Ofullständig statistik

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Anne
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Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Anne » 01 aug 2012 13:38

Portande av suchanother. Det är liksom en liten pyttepyttegrej som går förlorad om man måste uttrycka sig inom snäva ramar och det är hopselipopsan! - Ärligheten. Jag tänker inte finna mig i sånt trams. Ärlighet ska uppmuntras. Upplever det som direkt stötande att sånt sker på ett filosofiforum.

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Johan Ågren
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Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Johan Ågren » 01 aug 2012 14:16

Lynx,

om du hade alla detaljer så skulle du hålla med om att det avstängandet var rätt. Om jag får vädja till ditt förtroende. T.ex så ogillar jag rasism. Dessutom ogillar jag direkta hot. Jag skriver detta nu för att all form av tveksamhet gällande denna avstängning ska klargöras. Jag vill absolut inte ha något mer att göra med denna person, och att jag tidigare skrivit att jag gillat honom ändå trotts sitt ohyfsade sätt är något jag ångrar.

Anne
Inlägg: 6108
Blev medlem: 18 maj 2012 12:30

Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Anne » 01 aug 2012 14:31

Eftersom jag inte har alla detaljer så finns det kanske rimliga argument som kan finnas och när jag då inte känner till dessa - för att jag ska kunna ta ställning till det jag inte känner till. Lösdrivaren behöver kärlek.

Anne
Inlägg: 6108
Blev medlem: 18 maj 2012 12:30

Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Anne » 01 aug 2012 14:49

Such, om du läser detta - ta in i ditt hjärta att du inte kan klandra de som inte förstår dig. Hämnd är väldigt, väldigt, Väldigt Dumt. Lyssna på mig nu. Du vet att jag älskar dig.

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Johan Ågren
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Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Johan Ågren » 01 aug 2012 14:52

Det jag önskar av de som använder ett forum jag jobbar med är att det finns ett förtroende för mitt omdöme. Det är en grundförutsättning när en användare väljer att engagera sig i ett forum tycker jag. Forum som sköts dåligt ska man inte använda. Jag stänger inte av personer lättvindigt, inte ens efter hot om fysiskt våld då jag såg det som tomma hot. När det upprepas flera gånger så blir det starkare. När detta sedan toppas med rasism och vidriga kommentarer så räcker det. Jag förhandlar inte kärleksmässigt med de som förhåller sig rasistiskt eller ser våld som ett alternativ. Så högt i tak är det inte på FF. Vad som tillåts baseras på de mänskliga rättigheterna.

Anne
Inlägg: 6108
Blev medlem: 18 maj 2012 12:30

Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Anne » 01 aug 2012 16:16

Så om man inte gillar Reinfeldregimen bör man flytta utomlands...?

Jo, jag tycker om dig Johan, men ibland tycker jag att du beter dig klantigt.

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Johan Ågren
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Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Johan Ågren » 01 aug 2012 16:33

Du kan inte jämföra ett forum på internet med att bo i ett land. Då kan jag lika gärna dra det åt andra hållet och säga: - Så om du tycker illa om en människa så så ska du inte leva med den?" Om du anser att ett forum sköts dåligt så kan du inte rösta bort de som sköter det. Det är inte en demokrati. Filosofin är överordnad allt, även de mänskliga rättigheterna, men ett forum är underordnat de som sätter ramarna för dess innehåll. Filosofin och dina tankar är fria, men du ges inte rätt att uttrycka dem här om de strider mot de mänskliga rättigheterna. Yttrandefriheten relaterar alltid till #30 i de mänskliga rättigheterna.

Jag tar inte åt mig att jag är klantig i en enskild fråga tills motsatsen bevisats.

Anne
Inlägg: 6108
Blev medlem: 18 maj 2012 12:30

Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Anne » 01 aug 2012 16:46

Varför kan jag inte det, Johan? Jag kanske tycker att det är pissigt att mänsklighet strider med små barn som sköldar i krig, utvecklar biokemiska vapen osv. Jag kanske inte vill vara med om det. Det stora finns i det lilla och det lilla finns i det stora. Ett internetforum är inget undantag för den grundprincipen.

Anne
Inlägg: 6108
Blev medlem: 18 maj 2012 12:30

Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Anne » 01 aug 2012 17:05

Förresten Johan - kan jag lägga ut en påbörjad bok här? Den är några sidor, vet inte riktigt hur många. Minns nämnligen inte riktigt vad jag tänkte då pga den efterföljande ECT:n som jag fick i samma veva. Tar det upp för mycket space?

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Johan Ågren
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Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Johan Ågren » 01 aug 2012 17:08

lynx skrev:Förresten Johan - kan jag lägga ut en påbörjad bok här? Den är några sidor, vet inte riktigt hur många. Minns nämnligen inte riktigt vad jag tänkte då pga den efterföljande ECT:n som jag fick i samma veva. Tar det upp för mycket space?


Gör en tråd i galleriforumet. Vet inte just nu om det finns en begränsning hur många tecken det kan vara i ett inlägg. Annars kanske du kan göra ett inlägg per kapitel eller liknande.

Kollade, och det finns ingen begränsning för antalet tecken i ett inlägg. Fast jag vet inte hur det hela kommer att bete sig.

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Johan Ågren
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Re: Ofullständig statistik

Inläggav Johan Ågren » 01 aug 2012 17:17

Title: Four Faultless Felons
Author: G.K. Chesterton
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Language: English
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Date most recently updated: January 2006

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Title: Four Faultless Felons
Author: G.K. Chesterton



CLUE OF THE PRESSMAN

I PROLOGUE OF THE PRESSMAN

MR. ASA LEE PINION, of the Chicago Comet, had crossed half of America,
the whole of the Atlantic, and eventually even Piccadilly Circus, in
pursuit of the notable, if not notorious figure of Count Raoul de
Marillac. Mr. Pinion wanted to get what is called "a story"; a story to
put in his paper. He did get a story, but he did not put it in his paper.
It was too tall a story, even for the Comet. Perhaps the metaphor is true
in more ways than one, and the fable was tall like a church-spire or a
tower among the stars: beyond comprehension as well as belief. Anyhow,
Mr. Pinion decided not to risk his readers' comments. But that is no
reason why the present writer, writing for more exalted, spiritual and
divinely credulous readers, should imitate his silence.

Really, the anecdote he heard was quite incredible: and Mr. Pinion was
not intolerant. While the Count was painting the town red and himself
black, it was quite possible to believe that he was not so black as he
was painted. After all, his extravagance and luxury, however
ostentatious, did no particular harm to anybody but himself; and if he
associated with the dissipated and degraded, he had never been known to
interfere with the innocent or the reputable. But while it was credible
enough that the nobleman was not so black as he was painted, he certainly
could not be quite so white as he was painted, in the wild story that was
told that evening. The story came from a friend of the Count's, much too
friendly a friend, thought Mr. Pinion, friendly to the point of
feeble--mindedness. He supposed it must be a delusion or a hoax; anyhow
he did not put it into his paper. Yet it is because of this highly
improbable anecdote that the Count de Marillac stands at the opening of
this book, to introduce the four stories which were put forth as
parallels to his own.

But there was one fact which struck the journalist as odd even at the
beginning. He understood well enough that it would be difficult to catch
the Count anywhere, as he whirled from one social engagement to another,
in the manner appropriately called "fast". And he was not offended when
Marillac said he could only spare ten minutes at his London club before
going on to a theatrical first--night and other ensuing festivities.
During that ten minutes, however, Marillac was quite polite, answered the
rather superficial society questions which the Comet wanted answered, and
very genially introduced the journalist to three or four club companions
or cronies who were standing about him in the lounge, and who continued
to stand about after the Count himself had made his beaming and flashing
exit.

"I suppose," said one of them, "that the naughty old man has gone to see
the naughty new play with all the naughty new people."

"Yes," grunted a big man standing in front of the fire. "He's gone with
the naughtiest person of all, the author, Mrs. Prague. Authoress, I
suppose she'd call herself--being only cultured and not educated."

"He always goes to the first night of those plays," assented the other.
"P'raps he thinks there won't be a second night, if the police raid the
place."

"What play is it?" asked the American in a gentle voice. He was a quiet
little man with a very long head and a refined falcon profile; he was
much less loud and casual than the Englishmen.

"Naked Souls," said the first man with a faint groan. "Dramatized version
of the world-shaking novel Pan's Pipes. Grapples grimly with the facts of
life."

"Also bold, breezy and back to Nature," said the man by the fire. "We
hear a lot just now about Pan's Pipes. They seem to me a little too like
drain-pipes."

"You see," said the other, "Mrs. Prague is so very Modern, she has to go
back to Pan. She says she cannot bear to believe that Pan is dead."

"I think," said the large man, with a touch of heavy violence, "that Pan
is not only dead but rotting and stinking in the street."

It was the four friends of Marillac who puzzled Mr. Pinion. They were
obviously rather intimate friends, and yet they were not, on the whole,
of the sort likely to be even acquaintances. Marillac himself was much
what might have been expected, rather more restless and haggard than his
handsome portraits might have implied, a thing likely enough with his
late hours and his advancing years. His curly hair was still dark and
thick, but his pointed grey beard was whitening fast; his eyes were a
little hollow, and had a more anxious expression than could be inferred,
at a distance, from his buoyant gestures and rapid walk. All that was
quite in character, but the tone of the group was different. One figure
alone out of the four seemed in some sense of Marillac's world, having
something of the carriage of a military officer, with that fine shade
that suggests a foreign officer. He had a cleanshaven, regular and very
impassive face; he was sitting down when he bowed politely to the
stranger, but something in the bow suggested that, standing up, he would
have clicked his heels. The others were quite English and quite
different. One of them was the very big man, with big shoulders bowed but
powerful and a big head not yet bald but striped with rather thin brown
hair. But the arresting thing about him was that indescribable suggestion
of dust or cobwebs that belongs to a strong man leading a sedentary life,
possibly scientific or scholarly, but certainly obscure, in its method if
not its effect; the sort of middle-class man with a hobby, who seems to
have been dug out of it with a spade. It was hard to imagine a more
complete contradiction to such a meteor of fashion as the Count. The man
next him, though more alert, was equally solid and respectable and free
from fashionable pretensions; a short, square man with a square face and
spectacles, who looked like what he was, an ordinary busy suburban
general practitioner. The fourth of Marillac's incongruous intimates was
quite frankly shabby. Grey seedy clothes hung limply on his lean figure,
and his dark hair and rather ragged beard could, at the best, be only
excused as Bohemian. He had very remarkable eyes, sunk very deep in his
head and yet, by a paradox, standing out like signals. The visitor found
himself continually drawn to them, as if they were magnets.

But, all together, the group bothered and bewildered him. It was not
merely a difference of social class, it was an atmosphere of sobriety and
even of solid work and worth, which seemed to belong to another world.
The four men in question were friendly in a modest and even embarrassed
manner; they fell into conversation with the journalist as with any
ordinary equal in a tram or a tube, and when, about an hour later, they
asked him to share their dinner at the club, he had no such sense of
strain as he might have felt in facing one of the fabulous Luculline
banquets of their friend the Count de Marillac.

For however seriously Marillac might or might not be taking the serious
drama of Sex and Science, there was no doubt that he would take the
dinner even more seriously. He was famous as an epicure of almost the
classic and legendary sort, and all the gourmets of Europe reverenced his
reputation. The little man with the spectacles glanced at this fact,
indeed, as they sat down to dinner: "Hope you can put up with our simple
fare, Mr. Pinion," he said. "You'd have had a much more carefully
selected menu if Marillac had been here."

The American reassured him with polite expressions about the club dinner;
but added: "I suppose it is true that he does make rather an art of
dining?"

"Oh, yes," said the man in spectacles. "Always has all the right things
at the wrong times. That's the ideal, I suppose."

"I suppose he takes a lot of trouble?" said Pinion.

"Yes," said the other. "He chooses his meals very carefully. Not
carefully from my point of view. But then I'm a doctor."

Pinion could not keep his eyes off the magnetic eyes of the man with the
shabby clothes and shaggy hair. Just now the man was gazing across the
table with a curious intentness, and in the ensuing silence, he suddenly
intervened.

"Everybody knows he's very particular in choosing his dinner. But I bet
not one man in a million knows the principle on which he chooses it."

"You must remember," said Pinion, with his soft accent, "that I am a
journalist, and I should like to be the one man in a million."

The man opposite looked at him steadily and rather strangely for a
moment, and then said: "I have half a mind.... Look here, have you any
human curiosity as well as journalistic curiosity? I mean, would the one
man like to know, even if the million never knew?"

"Oh, yes," replied the journalist, "I have plenty of curiosity, even
about things I am told in confidence. But I can't quite see why
Marillac's taste in champagne and ortolans should be so very
confidential."

"Well," answered the other gravely, "why do you think he chooses them?"

"I guess I've got a bromide mind," said the American, "but I should
rather suspect him of choosing the things he likes."

"Au contraire, as the other gourmet said when asked if he lunched on the
boat."

The man with the peculiar eyes broke off from his flippant speech,
plunged for a few moments into profound silence, and then resumed in so
different a tone that it was like another man suddenly speaking at the
table.

"Every age has its bigotry, which is blind to some particular need of
human nature; the Puritans to the need for merriment, the Manchester
School to the need for beauty, and so on. There is a need in man, or at
least in many men, which it is not fashionable to admit or allow for in
these days. Most people have had a touch of it in the more serious
emotions of youth; in a few men it burns like a flame to the last, as it
does here. Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, has been
blamed for imposing it, but in fact, it rather regulated and even
restrained the passion than forced it. It exists in all religions, to a
wild and frantic extent in some of the religions of Asia. There men hack
themselves with knives or hang themselves on hooks, or walk through life
with withered arms rigidly uplifted, crucified upon empty air. It is the
appetite for what one does not like. Marillac has it."

"What on earth--" began the startled journalist, but the other continued:
"In short, it is what people call Asceticism, and one of the modern
mistakes is not allowing for its real existence in rare but quite real
people. To live a life of incessant austerity and self-denial, as
Marillac does, is surrounded with extraordinary difficulties and
misunderstandings in modern society. Society can understand some
particular Puritan fad, like Prohibition, especially if it is imposed on
other people, above all, on poor people. But a man like Marillac,
imposing on himself, not abstinence from wine, but abstinence from
worldly pleasures of every sort. ..."

"Excuse me," said Pinion in his most courteous tones, "I trust I'd never
have the incivility to suggest that you have gone mad, so I must ask you
to tell me candidly whether I have."

"Most people," replied the other, "would answer that it is Marillac who
has gone mad. Perhaps he has; anyhow, if the truth were known, he would
certainly be thought so. But it isn't only to avoid being put in a
lunatic asylum that he hides his hermit's ideal by pretending to be a man
of pleasure. It's part of the whole idea, in its only tolerable form. The
worst of those Eastern fakirs hung on hooks is that they are too
conspicuous. It may make them just a little vain. I don't deny that
Stylites and some of the first hermits may have been touched with the
same danger. But our friend is a Christian anchorite; and understands the
advice, 'When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.' He is not
seen of men to fast. On the contrary, he is seen of men to feast. Only,
don't you see, he has invented a new kind of fasting."

Mr. Pinion of the Comet suddenly laughed, a curt and startled laugh, for
he was very quick and had already guessed the joke.

"You don't really mean--" he began.

"Well, it's quite simple, isn't it?" replied his informant. "He feasts on
all the most luxurious and expensive things that he doesn't like.
Especially on the things that he simply detests. Under that cover, nobody
can possibly accuse him of virtue. He remains impenetrably protected
behind a rampart of repulsive oysters and unwelcome aperitifs. In short,
the hermit must now hide anywhere but in the hermitage. He generally
hides in the latest luxurious gilded hotels, because that's where they
have the worst cooking."

"This is a very extraordinary tale," said the American, arching his
eyebrows.

"You begin to see the idea?" said the other. "If he has twenty different
hors-d'oeuvres brought to him and takes the olives, who is to know that
he hates olives? If he thoughtfully scans the whole wine-list and
eventually selects a rather recondite Hock, who will guess that his whole
soul rises in disgust at the very thought of Hock: and that he knows
that's the nastiest--even of Hocks? Whereas, if he were to demand dried
peas or a mouldy crust at the Ritz, he would probably attract attention."

"I never can quite see," said the man in spectacles restlessly, "what is
the good of it all."

The other man lowered his magnetic eyes and looked down with some
embarrassment. At last he said: "I think I can see it, but I don't think
I can say it. I had a touch of it myself once, only in one special
direction, and I found it almost impossible to explain to anybody. Only
there is one mark of the real mystic and ascetic of this sort; that he
only wants to do it to himself. He wants everybody else to have what wine
or smokes they want and will ransack the Ritz for it. The moment he wants
to dragoon the others, the mystic sinks into a mire of degradation and
becomes the moral reformer."

There was a pause, and then the journalist said suddenly: "But, look
here, this won't do. It isn't only wasting his money on wining and dining
that has got Marillac a bad name. It's the whole thing. Why is he such a
fan for these rotten erotic plays and things? Why does he go about with a
woman like Mrs. Prague? That doesn't seem like a hermit, anyhow."

The man facing Pinion smiled and the heavier man on his right half turned
with a sort of grunt of laughter.

"Well," he said, "it's pretty plain you've never been about with Mrs.
Prague."

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Pinion; and this time there was something
like a general laugh.

"Some say she's his Maiden Aunt and it's his duty to be kind to her,"
began the first man, but the second man interrupted him gruffly: "Why do
you call her a Maiden Aunt when she looks like a--"

"Quite so, quite so," said the first man rather hastily, "and why 'looks
like'--if it comes to that?"

"But her conversation!" groaned his friend. "And Marillac stands it for
hours on end!"

"And her play!" assented the other. "Marillac sits through five mortal
acts of it. If that isn't being a martyr--"

"Don't you see?" cried the shabby man with something like excitement.
"The Count is a cultivated and even learned man; also he is a Latin and
logical to the point of impatience. And yet he sticks it. He endures five
or six acts of a Really Modern Intellectual Incisive Drama. The First Act
in which she says that Woman will no longer be put on a pedestal; the
Second Act in which Woman will no longer be put under a glass case; the
Third Act in which Woman will no longer be a plaything for man, and the
Fourth in which she will no longer be a chattel; all the cliches. And he
still has two acts before him, in which she will not be something else,
will not be a slave in the home or an outcast flung from the home. He's
seen it six times without turning a hair; you can't even see him grind
his teeth. And Mrs. Prague's conversation! How her first husband could
never understand, and her second husband seemed as if he might
understand, only her third husband carried her off as if there was real
understanding--and so on, as if there were anything to be understood. You
know what an utterly egotistical fool is like. And he suffers even those
fools gladly."

"In fact," put in the big man in his brooding manner, "you might say he
has invented the Modern Penance. The Penance of Boredom. Hair-shirts and
hermits' caves in a howling wilderness would not be so horrible to modern
nerves as that."

"By your account," ruminated Pinion, "I've been chasing a pleasure-seeker
tripping on the light fantastic toe and only found a hermit standing on
his head." After a silence he said abruptly, "Is this really true? How
did you find it out?"

"That's rather a long story," replied the man opposite. "The truth is
that Marillac allows himself one feast in the year, on Christmas Day, and
eats and drinks what he really likes. I found him drinking beer and
eating tripe and onions in a quiet pub in Hoxton, and somehow we were
forced into confidential conversation. You will understand, of course,
that this is a confidential conversation."

"I certainly shan't print it," answered the journalist. "I should be
regarded as a lunatic if I did. People don't understand that sort of
lunacy nowadays, and I rather wonder you take to it so much yourself."

"Well, I put my own case before him, you see," answered the other. "In a
small way it was a little like his own. And then I introduced him to my
friends, and so he became a sort of President of our little club."

"Oh," said Pinion rather blankly, "I didn't know you were a club."

"Well, we are four men with a common bond at least. We have all had
occasion, like Marillac, to look rather worse than we were."

"Yes," grunted the large man rather sourly, "we've all been
Misunderstood. Like Mrs. Prague."

"The Club of Men Misunderstood is rather more cheerful than that,
however," continued his friend. "We are all pretty jolly here,
considering that our reputations have been blasted by black and revolting
crimes. The truth is we have devoted ourselves to a new sort of detective
story--or detective service if you like. We do not hunt for crimes but
for concealed virtues. Sometimes, as in Marillac's case, they are very
artfully concealed. As you will doubtless be justified in retorting, we
conceal our own virtues with brilliant success."

The journalist's head began to go round a little, though he thought
himself pretty well accustomed both to crazy and criminal surroundings.
"But I thought you said," he objected, "that your reputations were
blasted with crime. What sort of crime?"

"Well, mine was murder," said the man next to him. "The people who
blasted me did it because they disapproved of murder, apparently. It's
true I was rather a failure at murder, as at everything else."

Pinion's gaze wandered in some bewilderment to the next man who answered
cheerfully: "Mine was only a common fraud. A professional fraud, too, the
sort that gets you kicked out of your profession sometimes. Rather like
Dr. Cook's sham discovery of the North Pole."

"What does all this mean?" asked Pinion; and he looked inquiringly at the
man opposite, who had done so much of the explaining so far.

"Oh, theft," said the man opposite, indifferently; "the charge on which I
was actually arrested was petty larceny."

There was a profound silence, which seemed to settle in a mysterious
manner, like a gathering cloud, on the figure of the fourth member, who
had not spoken so far a single word. He sat erect in his rather stiff,
foreign fashion; his wooden, handsome face was unchanged and his lips had
never moved even for so much as a murmur. But now, when the sudden and
deep silence seemed to challenge him, his face seemed to harden from wood
to stone and when he spoke at last, his foreign accent seemed something
more than alien, as if it were almost inhuman.

"I have committed the Unpardonable Sin," he said. "For what sin did Dante
reserve the last and lowest hell; the Circle of Ice?" Still no one spoke;
and he answered his own question in the same hollow tone: "Treason. I
betrayed the four companions of my party, and gave them up to the
Government for a bribe."

Something turned cold inside the sensitive stranger, and for the first
time he really felt the air around him sinister and strange. The
stillness continued for another half minute, and then all the four men
burst out into a great uproar of laughter.

The stories they told, to justify their boasts or confessions, are here
retold in a different fashion, as they appeared to those on the outskirts
rather than the centre of the events. But the journalist, who liked to
collect all the odd things of life, was interested enough to record them,
and then afterwards recast them. He felt he had really got something, if
not exactly what he had expected, out of his pursuit of the dashing and
extravagant Count Raoul de Marillac.



THE MODERATE MURDERER

I THE MAN WITH THE GREEN UMBRELLA

THE new Governor was Lord Tallboys, commonly called Top-hat Tallboys,
because of his attachment to that uncanny erection, which he continued to
carry balanced on his head as calmly among the palm-trees of Egypt as
among the lamp-posts of Westminster. Certainly he carried it calmly
enough in lands where few crowns were safe from toppling. The district he
had come out to govern may here be described, with diplomatic vagueness,
as a strip on the edge of Egypt and called for our convenience Polybia.
It is an old story now, but one which many people had reason to remember
for many years, and at the time it was an imperial event. One Governor
was killed, another Governor was nearly killed, but in this story we are
concerned only with one catastrophe, and that was rather a personal and
even private catastrophe.

Top-hat Tallboys was a bachelor and yet he brought a family with him. He
had a nephew and two nieces of whom one, as it happened, had married the
Deputy Governor of Polybia, the man who had been called to rule during
the interregnum after the murder of the previous ruler. The other niece
was unmarried; her name was Barbara Traill, and she may well be the first
figure to cross the stage of this story.

For indeed she was rather a solitary and striking figure, raven dark and
rich in colouring with a very beautiful but rather sullen profile, as she
crossed the sandy spaces and came under the cover of one long low wall
which alone threw a strip of shadow from the sun, which was sloping
towards the desert horizon. The wall itself was a quaint example of the
patchwork character of that borderland of East and West. It was actually
a line of little villas, built for clerks and small officials, and thrown
out as by a speculative builder whose speculations spread to the ends of
the earth. It was a strip of Streatham amid the ruins of Heliopolis. Such
oddities are not unknown, when the oldest countries are turned into the
newest colonies. But in this case the young woman, who was not without
imagination, was conscious of a quite fantastic contrast. Each of these
dolls' houses had its toy shrubs and plants and its narrow oblong of back
garden running down to the common and continuous garden wall; and it was
just outside this wall that there ran the rough path, fringed with a few
hoary and wrinkled olives. Outside the fringe there faded away into
infinity the monstrous solitude of sand. Only there could still be
detected on that last line of distance a faint triangular shape, a sort
of mathematical symbol whose unnatural simplicity has moved all poets and
pilgrims for five thousand years. Anyone seeing it really for the first
time, as the girl did, can hardly avoid uttering a cry: "The Pyramids!"

Almost as she said it a voice said in her ear, not loud but with alarming
clearness and very exact articulation: "The foundations were traced in
blood and in blood shall they be traced anew. These things are written
for our instruction."

It has been said that Barbara Traill was not without imagination; it
would be truer to say that she had rather too much. But she was quite
certain she had not imagined the voice, though she certainly could not
imagine where it came from. She appeared to be absolutely alone on the
little path which ran along the wall and led to the gardens round the
Governorate. Then she remembered the wall itself, and looking sharply
over her shoulder, she fancied she saw for one moment a head peering out
of the shadow of a sycamore, which was the only tree of any size for some
distance, since she had left the last of the low sprawling olives two
hundred yards behind. Whatever it was, it had instantly vanished, and
somehow she suddenly felt frightened, more frightened at its
disappearance than its appearance. She began to hurry along the path to
her uncle's residence at a pace that was a little like a run. It was
probably through this sudden acceleration of movement that she seemed to
become aware, rather abruptly, that a man was marching steadily in front
of her along the same track towards the gates of the Governorate.

He was a very large man, and seemed to take up the whole of the narrow
path. She had something of the sensation, with which she was already
slightly acquainted, of walking behind a camel through the narrow and
crooked cracks of the Eastern town. But this man planted his feet as
firmly as an elephant; he walked, one might say, even with a certain
pomp, as if he were in a procession. He wore a long frock-coat and his
head was surmounted by a tower of scarlet, a very tall red fez, rather
taller than the top-hat of Lord Tallboys. The combination of the red
Eastern cap and the black Western clothes is common enough among the
Effendi class in those countries. But somehow it seemed novel and
incongruous in this case, for the man was very fair and had a big blond
beard blown about in the breeze. He might have been a model for the
idiots who talk of the Nordic type of European, but somehow he did not
look like an Englishman. He carried hooked on one finger a rather
grotesque green umbrella or parasol, which he twirled idly like a
trinket. As he was walking slower and slower and Barbara was walking fast
and wanted to walk faster, she could hardly repress an exclamation of
impatience and something like a request for room to pass. The large man
with the beard immediately faced round and stared at her; then he lifted
a monocle and fixed it in his eye and instantly smiled his apologies. She
realized that he must be short-sighted and that she had been a mere blur
to him a moment before, but there was something else in the change of his
face and manner, something that she had seen before, but to which she
could not put a name.

He explained, with the most formal courtesy, that he was going to leave a
note for an official at the Governorate, and there was really no reason
for her to refuse him credence or conversation. They walked a little way
together, talking of things in general, and she had not exchanged more
than a few sentences before she realized that she was talking to a
remarkable man.

We hear much in these days about the dangers of innocence, much that is
false and a little that is true. But the argument is almost exclusively
applied to sexual innocence. There is a great deal that ought to be said
about the dangers of political innocence. That most necessary and most
noble virtue of patriotism is very often brought to despair and
destruction, quite needlessly and prematurely, by the folly of educating
the comfortable classes in a false optimism about the record and security
of the Empire. Young people like Barbara Traill have often never heard a
word about the other side of the story, as it would be told by Irishmen
or Indians or even French Canadians, and it is the fault of their parents
and their papers if they often pass abruptly from a stupid Britishism to
an equally stupid Bolshevism. The hour of Barbara Traill was come, though
she probably did not know it.

"If England keeps her promises," said the man with the beard, frowning,
"there is still a chance that things may be quiet."

And Barbara had answered, like a schoolboy: "England always keeps her
promises."

"The Waba have not noticed it," he answered with an air of triumph.

The omniscient are often ignorant. They are often especially ignorant of
ignorance. The stranger imagined that he was uttering a very crushing
repartee, as perhaps he was, to anybody who knew what he meant. But
Barbara had never heard of the Waba. The newspapers had seen to that.

"The British Government," he was saying, "definitely pledged itself two
years ago to a complete scheme of local autonomy. If it is a complete
scheme, all will be well. If Lord Tallboys has come out here with an
incomplete scheme, a compromise, it will be very far from well. I shall
be very sorry for everybody, but especially for my English friends."

She answered with a young and innocent sneer, "Oh yes-I suppose you are a
great friend of the English."

"Yes," he replied calmly. "A friend: but a candid friend."

"Oh, I know all about that sort," she said with hot sincerity. "I know
what they mean by a candid friend. I've always found it meant a nasty,
sneering, sneaking, treacherous friend."

He seemed stung for an instant and answered, "Your politicians have no
need to learn treachery from the Egyptians." Then he added abruptly: "Do
you know on Lord Jaffray's raid they shot a child? Do you know anything
at all? Do you even know how England tacked on Egypt to her Empire?"

"England has a glorious Empire," said the patriot stoutly.

"England had a glorious Empire," he said. "So had Egypt."

They had come, somewhat symbolically, to the end of their common path and
she turned away indignantly to the gate that led into the private gardens
of the Governor. As she did so he lifted his green umbrella and pointed
with a momentary gesture at the dark line of the desert and the distant
Pyramid. The afternoon had already reddened into evening, and the sunset
lay in long bands of burning crimson across the purple desolation of that
dry inland sea.

"A glorious Empire," he said. "An Empire on which the sun never sets.
Look . . the sun is setting in blood."

She went through the iron gate like the wind and let it clang behind her.
As she went up the avenue towards the inner gardens, she lost a little of
her impatient movement and began to trail along in the rather moody
manner which was more normal to her. The colours and shadows of that
quieter scene seemed to close about her; this place was for the present
her nearest approach to home, and at the end of the long perspective of
gaily coloured garden walks, she could see her sister Olive picking
flowers.

The sight soothed her; but she was a little puzzled about why she should
need any soothing. She had a deeply disquieting sense of having touched
something alien and terrible, something fierce and utterly foreign, as if
she had stroked some strange wild beast of the desert. But the gardens
about her and the house beyond had already taken on a tone or tint
indescribably English, in spite of the recent settlement and the African
sky. And Olive was so obviously choosing flowers to put into English
vases or to decorate English dinner-tables, with decanters and salted
almonds.

But as she drew nearer to that distant figure, it grew more puzzling. The
blossoms grasped in her sister's hand looked like mere ragged and random
handfuls, torn away as a man lying on the turf would idly tear out grass,
when he is abstracted or angry. A few loose stalks lay littered on the
path; it seemed as if the heads had been merely broken off as if by a
child. Barbara did not know why she took in all these details with a slow
and dazed eye, before she looked at the central figure they surrounded.
Then Olive looked up and her face was ghastly. It might have been the
face of Medea in the garden, gathering the poisonous flowers.

II THE BOY WHO MADE A SCENE

BARBARA TRAILL was a girl with a good deal of the boy about her. This is
very commonly said about modern heroines. None the less, the present
heroine would be a very disappointing modern heroine. For, unfortunately,
the novelists who call their heroines boyish obviously know nothing
whatever about boys. The girl they depict, whether we happen to regard
her as a bright young thing or a brazen little idiot, is at any rate in
every respect the complete contrary of a boy. She is sublimely candid;
she is slightly shallow; she is uniformly cheerful; she is entirely
unembarrassed; she is everything that a boy is not. But Barbara really
was rather like a boy. That is, she was rather shy, obscurely
imaginative, capable of intellectual friendships and at the same time of
emotional brooding over them; capable of being morbid and by no means
incapable of being secretive. She had that sense of misfit which
embarrasses so many boys, the sense of the soul being too big to be seen
or confessed, and the tendency to cover the undeveloped emotions with a
convention. One effect of it was that she was of the sort troubled by
Doubt. It might have been religious doubt, at the moment it was a sort of
patriotic doubt, though she would have furiously denied that there was
any doubt about the matter. She had been upset by her glimpse of the
alleged grievances of Egypt or the alleged crimes of England, and the
face of the stranger, the white face with the golden beard and the
glaring monocle, had come to stand for the tempter or the spirit that
denies. But the face of her sister suddenly banished all such merely
political problems. It brought her back with a shock to much more private
problems, indeed to much more secret problems, for she had never admitted
them to anyone but herself.

The Traills had a tragedy, or rather, perhaps, something that Barbara's
brooding spirit had come to regard as the dawn of a tragedy. Her younger
brother was still a boy; it might more truly be said that he was still a
child. His mind had never come to a normal maturity, and though opinions
differed about the nature of the deficiency, she was prone in her black
moods to take the darkest view and let it darken the whole house of
Tallboys. Thus it happened that she said quickly, at the sight of her
sister's strange expression: "Is anything wrong about Tom?"

Olive started slightly, and then said, rather crossly than otherwise:
"No, not particularly. . . . Uncle has put him with a tutor here, and
they say he's getting on better. . . . Why do you ask? There's nothing
special the matter with him."

"Then I suppose," said Barbara, "that there is something special the
matter with you."

"Well," answered the other, "isn't there something the matter with all of
us?"

With that she turned abruptly and went back towards the house, dropping
the flowers she had been making a pretence of gathering, and her sister
followed, still deeply disturbed in mind.

As they came near the portico and veranda, she heard the high voice of
her uncle Tallboys, who was leaning back in a garden chair and talking to
Olive's husband, the Deputy Governor. Tallboys was a lean figure with a
large nose and ears standing out from his stalk of a head; like many men
of that type he had a prominent Adam's apple and talked in a
full-throated gobbling fashion. But what he said was worth listening to,
though he had a trick of balancing one clause against another, with
alternate gestures of his large, loose hands, which some found a trifle
irritating. He was also annoyingly deaf. The Deputy Governor, Sir Harry
Smythe, was an amusing contrast, a square man with a rather congested
face, the colour high under the eyes, which were very light and clear,
and two parallel black bars of brow and moustache, which gave him rather
a look of Kitchener, until he stood up and looked stunted by the
comparison. It also gave him a rather misleading look of bad temper, for
he was an affectionate husband and a good-humoured comrade, if a rather
stubborn party man. For the rest the conversation was enough to show that
he had a military point of view, which is sufficiently common and even
commonplace.

"In short," the Governor was saying, "I believe the Government scheme is
admirably adapted to meet a somewhat difficult situation. Extremists of
both types will object to it, but extremists object to everything."

"Quite so," answered the other, "the question isn't so much whether they
object as whether they can make themselves objectionable."

Barbara, with her new and nervous political interests, found herself
interrupted in her attempt to listen to the political conversation by the
unwelcome discovery that there were other people present. There was a
very beautifully dressed young gentleman, with hair like black satin, who
seemed to be the local secretary of the Governor; his name was Arthur
Meade. There was an old man with a very obvious chestnut wig and a very
unobvious, not to say inscrutable yellow face, who was an eminent
financier known by the name of Morse. There were various ladies of the
official circle who were duly scattered among these gentlemen. It seemed
to be the tail-end of a sort of afternoon tea, which made all the more
odd and suspicious the strange behaviour of the only hostess, in straying
to the other garden and tearing up the flowers. Barbara found herself set
down beside a pleasant old clergyman with smooth, silver hair, and an
equally smooth, silver voice, who talked to her about the Bible and the
Pyramids. She found herself committed to the highly uncomfortable
experience of pretending to conduct one conversation while trying to
listen to another.

This was the more difficult because the Rev. Ernest Snow, the clergyman
in question, had (for all his mildness) not a little gentle pertinacity.
She received a confused impression that he held very strong views on the
meaning of certain Prophecies in connection with the end of the world and
especially with the destiny of the British Empire. He had that habit of
suddenly asking questions which is so unkind to the inattentive listener.
Thus, she would manage to hear a scrap of the talk between the two rulers
of the province, the Governor would say, balancing his sentences with his
swaying hands: "There are two considerations and by this method we meet
them both. On the one hand, it is impossible entirely to repudiate our
pledge. On the other hand, it is absurd to suppose that the recent
atrocious crime does not necessarily modify the nature of that pledge. We
can still make sure that our proclamation is a proclamation of a
reasonable liberty. We have therefore decided--"

And then, at that particular moment, the poor clergyman would pierce her
consciousness with the pathetic question: "Now how many cubits do you
think that would be?"

A little while later she managed to hear Smythe, who talked much less
than his companion, say curtly: "For my part, I don't believe it makes
much difference what proclamations you make. There are rows here when we
haven't got sufficient forces, and there are no rows when we have got
sufficient forces. That's all."

"And what is our position at present?" asked the Governor gravely.

"Our position is damned bad, if you ask me," grumbled the other in a low
voice. "Nothing has been done to train the men; why, I found the rifle
practice consisted of a sort of parlour game with a pea-shooter about
twice a year. I've put up proper rifle butts beyond the olive walk there
now, but there are other things. The munitions are not--"

"But in that case," came the mild but penetrating voice of Mr. Snow, "in
that case what becomes of the Shunamites?"

Barbara had not the least idea what became of them, but in this case she
felt she could treat it as a rhetorical question. She forced herself to
listen a little more closely to the views of the venerable mystic, and
she only heard one more fragment of the political conversation.

"Shall we really want all these military preparations?" asked Lord
Tallboys rather anxiously. "When do you think we shall want them?"

"I can tell you," said Smythe with a certain grimness. "We shall want
them when you publish your proclamation of reasonable liberty."

Lord Tallboys made an abrupt movement in the garden chair, like one
breaking up a conference in some irritation; then he made a diversion by
lifting a finger and signalling to his secretary Mr. Meade, who slid up
to him and after a brief colloquy slid into the house. Released from the
strain of State affairs, Barbara fell once more under the spell of the
Church and the Prophetical Office. She still had only a confused idea of
what the old clergyman was saying, but she began to feel a vague element
of poetry in it. At least it was full of things that pleased her fancy
like the dark drawings of Blake, prehistoric cities and blind and stony
seers and kings who seemed clad in stone like their sepulchres the
Pyramids. In a dim way she understood why all that stony and starry
wilderness has been the playground of so many cranks. She softened a
little towards the clerical crank and even accepted an invitation to his
house on the day after the following, to see the documents and the
definite proof about the Shunamites. But she was still very vague about
what it was supposed to prove.

He thanked her and said gravely: "If the prophecy is fulfilled now, there
will be a grave calamity."

"I suppose," she said with a rather dreary flippancy, "if the prophecy
were not fulfilled, it would be an even greater calamity."

Even as she spoke there was a stir behind some of the garden palms and
the pale and slightly gaping face of her brother appeared above the
palm-leaves. The next moment she saw just behind him the secretary and
the tutor; it was evident that his uncle had sent for him. Tom Traill had
the look of being too big for his clothes, which is not uncommon in the
otherwise undeveloped; the gloomy good looks which he would otherwise
have shared with his branch of the family were marred by his dark,
straight hair being brushed crooked and his habit of looking out the
corner of his eye at the corner of the carpet. His tutor was a big man of
a dull and dusty exterior, apparently having the name of Hume. His broad
shoulders were a little bowed like those of a drudge, though he was as
yet hardly middle-aged. His plain and rugged face had a rather tired
expression, as well it might. Teaching the defective is not always a
hilarious parlour game.

Lord Tallboys had a brief and kindly conversation with the tutor. Lord
Tallboys asked a few simple questions. Lord Tallboys gave a little
lecture on education, still very kindly, but accompanied by the waving of
the hands in rotation. On the one hand, the power to work was a necessity
of life and could never be wholly evaded. On the other hand, without a
reasonable proportion of pleasure and repose even work would suffer. On
the one hand . . it was at this point that the Prophecy was apparently
fulfilled and a highly regrettable Calamity occurred at the Governor's
tea-party.

For the boy burst out abruptly into a sort of high, gurgling crow and
began to flap his hands about like the wings of a penguin, repeating over
and over again, "On the one hand. On the other hand. On the one hand. On
the other hand. On the one hand. On the other hand. . . . Golly!"

"Tom!" cried Olive on a sharp accent of agony and there was a ghastly
silence over all the garden.

"Well," said the tutor in a reasonable undertone, which was as clear as a
bell in that stillness, "you can't expect to have three hands, can you?"

"Three hands?" repeated the boy, and then after a long silence, "Why, how
could you?"

"One would have to be in the middle, like an elephant's trunk," went on
the tutor in the same colourless, conversational tone. "Wouldn't it be
nice to have a long nose like an elephant so that you could turn it this
way and that and pick up things on the breakfast-table, and never let go
of your knife and fork?"

"Oh, you're mad!" ejaculated Tom with a sort of explosion that had a
queer touch of exultation.

"I'm not the only mad person in the world, old boy," said Mr. Hume.

Barbara stood staring as she listened to this extraordinary conversation
in that deadly silence and that highly unsuitable social setting. The
most extraordinary thing about it was that the tutor said these crazy and
incongruous things with an absolutely blank face.

"Didn't I ever tell you," he said in the same heavy and indifferent
voice, "about the clever dentist who could pull out his own teeth with
his own nose? I'll tell you tomorrow."

He was still quite dull and serious; but he had done the trick. The boy
was distracted from his dislike of his uncle by the absurd image, just as
a child in a temper is distracted by a new toy. Tom was now only looking
at the tutor and followed him everywhere with his eyes. Perhaps he was
not the only member of his family who did so. For the tutor, Barbara
thought, was certainly a very odd person.

There was no more political talk that day, but there was not a little
political news on the next. On the following morning proclamations were
posted everywhere announcing the just, reasonable and even generous
compromise which His Majesty's Government was now offering as a fair and
final settlement of the serious social problems of Polybia and eastern
Egypt. And on the following evening the news went through the town in one
blast, like the wind of the desert, that Viscount Tallboys, Governor of
Polybia, had been shot down by the last of the line of olives, at the
corner of the wall.

III THE MAN WHO COULD NOT HATE

IMMEDIATELY after leaving the little garden-party, Tom and his tutor
parted for the evening, for the former lived at the Governorate, while
the latter had a sort of lodge or little bungalow higher up on the hill
behind amid the taller trees. The tutor said in private what everybody
had indignantly expected him to say in public, and remonstrated with the
youth for his display of imitative drama.

"Well, I won't like him," said Tom warningly. "I'd like to kill him. His
nose sticks out."

"You can hardly expect it to stick in," said Mr. Hume mildly. "I wonder
whether there's an old story about the man whose nose stuck in."

"Is there?" demanded the other in the literal spirit of infancy.

"There may be tomorrow," replied the tutor and began to climb the steep
path to his abode.

It was a lodge built mostly of bamboo and light timber with a gallery
running round outside, from which could be seen the whole district spread
out like a map. The grey and green squares of the Governorate building
and grounds; the path running straight under the low garden wall and
parallel to the line of villas; the solitary sycamore breaking the line
at one point and farther along the closer rank of the olive-trees, like a
broken cloister, and then another gap and then the corner of the wall,
beyond which spread brown slopes of desert, patched here and there with
green, where the ground was being turfed as part of some new public works
or the Deputy Governor's rapid reforms in military organization. The
whole hung under him like a vast coloured cloud in the brief afterglow of
the Eastern sunset; then it was rapidly rolled in the purple gloom in
which the strong stars stood out over his head and seemed nearer than the
things of earth.

He stood for some moments on the gallery looking down on the darkening
landscape, his blunt features knotted in a frown of curious reflection.
Then he went back into the room where he and his pupil had worked all
day, or where he had worked to induce his pupil to consider the idea of
working. It was a rather bare room and the few objects in it rather odd
and varied. A few bookshelves showed very large and gaily coloured books
containing the verses of Mr. Edward Lear, and very small and shabby books
containing the verses of the principal French and Latin poets. A rack of
pipes, all hanging crooked, gave the inevitable touch of the bachelor; a
fishing-rod and an old double-barrelled gun leaned dusty and disused in a
corner; for it was long ago that this man, in other ways so remote from
the sports of his countrymen, had indulged those two hobbies, chiefly
because they were unsociable. But what was perhaps most curious of all,
the desk and the floor were littered with geometrical diagrams treated in
a manner unusual among geometers, for the figures were adorned with
absurd faces or capering legs, such as a schoolboy adds to the squares
and triangles on the blackboard. But the diagrams were drawn very
precisely, as if the draughtsman had an exact eye and excelled in
anything depending on that organ.

John Hume sat down at his desk and began to draw more diagrams. A little
later he lit a pipe, and began to study those he had drawn, but he did
not leave his desk or his preoccupations. So the hours went by amid an
unfathomable stillness around that hillside hermitage, until the distant
strains of a more or less lively band floated up from below, as a signal
that a dance at the Governorate was already in progress. He knew there
was a dance that night and took no notice of it; he was not sentimental,
but some of the tunes stirred almost mechanical memories. The Tallboys
family was a little old-fashioned, even for this rather earlier time.
They were old-fashioned in not pretending to be any more democratic than
they were. Their dependents were dependents, decently treated; they did
not call themselves liberal because they dragged their sycophants into
society. It had therefore never crossed the mind of the secretary or the
tutor that the dance at the Governorate was any concern of theirs. They
were also old-fashioned in the arrangements of the dance itself, and the
date must also be allowed for. The new dances had only just begun to
pierce, and nobody had dreamed of the wild and varied freedom of our new
fashion, by which a person has to walk about all night with the same
partner to the same tune. All this sense of distance, material and moral,
in the old swaying waltzes moved through his subconsciousness and must be
allowed for in estimating what he suddenly looked up and saw.

It seems for one instant as if, in rising through the mist, the tune had
taken outline and colour and burst into his room with the bodily presence
of a song, for the blues and greens of her patterned dress were like
notes of music and her amazing face came to him like a cry, a cry out of
the old youth he had lost or never known. A princess flying out of
fairyland would not have seemed more impossible than that girl from that
ballroom, though he knew her well enough as the younger sister of his
charge, and the ball was a few hundred yards away. Her face was like a
pale face burning through a dream and itself as unconscious as a
dreamer's, for Barbara Traill was curiously unconscious of that mask of
beauty fixed on her brooding boyish soul. She had been counted less
attractive than her sisters and her sulks had marked her almost as the
ugly duckling. Nothing in the solid man before her told of the shock of
realization in his mind. She did not even smile. It was also
characteristic of her that she blurted out what she had to say at once,
almost as crudely as her brother: "I'm afraid Tom is very rude to you,"
she said. "I'm very sorry. How do you think he is getting on?"

"I think most people would say," he said slowly at last, "that I ought to
apologize for his schooling more than you for his family. I'm sorry about
his uncle, but it's always a choice of evils. Tallboys is a very
distinguished man and can look after his own dignity, but I've got to
look after my charge. And I know that is the right way with him. Don't
you be worried about him. He's perfectly all right if you understand him,
and it's only a matter of making up for lost time."

She was listening, or not listening, with her characteristic frown of
abstraction; she had taken the chair he offered her apparently without
noticing it and was staring at the comical diagrams, apparently without
seeing them. Indeed, it might well have been supposed that she was not
listening at all, for the next remark she made appeared to be about a
totally different subject. But she often had a habit of thus showing
fragments of her mind, and there was more plan in the jigsaw puzzle than
many people understood. Anyhow, she said suddenly, without lifting her
eyes from the ludicrous drawing in front of her: "I met a man going to
the Governorate today. A big man with a long, fair beard and a single
eyeglass. Do you know who he is? He said all sorts of horrid things
against England."

Hume got to his feet with his hands in his pockets and the expression of
one about to whistle. He stared at the girl and said softly: "Hullo! Has
he turned up again? I thought there was some trouble coming. Yes, I know
him-they call him Dr. Gregory, but I believe he comes from Germany,
though he often passes for English. He is a stormy petrel, anyhow; and
wherever he goes there's a row. Some say we ought to have used him
ourselves; I believe he once offered his talents to our Government. He's
a very clever fellow and knows a frightful lot of the facts about these
parts."

"Do you mean," she said sharply, "that I'm to believe that man and all
the things he said?"

"No," said Hume. "I shouldn't believe that man; not even if you believe
all the things he said."

"What do you mean?" she demanded.

"Frankly, I think he is a thoroughly bad egg," said the tutor. "He's got
a pretty rotten reputation about women; I won't go into details, but he'd
have gone to prison twice but for suborning perjury. I only say, whatever
you may come to believe, don't believe in him."

"He dared to say that our Government broke its word," said Barbara
indignantly.

John Hume was silent. Something in his silence affected her like a
strain, and she said quite irrationally: "Oh, for the Lord's sake say
something! Do you know he dared to say that somebody on Lord Jaffray's
expedition shot a child? I don't mind their saying England's cold and
hard and all that; I suppose that's natural prejudice. But can't we stop
these wild, wicked lies?"

"Well," replied Hume rather wearily, "nobody can say that Jaffray is cold
and hard. The excuse for the whole thing was that he was blind drunk."

"Then I am to take the word of that liar!" she said fiercely.

"He's a liar all right," said the tutor gloomily. "And it's a very
dangerous condition of the Press and the public, when only the liars tell
the truth."

Something of a massive gravity in his grim humour for the moment
overpowered her breathless resentment, and she said in a quieter tone:
"Do you believe in this demand for self-government?"

"I'm not very good at believing," he said. "I find it very hard to
believe that these people cannot live or breathe without votes, when they
lived contentedly without them for fifty centuries when they had the
whole country in their own hands. A Parliament may be a good thing; a
top-hat may be a good thing; your uncle certainly thinks so. We may like
or dislike our top-hats. But if a wild Turk tells me he has a natural
born right to a top-hat, I can't help answering: 'Then why the devil
didn't you make one for yourself?'"

"You don't seem to care much for the Nationalists either," she said.

"Their politicians are often frauds, but they're not alone in that.
That's why I find myself forced into an intermediate position, a sort of
benevolent neutrality. It simply seems to be a choice between a lot of
blasted blackguards and a lot of damned drivelling, doddering idiots. You
see I'm a Moderate."

He laughed a little for the first time, and his plain face was suddenly
altered for the better. She was moved to say in a more friendly tone:
"Well, we must prevent a real outbreak. You don't want all our people
murdered."

"Only a little murdered," he said, still smiling. "Yes, I think I should
like some of them rather murdered. Not too much, of course; it's a
question of a sense of proportion."

"Now you're talking nonsense," she said, "and people in our position
can't stand any nonsense. Harry says we may have to make an example."

"I know," he said. "He made several examples when he was in command here,
before Lord Tallboys came out. It was vigorous-very vigorous. But I think
I know what would be better than making an example."

"And what is that?"

"Setting an example," said Hume. "What about our own politicians?"

She said suddenly: "Well, why don't you do something yourself?"

There was a silence. Then he drew a deep breath. "Ah, there you have me.
I can't do anything myself. I am futile; naturally and inevitably futile.
I suffer from a deadly weakness."

She felt suddenly rather frightened; she had encountered his blank and
empty eyes.

"I cannot hate," he said. "I cannot be angry."

Something in his heavy voice seemed full of quality, like the fall of a
slab of stone on a sarcophagus; she did not protest, and in her
subconsciousness yawned a disappointment. She half realized the depth of
her strange reliance and felt like one who had dug in the desert and
found a very deep well, and found it dry.

When she went out on to the veranda the steep garden and plantation were
grey in the moon, and a certain greyness spread over her own spirit, a
mood of fatalism and of dull fear. For the first time she realized
something of what strikes a Western eye in Eastern places as the
unnaturalness of nature. The squat, limbless growth of the prickly pear
was not like the green growths of home, springing on light stalks to
lovely flowers like butterflies captured out of air. It was more like the
dead blind bubbling of some green, squalid slime: a world of plants that
were as plain and flat as stones. She hated the hairy surface of some of
the squat and swollen trees of that grotesque garden; the tufts here and
there irritated her fancy as they might have tickled her face. She felt
that even the big, folded flowers, if they opened, would have a foul
fragrance. She had a latent sense of the savour of faint horror, lying
over all as lightly as the faint moonshine. Just as it had chilled her
most deeply, she looked up and saw something that was neither plant nor
tree, though it hung as still in the stillness, but it had the unique
horror of a human face. It was a very white face, but bearded with gold
like the Greek statues of gold and ivory, and at the temples were two
golden curls, that might have been the horns of Pan.

For the moment that motionless head might indeed have been that of some
terminal god of gardens. But the next moment it had found legs and came
to life, springing out upon the pathway behind her. She had already gone
some distance from the hut and was not far from the illuminated grounds
of the Governorate, whence the music swelled louder as she went.
Nevertheless, she swung round and faced the other way, looking
desperately at the figure she recognized. He had abandoned his red fez
and black frock-coat and was clad completely in white, like many tropical
trippers, but it gave him in the moonlight something of the silver touch
of a spectral harlequin. As he advanced he screwed the shining disk into
his eye and it revealed in a flash the faint memory that had always
escaped her. His face in repose was calm and classic and might have been
the stone mask of Jove rather than Pan. But the monocle gathered up his
features into a sneer and seemed to draw his eyes closer together; and
she suddenly saw that he was no more a German than an Englishman. And
though she had no Anti-Semitic prejudice in particular, she felt somehow
that in that scene there was something sinister in a fair Jew, as in a
white negro.

"We meet under a yet more beautiful sky," he said; she hardly heard what
else he said. Broken phrases from what she had heard recently tumbled
through her mind, mere words like "reputation" and "prison", and she
stepped back to increase the distance, but moving in the opposite
direction from which she had come. Afterwards she hardly remembered what
had happened; he had said other things; he had tried to stop her, and an
instantaneous impression of crushing and startling strength, like a
chimpanzee, surprised her into a cry. Then she stumbled and ran, but not
in the direction of the house of her own people.

Mr. John Hume got out of his chair more quickly than was his wont and
went to meet someone who stumbled up the stair without.

"My dear child," he said, and put a hand on her shaking shoulder, giving
and receiving a queer thrill like a dull electric shock. Then he went,
moving quickly past her. He had seen something in the moonlight beyond
and without descending the steps, sprang over the rail to the ground
below, standing waist-high in the wild and tangled vegetation. There was
a screen of large leaves waving to and fro between Barbara and the rapid
drama that followed, but she saw, as in flashes of moonlight, the tutor
dart across the path of the figure in white and heard the shock of blows
and saw a kick like a catapult. There was a wheel of silver legs like the
arms of the Isle of Man, and then out of the dense depth of the lower
thicket a spout of curses in a tongue that was not English, nor wholly
German, but which shrieked and chattered in all the Ghettoes of the
world. But one strange thing remained even in her disordered memory; that
when the figure in white had risen tottering and turned to plunge down
the hill, the white face and the furious gesture of malediction were
turned, not towards the assailant, but towards the house of the Governor.

The tutor was frowning ponderously as he came again up the veranda steps,
as if over some of his geometrical problems. She asked him rather wildly
what he had done and he answered in his heavy voice: "I hope I half
killed him. You know I am in favour of half measures."

She laughed rather hysterically and cried: "You said you could not be
angry."

Then they suddenly became very stiff and silent and it was with an almost
fatuous formality that he escorted her down the slope to the very doors
of the dancing-rooms. The sky behind the green pergolas of foliage was a
vivid violet or some sort of blue that seemed warmer than any red; and
the furry filaments of the great tree-trunks seemed like the quaint
sea-beasts of childhood, which could be stroked and which unfolded their
fingers. There was something upon them both beyond speech or even
silence. He even went so far as to say it was a fine night.

"Yes," she answered, "it is a fine night"; and felt instantly as if she
had betrayed some secret.

They went through the inner gardens to the gate of the vestibule, which
was crowded with people in uniform and evening dress. They parted with
the utmost formality; and that night neither of them slept.


IV THE DETECTIVE AND THE PARSON

IT was not until the following evening, as already noted, that the news
came that the Governor had fallen by a shot from an unknown hand. And
Barbara Traill received the news later than most of her friends, because
she had departed rather abruptly that morning for a long ramble amid the
ruins and plantations of palm, in the immediate neighbourhood. She took a
sort of picnic basket with her, but light as was her visible luggage, it
would be true to say that she went away to unpack upon a large scale. She
went to unfold a sort of invisible impedimenta which had accumulated in
her memories, especially her memories of the night before. This sort of
impetuous solitude was characteristic of her, but it had an immediate
effect which was rather fortunate in her case. For the first news was the
worst, and when she returned the worst had been much modified. It was
first reported that her uncle was dead; then that he was dying; finally
that he had only been wounded and had every prospect of recovery. She
walked with her empty basket straight into the hubbub of discussion about
these things, and soon found that the police operations for the discovery
and pursuit of the criminal were already far advanced. The inquiry was in
the hands of a hard headed, hatchet-faced officer named Hayter, the chief
of the detective force; who was being actively seconded by young Meade,
the secretary of the Governor. But she was rather more surprised to find
her friend the tutor in the very centre of the group, being questioned
about his own recent experiences.

The next moment she felt a strange sort of surge of subconscious
annoyance, as she realized the subject-matter of the questions. The
questioners were Meade


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