A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Something of Myself
            For My Friends Known and Unknown
Author:     Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
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Language:   English
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Date first posted:          September 2004
Date most recently updated: September 2004

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Title:      Something of Myself
            For My Friends Known and Unknown
Author:     Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)




   I. A Very Young Person
  II. The School Before Its Time
 III. Seven Years' Hard
  IV. The Interregnum
   V. The Committee of Ways and Means
  VI. South Africa
 VII. The Very-Own House
VIII. Working-Tools




Chapter I


A Very Young Person

1865-1878

Give me the first six years of a child's life and you can have the rest.

Looking back from this my seventieth year, it seems to me that every card
in my working life has been dealt me in such a manner that I had but to
play it as it came. Therefore, ascribing all good fortune to Allah the
Dispenser of Events, I begin:--

My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and
purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of
early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with my ayah and later
with my sister in her perambulator, and of our returns with our purchases
piled high on the bows of it. Our ayah was a Portuguese Roman Catholic
who would pray--I beside her--at a wayside Cross. Meeta, my Hindu bearer,
would sometimes go into little Hindu temples where, being below the age
of caste, I held his hand and looked at the dimly-seen, friendly Gods.

Our evening walks were by the sea in the shadow of palm-groves which, I
think, were called the Mahim Woods. When the wind blew the great nuts
would tumble, and we fled--my ayah, and my sister in her perambulator--to
the safety of the open. I have always felt the menacing darkness of
tropical eventides, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through
palm or banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs.

There were far-going Arab dhows on the pearly waters, and gaily dressed
Parsees wading out to worship the sunset. Of their creed I knew nothing,
nor did I know that near our little house on the Bombay Esplanade were
the Towers of Silence, where their Dead are exposed to the waiting
vultures on the rim of the towers, who scuffle and spread wings when they
see the bearers of the Dead below. I did not understand my Mother's
distress when she found 'a child's hand' in our garden, and said I was
not to ask questions about it. I wanted to see that child's hand. But my
ayah told me.

In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, she or Meeta would tell
us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent
into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution 'Speak
English now to Papa and Mamma.' So one spoke 'English,' haltingly
translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in.
The Mother sang wonderful songs at a black piano and would go out to Big
Dinners. Once she came back, very quickly, and told me, still awake, that
'the big Lord Sahib' had been killed and there was to be no Big Dinner.
This was Lord Mayo, assassinated by a native. Meeta explained afterwards
that he had been 'hit with a knife.' Meeta unconsciously saved me from
any night terrors or dread of the dark. Our ayah, with a servant's
curious mixture of deep affection and shallow device, had told me that a
stuffed leopard's head on the nursery wall was there to see that I went
to sleep. But Meeta spoke of it scornfully as 'the head of an animal,'
and I took it off my mind as a fetish, good or bad, for it was only some
unspecified 'animal.'

Far across green spaces round the house was a marvellous place filled
with smells of paints and oils, and lumps of clay with which I played.
That was the atelier of my Father's School of Art, and a Mr. 'Terry
Sahib' his assistant, to whom my small sister was devoted, was our great
friend. Once, on the way there alone, I passed the edge of a huge ravine
a foot deep, where a winged monster as big as myself attacked me, and I
fled and wept. My Father drew for me a picture of the tragedy with a
rhyme beneath:--

There was a small boy in Bombay
Who once from a hen ran away.
    When they said: 'You're a baby,'
    He replied: 'Well, I may be:
But I don't like these hens of Bombay.'

This consoled me. I have thought well of hens ever since.

Then those days of strong light and darkness passed, and there was a time
in a ship with an immense semi-circle blocking all vision on each side of
her. (She must have been the old paddlewheel P.&O. Ripon.) There was a
train across a desert (the Suez Canal was not yet opened) and a halt in
it, and a small girl wrapped in a shawl on the seat opposite me, whose
face stands out still. There was next a dark land, and a darker room full
of cold, in one wall of which a white woman made naked fire, and I cried
aloud with dread, for I had never before seen a grate.

Then came a new small house smelling of aridity and emptiness, and a
parting in the dawn with Father and Mother, who said that I must learn
quickly to read and write so that they might send me letters and books.

I lived in that house for close on six years. It belonged to a woman who
took in children whose parents were in India. She was married to an old
Navy Captain, who had been a midshipman at Navarino, and had afterwards
been entangled in a harpoon-line while whale-fishing, and dragged down
till he miraculously freed himself. But the line had scarred his ankle
for life--a dry, black scar, which I used to look at with horrified
interest.

The house itself stood in the extreme suburbs of Southsea, next to a
Portsmouth unchanged in most particulars since Trafalgar--the Portsmouth
of Sir Walter Besant's By Celia's Arbour. The timber for a Navy that was
only experimenting with iron-clads such as the Inflexible lay in great
booms in the Harbour. The little training-brigs kept their walks opposite
Southsea Castle, and Portsmouth Hard was as it had always been. Outside
these things lay the desolation of Hayling Island, Lumps Fort, and the
isolated hamlet of Milton. I would go for long walks with the Captain,
and once he took me to see a ship called the Alert (or Discovery)
returned from Arctic explorations, her decks filled with old sledges and
lumber, and her spare rudder being cut up for souvenirs. A sailor gave me
a piece, but I lost it. Then the old Captain died, and I was sorry, for
he was the only person in that house as far as I can remember who ever
threw me a kind word.

It was an establishment run with the full vigour of the Evangelical as
revealed to the Woman. I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to
it in all its terrors--I and whatever luckless little slavey might be in
the house, whom severe rationing had led to steal food. Once I saw the
Woman beat such a girl who picked up the kitchen poker and threatened
retaliation. Myself I was regularly beaten. The Woman had an only son of
twelve or thirteen as religious as she. I was a real joy to him, for when
his mother had finished with me for the day he (we slept in the same
room) took me on and roasted the other side.

If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day's doings
(specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very
satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed
at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of
bullying, but this was calculated torture--religious as well as
scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it
necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary
effort.

But my ignorance was my salvation. I was made to read without
explanation, under the usual fear of punishment. And on a day that I
remember it came to me that 'reading' was not 'the Cat lay on the Mat,'
but a means to everything that would make me happy. So I read all that
came within my reach. As soon as my pleasure in this was known,
deprivation from reading was added to my punishments. I then read by
stealth and the more earnestly.

There were not many books in that house, but Father and Mother as soon as
they heard I could read sent me priceless volumes. One I have still, a
bound copy of Aunt Judy's Magazine of the early 'seventies, in which
appeared Mrs. Ewing's Six to Sixteen. I owe more in circuitous ways to
that tale than I can tell. I knew it, as I know it still, almost by
heart. Here was a history of real people and real things. It was better
than Knatchbull-Hugessen's Tales at Tea-time, better even than The Old
Shikarri with its steel engravings of charging pigs and angry tigers. On
another plane was an old magazine with Scott's 'I climbed the dark brow
of the mighty Helvellyn.' I knew nothing of its meaning but the words
moved and pleased. So did other extracts from the poems of 'A. Tennyson.'

A visitor, too, gave me a little purple book of severely moral tendency
called The Hope of the Katzekopfs--about a bad boy made virtuous, but it
contained verses that began, 'Farewell Rewards and Fairies,' and ended
with an injunction 'To pray for the "noddle" of William Churne of
Staffordshire.' This bore fruit afterwards.

And somehow or other I came across a tale about a lion-hunter in South
Africa who fell among lions who were all Freemasons, and with them
entered into a confederacy against some wicked baboons. I think that,
too, lay dormant until the Jungle Books began to be born.

There comes to my mind here a memory of two books of verse about
child-life which I have tried in vain to identify. One--blue and
fat--described 'nine white wolves' coming 'over the wold' and stirred me
to the deeps; and also certain savages who 'thought the name of England
was something that could not burn.'

The other book--brown and fat--was full of lovely tales in strange metres.
A girl was turned into a water-rat 'as a matter of course'; an Urchin
cured an old man of gout by means of a cool cabbage-leaf, and somehow
'forty wicked Goblins' were mixed up in the plot; and a 'Darling' got out
on the house-leads with a broom and tried to sweep stars off the skies.
It must have been an unusual book for that age, but I have never been
able to recover it, any more than I have a song that a nursemaid sang at
low-tide in the face of the sunset on Littlehampton Sands when I was less
than six. But the impression of wonder, excitement and terror and the red
bars of failing light is as clear as ever.

Among the servants in the House of Desolation was one from Cumnor, which
name I associated with sorrow and darkness and a raven that 'flapped its
wings.' Years later I identified the lines: 'And thrice the Raven flapped
her wing Around the towers of Cumnor Hall.' But how and where I first
heard the lines that cast the shadow is beyond me--unless it be that the
brain holds everything that passes within reach of the senses, and it is
only ourselves who do not know this.

When my Father sent me a Robinson Crusoe with steel engravings I set up
in business alone as a trader with savages (the wreck parts of the tale
never much interested me), in a mildewy basement room where I stood my
solitary confinements. My apparatus was a coconut shell strung on a red
cord, a tin trunk, and a piece of packing-case which kept off any other
world. Thus fenced about, everything inside the fence was quite real, but
mixed with the smell of damp cupboards. If the bit of board fell, I had
to begin the magic all over again. I have learned since from children who
play much alone that this rule of 'beginning again in a pretend game' is
not uncommon. The magic, you see, lies in the ring or fence that you take
refuge in.

Once I remember being taken to a town called Oxford and a street called
Holywell, where I was shown an Ancient of Days who, I was told, was the
Provost of Oriel; wherefore I never understood, but conceived him to be
some sort of idol. And twice or thrice we went, all of us, to pay a
day-long visit to an old gentleman in a house in the country near Havant.
Here everything was wonderful and unlike my world, and he had an old lady
sister who was kind, and I played in hot, sweet-smelling meadows and ate
all sorts of things.

After such a visit I was once put through the third degree by the Woman
and her son, who asked me if I had told the old gentleman that I was much
fonder of him than was the Woman's son. It must have been the tail-end of
some sordid intrigue or other--the old gentleman being of kin to that
unhappy pair--but it was beyond my comprehension. My sole concern had been
a friendly pony in the paddock. My dazed attempts to clear myself were
not accepted and, once again, the pleasure that I was seen to have taken
was balanced by punishments and humiliation--above all humiliation. That
alternation was quite regular. I can but admire the infernal laborious
ingenuity of it all. Exempli gratia. Coming out of church once I smiled.
The Devil-Boy demanded why. I said I didn't know, which was child's
truth. He replied that I must know. People didn't laugh for nothing.
Heaven knows what explanation I put forward; but it was duly reported to
the Woman as a 'lie.' Result, afternoon upstairs with the Collect to
learn. I learned most of the Collects that way and a great deal of the
Bible. The son after three or four years went into a Bank and was
generally too tired on his return to torture me, unless things had gone
wrong with him. I learned to know what was coming from his step into the
house.

But, for a month each year I possessed a paradise which I verily believe
saved me. Each December I stayed with my Aunt Georgie, my mother's
sister, wife of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, at The Grange, North End Road. At
first I must have been escorted there, but later I went alone, and
arriving at the house would reach up to the open-work iron bell-pull on
the wonderful gate that let me into all felicity. When I had a house of
my own, and The Grange was emptied of meaning, I begged for and was given
that bell-pull for my entrance, in the hope that other children might
also feel happy when they rang it.

At The Grange I had love and affection as much as the greediest, and I
was not very greedy, could desire. There were most wonderful smells of
paints and turpentine whiffing down from the big studio on the first
floor where my Uncle worked; there was the society of my two cousins, and
a sloping mulberry tree which we used to climb for our plots and
conferences. There was a rocking-horse in the nursery and a table that,
tilted up on two chairs, made a toboggan-slide of the best. There were
pictures finished or half finished of lovely colours; and in the rooms
chairs and cupboards such as the world had not yet seen, for William
Morris (our Deputy 'Uncle Topsy ') was just beginning to fabricate these
things. There was an incessant come and go of young people and grown-ups
all willing to play with us--except an elderly person called 'Browning,'
who took no proper interest in the skirmishes which happened to be raging
on his entry. Best of all, immeasurably, was the beloved Aunt herself
reading us The Pirate or The Arabian Nights of evenings, when one lay out
on the big sofas sucking toffee, and calling our cousins 'Ho, Son,' or
'Daughter of my Uncle' or 'True Believer.'

Often the Uncle, who had a 'golden voice,' would assist in our evening
play, though mostly he worked at black and white in the middle of our
riots. He was never idle. We made a draped chair in the hall serve for
the seat of 'Norna of the Fitful Head' and addressed her questions till
the Uncle got inside the rugs and gave us answers which thrilled us with
delightful shivers, in a voice deeper than all the boots in the world.
And once he descended in broad daylight with a tube of 'Mummy Brown' in
his hand, saying that he had discovered it was made of dead Pharaohs and
we must bury it accordingly. So we all went out and helped--according to
the rites of Mizraim and Memphis, I hope--and--to this day I could drive a
spade within a foot of where that tube lies.

At bedtime one hastened along the passages, where unfinished cartoons lay
against the walls. The Uncle often painted in their eyes first, leaving
the rest in charcoal--a most effective presentation. Hence our speed to
our own top-landing, where we could hang over the stairs and listen to
the loveliest sound in the world--deep-voiced men laughing together over
dinner.

It was a jumble of delights and emotions culminating in being allowed to
blow the big organ in the studio for the beloved Aunt, while the Uncle
worked, or 'Uncle Topsy' came in full of some business of picture-frames
or stained glass or general denunciations. Then it was hard to keep the
little lead weight on its string below the chalk mark, and if the organ
ran out in squeals the beloved Aunt would be sorry. Never, never angry!

As a rule Morris took no notice of anything outside what was in his mind
at the moment. But I remember one amazing exception. My cousin Margaret
and I, then about eight, were in the nursery eating pork-dripping on
brown bread, which is a dish for the Gods, when we heard 'Uncle Topsy' in
the hall calling, as he usually did, for 'Ned' or 'Georgie.' The matter
was outside our world. So we were the more impressed when, not finding
the grown-ups, he came in and said he would tell us a story. We settled
ourselves under the table which we used for a toboggan-slide and he,
gravely as ever, climbed on to our big rocking-horse. There, slowly
surging back and forth while the poor beast creaked, he told us a tale
full of fascinating horrors, about a man who was condemned to dream bad
dreams. One of them took the shape of a cow's tail waving from a heap of
dried fish. He went away as abruptly as he had come. Long afterwards,
when I was old enough to know a maker's pains, it dawned on me that we
must have heard the Saga of Burnt Njal, which was then interesting him.
In default of grown-ups, and pressed by need to pass the story between
his teeth and clarify it, he had used us.

But on a certain day--one tried to fend off the thought of it--the
delicious dream would end, and one would return to the House of
Desolation, and for the next two or three mornings there cry on waking
up. Hence more punishments and cross-examinations.

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never
told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than
animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely
to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear
of it.

In justice to the Woman I can say that I was adequately fed. (I remember
a gift to her of some red 'fruit' called 'tomatoes' which, after long
consideration, she boiled with sugar; and they were very beastly. The
tinned meat of those days was Australian beef with a crumbly fat, and
string-boiled mutton, hard to get down.) Nor was my life an unsuitable
preparation for my future, in that it demanded constant wariness, the
habit of observation, and attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of
discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour;
and automatic suspicion of sudden favours. Brother Lippo Lippi, in his
own harder case, as a boy discovered:--

Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
He learns the look of things, and none the less
For admonition.

So it was with me.

My troubles settled themselves in a few years. My eyes went wrong, and I
could not well see to read. For which reason I read the more and in bad
lights. My work at the terrible little dayschool where I had been sent
suffered in consequence, and my monthly reports showed it. The loss of
'reading-time' was the worst of my 'home' punishments for bad
school-work. One report was so bad that I threw it away and said that I
had never received it. But this is a hard world for the amateur liar. My
web of deceit was swiftly exposed--the Son spared time after banking-hours
to help in the auto-da-fé--and I was well beaten and sent to school
through the streets of Southsea with the placard 'Liar' between my
shoulders. In the long run these things, and many more of the like,
drained me of any capacity for real, personal hate for the rest of my
days. So close must any life-filling passion lie to its opposite. 'Who
having known the Diamond will concern himself with glass?'

Some sort of nervous breakdown followed, for I imagined I saw shadows and
things that were not there, and they worried me more than the Woman. The
beloved Aunt must have heard of it, and a man came down to see me as to
my eyes and reported that I was half-blind. This, too, was supposed to be
'showing-off,' and I was segregated from my sister--another punishment--as
a sort of moral leper. Then--I do not remember that I had any warning--the
Mother returned from India. She told me afterwards that when she first
came up to my room to kiss me goodnight, I flung up an arm to guard off
the cuff that I had been trained to expect.

I was taken at once from the House of Desolation, and for months ran wild
in a little farm-house on the edge of Epping Forest, where I was not
encouraged to refer to my guilty past. Except for my spectacles, which
were uncommon in those days, I was completely happy with my Mother and
the local society, which included for me a gipsy of the name of Saville,
who told me tales of selling horses to the ignorant; the farmer's wife;
her niece Patty who turned a kind blind eye on our raids into the dairy;
the postman; and the farm-boys. The farmer did not approve of my teaching
one of his cows to stand and be milked in the field. My Mother drew the
line at my return to meals red-booted from assisting at the slaughter of
swine, or reeking after the exploration of attractive muck heaps. These
were the only restrictions I recall.

A cousin, afterwards to be a Prime Minister, would come down on visits.
The farmer said that we did each other 'no good.' Yet the worst I can
remember was our self-sacrificing war against a wasps' nest on a muddy
islet in a most muddy pond. Our only weapons were switches of broom, but
we defeated the enemy unscathed. The trouble at home centred round an
enormous currant roly-poly--a 'spotted dog' afoot long. We took it away to
sustain us in action and we heard a great deal about it from Patty in the
evening.

Then we went to London and stayed for some weeks in a tiny lodging-house
in the semi-rural Brompton Road, kept by an ivory-faced, lordly-whiskered
ex-butler and his patient wife. Here, for the first time, it happened
that the night got into my head. I rose up and wandered about that still
house till daybreak, when I slipped out into the little brick-walled
garden and saw the dawn break. All would have been well but for Pluto, a
pet toad brought back from Epping Forest, who lived mostly in one of my
pockets. It struck me that he might be thirsty, and I stole into my
Mother's room and would have given him drink from a water jug. But it
slipped and broke and very much was said. The ex-butler could not
understand why I had stayed awake all night. I did not know then that
such nightwakings would be laid upon me through my life; or that my
fortunate hour would be on the turn of sunrise, with a sou'-west breeze
afoot.

The sorely tried Mother got my sister and me season-tickets for the old
South Kensington Museum which was only across the road. (No need in those
days to caution us against the traffic.) Very shortly we two, on account
of our regular attendance (for the weather had turned wet), owned that
place and one policeman in special. When we came with any grown-ups he
saluted us magnificently. From the big Buddha with the little door in his
back, to the towering dull-gilt ancient coaches and carven chariots in
long dark corridors--even the places marked 'private' where fresh
treasures were always being unpacked--we roved at will, and divided the
treasures child-fashion. There were instruments of music inlaid with
lapis, beryl and ivories; glorious gold-fretted spinets and clavichords;
the bowels of the great Glastonbury clock; mechanical models steel- and
silver-butted pistols, daggers and arquebusses--the labels alone were an
education; a collection of precious stones and rings--we quarrelled over
those--and a big bluish book which was the manuscript of one of Dickens'
novels. That man seemed to me to have written very carelessly; leaving
out lots which he had to squeeze in between the lines afterwards.

These experiences were a soaking in colour and design with, above all,
the proper Museum smell; and it stayed with me. By the end of that long
holiday I understood that my Mother had written verses, that my Father
'wrote things' also; that books and pictures were among the most
important affairs in the world; that I could read as much as I chose and
ask the meaning of things from any one I met. I had found out, too, that
one could take pen and set down what one thought, and that nobody accused
one of 'showing off' by so doing. I read a good deal; Sidonia the
Sorceress; Emerson's poems; and Bret Harte's stories; and I learned all
sorts of verses for the pleasure of repeating them to myself in bed.




Chapter II


The School Before Its Time

1878-1882

Then came school at the far end of England. The Head of it was a lean,
slow-spoken, bearded, Arab-complexioned man whom till then I had known as
one of my Deputy-Uncles at The Grange--Cormell Price, otherwise 'Uncle
Crom.' My Mother, on her return to India, confided my sister and me to
the care of three dear ladies who lived off the far end of Kensington
High Street over against Addison Road, in a house filled with books,
peace, kindliness, patience and what to-day would be called 'culture.'
But it was natural atmosphere.

One of the ladies wrote novels on her knee, by the fireside, sitting just
outside the edge of conversation, beneath two clay pipes tied with black
ribbon, which once Carlyle had smoked. All the people one was taken to
see either wrote or painted pictures or, as in the case of a Mr. and Miss
de Morgan, ornamented tiles. They let me play with their queer, sticky
paints. Somewhere in the background were people called Jean Ingelow and
Christina Rossetti, but I was never lucky enough to see those good
spirits. And there was choice in the walls of bookshelves of anything one
liked from Firmilian to The Moonstone and The Woman in White and,
somehow, all Wellington's Indian Despatches, which fascinated me.

These treasures were realised by me in the course of the next few years.
Meantime (Spring of '78), after my experience at Southsea, the prospect
of school did not attract. The United Services College was in the nature
of a company promoted by poor officers and the like for the cheap
education of their sons, and set up at Westward Ho! near Bideford. It was
largely a caste-school--some seventy-five per cent of us had been born
outside England and hoped to follow their fathers in the Army. It was but
four or five years old when I joined, and had been made up under Cormell
Price's hand by drafts from Haileybury, whose pattern it followed, and, I
think, a percentage of 'hard cases' from other schools. Even by the
standards of those days, it was primitive in its appointments, and our
food would now raise a mutiny in Dartmoor. I remember no time, after home
tips had been spent, when we would not eat dry bread if we could steal it
from the trays in the basement before tea. Yet the sick-house was
permanently empty except for lawful accidents; I remember not one death
of a boy; and only one epidemic--of chicken-pox. Then the Head called us
together and condoled with us in such fashion that we expected immediate
break-up and began to cheer. But he said that, perhaps, the best thing
would be to take no notice of the incident, and that he would 'work us
lightly' for the rest of the term. He did and it checked the epidemic.

Naturally, Westward Ho! was brutal enough, but, setting aside the foul
speech that a boy ought to learn early and put behind him by his
seventeenth year, it was clean with a cleanliness that I have never heard
of in any other school. I remember no cases of even suspected perversion,
and am inclined to the theory that if masters did not suspect them, and
show that they suspected, there would not be quite so many elsewhere.
Talking things over with Cormell Price afterwards, he confessed that his
one prophylactic against certain unclean microbes was to 'send us to bed
dead tired.' Hence the wideness of our bounds, and his deaf ear towards
our incessant riots and wars between the Houses.

At the end of my first term, which was horrible, my parents could not
reach England for the Easter holidays, and I had to stay up with a few
big boys reading for Army Exams. and a batch of youngsters whose people
were very far away. I expected the worst, but when we survivors were left
in the echoing form-rooms after the others had driven cheering to the
station, life suddenly became a new thing (thanks to Cormell Price). The
big remote seniors turned into tolerant elder brothers, and let us small
fry rove far out of bounds; shared their delicacies with us at tea; and
even took an interest in our hobbies. We had no special work to do and
enjoyed ourselves hugely. On the return of the school 'all smiles stopped
together,' which was right and proper. For compensation I was given a
holiday when my Father came home, and with him went to the Paris
Exhibition of '78, where he was in charge of Indian Exhibits. He allowed
me, at twelve years old, the full freedom of that spacious and friendly
city, and the run of the Exhibition grounds and buildings. It was an
education in itself; and set my life-long love for France. Also, he saw
to it that I should learn to read French at least for my own amusement,
and gave me Jules Verne to begin with. French as an accomplishment was
not well-seen at English schools in my time, and knowledge of it connoted
leanings towards immorality. For myself;--

I hold it truth with him who sung
    Unpublished melodies,
Who wakes in Paris, being young,
    O' summer, wakes in Paradise.

For those who may be still interested in such matters, I wrote of this
part of my life in some Souvenirs of France, which are very close to the
facts of that time.

My first year and a half was not pleasant. The most persistent bullying
comes less from the bigger boys, who merely kick and pass on, than from
young devils of fourteen acting in concert against one butt. Luckily for
me I was physically some years in advance of my age, and swimming in the
big open sea baths, or off the Pebble Ridge, was the one accomplishment
that brought me any credit. I played footer (Rugby Union), but here again
my sight hampered me. I was not even in the Second Fifteen.

After my strength came suddenly to me about my fourteenth year, there was
no more bullying; and either my natural sloth or past experience did not
tempt me to bully in my turn. I had by then found me two friends with
whom, by a carefully arranged system of mutual aids, I went up the school
on co-operative principles.

How we--the originals of Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle--first came together I
do not remember, but our Triple Alliance was well established before we
were thirteen. We had been oppressed by a large toughish boy who raided
our poor little lockers. We took him on in a long, mixed
rough-and-tumble, just this side of the real thing. At the end we were
all-out (we worked by pressure and clinging, much as bees 'ball' a Queen)
and he never troubled us again.

Turkey possessed an invincible detachment--far beyond mere
insolence--towards all the world and a tongue, when he used it, dipped in
some Irish-blue acid. Moreover, he spoke, sincerely, of the masters as
'ushers,' which was not without charm. His general attitude was that of
Ireland in English affairs at that time.

For executive capacity, the organisation of raids, reprisals, and
retreats, we depended on Stalky, our Commander-in-Chief and Chief of his
own Staff. He came of a household with a stern head, and, I fancy, had
training in the holidays. Turkey never told us much about his belongings.
He turned up, usually a day or two late, by the Irish packet, aloof,
inscrutable, and contradictious. On him lay the burden of decorating our
study, for he served a strange God called Ruskin. We fought among
ourselves 'regular an' faithful as man an' wife,' but any debt which we
owed elsewhere was faithfully paid by all three of us.

Our 'socialisation of educational opportunities' took us unscathed up the
school, till the original of Little Hartopp, asking one question too
many, disclosed that I did not know what a cosine was and compared me to
'brute beasts.' I taught Turkey all he ever knew of French, and he tried
to make Stalky and me comprehend a little Latin. There is much to be said
for this system, if you want a boy to learn anything, because he will
remember what he gets from an equal where his master's words are
forgotten. Similarly, when it was necessary to Stalky that I should get
into the Choir, he taught me how to quaver 'I know a maiden fair to see'
by punching me in the kidneys all up and down the cricket-field. (But
some small trouble over a solitaire marble pushed from beneath the hem of
a robe down the choir-steps into the tiled aisle ended that venture.)

I think it was his infernal impersonality that swayed us all in our wars
and peace. He saw not only us but himself from the outside, and in later
life, as we met in India and elsewhere, the gift persisted. At long last,
when with an equipment of doubtful Ford cars and a collection of
most-mixed troops, he put up a monumental bluff against the Bolsheviks
somewhere in Armenia (it is written in his Adventures of Dunsterforce)
and was as nearly as possible destroyed, he wrote to the authorities
responsible. I asked him what happened. 'They told me they had no more
use for my services,' said he. Naturally I condoled. 'Wrong as usual,'
said the ex-Head of Number Five study. 'If any officer under me had
written what I did to the War Office, I'd have had him broke in two
twos.' That fairly sums up the man--and the boy who commanded us. I think
I was a buffer state between his drivings and his tongue-lashings and his
campaigns in which we were powers; and the acrid, devastating Turkey who,
as I have written, 'lived and loved to destroy illusions' yet reached
always after beauty. They took up room on tables that I wanted for
writing; they broke into my reveries; they mocked my Gods; they stole,
pawned or sold my outlying or neglected possessions; and--I could not have
gone on a week without them nor they without me.

But my revenge was ample. I have said I was physically precocious. In my
last term I had been thrusting an unlovely chin at C---- in form. At last
he blew up, protested he could no longer abide the sight, and ordered me
to shave. I carried this word to my House-master. He, who had long looked
on me as a cultivated sink of iniquities, brooded over this confirmation
of his suspicions, and gave me a written order on a Bideford barber for a
razor, etc. I kindly invited my friends to come and help, and lamented
for three miles the burden of compulsory shaving. There were no ripostes.
There was no ribaldry. But why Stalky and Turkey did not cut their
throats experimenting with the apparatus I do not understand.

We will now return to the savage life in which all these prodigious
events 'transpired.'

We smoked, of course, but the penalties of discovery were heavy because
the Prefects, who were all of the 'Army Class' up for the Sandhurst or
Woolwich Preliminary, were allowed under restrictions to smoke pipes. If
any of the rank and file were caught smoking, they came up before the
Prefects, not on moral grounds, but for usurping the privileges of the
Ruling Caste. The classic phrase was; 'You esteem yourself to be a
Prefect, do you? All right. Come to my study at six, please.' This seemed
to work better than religious lectures and even expulsions which some
establishments used to deal out for this dread sin.

Oddly enough 'fagging' did not exist, though the name 'fag' was regularly
used as a term of contempt and sign of subordination against the Lower
School. If one needed a 'varlet' to clean things in a study or run
errands, that was a matter for private bargaining in our only
currency--food. Sometimes such service gave protection, in the sense that
it was distinct cheek to oppress an accredited 'varlet.' I never served
thus, owing to my untidiness; but our study entertained one sporadically,
and to him we three expounded all housewifely duties. But, as a rule,
Turkey would tidy up like the old maid to whom we always compared him.

Games were compulsory unless written excuse were furnished by competent
authority. The penalty for wilful shirking was three cuts with a
ground-ash from the Prefect of Games. One of the most difficult things to
explain to some people is that a boy of seventeen or eighteen can thus
beat a boy barely a year his junior, and on the heels of the punishment
go for a walk with him; neither party bearing malice or pride.

So too in the War of '14 to '18 young gentlemen found it hard to
understand that the Adjutant who poured vitriol on their heads at Parade,
but was polite and friendly at Mess, was not sucking up to them to make
amends for previous rudeness.

Except in the case of two House-masters I do not recall being lectured or
preached at on morals or virtue. It is not always expedient to excite a
growing youth's religious emotions, because one set of nerves seems to
communicate with others, and Heaven knows what mines a 'pi-jaw' may touch
off. But there were no doors to our bare windy dormitories, nor any sort
of lock on the form-rooms. Our masters, with one exception who lived
outside, were unmarried. The school buildings, originally cheap
lodging-houses, made one straight bar against a hillside, and the boys
circulated up and down in front of it. A penal battalion could not have
been more perfectly policed, though that we did not realise. Mercifully
we knew little outside the immediate burden of the day and the necessity
for getting into the Army. I think, then, that when we worked we worked
harder than most schools.

My House-master was deeply conscientious and cumbered about with many
cares for his charges. What he accomplished thereby I know not. His
errors sprang from pure and excessive goodness. Me and my companions he
always darkly and deeply suspected. Realising this, we little beasts made
him sweat, which he did on slight provocation.

My main interest as I grew older was C----, my English and Classics
Master, a rowing-man of splendid physique, and a scholar who lived in
secret hope of translating Theocritus worthily. He had a violent temper,
no disadvantage in handling boys used to direct speech, and a gift of
schoolmaster's 'sarcasm' which must have been a relief to him and was
certainly a treasure-trove to me. Also he was a good and House-proud
House-master. Under him I came to feel that words could be used as
weapons, for he did me the honour to talk at me plentifully; and our
year-in year-out form-room bickerings gave us both something to play
with. One learns more from a good scholar in a rage than from a score of
lucid and laborious drudges; and to be made the butt of one's companions
in full form is no bad preparation for later experiences. I think this
'approach' is now discouraged for fear of hurting the soul of youth, but
in essence it is no more than rattling tins or firing squibs under a
colt's nose. I remember nothing save satisfaction or envy when C---- broke
his precious ointments over my head.

I tried to give a pale rendering of his style when heated in a 'Stalky'
tale, 'Regulus,' but I wish I could have presented him as he blazed forth
once on the great Cleopatra Ode--the 27th of the Third Book. I had
detonated him by a very vile construe of the first few lines. Having
slain me, he charged over my corpse and delivered an interpretation of
the rest of the Ode unequalled for power and insight. He held even the
Army Class breathless.

There must be still masters of the same sincerity; and gramophone records
of such good men, on the brink of profanity, struggling with a Latin
form, would be more helpful to education than bushels of printed books.
C---- taught me to loathe Horace for two years; to forget him for twenty,
and then to love him for the rest of my days and through many sleepless
nights.

After my second year at school, the tide of writing set in. In my
holidays the three ladies listened--it was all I wanted--to anything I had
to say. I drew on their books, from The City of Dreadful Night which
shook me to my unformed core, Mrs. Gatty's Parables from Nature which I
imitated and thought I was original, and scores of others. There were few
atrocities of form or metre that I did not perpetrate and I enjoyed them
all.

I discovered, also, that personal and well-pointed limericks on my
companions worked well, and I and a red-nosed boy of uncertain temper
exploited the idea--not without dust and heat; next, that the metre of
Hiawatha saved one all bother about rhyme; and that there had been a man
called Dante who, living in a small Italian town at general issue with
his neighbours, had invented for most of them lively torments in a
nine-ringed Hell, where he exhibited them to after-ages. C---- said, 'He
must have made himself infernally unpopular.' I combined my authorities.

I bought a fat, American-cloth-bound notebook, and set to work on an
Inferno, into which I put, under appropriate torture, all my friends and
most of the masters. This was really remunerative because one could chant
his future doom to a victim walking below the windows of the study which
I with my two companions now possessed. Then, 'as rare things will,' my
book vanished, and I lost interest in the Hiawatha metre.

Tennyson and Aurora Leigh came in the way of nature to me in the
holidays, and C---- in form once literally threw Men and Women at my head.
Here I found 'The Bishop orders his Tomb,' 'Love among the Ruins' and
'Fra Lippo Lippi,' a not too remote--I dare to think--ancestor of mine.

Swinburne's poems I must have come across first at the Aunt's. He did not
strike my very young mind as 'anything in particular' till I read
Atalanta in Calydon, and one verse of verses which exactly set the time
for my side-stroke when I bathed in the big rollers off the Ridge. As
thus:--

Who shall seek--thee and bring
    And restore thee thy day [Half roll]
When the dove dipt her wing
    And the oars won their way [Other half roll]
Where the narrowing Symplegades whitened
    The Straits of Propontis with spray? [Carry on with the impetus]

If you can time the last line of it to end with a long roller crashing on
your head, the cadence is complete. I even forgave Bret Harte, to whom I
owed many things, for taking that metre in vain in his 'Heathen Chinee.'
But I never forgave C---- for bringing the fact to my notice.

Not till years later--talking things over with my 'Uncle Crom'--did I
realise that injustices of this sort were not without intention. 'You
needed a tight hand in those days,' he drawled. 'C---- gave it to you.'
'He did,' said I, 'and so did H----,' the married master whom the school
thoroughly feared.

'I remember that,' Crom answered. 'Yes, that was me too.' This had been
an affair of an Essay--'A Day in the Holidays,' or something of that
nature. C---- had set it but the papers were to be marked by H----. My
essay was of variegated but constant vileness, modelled, I fancy, on
holiday readings of a journal called The Pink 'Un. Even I had never done
anything worse. Normally H----'s markings would have been sent in to C----
without comment. On this occasion, however (I was in Latin form at the
time), H---- entered and asked for the floor. C---- yielded it to him with
a grin. H---- then told me off before my delighted companions in his best
style, which was acid and contumelious. He wound up by a few general
remarks about dying as a 'scurrilous journalist.' (I think now that H----
too may have read The Pink 'Un.) The tone, matter, and setting of his
discourse were as brutal as they were meant to be--brutal as the necessary
wrench on the curb that fetches up a too-flippant colt. C---- added a
rider or two after H---- had left.

(But it pleased Allah to afflict H---- in after years. I met him in charge
of a 'mixed' College in New Zealand, where he taught a class of young
ladies Latinity. 'And when they make false quantities, like you used to,
they make-eyes at me!' I thought of my chill mornings at Greek Testament
under his ready hand, and pitied him from the bottom of my soul.)

Yes--I must have been 'nursed' with care by Crom and under his orders.
Hence, when he saw I was irretrievably committed to the ink-pot, his
order that I should edit the School Paper and have the run of his Library
Study. Hence, I presume, C----'s similar permission, granted and withdrawn
as the fortunes of our private war varied. Hence the Head's idea that I
should learn Russian with him (I got as far as some of the cardinal
numbers) and, later, précis-writing. This latter meant severe compression
of dry-as-dust material, no essential fact to be omitted. The whole was
sweetened with reminiscences of the men of Crom's youth, and throughout
the low, soft drawl and the smoke of his perpetual Vevey he shed light on
the handling of words. Heaven forgive me! I thought these privileges were
due to my transcendent personal merits.

Many of us loved the Head for what he had done for us, but I owed him
more than all of them put together; and I think I loved him even more
than they did. There came a day when he told me that a fortnight after
the close of the summer holidays of '82, I would go to India to work on a
paper in Lahore, where my parents lived, and would get one hundred silver
rupees a month! At term-end he most unjustly devised a prize poem--subject
'The Battle of Assaye ', which, there being no competitor, I won in what
I conceived was the metre of my latest 'infection'--Joaquin Miller. And
when I took the prize-book, Trevelyan's Competition Wallah, Crom Price
said that if I went on I might be heard of again.

I spent my last few days before sailing with the beloved Aunt in the
little cottage that the Burne-Jones' had bought for a holiday house at
Rottingdean. There I looked across the village green and the horse-pond
at a house called 'The Elms' behind a flint wall, and at a church
opposite; and--had I known it--at 'The bodies of those to be In the Houses
of Death and of Birth.'




Chapter III


Seven Years' Hard

I am poor Brother Lippo by your leave.
You need not clap your torches to my face.
                          Fra Lippo Lippi.

So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years
older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother
abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I
was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the
vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys
have told me how the same thing happened to them.

There were yet three or four days' rail to Lahore, where my people lived.
After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in
full strength.

That was a joyous home-coming. For--consider!--I had returned to a Father
and Mother of whom I had seen but little since my sixth year. I might
have found my Mother 'the sort of woman I don't care for,' as in one
terrible case that I know; and my Father intolerable. But the Mother
proved more delightful than all my imaginings or memories. My Father was
not only a mine of knowledge and help, but a humorous, tolerant, and
expert fellow-craftsman. I had my own room in the house; my servant,
handed over to me by my father's servant, whose son he was, with the
solemnity of a marriage-contract; my own horse, cart, and groom; my own
office-hours and direct responsibilities; and--oh joy!--my own office-box,
just like my Father's, which he took daily to the Lahore Museum and
School of Art. I do not remember the smallest friction in any detail of
our lives. We delighted more in each other's society than in that of
strangers; and when my sister came out, a little later, our cup was
filled to the brim. Not only were we happy, but we knew it.

But the work was heavy. I represented fifty per cent of the 'editorial
staff' of the one daily paper of the Punjab--a small sister of the great
Pioneer at Allahabad under the same proprietorship. And a daily paper
comes out every day even though fifty per cent of the staff have fever.

My Chief took me in hand, and for three years or so I loathed him. He had
to break me in, and I knew nothing. What he suffered on my account I
cannot tell; but the little that I ever acquired of accuracy, the habit
of trying at least to verify references, and some knack of sticking to
desk-work, I owed wholly to Stephen Wheeler.

I never worked less than ten hours and seldom more than fifteen per diem;
and as our paper came out in the evening did not see the midday sun
except on Sundays. I had fever too, regular and persistent, to which I
added for a while chronic dysentery. Yet I discovered that a man can work
with a temperature of 104, even though next day he has to ask the office
who wrote the article. Our native Foreman, on the News side, Mian Rukn
Din, a Muhammedan gentleman of kind heart and infinite patience, whom I
never saw unequal to a situation, was my loyal friend throughout. From
the modern point of view I suppose the life was not fit for a dog, but my
world was filled with boys, but a few years older than I, who lived
utterly alone, and died from typhoid mostly at the regulation age of
twenty-two. As regarding ourselves at home, if there were any dying to be
done, we four were together. The rest was in the day's work, with love to
sweeten all things.

Books, plays, pictures, and amusements, outside what games the cold
weather allowed, there were none. Transport was limited to horses and
such railways as existed. This meant that one's normal radius of travel
would be about six miles in any direction, and--one did not meet new white
faces at every six miles. Death was always our near companion. When there
was an outbreak of eleven cases of typhoid in our white community of
seventy, and professional nurses had not been invented, the men sat up
with the men and the women with the women. We lost four of our invalids
and thought we had done well. Otherwise, men and women dropped where they
stood. Hence our custom of looking up any one who did not appear at our
daily gatherings.

The dead of all times were about us--in the vast forgotten Muslim
cemeteries round the Station, where one's horse's hoof of a morning might
break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our
mud garden walls, and were turned up among the flowers by the Rains; and
at every point were tombs of the dead. Our chief picnic rendezvous and
some of our public offices had been memorials to desired dead women; and
Fort Lahore, where Runjit Singh's wives lay, was a mausoleum of ghosts.

This was the setting in which my world revolved. Its centre for me--a
member at seventeen--was the Punjab Club, where bachelors, for the most
part, gathered to eat meals of no merit among men whose merits they knew
well. My Chief was married and came there seldom, so it was mine to be
told every evening of the faults of that day's issue in very simple
language. Our native compositors 'followed copy' without knowing one word
of English. Hence glorious and sometimes obscene misprints. Our
proof-readers (sometimes we had a brace of them) drank, which was
expected; but systematic and prolonged D.T. on their part gave me more
than my share of their work. And in that Club and elsewhere I met none
except picked men at their definite work--Civilians, Army, Education,
Canals, Forestry, Engineering, Irrigation, Railways, Doctors, and
Lawyers--samples of each branch and each talking his own shop. It follows
then that that 'show of technical knowledge' for which I was blamed later
came to me from the horse's mouth, even to boredom.

So soon as my paper could trust me a little, and I had behaved well at
routine work, I was sent out, first for local reportings; then to
race-meetings which included curious nights in the lottery-tent. (I saw
one go up in flame once, when a heated owner hove an oil-lamp at the
handicapper on the night the owner was coming up for election at the
Club. That was the first and last time I had seen every available black
ball expended and members begging for more.) Later I described openings
of big bridges and such-like, which meant a night or two with the
engineers; floods on railways--more nights in the wet with wretched heads
of repair gangs; village festivals and consequent outbreaks of cholera or
small-pox; communal riots under the shadow of the Mosque of Wazir Khan,
where the patient waiting troops lay in timber-yards or side-alleys till
the order came to go in and hit the crowds on the feet with the gun-butt
(killing in Civil Administration was then reckoned confession of
failure), and the growling, flaring, creed-drunk city would be brought to
hand without effusion of blood, or the appearance of any agitated
Viceroy; visits of Viceroys to neighbouring Princes on the edge of the
great Indian Desert, where a man might have to wash his raw hands and
face in soda-water; reviews of Armies expecting to move against Russia
next week; receptions of an Afghan Potentate, with whom the Indian
Government wished to stand well (this included a walk into the Khyber,
where I was shot at, but without malice, by a rapparee who disapproved of
his ruler's foreign policy); murder and divorce trials, and (a really
filthy job) an inquiry into the percentage of lepers among the butchers
who supplied beef and mutton to the European community of Lahore. (Here I
first learned that crude statements of crude facts are not well-seen by
responsible official authorities.) It was Squeers' method of instruction,
but how could I fail to be equipped with more than all I might need? I
was saturated with it, and if I tripped over detail, the Club attended to
me.

My first bribe was offered to me at the age of nineteen when I was in a
Native State where, naturally, one concern of the Administration was to
get more guns of honour added to the Ruler's official salute when he
visited British India, and even a roving correspondent's good word might
be useful. Hence in the basket of fruits (dali is its name) laid at my
tent door each morning, a five-hundred-rupee note and a Cashmere shawl.
As the sender was of high caste I returned the gift at the hands of the
camp-sweeper, who was not. Upon this my servant, responsible to his
father, and mine, for my well-being, said without emotion; 'Till we get
home you eat and drink from my hands.' This I did.

On return to work I found my Chief had fever, and I was in sole charge.
Among his editorial correspondence was a letter from this Native State
setting forth the record during a few days' visit of 'your reporter, a
person called Kipling'; who had broken, it seemed, the Decalogue in every
detail from rape to theft. I wrote back that as Acting-Editor I had
received the complaints and would investigate, but they must expect me to
be biassed because I was the person complained of.

I visited the State more than once later, and there was not a cloud on
our relations. I had dealt with the insult more Asiatico--which they
understood; the ball had been returned more Asiatico--which I understood;
and the incident had been closed.

My second bribe came when I worked under Stephen Wheeler's successor, Kay
Robinson, brother of Phil Robinson who wrote In My Indian Garden. With
him, thanks to his predecessor having licked me into some shape, my
relations were genial. It was the old matter of gun-salutes again; the
old machinery of the basket of fruit and shawls and money for us both,
but this time left impudently on the office verandah. Kay and I wasted a
happy half-hour pricking 'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes' into the
currency notes, mourned that we could not take either them or the shawls,
and let the matter go.

My third and most interesting bribe was when reporting a divorce case in
Eurasian society. An immense brown woman penned me in a corner and
offered 'if I would but keep her name out of it' to give me most intimate
details, which she began at once to do. I demanded her name before
bargaining. 'Oah! I am the Respondent. Thatt is why I ask you.' It is
hard to report some dramas without Ophelias if not Hamlets. But I was
repaid for her anger when Counsel asked her if she had ever expressed a
desire to dance on her husband's grave. Till then she had denied
everything. 'Yess,' she hissed, 'and I jolly-damn-well would too.'

A soldier of my acquaintance had been sentenced to life-imprisonment for
a murder which, on evidence not before the court, seemed to me rather
justified. I saw him later in Lahore gaol at work on some complicated
arrangement of nibs with different coloured inks, stuck into a sort of
loom which, drawn over paper, gave the ruling for the blank forms of
financial statements. It seemed wickedly monotonous. But the spirit of
man is undefeatable. 'If I made a mistake of an eighth of an inch in
spacing these lines, I'd throw out all the accounts of the Upper Punjab,'
said he.

As to our reading public, they were at the least as well educated as
fifty per cent of our 'staff'; and by force of their lives could not be
stampeded or much 'thrilled.' Double headlines we had never heard of, nor
special type, and I fear that the amount of 'white' in the newspapers
to-day would have struck us as common cheating. Yet the stuff we dealt in
would have furnished modern journals of enterprise with almost daily
sensations.

My legitimate office-work was sub-editing, which meant eternal
cuttings-down of unwieldy contributions--such as discourses on abstruse
questions of Revenue and Assessment from a great and wise Civilian who
wrote the vilest hand that even our compositors ever saw; literary
articles about Milton. (And how was I to know that the writer was a
relative of one of our proprietors, who thought our paper existed to air
his theories?) Here Crom Price's training in précis-work helped me to get
swiftly at what meat there might be in the disorderly messes. There were
newspaper exchanges from Egypt to Hong-Kong to be skimmed nearly every
morning and, once a week, the English papers on which one drew in time of
need; local correspondence from outstations to vet for possible libels in
their innocent allusions; 'spoofing' letters from subalterns to be
guarded against (twice I was trapped here); always, of course, the filing
of cables, and woe betide an error then! I took them down from the
telephone--a primitive and mysterious power whose native operator broke
every word into mono syllables. One cut-and-come-again affliction was an
accursed Muscovite paper, the Novoie Vremya, written in French, which,
for weeks and weeks, published the war diaries of Alikhanoff, a Russian
General then harrying the Central Russian Khanates. He gave the name of
every camp he halted at, and regularly reported that his troops warmed
themselves at fires of sax-aul, which I suppose is perhaps sage-brush. A
week after I had translated the last of the series every remembrance of
it passed from my normal memory.

Ten or twelve years later, I fell sick in New York and passed through a
long delirium which, by ill-chance, I remembered when I returned to life.
At one stage of it I led an enormous force of cavalry mounted on red
horses with brand-new leather saddles, under the glare of a green moon,
across steppes so vast that they revealed the very curve of earth. We
would halt at one of the camps named by Alikhanoff in his diary (I would
see the name of it heaving up over the edge of the planet), where we
warmed ourselves at fires of sax-aul, and where, scorched on one side and
frozen on the other, I sat till my infernal squadrons went on again to
the next fore-known halt; and so through the list.

In the early '80s a Liberal Government had come into power at Home and
was acting on liberal 'principle,' which so far as I have observed ends
not seldom in bloodshed. Just then, it was a matter of principle that
Native Judges should try white women. Native in this case meant
overwhelmingly Hindu; and the Hindu's idea of women is not lofty. No one
had asked for any such measure--least of all the Judiciary concerned. But
principle is principle, though the streets swim. The European community
were much annoyed. They went to the extremity of revolt--that is to say
even the officials of the Service and their wives very often would not
attend the functions and levees of the then Viceroy, a circular and
bewildered recluse of religious tendencies. A pleasant English gentleman
called C.P. Ilbert had been imported to father and god-father the Bill. I
think he, too, was a little bewildered. Our paper, like most of the
European Press, began with stern disapproval of the measure, and, I
fancy, published much comment and correspondence which would now be
called 'disloyal.'

One evening, while putting the paper to bed, I looked as usual over the
leader. It was the sort of false-balanced, semi-judicial stuff that some
English journals wrote about the Indian White Paper from 1932 to '34, and
like them it furnished a barely disguised exposition of the Government's
high ideals. In after-life one got to know that touch better, but it
astonished me at the time, and I asked my Chief what it all meant. He
replied, as I should have done in his place; 'None of your dam'
business,' and, being married, went to his home. I repaired to the Club
which, remember, was the whole of my outside world.

As I entered the long, shabby dining-room where we all sat at one table,
everyone hissed. I was innocent enough to ask; 'What's the joke? Who are
they hissing?' 'You,' said the man at my side. 'Your dam' rag has ratted
over the Bill.'

It is not pleasant to sit still when one is twenty while all your
universe hisses you. Then uprose a Captain, our Adjutant of Volunteers,
and said: 'Stop that! The boy's only doing what he's paid to do.' The
demonstration tailed off, but I had seen a great light. The Adjutant was
entirely correct. I was a hireling, paid to do what I was paid to do,
and--I did not relish the idea. Someone said kindly; 'You damned young
ass! Don't you know that your paper has the Government printing-contract?'
I did know it, but I had never before put two and two together.

A few months later one of my two chief proprietors received the
decoration that made him a Knight. Then I began to take much interest in
certain smooth Civilians, who had seen good in the Government measure and
had somehow been shifted out of the heat to billets in Simla. I followed
under shrewd guidance, often native, the many pretty ways by which a
Government can put veiled pressure on its employees in a land where every
circumstance and relation of a man's life is public property. So, when
the great and epoch-making India Bill turned up fifty years later, I felt
as one re-treading the tortuous byways of his youth. One recognised the
very phrases and assurances of the old days still doing good work, and
waited, as in a dream, for the very slightly altered formulas in which
those who were parting with their convictions excused themselves. Thus;
'I may act as a brake, you know. At any rate I'm keeping a more extreme
man out of the game.' 'There's no sense running counter to the
inevitable,'--and all the other Devil-provided camouflage for the
sinner-who-faces-both-ways.

In '85 I was made a Freemason by dispensation (Lodge Hope and
Perseverance 782 E.C.), being under age, because the Lodge hoped for a
good Secretary. They did not get him, but I helped, and got the Father to
advise, in decorating the bare walls of the Masonic Hall with hangings
after the prescription of Solomon's Temple. Here I met Muslims, Hindus,
Sikhs, members of the Arya and Brahmo Samaj, and a Jew tyler, who was
priest and butcher to his little community in the city. So yet another
world opened to me which I needed.

My Mother and sister would go up to the Hills for the hot weather, and in
due course my Father too. My own holiday came when I could be spared.
Thus I often lived alone in the big house, where I commanded by choice
native food, as less revolting than meat-cookery, and so added
indigestion to my more intimate possessions.

In those months--mid-April to mid-October--one took up one's bed and
walked about with it from room to room, seeking for less heated air; or
slept on the flat roof with the waterman to throw half-skinfuls of water
on one's parched carcase. This brought on fever but saved heat-stroke.

Often the night got into my head as it had done in the boarding-house in
the Brompton Road, and I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd
places-liquor-shops, gambling-and opium-dens, which are not a bit
mysterious, wayside entertainments such as puppet-shows, native dances;
or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan for the
sheer sake of looking. Sometimes, the Police would challenge, but I knew
most of their officers, and many folk in some quarters knew me for the
son of my Father, which in the East more than anywhere else is useful.
Otherwise, the word 'Newspaper' sufficed; though I did not supply my
paper with many accounts of these prowls. One would come home, just as
the light broke, in some night-hawk of a hired carriage which stank of
hookah-fumes, jasmine-flowers, and sandalwood; and if the driver were
moved to talk, he told one a good deal. Much of real Indian life goes on
in the hot-weather nights. That is why the native staff of the offices
are not much use next morning. All native offices aestivate from May at
least till September. Files and correspondence are then as a matter of
course pitched unopened into corners, to be written up or faked when the
weather gets cooler. But the English who go Home on leave, having imposed
the set hours of a northern working day upon the children of children,
are surprised that India does not work as they do. This is one of the
reasons why autonomous India will be interesting.

And there were 'wet' nights too at the Club or one Mess, when a tableful
of boys, half-crazed with discomfort, but with just sense enough to stick
to beer and bones which seldom betray, tried to rejoice and somehow
succeeded. I remember one night when we ate tinned haggis with cholera in
the cantonments 'to see what would happen,' and another when a savage
stallion in harness was presented with a very hot leg of roast mutton, as
he snapped. Theoretically this is a cure for biting, but it only made him
more of a cannibal.

I got to meet the soldiery of those days in visits to Fort Lahore and, in
a less degree, at Mian Mir Cantonments. My first and best beloved
Battalion was the 2nd Fifth Fusiliers, with whom I dined in awed silence
a few weeks after I came out. When they left I took up with their
successors, the 30th East Lancashire, another North-country regiment;
and, last, with the 31st East Surrey--a London recruited confederacy of
skilful dog-stealers, some of them my good and loyal friends. There were
ghostly dinners too with Subalterns in charge of the Infantry Detachment
at Fort Lahore, where, all among marble-inlaid, empty apartments of dead
Queens, or under the domes of old tombs, meals began with the regulation
thirty grains of quinine in the sherry, and ended--as Allah pleased!

I am, by the way, one of the few civilians who have turned out a
Quarter-Guard of Her Majesty's troops. It was on a chill winter morn,
about 2 A.M. at the Fort, and though I suppose I had been given the
countersign on my departure from the Mess, I forgot it ere I reached the
Main Guard, and when challenged announced myself spaciously as 'Visiting
Rounds.' When the men had clattered out I asked the Sergeant if he had
ever seen a finer collection of scoundrels. That cost me beer by the
gallon, but it was worth it.

Having no position to consider, and my trade enforcing it, I could move
at will in the fourth dimension. I came to realise the bare horrors of
the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he endured on account of
the Christian doctrine which lays down that 'the wages of sin is death.'
It was counted impious that bazaar prostitutes should be inspected; or
that the men should be taught elementary precautions in their dealings
with them. This official virtue cost our Army in India nine thousand
expensive white men a year always laid up from venereal disease. Visits
to Lock Hospitals made me desire, as earnestly as I do to-day, that I
might have six hundred priests--Bishops of the Establishment for
choice--to handle for six months precisely as the soldiers of my youth
were handled.

Heaven knows the men died fast enough from typhoid, which seemed to have
something to do with water, but we were not sure; or from cholera, which
was manifestly a breath of the Devil that could kill all on one side of a
barrack-room and spare the others; from seasonal fever; or from what was
described as 'blood-poisoning.'

Lord Roberts, at that time Commander-in-Chief in India, who knew my
people, was interested in the men, and--I had by then written one or two
stories about soldiers--the proudest moment of my young life was when I
rode up Simla Mall beside him on his usual explosive red Arab, while he
asked me what the men thought about their accommodation,
entertainment-rooms and the like. I told him, and he thanked me as
gravely as though I had been a full Colonel.

My month's leave at Simla, or whatever Hill Station my people went to,
was pure joy--every golden hour counted. It began in heat and discomfort,
by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one's
bedroom, and next morn--thirty more of them ahead!--the early cup of tea,
the Mother who brought it in, and the long talks of us all together
again. One had leisure to work, too, at whatever play-work was in one's
head, and that was usually full.

Simla was another new world. There the Hierarchy lived, and one saw and
heard the machinery of administration stripped bare. There were the Heads
of the Viceregal and Military staffs and their Aides-de-Camp; and playing
whist with Great Ones, who gave him special news, was the Correspondent
of our big sister paper the Pioneer, then a power in the land.

The dates, but not the pictures, of those holidays are blurred. At one
time our little world was full of the aftermaths of Theosophy as taught
by Madame Blavatsky to her devotees. My Father knew the lady and, with
her, would discuss wholly secular subjects; she being, he told me, one of
the most interesting and unscrupulous impostors he had ever met. This,
with his experience, was a high compliment. I was not so fortunate, but
came across queer, bewildered, old people, who lived in an atmosphere of
'manifestations' running about their houses. But the earliest days of
Theosophy devastated the Pioneer, whose Editor became a devout believer,
and used the paper for propaganda to an extent which got on the nerves
not only of the public but of a proof-reader, who at the last moment
salted an impassioned leader on the subject with, in brackets; 'What do
you bet this is a dam' lie?' The Editor was most untheosophically angry!

On one of my Simla leaves--I had been ill with dysentery again--I was sent
off for rest along the Himalaya-Tibet road in the company of an invalid
officer and his wife. My equipment was my servant--he from whose hands I
had fed in the Native State before-mentioned; Dorothea Darbishoff, alias
Dolly Bobs, a temperamental she-pony; and four baggage-coolies who were
recruited and changed at each stage. I knew the edge of the great Hills
both from Simla and Dalhousie, but had never marched any distance into
them. They were to me a revelation of 'all might, majesty, dominion, and
power, henceforth and for ever,' in colour, form, and substance
indescribable. A little of what I realised then came back to me in Kim.

On the day I turned back for Simla--my companions were going further--my
servant embroiled himself with a new quartette of coolies and managed to
cut the eye of one of them. I was a few score miles from the nearest
white man, and did not wish to be haled before any little Hill Rajah,
knowing as I did that the coolies would unitedly swear that I had
directed the outrage. I therefore paid blood-money, and strategically
withdrew--on foot for the most part because Dolly Bobs objected to every
sight and most of the smells of the landscape. I had to keep the coolies
who, like the politicians, would not stay put, in front of me on the
six-foot-wide track, and, as is ever the case when one is in
difficulties, it set in to rain. My urgent business was to make my first
three days' march in one--a matter of thirty odd miles. My coolies wanted
to shy off to their village and spend their ill-gotten silver. On me
developed the heartbreaking job of shepherding a retreat. I do not think
my mileage that day could have been much less than forty miles of sheer
up-hill and down-dale slogging. But it did me great good, and enabled me
to put away bottles of strong Army beer at the wet evening's end in the
resthouse. On our last day, a thunderstorm, which had been at work a few
thousand feet below us, rose to the level of the ridge we were crossing
and exploded in our midst. We were all flung on our faces, and when I was
able to see again I observed the half of a well-grown pine, as neatly
split lengthwise as a match by a penknife, in the act of hirpling down
the steep hillside by itself. The thunder drowned everything, so that it
seemed to be posturing in dumb show, and when it began to hop--horrible
vertical hops--the effect was of pure D.T. My coolies, however, who had
had the tale of my misdeeds from their predecessors, argued that if the
local Gods missed such a sitting shot as I had given them, I could not be
altogether unlucky.

It was on this trip that I saw a happy family of four bears out for a
walk together, all talking at the tops of their voices; and also--the sun
on his wings, a thousand feet below me--I stared long at a wheeling eagle,
himself thousands of feet above the map-like valley he was quartering.

On my return I handed my servant over to his father, who dealt faithfully
with him for having imperilled my Father's son. But what I did not tell
him was that my servant, a Punjabi Muslim, had in his first panic
embraced the feet of the injured hill-coolie, a heathen, and begged him
to 'show mercy.' A servant, precisely because he is a servant, has his
izzat--his honour--or, as the Chinese say, his 'face.' Save that, and he
is yours. One should never rate one's man before others; nor, if he knows
that you know the implication of the words that you are using on him,
should you ever use certain words and phrases. But to a young man raw
from England, or to an old one in whose service one has grown grey,
anything is permitted. In the first case; 'He is a youngster. He slangs
as his girl has taught him,' and the man keeps his countenance even
though his master's worst words are inflected woman-fashion. In the
second case, the aged servitor and deputy-conscience says; 'It is naught.
We were young men together. Ah! you should have heard him then!'

The reward for this very small consideration is service of a kind that
one accepted as a matter of course--till one was without it. My man would
go monthly to the local Bank and draw my pay in coined rupees, which he
would carry home raw in his waist-band, as the whole bazaar knew, and
decant into an old wardrobe, whence I would draw for my needs till there
remained no more.

Yet, it was necessary to his professional honour that he should present
me monthly a list of petty disbursements on my personal behalf--such as
oil for the buggy-lamps, bootlaces, thread for darning my socks, buttons
replaced and the like--all written out in bazaar-English by the
letter-writer at the corner of the road. The total rose, of course, with
my pay, and on each rupee of this bill my man took the commission of the
East, say one-sixteenth or perhaps one-tenth of each rupee.

For the rest, till I was in my twenty-fourth year, I no more dreamed of
dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door or--I was going to
say turning a key in a lock. But we had no locks. I gave myself indeed
the trouble of stepping into the garments that were held out to me after
my bath, and out of them as I was assisted to do. And--luxury of which I
dream still--I was shaved before I was awake!

One must set these things against the taste of fever in one's mouth, and
the buzz of quinine in one's ears; the temper frayed by heat to
breakingpoint but for sanity's sake held back from the break; the
descending darkness of intolerable dusks; and the less supportable dawns
of fierce, stale heat through half of the year.

When my people were at the Hills and I was alone, my Father's butler took
command. One peril of solitary life is going to seed in details of
living. As our numbers at the Club shrank between April and
mid-September, men grew careless, till at last our conscience-stricken
Secretary, himself an offender, would fetch us up with a jerk, and forbid
us dining in little more than singlet and riding-breeches.

This temptation was stronger in one's own house, though one knew if one
broke the ritual of dressing for the last meal one was parting with a
sheet-anchor. (Young gentlemen of larger views to-day consider this
'dress-for-dinner' business as an affectation ranking with 'the old
school tie.'--I would give some months' pay for the privilege of
enlightening them.) Here the butler would take charge. 'For the honour of
the house there must be a dinner. It is long since the Sahib has bidden
friends to eat.' I would protest like a fretful child. He would reply;
'Except for the names of the Sahibs to be invited all things are on my
head.' So one dug up four or five companions in discomfort; the pitiful,
scorched marigold blooms would appear on the table and, to a full
accompaniment of glass, silver, and napery, the ritual would be worked
through, and the butler's honour satisfied for a while.

At the Club, sudden causeless hates flared up between friends and died
down like straw fires; old grievances were recalled and brooded over
aloud; the complaint-book bristled with accusations and inventions. All
of which came to nothing when the first Rains fell, and after a three
days' siege of creeping and crawling things, whose bodies stopped our
billiards and almost put out the lamps they sizzled in, life picked up in
the blessed cool.

But it was a strange life. Once, suddenly, in the Club ante-room a man
asked a neighbour to pass him the newspaper. 'Get it yourself,' was the
hot-weather answer. The man rose but on his way to the table dropped and
writhed in the first grip of cholera. He was carried to his quarters, the
Doctor came, and for three days he went through all the stages of the
disease even to the characteristic baring of discoloured gums. Then he
returned to life and, on being condoled with, said; 'I remember getting
up to get the paper, but after that, give you my word, I don't remember a
thing till I heard Lawrie say that I was coming out of it.' I have heard
since that oblivion is sometimes vouchsafed.

Though I was spared the worst horrors, thanks to the pressure of work, a
capacity for being able to read, and the pleasure of writing what my head
was filled with, I felt each succeeding hot weather more and more, and
cowered in my soul as it returned.

This is fit place for a 'pivot' experience to be set side by side with
the affair of the Adjutant of Volunteers at the Club. It happened one
hotweather evening, in '86 or thereabouts, when I felt that I had come to
the edge of all endurance. As I entered my empty house in the dusk there
was no more in me except the horror of a great darkness, that I must have
been fighting for some days. I came through that darkness alive, but how
I do not know. Late at night I picked up a book by Walter Besant which
was called All in a Garden Fair. It dealt with a young man who desired to
write; who came to realise the possibilities of common things seen, and
who eventually succeeded in his desire. What its merits may be from
today's 'literary' standpoint I do not know. But I do know that that book
was my salvation in sore personal need, and with the reading and
re-reading it became to me a revelation, a hope and strength. I was
certainly, I argued, as well equipped as the hero and--and--after all,
there was no need for me to stay here for ever. I could go away and
measure myself against the doorsills of London as soon as I had money.
Therefore I would begin to save money, for I perceived there was
absolutely no reason outside myself why I should not do exactly what to
me seemed good. For proof of my revelation I did, sporadically but
sincerely, try to save money, and I built up in my head--always with the
book to fall back upon--a dream of the future that sustained me. To Walter
Besant singly and solely do I owe this--as I told him when we met, and he
laughed, rolled in his chair, and seemed pleased.

In the joyous reign of Kay Robinson, my second Chief, our paper changed
its shape and type. This took up for a week or so all hours of the
twenty-four and cost me a break-down due to lack of sleep. But we two
were proud of the results. One new feature was a daily 'turnover'--same as
the little pink Globe at Home--of one column and a quarter. Naturally, the
'office' had to supply most of them and once more I was forced to 'write
short.'

All the queer outside world would drop into our workshop sooner or
later--say a Captain just cashiered for horrible drunkenness, who reported
his fall with a wry, appealing face, and then--disappeared. Or a man old
enough to be my father, on the edge of tears because he had been
overpassed for Honours in the Gazette. Or three troopers of the Ninth
Lancers, one of whom was an old schoolmate of mine who became a General
with an expedition of his own in West Africa in the Great War. The other
two also were gentlemen-rankers who rose to high commands. One met men
going up and down the ladder in every shape of misery and success.

There was a night at the Club when some silly idiot found a half-dead
viper and brought it to dinner in a pickle-bottle. One man of the company
kept messing about with the furious little beast on the table-cloth till
he had to be warned to take his hands away. A few weeks after, some of us
realised it would have been better had he accomplished what had been in
his foreboding mind that night.

But the cold weather brought ample amends. The family were together again
and--except for my Mother's ukase against her men bringing bound volumes
of the Illustrated London News to meals (a survival of hot-weather
savagery)--all was bliss. So, in the cold weather of '85 we four made up a
Christmas annual called Quartette, which pleased us a great deal and
attracted a certain amount of attention. (Later, much later, it became a
'collector's piece' in the U.S. bookmarket, and to that extent smudged
the happy memories of its birth.) In '85 I began a series of tales in the
Civil and Military Gazette which were called Plain Tales from the Hills.
They came in when and as padding was needed. In '86 also I published a
collection of newspaper verses on Anglo-Indian life, called Departmental
Ditties, which, dealing with things known and suffered by many people,
were well received. I had been allowed, further, to send stuff that we,
editorially, had no use for, to far-off Calcutta papers, such as the
Indigo Planters' Gazette, and elsewhere. These things were making for me
the beginnings of a name even unto Bengal.

But mark how discreetly the cards were being dealt me. Up till '87 my
performances had been veiled in the decent obscurity of the far end of an
outlying province, among a specialised community who did not interest any
but themselves. I was like a young horse entered for small, up-country
events where I could get used to noise and crowds, fall about till I
found my feet, and learn to keep my head with the hoofs drumming behind
me. Better than all, the pace of my office-work was 'too good to
inquire,' and its nature--that I should realise all sorts and conditions
of men and make others realise them--gave me no time to 'realise' myself.

Here was my modest notion of my own position at the end of my five years'
Viceroyalty on the little Civil and Military Gazette. I was still fifty
per cent of the editorial staff, though for a while I rose to have a man
under me. But just are the Gods!--that varlet was 'literary' and must
needs write Elia-like 'turnovers' instead of sticking to the legitimate!
Any fool, I knew to my sorrow, could write. My job was to sub-edit him or
her into some sort of shape. Any other fool could review; (I myself on
urgent call have reviewed the later works of a writer called Browning,
and what my Father said about that was unpublishable). Reporting was a
minor 'feature,' although we did not use that word. I myself qua reporter
could turn in stuff one day and qua subeditor knock it remorselessly into
cocked hats the next. The difference, then, between me and the vulgar
herd who 'write for papers' was, as I saw it, the gulf that divides the
beneficed clergyman from ladies and gentlemen who contribute pumpkins and
dahlias to Harvest Festival decorations. To say that I magnified my
office is to understate. But this may have saved me from magnifying
myself beyond decency.

In '87 orders came for me to serve on the Pioneer, our big sister-paper
at Allahabad, hundreds of miles to the southward, where I should be one
of four at least and a new boy at a big school.

But the North-West Provinces, as they were then, being largely Hindu,
were strange 'air and water' to me. My life had lain among Muslims, and a
man leans one way or other according to his first service. The large,
well-appointed Club, where Poker had just driven out Whist and men
gambled seriously, was full of large-bore officials, and of a
respectability all new. The Fort where troops were quartered had its
points; but one bastion jutted out into a most holy river. Therefore,
partially burned corpses made such a habit of stranding just below the
Subalterns' quarters that a special expert was entertained to pole them
off and onward. In Fort Lahore we dealt in nothing worse than ghosts.

Moreover, the Pioneer lived under the eye of its chief proprietor, who
spent several months of each year in his bungalow over the way. It is
true that I owed him my chance in life, but when one has been second in
command of even a third-class cruiser, one does not care to have one's
Admiral permanently moored at a cable's length. His love for his paper,
which his single genius and ability had largely created, led him
sometimes to 'give the boys a hand.' On those hectic days (for he added
and subtracted to the last minute) we were relieved when the issue caught
the down-country mail.

But he was patient with me, as were the others, and through him again I
got a wider field for 'outside stuff.' There was to be a weekly edition
of the Pioneer for Home consumption. Would I edit it, additional to
ordinary work? Would I not? There would be fiction--syndicated
serial-matter bought by the running foot from agencies at Home. That
would fill one whole big page. The 'sight of means to do ill deeds' had
the usual effect. Why buy Bret Harte, I asked, when I was prepared to
supply home-grown fiction on the hoof? And I did.

My editing of the Weekly may have been a shade casual--it was but a
re-hash of news and views after all. My head was full of, to me,
infinitely more important material. Henceforth no mere twelve-hundred
Plain Tales jammed into rigid frames, but three- or five-thousand-word
cartoons once a week. So did young Lippo Lippi, whose child I was, look
on the blank walls of his monastery when he was bidden decorate them
'Twas 'ask and have; Choose, for more's ready,' with a vengeance.

I fancy my change of surroundings and outlook precipitated the rush. At
the beginning of it I had an experience which, in my innocence, I mistook
for the genuine motions of my Daemon. I must have been loaded more
heavily than I realised with 'Gyp,' for there came to me in scenes as
stereoscopically clear as those in the crystal an Anglo-Indian Autour du
Mariage. My pen took charge and I, greatly admiring, watched it write for
me far into the nights. The result I christened The Story of the Gadsbys,
and when it first appeared in England I was complimented on my 'knowledge
of the world.' After my indecent immaturity came to light, I heard less
of these gifts. Yet, as the Father said loyally; 'It wasn't all so dam'
bad, Ruddy.'

At any rate it went into the Weekly, together with soldier tales, Indian
tales, and tales of the opposite sex. There was one of this last which,
because of a doubt, I handed up to the Mother, who abolished it and wrote
me; Never you do that again. But I did and managed to pull off, not
unhandily, a tale called 'A Wayside Comedy,' where I worked hard for a
certain 'economy of implication,' and in one phrase of less than a dozen
words believed I had succeeded. More than forty years later a Frenchman,
browsing about some of my old work, quoted this phrase as the clou of the
tale and the key to its method. It was a belated 'workshop compliment'
that I appreciated. Thus, then, I made my own experiments in the weights,
colours, perfumes, and attributes of words in relation to other words,
either as read aloud so that they may hold the ear, or, scattered over
the page, draw the eye. There is no line of my verse or prose which has
not been mouthed till the tongue has made all smooth, and memory, after
many recitals, has mechanically skipped the grosser superfluities.

These things occupied and contented me, but--outside of them--I felt that
I did not quite fit the Pioneer's scheme of things and that my superiors
were of the same opinion. My work on the Weekly was not legitimate
journalism. My flippancy in handling what I was trusted with was not
well-seen by the Government or the departmental officialism, on which the
Pioneer rightly depended for advance and private news, gathered in at
Simla or Calcutta by our most important Chief Correspondent. I fancy my
owners thought me safer on the road than in my chair; for they sent me
out to look at Native State mines, mills, factories and the like. Here I
think they were entirely justified. My proprietor at Allahabad had his
own game to play (it brought him his well-deserved knighthood in due
course) and, to some extent, my vagaries might have embarrassed him. One,
I know, did. The Pioneer editorially, but cautiously as a terrier drawing
up to a porcupine, had hinted that some of Lord Roberts' military
appointments at that time verged on nepotism. It was a regretful and
well-balanced allocution. My rhymed comment (and why my Chief passed it I
know not!) said just the same thing, but not quite so augustly. All I
remember of it are the last two flagrant lines:

And if the Pioneer is wrath
Oh Lord, what must you be!

I don't think Lord Roberts was pleased with it, but I know he was not
half so annoyed as my chief proprietor.

On my side I was ripe for change and, thanks always to All in a Garden
Fair, had a notion now of where I was heading. My absorption in the
Pioneer Weekly stories, which I wanted to finish, had put my plans to the
back of my head, but when I came out of that furious spell of work
towards the end of '88 I rearranged myself. I wanted money for the
future. I counted my assets. They came to one book of verse; one ditto
prose; and--thanks to the Pioneer's permission--a set of six small
paper-backed railway-bookstall volumes embodying most of my tales in the
Weekly--copyright of which the Pioneer might well have claimed. The man
who then controlled the Indian railway bookstalls came of an imaginative
race, used to taking chances. I sold him the six paper-backed books for
£200 and a small royalty. Plain Tales from the Hills I sold for £50, and
I forget how much the same publisher gave me for Departmental Ditties.
(This was the first and last time I ever dealt direct with publishers.)

Fortified with this wealth, and six months' pay in lieu of notice, I left
India for England by way of the Far East and the United States, after six
and a half years of hard work and a reasonable amount of sickness. My
God-speed came from the managing director, a gentleman of sound
commercial instincts, who had never concealed his belief that I was
grossly overpaid, and who, when he paid me my last wages, said; 'Take it
from me, you'll never be worth more than four hundred rupees a month to
anyone.' Common pride bids me tell that at that time I was drawing seven
hundred a month.

Accounts were squared between us curiously soon. When my notoriety fell
upon me, there was a demand for my old proofs, signed and unsigned stuff
not included in my books, and a general turning-out of refuse-bins for
private publication and sale. This upset my hopes of editing my books
decently and responsibly, and wrought general confusion. But I was told
later that the Pioneer had made as much out of its share in this
remnant-traffic as it had paid me in wages since I first landed. (Which
shows how one cannot get ahead of gentlemen of sound commercial
instincts.)

Yet a man must needs love anything that he has worked and suffered under.
When, at long last, the Pioneer--India's greatest and most important paper
which used to pay twenty-seven per cent to its shareholders--fell on evil
days and, after being bedevilled and bewitched, was sold to a syndicate,
and I received a notification beginning; 'We think you may be interested
to know that,' etc., I felt curiously alone and unsponsored. But my first
mistress and most true love, the little Civil and Military Gazette,
weathered the storm. Even if I wrote them, these lines are true:--

Try as he will, no man breaks wholly loose
    From his first love, no matter who she be.
Oh, was there ever sailor free to choose,
    That didn't settle somewhere near the sea?

Parsons in pulpits, tax-payers in pews,
    Kings on your thrones, you know as well as me,
We've only one virginity to lose,
    And where we lost it there our hearts will be!

And, besides, there is, or was, a tablet in my old Lahore office
asserting that here I 'worked.' And Allah knows that is true also!




Chapter IV


The Interregnum

The youth who daily farther from the East
Must travel . . .
                              Wordsworth.

And, in the autumn of '89, I stepped into a sort of waking dream when I
took, as a matter of course, the fantastic cards that Fate was pleased to
deal me.

The ancient landmarks of my boyhood still stood. There were the beloved
Aunt and Uncle, the little house of the Three Old Ladies, and in one
corner of it the quiet figure by the fireplace composedly writing her
next novel on her knee. It was at the quietest of tea-parties, in this
circle, that I first met Mary Kingsley, the bravest woman of all my
knowledge. We talked a good deal over the cups, and more while walking
home afterwards--she of West African cannibals and the like. At last, the
world forgetting, I said 'Come up to my rooms and we'll talk it out
there.' She agreed, as a man would, then suddenly remembering said; 'Oh,
I forgot I was a woman. 'Fraid I mustn't.' So I realised that my world
was all to explore again.

A few--a very few--people in it had died, but no one expected to do so for
another twenty years. White women stood and waited on one behind one's
chair. It was all whirlingly outside my comprehension.

But my small stock-in-trade of books had become known in certain
quarters; and there was an evident demand for my stuff. I do not recall
that I stirred a hand to help myself. Things happened to me. I went, by
invitation, to Mowbray Morris the editor of Macmillan's Magazine, who
asked me how old I was and, when I told him I hoped to be twenty-four at
the end of the year, said; 'Good God!' He took from me an Indian tale and
some verses, which latter he wisely edited a little. They were both
published in the same number of the Magazine--one signed by my name and
the other 'Yussuf' All of this confirmed the feeling (which has come back
at intervals through my life), 'Lord ha' mercy on me, this is none of I.'

Then more tales were asked for, and the editor of the St. James's Gazette
wanted stray articles, signed and unsigned. My 'turnover' training on the
Civil and Military made this easy for me, and somehow I felt easier with
a daily paper under my right elbow.

About this time was an interview in a weekly paper, where I felt myself
rather on the wrong side of the counter and that I ought to be
questioning my questioner. Shortly after, that same weekly made me a
proposition which I could not see my way to accept, and then announced
that I was 'feeling my oats,' of which, it was careful to point out, it
had given me my first sieveful. Since, at that time, I was overwhelmed,
not to say scared, by the amazing luck that had come to me, the
pronouncement gave me confidence. If that was how I struck the external
world--good! For naturally I considered the whole universe was acutely
interested in me only--just as a man who strays into a skirmish is
persuaded he is the pivot of the action.

Meantime, I had found me quarters in Villiers Street, Strand, which
forty-six years ago was primitive and passionate in its habits and
population. My rooms were small, not over-clean or well-kept, but from my
desk I could look out of my window through the fanlight of Gatti's
Music-Hall entrance, across the street, almost on to its stage. The
Charing Cross trains rumbled through my dreams on one side, the boom of
the Strand on the other, while, before my windows, Father Thames under
the Shot Tower walked up and down with his traffic.

At the outset I had so muddled and mismanaged my affairs that, for a
while, I found myself with some money owing me for work done, but no
funds in hand. People who ask for money, however justifiably, have it
remembered against them. The beloved Aunt, or any one of the Three Old
Ladies, would have given to me without question; but that seemed too like
confessing failure at the outset. My rent was paid; I had my dress-suit;
I had nothing to pawn save a collection of unmarked shirts picked up in
all the ports; so I made shift to manage on what small cash I had in
pocket.

My rooms were above an establishment of Harris the Sausage King, who, for
tuppence, gave as much sausage and mash as would carry one from breakfast
to dinner when one dined with nice people who did not eat sausage for a
living. Another tuppence found me a filling supper. The excellent tobacco
of those days was, unless you sank to threepenny 'Shag' or soared to
sixpenny 'Turkish,' tuppence the half-ounce; and fourpence, which
included a pewter of beer or porter, was the price of admission to
Gatti's.

It was here, in the company of an elderly but upright barmaid from a pub
near by, that I listened to the observed and compelling songs of the Lion
and Mammoth Comiques, and the shriller strains--but equally 'observed'--of
the Bessies and Bellas, whom I could hear arguing beneath my window with
their cab-drivers, as they sped from Hall to Hall. One lady sometimes
delighted us with viva-voce versions of--'what 'as just 'appened to me
outside 'ere, if you'll believe it.' Then she would plunge into brilliant
improvisations. Oh, we believed! Many of us had, perhaps, taken part in
the tail of that argument at the doors, ere she stormed in.

Those monologues I could never hope to rival, but the smoke, the roar,
and the good-fellowship of relaxed humanity at Gatti's 'set' the scheme
for a certain sort of song. The Private Soldier in India I thought I knew
fairly well. His English brother (in the Guards mostly) sat and sang at
my elbow any night I chose; and, for Greek chorus, I had the comments of
my barmaid--deeply and dispassionately versed in all knowledge of evil as
she had watched it across the zinc she was always swabbing off. (Hence,
some years later, verses called 'Mary, pity Women,' based on what she
told me about 'a friend o' mine 'oo was mistook in 'er man.') The outcome
was the first of some verses called Barrack-Room Ballads which I showed
to Henley of the Scots, later National Observer, who wanted more; and I
became for a while one of the happy company who used to gather in a
little restaurant off Leicester Square and regulate all literature till
all hours of the morning.

I had the greatest admiration for Henley's verse and prose and,
if such things be merchandise in the next world, will cheerfully
sell a large proportion of what I have written for a single
meditation--illumination--inspiration or what you please--that he
wrote on the Arabian Nights in a tiny book of Essays and Reviews.

As regards his free verse I--plus some Chianti--once put forward the old
notion that free verse was like fishing with barbless hooks. Henley
replied volcanically. It was, said he, 'the cadences that did it.' That
was true; but he alone, to my mind, could handle them aright, being a
Master Craftsman who had paid for his apprenticeship.

Henley's demerits were, of course, explained to the world by loving
friends after his death. I had the fortune to know him only as kind,
generous, and a jewel of an editor, with the gift of fetching the very
best out of his cattle, with words that would astonish oxen. He had,
further, an organic loathing of Mr. Gladstone and all Liberalism. A
Government Commission of Enquiry was sitting in those days on some
unusually blatant traffic in murder among the Irish Land Leaguers; and
had whitewashed the whole crowd. Where upon, I wrote some impolite verses
called 'Cleared!' which at first The Times seemed ready to take but on
second thoughts declined. I was recommended to carry them to a monthly
review of sorts edited by a Mr. Frank Harris, whom I discovered to be the
one human being that I could on no terms get on with. He, too, shied at
the verses, which I referred to Henley, who, having no sense of political
decency, published them in his Observer, and--after a cautious
interval--The Times quoted them in full. This was rather like some of my
experiences in India, and gave me yet more confidence.

To my great pride I was elected a Member of the Savile--'the little
Savile' then in Piccadilly--and, on my introduction, dined with no less
than Hardy and Walter Besant. My debts to the latter grew at once, and
you may remember that I owed him much indeed. He had his own views on
publishers, and was founding, or had just founded, the Authors' Society.
He advised me to entrust my business to an agent and sent me to his
own--A. P. Watt, whose son was about my own age. The father took hold of
my affairs at once and most sagely; and on his death his son succeeded.
In the course of forty odd years I do not recall any difference between
us that three minutes' talk could not clear up. This, also, I owed to
Besant.

Nor did his goodness halt there. He would sit behind his big, frosted
beard and twinkling spectacles, and deal me out wisdom concerning this
new incomprehensible world. One heard very good talk at the Savile. Much
of it was the careless give-and-take of the atelier when the models are
off their stands, and one throws bread-pellets at one's betters, and
makes hay of all schools save one's own. But Besant saw deeper. He
advised me to 'keep out of the dog-fight.' He said that if I were 'in
with one lot' I would have to be out with another; and that, at last,
'things would get like a girls' school where they stick out their tongues
at each other when they pass.' That was true too. One heard men vastly
one's seniors wasting energy and good oaths in recounting 'intrigues'
against them, and of men who had 'their knife into' their work, or whom
they themselves wished to 'knife.' (This reminded me somehow of the
elderly officials who opened their hearts in my old office when they were
disappointed over anticipated Honours.) It seemed best to stand clear of
it all. For that reason, I have never directly or indirectly criticised
any fellow-craftsman's output, or encouraged any man or woman to do so;
nor have I approached any persons that they might be led to comment on my
output. My acquaintance with my contemporaries has from first to last
been very limited.

At 'the little Savile' I remember much kindness and toleration. There was
Gosse, of course, sensitive as a cat to all atmospheres, but utterly
fearless when it came to questions of good workmanship; Hardy's grave and
bitter humour; Andrew Lang, as detached to all appearances as a cloud,
but--one learned to know--never kinder in your behalf than when he seemed
least concerned with you; Eustace Balfour, a large, lovable man, and one
of the best of talkers, who died too soon; Herbert Stephen, very wise and
very funny when he chose; Rider Haggard, to whom I took at once, he being
of the stamp adored by children and trusted by men at sight; and he could
tell tales, mainly against himself, that broke up the tables; Saintsbury,
a solid rock of learning and geniality whom I revered all my days;
profoundly a scholar and versed in the art of good living. There was a
breakfast with him and Walter Pollock of the Saturday Review in the
Albany, when he produced some specially devilish Oriental delicacy which
we cooked by the light of our united ignorances. It was splendid! Why
those two men took the trouble to notice me, I never knew; but I learned
to rely on Saintsbury's judgment in the weightier matters of the Laws of
Literature. At his latter end he gave me inestimable help in a little
piece of work called 'Proofs of Holy Writ,' which without his books could
never have been handled. I found him at Bath, compiling with erudition
equal to his earnestness the Cellar-book of the Queen's Doll's House. He
produced a bottle of real Tokay, which I tasted, and lost my number badly
by saying that it reminded me of some medicinal wine. It is true he
merely called me a blasphemer of the worst, but what he thought I do not
care to think!

There were scores of other good men at the Savile, but the tones and the
faces of those I have named come back clearest.

My home life--it was a far cry from Piccadilly to Villiers Street--was
otherwise, through the months of amazement which followed my return to
England. That period was all, as I have said, a dream, in which it seemed
that I could push down walls, walk through ramparts and stride across
rivers. Yet I was so ignorant, I never guessed when the great fogs fell
that trains could take me to light and sunshine a few miles outside
London. Once I faced the reflection of my own face in the jet-black
mirror of the window-panes for five days. When the fog thinned, I looked
out and saw a man standing opposite the pub where the barmaid lived. Of a
sudden his breast turned dull red like a robin's, and he crumpled, having
cut his throat. In a few minutes--seconds it seemed--a hand-ambulance
arrived and took up the body. A pot-boy with a bucket of steaming water
sluiced the blood off into the gutter, and what little crowd had
collected went its way.

One got to know that ambulance (it lived somewhere at the back of St.
Clement Danes) as well as the Police of the E. Division, and even as far
as Piccadilly Circus, where, any time after 10.30 P.M., the forces might
be found at issue with 'real ladies.' And through all this shifting,
shouting brotheldom the pious British householder and his family bored
their way back from the theatres, eyes-front and fixed, as though not
seeing.

Among my guests in chambers was a Lion Comique from Gatti's--an artist
with sound views on art. According to him, 'it was all right to keep on
knockin' 'em' ('puttin' it across' came later) 'but, outside o' that, a
man wants something to lay hold of. I'd ha' got it, I think, but for this
dam' whisky. But, take it from me, life's all a bloomin' kick-up.'
Certainly my life was; but, to some extent, my Indian training served to
ballast me.

I was plentifully assured, viva voce and in the Press-cuttings--which is a
drug that I do not recommend to the young--that 'nothing since Dickens'
compared with my 'meteoric rise to fame,' etc. (But I was more or less
inoculated, if not immune, to the coarser sorts of print.) And there was
my portrait to be painted for the Royal Academy as a notoriety. (But I
had a Muhammedan's objection to having my face taken, as likely to draw
the Evil Eye. So I was not too puffed up.) And there were letters and
letters of all sorts of tendencies. (But if I answered them all I might
as well be back at my old table.) And there were proposals from 'certain
people of importance,' insistent and unscrupulous as horse-copers,
telling me how 'the ball was at my feet' and that I had only to kick
it--by repeating the notes I had already struck and trailing characters I
had already 'created' through impossible scenes--to achieve all sorts of
desirable things. But I had seen men as well as horses foundered in my
lost world behind me. One thing only stood fast through this welter. I
was making money--much more than four hundred rupees a month--and when my
Bank-book told me I had one thousand whole pounds saved, the Strand was
hardly wide enough for my triumph. I had intended a book 'to take
advantage of the market.' This I had just sense enough to countermand.
What I most needed was that my people should come over and see what had
overtaken their son. This they did on a flying visit, and then my
'kickup' had some worth.

As always, they seemed to suggest nothing and interfere nowhere. But they
were there--my Father with his sage Yorkshire outlook and wisdom; my
Mother, all Celt and three-parts fire--both so entirely comprehending that
except in trivial matters we had hardly need of words.

I think I can with truth say that those two made for me the only public
for whom then I had any regard whatever till their deaths, in my
forty-fifth year. Their arrival simplified things, and 'set' in my head a
notion that had been rising at the back of it. It seemed easy enough to
'knock 'em'--but to what end beyond the heat of the exercise? (That both
my grandfathers had been Wesleyan Ministers did not strike me till I was,
familiarly, reminded of it.) I had been at work on the rough of a set of
verses called later 'The English Flag' and had boggled at a line which
had to be a key-line but persisted in going 'soft.' As was the custom
between us, I asked into the air 'What am I trying to get at?' Instantly
the Mother, with her quick flutter of the hands 'You're trying to say;
"What do they know of England who only England know,"' The Father
confirmed. The rest of the rhetoric came away easily; for it was only
pictures seen, as it were, from the deck of a long fourteen-footer, a
craft that will almost sail herself.

In the talks that followed, I exposed my notion of trying to tell to the
English something of the world outside England--not directly but by
implication.

They understood. Long before the end the Mother, summarising, said; 'I
see. "Unto them did he discover His swan's nest among the reeds." Thank
you for telling us, dear.' That settled that; and when Lord Tennyson
(whom alas! I never had the good fortune to meet) expressed his approval
of the verses when they appeared, I took it for a lucky sign. Most men
properly broke to a trade pick up some sort of workshop facility which
gives them an advantage over their untrained fellows. My office-work had
taught me to think out a notion in detail, pack it away in my head, and
work on it by snatches in any surroundings. The lurch and surge of the
old horse-drawn buses made a luxurious cradle for such ruminations. Bit
by bit, my original notion grew into a vast, vague conspectus--Army and
Navy Stores List if you like--of the whole sweep and meaning of things and
effort and origins throughout the Empire. I visualised it, as I do most
ideas, in the shape of a semi-circle of buildings and temples projecting
into a sea-of dreams. At any rate, after I had got it straight in my
head, I felt there need be no more 'knockin' 'em' in the abstract.

Likewise, in my wanderings beyond Villiers Street, I had met several men
and an occasional woman, whom I by no means loved. They were overly
soft-spoken or blatant, and dealt in pernicious varieties of safe
sedition. For the most part they seemed to be purveyors of luxuries to
the 'Aristocracy,' whose destruction by painful means they loudly
professed to desire. They derided my poor little Gods of the East, and
asserted that the British in India spent violent lives 'oppressing' the
Native. (This in a land where white girls of sixteen, at twelve or
fourteen pounds per annum, hauled thirty and forty pounds weight of
bath-water at a time up four flights of stairs!)

The more subtle among them had plans, which they told me, for 'snatching
away England's arms when she isn't looking--just like a naughty child--so
that when she wants to fight she'll find she can't.' (We have come far on
that road since.) Meantime, their aim was peaceful, intellectual
penetration and the formation of what to-day would be called 'cells' in
unventilated corners. Collaborating with these gentry was a mixed crowd
of wide-minded, wide-mouthed Liberals, who darkened counsel with pious
but disintegrating catch-words, and took care to live very well indeed.
Somewhere, playing up to them, were various journals, not at all badly
written, with a most enviable genius for perverting or mistaking anything
that did not suit their bilious doctrine. The general situation, as I saw
it, promised an alluring 'dog-fight,' in which I had no need to take
aggressive part because, as soon as the first bloom had faded off my
work, my normal output seemed to have the gift of arriding per se the
very people I most disliked. And I had the additional luck not to be
taken seriously for some time. People talked, quite reasonably, of
rockets and sticks; and that genius, J.K.S., brother to Herbert Stephen,
dealt with Haggard and me in some stanzas which I would have given much
to have written myself. They breathed a prayer for better days when:--

The world shall cease to wonder
    At the genius of an Ass,
And a boy's eccentric blunder
    Shall not bring success to pass:

When there stands a muzzled stripling,
    Mute, beside a muzzled bore
When the Rudyards cease from Kipling
    And the Haggards Ride no more.

It ran joyously through all the papers. It still hangs faintly in the air
and, as I used to warn Haggard, may continue as an aroma when all but our
two queer names are forgotten.

Several perfectly good reviewers also helped me by demonstrating how I
had arrived at my effects by a series of happy accidents. One kind man
even went to some trouble, including a good dinner, to discover
personally whether I had 'ever read much.' I could not do less than
confirm his worst suspicions, for I had been 'taken on' in that way at
the Punjab Club, till my examiner found out that I was pulling his leg,
and chased me all round the compound. (The greatest reverence is due to
the young. They have, when irritated, little of their own.)

But in all this jam of work done or devising, demands, distractions,
excitements, and promiscuous confusions, my health cracked again. I had
broken down twice in India from straight overwork, plus fever and
dysentery, but this time the staleness and depression came after a bout
of real influenza, when all my Indian microbes joined hands and sang for
a month in the darkness of Villiers Street.

So I took ship to Italy, and there chanced to meet Lord Dufferin, our
Ambassador, who had been Viceroy of India and had known my people. Also,
I had written some verses called 'The Song of the Women' about Lady
Dufferin's maternity work for women in India, which both she and he
liked. He was kindness itself, and made me his guest at his Villa near
Naples where, one evening between lights, he talked--at first to me
directly, then sliding into a reverie--of his work in India, Canada, and
the world at large. I had seen administrative machinery from beneath, all
stripped and overheated. This was the first time I had listened to one
who had handled it from above. And unlike the generality of Viceroys,
Lord Dufferin knew. Of all his revelations and reminiscences, the
sentence that stays with me is 'And so, you see, there can be no room'
(or was it 'allowance'?) 'for good intentions in one's work.'

Italy, however, was not enough. My need was to get clean away and re-sort
myself. Cruises were then unknown; but my dependence was Cook. For the
great J.M. himself--the man with the iron mouth and domed brow--had been
one of my Father's guests at Lahore when he was trying to induce the
Indian Government to let him take over the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as
a business proposition. Had he succeeded some lives, and perhaps a war or
two, might have been saved. His home offices took friendly interest in my
plans and steamer connections.

I sailed first to Cape Town in a gigantic three-thousand-ton liner called
The Moor, not knowing I was in the hands of Fate. Aboard her, I met a
Navy Captain going to a new Command at Simon's Town. At Madeira he
desired to lay in wine for his two-year commission. I assisted him
through a variegated day and fluctuating evening, which laid the
foundations of life-long friendship.

Cape Town in '91 was a sleepy, unkempt little place, where the stoeps of
some of the older Dutch houses still jutted over the pavement. Occasional
cows strolled up the main streets, which were full of coloured people of
the sort that my ayah had pointed out to me were curly-haired (hubshees)
who slept in such posture as made it easy for the devils to enter their
bodies. But there were also many Malays who were Muslims of a sort and
had their own Mosques, and whose flamboyantly-attired women sold flowers
on the kerb, and took in washing. The dry, spiced smell of the land and
the smack of the clean sunshine were health-restoring. My Navy Captain
introduced me to the Naval society of Simon's Town, where the
south-easter blows five days a week, and the Admiral of the Cape Station
lived in splendour, with at least a brace of live turtles harnessed to
the end of a little wooden jetty, swimming about till due to be taken up
for turtle soup. The Navy Club there and the tales of the junior officers
delighted me beyond words. There I witnessed one of the most
comprehensive 'rags' I had ever seen. It rose out of a polite suggestion
to a newly-appointed Lieutenant-Commander that the fore-topmast of his
tiny gunboat 'wanted staying forward.' It went on till all the furniture
was completely rearranged all over the room. (How was I to guess that in
a few years I should know Simon's Town like the inside of my own pocket,
and should give much of my life and love to the glorious land around it?)

We parted, my Captain and I, after a farewell picnic, among white,
blowing sand where natives were blasting and where, of a sudden, a
wrathful baboon came down the rock-face and halted waistdeep in a bed of
arum-lilies. 'We'll meet again,' said my Captain, 'and if ever you want a
cruise, let me know.'

A day or so before my departure for Australia, I lunched at an Adderley
Street restaurant next to three men. One of them, I was told, was Cecil
Rhodes, who had made the staple of our passengers' talk on The Moor
coming out. It never occurred to me to speak to him; and I have often
wondered why. . . .

Her name was The Doric. She was almost empty, and she spent twenty-four
consecutive days and nights trying, all but successfully, to fill her
boats at one roll and empty them down the saloon skylight the next. Sea
and sky were equally grey and naked on that weary run to Melbourne. Then
I found myself in a new land with new smells and among people who
insisted a little too much that they also were new. But there are no such
things as new people in this very old world.

The leading paper offered me the most distinguished honour of describing
the Melbourne Cup, but I had reported races before and knew it was not in
my line. I was more interested in the middle-aged men who had spent their
lives making or managing the land. They were direct of speech among each
other, and talked a political slang new to me. One learned, as one always
does, more from what they said to each other or took for granted in their
talk, than one could have got at from a hundred questions. And on a warm
night I attended a Labour Congress, where Labour debated whether some
much-needed lifeboats should be allowed to be ordered from England, or
whether the order should be postponed till life-boats could be built in
Australia under Labour direction at Labour prices.

Hereafter my memories of Australian travel are mixed up with trains
transferring me, at unholy hours, from one too-exclusive State gauge to
another; of enormous skies and primitive refreshment rooms, where I drank
hot tea and ate mutton, while now and then a hot wind, like the loo of
the Punjab, boomed out of the emptiness. A hard land, it seemed to me,
and made harder for themselves by the action of its inhabitants, who--it
may have been the climate--always seemed a bit on edge.

I went also to Sydney, which was populated by leisured multitudes all in
their shirt-sleeves and all picnicking all the day. They volunteered that
they were new and young, but would do wonderful things some day, which
promise they more than kept. Then to Hobart, in Tasmania, to pay my
respects to Sir George Grey, who had been Governor at Cape Town in the
days of the Mutiny. He was very old, very wise and foreseeing, with the
gentleness that accompanies a certain sort of strength.

Then came New Zealand by steamer (one was always taking small and rickety
coast-wise craft across those big seas), and at Wellington I was met,
precisely where warned to expect him, by 'Pelorus Jack,' the big,
white-marked dolphin, who held it his duty to escort shipping up the
harbour. He enjoyed a special protection of the Legislature proclaiming
him sacred, but, years later, some animal shot and wounded him and he was
no more seen. Wellington opened another world of kindly people, more
homogeneous, it struck me, than the Australian, large, long-eyelashed,
and extraordinarily good-looking. Maybe I was prejudiced, because no less
than ten beautiful maidens took me for a row in a big canoe by moonlight
on the still waters of Wellington Harbour, and everyone generally put
aside everything for my behoof, instruction, amusement, and comfort. So,
indeed, it has always been. For which reason I deserve no credit when my
work happens to be accurate in detail. A friend long ago taxed me with
having enjoyed the 'income of a Prince and the treatment of an
Ambassador,' and with not appreciating it. He even called me, among other
things, 'an ungrateful hound.' But what, I ask you, could I have done
except go on with my work and try to add to the pleasure of those that
had found it pleasant? One cannot repay the unrepayable by grins and
handshakes.

From Wellington I went north towards Auckland in a buggy with a small
grey mare, and a most taciturn driver. It was bush country after rain. We
crossed a rising river twenty-three times in one day, and came out on
great plains where wild horses stared at us, and caught their feet in
long blown manes as they stamped and snorted. At one of our halts I was
given for dinner a roast bird with a skin like pork crackling, but it had
no wings nor trace of any. It was a kiwi--an apteryx. I ought to have
saved its skeleton, for few men have eaten apteryx. Hereabouts my
driver--I had seen the like happen in lonely places before--exploded, as
sometimes solitaries will. We passed a horse's skull beside the track, at
which he began to swear horribly but without passion. He had, he said,
driven and ridden past that skull for a very long time. To him it meant
the lock on the chain of his bondage to circumstance, and why the hell
did I come along talking about all those foreign, far places I had seen?
Yet he made me go on telling him.

I had had some notion of sailing from Auckland to visit Robert Louis
Stevenson at Samoa, for he had done me the honour to write me about some
of my tales; and moreover I was Eminent Past Master R.L.S. Even to-day I
would back myself to take seventy-five per cent marks in written or
viva-voce examination on The Wrong Box which, as the Initiated know, is
the Test Volume of that Degree. I read it first in a small hotel in
Boston in '89, when the negro waiter nearly turned me out of the
dining-room for spluttering over my meal.

But Auckland, soft and lovely in the sunshine, seemed the end of
organised travel; for the captain of a fruit-boat, which might or might
not go to Samoa at some time or other, was so devotedly drunk that I
decided to turn south, and work back to India. All I carried away from
the magic town of Auckland was the face and voice of a woman who sold me
beer at a little hotel there. They stayed at the back of my head till ten
years later when, in a local train of the Cape Town suburbs, I heard a
petty officer from Simon's Town telling a companion about a woman in New
Zealand who 'never scrupled to help a lame duck or put her foot on a
scorpion.' Then--precisely as the removal of the key-log in a timber jam
starts the whole pile--those words gave me the key to the face and voice
at Auckland, and a tale called 'Mrs. Bathurst' slid into my mind,
smoothly and orderly as floating timber on a bank-high river.

The South Island, mainly populated by Scots, their sheep, and the Devil's
own high winds, I tackled in another small steamer, among colder and
increasing seas. We cleared it at the Last Lamp-post in the
World--Invercargill--on a boisterous dark evening, when General Booth of
the Salvation Army came on board. I saw him walking backward in the dusk
over the uneven wharf, his cloak blown upwards, tulip-fashion, over his
grey head, while he beat a tambourine in the face of the singing,
weeping, praying crowd who had come to see him off.

We stood out, and at once took the South Pacific. For the better part of
a week we were swept from end to end, our poop was split, and a f