I had forgotten the lau, of Dinkas describe it as having which I had heard rumours a bunch of tentacles on its from time to time. The Sudan, head, a thick wiry net of hairs it seemed, had its pterodactyl, which it darts out to entangle too. I told them about the the bird or fish it feeds on." legendary beast of the Jiundu swamp and Bliss' proposed expedition. "Or man," said Tubby. "I think I shall give the lau a miss. I don't fancy being "Do you mean Pygmy stalked by one. Not my idea Bliss? "The man who bought the dinosaur's egg?" of shikar.' The general verdict of the table, I think, was: Difficult "A bit touched in the head, to dismiss as untrue. isn't he?" Scatters and Tubby went off "A tough nut, I should early to Ranelagh; Boomer think." had a train to catch; and I I had not realised Uncle was left alone with Rowlandson, Bliss' notoriety. "I wonder if there is anything in it," Scatters reflected. "Bliss' beast and the lau may be cousins." Rowlandson thought there was. There is hardly a corner of Africa where you don't hear some yarn of the kind. You remember the story of the brontosaurus which was supposed to haunt Katanga? And there is the flying reptile of the Libyan desert known to the Senussi as the issula, own brother perhaps to Herodotus' winged snake. But it is generally in swamp forest like that Jiundu morass you mentioned. Much the same country, I should think, as the lau's habitat, difficult to explore. It would be exactly the kind of place you would find a prehistoric survival. If any exists." "The natives all seem to agree about it," Scatters said. "Yes; there is plenty of presumptive evidence. The who treated me to one of his jeremiads on game extermination. In five years there wouldn't be a Giant Eland left in the Sudan. That was cattle disease. But the curse of the country were the Yanks and Cockneys. Cook's tourists. They get fitted up in Khartum, rifles and everything. All they had to do was to walk on board. "I saw a steamer a party had hired, gramophones on deck, tables laid out with sandwiches and short drinks, English-speaking boys, broadcasting apparatus. And the beggars pepper elephants and giraffes from the deck, fire into the brown. I believe they carried a machine-gun. What's the good of game preservation laws?! The most thumping fine is about as much use as a sick headache. The profiteer pays up smiling. The other day Government confiscated and auctioned a fellow's heads and skins. He bought them in. Six months' quod in Khartum gaol is what they want." Rowlandson gulped down his cognac and lighted another cigar. 'Well, good-bye, Clayton. I must be off. Got an appointment with Ward. Good luck with the Board. I hope we go out on the same steamer together." I still had half an hour before I need leave the club. I had been as happy as a lord at lunch, as if I were already back in it all-the mud, the sand, the sun, the mosquitoes, the flies. The glamour of the Sudan was revived. I kept the thought of the Board under a tight valve. The undercurrent of misgiving was like an ache which one forgets when one is excited. Duncan had disturbed my contentment with the vegetable existence more than any of them. When Rowlandson left, I thought I would go up to the library and look up his line of pilgrimage on the map. I was a bit vague about the lie of Falata and Bornu. But I found the stairs a serious proposition. I had to stop and rest at each flight as if somebody had tied a weight to my legs. Had Chimbashi got in a Parthian shot? By the time I reached the top I was certain of it. I remembered that the Board met in a room at the top of another three flights of stairs, and that there was no lift. Obviously strategy demanded a slow and cautious approach if I was going to arrive with VOL. CCXVIII.—NO. MCCCXIX. my pulse in order and all my breath. So I left the club without satisfying my curiosity about Duncan's itinerary. Now I come to think of it, I have never repaired that omission. For in the next quarter of an hour the thing happened which made it necessary to rearrange my future completely, and Angela's, and the children's. There was no bluffing the medicos. The Board decided that the Sudan was out of the question. They prescribed a temperate climate, a very uninteresting diet, and the negation of all but the mildest activities. So that was that. I could imagine Chimbashi grinning in his glass case. A In the train I reviewed the situation, my mind revolving like a caged squirrel. Up and down, round and round. whirligig of emotions. One of the sensations that kept coming up was relief. No more suspense. The thing was settled. I had been trying to fool myself into the idea that I was fit for work. I suppose I had known all the time that I was not, but it was the Board's business, not mine, to discover that. In the meanwhile, with the aid of the philosophic portcullis trick, I had been chewing the lotus contentedly all these months. "I'll put my stake on red," I had said. 'If black turns up, what does it matter? Why fuss?' Still the financial side of it was rather a poser. How were we going to live? I should N 2 have a small commuted pension, probably in a lump sum. We should have to sell Homersfield, of course. Then there were Angela's shares. Amalgamated Moonstones. A bit shaky, but she insisted on her 7 per cents. They brought her in £47 a year, less income tax. Now, I supposed, they could not make us pay income tax, as we had no income. Silver lining No. 1. And what should we do then? What do people do when they have used up their capital and find themselves on the unemployed list? There must be thousands in our place, with even less to fall back upon. They would probably think us rich. Yet they managed to knock along somehow. This was a mystery which had often puzzled me. People talked casually of the workhouse as a refuge, but I could not think of any one I knew personally except a few philosophic Homersfield friends who had been reduced to living in one. The train pulled up opposite I reckoned it all up. We should have less than three hundred a year. We might live on that in France, if we were careful, with exchange at eighty. The Board had advised the south of France. a murky-lighted street, rows I could not see myself and Angela going the round of Dax and Ax and Aix with the Brebis. In the Riviera, of course, living would be too dear. Besides, we both hated it. The Basque coast appealed to us more, but I had heard that it was getting just as expensive, or worse. Still, there were other gites, and France would be the very thing for the children's education. By Jove that reminded me. We should have to leave Miss Seamore behind. Silver lining No. 2. France was an attractive idea, but after a year or two the children would have to go to school; then the fees would eat up the whole of our income. That would mean living on capital. How many years would it be before we had spent it all? After more involved calculations I worked it out at eight, possibly nine. of mean dismal little houses all exactly alike. I had never explored slum realities, but the word tenement called up an alarming picture. The squirrel in its cage started its revolutions again. Up and down, round and round. I remembered a recipe an optimist once gave me for the compression of hump. I will not answer for its morality, or even its efficacy. One had to count up one's escapes by thinking of people less happy than oneself. Item: the tobacconist's assistant in his upright coffin in the Underground. Item: the teacher in a Spanish school. Item: the prisoner in the condemned cell waiting to hanged. Item: the Chinaman in his Sorrow Cage. There were worse things than being penniless. One might be tortured, or burnt, or periodically chastised, or bored, suffer other barbarous treat Angela, of course, was angelic. She didn't wait for me to tell her. She knew. I am afraid she embraced me on the platform. "I am so glad," she said; "I couldn't bear to think of you going back to that horrid Sudan.' ment until one's affections and and a silhouette of the reappetites were slowly atrophied. surrected Joan. Angela was Maupassant has a story of a on the platform. There was peasant woman who bullied no need to break it to her. and starved her husband when My forced grin was enough. he became too weak to work and earn wages. In some countries when one ceases to be useful to Society, one is put away. Or one might be blind. Imagine not being able to see Angela! Or lose one's curiosity, or one's interest in the interior life. By the time we got to Renton Parva I was beginning to think myself an uncommonly lucky person. Angela and the kids were as fit as three trivets. After all, it is not much fun trying to do things when you don't feel up to it. There were hundreds of books I wanted to read, and I could sit down to it now. French literature alone; I had hardly touched it. And I could work up medieval history. I might get some publisher to give me translating work. As we drew into Homersfield I saw the lamps of the dog-cart in the station yard Silver lining No. 3. We had left the station lights behind when I heard her say something about Miss Seamore and finding her a new place. "I suppose we ought not to be glad," she murmured. Then she prepared me for bad news. "Amalgamated Moonstones. I had a letter this morning. They are not paying dividends." Poor Angela. 'You didn't go and see Chimbashi ? she asked me, after a silence so pregnant that I knew what was coming. "I did," I admitted. It just showed. But Angela was much too chivalrous to say so. XII. THE SIMPLE LIFE AT NURIEN. The exodus from Homers- old friends of the Sellingers, field was not the dismal event I had feared. The thing I dreaded most was the sale of the place and the warehousing of the things we could not bring ourselves to sell, but we were able to let the house instead of selling it, so in name at least it was still ours. The Whittakers, our tenants, very kept Jessie and the cook, and her treasures. There were not going to be any children, or dogs. And Whittaker was a bibliophile, so our books were safe. To Val and Irene, of course, who had few memories of ends, the exodus meant very little. Their only cross was that they wanted to take their museum to France, but had to leave it behind. I sympathised with Miss Seamore when she received their airy good-byes. But partings of this kind rarely have any significance for children. A week, or a month, or a year, mean much the same thing. We had let the house for four years, and they quite thought we were coming back again. Anyhow, the excitement of travel left no room for homesickness. I was still young enough to wish that one could look out of both windows of the train at the same time, and the children were old enough to enjoy the "furriness of it. I remembered my own schoolboy holidays in France. At Nurien everything was strange. Not only the people. Even the dogs were different, in the way they walked and in the way they looked at you, a sort of Gallic consciousness, as different from English dogs as Frenchmen from Englishmen. The French horse, with its strange headgear and collar exalted like a horn, no doubt had a French way of thinking. And the smells were not the same. That early morning smell of the streets, a fragrant blend of newly-ground coffee and caporal, mingled with the exhalations of the boulangerie, was new and delicious. Val remarked on the absence of pillar-boxes and policemen. It was delightful to go to the tobacconist's for stamps instead of the post-office, and to watch the old lady serving other old ladies-who were sometimes bearded-with snuff over the counter; and on the way to peer into the halfMoorish wistaria-hung courtyard with its stone troughs like fonts, and oleanders planted in tubs under the balconies; or to explore the cobbled alleys which led down steps and through arches to the stream where the washerwomen beat clothes on flat stones. The out-of-doors laundry, with its public washing, seemed an expression of the agreeable intimacy of the easy-going responsive Nurienais. The children soon made friends. There was Henri, the pharmacien's son, who knew a few words of English, and wanted to acquire more, or to parade those he already had; and M. Bruneteau, the notaire, whom Val found fishing, and who ducted him into the art of catching trout with the gentle asticot. He became an occasional visitor with other acquaintances Irene and Val picked up in odd places, among whom whom was M. Minicot, the dwarf, but he only came to the window, like a bird. in Dwarfs, and other human freaks, added to the excitement of Nurien. The first |