No More Learning

Every one else accepted her as an amusing,
honest little body. ] Wherefore, to believe that her husband had been
shedding watches under that "Thing's" window at ungodly hours, coupled
with the fact of his late arrival on the previous night, was. . . . .

At this point she rose up and sought her husband. He denied everything
except the ownership of the watch. She besought him, for his Soul's
sake, to speak the truth. He denied afresh, with two bad words. Then a
stony silence held the Colonel's Wife, while a man could draw his breath
five times.

The speech that followed is no affair of mine or yours. It was made up
of wifely and womanly jealousy; knowledge of old age and sunken cheeks;
deep mistrust born of the text that says even little babies' hearts
are as bad as they make them; rancorous hatred of Mrs. Larkyn, and the
tenets of the creed of the Colonel's Wife's upbringing.

Over and above all, was the damning lip-strapped Waterbury, ticking away
in the palm of her shaking, withered hand. At that hour, I think, the
Colonel's Wife realized a little of the restless suspicions she had
injected into old Laplace's mind, a little of poor Miss Haughtrey's
misery, and some of the canker that ate into Buxton's heart as he
watched his wife dying before his eyes. The Colonel stammered and tried
to explain. Then he remembered that his watch had disappeared; and the
mystery grew greater. The Colonel's Wife talked and prayed by turns
till she was tired, and went away to devise means for "chastening the
stubborn heart of her husband. " Which translated, means, in our slang,
"tail-twisting. "

You see, being deeply impressed with the doctrine of Original Sin, she
could not believe in the face of appearances. She knew too much, and
jumped to the wildest conclusions.

But it was good for her. It spoilt her life, as she had spoilt the life
of the Laplaces. She had lost her faith in the Colonel, and--here the
creed suspicion came in--he might, she argued, have erred many times,
before a merciful Providence, at the hands of so unworthy an instrument
as Mrs. Larkyn, had established his guilt.

He was a bad, wicked, gray-haired profligate. This may sound too sudden
a revulsion for a long-wedded wife; but it is a venerable fact that, if
a man or woman makes a practice of, and takes a delight in, believing
and spreading evil of people indifferent to him or her, he or she will
end in believing evil of folk very near and dear. You may think, also,
that the mere incident of the watch was too small and trivial to raise
this misunderstanding. It is another aged fact that, in life as well as
racing, all the worst accidents happen at little ditches and cut-down
fences. In the same way, you sometimes see a woman who would have made a
Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces
over all the mean worry of housekeeping. But that is another story.

Her belief only made the Colonel's Wife more wretched, because it
insisted so strongly on the villainy of men. Remembering what she had
done, it was pleasant to watch her unhappiness, and the penny-farthing
attempts she made to hide it from the Station. But the Station knew and
laughed heartlessly; for they had heard the story of the watch, with
much dramatic gesture, from Mrs. Larkyn's lips.

Once or twice Platte said to Mrs. Larkyn, seeing that the Colonel had
not cleared himself:--"This thing has gone far enough. I move we tell
the Colonel's Wife how it happened. " Mrs. Larkyn shut her lips and shook
her head, and vowed that the Colonel's Wife must bear her punishment
as best she could. Now Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous woman, in whom none
would have suspected deep hate. So Platte took no action, and came to
believe gradually, from the Colonel's silence, that the Colonel must
have "run off the line" somewhere that night, and, therefore, preferred
to stand sentence on the lesser count of rambling into other people's
compounds out of calling hours. Platte forgot about the watch business
after a while, and moved down-country with his regiment. Mrs. Larkyn
went home when her husband's tour of Indian service expired. She never
forgot.

But Platte was quite right when he said that the joke had gone too far.
The mistrust and the tragedy of it--which we outsiders cannot see and
do not believe in--are killing the Colonel's Wife, and are making the
Colonel wretched. If either of them read this story, they can depend
upon its being a fairly true account of the case, and can "kiss and make
friends. "

Shakespeare alludes to the pleasure of watching an Engineer being
shelled by his own Battery. Now this shows that poets should not write
about what they do not understand. Any one could have told him that
Sappers and Gunners are perfectly different branches of the Service.
But, if you correct the sentence, and substitute Gunner for Sapper, the
moral comes just the same.




THE OTHER MAN.

When the earth was sick and the skies were gray,
And the woods were rotted with rain,
The Dead Man rode through the autumn day
To visit his love again.
--Old Ballad.

Far back in the "seventies," before they had built any Public Offices at
Simla, and the broad road round Jakko lived in a pigeon-hole in the P.
W. D. hovels, her parents made Miss Gaurey marry Colonel Schreiderling.
He could not have been MUCH more than thirty-five years her senior; and,
as he lived on two hundred rupees a month and had money of his own,
he was well off. He belonged to good people, and suffered in the cold
weather from lung complaints. In the hot weather he dangled on the brink
of heat-apoplexy; but it never quite killed him.

Understand, I do not blame Schreiderling. He was a good husband
according to his lights, and his temper only failed him when he was
being nursed. Which was some seventeen days in each month. He was almost
generous to his wife about money matters, and that, for him, was a
concession. Still Mrs. Schreiderling was not happy. They married her
when she was this side of twenty and had given all her poor little heart
to another man. I have forgotten his name, but we will call him the
Other Man. He had no money and no prospects.

He was not even good-looking; and I think he was in the Commissariat or
Transport. But, in spite of all these things, she loved him very
madly; and there was some sort of an engagement between the two when
Schreiderling appeared and told Mrs. Gaurey that he wished to marry her
daughter. Then the other engagement was broken off--washed away by
Mrs. Gaurey's tears, for that lady governed her house by weeping over
disobedience to her authority and the lack of reverence she received
in her old age. The daughter did not take after her mother. She never
cried. Not even at the wedding.

The Other Man bore his loss quietly, and was transferred to as bad a
station as he could find. Perhaps the climate consoled him. He suffered
from intermittent fever, and that may have distracted him from his other
trouble. He was weak about the heart also. Both ways. One of the valves
was affected, and the fever made it worse.

This showed itself later on.

Then many months passed, and Mrs. Schreiderling took to being ill.

She did not pine away like people in story books, but she seemed to pick
up every form of illness that went about a station, from simple fever
upwards. She was never more than ordinarily pretty at the best of times;
and the illness made her ugly. Schreiderling said so. He prided himself
on speaking his mind.

When she ceased being pretty, he left her to her own devices, and went
back to the lairs of his bachelordom. She used to trot up and down Simla
Mall in a forlorn sort of way, with a gray Terai hat well on the back of
her head, and a shocking bad saddle under her.

Schreiderling's generosity stopped at the horse. He said that any saddle
would do for a woman as nervous as Mrs. Schreiderling. She never was
asked to dance, because she did not dance well; and she was so dull
and uninteresting, that her box very seldom had any cards in it.
Schreiderling said that if he had known that she was going to be such
a scare-crow after her marriage, he would never have married her. He
always prided himself on speaking his mind, did Schreiderling!

He left her at Simla one August, and went down to his regiment.

Then she revived a little, but she never recovered her looks. I found
out at the Club that the Other Man is coming up sick--very sick--on an
off chance of recovery. The fever and the heart-valves had nearly
killed him. She knew that, too, and she knew--what I had no interest in
knowing--when he was coming up. I suppose he wrote to tell her. They had
not seen each other since a month before the wedding. And here comes the
unpleasant part of the story.

A late call kept me down at the Dovedell Hotel till dusk one evening.
Mrs. Schreidlerling had been flitting up and down the Mall all the
afternoon in the rain. Coming up along the Cart-road, a tonga passed me,
and my pony, tired with standing so long, set off at a canter. Just by
the road down to the Tonga Office Mrs. Schreiderling, dripping from head
to foot, was waiting for the tonga. I turned up-hill, as the tonga was
no affair of mine; and just then she began to shriek. I went back at
once and saw, under the Tonga Office lamps, Mrs. Schreiderling kneeling
in the wet road by the back seat of the newly-arrived tonga, screaming
hideously.

Then she fell face down in the dirt as I came up.

Sitting in the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the
awning-stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache, was the
Other Man--dead. The sixty-mile up-hill jolt had been too much for his
valve, I suppose. The tonga-driver said:--"The Sahib died two stages out
of Solon. Therefore, I tied him with a rope, lest he should fall out
by the way, and so came to Simla. Will the Sahib give me bukshish? IT,"
pointing to the Other Man, "should have given one rupee. "

The Other Man sat with a grin on his face, as if he enjoyed the joke of
his arrival; and Mrs. Schreiderling, in the mud, began to groan. There
was no one except us four in the office and it was raining heavily. The
first thing was to take Mrs. Schreiderling home, and the second was to
prevent her name from being mixed up with the affair. The tonga-driver
received five rupees to find a bazar 'rickshaw for Mrs. Schreiderling.
He was to tell the tonga Babu afterwards of the Other Man, and the Babu
was to make such arrangements as seemed best.

Mrs. Schreiderling was carried into the shed out of the rain, and for
three-quarters of an hour we two waited for the 'rickshaw. The Other
Man was left exactly as he had arrived. Mrs. Schreiderling would do
everything but cry, which might have helped her. She tried to scream as
soon as her senses came back, and then she began praying for the Other
Man's soul. Had she not been as honest as the day, she would have prayed
for her own soul too. I waited to hear her do this, but she did not.
Then I tried to get some of the mud off her habit. Lastly, the 'rickshaw
came, and I got her away--partly by force. It was a terrible business
from beginning to end; but most of all when the 'rickshaw had to squeeze
between the wall and the tonga, and she saw by the lamp-light that thin,
yellow hand grasping the awning-stanchion.

She was taken home just as every one was going to a dance at Viceregal
Lodge--"Peterhoff" it was then--and the doctor found that she had fallen
from her horse, that I had picked her up at the back of Jakko, and
really deserved great credit for the prompt manner in which I had
secured medical aid. She did not die--men of Schreiderling's stamp marry
women who don't die easily. They live and grow ugly.

She never told of her one meeting, since her marriage, with the Other
Man; and, when the chill and cough following the exposure of that
evening, allowed her abroad, she never by word or sign alluded to having
met me by the Tonga Office. Perhaps she never knew.

She used to trot up and down the Mall, on that shocking bad saddle,
looking as if she expected to meet some one round the corner every
minute. Two years afterward, she went Home, and died--at Bournemouth, I
think.

Schreiderling, when he grew maudlin at Mess, used to talk about "my
poor dear wife. " He always set great store on speaking his mind, did
Schreiderling!




CONSEQUENCES.

Rosicrucian subtleties
In the Orient had rise;
Ye may find their teachers still
Under Jacatala's Hill.

Seek ye Bombast Paracelsus,
Read what Flood the Seeker tells us
Of the Dominant that runs
Through the cycles of the Suns--
Read my story last and see
Luna at her apogee.

There are yearly appointments, and two-yearly appointments, and
five-yearly appointments at Simla, and there are, or used to be,
permanent appointments, whereon you stayed up for the term of your
natural life and secured red cheeks and a nice income. Of course, you
could descend in the cold weather; for Simla is rather dull then.

Tarrion came from goodness knows where--all away and away in some
forsaken part of Central India, where they call Pachmari a "Sanitarium,"
and drive behind trotting bullocks, I believe. He belonged to a
regiment; but what he really wanted to do was to escape from his
regiment and live in Simla forever and ever. He had no preference for
anything in particular, beyond a good horse and a nice partner. He
thought he could do everything well; which is a beautiful belief when
you hold it with all your heart. He was clever in many ways, and good to
look at, and always made people round him comfortable--even in Central
India.

So he went up to Simla, and, because he was clever and amusing, he
gravitated naturally to Mrs. Hauksbee, who could forgive everything
but stupidity. Once he did her great service by changing the date on an
invitation-card for a big dance which Mrs. Hauksbee wished to attend,
but couldn't because she had quarrelled with the A. -D. -C. , who took
care, being a mean man, to invite her to a small dance on the 6th
instead of the big Ball of the 26th. It was a very clever piece of
forgery; and when Mrs. Hauksbee showed the A. -D. -C. her invitation-card,
and chaffed him mildly for not better managing his vendettas, he really
thought he had made a mistake; and--which was wise--realized that it
was no use to fight with Mrs. Hauksbee. She was grateful to Tarrion and
asked what she could do for him. He said simply: "I'm a Freelance up
here on leave, and on the lookout for what I can loot. I haven't a
square inch of interest in all Simla. My name isn't known to any man
with an appointment in his gift, and I want an appointment--a good,
sound, pukka one. I believe you can do anything you turn yourself to do.
Will you help me? " Mrs. Hauksbee thought for a minute, and passed
the last of her riding-whip through her lips, as was her custom when
thinking.

Then her eyes sparkled, and she said:--"I will;" and she shook hands
on it. Tarrion, having perfect confidence in this great woman, took no
further thought of the business at all. Except to wonder what sort of an
appointment he would win.

Mrs. Hauksbee began calculating the prices of all the Heads of
Departments and Members of Council she knew, and the more she thought
the more she laughed, because her heart was in the game and it amused
her. Then she took a Civil List and ran over a few of the appointments.
There are some beautiful appointments in the Civil List. Eventually, she
decided that, though Tarrion was too good for the Political Department,
she had better begin by trying to get him in there. What were her own
plans to this end, does not matter in the least, for Luck or Fate played
into her hands, and she had nothing to do but to watch the course of
events and take the credit of them.

All Viceroys, when they first come out, pass through the "Diplomatic
Secrecy" craze. It wears off in time; but they all catch it in the
beginning, because they are new to the country.

The particular Viceroy who was suffering from the complaint just
then--this was a long time ago, before Lord Dufferin ever came from
Canada, or Lord Ripon from the bosom of the English Church--had it very
badly; and the result was that men who were new to keeping official
secrets went about looking unhappy; and the Viceroy plumed himself on
the way in which he had instilled notions of reticence into his Staff.

Now, the Supreme Government have a careless custom of committing
what they do to printed papers. These papers deal with all sorts of
things--from the payment of Rs.
200 to a "secret service" native, up to
rebukes administered to Vakils and Motamids of Native States, and rather
brusque letters to Native Princes, telling them to put their houses
in order, to refrain from kidnapping women, or filling offenders with
pounded red pepper, and eccentricities of that kind. Of course, these
things could never be made public, because Native Princes never err
officially, and their States are, officially, as well administered as
Our territories. Also, the private allowances to various queer people
are not exactly matters to put into newspapers, though they give quaint
reading sometimes.

When the Supreme Government is at Simla, these papers are prepared
there, and go round to the people who ought to see them in office-boxes
or by post. The principle of secrecy was to that Viceroy quite as
important as the practice, and he held that a benevolent despotism like
Ours should never allow even little things, such as appointments of
subordinate clerks, to leak out till the proper time. He was always
remarkable for his principles.

There was a very important batch of papers in preparation at that time.
It had to travel from one end of Simla to the other by hand.

It was not put into an official envelope, but a large, square, pale-pink
one; the matter being in MS. on soft crinkly paper. It was addressed to
"The Head Clerk, etc. , etc. " Now, between "The Head Clerk, etc. , etc. ,"
and "Mrs. Hauksbee" and a flourish, is no very great difference if the
address be written in a very bad hand, as this was. The chaprassi who
took the envelope was not more of an idiot than most chaprassis. He
merely forgot where this most unofficial cover was to be delivered, and
so asked the first Englishman he met, who happened to be a man riding
down to Annandale in a great hurry. The Englishman hardly looked, said:
"Hauksbee Sahib ki Mem," and went on. So did the chaprassi, because that
letter was the last in stock and he wanted to get his work over. There
was no book to sign; he thrust the letter into Mrs. Hauksbee's bearer's
hands and went off to smoke with a friend.

Mrs. Hauksbee was expecting some cut-out pattern things in flimsy paper
from a friend. As soon as she got the big square packet, therefore, she
said, "Oh, the DEAR creature! " and tore it open with a paper-knife, and
all the MS. enclosures tumbled out on the floor.

Mrs. Hauksbee began reading. I have said the batch was rather
important. That is quite enough for you to know. It referred to some
correspondence, two measures, a peremptory order to a native chief and
two dozen other things. Mrs. Hauksbee gasped as she read, for the first
glimpse of the naked machinery of the Great Indian Government, stripped
of its casings, and lacquer, and paint, and guard-rails, impresses even
the most stupid man. And Mrs. Hauksbee was a clever woman. She was
a little afraid at first, and felt as if she had laid hold of a
lightning-flash by the tail, and did not quite know what to do with it.
There were remarks and initials at the side of the papers; and some
of the remarks were rather more severe than the papers. The initials
belonged to men who are all dead or gone now; but they were great in
their day.

Mrs. Hauksbee read on and thought calmly as she read. Then the value of
her trove struck her, and she cast about for the best method of using
it. Then Tarrion dropped in, and they read through all the papers
together, and Tarrion, not knowing how she had come by them, vowed that
Mrs. Hauksbee was the greatest woman on earth.

Which I believe was true, or nearly so.

"The honest course is always the best," said Tarrion after an hour and a
half of study and conversation. "All things considered, the Intelligence
Branch is about my form. Either that or the Foreign Office. I go to lay
siege to the High Gods in their Temples. "

He did not seek a little man, or a little big man, or a weak Head of a
strong Department, but he called on the biggest and strongest man that
the Government owned, and explained that he wanted an appointment at
Simla on a good salary. The compound insolence of this amused the Strong
Man, and, as he had nothing to do for the moment, he listened to the
proposals of the audacious Tarrion.

"You have, I presume, some special qualifications, besides the gift of
self-assertion, for the claims you put forwards? " said the Strong Man.
"That, Sir," said Tarrion, "is for you to judge. " Then he began, for
he had a good memory, quoting a few of the more important notes in the
papers--slowly and one by one as a man drops chlorodyne into a glass.
When he had reached the peremptory order--and it WAS a peremptory
order--the Strong Man was troubled.

Tarrion wound up:--"And I fancy that special knowledge of this kind is
at least as valuable for, let us say, a berth in the Foreign Office, as
the fact of being the nephew of a distinguished officer's wife. " That
hit the Strong Man hard, for the last appointment to the Foreign Office
had been by black favor, and he knew it. "I'll see what I can do for
you," said the Strong Man. "Many thanks," said Tarrion. Then he left,
and the Strong Man departed to see how the appointment was to be
blocked. . . . . . . . . .

Followed a pause of eleven days; with thunders and lightnings and much
telegraphing. The appointment was not a very important one, carrying
only between Rs. 500 and Rs. 700 a month; but, as the Viceroy said, it
was the principle of diplomatic secrecy that had to be maintained,
and it was more than likely that a boy so well supplied with special
information would be worth translating. So they translated him. They
must have suspected him, though he protested that his information was
due to singular talents of his own. Now, much of this story, including
the after-history of the missing envelope, you must fill in for
yourself, because there are reasons why it cannot be written. If you do
not know about things Up Above, you won't understand how to fill it in,
and you will say it is impossible.

What the Viceroy said when Tarrion was introduced to him was:--"So, this
is the boy who 'rusked' the Government of India, is it? Recollect, Sir,
that is not done TWICE. " So he must have known something.

What Tarrion said when he saw his appointment gazetted was:--"If Mrs.
Hauksbee were twenty years younger, and I her husband, I should be
Viceroy of India in twenty years. "

What Mrs. Hauksbee said, when Tarrion thanked her, almost with tears
in his eyes, was first:--"I told you so! " and next, to herself:--"What
fools men are! "




THE CONVERSION OF AURELIAN McGOGGIN.

Ride with an idle whip, ride with an unused heel.
But, once in a way, there will come a day
When the colt must be taught to feel
The lash that falls, and the curb that galls,
And the sting of the rowelled steel.
--Life's Handicap.

This is not a tale exactly. It is a Tract; and I am immensely proud of
it. Making a Tract is a Feat.

Every man is entitled to his own religious opinions; but no man--least
of all a junior--has a right to thrust these down other men's throats.
The Government sends out weird Civilians now and again; but McGoggin
was the queerest exported for a long time. He was clever--brilliantly
clever--but his cleverness worked the wrong way. Instead of keeping to
the study of the vernaculars, he had read some books written by a
man called Comte, I think, and a man called Spencer, and a Professor
Clifford. [You will find these books in the Library. ] They deal with
people's insides from the point of view of men who have no stomachs.
There was no order against his reading them; but his Mamma should have
smacked him.

They fermented in his head, and he came out to India with a rarefied
religion over and above his work. It was not much of a creed. It only
proved that men had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and
that you must worry along somehow for the good of Humanity.

One of its minor tenets seemed to be that the one thing more sinful than
giving an order was obeying it. At least, that was what McGoggin said;
but I suspect he had misread his primers.

I do not say a word against this creed. It was made up in Town, where
there is nothing but machinery and asphalt and building--all shut in
by the fog. Naturally, a man grows to think that there is no one higher
than himself, and that the Metropolitan Board of Works made everything.
But in this country, where you really see humanity--raw, brown, naked
humanity--with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the
used-up, over-handled earth underfoot, the notion somehow dies away,
and most folk come back to simpler theories. Life, in India, is not long
enough to waste in proving that there is no one in particular at the
head of affairs.

For this reason. The Deputy is above the Assistant, the Commissioner
above the Deputy, the Lieutenant-Governor above the Commissioner, and
the Viceroy above all four, under the orders of the Secretary of State,
who is responsible to the Empress. If the Empress be not responsible to
her Maker--if there is no Maker for her to be responsible to--the
entire system of Our administration must be wrong. Which is manifestly
impossible. At Home men are to be excused. They are stalled up a good
deal and get intellectually "beany. " When you take a gross, "beany"
horse to exercise, he slavers and slobbers over the bit till you can't
see the horns.

But the bit is there just the same. Men do not get "beany" in India. The
climate and the work are against playing bricks with words.

If McGoggin had kept his creed, with the capital letters and the endings
in "isms," to himself, no one would have cared; but his grandfathers on
both sides had been Wesleyan preachers, and the preaching strain came
out in his mind. He wanted every one at the Club to see that they had no
souls too, and to help him to eliminate his Creator. As a good many men
told him, HE undoubtedly had no soul, because he was so young, but it
did not follow that his seniors were equally undeveloped; and, whether
there was another world or not, a man still wanted to read his papers in
this. "But that is not the point--that is not the point! " Aurelian used
to say. Then men threw sofa-cushions at him and told him to go to
any particular place he might believe in. They christened him the
"Blastoderm"--he said he came from a family of that name somewhere, in
the pre-historic ages--and, by insult and laughter, strove to choke him
dumb, for he was an unmitigated nuisance at the Club; besides being an
offence to the older men. His Deputy Commissioner, who was working on
the Frontier when Aurelian was rolling on a bed-quilt, told him that,
for a clever boy, Aurelian was a very big idiot. And, you know, if
he had gone on with his work, he would have been caught up to the
Secretariat in a few years. He was just the type that goes there--all
head, no physique and a hundred theories. Not a soul was interested in
McGoggin's soul. He might have had two, or none, or somebody's else's.
His business was to obey orders and keep abreast of his files instead of
devastating the Club with "isms. "

He worked brilliantly; but he could not accept any order without
trying to better it. That was the fault of his creed. It made men too
responsible and left too much to their honor. You can sometimes ride an
old horse in a halter; but never a colt.

McGoggin took more trouble over his cases than any of the men of his
year. He may have fancied that thirty-page judgments on fifty-rupee
cases--both sides perjured to the gullet--advanced the cause of
Humanity. At any rate, he worked too much, and worried and fretted over
the rebukes he received, and lectured away on his ridiculous creed out
of office, till the Doctor had to warn him that he was overdoing it. No
man can toil eighteen annas in the rupee in June without suffering. But
McGoggin was still intellectually "beany" and proud of himself and his
powers, and he would take no hint. He worked nine hours a day steadily.

"Very well," said the doctor, "you'll break down because you are
over-engined for your beam. " McGoggin was a little chap.

One day, the collapse came--as dramatically as if it had been meant to
embellish a Tract.

It was just before the Rains. We were sitting in the verandah in the
dead, hot, close air, gasping and praying that the black-blue clouds
would let down and bring the cool. Very, very far away, there was a
faint whisper, which was the roar of the Rains breaking over the river.
One of the men heard it, got out of his chair, listened, and said,
naturally enough:--"Thank God! "

Then the Blastoderm turned in his place and said:--"Why? I assure you
it's only the result of perfectly natural causes--atmospheric phenomena
of the simplest kind. Why you should, therefore, return thanks to a
Being who never did exist--who is only a figment--"

"Blastoderm," grunted the man in the next chair, "dry up, and throw
me over the Pioneer. We know all about your figments. " The Blastoderm
reached out to the table, took up one paper, and jumped as if something
had stung him. Then he handed the paper over.

"As I was saying," he went on slowly and with an effort--"due to
perfectly natural causes--perfectly natural causes. I mean--"

"Hi! Blastoderm, you've given me the Calcutta Mercantile Advertiser. "

The dust got up in little whorls, while the treetops rocked and the
kites whistled. But no one was looking at the coming of the Rains.

We were all staring at the Blastoderm, who had risen from his chair and
was fighting with his speech. Then he said, still more slowly:--

"Perfectly conceivable--dictionary--red
oak--amenable--cause--retaining--shuttlecock--alone. "

"Blastoderm's drunk," said one man. But the Blastoderm was not drunk. He
looked at us in a dazed sort of way, and began motioning with his hands
in the half light as the clouds closed overhead.

Then--with a scream:--

"What is it? --Can't--reserve--attainable--market--obscure--"

But his speech seemed to freeze in him, and--just as the lightning shot
two tongues that cut the whole sky into three pieces and the rain fell
in quivering sheets--the Blastoderm was struck dumb. He stood pawing and
champing like a hard-held horse, and his eyes were full of terror.

The Doctor came over in three minutes, and heard the story. "It's
aphasia," he said. "Take him to his room. I KNEW the smash would come. "
We carried the Blastoderm across, in the pouring rain, to his quarters,
and the Doctor gave him bromide of potassium to make him sleep.

Then the Doctor came back to us and told us that aphasia was like all
the arrears of "Punjab Head" falling in a lump; and that only once
before--in the case of a sepoy--had he met with so complete a case.
I myself have seen mild aphasia in an overworked man, but this sudden
dumbness was uncanny--though, as the Blastoderm himself might have said,
due to "perfectly natural causes. "

"He'll have to take leave after this," said the Doctor. "He won't be
fit for work for another three months. No; it isn't insanity or anything
like it. It's only complete loss of control over the speech and memory.
I fancy it will keep the Blastoderm quiet, though. "

Two days later, the Blastoderm found his tongue again. The first
question he asked was: "What was it? " The Doctor enlightened him.

"But I can't understand it! " said the Blastoderm; "I'm quite sane; but I
can't be sure of my mind, it seems--my OWN memory--can I? "

"Go up into the Hills for three months, and don't think about it," said
the Doctor.

"But I can't understand it," repeated the Blastoderm. "It was my OWN
mind and memory. "

"I can't help it," said the Doctor; "there are a good many things you
can't understand; and, by the time you have put in my length of service,
you'll know exactly how much a man dare call his own in this world. "

The stroke cowed the Blastoderm. He could not understand it. He went
into the Hills in fear and trembling, wondering whether he would be
permitted to reach the end of any sentence he began.

This gave him a wholesome feeling of mistrust. The legitimate
explanation, that he had been overworking himself, failed to satisfy
him. Something had wiped his lips of speech, as a mother wipes the milky
lips of her child, and he was afraid--horribly afraid.

So the Club had rest when he returned; and if ever you come across
Aurelian McGoggin laying down the law on things Human--he doesn't seem
to know as much as he used to about things Divine--put your forefinger
on your lip for a moment, and see what happens.

Don't blame me if he throws a glass at your head!




A GERM DESTROYER.

Pleasant it is for the Little Tin Gods,
When great Jove nods;
But Little Tin Gods make their little mistakes
In missing the hour when great Jove wakes.

As a general rule, it is inexpedient to meddle with questions of State
in a land where men are highly paid to work them out for you.