ! 104 The Faun and the Philosopher Home — to the land — home : Crash — down, on the shore, With a roar, Of foam. Lost in the swirl of thy locks on the shore, Rest thee — thy measureless journey is o'er. " I had," he said, when I had read the verses, " to go and hear the sea. It takes me like that sometimes, that I must go and hear its waves and its roar, and smell its salt, and when it takes me I have to go. I suppose it's because of being brought up, as I told you, within sound of the roar of Niagara — if I miss the sound of water for long, for many weeks together, I begin to pine and weary for it and — well — it may be foolish, of course, to yield to it, but don't you think it would be more foolish to go on pining and wearying for a thing that you can get so easily ? Isn't it better just to harness up the Pterodactyl and jog along until I come to the roar ? " " Much better, I should think." " D'you think it's because of Niagara filling all my childhood with its roar that I am like that ? " The Call of the Sea 105 I said that I thought if these things were to be explained at all that this was as good a way of explaining as any other. " Of course," he said, " you do not get the sea like that — not just so — on any part of the Sussex coast that I know. They're the muddiest waves there, milk and watery, from the chalk cliffs, and it's all a very little sea, but I love it. Still, you don't get that " — tapping his paper — " there." " Where do you ? " I asked. " Where there is a big sea — anywhere along the west coast, where the Atlantic comes in — not on a rocky cliff shore, of course, but on a level beach." " You've been to all these places ? " " Oh, yes, the Pterodactyl and I are wide rangers — even to Scotland. You've heard Nature making a noise. This is how she appealed to me in one of her silences. They're just as im- pressive." He handed me another poem headed " Nature's Silences," and, under them as a sub-heading : 106 The Faun and the Philosopher "GLEN ROSA" It went thus : Thou great grey glen of Scotland, at whose head The mountain tarn leaps laughing down the mist, And bounds, or brawls, or glides o'er all its bed To kiss the sea, as erst the cloud it kist. Who to thy mystic heart may haply stray Hears voices speak in tongues unlearnt before, From out thy deafning silence bears away A word that whispers through a city's roar. Here, safe from little vexing strife of men, He fills his soul from God's immensity, Finds all his world within that great lone glen Whose walls are of God's earth, whose roof His sky. Wide walls, as featureless as Ocean's face — Grey monotones beneath the grey dour weather That scuds in storm-wrack 'thwart the Heavens apace, Grudging its brilliance to the purple heather. On the glen's summit, where the mist uplifts, By devious winds in forms fantastic curl'd, A crest, sky-cleaving, cuts betwixt the rifts, As though the sharp-set limit of a world, And all beyond were void eternity Whose secret vainly, from his cloudy height, Yon soaring eagle questions with the eye That darts defiance to the lord of light. The Call of the Sea 107 Then back, and through the silent solitudes — Nor soon shall he, that mystic path who trod, Forget, 'mid scenes where human care intrudes, Such converse face to face with Nature's God. " Where is that — Glen Rosa ? " I asked. " Arran," he said shortly — then added : " I had gone back, while you were reading, to the sea — I always do. Have you ever watched the waves as they break on a rock-bound shore ? There, sometimes, and always if the sun's rays fall right, you will see, as the thin spray mist is tossed back from the blow of the fluid on the solid, a gleam of the rainbow's hue — prismatic colours. As soon as it is formed it is gone, but you know it has been there, and you know that, given the same conditions, it will appear again — that is a certainty." I said " Yes " to that. There was not much else to say. " Well," he said, " you will find that one of the things which is most vexing and troubling the minds of men to-day is the difficulty of reconciling the Darwinian theory of man's 108 The Faun and the Philosopher evolution out of lower organized forms with the idea of a God-given soul. Evidence that no impartial mind can decline compels us to accept the former ; certainly there was a stage in the world's development when there was no man — only lower forms — and no human soul. But a sentiment, a conviction, call it what you will, of greater force than any reasoned con- viction, bids us cling to the belief in the soul." " Yes," I agreed. " But what has this to do with the rainbow in the spray ? " " I am trying," he said, " to suggest an explanation by analogy, that may just a very little bit help to resolve the difficulty of the Darwinian origin of man from the soulless things and of his acquirement of his soul. I suggest that as the other conditions for the apparition of the rainbow, except the spray, were all there even when you saw no sign of the colours, so too all the other conditions of man's soul have been in being for unknown asons, perhaps from the very beginnings of time (if you will forgive a phrase which means nothing). The Call of the Sea 109 They only waited for the evolution of man to come into play as naturally and inevitably as the prism colours in the spray mist. They were elemental forces, if you like to call them so, and as soon as ever a human being is created they are bound to act. How does that strike you ? ' " Suggestive," I said, " at all events — if that's all you claim for it." " Of course it is all : if you accept it as a suggestive hypothesis it is enough and I am pleased." " And I would suggest this too," I added, " that possibly there has been an evolution and a development in these very forces which you have been pleased to call elemental." " I will accept that also," he said, " as a suggestive hypothesis, though it is one which opens out too big problems for me. But I will ask you particularly to notice that I did not speak of elemental forces without apologizing for the phrase." T CHAPTER XI CRIME AND CHASTISEMENT HE sentiments of the Forest folk towards Professor Fisher afforded a curious study. Of veneration for his learned eminence they had none, for it is a quality which seems to be lacking from their composition. Probably a phrenological examination would discover the bump of veneration to be wanting from their craniums. They regarded him with a little curiosity, perhaps with a little fear, and yet with a certain affection and gratitude. Once he had offered advice, which was accepted and proved of service, to the mother of the youth whom I have spoken of under the name of Saxon Jim, when she was suffering from symptoms which she described as a " swiminess," with a very no Crime and Chastisement in long accent on the first syllable, " of the head." Miss Mary had gone in to see the woman on a day when they were walking past her cottage, and finding her in much pain had asked the Professor to come in too. The faculty which Miss Mary herself had in perfection, of talking to the poor people as if they were friends and fellow-creatures, was certainly not derived from her father. He spoke as if he regarded them as beings of another planet, different from himself in nature as in speech, but he prescribed an effective remedy, which the youth Jim came to the Holt to fetch ; and the Professor attained much fame from the relieved woman's declara- tion to all her acquaintance that it was " as good as if the doctor himself had give it to me." From that day it became quite common for one or other of the Forest folk, who were all Miss Mary's friends, to ask through her the advice of the Professor in their many ailments, the more readily, perhaps, that he charged nothing for it ; and those who were in debt to the Parish doctor, and could not well expect zealous help 112 The Faun and the Philosopher from him until they had discharged it, were readiest of all. The fact that he had no diploma and perhaps put himself under the ban of the law was the last consideration likely to give the Professor pause, and possibly the fact that he took no fee made him legally blameless. Once he had set a broken finger, with the good results that his intimate knowledge of anatomy favoured, and the people had fallen into the habit of regarding him rather in the light of a consulting physician. One day, as I was coming to the Holt, I met Miss Mary among the silvern stems of the white birches, herself white and slender as one of them. She was like a rare and beautiful maiden of medieval romance, one of those for whom it would be right to be accompanied by a white fawn. There was a virginal impression carried with her which made it seem as if all white things, white doves, white flowers, and so on, were her appropriate environment. I told her so once, with a suggestion that she should make herself a white garden as it is called, with none Crime and Chastisement 113 but white flowers in it, at the Holt ; at which she laughed me to scorn very merrily and told me not to have such affected ideas. None the less, I was just conveying her, at the moment, a gift, if not of white beautiful things, at least of that which it was to be hoped would in due course hatch out to something of the like. True, even at best, "on first hatching there would be no purity of white, but a golden down. This is speaking in riddles. To be plain, I was bringing her a basketful, or " sit- ting," of white Aylesbury ducks' eggs. She had expressed a desire for some ducks, to go in the pond which they had fashioned from the stream running along the foot of the copse. Beautiful white swans, on an azure lake, would have been the right company for her. " But I want to make them pay," she said, in a way that suggested the modern rather than the mediaeval maid. Dr. Fisher himself had established the poultry farm, of which the duck establishment was the offshoot — buff-Orpingtons that lay nice brown 8 H4 The Faun and the Philosopher eggs and are good birds for the table besides. You might think what you pleased of Miss Mary's motives in wanting her ducks ; it was impossible to think of Dr. Fisher's interest in the domestic poultry being that of the housekeeper. He liked to watch the birds, and would spend a long time so doing, or so-nothing-doing, and what the thoughts were that went through his brain, the while, no man, perhaps not even so gifted an intuitionist of his mind as his daughter, might guess, but on this you might safely wager, that they were not the thoughts that domestic poultry commonly suggest, for that brain of the Doctor's was like Africa — semper aliquid novum to be expected of it. I had said as much to Miss Mary, once, at a remark of her father's. A pained look came on her beautiful face. "Don't," she whispered, "Don't." After- wards I asked her, " Don't what ? " I knew I had given her pain — that good, kind girl — and would have bitten out, if not all my tongue, at least quite a big piece of it rather than do so, but did not know quite how I had hurt her. I Crime and Chastisement 115 wanted to know, so that I might escape mis- behaving again. So she told me, what amounted to this — that she knew her father's brain was not quite normal, nor had been ever since that terrible adventure in the boat. I might have informed her that even before that, in the opinion of his fellow-scientists, his genius, which not one of them questioned, had come peril- ously near the extreme limit of perfect sanity. He was an example that Lombroso had hinted at as directly as a hint of the kind may be given about a man still living — and about one very able to scarify any who pecked at him. This revelation let me into some secret chambers of this girl's sad life. She might be pictured as the guardian angel of this rather terrible old man, her father, whom she loved intensely and admired vastly and feared less than anyone else feared him. Her fears really were for him, rather than for herself, lest that strong brain should trespass over the extreme border-line. The Professor was greatly more versatile than most men of science, but in all its versatility 8* n6 The Faun and the Philosopher his mind had never, since I had known him, turned in the direction of sport. Nevertheless he was the possessor, by inheritance or other- wise, of an immense gun. Its length of barrel was abnormal, and so, no doubt, was its age. It belonged to the muzzle-loading stage in the development of fowling-pieces, and for how many years it had not been fired no man could say until Frederick, the gardener, poultry-keeper and outdoor man-of-all-work in the Professor's employ, proved himself to be possessed of very remarkable courage by borrowing it to shoot, or to scare, the bullfinches which came after the fruit buds. Of the many surprises which the Professor from time to time had afforded me I think few have been greater than the discovery that he knew how the gun was loaded and was even capable of loading it himself at need. The need arose thus : Lying, as the Professor's property did, in the unpopulated Forest, and marching at its lowest point with one of the great warrens, dense with trees and undergrowth, it was obviously open Crime and Chastisement 117 to the secret approach of persons who had no scruple in helping themselves to any unconsidered trifle which had been left out overnight ; and the disposition of the outhouses and the careless way in which the poultry were enclosed, or not enclosed, exposed it as a positive temptation to the chicken-thief. Two highly successful raids on the hen-roost had incited even the Professor to a state of comparative preparedness for the next. The preparation consisted mainly in an instruction to Frederick, who did not sleep in the house, to load the ancient gun with powder, but no shot, and leave it on two pegs inserted specially for its support in the wall of the passage outside the Professor's bedroom. His instructions were precise, that the shot-flask should be suspended from one of the pegs, so that it should remain only to pour in the shot and ram down the wad to fully charge the fowling-piece. The sky was obscured by clouds, but a moon gleamed fitfully between them, on a night when the Professor, whose window overlooked n8 The Faun and the Philosopher the poultry yard, was aroused from a light sleep by an outcry of hens' voices. It did not take him a moment to realize the situation, and without striking a light in the room he made for the door, lighted his candle in the passage and fetched down the gun. " Of course," as he observed in telling the story later, "■ Frederick had forgotten his instructions. The shot-pouch was not there." The shot-flask was not there, but on the window-sill, in a large saucer, was a heap of peas which Miss Mary was saving for seed from the choicest of her sweet-pea plants of the year. I can imagine the grim smile on the Professor's face as he poured a handful of these down the barrel, by way of charge, and rammed a wad home upon them. Then he blew out his candle, groped his way back to his room and carried the gun to the open window. The cackling had ceased in the hen-roosts. It is likely that the thief whom the Professor sus- pected had heard the opening of the bedroom door within the house and suspended operations in consequence. Still the Professor watched, Crime and Chastisement 119 while the moonbeams came and went between the clouds, and just as he was wearying of his vigil and was about to abandon it he saw a figure come from the shadow of one outhouse to pass behind another, and at the darkly-seen figure he fired. The outrageous noise of the gun in the still- ness of the night was followed, so closely that it seemed of a piece with it, by a very human yell, and then the silence fell once more. The Professor went to the door again, lighted his candle in the passage and was replacing the gun when Miss Mary appeared in consterna- tion, from her room, to ask what was the matter. " It's nothing, Mary," he said. " I think I've shot the chicken-thief. I had to take some of your peas. It's Frederick's fault." " Oh, father," she said in horror, " you don't mean you've killed him ? " " Whom ? Frederick ? " "The thief, I mean." " Oh, no, I think not. He could cry out quite loudly." 120 The Faun and the Philosopher " Father," she said. " You must go and see. If not, I will." " Do you really think it's worth while ? I will, if you like." Miss Mary told me that the deliberation with which he made his preparations for going out was exasperating almost beyond her endurance. It seemed an age — probably it was about three minutes — before he returned, in the same leisurely way, to reassure her, not altogether, as it seemed, without regret, that the corpse of no chicken-thief was to be found, and the disturbed household returned to bed until the morning. At breakfast, word was brought in that Mrs. Pratt had called desiring to see the Professor. " Sprat," he said. " Who is Mrs. Sprat ? " " Pratt, Father, not Sprat," Miss Mary cor- rected. " It will be that gipsy woman from the top of the Forest. I'll go and see what she wants." The Professor finished his breakfast as Miss Mary came back to say that Mrs. Pratt had Crime and Chastisement 121 come in great trouble because her son Joe, commonly known as Gipsy Joe in Forest society, had met with a severe gun accident. She was most anxious that the Professor should come and see to him. " Why doesn't she get the doctor to him ? " the Professor asked. " She says she doesn't ' hold with ' doctors." " That means she's in debt to him." " And anyhow you were the nearest — oh, Father, you know you'll go," she ended en- treatingly. " Oh, yes, I know I'll go," he said, " and so does she and so do you, and her young scamp will get his doctoring for nothing. She wouldn't pay the doctor, so it will be taking no bread out of his mouth. Where is she ? " As they walked together to " the top of the Forest " as the region was called of the few poor houses of which Mrs. Pratt's was one, the vigorous step of the gipsy woman, eager to bring the Professor's help to the aid of her son, outstripped those of the ever-weary learned 122 The Faun and the Philosopher man accompanying her. At frequent intervals she had to stop and wait for him. In answer to his inquiry as to how the accident happened, Mrs. Pratt informed him that Joe had been cleaning the gun, not knowing it to be loaded, and that it had gone off in his hands. " I did not know," the Professor said, " that Joe had a gun." Mrs. Pratt explained that it was one which he had borrowed. When they came to the house they found the sufferer prone, face downwards on the bed. The Professor asked in what part of the person he was wounded, but the lad himself only responded by a groan. His mother, how- ever, with very little ceremony, removed enough of his clothing to exhibit several of what had all the appearance of shot-wounds, for the most part in the region which the Professor's scientific phrase described as the gluteus maximus, though a few scattered ones had gone into the back and the hinder part of the thigh. " A curious place for a man to shoot himself Crime and Chastisement 123 in, is it not ? " the Professor asked ; but a groan, as before, was the only response from the patient, and this time even Mrs. Pratt had no ready answer. " Only skin deep. They have not pene- trated," said the Professor, after examining the wounds ; and again it is likely that an acute listener might have detected that note of regret in which he had reassured his daughter that no corpse was lying in the poultry yard. He began to operate delicately with the lancet which he had brought with him, pressing up each pellet into an excrescence beneath the skin before he made the incision which freed it. A stifled yell and a wriggle at each cut were the only signs of sensation given by the victim. " A curious place for a man to have shot himself in," he repeated as he took out the first pellet, " and," holding it between his finger and thumb and examining it critically, " curious ammunition he seems to have used to load the gun." He laid the pellets carefully, as he extracted 124 The Faun and the Philosopher them, on the table beside the bed, and when he had taken out the last he said, " I think he'll heal soon. His blood seems very healthy. You will not pay me any fee for this operation, but " he swept up the extracted pellets, washed them carefully while he washed his hands, and placed them in the fold of a piece of paper which he took from his pocket — " I'll take these with me," he said. " I think they belong to me." When he came back to the Holt he gave the piece of paper containing the pellets to his daughter, saying, " I am glad to be able to return you a few of the peas I was obliged to borrow. I daresay they will grow." CHAPTER XII HONOUR AND HONESTY T HAD long suspected that the disposition of my friend of the van was not such as to be bound closely by the strict letter of the law if it happened to run counter to his whim. It was a suspicion that was confirmed and strengthened by an entertainment to which he invited me about this time at his travelling hostelry, in course of which he enunciated the dictum that " Honour is the poetry of honesty." I was surprised, for he did not often commit epigram. The comment was rather after Dr. Fisher's manner, whom, it occurred to me, the wise Faun might, for his secret purposes, think it prudent to flatter by pious imitation. The Faun's own mind was not of that tightly compact, neat, concise type which goes kindly 125 126 The Faun and the Philosopher into the ways of such pithy speech. Its trend was rather vague, of the nomadic habit, like his physical disposition. But the situation was not a normal one — rather a shocking one. It required exceptional explanation, and it was in this, among other forms, that my curious friend offered me explanation. It did not occur to him that it required excuse. On the contrary, he appeared to take a pride in it. He admitted, practically, in this very epigram, its lapse from the bourgeois virtue of honesty, but claimed its justification as something better and more knightly than honest, namely, honourable. The circumstances were these. He had in- vited me to dine with him, and I had gone with pleasure to partake of his bounty, ready to better my acquaintance with him and curious to know what dainties of the wilderness he would put before me. I should have been disappointed had the menu been that of the Ritz Hotel : I had speculated on squirrels roasted on the spit or hedgehog baked in a crust Honour and Honesty 127 of clay. There was nothing thus gipsy-like. He gave me trout, most tasteful little trout, which he had taken out of the streamlet beside which his van rested. The mode of their taking he explained to me : it was the ancient device known to boyhood by the name of tickling — a pleasant sport for which you wade in the splashing water of the brook, cutting your feet into ridge and furrow (but who heeds that ?) on the jagged pebbles of the stream's floor ; your hand explores each dark holt on the brook's side in which a trout may have taken shelter, and when you feel his slim, cool body you commence, with delicate titillations, and, thus hypnotizing him by the pleasant sensation, gradually advance your fingers up his figure till you can seize him with a sudden firm grip of finger and thumb in the gills. That is felonious work enough, perhaps, but my friend defended himself from any criticism that I might be disposed to offer on that score by affirming that in this way of capture you could select those that were " size-able." Dangling 128 The Faun and the Philosopher a hooked worm into the brook — it was too small and too heavily overgrown for the casting of a fly — you would be certain to catch a number of babies and to injure their little mouths in taking them off the hook for release. But I felt no disposition to criticism on this account ; for, after all, is it the part of the guest to com- ment, except on enormous provocation offered, on the mode by which the giver of the feast may have obtained the viands set on table ? Such enormous provocation, however, did arrive, with the coming of the second course. My friend had bid me be just to the arranged hour, and I understood this insistency on punctuality, which seemed a little foreign to the leisurely nomadic life, when I sniffed the trout frying, and when he forthwith brought them sizzling " on their native pan," and set them out before me on a plate. Meanwhile there had come further savoury suggestions from a pot which hung by a tripod over the fire, and when the trout were picked to the bones, and he had taken away the skeletons, he addressed himself Honour and Honesty 129 next, with a ladle, to the contents of this pot. Thence he extracted two principal " pieces of resistance," afterwards a big spoonful or two of mixed vegetable stuff, and so, on two plates, he placed the chief items of the dinner, the one before himself, the other before me, and we prepared for the attack. I was uncertain, even from the first, whether his face did not wear a look of conscious guilt. Twice I glanced at him keenly, first as I regarded the portion, plainly the body of some bird, before me, and secondly, after I had cut a morsel from the breast and tasted its flavour. " Why," I said then, in a voice which I felt that the shock of my horror had reduced to a guilty whisper, " why, they're partridges ! " " Yes, yes," he answered gaily — very gaily — with a gaiety that I am sure was a little affected and overdone. " Yes, of course — partridges. I hope you like them." " Like them ! " I repeated, with ever-growing dismay — as if it were a question of one's gastro- nomic tastes ! — " but, don't you know — they 9 Si (t 130 The Faun and the Philosopher can't be partridges — it's, why, it's right in the middle of the close time." Oh, of course," he said with a short laugh, if they can't be partridges just because it's ' close time ' according to the silly law ! " " I mean," I stammered, nearly speechless at the immorality of the man's sentiment, " one doesn't eat partridges at this time of year." " Doesn't one ? " he said. "I do ; and what's more, I advise you to, for there's nothing else, barring a savoury and some odds and ends, for dinner." I had to recognize that if his morals were bad his advice was good. There was nothing else, as he said, for dinner. If I did not eat the bird, that abstinence would not bring it to life again. Moreover, as I had to admit, although I felt as if the first mouthful or two were going to choke me, it was exceedingly good eating. It was not a young bird, but the rascal's mode of cooking it — practically en casserole — showed that he knew how to make the best Honour and Honesty 131 possible of an old one. I ventured on no more comment. There was a slight sense of con- straint between us, as may be supposed to subsist between a criminal and his accessory- after the fact, until the unlicensed bones had been picked clean and put out of sight, and it was only when the excellent meal was over, and we were smoking and sipping coffee in lee of the van, that I asked him, with some hesitation : " Those partridges — eh ? Had they been kept on ice r " Ice, no," he said, with a shameless laugh — a good dinner makes men shameless. " More likely barley." " D'you mean to say," I asked, " you killed them — lately ? " " Last Wednesday," he said — this was Mon- day — " both at a shot." " Where ? " I asked faintly. " Just below here," he replied vaguely ; then continued, as with a malicious pleasure in piling up the horror, " sitting." 9* 132 The Faun and the Philosopher " On the ground ? " I asked. " Isn't that where partridges generally sit ? " he asked in turn. That was the last word. One could say no more. So, at least, I thought. I found out immediately, however, that he had an immense deal to say. He had been rather artistic about it all. He had been skilful in taking me down, as participant in his crime, to the nethermost depths of the horror into which he had plunged me, and now, having got me there, he proceeded to argue me into a state of mind in which I was ultimately confused altogether as to the ques- tion of right and wrong. His act was illegal — oh, yes. He did not dispute that for a moment. He took pride in the confession. But, he main- tained, what was the law ? It was a device of man set up for the guidance, under compulsion, of those who, without its restraint, could not be trusted to behave themselves. It was for the moral weaklings. The strong man should be able to judge for himself what was right for him and socially good. These partridges — yes Honour and Honesty 133 — he had shot them when it was illegal to do so — had shot them illegally with every possible added circumstance of offence — two at once, on the ground. He had outraged the sports- man's traditions, as well as the law. For the traditions he did not care. As for the law, it was framed with the view of protecting partridges while nesting — I would admit that, would I not ? Certainly I admitted that. Well, then, these birds were not nesting ; they were a barren pair. It was on that account, and that only, that he had shot them. Wild horses would not have made him draw trigger on a pair that were really domestically engaged. That was his excuse ; he claimed it as his justifica- tion. He claimed, moreover, that much evil was done by the sportsman, even within the law, shooting partridges quite legally, but quite immorally, in January after they had paired, and long before it was possible to tell, as it had been in this instance, whether their pairing was or was not going to be productive. In a word, he claimed for himself a licence above the 134 The Faun and the Philosopher law. He claimed, acting illegally, to act not worse but better than the law enjoined. Then it was — at this point — that he delivered him- self of his epigram, " Honour is the poetry of honesty." Honesty the prosy rule-maker ; honour the spiritual director of high souls. " Better a June dish of partridges," he said, " and honour therewith, than all your hone6t mutton " " Shut up," I interrupted, " you are too immoral to live. But — it was a good dinner." CHAPTER XIII EGYPTIAN INDUSTRY /^IPSY JOE was more busy than usual — for normally he was a man of leisure — assembling certain materials. He had a tin which had once held cornflour, a bit of candle, and another tin in which was paraffin of a low flash-point. He now needed matches, and his outfit would be complete. He found these, after a while, matches of a kind manufactured in Sweden, to which the Englishman gives a name that does not flatter the sulphurous smell they emit when struck. Now he had all ready. He bestowed the articles in various receptacles, in a coat so loose-fitting on his lean body that it might serve admirably for those conjurors who bring rabbits and pigeons out of empty 135 136 The Faun and the Philosopher hats. The coat was no tighter than before when all these things were bestowed about it, and it did not anywhere show a bulge. Easter had long passed ; there had been a glorious spell of dry weather. Heather, grass and gorse, all were tinder dry ; the bracken had not yet sent its succulent young shoots high enough to matter. Gipsy Joe, with his dog " with a touch of the whippet about 'im " at his heels, made his way along his usual circuitous bypaths, and with his usual stealthy gait, to the great patch of gorse lying right to windward of the Holt. There he looked around him for a while in the most unconcerned manner possible. The sun was about to go below the hill, but still there was light in the sky. He sent his dog coursing about among the bushes, in order that the Ranger, if he should be seated somewhere in hiding on the high ridge and observing all below him through that invention of the Evil One which Gipsy Joe called a " spy-glass," should deem him engaged on some mere little business of forest-poaching beneath the dignity Egyptian Industry 137 of an official's serious notice. Next, having sacrificed thus to the tutelary deities, the dark- faced lad bent himself to a business that, no doubt, is one of some little danger, requiring much care. He brought from one of the big pockets his candle, from another the tin which had once held innocent cornflour. He affixed the candle, by the well-known device of lighting it and letting drop a grease-spot or two, to the bottom of the tin, inside, so that it stood up as in a lantern. Then he blew the candle out and poured in a little paraffin till its surface came something like half-way up the candle, and when that was done he set down the tin and candle and oil in the patch of the driest gorse and bracken, most perfectly sheltered from the breeze. Finally — and this was the delicate and dangerous part of the work — he struck a sulphurous match, and with excessive care that no spark from it should fly or fall to catch the paraffin, lit his candle again, and so, like a small offering of unsavoury incense to Pan, the only 138 The Faun and the Philosopher god he knew, he left it burning among the tinder-dry growth. All this was told me by Saxon Jim — dearest friend of Gipsy Joe, so that they fought severely about once every month and swore eternal friendship immediately afterwards — but only after the gipsy's death. He had always been weak in his chest, as so many of these people are — that is to say, of the half-bred race to which Joe belonged. Those who are acquainted with the gipsies of pure race and manners, dwellers sub Jove jrigido, claim for them the almost complete immunity from pulmonary trouble which surely ought, according to the open-air theorists derided of Dr. Fisher, to be their happy lot, but Ashdown Forest and its author- ities are not hospitable to these vagrants — I almost think my harmless poet gipsy must have found a way to the Ranger's heart by com- munication established by a touch of precious metal in the palm ; or was it, perchance, by a quotation from a Greek poet ? Certainly he was not to be dealt with on lines laid down for Egyptian Industry 139 the " moving on " of common rogues and vagabonds. The " gipples " of the Forest are usually a half-bred race living in cottages, and possibly paying a penalty for the comfort of a life within walls in form of chest troubles unknown to the tent and van-dweller. He, at all events, cannot endure the germ-laden air of houses without immediate distress of lungs. Gipsy Joe's death, however, did not happen in that way, but I need not speak about that. What he did at the moment, as soon as he had lit his candle with exceeding care, was to hasten away, by the devious paths he knew, with the swift gliding slouch which was so like that of the drooping-tailed small lurcher following him. He had gone a matter of two miles, turning back here and there to see whether any result came of his business, and the glow of twilight had quite gone from the sky, before a little flash caught his eye — just a red flare — and went out. Then it appeared again, only like a red sheet this time, rather larger. It was as if someone had taken the sheet, then, and tossed it up into 140 The Faun and the Philosopher the air. It came down again, but again it went up. It went up so high that it seemed as if it must make the very Heaven hot, for Joe had chosen a place where the gorse grew old and tall. As the flame flared, it illuminated great clouds of smoke, and now it was as if the sheet, con- tinually growing and spreading, were being pulled along, for there was one direction, and one only, in which it did not spread — that was on the windward side, which it was already beginning to leave in smouldering blackness. It was rather like this, if you may attempt to describe such a glorious thing as even the beginning of a forest fire, that it all happened — rather like this that Jim described it to me — the beginning of a fire that became notorious before its end, and rather like this that I have seen others begin. This was the manner of its happening, and if the manner is at all interesting it seems certainly no less interesting to inquire why it happened — the motive of it. That is not at all so simple. I asked the Saxon why the gipsy did it, and Egyptian Industry 141 knew quite well what the answer would be : " I dunno," and it was a true answer, too, just because the motives were so complicated that Gipsy Joe himself could not tell you just why. We may make a guess at the mixed elements of the motive — first, a spite at the owner of the Holt, which was private property lying in the track dead to leeward of the fire's start, next, a natural and not unhealthy delight in the fine spectacle of fire raging in the night — that accounts for something — then, a sense that " the rich," as those whom the so-called " rich " term " the poor " designate them, admire the beauties of heather and gorse with appreciation which " the poor " find unintelligible, like so many of the ways of the rich. If Rochefoucauld could write with horrid truth, even of those who are equal in fortune, that " dans les malheurs des autres il y a toujours quelque chose que ne nous deplaise pas," it is surely more inevitably certain still that a poor man must know a senti- ment that is not displeasing in the misfortune of a richer neighbour. And if the misfortune 142 The Faun and the Philosopher be of his own creating, it would hardly be in human gipsy nature to rejoice the less. For yet another factor in the complexity, we may take the satisfaction in an act which the law forbids, and in the law's successful evasion. The motives are not far to seek, and are many enough to be confusing, and quite justify Jim's " I dunno," even without that more respectable plea of : " It do improve the pasture," which he put forward with a shamefaced consciousness that I must know it to be one that would not greatly appeal to his gipsy friend, who owned only that canine animal " with a touch of the whippet," which would take grass only occa- sionally, in small quantities and medicinally. Jim expressed no condemnation of the act of destruction. I knew him too well to expect any sympathy for my own sense of loss in seeing the beauty of the hill turned to blackened ruin, but tried an appeal to his pity for the roasting of wretched insects and nesting birds which the fire must involve. His reply was inarticulate. Like all his race he was not unkindly, but lacked Egyptian Industry 143 the imagination to realize suffering, that he did not see, of creatures lower than himself in the scale of life. Year by year these fires recur, more or less destructively, on common and moor and forest, and probably a great majority have their inception much in this manner. A few, no doubt, are accidental, sprung from the match carelessly dropped, or the picnic fire not perfectly extinguished, but most are the creation of malice, or of mischief premeditated in brutish brains of dull men or boys not knowing what they do nor why they do it — only with a dull sense of satisfaction in the blaze and in the lawless act, and in the gratified small spite, and with no realization at all of the beauty which they destroy or of the suffering which they inflict. CHAPTER XIV RESCUE A T first the fire had crept and crept, as it ran in the low herbage of the dwarf gorse and the heather. It had left a dark trail of smouldered ashes, like a black serpent, behind it. As it went it broadened and broadened at its head, with eager tongues of red darting out from it, till it had come to the taller gorse, and there it had leapt and leapt, catching from one tinder-dry golden head to another and always winning its way more persistently and solidly in the undergrowth. It had a fine wind fanning it, and presently it began to send out a cloud of curling smoke, now dark against the clear sky and now luminously aglow. Much of this Gipsy Joe watched, well satis- fied with the work of his ingenious industry, from 144 Rescue 145 his hide far up in the opposite hillside, and now, though this he could not hear, it began to roar like a devouring beast and to travel wider and faster. The lurid glow in the sky was seen first in one and then another squatter's holding in the Forest, and some few turned forth to try what they could do in the way of beating out or arresting the flames, but the majority were quite indifferent, or even pleased to think of the beautiful land laid bare and ugly, for they take no delight in its beauty and only deem that if the gorse is burnt there will be the more pasture ; in which purely utilitarian view they may be right. It happened to me to have notice of it first, as I looked out of the window, in form of a faint glow above the nearest crest of land, so I put on thick boots again and went up the hill with no particular interest. Forest fires were many, and though this seemed to lie in the direction of the Professor's small estate, I knew by frequent experience that few phenomena are more decep- tive in regard to their locality than a distant fire. 10 146 The Faun and the Philosopher It may be three miles away, or may be not a third part of a mile. The direction is all that the glow tells you. Of its distance it says no- thing. Gaining the hill-top, my interest quick- ened. The fire, like a raging sea of crimson waves, was right below me, with the wind, as a moment's look assured me, carrying it right on the Professor's garden. For the extinction, so far as it is possible, of a fire in heather and gorse country, no weapon is more effective than a birch besom. A cudgel is relatively useless, for you do not need a weapon of weight, to break down any big resistance, but the wider the spread of the stroke that you can apply the more useful it is. Failing a broom, a bushy branch is efficient, and with one or other most of the workers were armed, beat- ing at the flames, by the time of my arrival. Against the roaring wall of fire they were working most inadequately, for the heat and the driving sparks did not allow them to come within striking range, but a moment later the Forest Ranger, who understood the Rescue 147 business, came on the scene and introduced a method into the work which soon had its effect. The fire had widened its jaws, so that they extended far, on either side, beyond the most gravely threatened point of the Professor's hedge. They also extended far beyond the small line of less than a score of workers who were endeavour- ing to put out the flames, but the line was long enough to guard that threatened point — if only they could get to work with their besoms and bushes before the fire touched it. The Professor himself was present, viewing the scene with an air of much detachment, as if it had no personal interest for him. Miss Mary, on the contrary, was forward in the beating line, attacking the flames with a rashness which made me entreat her more than once to be careful lest a blazing fragment whirled from the flare should set her light skirts afire. It was a real danger. Fortunately for the safety of the Professor's house and garden, which he seemed to regard so lightly, a former owner had been provident enough to cut the 10* 148 The Faun and the Philosopher gorse and heather for the width of a dozen yards or so from the hedge, and though this had been allowed to grow unheeded to the measure of a foot or two, it was not of such height that when the flames reached it they might not be dealt with by the beaters. The Ranger drew up his force, which obeyed him docilely, in this lower brushwood between the tall gorse and the hedge, bidding them hold back from their useless efforts against the high leaping flames, and when these died out of the tall growth and came crackling over the lowlier fuel he gave the word of command with a loud " Now ! " and, as he gave the lead, all the line together fell with their various beaters on the advancing flames and reduced them to smouldering, glowing embers a yard or two before the hedge. At that angle of greatest danger the fire was checked. It needed only the attention of one man, detailed to see that it did not break out again, in serpentine course over the ground, at some point further in advance, but on either side of this extinguished and blackened stretch Rescue 149 the fire still went raging on in the high gorse. At the foot of the Professor's holding it raged fiercest of all, where that holding ran down and marched with one of the great warrens. Here no provision of low-cut growth had been made to give opportunity for the fire's checking. We had but to watch it blaze, watch it leap from high gorse to taller firs within the enclosure, leaping the boundary hedge in its course as if no hedge were there. The resinous pines gave splendid fuel for its feeding and the flames roared heaven-high in the woodlands, a sight of splendour, but fraught with cruel ruin and God knew what potentiality of disaster and death. It was then, and only then, as Saxon Jim informed me long afterwards, that Gipsy Joe began to be frightened at what he had created. On that side we were helpless, but on the other, the upper side of Dr. Fisher's policy, the gorse was high, but there was little peril of the fire's spreading to the limitless danger that we saw below. There were spaces of lower growth where the Ranger might marshal his now 150 The Faun and the Philosopher augmented army with a hope that their efforts would succeed, and there a drama of much pathos was enacted. Some commoner's sheep had no doubt been sleeping peacefully in the shelter of the gorse when the raging fire came down upon them. Rushing in their blind way here and there, as it seemed, all had escaped except one overgrown late lamb that had allowed itself to be imprisoned within a belt of the higher gorse that had caught more quickly than the heather which it surrounded. The wretched lamb could not be seen, within the zone of smoke and flame, but its cries were piteous, sounding now here, now there, so that we were forced vividly to imagine it dashing this way and that upon a carpet along which the fires were con- stantly creeping closer, and ever being brought up against the impassable circle of flames. To add to the pitifulness, the distracted mother was rushing this way and that, no less aimlessly, outside the blazing rampart, answering, in deeper note, each cry of its offspring. " Oh, do do something," Miss Mary cried, Rescue 151 almost beside herself in sympathy. " Can't any- body do anything ? " " 'Tisn't possible, miss," a smoke-begrimed commoner answered. " Anything as we could do to save the poor thing we'd do, but 'tain't no ways possible." Even as he spoke, a slim figure darted quickly through the gloom beside us into the lurid glare of the flame wall. A cry of horror went from us as he tore off his coat and holding it like a screen before his face, dashed into the crackling, roaring, blazing mass of gorse, which parted but a moment to give him passage and closed as if it had swallowed him wholly. Miss Mary caught my arm, and her face looked dead pale, but she never said a word. I realize now that she knew who the madman was and why he did the mad deed, but I never guessed at the time. They seemed minutes that we all stood in horror, but I suppose they were but seconds before the man reappeared, as he had come, miraculously, as it seemed to me, alive, dashing a gap in the blazing hedge and bearing in his arms, still crying piteously, 152 The Faun and the Philosopher the lamb. He thrust it, almost roughly, into Miss Mary's arms held joyfully open for it, then went, with never a word, back into the gloom, and I saw him fall. Miss Mary had not seen the fall. She caressed the lamb ecstatically, and the mother came " baa-ing " up to her. The commoner who had stood beside us and had spoken of the impossibility of rescue came where I bent over the fallen man. " He isn't dead, is he, sir ? " the forester asked in a terrified voice. " No," I said. " No, but he's fainted, or suffocated. Help me carry him to the house, and while we lifted him, together, I heard the Professor say in his weary, unemotional voice : " I think perhaps the lamb would rather be with its mother, Mary, than with you." As the girl bent to give back the child to its parent a flicker of bright light fell on the face of the man we were carrying. It was the Faun. CHAPTER XV THE CONVALESCENT 'T^HAT fire, created with so much misapplied ingenuity by Gipsy Joe, raged in the fir-wood furiously during all that night and the following day and night, with a small army of men vainly striving to subdue it, and was hardly prevented destroying farm buildings and a larger dwelling-house. Its damage was reported to amount to several thousands of pounds in cash value, and the destruction of Nature's beauty that it wrought went beyond reckoning. And all the while the lamb's rescuer, whom I have called the Faun, lay in Dr. Fisher's house and was cared for, I doubt not very effectively, by the local doctor and the parish nurse. His burns were not in the least serious, but exceed- ingly painful, and I do not know what degree of 153 154 The Faun and the Philosopher assuagement they received from Miss Mary's occasional visits to his bedside and her reproaches that he should have run this mad risk " for the sake of that poor lamb." It was thus that she phrased it, knowing I believe very well that it was for quite another sake that he went through the fire, and possibly that in the same cause he would cheerfully traverse it again. The fire had begun to seem only an episode, and the black ruin it had wrought a spectacle to be gazed on with sad eyes, by the time he was able to come out, still bandaged, and sit on the verandah which gave an outlook at the blackened trunks and bared branches. I had been to the Pterodactyl and brought him a few clothes and the leathern satchel which he used as a desk and portfolio, so he had his papers and things all handy. I had arranged with Saxon Jim to see that his horse was fed and looked after while his burns were mending. It seemed to me that for the purpose which I believed him to have much at heart that mad dash into the flames had proved to be not without a certain method. The Convalescent 155 Within a week of the night of the fire I met him walking, rather painfully, along the road at the bottom of the valley and turned back with him to the Holt. Miss Mary was in the garden, a radiant vision, among the sweet peas. I said I had come to call on her father, thinking my friend would be sure to stay with her among the flowers. But he did not — one never could be certain what he would do. " Oh, do go in, please," Miss Mary said, " I don't know how they'll be getting on, I'm sure. His Reverence is there with him, and I know he was beginning to tell him he ought to make an effort — to be brighter, more interested in the things about him. Oh, you know what his Reverence is — he means so well, kind man, and he does it mostly for my sake. He thinks — I don't know what he thinks — that father isn't kind to me, or something. It's so ridiculous." I did know, as Miss Mary said, what his Rever- ence, as she called him, was — just all that she described him — and I did not doubt the amazing 156 The Faun and the Philosopher possibility hinted at that he might be profession- ally taking the Professor's soul in charge. We went up the garden path to the verandah from which the French windows, opening to the ground, led to the room which the Professor called his study. We heard voices coming through the window while we approached, and as we reached it his Reverence said in tones of expostulation : " I do not wish to blame you. Far from it. Believe me, my feeling is purely one of pity." " And I should imagine you would pity us," the Professor answered him, as we stood embar- rassed a moment, hardly knowing whether to intrude on what appeared to be a conversation of some intimacy. " You may well be pitiful to any poor agnostic soul. As for you others, I should think you ought to be able to face the world with courage and a smile — you who have your hand in the hand of your God for Him to lead you along the path. What have we — friendless, alone, no guide ? And yet some of you can speak of us as if we were proud — our The Convalescent 157 agnosticism itself a sin of pride — as if we were setting ourselves up to be able to do without guidance ! By heaven, or whatever you hold most sacred, if there is a creature that needs your loving kindness, needs all that your Christianity stands for it is the poor agnostic. Surely we may claim a little credit if we can face the world and fate with anything like a smile at all. Give us our little due." He spoke with an emotion that was unusual in his tired voice. Whatever the clergyman had been saying to him had touched a nerve which had aroused not the hard antagonism which I should have expected and which Miss Mary had feared, but some more profound and tender feeling. " Why men should go religious mad I cannot see," he was continuing. " I see every reason for their going irreligious mad. If a man believes in the Divine guidance, can place his hand, as I say, into the hand of the Divine guide, surely that man Ah " — he turned, as I purposely made a slight movement of my foot upon the floor, 158 The Faun and the Philosopher that he might know there were listeners of whom he was unaware. " Come in. I was just telling his Reverence that Mary complains of the close- ness of the church on a Sunday evening and asking, if I threw a brick through the window to give it ventilation, whether he would put me down as a church-worker. Come in." In a moment he had attuned the conversation to that whimsically sardonic note which it came so easily to him to make dominant, and had drawn us in as chorus. CHAPTER XVI THE SINGED MOTH "\ TICE," the Professor observed, in his own sententious manner, " is none the more venial because it has become habitual." I understand that while the burnt man was getting better and Miss Mary was cheering his convalescence with a sympathy which was only proper and natural considering the cause in which his sufferings had been incurred, there was many a long talk between them, as intimate as his intense shyness and sensitiveness would permit, and doubtless the Professor, leaning back in his chair and brooding his own thoughts, yet with an occasional ear ready to appreciate, in his pecu- liar grim humour, the talk that went on about him, found much with which to entertain 159 160 The Faun and the Philosopher himself in what passed between the two young people. It was at the unfortunate Faun, still in the pains and feebleness of his convalescence, that he launched the above Johnsonian sentence. The Faun had incurred his whimsical rebuke by so greatly daring as to smoke a cigarette in his bed- room before breakfast. The aromatic smell pervaded the little house abundantly. The Faun made full confession, and on the Professor's fault-finding strove to have himself excused on the ground that it was his custom to begin the day thus, with a cigarette. It was thereupon that Dr. Fisher hurled this thunderbolt of a phrase at him. The Faun attempted reply in form scarcely more happy than his first effort. " Not more venial," he allowed, " but none the less pleasant." It would have been wholly unlike the Pro- fessor to let pass unchallenged such a plea as that. " Not less pleasant," he retorted, " a vice that has become habitual ! Do you mean to tell me that custom, use, staleness, do not The Singed Moth 161 take the edge off its criminal delight ? Such a doctrine is opposed to the universal experience of humanity." Of course the Faun knew he had made a false move. The Professor had him fast for check- mate. But he was resourceful. " I liked my last cigarette a great deal better than I liked my first," he said. The Professor's wrath was mollified by the agreeable vision suggested of the Faun in the throes of that earliest taste of tobacco. " No doubt," he admitted, " a man's palate must get sooted up before it can consent kindly to being a chimney." The Faun had proved, as might not perhaps have been expected, except on the ground that the personality of the nurse made a difference, a very tractable patient, easily amused and very capable of amusing himself as soon as he was permitted to handle pencil and paper. Then he entertained himself with the scribbling of verses on all and every subject, in all and every form. He attempted the deepest themes and the loftiest. ii 1 62 The Faun and the Philosopher He was just as happy with the very trivial. When Betty, a red-armed girl who did kitchen work under a good deal of personal attention and in- struction from Miss Mary, let fall, with a crash and a smash, a plate of the good old willow- pattern, the Faun rose, or condescended, to the occasion with his version of the ancient story. He called it : A TRAGEDY IN CHINA Betty in the kitchen broke a willow-pattern plate. I spoke to her severely, but I spoke a moment late To save those little people from a very dreadful fate Whose fortune's told in blue upon the willow-pattern plate. Two blue little people come running, together, Across a blue bridge, in the sunshiny weather. They run from a garden, where stands a blue tree Above the blue house of a wealthy Chinee. The one is a maiden, the other her lover — A blue weeping-willow hangs half the bridge over. Behind, in pursuit, comes papa, with a whip, But they're over the bridge, and aboard the blue ship That her lover has moored by the strand of the sea — The Singed Moth 163 With a shove off the shore, from his wrath they are free. Now deep in the water the oars they are plying, While high in the heaven the blue doves are flying. To his blue island home her lover will waft her, And there they will happily live ever after. That is the story of the willow-pattern plate, So please be very careful — though it's only one and eight — And remember that you have in hand a very precious freight When you carry from the kitchen a willow-pattern plate. On one point, I was informed, the Faun had been adamant. Though he was for ever humming that little verse about " Time goes fast and I go slow, Yet down the world together we go," neither wild horses nor the far stronger suasion of Miss Mary's charm and request could induce him to form one of that village choir of which she was leading light and lady. By way of com- promise he had done something for her while he lay half-scorched, poor moth, in her service, 11* 164 The Faun and the Philosopher but blissful in her tendance on him — had written what he called " A Book " (happily for the children, only a very little booklet indeed) " of Empire Song," for the choir to learn to sing under the guidance of their conductress. There were solos, part-songs, quartets — all kinds of music. " It only needs," said the Professor, " that the fellow should break a leg, for the composition of an oratorio." His song fervently breathed the spirit of the eternal Jingo, to which I was assured the village would fervently respond. A concert was pro- posed, by way of aid towards a fund for a cricket pavilion, of which the village club was sorely in need Without it, it could not look with the right proud aspect at elevens coming to visit it from other villages where a cricket pavilion was an established fact. That, according to the Professor, and not any sentiments favouring decency or comfort, was the real motive for their keen desire for a pavilion. On which account, he confessed himself in full sympathy with the project. This unguarded and whimsical ex- The Singed Moth 165 pression of friendliness had been pounced on by Miss Mary urging him, in season and out, to consent to give a lecture in aid of the same great cause. It was surprising that he did not decline in the adamantine style of the Faun's refusal to make one of the choir. For the moment the Professor continued to coquet with the lecture idea, at one time appearing to grow warm to it ; at another, icily alien. The Faun's patriotic verses were delivered complete, from his sofa, long before any definite decision about the lecture was announced. It was then, as the Faun said, " up to " Miss Mary and to the organist to fit music to his words, and after that there was the learning of it all by the choir before any public performance could be given, so that any financial aid to the cricket club which should accrue from its production would not be rendered for some little while to come. Meanwhile we were permitted to read the verses, and Miss Mary made rather doleful music, striking occasional phrases on the cottage piano, 1 66 The Faun and the Philosopher which she thought might carry some of the songs. His " Book of Empire Song," though brief as books go, may have the dignity of its own chapter heading, if only for its more convenient skipping by an unpatriotic and unmusical reader. CHAPTER XVII THE FAUN'S EMPIRE SONGS SONG OF OUR FATHERS Unison Chorus There stands a little island Girt with the ocean foam, Our fathers tilled its acres But they made the world their home. They launched their ships for conquest In the fighting days of old, And prayed the God of Battles Their right He would uphold. They went forth first in warship And then on keel of peace. And victory brought them blessing Of the foes they gave release From the bondage of the tyrant, From oppression worse than war, For they gave them freedom's guerdon- The grace of equal law. 167 1 68 The Faun and the Philosopher Harmony Like gods of the sea They went forth to set free All peoples enslaved by their king or their creed. With sword at the thigh And the cross set on high In witness to Heaven of right in their deed — With message made clear For the nations to hear That their Empire was wrought of humanity's need. Unison Chorus 'Twas theirs to fight the battles 'Tis ours to reap the gain, To till the conquered acres To plough the hard-won plain. They went with sword victorious, We stay to hold the scale Of justice and of mercy, For else of no avail Can prove the boast of Empire ; Nor all the warships' might Can hold its world-wide limit Save by the power of right — The right of all and sundry Who dwell within its bound And claim with pride their portion In the fair God-given ground. The Faun's Empire Songs 169 Harmony They have made us bequest Of fair lands in the West, A continent vast from the sea to the sea. The tribes of the East Out of bondage released Have brought them their princes and realms for a fee. The African main They divided in twain, And held for their own what was highest of worth. Australasia has known No rule but their own — The rule of the sea-kings who sailed from the North. SONG OF THE HERITAGE This is your heritage, men of Britain, Men of the Saxon, the dominant race. This is your privilege, mothers of Britain, Mothers of men who have won them a place, Not in a narrow and storm-beaten island, But wide as the world and as fair as her face. This is the work that our fathers have left us, Work for the Empire, stern to endure, Work to maintain the kingdoms they won us, Work to confirm, to make victory sure, Sure in the hearts of the peoples they conquered, Sure in a justice that's equal and pure. 170 The Faun and the Philosopher They were strong, for the hand of the Lord was upon them. We reach a hand for His strengthening still. We hear a voice that calls as they heard it Calling us whether for good or for ill : " Come, you are summoned for service of Empire, Be it a service to save or to kill." SONG OF THE COLONIES Where the flag of Empire stands Over yet uncharted lands On the Earth's remotest bound, There, by testing of the worth Of the sons of Empire's birth, Shall their claim be proven sound. Where the sheep go forth to feed On the yet unpastured mead 'Neath Australian sun a-glow — Where the sleigh-man drives the pack On the yet untrodden track Of the great North-Western snow — Where the miner toils amain On the minerals' gleaming vein Thousand fathoms 'neath the ground — Where the log-man fells the pine Near the snow's unmelting line To the glacier-torrent's sound — The Faun's Empire Songs 171 In the depth and on the height In the sunshine or the night — \R here the surges foam ashore And the tempest's awful roar Almost stuns — Still their hearts make one acclaim, " We are come in England's name, We are guardians of her fame, And we ne'er will work her shame Of her sons." {These last lines to be repeated, by all the Choir, with rising volume of sound, twice or more) SONG OF THE BUILDERS Now have they touched the earth with wand of fairy, Now have built huge their cities by the sea, Now have set fair their homesteads on the prairie. The corn gleams gold where jungle used to be. Now have they bound world-forces to their pleasure, Tamed to their will, like geni of the ring ; Now span the globe with speed that passes measure, Now traverse seas like bird upon the wing. Now, like magicians of an Eastern fable, The world-sphere round they make their voices heard — The sea must bear the ocean-spanning cable, The sky be herald of their whispered word. 172 The Faun and the Philosopher Bright now the gardens bloom in pleasant places, Firelight's a-glow in many a happy home, Matron and child look forth with merry faces, Where, late, the beasts and savages did roam. Thus have they wrought, and still across the ocean, Still from the land which gave their fathers birth, Still on the impulse of the old emotion Britons go forth to replenish all the earth. THE EMPIRE-SOUL Song There's a strange music stirring In London's great heart, And the cities, responsive, Must each bear a part In the chorus supernal That falls on the ear Of the soul as it trembles Its echoes to hear. 'Tis the Empire-soul speeding Its message to all. Though oceans and continents Part them — the call Is clear and insistent In peace or in strife For all who have part In her infinite life. The Faun's Empire Songs 173 SONG OF THE PIONEERS For Men's Voices They are gone from the smiling homestead, They are gone from the reeking street, And some are gone with the colours, And some are gone with the fleet. And some there are gone in sorrow, And some there are gone in shame, And some are gone with a laugh on the lips, And some with a curse on their name. But all are gone with the one intent Whether knowing, or all adrift, They are gone at the beck and bidding of Heaven To give the old Empire a lift, To give the old Empire a lift. And some are gone to the glare of the sun, And some to the glare of the snow, And some are gone to the mountain tops, And some to the mines below. And some are a-toil on the sun-baked veldt And some in the prairie's drouth, And some are gone to the shining East. And some to the lands of the South. But wherever they go and whatever they do, Whatever their call or their gift, They are gone at the beck and bidding of Heaven To give the old Empire a lift, To give the old Empire a lift. 174 The Faun and the Philosopher And a few are gone where the work is light, But more where the toil is stiff, And many are gone with their life in their hand ; But however short their shrift, They are gone at the beck and bidding of Heaven To give the old Empire a lift, To give the old Empire a lift. Quartet This be your song of triumph, A song that is fairly sung. But who shall sing of the cruel woe When the mother's heart is wrung As her first-born leaves her to cross the sea For a home in a foreign land, With a two-way tug at his doubting heart That himself can't understand. This too is a song of triumph, If you will but understand. When the first-born leaves her to cross the sea, For a home in a foreign land, Not his alone is the two-way tug And the pain of the doubting heart, For the mother has share in the sons she bare, And hers is the nobler part. The Faun's Empire Songs 175 SONG OF THE HOME-STAYER Female Voices A lad looked forth from the lowly door Of an English cottage home. His mother watched, her heart was sore, She knew his thoughts did roam. His eyes were on the vesper star That rose above the hill, As though it drew his mind afar, For all it shone so still. He turned — her troubled mien he knew — " Ah, Mother, look not so. The world is full of work to do, And I have vowed to go " Where I can find new lands to plough And unknown seas to sail. You would not I should break my vow, Nor have my purpose fail." She clasped him to her grief-wrung breast. " Ah, yes, boy, go your way, And may your path by Heaven be blest. I would not bid you stay." 176 The Faun and the Philosopher So there is one at home who grieves, And one abroad who toils To garner in the Empire's sheaves And share the Empire's spoils, And though the mother's tear may spring For him that's far away, Yet still her heart with pride may sing : " I did not say him nay " When he would go across the sea And seek the larger life, Nor check his manhood's ardour, free To mingle in the strife. " And since I tore him from my heart And sent him forth, a man, I too have done my woman's part To perfect Empire's plan." Half Chorus Then is Empire worth the pain ? Does not loss out-balance gain ? Is it worth the mother's tear For her son, the pioneer Who must go with life in hand To the unknown frontier land ? Is it worth the weight we bear — Weight we add to year by year ? The Faun's Empire Songs 177 Other Half Chorus Aye, the answer shall be given — It is by the will of Heaven That our Empire stands to-day ; 'Tis not ours to go or stay. Be it loss or be it gain, Be it joy or be it pain, We are called to rule aright All our forebears won with might. 'Tis not ours to choose or judge, Nor our work to pick and grudge. We are servants in His hands Who has bade us rule the lands That our fathers have acquired. And, by His strong faith inspired, We shall rule them at His will, And His purpose shall fulfil. Semi-Chorus Sing we then the ancient story — Story ever freshly true, How men go for England's glory Seeking worlds and conquests new. Hark, as one, our choir upraises, All around the zone of earth, Voices tuned to songs of praises Of the land that gave us birth. 12 178 The Faun and the Philosopher Nor are Anglo-Saxon voices Those alone that swell the sound. Many an alien heart rejoices All the grateful globe around For the good that we have wrought them, For the rightness of our cause, For the freedom we have brought them, For the boon of equal laws. Full Chorus This is then our Empire's work beneath the sun, And 'tis ours to see the work be rightly done — That our Empire's mighty name Be not brought to scathe or blame ; That no falterer's hand may shirk His set portion of the work ; That we go with faith made strong For the righting of the wrong. So the words of praise shall rise Till they fill the highest skies, From the mouth of all the world To the Empire's flag unfurled, While all Empire's sons are one In their pride of great deeds done By their fathers in the past ; And such pride themselves inspires To be worthy of their sires To the last. The Faun's Empire Songs 179 a They ought to please his Reverence im- mensely," was the Professor's comment on the verses. " They breathe a faith that is Hebraic in the God of Battles." " You couldn't write inspiringly of Empire in terms of evolution," I urged, in the Faun's defence. "Possibly," Dr. Fisher admitted. "It's amazing what a fraud he is." " Not more than most lovers," I said. " I don't think he'll mind much about his Reverence, but I understand that Miss Mary's pleased with them." 12' CHAPTER XVIII WATERFALLS /^\N a certain afternoon, when the Faun and his host and hostess sat together in the verandah, the Professor's thoughts were re- called from abstruse regions into which they had wandered by Miss Mary asking, as in pursuance of a subject under discussion, " Then what size would a trout have to be to be able to jump the Niagara Falls ? " I have no doubt that Miss Mary would have received from the Faun a polite and well calcu- lated answer had it not been interrupted by an exclamation expressing the Professor's scorn. " Well, why not, Father," the girl retorted. " If a trout of ten inches long will jump a fall of two feet high, how long would a trout have 180 Waterfalls 181 to be to jump a fall of — how high did you say Niagara was ? " " Does it follow that as you increase size you increase proportionately the jumping power ? ' the Professor asked. " I should think it did," said the girl. " A flea, I believe," said the Professor, " can jump a hundred times its own height — I have not measured. It would be an unusual horse, I imagine, that could jump a hundred times a horse's height." " But those are things of different species," said she. " I am supposing a much bigger thing of the same species. Now — read that. I'm going to put on my hat, and then I'm going to take you out, both of you." She handed her father a sheet of paper as she went in through the French window. The Professor gave one of his rare chuckles (I had all this later from my friend of the van). " It must be so funny," the Professor went on, " to be a woman. You never know where they may not show a symptom of intelligence. 1 82 The Faun and the Philosopher I never gave Mary credit for thinking of that answer. What is this ? " he grumbled, as he unfolded the paper. " My feeble effort," the Faun replied, " to suggest the indescribable." NIAGARA The Falls Great miracle of beauty and of wonder, Niagara — where the sheer rock would sunder The flood that's over from the flood that's under — That lucent crown, the raging torrent cresting, Now seems, a moment the rapt eye arresting, To pause, like diver ere the deep plunge questing ; Then, with a rush, its own bright substance rending, In awful might, swift to the depth descending, Its emerald mass in opal shimmer blending, Falls — like the billow of a monstrous ocean, Casting the incense of its high devotion To heaven, in spray-cloud of its back-tost motion. The Smooth below Now is that turmoil spent, and placid-gliding It flows a while, the tall cliffs wide-dividing, Seeking the Eastward home of its abiding. Waterfalls 183 The Rapids Soon, in pent channel of its rocky prison, With forceful rage to height tumultuous risen, Its rapids fret and boil Where the waters rend the waters and, tost on the crest of strife, A man and his might were a straw in the hapless fight for life — Caught in the current's coil, Smothered and overthrown, Drawn down like a stone. Miss Mary came back with her hat on before her father had done reading the lines. " Well ? " she said, as he folded the sheet again and gave it back to her. " Well," he answered. " Why don't you say something," she insisted, " say what you think of them ? " " No man, unless he is a fool, should ever be asked his opinion of a work of art when the artist is by." " At all events," said Mary to the unfortunate artist in question, " he pays you the compliment of calling it a work of art, and compliments don't rain from him." 184 The Faun and the Philosopher They went, by a beautiful path beside the warren, down the hill, and clambering up along the forest path and again down the hill to the fold of that very valley in which the horse and van of the Faun had stood, only farther up its course. Half up the vale, I met them. When the Faun began to perceive whither the girl in her queenly way was leading us, he was dis- posed to expostulate, of course thus making the Professor, from indifferent, most desirous of going just that way and no other. She led us to a scene of his labour at which I had surprised him, half in and half out of water, several weeks before. He had a pickaxe and had worked much of the stream's bank away. Again, he had at one place dammed back the stream, at another turned its course, at another made it shallow. But that at which he had laboured most, and with no less powerful aid than that of dynamite to serve him, was in forming a sheer fall perhaps three feet, perhaps more, in height. Had I come upon this work as the Professor came, straight from the reading of those lines which Waterfalls 185 tried to tell of the great fall, then of the level flowing and of the tumultuous rapids below, I too might have known, and deemed it impossible not to know, what it was all meant for ; but, as it was, without this clue, I asked stupidly, and he had to tell me, to my shame, that it was his Niagara. Of course it was — there was the American fall and the Canadian fall, with Goat Island above, dividing them ; and all, in little, devised to scale, just as in the tremendous original. He was inclined to be ashamed and shy, even when he was showing it to me, and became painfully so when it fell under the Professor's criticism. But the Professor was very under- standing about it, knowing that the artificer had been brought up in the roar of the great waters, and when he attempted some apology for his little copy of them, saying he was " Afraid it was childish," the Professor said, " Doesn't that all depend on the point of view ? At least it's quite impossible that it should be as childish as all that fuss and fury 1 86 The Faun and the Philosopher that grave men make about knocking balls into a hole in the ground in playing a game that they call golf. At least this has a reason and a justification. It is a representation of what you saw in childhood. I call it a pleasant thing." Then the poor fellow was so led on by this exceeding and uncommon graciousness of the Professor that he began to tell Miss Mary of how the trout would jump at this fall in the winter when they went up the small streams to spawn, and spoke of the wonder of their power, that they should be able, working their way through a medium ever slipping against them, with a take-off for their jump, so to say, which was travelling in the opposite line to their final and splendid leap, to throw themselves thus high from the water. To this the Professor listened grimly and then said, " The current they run up in, to the fall's foot, isn't travelling against them. If anything, it's with them." " Why, Father," said Miss Mary, " how can you say that ? Look at it going down, and look here ! " She threw a light stick into the level Waterfalls 187 swirl below the fall and it went speeding down. The Professor smiled his weary smile of long sufferance of the world's folly. " Have you a knife ? " he asked the Faun. " Of course you're the sort of person that would be sure to have a knife." He cut a stalk of bracken. Then he clam- bered down in a way that suggested at once his complete fearlessness and his excessive ten- dency to slip into the stream, and, bending over, laid the frond of the bracken on the water's surface, just below the fall, while he held the stem lightly between his thumb and finger. " You see," he said, and they saw the frond carried down the stream, the stem laid back obliquely over the level water. He drew the fern back. Then he put it into the water again, at the same place as before, but this time, instead of letting it lie lightly on the surface, he thrust it down so that the broad frond, on which alone the current would play with any force, should be deep below the surface. Once 1 88 The Faun and the Philosopher he had thus pressed it deep he held the stem lightly again. " You see," he said again. What they saw was that this time the stem did not lie obliquely to the level of the water. It hung down nearly straight, with an inclination rather towards, than away from, the fall and the apparent direction of the current. " When your trout," he asked, " run up to jump the fall, do you see them skimming along on the surface till they come to it ? " " No, certainly I don't," the young man admitted. " They just come up suddenly, don't they, with a spring, from below, close at the fall's foot, and make a jump at it ? " " Yes, that's their way." " Isn't it rather silly then to talk about their taking off from a medium travelling against them ? Obviously what they do is to run up in the lower current, which is rather in their favour than opposing them, and only come up through an inch or two of the current against them just as they come to the top." Waterfalls 189 The unfortunate Faun said nothing, rather abashed. The Professor seemed to notice his depression and a ghost of a smile came to the corners of his eyes as he declaimed, " Great miracle of beauty and of wonder ! " " Yes," said the other in an apologetic way, " it hardly looks just like all that, does it ? But," he added, " you know what the real thing is — you won't get words too big for that." " Not easily," the Professor assented. They were talking in a cypher to which at the moment I had no key. Later I asked Dr. Fisher what it was all about, and for answer he showed me the Faun's verses on the Falls. I knew the author, of course. " He's a curious product," I said, as I finished reading. " I like the fellow," said the Professor. " He's such an individualist." " Do you think he's quite self-sufficing?" I asked. " You mean, he wants his mate ? That may be ; it is Nature's way. He's an individualist, for all that, and I like him for it : I believe in 190 The Faun and the Philosopher Individualism. I cannot see that Socialism, in its only tolerable sense of State ownership of capital, is Nature's way at all. The Socialists strike me as going against Nature, trying to better her altogether. Their ideal is to make a perfect State. The only reasonable ideal for man is to make a happy man." " Their argument would be that the second can be done only by the means of the first." " Then I deny any force to their argument. Their ideal has always seemed to me to promise a most dull life to any that lived to see it realized. Happily no one will." " You think it impracticable ? " " I think the State would administer capital abominably — very corruptly, too, according to what we see of municipal enterprise — worse and more corruptly than private enterprise." " Surely you must give it credit for adminis- tering certain things well — look at the Post Office." " I am willing to look at it. What makes you think that department well organized ? " Waterfalls 191 " Surely it all shows wonderful organization. You can put a letter, with a penny stamp on, into a box in the wilds of Scotland and can rely on its being delivered punctually in the most distant colony — say on an Australian sheep-run." " I'll grant you letters are delivered with regu- larity. That does not prove that the Post Office business is done with even tolerable economy. You know nothing of its workings — nothing. For all you or I know it may be wasting money scandalously. I am willing to look at it, as I say, but both you and I are quite unable to look into it." I had to confess that I knew little of the inner finance of the Post Office department. " What do you think that strange fellow and Mary talk about when they are together ? " the Professor asked presently. " I don't know," I said. " Yesterday I saw him showing her how no two flowers on the same primrose are so made that they can be crossed together — it is botany sometimes." When I heard them the other day they were a 192 The Faun and the Philosopher talking Free Trade ; at least he was, or thought he was : the poor girl was looking at it from the Protection point of view." " D'you think it's all a question of the point of view ? " " Isn't it so — a question like any other, of supply and demand ? If you're the producer and have been selling me a thing for a shilling and a tax is put on it of a penny, then if I want it very badly I'll pay you thirteen pence for it, in which case the consumer pays, and if I don't want it badly but you want badly to sell it, then you'll pay the tax and still sell it to me for a shilling — in which case it's the producer pays. All question of supply and demand. He gives her his poems to read." " No doubt a more likely way of love-making than discussing social economy." " But there are no love poems, mercifully. At least I have been shown none. There's a small book of them here, typewritten. He had them put together, I believe, for Mary. Have you seen them ? ' Nature's Voices ' he calls Waterfalls 193 them, and ' Nature's Silences.' Really the fellow ought to play the Pan-pipes." I thought of the Faun's ears and wondered what, if any, of that strange malformation had been revealed while he lay suffering from his burns. " I've read this," I said, as I turned the pages. — " ' The Breaking Wave.' He has courage, with his imitative metres. What's this — the ' Wind Wooing the Forest ? ' " " Read it," said the Professor. " The fellow has strange fancies." VOICES OF NATURE How the Storm wooed the Forest Over the billowy grass he stole on a slumbering forest, Bent her with fan of his wing and played in her delicate tresses, Then in her heart of hearts, in swelling and deepening bass-notes, Lifted his voice and roared, confounding and deaf'ning her senses To ache of her tortured limbs, in strange embraces complaining, 13 194 The Faun and the Philosopher Or deeper groan of her pain, or myriad snapping of tendrils, Or crack and rending crash of great main members splintered — Hushed him and hushed him away — Woke with a threatening shudder — Sank him restfully down — left her a moment of respite — Surged up again through her limbs with ever gathering tempest, Swelled and roared in his rage, till the depths of her being were shaken, Sank him again to his rest and grumbled aloof as he watched her. Anon, with buffet and gust of his anger menaced and swept her, Sighed away over her head and left her alone with her ruin. " He seems to have an ear for the storm and stress," I said. " Did you ever meet anyone at all like him ? " the Professor asked, as I laid down the sheets. " Never in the least," I said emphatically. " Neither did I. That at all events is a point in his favour." CHAPTER XIX THE INFINITELY OBVIOUS AND THE OBVIOUSLY INFINITE ~p\R. FISHER finally consenting, to the greatest surprise of those who knew him best, to give the proposed lecture in the village hall, we ventured to ask him the title and the topic that he would choose for the address. At first he expressed himself disposed to keep an open mind on the subject heading, and also on the subject matter, until he should find himself actually in the hall and should see, as Chaucer has it, how " thy gost shal thee lede " — how the spirit should move him — but eventually he announced his intention to lecture " On the infinitely obvious and the obviously infinite." That, it was pointed out, was a title that not a single one of the villagers would understand. To i95 13* 196 The Faun and the Philosopher which he replied characteristically that it was infinitely obvious, their stupidity being obviously infinite, that there was no title which they would understand, and accordingly that it mattered little what title, or indeed what subject, was selected. Gently and judiciously pressed for his meaning in the title that he suggested, he replied : " Almost anything you please is in- finitely obvious and obviously infinite." When the great day came on which the address was actually delivered, it is hardly necessary to say that much of it was found to be anything but infinitely obvious, however obvious in its infinity, but Dr. Fisher had yielded to much persuasion and had dropped this intricately ingenious title, and the heading of the lecture was announced simply as " On the Obvious." Considering the remoteness of the district from large centres of population the size of the audience in the village hall was a tribute to the Doctor's learning and not a little also to his known eccentricity. I saw Miss Mary's eye beaming with altruistic covetousness as she reckoned up the many sh.il- Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 197 lings and the few half-crowns — for the reserved seats — that would go to help building the cricket pavilion. Whether the Doctor himself had any idea what he was going to say when he made his appearance, amid loud applause, on the platform, I do not know ; it is certain that if he had any scheme in his head he had not imparted it. At a little distance from the village a small artistic colony had established itself, in recognition of the many natural beauties of the Forest and its neighbourhood, and I believe that it was the sight of a little collection of these people in the body of the hall that inspired the Doctor to direct many of his comments to the subjects in which they took a special interest. Whatever the merits of his title, it had at least that of leaving him free to discourse equally on every- thing or on nothing. He went in no trammels. It is not my purpose to inflict the lecture on the reader, as it was delivered. There was a reporter present, and his verbatim report appeared, pro- bably in flagrant disregard of copyright, in the local paper, whence a scientific paper or two 198 The Faun and the Philosopher copied extracts from it, though it touched on science scarcely at all. With a hankering in his mind after the too ingenious title which he had been induced to abandon, the Professor began by telling us that the amplified heading for his lecture would be " On the Artistically Obvious and the Obviously Artistic." He proceeded to the observation that manhood finds its greatest pleasure and interest in the unknown. How much better, therefore, he argued, to be ignorant. Likely enough the major premiss is just — that man finds nothing so fascinating as the un- known ; though even this is open to question. (I am giving, now, a blend of the original lecture with some subsequent criticism.) When we tell children stories do we always find them asking us for " some new thing ? " Do they always want the delight of the unknown ? No, what they love are the old, old stories which they know, word for word, far better than the tellers. They will correct the teller if he go astray by so much as the length of a dragon's tail or the colour of a hero's eye. With breathless excite- Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 199 ment they await the perfectly familiar denoue- ment, greeting with yells of excitement the well- loved features. At all events when we are new to the world we love old friends, whatsoever we may do later, and after all there is at the heart of each of us a child — of immortal youth — who loves the playgrounds of its ancestors. We love even the inherited friendships — we are born with a host of reminiscences stored in us. But perhaps this faithfulness to the old familiar faces belongs essentially if not exclusively to childhood. In the grown man always — and often, after all has been said, in the child — there is a share of the genius which has given us Columbia. We love exploring, pioneering into the unknown. Let us allow this to Dr. Fisher. Let us go with him and say, " Yes, Mankind, widely speaking, finds its greatest pleasure in the unknown. What then ? " " Why then," would say the Professor, " how much better is ignorance ! " However generously we may grant the major prem iss we ought not to fail to see that there 4 ft 200 The Faun and the Philosopher lies between it and the conclusion a minor premiss, which the Professor was cunning not to state, but tacitly assumed as self-evident — namely, that the sphere of the unknown is most wide to the ignorant. Surely the reverse is more truly the case. Knowledge but widens our concep- tions of what there is yet to be known. The Greeks knew that Zeus sat on Olympus and sometimes sent Hermes or another of them on a cloud or a rainbow to hit a man on the head or do some act which was scarcely worthy of the dignity of the Godhead. We know that we flash an electric message across the Atlantic in less time than it takes to write it, but we also know our ignorance of the ultimate, or even of a very proxi- mate, how of the transmission and creation of that flash. The Greeks did not know their ignorance about Zeus nearly so well — speaking of the Greeks of Homer's story. We have farther vistas into the unknown than they had, although — or, rather, because — we have more knowledge. For of this fact — of our greater knowledge — not even the most dogmatic of philosophic doubters, Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 201 not even Dr. Fisher, presumed to raise a question. It was the Professor of course who intro- duced the Classics. How the Greeks got so far ahead of us in certain branches of art is not, he confessed, among things that are obvious. It was easy to see one way in which it was not done — it was not done by generalizing about Art — by talking a great deal about it and its methods, or even by spelling it with a big A. It had taken nineteen centuries for us to learn to do all that, and yet we did not compare so very favourably with them. The truth is they did not care to think too much about it all — they were content with looking and feeling. They were content to leave the unknown where it was — still unknown and fascinating. Never- theless, they knew the lines of beauty and of strength — knew how to express qualities in their sculpture even if they could not have explained just how they did it. Those who do best in Art, even to-day, are those who go on doing — not talking. De force de peindre 202 The Faun and the Philosopher devient feinteur. He told us the story about those two great men, the Boswell and the Johnson of landscape painting — Mr. Ruskin and Turner. Mr. Ruskin had talked for an hour to Turner, in his beautiful eloquent way, about painting, dwelling on the superb excellences of the latter's work. The language of the great critic was lovelily expressed in very fine words. " Yes," replied the painter, after listen- ing long in puzzled silence, " yes, painting's a rum job." That is all he had to say in answer ; yet Turner was a better painter than Ruskin. That is not to say, however, which was the greater man. All comparisons are odious, especially those which are most obvious ; but there is no question of comparison, as painters, between Turner and Ruskin. So the Greeks did, according to Dr. Fisher — and talked not — at least about Art. They were pedantic enough, especially later, in their philosophical schools, no doubt (but can philo- sophy help being pedantic ?) ; whereas Art goes Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 203 out in an atmosphere of pedantry like a candle lowered into unnourishing gas. The Greeks just looked and loved, and then put this love into marble ; it was all very simple and very healthy. Nor can it be said that they would have done any worse had they put a little more thought into it — generalized a little more. For look at that statue of Hermes with the infant Bacchus on his arm which Pausanias saw in the temple of Here, where they found it centuries later under the ruin of the Goths — is it a child that is sitting on the beautiful godlike arm ? For the religion was anthropomorphic, and this ought to be a human child. But it is not ; it is like a little old man, if it is like any- thing human. And this proves one thing at all events — that Praxiteles had not been through any nineteenth-century Art Schools. It is not the only thing about Praxiteles' work which proves it ; but by itself it is enough, for no man since 1800 ever arrived at a tenth, say, of Praxiteles' skill without having had drummed into him, times beyond number, the rules of 204 The Faun and the Philosopher comparative proportion of a child and an adult in their respective parts. Praxiteles perhaps, also, did not love babies. Dr. Fisher asserted, with confidence, that no really artistic people, like the Greeks, could. The regard of the Greeks for beauty of form, as Dr. Fisher pointed out to us, was something quite other, not only in degree but in kind, from our vague admiration. It was their religion, or at least a part of it, and not an unimportant part. Perfection of bodily form, in an anthropomorphic creed, was necessarily an attribute of godliness. The young Greek aimed, by the care of his body, by gymnastic exercises and by elaborate baths, at attaining to perfection which should render him godlike. Beauty of form was a cult. It was the highest expression of the divine in man. It is very easy to see how K a\og and ayadog became interchangeable terms. The identity of the good and the beautiful is intelligible, even necessary, in the conditions of Greek thought. Mr. Ruskin, in the nineteenth century, which Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 205 was everything rather than Greek, has been taken in the toils of this identity, as if it were real and absolute instead of merely relative to men's changeable modes of thought. Virtually he so far identifies moral and artistic excellence, as almost to affirm in terms that only the good man can produce the good work of art. The position flatters art. Unfortunately contra- dictory instances exist in abundance for its disproof. Andrea del Sarto was not all we might wish him, and Benvenuto Cellini had scarcely that placid soul which belongs to the truly good man. The fact is that the artistic temperament, like every other, has the defects of its qualities — defects whose nature is pecu- liarly apt to produce defection from the line of moral right. The ardent imagination of the artist presents him with singular temptations in singular force, and the habit of yielding him- self to its inspirations makes it the harder for him to resist them when their origin is infernal rather than divine. He demands our charity therefore ; but that is another thing from 206 The Faun and the Philosopher requiring us to say that good art is necessarily the work of good men. And yet we all in our day had to love our Ruskin — his power and his periods — in modera- tion. It was possible to grow weary of him — for a while, as of highly confectioned sweetmeat ; after which we might hunger for a tonic of Rudyard Kipling in a Barrack Room Ballad. But we would return again to our Ruskin in spite of what we were bold enough to deem his aber- rations, only wishing that our own aberrations were able to lead us along similar high and glorious paths — indifferent whither they led us. That is the danger in such beautiful guidance as we find in Mr. Ruskin's magic — the danger of indifference to the goal whither it leads us. The goal ought to make all — no, not all, but nearly all — the difference. It is, at all events, more important than the path ; but we are apt to forget this when we walk in pleasant company. We therefore, Dr. Fisher concludes, must deny the identity of K a\og and ayaOog, though Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 207 admitting to the Greeks every justification for their identification ; and seeing in the identification one cause at least that the sculptors of Paris and London are not as those of Hellas. Other advantages the Greeks had which are manifest. They had slaves, which means lei- sure — then they had a restful as well as an inspiring life ; it was not full of the hurry and distraction of our life. A great conception demands repose for its perfection — nearly all instances show this ; and who, in our age, gets repose ? Without it no prolonged concentra- tion of thought or dwelling upon an idea is possible. " Es bildet sich ein Talent in der Stille, Sich ein Karakter in der Strom der Welt." There is a maxim to teach us that the identity of the moral and artistic excellence is an illusion. But the Greeks had their Strom der Welt, as well as their Stille, for they found their leisure just as they were emerging from the period of 208 The Faun and the Philosopher the " Pelasgic hairy strength," as Emerson called it, in their national history — the fighting sap in full flow ; which was turned to the arts of peace : to the arts, not to the chaffer and huckstering of shopkeeping. They had advan- tages. Then again they were the children of fathers who had known that the gods sat on Olympus — they were the children of anthropo- morphic mythology, not great-great-grand- children as we are ; we who are the children of a scientific mythology. And it is in pro- portion as a mythology is anthropomorphic that it lends itself to the arts. Naturally, we do not put so much value on physical strength since we have so replaced and bettered it by our mechanical appliances. We cease to " re- joice in any man's legs " so soon as we begin to " hook on the forces of nature to our ma- chinery." But do not let us boast about our mythology — that it is scientific — for the science of one age has always been the mythology of the next. All are attempts at finding out " how we are governed," and our know- Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 209 ledge grows by the mistakes we make in the attempts. It is a great thing in art, said the Professor, this knowing, this certainty that our beliefs are the truth. We cannot worthily express fancies in art — that is to say, if we know that they are fancies. The medieval men who did the great religious paintings were men who had lived in monasteries, retired from the world, their whole mind occupied with visions of the Madonna and with incarnations of the Godhead. These visions were the realities of their lives, their whole being was possessed and dominated by them — therefore when they came to put their minds upon canvas such sub- jects were the most natural forms of expression. Hence their convincingness. To-day the age of visions is past — it is the age of microbes. Science has shown us a world so full of germs and cells and matter that there is no room in it for visions. When our forefathers had the plague they used to say it was the Devil, now we say it is the microbe. It is only a different 14 210 The Faun and the Philosopher way of saying that we do not understand it ; but it is not a way that helps the arts, as the animism helped them, with great gifts of raw material. Lastly, to come to detail, the Greeks were in the constant habit of seeing the nude human form. There cannot be a doubt that they were in the way of showing to each other and commenting on the points of this or that noted athlete, as men do now of their horses. This familiarity with all the beauties of the human form would not be of so much advantage in literary and dramatic art ; but in sculpture, in which they particularly excel, it must count for much. But when we say " they," after all, we may take but one, even from among them, so far as the simple study of form goes, and put him by himself on a pedestal — only that none but himself were worthy to make his statue — Phidias. Phidias was Greek, said Dr. Fisher, because he had to be of some nation, and they may justly boast of him — those thin shades of Greeks beyond the Styx — but we should compliment Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 211 Greek art too highly, and Phidias too little, were we to say that he was representative of it. Was Shakespeare " representative " of English dramatic art ? It is much to say — of the art. Yet England is proud of him — proud, but with a knowledge that he belonged to England by accident, as it were, that he is too big for England, that he is the world's. With such proud sense of her unworthiness may Greece rejoice in Phidias. Dr. Fisher also averred distinctly, without any paradoxical ambiguity, that we want better art critics, or rather that we badly need our published art criticism to be better done. He said this in the main with relation to sculpture and painting. But how difficult, almost im- possible, to do to satisfaction ! Less difficult, maybe, with sculpture than with painting. In the former the idea which the artist wishes t express can scarcely be so complex — the senti- ment ought to be intelligible, the composition is a question of taste about which there is not likely to be as much room for dispute as in 14* 212 The Faun and the Philosopher most of such questions. The workmanship and anatomy and the forms of the drapery are matters of definite treatment in the expression of each. All this applies especially to sculpture in the round, but in degree it is true of high relief work and in less degree again of low relief. But when we come to criticism of pictures, and especially of colour, the qualities become almost indefinitely numerous and conflictingly complex. Criticism has to go very delicately. Between Pre-Raphaelitism and Futurism what a wide gulf there is ; yet each, and all intermediate phases, seem to be honest expressions. The Pre-Raphaelite school, so far as it remains faith- ful to the earliest teachings, is for the time being moribund. Impressionism seems, on the surface, to find most justification. But it has to be accepted with a reserve. Mr. Collier has told us, after some scientific analysis of the physical conditions of sight, that it is possible to put on paper an exact copy of the impression on the retina. At least that is how one reads him ; and if wrongly one may be allowed to ask Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 213 pardon. It might be possible to meet this statement with a direct contradiction — -to point out the limited scale of colour on our palettes — to remark that whereas our range is between white and black, Nature can make a thing white and then put it into the sunlight, and make a thing black, and then put it into the shade. It is easy to say this, and equally easy for Mr. Collier, no doubt, to answer it. But suppose instead of contradicting his premiss we admit it ; and say that we can put on paper an exact imitation of the image which at any instant is on the retina. Then let us ask, is that enough ? Perhaps not, because what we " see " when we look at a landscape — using the word " see ' in its fullest sense — is not merely the picture which at any instant is on the retina, but a picture which is made up of that image plus our store of knowledge about the details of the image, -plus the image which we received a moment ago from the landscape. By the store of our know- ledge about the picture one does not mean that if we see a cow in the picture we at once bring 214 The Faun and the Philosopher into our conception all we ever heard or learned of the life-history of a cow ; but we do bring in a certain amount of ready-money change out of that store of knowledge — the connotation which the word " cow ' instantly suggests. This much assistance, however, we may equally bring in to the service of the painter of a picture when we look at his work. But what we do not bring into our view of a painted picture is the second plus. We see the land- scape as it were hypnotized, all its movement arrested. When we viewed the original it was not so. A tree had stirred in the wind a second before ; a cow had turned her head ; the grass had swayed ; a leaf had fallen — certainly, almost, we had some previous impression given us, perhaps unconsciously, which went to help and to fill in our impression of the given moment — to translate the image on the retina into some- thing with a fuller meaning for our consciousness. The pictured landscape gives us none of this. By way of compensation it should give us some- thing more than the original in another quality, Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 215 to make up to us for this loss. The case in portrait-painting is analogous. We cannot say on canvas all that the face says to us, in its constant change of expression. For compensa- tion, we must express something else — the best thought of which the sitter is capable, the best psychological moment. Surely a great deal of nonsense is talked, said Dr. Fisher, about the " dignity of Art," the " responsibility of Art," and so forth. Why is a man an artist, using the term in the very highest sense even ? Not because he feels that he has some message to deliver to the world — a message to which he can best give expression in some artistic form. No, that really is not the motive which sends men to cover canvas with paint, paper with ink, and musical scores with hieroglyphics. Certainly it is a theory which is held, but often the very men who propound the theory hold at the same time a more just but quite contradictory one — that art with a purpose is, so far, bad art. No ; art is the natural ex- pression of something within the artist which 216 The Faun and the Philosopher clamours for utterance, and the utterance of which is a pleasure. A man is an artist because he loves this spontaneous and natural expression, as a young healthy animal delights in physical activity. Of course the immediate reason that ninety-nine out of every hundred works of art are perpetrated is that Mrs. Artist and all the little Artists want bread-and-butter, but this is not the sort of reason that drove the perpe- trator originally to art. No one, nowadays, speaking broadly, adopts art, deliberately, in preference to brewing or banking, as a financial business. In every case he feels a " vocation ' : first — that is to say he conceives himself to have artistic genius. Later — perhaps long after he has got any notion of this kind out of his head, and when other people, instead, are beginning to hold it about him — he will produce his works for the sake of the money they will bring, but that was not the original reason of his making art his career. He became an artist because he loved producing artistic work — wanted to be a 7r6ir)T7je — a maker — a mock-creator — a maker of Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 217 images. Unfortunately, most of us, who take upon ourselves to talk about genius, are dis- cussing a quality, if it really is a distinct quality, with which we have no personal ac- quaintance. Of course, Dr. Fisher said, it is a theme on which a good deal of nonsense is talked, as on most into which the question of art enters. One or two of Dr. Fisher's old scientific friends, attracted by the prospect of seeing and hearing again one who had been very distinguished in their circle but had vanished completely from it, had actually come from London to attend the lecture. The Doctor had talked himself quite out of his characteristic mood of whim- sical cynicism and into something strangely like geniality. It carried him so far as to say that he should welcome any discussion on points which the lecture might have suggested, and one of his old scientific friends, accepting the sug- gestion in a spirit of kindly interest, incautiously observed that all genius was morbidly self- conscious. Very probably it was true ; at all 21 8 The Faun and the Philosopher events it was a truism ; therefore the Doctor seized upon it with all his dissecting tools. " I think," he said, " that you are just putting the cart before the horse. I do not mean, of course, that I want to convert the proposition altogether and say that all self-consciousness is genius — God forbid. What I mean is this, that if you look carefully into the matter you will find, I think, that if there is any relation between them (and I believe there is) it is rather that an excessive self-consciousness is in the nature of cause, and genius of effect, than vice versa. I am presuming it probable that when you speak of genius you are thinking of artistic genius — though what I am going to say appears to me true of other forms of genius, such as the military genius, too — they are all akin. But speaking of artistic genius first — what did you say ? " " No," said his friend, " I am sorry I inter- rupted — I was only going to ask how you would define artistic genius. It was a foolish question." " It was — I hate definitions ; they hamper one. But I will tell you. By artistic genius Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 219 I mean a genius for expressing great thoughts and great emotions. Do you call that a definition ? " " No, I do not," said the friend, laughing. " It is all you will get, then," he answered. " I don't suppose you ask for a definition of genius in general." " No," said the other. " I won't trouble you with that futility." " Well, then," the Doctor pursued, " these expressions of great thoughts and emotions to be, humanly speaking, intelligible, must be given by exhibiting the thoughts or the words or the actions of human beings. " At all events," he hastened to add, " of anthropomorphic beings — in case you should say that you have seen pictures of angels and the like. " Now don't tell me," said the Doctor, as his friend hesitated in replying, " that there is such a thing as landscape-painting — please don't " — he saw at once, by his listener's face, that he had anticipated the exception. " I 220 The Faun and the Philosopher am sorry you wanted to tell me that, because landscape-painting only differs in degree, and not in kind, viewed from the standpoint of our argument. It is not, directly, a picture of a man thinking or feeling, but it must be in relation to human thought and feeling, for the impression created by a landscape depends en- tirely upon that relation — is it not true ? " There was no denying its truth. " And it is equally true of the merit of beau- tiful form in a statue, though of course a statue may and should have other merits too." Quite so." But if the artistic expression is so much concerned with the thoughts and feelings and actions of men, it follows, does it not, that the artist, if he is at all a genius, must have con- siderable knowledge of human thoughts and feelings and actions ? " " Of course." " And this knowledge is acquired in two ways, mainly — by observation and introspection." " Yes." a a Infinitely Obv'ous and Obviously Infinite 221 " Then would you say that it is the duty of the artist, as such, to practise as much as possible his observation and introspection ? " " Certainly." " But is not human nature so constituted that that which is done from a sense of duty is seldom so well done as that which is done from a natural love of the doing ? " " Yes," said the friend, " but are we not wandering from our argument ? " " On the contrary," he replied, " we are hard on its conclusion, for of all dispositions is not the acutely self-conscious the most naturally inclined to this observation of itself and of others, in order to discover what others are thinking of it, and in order to bring itself into the relation with those others which seems good to it ? " " Yes, yes," the other said, " and you seem to me to have proved your case well, though you have gone about it with an almost Platonic circumvagation." " Every road seems long the first time we 222 The Faun and the Philosopher travel it," Dr. Fisher replied. " Especially if we do not see the goal. The argument pro- bably did not seem nearly as long to Socrates, who saw the conclusion in view all the time, as it did to his friends, who only saw it when their feet were kicking it." " That is almost as graceful a compliment to me," his old friend answered, laughing, " as your comparison of yourself with Socrates is modest. I admit, though, that I merited the compliment. But you must remember another parallel between yourself and Socrates — doubt- less he got the lion's share of enjoyment out of the arguments because he was talking almost all the time." " But whether we are going to harness up genius and an excess of self-consciousness as cart to horse or horse to cart," Dr. Fisher pursued, without the flattery of any attention to the jibe, " at all events we may be sure that extreme self-consciousness is only an incident of genius, not its essence — an essence so subtle that no one has yet been able to catch it in any web Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 223 of words or definitions. Occasionally only, in illuminated moments, one seems to have an idea of what genius may be, and to catch a glimpse of her fleeting spirit-body. But the beautiful thing passes us and is gone, and we are lucky if we have been able to touch the extremest fringe of her garment with a contact which we can recall — more than enough blessed if we are left with but a tiny atom of the fringe fast-clutched in our fingers, for that tiny rent fragment is worth more to us than all the broad-cloth-clad facts in our world. " We have done much, though, if in that fleeting glance we have succeeded in recognizing the identity of the spirit-body, which our imaginings of genius present to us, with the spirit-body of truth — not the truth of fact, but the truth of spirit. For many of these broad- cloth-clad facts are true, and if we do a damage to them we are not acting according to the spirit of truth. But the spirit of truth dwells in us, and by searching we may find her — by hard searching and looking into our hearts and 224 The Faun and the Philosopher finding out what is there, instead of repeating, parrot-like, the things that have been told us, instead of taking out thoughts from the ' ready- made ' clothing shop. They will not really fit us — we shall never go about with any conscious- ness of their Tightness — these thoughts which really ought to belong to someone else, but which we have stolen." Before the end of the discussion one of the artistic colony found an occasion for interpola- ting a ferocious criticism. " Without conviction we can never be con- vincing " — this was a phrase thrown out by Dr. Fisher to point his argument. " There never was a time," said the objector, from the body of the hall, " when such a maxim, launched on the world, was so likely to do mischief — when every little fool that has a fad puts it on paper or canvas and goes about crying that ' that is how he sees things,' there- fore he is speaking the truth that is in him. Go to the exhibition of the ' Societe des Artists Independants ' " Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 225 " I never heard of them," Dr. Fisher inter- rupted. " Is it possible ? Such is fame ! It is close behind the Concours Hippique in the Champs- Elysees — at least it was. Possibly it is defunct, but more probably it is immortal. There, however, you may see ' convictions ' enough to sicken you of your maxim." " Convictions are not impertinences," the Doctor retorted. " They are not the thrusting forward of some so-called idea which is a sacrilege of truth and aims only at notoriety. These fantastic painters have not looked right into their hearts and put on canvas what they found there — after painfully acquiring the technical skill to do so worthily. They have looked into their hearts indeed — in search of what ? Of something, of anything which would make their work look different from that of others and so attract attention. That is not the art which proceeds from conviction, but from impudence and insolence. " Wisdom never sprang, fully grown, from the 15 226 The Faun and the Philosopher head of Zeus. It is not to be believed. The Greek gods were too anthropomorphic for that, and nothing human ever invented by itself a work of wisdom, not even if that human thing was an artist inde pendant — Heaven, what a phrase — independent of Nature, I suppose ! The utmost effort of the individual has never done more than lay a stone of Wisdom's temple. Sometimes it is a keystone, sometimes it is a corner-stone, but the individual is never sole builder. The works of wisdom and truth are raised, like their makers, by painful, long evolu- tion working at the end of a chain whose top links and attachments are so high up that we cannot see them. Artists say that they cannot improve a single line of the curves of the Chinese dragon which appears on everything that is Chinese — from tea-chests to a golden silk flag, as long as a big room, which General Gordon brought home — and, needless to say, gave away — after the Taiping rebellion. But that is not to imply that some Chinese artist was greater in the expression of lines of movement and Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 227 beauty than any other artist in the world. When the first Ah Sin (the Chinese equivalent of John Smith), in pigtail, poker-playing, and general appearance, much like his namesake of to-day, drew the first dragon some four thousand years ago that dragon, we may be sure, was some- thing of a cripple. His curves were not so perfect then. It has taken four thousand years to bring them to what we are pleased to call perfection, one artist altering a line here, another there, of the original design. Who shall affirm that four thousand years hence our dragon of to-day may not be regarded as a cripple ? But that is not to say that we are not to work at him. Every stone that we lay, every line that we improve, is a foundation on which one who comes after may lay another. There is no reason that we should be anything but very humble — humbler even than your friends the artists independants — even though we be convinced. " It is the same with the Homeric poems. They did not spring, fully armed and grown, from Homer's head (presuming him to have 15* 228 The Faun and the Philosopher had an individual existence and a head) any more than the dragon from an individual Ah Sin's head ; but Homer put the coping-stone on the work. Shakespeare's immortal achievements have a like character. Wagner was not the in- ventor of the " Nibelungenlied " or the " Gotter- dammerung." What these great men do is to put on popular tales, babbled to babes for generations, the stamp of their genius — they fulfil them with truth out of their own true convictions, so that they keep their grain and lose their chaff — and this fulfilment of truth, this stamp of genius, is a hall-mark, bearing which the baby-tales and baby-dragons go down to posterity with an indefinitely enhanced value. They looked into their own hearts and found there the spirit of truth, whom they evoked to come forth and breathe life and strong manful- ness into the nursery tales. They did not need to trouble about broad-cloth-clad facts. No nursery tale outrages the sacredness of fact. Do you mean to tell me that Iris did not come skipping down on a rainbow, that Prospero did not evoke Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 229 and still tempests, that the witches did not summon up the king's ghost, that Faust was not the slave of Mephistopheles, that Siegfried did not find Brunhilda within the walls of flame ? Those were facts — better than broad-cloth-clad facts, they were — to the folk who first told about them : they were convictions, or, as I said before and still maintain, they would not go on for ever convincing. " A certain statesman was asked by one of his henchmen, newly come to Parliament, how one could best learn the rules of the House. ' By breaking them,' was the reply. " It was a reply well worthy of the man, and worthy of much consideration. We are all too afraid of breaking the rules — let us be very careful, though, lest we go to the other extreme. Let us not act on the assumption that rules are made for the same purposes as pie crust. It is a danger. It is the snare, no doubt, into which your friends, the artists independants, have fallen. It is a snare equally insidious in every department of morals and of 230 The Faun and the Philosopher art. It is a snare spread, as you say, in special profusion to-day when the fashion is at all costs to be unconventional. But all these efforts are impertinences and affectations, there is nothing true about them. They are the hysteri- cal violences of a weak woman rather than the expressions of a man's strength. The real temptation is to stand agaze in wonder, re- peating Pilate's vain question about the truth, till we find ourselves, still wondering, saying good-bye — our children's children closing our eyes, and no stone put on the temple ! Life gone in unfruitful wonder ! " A man can do worse things than this, but not much worse. If your conviction be honest, and not an affectation, why not go straight away to work on it ? If it prove wrong, try again. Even a crime committed and repented of may be shrived, but a ' Statue and bust '-like attitude, of gazing longingly at a sin with no heart to commit it, leads by way of slow paralysis to death, with never a chance of repentance or of a good deed done by way of amend. Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 231 " And don't be deluded by radical falsehoods masquerading in the guise of truism, as that ' you should always tell the truth.' There are times when no truth should be told, people to whom no truths should be told, and many truths which never should be told at all. Those eternal modifications of Aristotle, the irwg and the ttotb, the manner and the season, are never to be forgotten. I do not say that you may not descend into the depths, but it is only on the condition that you also touch the heights. Use the former to give the measure of the latter, but never touch the base for its own sake, merely. And all that you do, do simply. For goodness' sake in art, for the sake of all that is good in art, work as unconsciously as you can, expressing your spirit, not mindful of impress on other spirits. Remember that of all tactless acts the most tactless is to show tact. Let it be there if you will, but in least possible evidence, mindful that the most perfect tact is unconscious, pro- ceeding without mental effort from sympathy. If you are filled with that spirit, then your art, 232 The Faun and the Philosopher expressing what is best in you, will evoke a like response. If you go forth clamorous for response you stifle it. " But give yourself out. Do not hoard your- self, saying, ' No, I won't say that, I'll keep it — it will do for my next picture.' If the idea was worth anything it would have bred a better in its turn, and you might have had a family of them in your studio but for your niggardliness. There are qualities, though, more valuable, possibly, than your ideas — your kindliness of heart, your humanity in fact. Do not keep them all tightly shut up. Crumbs thrown on the water come back full-grown loaves. Have the same faith about money-spending — money is not essentially an objet d'art, though some coins are well engraved, but if you want a thing (really want it — that is to say, think it would be good for you to have it, and that it would help your growth) buy it — so long as the money is yours, and not your tradesmen's. There is often a good economy in lavishness, and, after all, there is always this new Old Age Pension Infinitely Obvious and Obviously Infinite 233 and the Workhouse. Even that is better than you, like the Duke, in the square, and the object of your desire, like the lady, at the window. The other, at all events, is life. Knowledge (including experience) is the one kind of cake out of which the more slices you cut the more remains. So you need be no niggard, either of its giving or receiving." At this conclusion, as of the obvious infinity, to quote his own phrase, of knowledge, did the Professor arrive by way of a lucubration on which he had set out from the text that, by reason of Man's manifest pleasure in the un- known, ignorance must evidently be a better state for him than knowledge ! Just what conclusions his hearers, especially the artistic colony, drew from it all, may be left matter of wide conjecture. CHAPTER XX FASCINATIONS T TP on the hill-side, in the gorse-bushes, a blackbird was " clacking " clamorously. A little nearer a robin was sending out a thin, penetrating alarm note. Something uncanny, to the apprehensions of these small avine people, was afoot. These hints and exclamations of anger or alarm are such as no one can afford to miss if he is on track to surprise Nature of her secrets, and if you do not go forth to be surprised — if you know exactly what you are to meet — you may as well stay at home, for any interest in your walk. So, here is this blackbird clacking, and perhaps you would not take very much notice of his witness alone, just because he is so per- petually bearing witness that he has grown quite 234 Fascinations 235 careless and irresponsible, and much of his witness is, if not false, at least quite uncalled for. He is too emotional, almost hysterical, in a chronic state of hyperesthesia. If you, whom he has known intimately by sight since the very first day that he put his naked red head out of the chipped egg, come on him unexpectedly, he will go off with shrieks of terror, as if you were a peregrine falcon or a cat. So there is nothing very serious to be apprehended simply because the blackbird is complaining. The robin is more trustworthy. What could be the adequate cause of all this trouble on the hillside ? If it were of avine making the maker would be a hawk, or a jay, or a magpie, in all probability, and were it one or other of these it would be visible even from a couple of hundred yards' distance. A jay would cer- tainly be audible, drowning with its own vocifera- tions the exclamations of the blackbird — a jay, believe me, who have seen it, is capable of the crime of taking young blackbirds from the nest and eating them before the eyes of their bitterly 236 The Faun and the Philosopher protesting parents — a magpie would be even more in evidence than a jay, and a hawk would not be concealing itself in the bushes. The only avine alternative left was that it should be an owl. An owl disturbed from its day's rest, taking covert in these bushes and discovered by a bird of the day, would be quite adequate occasion for all the outcry. On the whole, probabilities were much against the bird theory of the trouble ; much in favour, therefore, of the disturber of the peace being a beast of sensitive nose, and the up-wind approach was indicated as prudent. No man who has a wish to see the other animals at their normal avocations goes in conspicuous raiment, nor with any sudden movement of body or limb. The complainants themselves — they had now been joined by a pair of chaffinches vigorously chirping — were too much engaged to be likely to pay much attention if the approach were made with- out a great deal of self-advertisement ; but the object of their common fear was sure to be far more fearful of man, the enemy of all, and the Fascinations 237 moment one of them becomes apprehensive the consciousness of a human watcher is conveyed to all, and that is as much as to say that his watch- ing will find nothing very interesting to reward it. On this occasion, as I made a quiet way, with a gliding " ghost-step," towards the centre of the trouble, I had much in my favour — the wind was right, I had a background of trees, so that I did not stand out silhouetted against a clear sky, and there were taller hollies here and there among the more frequent gorse-bushes — tall enough for a hide. So I drew near and nearer, and the black- bird's cackle went louder, the bird itself going over the tops of the gorse in short, flurried nights of a yard or two, and still, for the life of me, I could see no reason for it all. The cause, whatever it were, must surely be very tiny, or at least very lowly, so that the grasses between the bushes hid it. I began to suspect a snake. The next moment the adequate reason of the uproar was revealed — a body, slim enough, almost, to be that of a snake, but short, reddish, with white below, and throwing itself this way and that, in 238 The Faun and the Philosopher the most extraordinary contortions, darting from side to side with such a speed you could hardly see it go, then lying on its back a moment, like a playful kitten. It was a weasel, and there was not a doubt what it was at — playing the fascina- tion game with these poor, foolish birds, that were fluttering all about it. How far the weasel's action was instinctive ; how far, if at all, it had any conscious intent of inveigling the birds by these singular antics, is quite beyond me to say. It is more than likely that his lightning-quick jumping, which we are pleased to call dancing, is part of the weasel's general behaviour when attacking a living foe, and is primarily intended to dodge the attacks which that foe delivers in its defence. It is a kind of movement very characteristic of the tribe to which the weasel belongs. We see it when a ferret is coming to grips with a strong, active rat. The mongoose is said to show the same tendency in a very much more marked degree when it is tackling a snake, and to a weasel, that tiny person, even a black- bird is a big foe. So the play went on, the birds, Fascinations 239 for all their alarm cries, fluttering ever nearer down to the small dancing dervish, and whether it would, as I momentarily expected, have made a swift leap at one or other will never be known, for on a sudden it stopped its games and sat up, as a squirrel sits, on its hinder end, erect and listening. Its nostrils quivered quickly, then it turned its head, dropped to its forefeet, went from my sight with a bound, and with its going the noisy protests of the small birds died down. What had happened ? What subtle distrac- tion from the world beyond had intervened to arrest the action on this small stage ? I was confident that it was no indiscretion on my own part, in the role, so far as I knew, of the sole " gallery." In an instant my grosser ears became aware of the reason, revealed in a sudden footfall and the hum of a human voice. A moment more discovered the authors of the disturbance — Miss Mary and my friend the Faun, she majestically walking in the comparative freedom of a rabbit run, he with a prancing motion of no great 240 The Faun and the Philosopher dignity, high-stepping over the heather by its side, intent above all things, as I did not fail to notice even in the first glance that gave them to my observation, to keep pace with her, bending to her ear to say something that I did not catch. But her answer, delivered in a clearer, challeng- ing note, I did hear : " No, never, not as long as Dad's alive." They were abreast of me now, and I had a finger to my lips to bid them pass me without a word, so that I might remain undetected by the actors in the interrupted drama and perhaps witness its revival — I was in their full view, and they were but the other side from me of a clump of bracken fern — but my gesture of caution was quite superfluous. So engrossed were they mutually that they had no side glance for me. To the lady's definitely expressed determination the man replied in a voice that had a pleading tone of sadness : " You are quite resolved ? ' To which she answered in the same note as before : " Yes, quite." Then he fell behind her and they went on in Fascinations 241 Indian file, leaving me with the guilty feeling of a spy, though wholly an unwilling one. What was his plea, to which she never would consent " as long as Dad's alive " ? I was not sure. But I might guess. 16 CHAPTER XXI HOW THE FAUN FOUND PEACE TT was a few weeks later than the date at which I had presented Miss Mary with that sitting of Aylesbury ducks' eggs that she met me with a look in her eyes which seemed eloquent of disaster. I was very anxious even before she began to speak. Nor did her first words lessen the strain. " A tragedy has happened." " Tell me," I said. " You know that sitting of ducks' eggs you gave me " — the reader also will perhaps remember — " they hatched out well, you know : there were nine hatched out of thirteen eggs. That's not bad for ducks. Especially because it's been rather a bad year for their hatching. I think it's been a little too dry." 242 How the Faun found Peace 243 " But I don't see the tragedy," I said. Miss Mary was sweetly feminine in deferring the point of the narrative. " The tragedy's this — there are nine hatched out, but they're all drakes." " Lord," I said. " That doesn't sound pro- mising for founding a dynasty." " No, does it ? " " It's a noble brotherhood — you shall have a noble sisterhood to match. I must give you another sitting and warrant them all ducks." " I don't believe," she said, laughing, " in your warranties." We met the Professor as we went up through the garden, and Miss Mary left me to chat with him. At first I had to do the chatting, for he seemed in a thoughtful and monosyllabic mood. Then he snapped out, with no relevance to the topic I had tried to start, " Your Faun is a fraud." " Oh," I said. " I don't know." " But I know," the Professor said. " You've seen his Pterodactyl ? " 244 The Faun and the Philosopher " His van ? — yes. Surely that's simple enough." " What d'you think of the sign it takes its name from ? " " D'you mean that fossil head ? " The Professor smiled. " Never mind," he said, " but have you read that long poem of his — his ' First and Last ' as he calls it — his Cosmo- gony ? " " Yes," I said. " Well, it's all a fraud. He doesn't believe a word of that — poor devil." " What d'you mean," I asked. " Why should you say that ? " " That's not what he believes : it's what he hopes : it's what he'd like to believe — a very different thing. It's the sort of purpose of the world that we'd all like to believe. He's de- frauding himself in all that long description — not believing, only making-believe." " It's innocent make-believe, at least," I said. " It's far better than that," the Professor replied, with a force that made me ashamed. How the Faun found Peace 245 " It's a fine effort to make-believe in a fine end, an end that would help and comfort a man ! " Only two days later I was again at the Holt and again the Professor introduced the van-man, with no relevance, to the conversation. It seemed to indicate that his thoughts were a good deal concerned with him. " That's a strange young man of yours," he said. " Of mine ? " " Well — you did bring him to us, didn't you — out of a van ? " " But he knew you, long before I had ever seen him. You met him, didn't you, in Canada ? " " Ah, yes ; I had forgotten. Mary told me." He pressed his hand over his brow and added, " I do forget things." " We all do," I said. It was the kind of re- mark which was sure to do him good. " Don't be so painfully obvious," he replied. " It appears that you and he overheard something 246 The Faun and the Philosopher of what I was saying the other day to his Rever- ence." " I'm sorry," I said guiltily. " We couldn't help it. We " " Oh," he interrupted, " I'm not blaming you. I never blame anyone." This was grossly untrue, but I did not say so. " See this that he has given me to read," and he handed me a sheet of paper with these lines : THE AGNOSTIC'S CRY Throw us a ray on the path — why are Thy ways so dark ? Wilt not proffer a hand to guide Thy child to the mark ? Steep are the paths of the world, set with terror and sin, With pain to learn of the right, pain to be strong to win To the little right we know, pain to avert the blame That we miss the end of life, the goal of the doubtful game, With the frequent chance to lose and the single chance to gain — And gain we know not what ! We would fight less oft in vain Might we see the victor's prize or feel Thou held'st us dear By a hand in the seeking hand or a word in the eager ear, Eager to hear Thy voice — we ask not to see Thy face — How the Faun found Peace 247 Only a word of hope to give us heart in the race, To give us hint for our faith in Thee who askest all Of us who go at Thy word and come at the word's recall, Yet givest nought Thyself— only a futile life, Life for a few-score years, with ne'er a clue to the strife In the fevered race we run, with its joys and frequent fears, The laughter that gives Thee praise, the hot accusing tears That Thou, who might give all, deniest the humble quest Of one who would know Thy truth, and, knowing, might serve Thee best. " The poor fellow," said the Professor, glancing again at the verses as I handed them back to him. " He is indeed disquieting him- self in vain." " It does not seem to sound the note of hope as clearly as that other, his Book of Genesis poem." " You should call that rather the note of his wish than of his hope. I told you he was all a fraud when he wrote that — that it was not the real thought of his soul that he ex- pressed there.' 5) 248 The Faun and the Philosopher " You think this more nearly expresses the real man ? " " The real man ? That's a meaningless phrase ! " " His real character, if you like that better." " I don't like it any better at all. Who knows another man's ' real character ' — his own either, for the matter of that ? Life is not like a novel or a play : it doesn't ' bring out,' as they call it, for public inspection, the char- acter of a man. And as a rule it's just in pro- portion as the characters of the people in a novel become more distinct and cut-and-dried and definite that they become less lifelike. Just look about you, at the people you know well, and think how much you know about what you're pleased to call their characters, and then tell me. You can only make guesses, guesses at what one or another would do in certain imagined circumstances, guesses even at what you yourself would do. It's only in a novel or a play that you get people labelled, like a phrenologist's head, with the qualities How the Faun found Peace 249 that go to make up character. You may know a man with certain qualities very strong in him — generosity or meanness, courage or cowardice, as the case may be — and may make a good forecast about those actions of the man in which there is a special relation to the one very dominant quality, but that's not knowing his * character,' which is made up of a great number of qualities — it is only knowing one of many facets of his character. We know that it's giving high praise to the intelligence of a man to say that he's a judge of character. If char- acter were a distinct and definite thing, as a novelist or a play-writer shows it to us, it would be no credit to any man's intelligence to be able to judge it." " These verses," I said, getting back to our starting-point. " They're suggested, of course, by what we overheard you saying." " Of course, but why show them to me ? " " I suppose he thought it might interest you to see your thoughts in his words." " Do you suppose," he asked, as if the 250 The Faun and The Philosopher question followed directly, " that he's in love with Mary ? " " He'd be a wonderful young man if he wasn't." " Do you think he's a good young fellow ? " " I don't know him. I should think he was — quite, from what I've seen — a little mad." " He would suit Mary the better for that — she's so very sane. He gave me another poem — where is it ? Mary's got a new housemaid, and she tidies — that means she put things where you can't find them. Ah, here." He gave me another sheet. FAITH The Soul Prays Spirit of God that made man, that made all things, Set him apart in the world, though a part of it, Teach us the secret, we pray, of the " why " of it. Wherefore is man thus apart, though a part of it ? Wherefore his lordship ? Wherein is he better ? Better of God-given thought and of reason ? Speak to us, grant us the keys of the mystery. How the Faun found Peace 251 Moaning of surges on far-distant beaches, Soft winds that sigh through the tresses of marram Fall on the senses like voices of comfort, Soothing, beneficent, hinting a meaning, Holding a promise that now, or a year hence, Some day, the Spirit will meet us, will speak with us, Teaching His mysteries. So far — no further ! Lone in the wilderness, searching His secrecies, Asking the green things that grow without questioning — Silently grateful for rain and for sunshine, Posing no questions, but gratefully taking — Asking the live things that teem in the woodland, Eating their food from His hand without questioning — Asking for ever ; the answer withheld from us ! The Spirit Answers Granted to man is the guerdon of seeking, His is the questioning — His and none other's. Theirs but to live, never asking the " why " of it. This is man's guerdon, that sets him apart from them — Granted the sense, that his life is a mystery, Man is full rich enough, rich as they ne'er can be. What though the answer on earth be withheld from him, Could he but trust it for good — this were faith in him. " I suppose that's for my spiritual encourage- ment," the Professor said when I had done 252 The Faun and the Philosopher reading. " It's a strange mode of wooing, isn't it ? " " Wooing ? " " Yes, wooing the father-in-law's consent, by writing him metaphysical verses." " If you look at it so, it is novel." " Does Mary like him ? " " Can I tell ? " Then, as I remembered the interrupted tragedy of the weasel and the birds, I found myself compelled in common honesty to add, " If you want a guess — yes, I'm inclined to think she does." " I'm very glad for her," he said. " Very glad. She's a dear girl. She must have had quite enough of me." Again he passed his hand across his brow in a very wearied way. And this time I refrained from the obvious remark. I asked the Faun a day or two later about these curious and curiously unfinished verses — the " Agnostic's Cry " and the other. For the first time in my acquaintance with him he seemed a little self-conscious and embarrassed How the Faun found Peace 253 in talking over his own production. " They are stupid," he said, " I wish I had never written them. I wish Dr. Fisher had never seen them." His manner made me the more anxious that he should explain. " I seem," he said, " to have left all that behind — that futility and speculation." " You mean that you have arrived — have found your answer ? " " Yes," he replied, " I almost think I can say that — not that I have found, but that I have been shown." " Will you not tell me about it ? " " I will try, yes. It was Miss Mary that found it for me — the answer." " Has she come down into the theological arena ? " His reply astonished me immensely. " She has." " And her weapons ? " " The most simple that can be imagined. I think it was rather like this that she put it : Supposing the Creator of it all — of this Universe — who set it all going, to have looked down 254 The Faun and the Philosopher upon the world as He made it, at a phase in its evolution at which Man had been developed, with his free will — the first creature, mind you, in all the evolution story that ever has had a free will — and supposing Him to have seen that man was using this freedom wrongly, what would be the likely, the rational, almost the obvious and natural mode of His action in order to inform man of his error ? " " It is you, not I, that are telling the story," I said, as he paused for me to answer. ' It is Miss Mary's story in the first instance. The likely mode, as she pointed out to me, would be for Him to contrive an interference, an interruption, with the mechanism that He had set going, to send a special message to man. And the natural, so to speak, way for Him to do this would be by the mouth of a man in whom He had permitted to reside a portion of the Divine soul. That is how Miss Mary put it to me, and, so put, it seems so rational, so easy." " And brings you at once to Christianity." How the Faun found Peace 255 " At once," he assented, " and all the rest of the story falls into its place without a jar. It seems in a wonderfully simple manner to have solved for me what I believed insoluble. It seems to make so many things that were diffi- cult quite easy. We are obliged to admit the miracle, the supernatural, in the first instance — in the initial starting of the evolution scheme. After that, it does not seem rational to deny the possibility, even the probability, of super- natural interference in the later stage, when the new element of a free-willed creature came on the scene. Even the most convinced materialist, even Dr. Fisher himself, could hardly dispute that." " Are you sure," I asked, " of his conviction and his materialism ? I am not." The Faun was more interested in the daughter. " She put it to me in another way," he said, taking no notice of my question about the father. " ' Supposing,' she said, ' that you had one of those little collections of ants, in their nests, that people sometimes keep in glass cages, and 256 The Faun and the Philosopher supposing you saw them doing something that was very foolish, and causing death or discomfort to a great many of them, and supposing, too, that you were able to create an ant, and to put some of your own superior reason into him, would not that creation be your most natural and obvious way of communicating with those other ants, and of telling them how foolish they were, and of teaching them to do better ? Is there any other conceivable way, in fact, in which you could so communicate with them ? Is it not manifest that it must be one of them- selves, one who speaks their language and who does their acts, to influence them both by precept and example ? ' " It struck me as an excellent parable, and I told him so. "It solved difficulties in a wonderful way for me," he said ; and with that he left me, his eyes shining with hope. The parable seemed to me excellent, and I was thankful for the peace which it had brought to the Faun's sick soul : nevertheless, I per- How the Faun found Peace 257 mitted myself to wonder for how much, in its influence upon him, the personality of the teller counted. I wondered whether the parable's efficacy would have been as pro- nounced if it had happened to me to hit on it and to tell it to him. I am wondering still. 17 CHAPTER XXII THE FALL OF THE LEAF FN the still mornings of autumnal frost it is curious how the leaf shivers off the forest trees at the first touch of the sun's rays slanting over the horizon. Though there be no wind to move them, yet down they come, dropping straight — big, golden leaves of the wild cherry trees that the frost has tinted, so that you might well imagine this golden shower the source of the myth of Danae. There is something just a little uncanny about it, though it is so beautiful, just because its cause is not quite obvious. It is a perplexity that need not endure — a little reflection will thaw this brain- frost. When the leaf has lived out its time on the tree, certain cortical cells are developed at 258 The Fall of the Leaf 259 the junction of the leaf-stem with the per- manent wood. These cells have a light cohesion only, so that the leaf, with its stem, is readily- broken away, on a very slight impact of air, as soon as the cells are developed. Until that development they will cling firmly, and that is the reason why, if you break off a branch from a tree and keep it in the house, the leaves do not fall off at the date of the autumnal leaf- fall common to the rest of their kind, and why the leaves will cling on a half-broken bough of the growing tree. If you wish to preserve the leaves on the branch you must check its growth : which only sounds something of a paradox because we associate the fall of the leaf with death, speaking of " the death of the leaf," and so on, though it is not precisely a correct way of speaking. On the still autumnal morn- ings the overnight frost has caused an out- thrust between these cortical cells, separating them as the moisture about and between them swells while it freezes. Virtually the leaf and its stem are already separated from the branch, 17* 260 The Faun and the Philosopher only that they are held in place by the same force, the frost, that has disintegrated them. Then, when the golden rays of the sun come streaming over the trees and touch the stems, the leaves are loosened, released, and fall to earth. It is a sight of great beauty — the golden shower descending through a haze which is still silvery because the sun has not yet warmed it through to a mellower hue — and yet a sight of pathos, as the limbs of the poor trees begin to stand out and stretch to heaven in a cold, wintry nakedness. So far as the kingdom of Flora is concerned it means that winter is already here. Definitely, whatever was here, summer had gone, autumn was in the throes. I had no knowledge of the ways of the van-folk, and no general information of the kind, even if I had it, would give light on the ways of my friend, who distinctly was not to be judged on general lines. I knew the lien that held him to his place on Ashdown Forest, yet every day I feared to find him gone, the lien broken, and even if I The Fall of the Leaf 261 did not believe that there would be any breaking of a maiden's heart therewith, were he to go, still it seemed to me that he ought not to be allowed to depart thus, with no word said. And, besides, he too had a heart. It may be argued that in that case his heart would prompt him and would find him the word, but I began to believe that in some small measure I knew him and understood his intense self-distrust and morbid self-consciousness about those singular, interesting ears and other less physical qualities in which he was peculiar. If I knew him aright at all he would be likely to go, saying nothing, eating his heart, incredu- lous that there could be any responsive pain in the heart of another. And by one who did not know him it might very well be argued, too, that all this was no affair of mine, that I could not touch it without most crude impertinence ; but that would be just because of the critic's lack of knowledge. Any who did know might appreciate that this was a man whose very childishness made it 262 The Faun and the Philosopher impossible for one who wished him well to be impertinent to him. In his simplicity he was so perfectly clear-sighted that he would under- stand. And, besides, I had always the plea that I had known Miss Mary from a baby, that she had no mother and that her father was — as he was. Right or wrong, I took the case into my hand, starting out, after a night of cogitation, to play providence, much against my normal principles. But are there not instances in which normal principles do not apply ? I found my friend, in the late autumnal dawn, at his van door, and since with him and his simplicity the direct road was always the right one, I said my say in the fewest words and watched him very miserably writhing in the pangs of the fear and hope that I had stirred. As I had expected, he showed no resentment at my interference — only grati- tude — but his mind was hard to determine. Really I do not know how it might have gone with him — I was already fearing an adverse decision — when, at the moment of mental The Fall of the Leaf 263 crisis, the sun's warmth searched out and dis- solved those frozen stem cells of the wild cherry tree above us and through the silvern stillness came down those golden leaves, with a little clatter. They seemed to break the spell and stir the spirit of this strange being who was always so responsive to the moods of Nature's soul. A shiver went through his frame just like that which had passed through the tree. He partially broke his reverie to hum to him- self that ever-reiterated verse of his — doubtless of his own coining : " Time goes fast, and I go slow, Yet down the world together we go. I can't catch him and he can't catch me, But we'll both be caught by eternity." Then all in a hurry he agreed, he would come, he was for starting on the instant. I represented to him that the hour was not appropriate ; the household at the Holt would not have broken its fast. He admitted that I was right, though with some disappointment. For a moment I feared that he would go back 264 The Faun and the Philosopher on his decision, but he held to it, agreeing to call at twilight, in the evening, as if the sug- gestion would seem too daring in the broad day. Then I discovered, what I had not in- tended, that it was the Professor whom he proposed to address. He gave me to understand, quite unwittingly, that he had little doubt of Miss Mary's answer, if he could win her father's approval. I discovered another startling cir- cumstance also — that he took it for granted that I should accompany him on the visit and be present throughout. It was quite in vain that I argued against this proposition. He was set on it, and practically presented the ultimatum that if I did not bear him company he would not go — whereon, almost perforce, I yielded. CHAPTER XXIII THE FAUN AND THE PHILOSOPHER TT was the strangest interview which I ever attended. My friend of the van opened the engagement with a very simple, frontal attack, saying that he loved Miss Mary and asking Dr. Fisher if he might hope for her hand in marriage. It was after the opening that the abnormality developed, for the poor Faun, overwhelmed by the sense of his inadequacy — and no wonder ! — as a suitor for so good and beautiful a creature as Miss Mary, was con- tinually busy with pointing out his unworthi- ness, while the Professor, on the other hand, was demonstrating how suitable he was, in every way, to be her husband. " I wonder so much," he said, " whether it is right for me to marry — whether I am fit to 265 266 The Faun and the Philosopher look after a woman." Whereto the Professor replied : " I don't wonder in the least about it. You're absolutely unfit." " Then how ? " a Do you really imagine that when you're married to Mary your role will be to look after her ? " " Well," said the Faun helplessly. " Ought I not to ? " " You ought to, yes. What will happen is that Mary will look after you. I never knew a man, unless perhaps it were myself, who wanted more looking after. There never was a man for whom it was more necessary that he should marry." The suitor seemed to be considering whether he could not find some other plea of his un- worthiness. I was terribly afraid that in his distress he would be led to say something about the unfortunate shape of his ears, which would have made us all very uncomfortable, but a kindly fate kept him clear of these freaks. The The Faun and the Philosopher 267 Professor asked him, " When do you think of getting married ? " " Oh, I don't know," he said in confusion. " We couldn't yet, you know. She'll never marry me as long as you're alive. She's told me so." a Indeed," the Professor replied with a tired smile. " Then this, I take it, is not the first battle in your campaign ? " " You mean — I have spoken to her. Yes, I have. I — I couldn't help it ; I'm very sorry." " No, you're not, my boy," and Dr. Fisher spoke in a tone of real kindness. " Or you needn't be. And I quite believe you couldn't help it. It's I, is it then " — and he reflected a little — " that am in the way of your happiness — of her happiness ? It's a curious thing," he added, turning to me as to one able to confirm his statement, " that I seem fated to make the life of every woman that has anything to do with me a dull edition of hell." I suppose there are people clever enough to 268 The Faun and the Philosopher think of the right answer to such an appeal as that. I could not. " There's one thing I should like you to tell me," Dr. Fisher said, and I thought that now at length they were coming to the subject that is summed up in the word "settlements' 1 and is commonly one of the first that men discuss at an interview of this kind. As usual with Dr. Fisher's sentences, its conclusion was entirely different from what I had forecasted from its commencement. " I should like to know," he went on, " what you mean by all that fraud about the pterodactyl's skull in your van ? What is your object in it, and how much, if any of it, is real ? " The Faun's confusion and contrition were painful. This was the second startling experi- ence that I had suffered during this meeting. The first was the news that my friend had al- ready gone so far in the way of an understanding with Miss Mary — my interference perhaps was even more uncalled for than it had appeared — and the second this, which I had very vaguely The Faun and the Philosopher 269 suspected before, that the great fossil head after which he had named his van was in truth no better than a " fake." He had absurdly little to say in his defence. " There is most of a jawbone of it real, really — and I did see so much of it taken out of a quarry at Tilgate. At least I believe it's a pterodactyl's jawbone — I'm not very up in them — as for the rest of it — it's all gesso duTo." " But," said the Professor, " what's the point, the object ? " " There's no point, no object," he said, miserably. " I only did it for a sort of joke. It's taken lots of people in." " Is that a sign of grace about it ? After all, yes, perhaps. It's better to make a success, even of a fraud, than a failure." There was some stammering of a bad excuse, as by a boy before his master. " I think I understand," the Professor went on. " You don't think these things matter — whether anyone belives in your pterodactyl or not, whether such a thing ever came out of the 270 The Faun and the Philosopher stratum in Tilgate Forest. You don't think it matters. That's what comes of being an individualist — you don't think that anything matters. That's what makes you rather re- freshing. You've no principles, no morals at all — delightful ! That's what makes it so very right that you should marry Mary. She's all principle, all morals." " Forgive me, sir," said the Faun, with a dignity I never should have imagined in him. " I cannot hear her found fault with." Had it been necessary for him, by any skill of pleading, to win his way into the Professor's favour as a son-in-law that speech, delivered without a suspicion that one might laugh at it, would have sufficed. " I can't take it back again," the Professor said with deep enjoyment. " You're quite right to think her perfect. She is. You'll find the truth of what I say before long," and there was menace in his tone, " that she's all principle, all morals — and yet, my dear fellow" — he laid aside, for a moment, that irony which so un- The Faun and the Philosopher 271 fortunately overlaid the real spirit of the man — " there is room for such a good heart as I do not suppose another soul ever had on this earth — unless it was her mother." As he said this his voice went away to a whisper, and it appeared that we should go too, the pur- pose of our visit accomplished. What my own part had been throughout I hardly knew, and was glad enough to bring the meeting to an end, but when we rose the Professor said good- bye to me, and added, " I'm going to ask our friend to stay if he will, and have a little more talk," which I felt was just as it should be, and went, delightedly. CHAPTER XXIV MYSTERY TVTEXT morning, when my toilet was still in the elementary stage, I received a note which indicated a development of the situation. It was from Miss Mary — a hurried line, asking me to come to the Holt as soon as possible. I interpreted the last words liberally, permitting them to cover time spent in a hasty breakfast, but the first sight of her anxious face made me regret that I had not obeyed more quickly. " Of course you have seen nothing of him — of father ? " " Your father ! " " He never came home last night — he has not slept in his bed. What can have happened ? ' In the morning the servant who usually called 272 Mystery 273 him had gone to Dr. Fisher's room and had found, as Miss Mary said, that he was not there, and that the bed had not been slept in. I asked her what steps she had taken, and she said that she had told everybody within reach, that they were now out searching high and low. At any moment then, as I assured her, one or other of her emissaries might bring in news. Her fear was, as she more than hinted to me, what the news might be. Communications had been established with Saxon Jim, and he had been dispatched to our friend of the van. He, if anybody, might be able to give a clue. I had left him late at night with the Professor. It was Miss Mary's belief that they had gone out together — she had heard them talking in the porch, and steps on the walk outside, then there was silence. She found that her father had gone out and she went to bed. I hesitated a moment before I ventured to ask : " Were they on quite good terms — talking as friends ? " She blushed at that a little, with a colour that showed beautifully on her pallor, as if she had a 18 274 The Faun and the Philosopher shrewd idea of the question that had been in discussion between them, but she answered that they had seemed on the best of terms. While we talked, Saxon Jim arrived. He had been to the van, but its owner also had gone, with no sign of breakfast eaten or provision made for his horse. Jim, with far more than normal Saxon acuteness, had taken these observa- tions on his own account. Probably his sense was quickened by the mystery which we felt in the air, and which seemed to thicken. A few emissaries returned from the various special points of search and inquiry to which they had been bidden, but brought no news, and the case was not one of those in which the absence of news was good. It seemed incumbent now to invoke the aid of the police, in which we felt no confidence, but I went to the Post Office, glad to take any action by way of escape from the round of vain wonderment and questioning as to what could have happened, and sent telegrams to police stations in three directions at the angles of an Mystery 275 equilateral triangle of which the Holt was approximately the centre. There was a comfort in the reflection that we were begirt with a cordon of professional searchers and detectives. Each missive went out " Reply paid," but none of the replies told us anything. Miss Mary was the more to be pitied that her post was at the centre of affairs, with nothing to do but pass the time waiting for news that did not come, but from which she feared the worst when it should come. She could not leave, in case of information arriving on which she would need to act. I went back to her and we had luncheon together, talking with a miserable affectation of cheerfulness of various subjects in which neither of us took an interest. At length we saw approaching, up the steep forest path towards the Holt, two figures which we rose to meet, as if instinctively feeling that they were heralds of tidings good or ill — Saxon Jim and Gipsy Joe. The gipsy lad looked very ill, and a hard cough racked him. Jim had fetched him from his bed to give us the news, 18* 276 The Faun and the Philosopher which we waited with impatience to hear, while the lad went about the telling of it by all the round-the-corner ways of narrative which are characteristic of his kind. At last we had it in coherent form. It was near dawn — probably abour four o'clock in the morning — that he was in the woods a mile or so westward of the Holt — on what business he did not explicitly relate, nor did we think good to ask for fear of staying the already much interrupted flood of his speech — when he was passed by the Pro- fessor walking along the right-of-way which leads through the woodland. " Oh, where could he have been going ? " Miss Mary broke in. That is the question that Gipsy Joe, though he could tell us so much, still had to leave without an answer, but he could lead us a long way yet on the road towards it. His curiosity stirred, he had followed the Professor as he went. — " No," said Joe, in reply to something Miss Mary put in here, " he was not looking — didn't take no notice of a rabbit, nor even a pheasant " — an indifference which naturally made an impres- Mystery 277 sion on Joe, whom these apparitions would have affected with a very different keenness. It appeared that he had been walking with a set purpose, absorbed in his own thoughts. As far as Wych Cross — a place of no less than five crossing roads — the gipsy, unseen and un- suspected, as he felt sure, watched the Professor, while the light of dawn crept into the sky. He watched so long as to be sure which turn the wanderer took at this meeting of the ways, and then came back on his tracks, much wondering. His account left us in like mood, greatly wondering, not greatly comforted. On his homeward way the lad had very properly called on our friend of the van and informed him what he had seen, and it was to be presumed, though he had left no word, that it was in quest of the Professor that our friend had been absent when Miss Mary had sent Saxon Jim in search of him. For my own part, I had more faith in the Faun as a sleuth-hound than in all the efforts of the rest together. What the gipsy had told us, however, indicated a more specific 278 The Faun and the Philosopher direction for our inquiries than they had been given hitherto. There was an excuse, at least, for renewed activity in the dispatch of telegrams to police stations along that road, the most northerly and westerly in its trend of all those branching from the direct one out of Forest Row, which the Professor was said to have taken. These telegrams sent, and a friend's groom en- gaged to ride out along that road and make inquiries at all likely places as he went, there seemed no more to do than to fold our hands as before and await information. CHAPTER XXV SOLUTION COULD do no good by remaining with Miss Mary, who was very brave in her grievous anxiety. Soon after luncheon I went home, and just as I was coming to my house I saw the small Mercury of the Post Office on his crudely coloured bicycle approaching with that tawny envelope which is the modern edition of Jove's missives. The telegram told everything — the one thing, at least, which comprehended all the lesser things. It was from the Faun. " Have found him," it went. " It is all over — heart failure. Break to Miss Mary and bring her. Will meet you at station. Wire train." It was laconic, but was enough. The place from which he telegraphed, the place where he had found the Professor, was the Hampshire village 279 280 The Faun and the Philosopher where the family had lived before their migra- tion to Ashdown Forest. It was where Mrs. Fisher and Clifton, the boy, were buried. Still there seemed to be obscurities. " Heart failure," the telegram said, and I appreciated the intelli- gent sympathy of our strange friend which had inspired him to give in this one word a sufficient and natural explanation of the death. Without doubt he had reconstructed in his own mind our mental attitude as we waited and wondered, and had realized that the daughter would fear that her father might have taken his life pur- posely. The kind fatal word banished that worst fear. After all, was it to be regretted that the sad, cynical, tortured, sensitive soul had found its rest ? I could hardly think so, though I felt already the gap that his loss would make in my life, as I went my way back once more to the Holt. And certainly his daughter could hardly be expected to feel it so. I was miserably aware of showing absolute poverty of resource, but could think of no better way of breaking the sad news to her than handing Solution 281 the telegram and letting it speak its hard message for itself. The colour went from her face as she took it, but she read the few words steadily. Then she said, in a voice which shook a little : ' When does the first train go — that we can catch ? ' She was splendidly brave. The journey was a vexing one, a cross-country traverse with changes and waits. I speculated on the talk in learned circles and on the obituary notices that we should read, in spite of the years of the Professor's retirement, but chiefly, I suppose, we both wondered how it all had happened, how and why he had gone to die in that little place in Hampshire that was so closely associated with things that meant most to him in his inner and real life. In spite of that word of comfort " heart failure," we both had an unconfessed thought, I suspect, that it did not tell the whole story, but it was a thought which neither of us was likely to express to the other. So we passed most of that vexatious journey, long in its grief and its delays, though short in time, in silence, and at the station were 282 The Faun and the Philosopher met, according to his promise, by the Faun, to whom I had wired the time of our arrival. We walked the short distance from the station to the little inn where the Professor's body lay, committing our luggage to the care of the " Boots " of the inn. We left the girl to go up alone, as was her right, to the room in which they had laid her dead, and then the Faun related to me all the story, as he knew it. His inspiration had been keen. When the gipsy had told him that the Professor was last seen walking on the road past Plaw Hatch he had an idea of his bourne, and, following after, found his inkling confirmed. At Horsham, where he arrived about ten in the morning, he learnt that a person of the Pro- fessor's very singular figure had taken the earliest train of the day to the branch-line station at which we had lately arrived. " And I felt that I knew," he said, " before I saw him, where I should find him. I spoke to no one, asked no questions, but went to the churchyard. Mary" (it was so he named her) Solution 283 " told me how he had been followed there once by that son of his who died, at midnight. There I found him on his wife's grave — dead." I looked at my friend, and he looked at me in return, almost pleadingly out of his dark eyes. " Heart failure," I said. " That was what the doctor diagnosed," he answered, and again he looked at me as before. I understood, and he knew that I understood. I knew that this walk, through the night, so greatly excessive for a man of the Professor's age and frailty, had been made of deliberate purpose, the means calculated with perfect accuracy to their end, the spirit never flagging till it had carried the wearied body to its desired goal — desired because he felt that his life's work was done, his existence only a bar to the happi- ness of the one whom he wished to be happy. It was the Faun who had sent him to it. Had that demand, so curiously tendered, for the daughter's hand not been made, the father would have been alive still. I understood, and the Faun knew that I understood, and the pleading 284 The Faun and the Philosopher of his eyes implored me not to put that under- standing into words — to leave it unavowed between us. After all, had not I, remotely, a hand in the work, for but for my urgency the Faun would not have spoken when and as he did? Miss Mary opened the inn door and came to us where we stood talking under a tree on the village green. She had been weeping, but asked quite composedly if I should like " to go and see father," — she still called him so. When I came down neither she nor the Faun was in sight. Without thinking where my steps led me, I went towards the churchyard. Over its low wall I saw their two figures standing by the grave of the Professor's wife. The girl was pressing a handkerchief with one hand to her eyes, but I noticed that the other was held, unresistingly, in that of her companion. It seemed as if I, too, should rate myself with those no longer needed. THE END Printed at The Chapel River Press, Kingston, Surrey. Messrs. Hutchinson & Co. are pleased to announce Novels for the Spring of 1915 by the following LEADING AUTHORS, particulars of which will be found in the ensuing pages. LUCAS MALET BARONESS ORCZY J. C. SNAITH BARONESS VON HUTTEN H. DE VERE STACPOOLE MAY SINCLAIR ROBERT HUGH BENSON DOROTHEA CONYERS MADAME ALBANESI MABEL BARNES-GRUNDY DOUGLAS SLADEN F. FRANKFORT MOORE M. P. WILLCOCKS H. B. SOMERVILLE EDGAR JEPSON ISABEL C. CLARKE TOM GALLON BERTA RUCK G. B. BURGIN H. GRAHAME RICHARDS MRS. CAMPBELL PRAED MRS. HUGH FRASER and CURTIS YORKE New 6s. Novels. Some Women and Timothy By H. B. SOMERVILLE Author of "Ashes of Vengeance " 5th Edition This new novel, by the author of that successful his- torical romance, " Ashes of Vengeance," describes the adventures— love and otherwise — of Timothy, Lord Ford- ley, who sets out to free his brother from an undesirable attachment. The results of Timothy's efforts to help his friends are not as excellent as his intentions, and lead him into various complicated situations, which he successfully meets with the help of a keen sense of humour. The women are — women, and some of them give Timothy very bad times, indeed ; but in the end Providence, with unexpected kindness, rewards him with the hand — and heart — of one who is his idea of all that " a gift from heaven " should be. The Three Sisters By MAY SINCLAIR Author of "The Judgment of Eve," "The Divine Fire," "The Combined Maze," etc. 3rd Large Edition " Once again Miss Sinclair has shown us that among the women-writers of the day she can be acclaimed without rival. ' The Three Sisters ' has most of the attributes of greatness." — Standard. " As nearly perfect as a novel may be." — Westminster Gazette. " The boldest and most challenging of all her books. ' The Three Sisters ' is almost without a flaw and burns with a clear flame, that if it is not genius is as near it as any woman of Miss Sinclair's generation has attained." — Daily News. " We have had many a successful novel from that clever authoress Miss Sinclair, but none more brilliant than ' The Three Sisters.' The book is one to read, and, when read, it will leave its mark." — World. New 6s. Novels. The Wisdom of Damaris By LUCAS MALET Author of "Sir Richard Calmady." The above long novel, which is the fruit of some years of thought and work, will most probably prove to be the author's best and most important work of fiction. The scene of the first portion of the novel is laid in Northern India, where Damaris Verity's father, a famous soldier of the Mutiny, occupies a distinguished command. The scene afterwards changes to the neighbourhood of Marychurch, an ancient seaport town on the English south coast, where General Verity owns a small property. Here Damaris passes her girlhood, and learns much about men and things not, perhaps, usually known by young ladies of her age. The novel should be interesting as indicating the social conditions which have gone far to produce in this country the Feminist movement of the present day. Meave By DOROTHEA CONYERS Author of "The Strayings of Sandy." In her new book, " Meave," the popular author of " The Strayings of Sandy," etc., has given us another sporting novel. But instead of the scene being laid in Ireland, " Meave " and her man go to England, where they upset the well-ordered ways of a big household, and bring a crusty old man back to a love of sport. New 6s. Novefs. The Herb of Healing By G. B. BURGIN Author of "The Shutters of Silence." "The Herb of Healing," Mr. G. B. Burgin's latest story of Four Corners, deals with the Canadian Indians' wonderful herb, which is an infallible cure for mortal sickness. The secret of this magic plant is religiously guarded by them and known to very few. Here we have the love affair of young Mr. Fiske with the accomplished Miss Lelota Lunn, and " Old Man's " and Ikey's efforts, assisted by " Miss Wilks " and a lovely Indian girl, Pahne- wuska, to save a dying young " school marm " by means of the magic herb. Ikey and " Old Man " set out in search of " the herb of healing," and meet with many adventures in their quest. The story, though abounding in humour with its tender and touching episodes, strikes a much graver note than Mr. Burgin usually affects. Candytuft — 2nd Editi °* I Mean Veronica By MABEL BARNES-GRUNDY Author of "Hilary on Her Own," "The Third Miss Wenderby," etc. " Excellent light reading. The reader has a very pleasant time of it, farcical comedy being in the ascendant. It is excellent fooling, and one enjoys it amazingly." — Pall Mall Gazette. " A merry little farce, written with keen observation and drawing of character." — Spectator. " Begins as a mild comedy and goes on to develop into roaring fare? " — Evening Standard. New 6s. Novels. Balshaws By BARONESS VON HUTTEN Author of "Sharrow." Those who have had the privilege of reading the Baroness von Hutten's new novel, "' Balshaws," are agreed that the plot she has evolved is one of the best that she has ever had. The author's gift of making her characters live is well exemplified in the present story. The book is about the same length as " Sharrow " (now in its 9th edition), and the delightful thing about it is, that Sandy is introduced into it incidentally, as is also Pam ! and who will not be glad to see a little more of that immortal lady ? Through the Ages, Beloved A Romance of Japan By H. GRAHAME RICHARDS Author of " Lucrezia Borgia's One Love." In this story the idea of reincarnation plays an im- portant part. The hero, Kanaya, who has been through the Russo-Japanese war, is a student of occult things. The object of his adoration is a lovely girl, whom he knew in a former incarnation. It is a love romance of modern Japan, beautifully told ; and the quality and colour in the descriptions of scenery and life are charming. 5 New 6s. Novels. Her German Husband By DOUGLAS SLADEN Author of " His Japanese Wife." The story of an English woman married to a German in the days before the war. It gives her trials and dis- appointments, and is a faithful picture of the life which may be expected from a mixed marriage in Germany. Incidentally, there are many comparisons of the different ways in which things are done in the two countries. This book will be a distinct departure in style from the military novels with which Mr. Sladen has won his popularitv recently — " The Tragedy of the Pyramids " and " The Curse of the Nile." It will be more in the style of the most successful of all his novels — his famous " Japanese Marriage," of which more than 120,000 copies have been sold. Whose Name is Legion By ISABEL C. CLARKE Author of "By the Blue River." In this story the author deals with Catholicism and Spiritualism as opposing forces. The story reveals an intimate knowledge of spiritualistic seances, and shows the results of dabbling in the occult out of curiosity and a love of power. The author unhesitatingly opposes such practices, and is on the side of sanity and goodness. The plot is certainly interesting, and the story is written with distinction, and has an arresting quality. 6 New 6s. Novels. Blue Waters By H. de VERE STACPOOLE Author of "The Blue Lagoon." Mr. H. de Vere Stacpoole has done nothing better than " Blue Waters." In it, as in " The Blue Lagoon," he displays his unequalled gift of conveying the feeling of wind, water and salt spray. There is summer life on the Florida Coast, centring round a fishing club frequented by rich Americans in quest of Tarpon, that gigantic fish which is the " big game " of the sea. There are few things more exciting than the description of fishing for Sea Bat. The real purpose, however, is the lover interest, which is hardly less exciting than the sporting element. Change By M. P. WILLCOCKS Author of " Wings of Desire." " Change " is no comedy of manners, but a tragi- comedy of the passions in which the humour is mainly supplied by the groups of amused spectators, especially by the ironic Professor who watches Starre, the hero, seeking for the woman he cannot see, because she stands precisely on his own level. In this testing of John Starre's folly lies the irony of a book which shows how everything in these days spells " Change," the raising of new standards and the passing of old ideals ; so that even before the great war the former things were passing, or had even passed. New 6s. Novels. The Princess of Happy Chance By TOM GALLON Author of "Tatterley." This last novel of the late Tom Gallon is, perhaps, the happiest story, in the best sense of the word, and one of the longest that he has given us. It is all compact of dreams and whimsicality and moonlight. Lucidora Eden had fed her starved young soul on dreams of great- ness, of Princes and Princesses. Doomed to a life of drudgery, she yet hoped and prayed passionately for the one thing every human soul demands : her hour of life — real and strong and full. And the story tells how Lucidora got her hour — suddenly and wonderfully ; how she reached to dizzy heights, and came to balance a crown — sometimes at not quite the correct angle — on her young head ; how she toppled down from the heights and lost the crown and found something better. The Courtship of Rosamond Fayre By BERTA RUCK (Mrs, Oliver Onions) Author of " His Official Fiancee.'* 4th Edition This sweetly treated comedy of love, written in much the same vein as Mrs. Oliver Onions' first and very suc- cessful novel, " His Official Fiance-e," now in its 4th large edition, is a country house romance, and is entirely modern. It is expected that this romance will be as popular as her first book, which is having a large sale in its Colonial form. 8 New 6s. Novels. A Bride of the Plains R,ady,BApril By BARONESS ORCZY Author of "The Scarlet Pimpernel," etc. This new novel is a companion novel to the author's phenomenally popular " A Son of the People." Like the latter novel, it deals with peasant life in the Lowlands of Hungary — some considerable time before the outbreak of the present war, which these humble, ignorant folk neither understand nor ever desired. The actual story is con- cerned with the love of a young peasant lad for a beautiful girl of his native village, and his separation from her while he is compelled to do his two years' military service. He is reported dead, and she yields to the desire of her parents and is about to plight her troth to a rich young farmer of the neighbourhood when her former lover returns. In that country, where tempers run high and passions are to a great extent uncontrolled, drama and tragedy naturally follow on such a complication. The dramatic climax of the story is brought about through the treachery of a handsome and young Jewish girl, and the passionate jealousy of her own fiancee and of her people. 9 New 6s. Novels. Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land By Mrs. CAMPBELL PRAED Author of " Fugitive Anne," etc. Lady Bridget O'Hara, fascinating, gifted and uncon- ventional, scorns the marriage system as practised in modern London, and goes to Australia, disillusioned, in quest of other distractions than love. Here she meets a fine specimen of an Australian bushman, and, attracted by his personality, by the open-air life of freedom and adven- ture, she marries and settles down with him in the Never- Never Land. It is the story of a conflict between a daughter of the old civilization, with its traditions and customs, and a son of the new, with its unfettered outlook and ideals. The Gillingham Rubies By EDGAR JEPSON Author of "The Lady Noggs." The story of an exciting struggle between an ebullient and vehement young American millionaire, and a brilliant lady criminal of a European reputation for ingenious and daring coups. The struggle is waged round the Gillingham Rubies, which she has planned to steal, and the scene is laid in Gillingham Castle, during a house-party. The struggle is waged with varying fortunes, and more than one of the Guests of the Marquis of Gillingham fall under suspicion of being concerned in the plot. But the mystery is upheld till nearly the end of the book. The battle for the Rubies is relieved by a very charming love affair which runs through the whole story, by many caustic pictures of the fashionable world, and it is further bright- ened by innumerable touches of Mr. Jepson's incomparable humour. 10 New 6s. Novels. The Great Age By J. C. SNAITH Author of "Broke of Covenden." To attempt to introduce Shakespeare into a novel would seem to be daring, if not courting disaster, but Mr. Snaith, in " The Great Age," has succeeded where others would have failed, because he has given us also a romance teeming with exciting incident. Readers of Dumas know full well that fiction dealing with past times can be made to live, especially when well-known historical personages are portrayed. Without in any way suggesting an imitation of that French writer's work, we think that readers of " The Great Age " will find it as of absorbing interest and containing all the " go " of a book by Dumas. The Sunlit Hills By MADAME ALBANESI Author of "The Glad Heart," "The Strongest of All Things," "Poppies in the Corn," etc The story of the gradual awakening of a young man (whose naturally fine character is swamped beneath a condition of selfishness, luxurious living and indifference) to the stern realities and duties of existence. Toby Settringham is popular in society — a spendthrift, a gambler, an idler, but, withal, a very charming individual, who deliberately marries a girl whom he does not love entirely because she is very rich. The novel deals graphically with the result of this marriage, and is full of incident and social scenes, all sketched in with that naturalness, sureness of touch and charm which is so peculiarly characteristic of this author's work. ii New 6s. Novels. The Pagans By MRS. HUGH FRASER and HUGH FRASER Joint Authors of "The Queen's Peril," etc. This is a convincing piece of work, containing some very powerfully written character studies. The domi- nating woman character is a society creature, who is more interesting than pleasant, but the two girls, Nita and Connie, are delightful each in their own way, and the men are well drawn and convincing. This is a book that any man or woman of the world will enjoy. The work of these writers is sufficiently well appreciated to need any special recommendation. Her Measure By CURTIS YORKE Author of "The Girl in Grey," etc. Curtis Yorke has written many successful novels, and her latest, " Her Measure," is perhaps, one of her best. In common with all her other books, it shows thoughtful and conscientious work, and the interest, beginning on the first page, holds the reader to the end. The plot turns on a freakish whim on the part of the heroine, Corinth Linton— and its results. There is an incisive realism in the scenes describing what befell her at Thorghyll, a gloomy old mansion in the wilds of York- shire. The dialogue throughout is remarkably good, and the book is certain to widen the author's already large circle of readers. 12 New 6s. Novels. Loneliness By R. H. BENSON Author of "Come Rack! Come Rope!" As the last novel of that gifted writer, the late Monsignor Benson, "Loneliness" would have been sure of a cordial recep- tion. But we would not be surprised if this book takes the highest place among the author's novels of modern life. It is a story of renunciation, beautifully told, and finished in style. The heroine, an irresistibly charming girl, is destined, by her supreme gift of song, to become a prima donna. The characterisation of the principal persons in the story is masterly. ROBERT HUGH BENSON'S NOVELS Each in crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. ODDS FISH ! 5th Large Edition INITIATION 5th Large Edition Also popular edition, is. net. AN AVERAGE MAN 7thLargeEdition Also popular edition, IS. net. COME RACK! COME ROPE ! 10th Large Edition Also popular edition, is. net. THE NECROMANCERS Also popular editions, 7d. and IS. net. THE DAWN OF ALL Also popular edition, 7d. net. THE COWARD Also popular edition, 6d. NONE OTHER GODS Also popular edition, "jA. net. A WINNOWING Also popular editions, 6d., 7d. and IS. net. THE CONVENTIONALISTS In popular edition only, 6d. 13 New 6s. Novels. The Lady of the Reef By FRANKFORT MOORE Author of "I Forbid the Banns" The love story which forms the basis of this novel does not run smooth throughout its course. When Walter Massaroon, a young painter fresh from his success in Paris, comes to a village on the north coast of Ireland, and meets his fate in the form of the fascinating Lady of the Reef, whose solitary life knows only the occasional excitement of a shipwreck on the dangerous rocks in front of her home, he is well aware of the fact ; but against the realization of his hopes he finds an obstacle of a formidable character. Of the two heroines in this romantic story it is difficult to say which is the more fascinating ; both are certainly among the most womanly of the author's creations. The Money Master By SIR GILBERT PARKER Author of "The Seats of the Mighty." A long and important novel by this distinguished novelist will be ready in the early autumn. 14 The Patrizi Memoirs A Roman Family under Napoleon (1796— 1815) By THE MARCHESA MADDALENA PATRIZI. Translated by Mrs. HUGH FRASER Author of "A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan," " Italian Yesterdays," etc With an Historical Introduction by John Fraser. In demy 8vo, cloth gilt, with 17 illustrations, including frontispiece in colours. I 2S. 6d. net. This volume throws a vivid light — full of intimate human interest — on Napoleonic tyranny and brutal dealing with what he considered dangerous and recalcitrant Catholics. He did not even exclude the Pope himself. The volume is based on the Journals and correspondence of the Marchese Jiovanni Patrizi, his wife the Princess Cunigonda of Saxony, and one of his sons. It recounts the heroic stand made by the Marchese for liberty to educate his own children, his imprison- ment, the sequestration of the family estates, the removal, under compulsion, of the children from Italy to France, and the fruitless efforts of his wife to get in touch with him. It is a contribution to history as well as to that body of literature dealing with the intimate aspects of human life. Although called a translation, no one knowing Mrs. Hugh Fraser's work will need to be told that it is no ordinary translation. Mrs. Fraser has herself written illuminating connecting links and added notes and elucidations, while the introduction has been written by a keen student of the Napoleonic era. The documents were collected by the Marchesa Maddalena Patrizi through a long period of industrious research both in France and Italy, and were printed in the " Memorie di Coesa Patrizi " some years ago for family circulation only. In the present work these are offered to the public for the first time, 15 Indo-China and its Primitive People. By CAPTAIN HENRY BAUDESSON With 60 Illustrations from photographs by the author In demy 8iw, cloth gilt, 1 6s. net. In the course of his travels Captain Baudesson carefully- observed the curious customs of the Moi and Chams, the uncultured people of Indo-China, among whom he dwelt for a long time. The author not only describes their rites and habits, but he endea- vours to show the origin of their ceremonies with those of civilization. The story of these travels is presented in vivid language and is full of local and picturesque colour. The reader is initiated into the life of the jungle, in which, day by day, the hardy pioneers lived. Tigers and elephants were frequently encountered during the journey of the mission, and many members of the expedition were wounded by the poisoned arrows of the natives, while jungle fever and malaria made havoc among them. The Kasidah of Haji Abdu Ei-Yezdi A LAY OF THE HIGHER LAW By SIR RICHARD F. BURTON, K.C.M.G. Translated and annotated by his Friend F.B. WITH A FOREWORD BY ROGER INGPEN AND A PORTRAIT FRONTISPIECE IN PHOTOGRAVURE Beautifully printed on hand-made paper, in foolscap 8vo, limp boards, 5s. net. The edition, limited to 50 copies on Japanese vellum, 2 Is. ■net., is all sold, and at a premium. " The Kasidah " has been described by some of Sir Richard Burton's admirers as his masterpiece, but the present edition is practically the first that has been placed within the reach of the general public. Originally published in 1880 under the pseudonym of Abdu El-Yezdl, the poem has long been out of print in this country. In the United States, owing to an absence of copyright, it has enjoyed great popularity in unauthorized reprints, perhaps because it has appealed strongly to those who belong to the cult of Omar Khayyam. It certainly contains some lines which are more worthy of survival than the rest of Sir Richard's work. 16 Rival Sultanas Nell Gwyn and Louise de Kerouaille By H. NOEL WILLIAMS Author of " Five Fair Sisters," " A Princess of Intrigue," &c. With 24 illustrations including a photogravure frontispiece. In 1 volume demy Svo, cloth gilt and gilt top, 16s. net. Of the numerous mistresses of the Merry Monarch, three only maintained their hold upon his affections for any length of time : the Duchess of Cleveland, Nell Gwyn and Louise de Kerouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, the ancestress of the Duke of Richmond. Mr. Noel Williams' new book treats of the two last named ladies, whose perpetual bickerings occupied a good deal of the King's attention during the last year of his life, and afforded a scandal-loving public plentiful material for gossip. The contrast between " pretty, witty Nelly," the Drury Lane actress, with her coarse tongue and her generous heart, and the haughty, high-bred, scheming Frenchwoman, is well brought out : and the book, written with all that accuracy of detail and lightness of touch which have secured the author so many readers, cannot fail to interest a wide public. 36th Year of Issue The Year's Art, 1915 Compiled by A. C. R. CARTER A concise epitome of all matters relating to the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Engraving, and Architecture, and to Schools of Design which have occurred during the year 1914, together with information respecting the events of 191 5. Crown Svo, cloth, 5-f. net. Over 600 pages, with Illustrations 17 The Ruined Cities of North Africa By RAGNAR STURZENBECKER With about 60 illustrations from photographs printed on art paper. Demy 8vo, cloth gilt, 16s. net. Dr. Sturzenbecker's name is well known throughout Europe as one of the leading authorities on the ancient civilizations of North Africa. But it will undoubtedly come as a surprise to some people to learn how much has been done to disinter the relics of the past from the plains of North Africa. These excavations have, on the whole, yielded greater treasures than Pompeii and Herculanium, for they have concerned towns of great size and importance which for centuries have lain hidden under their sandy covering. Many editions of Dr. Sturzenbecker's smaller book have been sold in Sweden, but the present volume, which has been written specially for the English public, is larger and far more important than the author's previous work and will contain the latest information on the subject. Twelve Years in Germany (1902 -1914) By THOMAS F. A. SMITH, Ph.D., Lecturer in the University of Erlangen. In cr. Svo, cloth gilt, 6s. net. This book separates itself from the many books already published on Germany. It is written by one who over a consider- able period of years and in a special capacity has had the opportunity of studying the German people and forming reliable conclusions about them. Dr. Smith held the position of English Lecturer at Erlangen from 1906 until his return to England a few months ago owing to the war. He acquired a real command of the German language written and spoken, gained an exact know- ledge of Germany's school system and universities, and made a special study of national social and private life on which he lectured. He knows every German State and hundreds of their towns and villages ; he has enjoyed the personal acquaintance of thousands of Teutons ; he has been for weeks on end in the huts of peasants and treated as a welcome guest in the homes of the rich ; he is in fact particularly well equipped for making this valuable contribution towards the proper understanding of modern Germany. 18 More Italian Yesterdays By Mrs. HUGH FRASER Author of "A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan," etc. With 1 6 photogravure illustrations In demy 8vo, cloth gilt and gilt top, 16s. net. Owing to the most cordial reception of Mrs. Fraser's "Italian Yesterdays," it has been decided to bring out another volume on lines precisely similar to those of the first book. Although Rome is naturally the central point in the present, as it was in the former, volume, the author does not by any means restrict herself to the Eternal City, but wanders pleasantly from the Sabine Hills to Naples, and from thence to Venice and other Italian towns. Mrs. Fraser tells in her delightfully fresh manner the story of Father Mastai, who later ascended the Papal throne as Pius IX. Besides dealing with many other places and people, she has chapters on St. Gregory the Great, and on Queen Joan of Naples. The book is something more than an olla podrida, for every page is savoured by Mrs. Fraser's delightful personality, and, occasionally, with her personal reminiscences ; it will, in fact, be found in every way as attractive as her first volume of " Italian Yesterdays." Robert Hugh Benson: An Appreciation By OLIVE KATHARINE PARR Author of "A Red Handed Saint," "Back Slum Idylls." "A White Handed Saint," etc. In foolscap 2>vo, cloth gilt, 3s. 6d. net. With illustrations. Monsignor Benson published his own confessions sometime before his lamented death, but it has remained for others to describe his personal charm and sympathy. In this little book Miss Parr has given us a description of Monsignor Hugh, and a 'record of his work at Buntingford. Such a task could not have fallen into better hands than this writer's, whose exceptional literary [gifts are widely known and appreciated, especially in the Catholic world. 19 HUTCHINSON'S NATURE LIBRARY. Each in large crown 8vo, cloth gilt, 6s. net. With numerous illustrations A new series of books on Natural History and other kindred subjects, written by experts in popular language, but with strict accuracy In detail. The Courtship of Animals 2 * dL *Tj d ™T y By P. W. PYCRAFT, A.L.S., F.Z.S., Zoological Department, British Museum. Author of " A History of Birds," " Story of Reptile Life," etc. With 40 plates on art paper MaccmafflG ■ A Book of Strange Companionships in Nature messmates . By EDWARD STEP> F . L . S< With 64 Illustrations from photographs on art paper The Infancy of Animals By w - p - PYC A R L A £/ F . z . 5 . With numerous Illustrations on art paper THE CUSTOMS OF THE WORLD A Popular Account of the Rites, Ceremonies, Superstitions, and most Interesting Customs of Men and Women in all Countries. Edited by WALTER HUTCHINSON, M.A., F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I. With an introduction by A. C. HADDON, M.A., Sc.D., F.R.S., and with Contributions by Eminent Authorities, including SIR GEORGE SCOTT, K.C.I.E. SIR EVERARD IM THURN, K.C.M.G. SIR HARRY IOHNSTON, G.C.M.G. SIR RICHARD TEMPLE. Bart., CLE. SIR SVEN HEDIN, K.C.I.E. C. G. SELIGMANN, M.D., F.R.G.S. K C. HADOON, M.A., D.Sc, F.R.S. HENRI MAITRE PROF. BALDWIN SPENCER, C.M.G., ADMIRAL SWINTON C. HOLLAND FRS. BARON E. NORDENSKIOLD. W W. SKEAT, M.A., F.R.A.I. T. I. ALLDRIDGE. I.S.O. VRNST VON HESSE-WARTEGG. R. W. WILLIAMSON, F.R.A.I. EDGAR THURSTON, CLE., F.R.A.I. CHARLES HOSE, D.Sc, F.R.G.S. DR. KRAMER. T. ATHOL JOYCE, M.A., F.R.A.I. EARL OF RUNALDSHAY, M.P., F.R.G.S. AND MANY OTHERS Customs connected with Birth, Courtship, Marriage, Accession to Chieftain- ship, Sport, Death, Burial, Relision, Superstition, and many other miscel- laneous customs connected with the men and women of all tribes and nationalities are included in the book. Illustrated with over 1,400 beautiful pictures on art paper, and 31 COLOURED PLATES from paintings specially executed for this work. In two handsome volumes, demy 4to, cloth gilt and gilt edges, 13s. 6d< net per volume^ and in various leather bindings. 20 A Vagabond Voyage in Brittany By Mrs. LEWIS CHASE In demy 8vo, cloth gilt, 7s. 6d. net. With a map and 64 beautiful illustrations from photographs. In this book Mrs. Lewis Chase gives an account of an inland voyage which she and her husband performed re- cently on the river ways through Brittany from St. Malo to Rennes, and thence to Brest — the Finisterre or Land's End of France. They purchased a boat, which they stocked with provisions, and each night they found some place to pitch their tent or some barn where they were allowed to shelter themselves. As may be expected, they had many adventures, which sometimes appeared humorous and at others the reverse. The people they encountered, the scenery, villages and locks innumerable that they passed through on this journey are all described. As a holiday resort the coast-line of Brittany is of course popular with the English and Americans. The interior of Brittany, however, is little visited, and will be most interesting to those seeking new fields for touring, especially if the course of the river is followed either on the tow-path, or in a rowing boat, as was done by the author. Those intending to explore delightful parts of Northern France should most certainly procure Mrs. Chase's book. 21 Popular Pocket Nature Books In small volumes (7& in. by 5 in.), richly gilt, rounded corners, 5s. net: TOADSTOOLS AND MUSHROOMS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE By EDWARD STEP, F.L.S. Author of "Wayside and Woodland Blossoms," "Wayside and Woodland Trees," etc. With 8 coloured plates, and 128 other illustrations from photographs on art paper. The author has been engaged for over ten years in securing the Nature photo- graphs from which a selection has been made to illustrate this book. With these, in combination with the clear descriptions in absolutely plain, non-technical language, the country rambler will be for the first time enabled to identify the mushiooms and toadstools of woodland, field and wayside. ASTRONOMY By G. F. CHAMBERS, F.R-A.S. With S coloured plates and 358 illustrations. BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE By FRANK FINN, F.Z.S. With 12 coloured plates. 118 illustrations from photo- graghs, and numerous outline drawings. EQQS AND NESTS OF BRITISH BIRDS By FRANK FINN, F.Z.S. With 20 coloured plates, and many other illustrations, both coloured and uncoloured, of all the British Birds' Eggs, reproduced from actual specimens. PETS AND HOW TO KEEP THEM By FRANK FINN, F.Z.S. With 107 illustrations, mostly from photographs, including 12 coloured plates. BRITISH FRESH-WATER FISHES By SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, Bart. With 24 beautiful coloured plates. WILD FRUITS of the COUNTRYSIDE By F. EDWARD HULME, F.L.S., F.S.A., etc. With 36 coloured plates by the Author, and 25 illustrations from photographs on art paper- OUR BRITISH TREES AND HOW TO KNOW THEM By FRANCIS GEORGE HEATH. With 250 illustrations. 22 A FREE GIFT of a superb 10s. 6d. PHOTOGRAVURE PICTURE will be made to each of the purchasers of the First 50,000 copies of Part I. MESSRS. HUTCHINSON & CO. announce that they will publish in February, Part I of a fascinating NEW "Work in about fourteen 7(1. fortnightly parts, Belgium the Glorious HER COUNTRY and HER PEOPLE The Story of a Brave Nation and a Pictorial and Authoritative Record of a Fair Country ruthlessly plundered and destroyed. Written by Eminent Authorities. Edited by Walter Hutchinson, M.A., F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I. Illustrated with about 600 BEAUTIFUL PICTURES and many FINE COLOURED PLATES The Belgium of yesterday can never be the same again now that the invader has swept over it — burning here, destroying there, and pillaging everywhere throughout the length and breadth of this fair land. The Cathedrals, Town Halls, Churches and examples of Flemish paintings are among the wonders that were lately to be seen in Belgium. Unhappily, many of these are gone for ever, but pictures of them will be found in the work, which is illustrated by a large number of beautiful photographs and other illustrations (selected from many thousands], besides Maps. In short, this work will give you the last glimpse before the war of this glorious country — a treasure-house of art and beauty — which is now a heap of ruins ; and as a record of what has passed it must be of lasting value. With the expenditure of many thousands of pounds, and with the assistance of some of the greatest living authorities, a sumptuous work has been prepared that will remain a lasting and treasured volume in thousands of British homes. Hitherto there has been no beautiful and important work in the English language on Belgium and her people, and this publication will form a living monument to the country of the bravest nation ever allied in arms to Great Britain. *** Orders should be placed at once for Part I., to secure a copy of the first edition, which will be finely printed from the original blocks on the best art paper. 23 VOLUMES 1 & 2 NOW READY. The most sumptuous Historical Work ever produced and a Standard and Art Work for every home. HUTCHINSON'S History of the Nations A popular concise, pictorial, and authoritative account of each Nation from the earliest times to the present day. Edited by WALTER HUTCHINSON, M.A., F.R.G.S., F.R.A.I., BARRISTER-AT-LAW. WRITTEN THROUGHOUT BY EMINENT HISTORIANS The work when complete will comprise 4 handsome volumes in demy 4to. and contain over 3,000 Illustrations, 50 coloured Plates and many Maps. The price per volume in various bindings is as follows : Cloth, richly gilt & gilt edges, 10/6 net | Half Red Persian, richly gilt&giltedges.1 3/0 net Half Green Morocco do. 12/6 net ! Full Morocco do. 16/0net Contributions to Vol. I. The Egyptians— Prof. FLINDERS PETRIE, D.C.L., Utt.O., LL.D., Ph.D., F.R.S., F.B.A. The Chinese— Prof. H. A. GILES, M.A., LL.D. The Indians— Sir RICHARD TEMPLE, Bart., C.I.E., F.R.C.S. The Babylonians and Hittites— LEONARD W. KINC, M.A., F.S.A. The Assyrians— LEONARD W. KINC, M.A., F.S.A. The Nations of Asia Minor— LEONARD W. KINC, M.A., F.S.A. The Creeks— Prof. J. P. MAHAFFY, M.A., C.V.O., D.D., D.C.L. The Phoenicians & Carthaginians-Prof. J. P. MAHAFFY, M.A., C.V.O., D.D., D.C.L. Contributions to Vol. Ih The Romans Prof. J. S. REID, M.A., LL.M., Litt.D. The Romans : Eastern Empire— EDWARD FOORD The Jews— Dr. ISRAEL ABRAHAMS The Persians & The Parthians-Sir RICHARD TEMPLE, Bart., C.I.E., F.R.C.S. The Japanese- Prof. JOSEPH HENRY LONGFORD The French— ARTHUR HASSALL, M.A. This Work contains thousands of beautiful illustrations of scenes in the history of each nation by famous Artists both old and modern, including many hundreds of pictures executed specially for the Work. Now being issued in Fortnightly Parts at 7d. net. A BEAUTIFUL COLOURED PLATE WITH EVERY PART. 24 Marvels of Insect Life By EDWARD STEP, F.L.S., &c. Author of "Wayside and Woodland Blossoms," "Wayside and Woodland Trees," etc. With 12 BEAUTIFUL COLOURED PLATES and 636 ILLUS TRA TIONS reproduced from photographs and Drawings specially executed for the work. Now Ready in One Handsome Crown 4to Volume, i os. 6d. net. The aim of the work is to introduce to the general reader the most marvellous and interesting facts in the habits and structure of Insects from all parts of the world. To this end the use of scientific phraseology has been entirely abandoned, and the facts have been stated with the simplicity and directness with which an observant traveller would describe the habits and customs of strange races with whom he had dwelt. Many of the well authen- ticated discoveries of modern naturalists in respect to Insect intelligence and marvellous habits have never been set forth in a form to make them accessible to the non-scientific reader, so that the subscriber to this work will here find much that is absolutely novel, whilst the familiar facts of Insect natural history with which he was made acquainted in his youth will be found restated with the fuller and clearer understanding that modern research has given to them. The extensive employment of photography in depicting the forms and manners of the Insects described gives the present work an advantage in the matters of accuracy and beauty over all its predecessors. The Editor, Mr. Edward Step, F.L.S., to whose pen most of the letterpress is due, has been an observer and student of Insect life from boyhood ; and the popularity of his many works in other branches of nature knowledge is a guarantee that it will be at once readable and accurate. ^5 THREE INTERESTING WAR BOOKS WHICH ARE BEING READ BY EVERYONE . Each in Cro. 8vo. Coloured Paper Cover, 1s. net. "THE SECRET WHITE PAPER" GERMANY'S GREAT LIE The Official German Justification of the War, Exposed and Criticized by DOUGLAS SLADEN This German book was printed in English and circulated under the title of " Truth about Germany," with the object of influencing America against Great Britain. By a lucky chance it is now pos- sible to give it to the British public, -word for word, notwithstanding that every precaution was taken to prevent a single copy from entering this country. The origin of von Bernhardi's Gospel of Inhumanity. THE CONFESSIONS OF FREDERICK THE GREAT KING OF PRUSSIA ; and The Life of Frederick the Great By HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE Now for the first time translated into English. Edited with a Topical and Historical Introduction by DOUGLAS SLADEN. THE STORY OF THE HUNS As told by EDWARD GIBBON The Germans, by their inhuman methods of warfare, have been designated The Modern Huns. This thrilling narrative tells how THE HUNS, by the nature of their deeds, earned an un- dying reputation for infamy of the most awful character, and how the civilization and arts of Greece were devastated by the bar- barian scourge of Scythia and Germany, 26 Hutchinson's Is. Net Novels for 1915 New Volumes In crown 8vo, cloth gilt, with pictorial wrappers. By BARONESS VON HUTTEN Maria Sharrow By R. H. BENSON An Average Man By the Author of " Come Rack ! Come Rope ! " etc. By S. R. CROCKETT Sandy's Love Affair By the Author of "The Lilac Suubounet," etc. By Mrs. HUGH FRASER and HUGH FRASER Captain Corheau's Adventures By Mrs. CROKER Lismoyle By the Author of "In OM Madras," etc. By BERTA RUCK (Mrs. Oliver Onions) His Official Fiancee By H. de VERE STACPOOLE Children of the Sea By the Author of " The Ship of Coral," "The Blue Lagoou," etc. By R. H. BENSON Initiation By the Author of "Come Rack! Come Rope!" etc. Bach in crown 8vo, with pictorial paper wrappers. By KATHLYN RHODES The Will of Allah By the Author of " The Desert Dreamers." By RALPH STOCK Marama By the Author of " The Pyjama Man." By COSMO HAMILTON Adam S Clay By the Author of "The Infinite Capacity." By FRANK DANBY Concert Pitch By the Author of "Let the Roof Fall In." By F. BANCROFT Time and Chance By the Author of "The Veldt Dwellers." 27 HUTCHINSON'S Is. Net NOVELS ALREADY ISSUED Eaeh in erown 8vo, eloth gilt, with coloured wrapper. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE 43 Father O'Flynn ROBERT HUGH BENSON 1 The Necromancers 46 Come Rack ! Come Rope ! DOROTHEA CONYERS 4 The Strayings of Sandy MAUD DIVER 36 Lilamani ROBERT HICHENS 7 A Spirit in Prison BARONESS VON HUTTEN 9 The Lordship of Love 10 The Green Patch JEROME K. JEROME 47 Paul Kelver WILLIAM LE QUEUX 11 The Confessions of a Ladies' Man FRANKFORT MOORE 12 I Forbid the Banns BARONESS ORCZY 13 Petticoat Government 14 The Elusive Pimpernel 15 A True Woman 45 Meadowsweet ELLEN THORNEYCROFT FOWLER 5 A Double Thread TOM GALLON 6 Tatterley EDEN PHILLPOTTS 16 The Three Brothers ALLEN RAINE 17 Torn Sails 18 A Welsh Singer OLIVE SCHREINER 19 The Story of an African Farm KATHERINE CECIL 20 Max THURSTON also OLIVE CHRISTIAN MALVERY 35 The Soul Market, " England's Own Jungle" Eaeh in erown 8vo, with pictorial paper eovers. A SPINSTER 23 The Truth about Man F. BANCROFT 48 The Veldt Dwellers DOROTHEA CONYERS 42 The Arrival of Antony FRANK DANBY 26 Let the Roof Fall In LUCAS MALET 38 Adrian Savage ARTHUR MORRISON 28 Green Ginger W. B. MAXWELL 37 Mrs. Thompson 44 In Cotton Wool KATHLYN RHODES 30 The Desert Dreamers H. DE VERE STACPOOLE 31 The Ship of Coral 40 The Order of Release Mrs. H. DE VERE STACPOOLE 49 Monte Carlo RALPH STOCK 53 The Pyjama Man CYNTHIA STOCKLEY 32 Virginia of the als ° Rhodesians KEBLE HOWARD 34 " Chicot " in America WILHELM LAMSZUS The Human Slaughter-House ?S Hutchinson's 7d. Novels A new series of successful copyright works of fiction, printed in clear readable type on good paper, and tastefully bound in art cloth and gold lettering. In foolscap 8vo, with designed title-page and frontispiece on art paper and wrapper in colours New Volumes for 1915. 90 91 92 109 93 94 95 96 GOLD IN THE GUTTER . IN OLD MADRAS THE NECROMANCERS . WHERE LOVE LEADS . THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW ROOM .... LINKED BY FATE . SOUTH SEA TALES . BABS THE IMPOSSIBLE . 112 THE ORDER OF RELEASE 98 LOVE THE TYRANT . 99 LITTLE BLUE PIGEON . 100 HORACE BLAKE 101 OUR ADVERSARY . 102 THE ARRIVAL OF ANTONY 103 A SENSE OF HUMOUR . 104 A GIRL OF SPIRIT . 105 THE MONOMANIAC . 106 CALVARY .... 61 THE SHIP OF CORAL 107 MIRANDA .... 108 NELL OF SHORNE MILLS 111 NONE OTHER GODS. 110 THE SHAME OF MOTLEY 29 Charles Garvice Mrs. Croker R. H. Benson Charles Garvice Gaston Leroux Charles Garvice Jack London Sarah Grand H. de Vere Stacpoole Charles Garvice A. G. Hales Mrs. Wilfrid Ward M. E. Br addon Dorothea Conyers Cosmo Hamilton Charles Garvice Emile Zola "Rita" H. de Vere Stacpoole M. E. Braddon Charles Garvice R. H. Benson Rafael Sabatini Hutchinson's 7d. Novels VOLUMES ALREADY ISSUED Madame Albanesi 49 Poppies iu the Oorn Mabel Barnes-Grundy 62 Patricia Plays a Part 60 The Third Miss Weuderby 32 Hilary on Her Own Robert Hugh Benson 28 The Conventionalists 47 The Dawn of All 66 A AVinnowing M. E. Braddon 15 Beyond these Voices 41 A Lost Eden G. B. Burgin 65 The King of Four Corners Rosa N. Carey 76 Life's Trivial Round 18 Mollie's Prince 2 My Lady Frivol Mary Cholmondeley 3 Prisoners Dorothea Conyers 68 Aunt Jane and Uncle James 6 Lady Elvertou's Emeralds 24 Two Impostors and Tinker 69 For Henri and Navarre B. M. Croker 63 The Serpent's Tooth Frank Danby ^3 Let the Roof Fall in Alphonse Daudet 84 Fromont Junior and Risler Senior Sir A. Conan Doyle 79 Sir Nigel Evelyn Everett-Green 30 The Silver Axe 86 Miss Mallory of Mote Justus Miles Forman 23 The Stumbling Block Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler 37 The Farringdons 88 Place and Power Mrs. Hugh Fraser 42 A Little Grey Sheep Tom Gallon 72 Meg the Lady H. Rider Haggard 40 Fair Margaret Cosmo Hamilton 71 The Princess of New York " Handasyde " 39 The Heart of Marylebone Henry Harland 17 The Royal End Anthony Hope 45 The Indiscretion of the Duchesr Baroness von Hut ten 52 Kingsmead 30 Hutchinson's 7d. Novels VOLUMES ALREADY ISSUED— continued " lota " 44 A Yellow Aster Violet Jacob 46 The Sheep Stealers Jerome K. Jerome 75 They and I 8 Tommy & Co. William Le Queux 4 The Under Secretary 56 Confessions of a Ladies' Man A. W. Marchmont 78 A Dash for a Throne 10 By Right of Sword W. B. Maxwell 29 Seymour Charlton F. F. Montresor 13 Into the Highways and Hedges 9 The One Who Looked On 14 At the Cross Roads F. Frankfort Moore 74 I Forbid the Banns David Christie Murray 7 A Risiug Star Eden Phillpotts 21 The Thief of Virtue Richard Pryce 27 Jezebel 54 Christopher Allen Raine 77 By Berwen Bunks Mrs. Baillie Reynolds 1 Thalassa 10 The M;iu Who Won 38 The Supreme Test H. Grahame Richards 85 Lucrezia Borgia's One Love Rafael Sabatini 58 The Trampling of the Lilies Mrs. Baillie Saunders 70 The Lady Q 20 The Mayoress's Wooing 43 The Bride's Mirror May Sinclair 80 The Combined Maze 33 The Helpmate 34 The Divine Fire J. A. Steuart 59 The Eternal Quest Mrs. Thurston 26 The Gambler 87 Max Percy White 25 Park Lane 53 Love and the Poor Suitor M. P. Willcocks 90 Wings of Desire Dolf Wyllarde 22 A Lonely Little Lady Augusta Evans Wilson (Author of "St. Elmo") 57 The Speckled Bird Emile Zola 81 The Ladies' Paradise 82 The Mysteries of Marseilles 83 A Love Episode 3i Hutchinson's 6d. Novels With attractive pictorial covers in colours. A Series of COPYRIGHT NOVELS by the Leading Authors, clearly and well printed, OVER TEN MILLION SOLD New Volumes for 19 15 401 The Gap Of Youth Madame Albanesi 402 The Rescue Cf Martha ... F. Frankfort Moore 403 A Lady of Spain G. B. Burgin 404 Lucrezia Borgia's One Love H. Grahame Richards 405 It Will be All Right Tom Gallon 406 Tansy Tickner Edwardes 407 Pomm's Daughter Claire de Pratz 408 Garthoyle Gardens Edgar jepson 409 The Second Sighter's Daughter G. B. Burgin The Honour of the Hcuse \ Mrs. Hugh Fraser and 410 me nonuur ui u,« nuuat, .j j L Stahlmann 411 Dr. Luttrell's First Patient Rosa N. Carey 412 The Sinner "Rita" 413 The Dagger and the Cross Joseph Hatton 414 Dragooning a Dragoon ... E. Livingston Prescott 415 Within the Gates G. B. Burgin 416 The Garden Of Dreams ••■ H. Grahame Richards 417 James Whitaker's Dukedom Edgar Jepson 4i8 The Queen's Own Traitors... E. Livingston Prescott 32 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. •m L9-50m-9,'60(B3610s4)444 AA 000 369 851 i i i 1 i