tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76565776332067829472024-03-19T14:10:51.622-07:00POSP AppendixThis is for reference ONLY...NOT for comments. For comments please refer to original essay that is linked.Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-89352397493876743512011-01-16T16:48:00.000-08:002011-01-17T15:19:49.882-08:00"No Exit"<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No Exit</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jean-Paul Sartre</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (enters, accompanied by the VALET, and glances around him) So here we are? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, Mr. Garcin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And this is what it looks like? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Second Empire furniture, I observe... Well, well, I dare say one gets used to it in time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Some do, some don't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are all the rooms like this one? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How could they be? We cater for all sorts: Chinamen and Indians, for instance. What use would they have for a Second Empire chair? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And what use do you suppose I have for one? Do you know who I was?...Oh, well, it's no great matter. And, to tell the truth, I had quite a habit of living among furniture that I didn't relish, and in false positions. I'd even come to like it. A false position in a Louis-Philippe dining room-- you know the style?--well, that had its points, you know. Bogus in bogus, so to speak. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And you'll find that living in a Second Empire drawing-room has its points. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Really?...Yes, yes, I dare say...Still I certainly didn't expect-- this! You know what they tell us down there? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What about? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > About...this- er--residence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Really, sir, how could you believe such cock-and-bull stories? Told by people who'd never set foot here. For, of course, if they had-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Quite so. But I say, where are the instruments of torture? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The racks and red-hot pincers and all the other paraphernalia? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah, you must have your little joke, sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > My little joke? Oh, I see. No, I wasn't joking. No mirrors, I notice. No windows. Only to be expected. And nothing breakable. But damn it all, they might have left me my toothbrush! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's good! So you haven't yet got over your--what-do-you-call-it?--sense of human dignity? Excuse my smiling. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll ask you to be more polite. I quite realize the position I'm in, but I won't tolerate... </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Sorry, sir. No offense meant. But all our guests aske me the same questions. Silly questions, if you'll pardon my saying so. Where's the torture-chamber? That's the first thing they ask, all of them. They don't bother their heads about the bathroom requisites, that I can assure you. But after a bit, when they've got their nerve back, they start in about their toothbrushes and what-ot. Good heavens, Mr. Garcin, can't you use your brains? What, I ask you, would be the point of brushing your teeth? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, of course you're right. And why shouild one want to see oneself in a looking-glass? But that bronze contraption on the mantelpiece, that's another story. I suppose there will be times when I stare my eyes out at it. Stare my eyes out--see what I mean?...All right, let's put our cards on the table. I assure you I'm quite conscious of my position. Shall I tell you what it feels like? A man's drowning, choking, sinking by inches, till only his eyes are just above water. And what does he see? A bronze atrocity by-- what's the fellow's name?--Barbedienne. A collector's piece. As in a nightmare. That's their idea, isn't it?...No, I suppose you're under orders not to answer questions; and I won't insist. But don't forget, my man, I've a good notion of what's coming to me, so don't you boast you've caught me off my guard. I'm facing the situation, facing it. So that's that; no toothbrush. And no bed, either. One never sleeps, I take it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's so. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Just as I expected. WHY should one sleep? A sort of drowsiness steals on you, tickles you behind the ears, and you feel your eyes closing-- but why sleep? You lie down on the sofa and-- in a flash, sleep flies away. Miles and miles away. So you rub your eyes, get up, and it starts all over again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Romantic, that's what you are. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Will you keep quiet, please! ...I won't make a scene, I shan't be sorry for myself, I'll face the situation, as I said just now. Face it fairly and squarely. I son't have it springing at me from behind, before I've time to size it up. And you call that being "romantic!" So it comes to this; one doesn't need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn't sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn't it? Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? ...Ah, I see; it's life without a break. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What are you talking about? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Your eyelids. We move ours up and down. Blinking, we call it. It's like a small black shutter that clicks down and makes a break. Everything goes black; one's eyes are moistened. You can't imagine how restful, refreshing, it is. Four thousand little rests per hour. Four thousand little respites--just think!...So that's the idea. I'm to live without eyelids. Don't act the fool, you know what I mean. No eyelids, no sleep; it follows, doesn't it? I shall never sleep again. But then--how shall I endure my own company? Try to understand. You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's a second nature with me-- and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely. But I can't go on doing that without a break. Down there I had my nights. I slept. I always had good nights. By way of compensation, I suppose. And happy little dreams. There was a green field. Just an ordinary field. I used to stroll in it...Is it daytime now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Can't you see? The lights are on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah, yes, I've got it. It's your daytime. And outside? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Outside? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Damn it, you know what I mean. Beyond that wall. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's a passage. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And at the end of the passage? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's more rooms, more passages, and stairs. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And what lies beyond them? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's all. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But surely you have a day off sometimes. Where do you go? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To my uncle's place. He's the head valet here. He has a room on the third floor. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I should have guessed as much. Where's the light-switch? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There isn't any. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? Can't one turn off the light? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, the management can cut off the current if they want to. But I can't remember their having done so on this floor. We have all the electricity we want. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So one has to live with one's eyes open all the time? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To live, did you say? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't let's quibble over words. With one's eyes open. Forever. Always broad daylight in my eyes-- and in my head. And suppose I took that contraption on the mantelpiece and dropped it on the lamp-- wouldn't it go out? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You can't move it. It's too heavy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're right. It's too heavy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Very well, sir, if you don't need me any more, I'll be off. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? You're going? Wait. That's a bell, isn't it? And if I ring, you're bound to come? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, yes, that's so-- in a way. But you can never be sure about that bell. There's something wrong with the wiring, and it doesn't always work. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's working all right. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So it is. But I shouldn't count on it too much if I were you. It's-- capricious. Well, I really must go now. Yes, sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, never mind. What's this? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Can't you see? An ordinary paper-knife. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are there books here? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then what's the use of this? Very well. You can go. (Garcin is by himself. He goes to the bronze ornament and strokes it reflectively. He sits down; then gets up, goes to the bell-push, and presses the button. The bell remains silent. He tries two or three times, without success. Then he tries to open the door, also without success. He calls the VALET several times, but gets no result. He beats the door with his fists, still calling. Suddenly he grows calm and sits down again. At the same moment the door opens and INEZ enters, followed by the VALET) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you call, sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (About to answer "yes", but sees INEZ and says) No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This is your room, madam. If there's any information you require--? Most of our guests have quite a lot to ask me. But I won't insist. Anyhow, as regards the toothbrush, and the electric bell, and that thing on the mantelshelf, this gentleman can tell you anything you want to know as well as I could. We've had a little chat, him and me. (Exits.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where's Florence? Didn't you hear? I asked you about Florence. Where is she? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I haven't an idea. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah, that's the way it works, is it? Torture by separation. Well, as far as I'm concerned, you won't get anywhere. Florence was a tiresome little fool, and I shan't miss her in the least. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg your pardon. Who do you suppose I am? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You? Why, the torturer, of course. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, that's a good one! Too comic for words. I the torturer! So you came in, had a look at me, and thought I was--er--one of the staff. Of course, it's that silly fellow's fault; he should have introduced us. A torturer indeed! I'm Joseph Garcin, journalist and man of letters by profession. And as we're both in the same boat, so to speak, might I ask you, Mrs.--? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not "Mrs." I'm unmarried. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Right. That's a start, anyway. Well, now that we've broken the ice, do you really think I look like a torturer? And, by the way, how does one recognize torturers when one sees them? Evidently you've ideas on the subject. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They look frightened. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Frightened? But how ridiculous! Of whom should they be frightened? Of their victims? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Laugh away, but I know what I'm talking about. I've often watched my face in the glass. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the glass? How beastly of them! They've removed everything in the least resembling a glass. Anyhow, I can assure you I'm not frightened. Not that I take my position lightly; I realize its gravity only too well. But I'm not afraid. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's your affair. Must you be here all the time, or do you take a stroll outside, now and then? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The door's locked. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh!.. That's too bad. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I can quite understand that it bores you having me here. And I too--well, quite frankly, I'd rather be alone. I want to think things out, you know; to set my life in order, and one does that better by oneself. But I'm sure we'll manage to pull along together somehow. I'm no talker, I don't move much; in fact I'm a peaceful sort of fellow. Only, if I may venture on a suggestion, we should make a point of being extremely courteous to each other. That will ease the situation for us both. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm not polite. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then I must be polite for two. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Your mouth! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg your pardon. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Can't you keep your mouth still? You keep twisting it about all the time. It's grotesque. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So sorry. I wasn't aware of it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's just what I reproach you with. Ther you are! You talk about politeness, and you don't even try to control your face. Remember you're not alone; you've no right to inflict the sight of your fear on me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How about you? Aren't you afraid? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What would be the use? There was some point in being afraid before, while one still had hope. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's no more hope--but it's still "before." We haven't yet begun to suffer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's so. Well? What's going to happen? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. I'm waiting. (Enter ESTELLE with the VALET. She looks at GARCIN whose face is still hidden by his hands.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. Don't look up. I know what you're hiding with your hands. I know you've no face left. What! But I don't know you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm not the torturer, madam. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I never thought you were. I --I thought someone was trying to play a rather nasty trick on me. Is anyone else coming? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, madam. No one else is coming. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh! Then we're to stay by ourselves, the three of us, this gentleman, this lady and myself. (laughs.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's nothing to laugh about. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's those sofas. They're so hideous. ANd justlook how they've been arranged. It makes me think of New Year's Day--when I used to visit that boring old aunt of mine, Aunt Mary. Her house is full of horror like that...I suppose each of us has a sofa of his own. Is that one mine? But you can't expect me to sit on that one. It would be too horrible for words. I'm in pale blue and it's vivid green. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Would you prefer mine? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That claret-colored one, you mean? That's very sweet of you, but really- no, I don't think it'd be so much better. What's the good of worrying, anyhow? We've got to take what comes to us, and I'll stick to the green one. The only one which might do at a pinch, is that gentleman's. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you hear, Mr. Garcin? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh-- the sofa, you mean. So sorry. Please take it, madam. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Thanks. Well, as we're to live together, I suppose we'd better introduce ourselves. My name's Rigault. Estelle Rigault. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And I'm Inez Serrano. Very pleased to meet you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Joseph Garcin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >VALET:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you require me any longer? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, you can go. I'll ring when I want you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're very pretty. I wish we'd had some flowers to welcome you with. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Flowers? Yes, I loved flowers. Only they'd fade so quickly here, wouldn't they? It's so stuffy. Oh, well, the great thing is to keep as cheerful as we can, don't you agree? Of course, you, too, are-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. Last week. What about you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm-- quite recent. Yesterday. As a matter of act, the ceremony's not quite over. The wind's blowing my sister's veil all over the place. She's trying her best to cry. Come, dear! Make another effort. That's better. Two tears, two little tears are twinkling under the black veil. Oh dar! What a sight Olga looks this morning! She's holding my sister's arm, helping her along. She's not crying, and I don't blame her, tears always mess one's face up, don't they? Olga was my bosom friend, you know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you suffer much? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. I was only half conscious, mostly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What was it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pneumonia. It's over now, they're leaving the cemetery. Good-by. Good-by. Quite a crowd they are. My husband's stayed at home. Prostrated with grief, poor man. How about you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The gas stove. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And you, Mr. Garcin? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIA:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Twelve bullets through my chest. Sorry! I fear I'm not good company among the dead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Please, please don't use that word. It's so--so crude. In terribly bad taste, really. It doesn't mean much, anyhow. Somehow I feel we've never been so much alive as now. If we've absolutely got to mention this--this state of things, I suggest we call ourselves--wait!--absentees. Have you been--been absent for long? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > About a month. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where do you come from? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > From Rio. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm from Paris. Have you anyone left down there? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, my wife. She's waiting at the entrance of the barracks. She comes there every day. But they won't let her in. Now she's trying to peep between the bars. She doesn't yet know I'm-- absent, but she suspects it. Now she's going away. She's wearing her black dress. So much the better, she won't need to change. She isn't crying, but she never did cry, anyhow. It's a bright, sunny day and she's like a black shadow creeping down the empty street. Those big tragic eyes of hers-- with that martyred look they always had. Oh, how she got on my nerves! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estelle! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Please, Mr. Garcin! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're sitting on my sofa. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg your pardon. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You looked so--so far away. Sorry I disturbed you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was setting my life in order. You may laugh but you'd do better to follow my example. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No need. My life's in perfect order. It tidied itself up nicely of its own accord. So I needn't bother about it now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Really? You imagine it's so simple as that. Whew! How hot it is here! Do you mind if-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How dare you! No, please don't. I loathe men in their shirt-sleeves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All right. Of course, I used to spend my nights in the newspaper office, and it was a regular Black Hole, so we never kept our coats on. Stiflingly hot it could be. Stifling, that it is. It's night now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's so. Olga's undressing; it must be after midnight. How quickly the time passes, on earth! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, after midnight. They've sealed up my room. It's dark, pitch-dark, and empty. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They've strung their coats on the backs of the chairs and rolled up their shirt-sleeves above the elbow. The air stinks of men and cigar-smoke. I used to like living among men in their shirt-sleeves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, in that case our tastes differ. That's all it proves. What about you? Do you like men in their shirt-sleeves? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, I don't care much for men any way. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Really I can't imagine why they put us three together. It doesn't make sense. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's that you said? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm looking at you two and thinking that we're going to live together...It's so absurd. I expected to meet old friends, or relatives. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, a charming old friend-- with a hole in the middle of his face. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, him too. He danced the tango so divinely. Like a professional...But why, why should we of all people be put together? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A pure fluke, I should say. They lodge folks as they can, in the order of their coming. Why are you laughing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Because you amuse me with your "flukes."As if they left anything to chance! But I suppose you've got to reassure yourself somehow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I wonder, now. Don't you think we may have met each other at some time in our lives? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Never. I shouldn't have forgotten you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Or perhaps we have friends in common. I wonder if you know the Dubois-Seymours? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not likely. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But everyone went to their parties. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's their job? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, they don't do anything. But they have a lovely house in the country, and hosts of people visit them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I didn't. I was a post-office clerk. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah, yes... Of course, in that case-- And you, Mr. Garcin? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've never met. I always lived in Rio. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then you must be right. It's mere chance that has brought us together. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Mere chance? Then it's by chance this room is furnished as we see it. It's an accident that the sofa on the right is a livid green, and that one on the left's wine-red. Mere chance? Well, just try to shift the sofas and you'll see the difference quick enough. And that statue on the mantelpiece, do you think it's there by accident? And what about the heat here? How about that? I tell you they've thought it all out. Down to the last detail. Nothing was left to chance. This room was all set for us. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But really! Everything here's so hideous; all in angles, so uncomfortable. I always loathed angles. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And do you think I lived in a Second Empire drawing-room? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So it was all fixed up beforehand? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. And they've put us together deliberately. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then it's not mere chance that you precisely are sitting opposite me? But what can be the idea behind it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ask me another! I only know they're waiting. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, do it. Do it if you can. You don't even know what they expect. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's outrageous! So something's coming to me from you two? Something nasty, I suppose. There are some faces that tell me everything at once. Yours don't convey anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look here! Why are we together? You've given us quite enough hints, you may as well come out with it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But I know nothing, absolutely nothing about it. I'm as much in the dark as you are. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've got to know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If only each of us had the guts to tell-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estelle! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What have you done? I mean, why have they sent you here? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's just it. I haven't a notion, not the foggiest. In fact, I'm wondering if there hasn't been some ghastly mistake. Don't smile. Just think of the number of people who-who become absentees every day. There must be thousands and thousands, and probably they're sorted out by-- by understrappers, you know what I mean. Stupid employees who don't know their job. So they're bound to make mistakes sometimes... Do stop smiling. Why don't you speak? If they made a mistake in my case, they may have done the same about you. And you, too. Anyhow, isn't it better to think we've got here by mistake? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is that all you have to tell me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What else should I tell? I've nothing to hide. I lost my parents when I was a kid, and I had my young brother to bring up. We were terribly poor and when an old friend of my people asked me to marry him I said yes. He was very well off, and quite nice. My brother was a very delicate child and needed all sorts of attention, so really that was the right thing for me to do, don't you agree? My husband was old enough to be my father, but for six years we had a happy married life. Then two years ago I met the man I was fated to love. We knew it the moment we set eyes on each other. He asked me to run away with him, and I refused. Then I got pneumonia and it finished me. That's the whole story. No doubt, by certain standards, I did wrong to sacrifice my youth to a man nearly three times my age. Do you think that could be called a sin? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Certainly not. And now, tell me, do you think it's a crime to stand by one's principles? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of course not. Surely no one could blame a man for that! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait a bit! I ran a pacifist newspaper. Then war broke out. What was I to do? Everyone was watching me, wondering: "Will he dare?" Well, I dared. I folded my arms and they shot me. Had I done anything wrong? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wrong? On the contrary. You were-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > --a hero! And how about your wife, Mr. Garcin? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's simple. I'd rescued her from-- from the gutter. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You see! You see! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, I see. Look here! What' s the point of play-acting, trying to throw dust in each other's eyes? We're all tarred with the same brush. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How dare you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, we are criminals-- murderers-- all three of us. We're in hell, my pets; they never make mistakes, and people aren't damned for nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Stop! For heaven's sake-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In hell! Damned souls-- that's us, all three! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Keep quiet! I forbid you to use such disgusting words. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A damned soul-- that's you, my little plaster saint. And ditto our friend there, the noble pacifist. We've had our hour of pleasure, haven't we? There have been people who burned their lives out for our sakes-- and we chuckled over it. So now we have to pay the reckoning. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Will you keep your mouth shut, damn it! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, well! Ah, I understand now. I know why they've put us three together. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I advise you to-- to think twice before you say any more. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait! You'll see how simple it is. Childishly simple. Obviously there aren't any physical torments-- you agree, don't you? And yet we're in hell. And no one else will come here. We'll stay in this room together, the three of us, for ever and ever...In short, there's someone absent here, the official torturer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'd noticed that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's obvious what they're after-- an economy of man-power-- or devil-power, if you prefer. The same idea as in the cafeteria, where customers serve themselves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Whatever do you mean? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, I shall never be your torturer. I wish neither of you any harm, and I've no concern with you. None at all. So the solution's easy enough; each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others. You here, you here, and I there. Like soldiers at our posts. Also, we mustn't speak. Not one word. That won't be difficult; each of us has plenty of material for self-communings. I think I could stay ten thousand years with only my thoughts for compnay. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Have I got to keep silent, too? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. And that way we--we'll work out our salvation. Looking into ourselves, never raising our heads. Agreed? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Agreed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I agree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then--good-by. (Inez sings to herself while Estelle has been plying her powder-puff and lipstick. She looks round for a mirror, fumbles in her bag, then turns toward Garcin.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Excuse me, have you a glass? Any sort of glass, a pocket-mirror will do. (Garcin remains silent.) Even if you won't speak to me, you might lend me a glass. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't worry. I've a glass in my bag. It's gone! They must have taken it from me at the entrance. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How tiresome! (Estelle shuts her eyes and sways, as if about to faint. Inez runs forward and holds her up.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's the matter? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I feel so queer. Don't you ever get taken that way? When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself-- in my mind. Painfully conscious. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah yes, in your mind. But everything that goes on in one's head is os vague, isn't it? It makes one want to sleep. I've six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don't see me. They're reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window-- but how empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent! When I talked to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me...Oh dear! My lipstick! I'm sure I've put it on all crooked. No, I can't do wihtout a looking-glass for ever and ever. I simply can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Suppose I try to be your glass? Come and pay me a visit, dear. Here's a place for you on my sofa. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But--(points to Garcin) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, he doesn't count. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But we're going to --to hurt each other. You said it yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do I look as if I wanted to hurt you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One never can tell. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Much more likely YOU'LL hurt ME. Still, what does it matter? If I've got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands. Sit down. Come closer. Closer. Look into my eyes. What do you see? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, I'm there! But so tiny I can't see myself properly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But I can. Every inch of you. Now ask me questions. I'll be as candid as any looking-glass. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Please, Mr. Garcin. Sure our chatter isn't boring you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't worry about him. As I said, he doesn't count. We're by ourselves...Ask away. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are my lips all right? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Show! No, they're a bit smudgy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I thought as much. Luckily no one's seen me. I'll try again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's better. No. Follow the line of your lips. Wait!! I'll guide your hand. There. That's quite good. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As good as when I came in? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Far better. Crueler. Your mouth looks quite diabolical that way. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Good gracious! And you say you like it! How maddening, not being able to see for myself! You're quite sure, Miss Serrano, that it's all right now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Won't you call me Inez? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Aree you sure it looks all right? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're lovely, Estelle. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But how can I rely upon your taste? Is it the same as my taste? Oh, how sickening it all is, enough to drive one crazy! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I HAVE your taste, my dear, because I like you so much. Look at me. No, straight. Now smile. I'm not so ugly, iether. Am I not nicer than your glass? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, I don't know. Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And why shouldn't you "tame"me? Listen! I want you to call me Inez. We must be great friends. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't make friends with women very easily. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not with postal clerks, you mean? Hullo, what's that-- that nasty red spot at the bottom of your cheek? A pimple? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A pimple? Oh, how simply foul! Where! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There...You know the way the catch larks-- with a mirror? I'm your lark-mirror, my dear, and you can't escape me...There isn't any pimple, not a trace of one. So what about it? Suppose the mirror started telling lies? Or suppose I covered my eyes--as he is doing-- and refused to look at you, all that loveliness of yours would be wasted on the desert air. No, don't be afraid, I can't help looking at you. I shan't turn my eyes away. And I'll be nice to you, ever so nice. Only you must be nice to me, too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are you really-- attracted by me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Very much indeed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But I wish he'd notice me too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of course! Because he's a MAN! You've won. But look at her, damn it! Don't pretend. You haven't missed a word of what we've said. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Quite so; not a word. I stuck my fingers in my ears, but your voices thudded in my brain. Silly chatter. Now will you leave me in peace, you two? I'm not interested in you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not in me, perhaps--but how about this child? Aren't you interested in her? Oh, I saw through your game; you got on your high horse just to impress her. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I asked you to leave me in peace. There's someone talking about me in the newspaper office and I want to listen. And, if it'll make you any happier, let me tell you that I've no use for the "child," as you call her. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Thanks. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, I didn't mean it rudely. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You cad! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So that's that. You know I begged you not to speak. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's her fault; she started. I didn't ask anything of her and she came and offered me her-her glass. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So you say. But all the time you were making up to him, trying every trick to catch his attention. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, why shouldn't I? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're crazy, both of you. Don't you see where this is leading us? For pity's sake, keep your mouths shut. Now let's all sit down again quite quietly; we'll look at the floor and each must try to forget the others are there. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out-- but you can't prevent your being there. Can you stop your thoughts? I hear them ticking away like a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and I'm certain you hear mine. It's all very well skulking on your sofa, but you're everywhere, and every sound comes to me soiled because you've intercepted it on its way. Why, you've even stolen my face; you know it and I don't ! And what about her, about Estelle? You've stolen her from me, too; if she and I were alone do you suppose she'd treat me as she does? No, take your hands from your face, I won't leave you in peace-- that would suit your book too well. You'd go on sitting there, in a sort of trance, like a yogi, and even if I didn't see her I'd feel it in my bones-- that she was making every sound, even the rustle of her dress, for your benefit, throwing you smiles you didn't see.... Well, I won't stand for that, I prefer to choose my hell; I prefer to look you in the eyes and fight it out face to face. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Have it your own way. I suppose we were bound to come to this; they knew what they were about, and we're easy game. If they'd put me in a room with men-- men can keep their mouths shut. But it's no use wanting the impossible. So I attract you, little girl? (Fondles her.) It seems you were making eyes at me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't touch me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? We might, anyhow, be natural... Do you know, I used to be mad about women? And some were fond of me. So we may as well stop posing, we've nothing to lose. Why trouble about politeness, and decorum, and the rest of it? We're between ourselves. And presently we shall be naked as -- as newborn babes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, let me be! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As newborn babes. Well, I'd warned you, anyhow. I asked so little of you, nothing but peace and a little silence. I'd put my fingers in my ears. Gomez was spouting away as usual, standing in the center of the room, with all the pressmen listening. In their shirt-sleeves. I tried to hear, but it wasn't easy. Things on earth move so quickly, you know. Couldn't you have held your tongues? Now it's over, he's stopped talking, and what he thinks of me has gone back into his head. Well, we've got to see it through somehow...Naked as we were born. So much the better; I want to know whom I have to deal with. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You know already. There's nothing more to learn. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're wrong. So long as each of us hasn't made a clean breast of it-- why they've damned him or her-- we know nothing. Nothing that counts. You, young lady, you shall begin. Why? Tell us why. If you are frank, if we bring our specters into the open, it may save us from disaster. So- out with it! Why? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you I haven't a notion. They wouldn't tell me why. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's so. They wouldn't tell me, either. But I've a pretty good idea... Perhaps you're shy of speaking first? Right. I'll lead off. I'm not a very estimable person. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No need to tell us that. We know you were a deserter. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let that be. It's only a side-issue. I'm here because I treated my wife abominably. That's all. For five years. Naturally, she's suffering still. There she is: the moment I mention her, I see her. It's Gomez who interests me, and it's she I see. Where's Gomez got to? For five years. There! They've given her back my things; she's sitting by the window, with my coat on her knees. The coat with the twelve bullet-holes. The blood's like rust; a brown ring round each hole. It's quite a museum-piece, that coat; scarred with history. And I used to wear it, fancy! ... Now, can't you shed a tear, my love! Surely you'll squeeze one out-- at last? No? You can't manage it? ... Night after night I came home blind drunk, stinking of wine and women. She'd sat up for me, of course. But she never cried, never uttered a word of reproach. Only her eyes spoke. Big, tragic eyes. I don't regret anything. I must pay the price, but I shan't whine.... It's snowing in the street. Won't you cry, confound you? That woman was a born martyr, you know; a victim by vocation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why did you hurt her like that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It was so easy. A wored was enough to make her flinch. Like a sensitive-plant. But never, never a reproach. I'm fond of teasing. I watched and waited. But no, not a tear, not a protest. I'd picked her up out of the gutter, you understand...Now she's stroking the coat. Her eyes are shut and she's feeling with her fingeres for the bullet-holes. What are you after? What do you expect? I tell you I regret nothing. The truth is, she admired me too much. Does that mean anything to you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. Nobody admired me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So much the better. So much the better for you. I suppose all this trikes you as very vague. Well, here's something hou can get your teeth into. I brought a half-caste girl to stay in our house. My wife slept upstairs; she must have heard-- everything. She was an early riser and, as I and the girl stayed in bed late, she served us our morning coffee. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You brute! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, a brute, if you like. But a well-beloved brute. (Far-away look comes to his eyes.) No, it's nothing. Only Gomez, and he's not talking about me... What were you saying? Yes, a brute. Certainly. Else why should I be here? Your turn. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, I was what some people down there called " a damned bitch." Damned already. So it's no surprise, being here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is that all you have to say? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. There was that affair with Florence. A dead men's tale. With three corpses to it. He to start with; the she and I. So there's no oneleft. I've nothing to worry about; it was a aclean sweep. Only that room. I see it now and then. Empty, with the doors locked.... No, they've just unlocked them. "To Let." It's to let; there's a notice on the door. that's -- too ridiculous. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Three. Three deaths, you said? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Three. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One man and two women? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, well. Did he kill himself? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He? No, he hadn't the guts for that. Still, he'd every reason; we led him a dog's life. As a matter of fact, he was run over by a tram. A silly sort of end... I was living with them; he was my cousin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Was Florence fair? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Fair? You know, I don't regret a thing; still, I'm not so very keen on telling you the story. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's all right..... So you got sick of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Quite gradually. All sorts of little things got on my nerves. For instance, he made a noise when he was drinking-- a sort of gurgle. Trifles like that. He was rather pathetic really. Vulnerable. Why are you smiling? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Because I, anyhow, am not vulnerable. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't be too sure... I crept inside her skin, she saw the world through my eyes. When she left him, I had her on my hands. We shared a bed-sitting-room at the other end of the town. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And then? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then that tram did its job. I used to remind her every day: "Yes, my pet, we killed him between us." I'm rather cruel, really. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So am I. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, you're not cruel. It's something else. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll tell you later. When I say I'm cruel, I mean I can't get on without making people suffer. Like a live coal. A livek coal in others' hearts. When I'm alone I flicker out. For six months I flamed away in her heart, till there was nothing but a cinder. One night she got up and turned on the gas while I was asleep. Then she crept back into bed. So now you know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well! Well! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes? What's in your mind? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing. Only that it's not a pretty story </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Obviously. But what matter? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As you say, what matter? Your turn. What have you done. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As I told you, I haven't a notion. I rack my brain, but it's no use. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Right. Then we'll give you a hand. That fellow with the smashed face, who was he? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who-- who do you mean? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You know quite well. The man you were so scared of seeing when you came in. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, him! A friend of mine. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why were you afraid of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's my business, Mr. Garcin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did he shoot himself on your account? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of course not. How absurd you are! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then why should you have been so scared? He blew his brains out, didn't he? That's how his face got smashed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't! Please don't go on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Because of you. Because of you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He shot himself because of you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Leave me alone! It's -- it's not fair, bullying me like that. I want to go! I want to go! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Go if you can. Personally, I ask for nothing better. Unfortunately the door's locked. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're hateful, both of you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Hateful? Yes, that's the word. Now get on with it. That fellow who killed himself on your account-- you were his mistress, eh? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of course she was. And he wanted to have her to himself alone. That's so, isn't it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He danced the tango like a professional, but he was poor as a church mouse-- that's right, isn't it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Was he poor or not? Give a straight answer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, he was poor. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And then you had your reputation to keep up. One day he came and implored you to run away with him, and you laughed in his face. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's it. You laughed at him. And so he killed himself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > DId you use to look at Florence in that way? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You've got it all wrong, you two. He wanted me to have a baby. So there! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And you didn't want one? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I certainly didn't. But the baby came, worse luck. I went to Switzerland for five months. No one knew anything. It was a girl. Roger was with me when she was born. It pleased him no end, having a daughter. It didn't please me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And then? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There was a balcony overlooking the lake. I brought a big stone. He could see what I was up to and he kept on shouting: "Estelle, for God's sake, don't!" I hated him then. He saw it all. He was leaning over the balcony and he saw the rings spreading on the water-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes? And then? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's all. I came back to Paris-- and he did as he wished. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You mean he blew his brains out? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It was absurd of him, really, my husband never suspected anything. Oh, how I loathe you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing doing. Tears don't flow in this place. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm a coward. A coward! If you knew how I hate you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Poor child! So the hearing's over. But there's no need to look like a hanging judge. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A hanging judge? I'd give a lot to be able to see myself in a glass. How hot it is! (Takes off coat.) Oh, sorry! (Puts it on again.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't bother. You can stay in your shirt-sleeves. As things are-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Just so. You mustn't be angry with me, Estelle. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm not angry with you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And what about me? Are you angry with me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, Mr. Garcin, now you have us in the nude all right. Do your understand things any better for that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I wonder. Yes, perhaps a trifle better. And now I suppose we start trying to help each other. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't need help. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Inez, they've laid their snare damned cunningly-- like a cobweb. If you make any movement, if you raise your hand to fan yourself, Estelle and I feel a little tug. Alone, none of us can save himself or herslf; we're linked together inextricably. So you can take your choice. Hullo? What's happening? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They've let it. The windows are wide open, a man is sitting on my bed. MY bed, if you please! They've let it, let it! Step in, step in, make yourself at home, you brute! Ah, there's a woman, too. She's going up to him, putting her hands on his shoulders...Damn it, why don't they turn the lights on? It's getting dark. Now he's going to kiss her. But that's my room, MY room! Pitch-dark now. I can't see anything, but I hear them whispering, whispering. Is he going to make love to her on MY bed?What's that she said? That it's noon and the sun is shining? I must be going blind. Blacked out. I can't see or hear a thing. So I'm done with the earth, it seems. No more alibis for m! I feel so empty, desiccated-- really dead at last. All of me's here, in this room. What were you saying? Something about helping me, wasn't it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Helping me to do what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To defeat their devilish tricks. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And what do you expect me to do in return? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To help ME. It only needs a little effort, Inez; just a spark of human feeling. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Human feeling. That's beyond my range. I'm rotten to the core. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And how about me? All the same, suppose we try? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's no use. I'm all dried up. I can't give and I can't receive. How could I help you? A dead twig, ready for the burning. FLorence was fair, a natural blonde. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do your realize that this young woman's fated to be your torturer? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps I've guessed it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's through her they'll get you. I, of course, I'm different-- aloof. I take no notice of her. Suppose you had a try-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's a trap. They're watching you, to see if you'll fall into it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I know. And you're another trap. Do you think they haven't foreknown every word you say? And of course there's a whole nest of pitfalls that we can't see. Everything here's a booby-trap. But what do I care? I'm a pitfall, too. For her, obviously. And perhaps I'll catch her. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You won't catch anything. We're chasing after each other, round and round in a vicious circle, like the horses on a roundabout. That's part of their plan, of course... Drop it, Inez. Open your hands and let go of everything. Or else you'll bring disaster on all three of us. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do I look the sort of person who lets go? I know what's coming to me. I'm going to burn, and it's to last forever. Yes, I KNOW everything. But do you think I'll let go? I'll catch her, she'll see you through my eyes, as Florence saw that other man. What's the good of trying to enlist my sympathy? I assure you I know everything, and I can't feel sorry even for myself. A trap! Don't I know it, and that I'm in a trap myself, up to the neck, and there's nothing to be done about it? ANd if it suits their book, so much the better! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, I, anyhow, can feel sorry for you, too. Look at me, we're naked, naked right through, and I can see into your heart. That's one link between us. Do you think I'd want to hurt you? I don't regret anything, I'm dried up, too. But for you I can still feel pity. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't. I hate being pawed about. And keep your pity for yourself. Don't forget, Garcin, that there are traps for you, too, in this room. ALl nicely set for you. You'd do better to watch your own interests. But, if you will elave us in peace, this child and me, I'll see I don't do you any harm. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Very well. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Please, Garcin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do you want of me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You can help ME, anyhow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If you want help, apply to her. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I implore you, Garcin-- you gave me your promise, didn't you? Help me quick. I don't want to be left alone. Olga's taken him to a cabaret. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Taken whom? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Peter....Oh, now they're dancing together. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who's Peter? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Such a silly boy. He called me his glancing stream-- just fancy! He was terribly in love with me... She's persuaded him to come out with her tonight. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you love him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They're sitting down now. She's puffing like a grampus. What a fool the girl is to insist on dancing! But I dare say she does it to reduce...No, of course I don't love him. He's only eighteen, and I'm not a baby-snatcher. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then why bother about them? What difference does it make? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He belonged to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing on earth belongs to you any more. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you he was mine. All mine. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, he was yours-- once. But now---try to make him hear, try to touch him. Olga can touch him, talk to him as much as she likes. That's so, isn't it? She can squeeze his hands, rub herself against him-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, look! She's pressing her great fat chest against him, puffing and blowing his his face. But, my poor little lamb, can't you see how ridiculous she is? Why don't you laugh at her? Oh, once I'd have only had to glance at them and she'd have slunk away. Is there really nothing, nothing left of me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing whatever. Nothing of you's left on earth-- not even a shadow. All you own is here. Would you like that paper-knife? Or that ornament on the mantelpiece? That blue sofa's yours. And I, my dear, am yours forever. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You mine! That's good! Well, which of you two would dare to call me his glancing stream, his crystal girl? You know too much about me, you know I'm rotten through and through... Peter, dear, think of me, fix your thoughts on me, and save me. All the time you're thinking "my glancing stream, his crystal girl," I'm only half here. I'm only half wicked, and half of me is down there with you, clean and bright and crystal-clear as running water...Oh, just look at her face, all scarlet, like a tomato. No, it's absurd, we've laughed at her together, you and I, often and often... What's that tune? -- I always loved it. Yes, the "St. Louis Blues"....All right, dance away, dance away. Garcin, I wish you could see her, you'd die of laughing.Only--she'll never know I SEE her. Yes, I see you, Olga, with your hair all anyhow, and you do look like a dope, my dear. Oh, now you're treading on his toes. It's a scream! Hurry up! Quicker! Quicker! He's dragging her along, bundling her round and round-- it's too ghastly! He always said I was so light, he loved to dance with me. I tell you, Olga, I can see you. No, she doesn't care, she's dancing through my gaze. What's that? What's that you said? "Our poor dear Estelle"? Oh, don't be such a humbug! You didn't even shed a tear at the funeral... And she has the nerve to talk to him about her poor dear friend Estelle! How dare she discuss me with Peter? Now then, keep time. She never could dance and talk at once. Oh, what's that? No, no. Don't tell him. Please, please don't tell him. You can keep him, do what you like with him, but please don't tell him about-- that! All right. You can have him now. Isn't it FOUL, Garcin? She's told him everything, about Roger, my trip to Switzerland, the baby. "Poor Estelle wasn't exactly--" "No, I wasn't exactly--- True enough. He's looking grave, shaking his head, but he doesn't seem so much surprised, not what one would expect. Keep him then-- I won't haggle with you over his long eyelashes, his pretty girlish face. They're yours for the asking. His glancing stream, his crystal. Well, the crystal's shattered into bits. "Poor Estelle!" Dance, dance, dance. On with it. But do keep time. One, two. One, two. How I'd love to go down to earth for just a moment, and dance with him again. The music's growing fainter. They've turned down the lights, as they do for a tango. Why are they playing so softly? Louder, please. I can't hear. It's so far away, so far away. I--I can't hear a sound. All over. It's the end. The earth has left me. Don't turn from me-- please. Take me in your arms. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Now then, Garcin! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's to her you should say that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't turn away. You're a man, aren't you, and surely I'm not a fright as all that! Everyone says I've lovely hair and after all, a man killed himself on my account. You have to look at something, and there's nothing here to see except the sofas and that awful ornament and the table. Surely I'm better to look at that an lot of stupid furniture. Listen! I've dropped out of their heart like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart--and you'll see how nice I can be. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you it's to that lady you should speak. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To her? But she doesn't count, she's a woman. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, I don't count? Is that what you think? But, my poor little fallen nestling, you've been sheltering in my heart for ages, though you didn't realize it. Don't be afraid; I'll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you'll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A sunbeam indeed! Don't talk such rubbish! You've tried that trick already, and you should know it doesn't work. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estelle! My glancing stream! My crystal! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > YOUR crystal? It's grotesque. Do you think you can fool me with that sort of talk? Everyone know by now what I did to my baby. The crystal's shattered, but I don't care. I'm just a hollow dummy, all that's left of me is the outside -- but it's not for you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come to me, Estelle. You shall be whatever you like: a glancing stream, a muddy stream. And deep down in my eyes you'll see yourself just as you want to be. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, leave me in peace. You haven't any eyes. Oh, damn it, isn't there anything I can do to get rid of you? I've an idea. (Spits in Garcin's face.) There! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Garcin, you shall pay for this. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So it's a man you need? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not any man. You. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No humbug now. Any man would do your business. As I happen to be here, you want me. Right! Mind, I'm not your sort at all, really; I'm not a young nincompoop and I don't dance the tango. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll take you as you are. And perhaps I shall change you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I doubt it. I shan't pay much attention; I've other things to think about. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What things? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They wouldn't interest you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll sit on your sofa and wait for you to take some notice of me. I promise not to bother you at all. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's right, fawn on him, like the silly bitch you are. Grovel and cringe! And he hasn't even good looks to commend him! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't listen to her. She has no eyes, no ears. She's -- nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll give you what I can. It doesn't amount to much. I shan't love you; I know you too well. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you want me, anyhow? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I ask no more. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In that case-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estelle! Garcin! You must be going crazy. You're not alone. I'm here too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of course-- but what does it matter? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Under my eyes? You couldn't-- couldn't do it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? I often undressed with my maid looking on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let her alone. Don't paw her with your dirty man's hands. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Take care. I'm no gentleman, and I'd have no compunction about striking a woman. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But you promised me; you promised. I'm only asking you to keep your word. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why should I, considering you were the first to break our agreement? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Very well, have it your own way. I'm the weaker party, one against two. But don't forget I'm here, and watching. I shan't take my eyes off you, Garcin; when you're kissing her, you'll feel them boring into you. Yes, have it your own way, make love and get it over. We're in hell; my turn will come. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Now then. Your lips. Give me your lips. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Really! Didn't I tell you not to pay attention to her? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You've got it wrong. It's Gomez; he's back in the press-room. They've shut the windows; it must be winter down there. Six months since I--Well, I warned you I'd be absent-minded sometimes, didn't I? They're shivering, they've kept their coats on. Funny they should feel the cold like that, when I'm feeling so hot. Ah, this time he's talking about me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is it going to last long? You might at least tell me what he's saying. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing. Nothing worth repeating. He's a swine, that's all. A god-damned bloody swine. Let's come back to-- to ourselves. Are you going to love me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I wonder now! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Will you trust me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What a quaint thing to ask! Considering you'll be under my eyes all the time, and I don't think I've much to fear from Inez, so far as you're concerned. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Obviously. I was thinking of another kind of trust. Talk away, talk away, you swine. I'm not there to defend myself. Estelle, you MUST give me your trust. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, what a nuisance you are! I'm giving you my mouth, my arms, my whole body-- and everything could be so simple... My trust! I haven't any to give, I'm afraid, and you're making me terribly embarrassed. You must have something pretty ghastly on your conscience to make such a fuss about my trusting you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They shot me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I know. Because you refused to fight. Well, why shouldn't you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I--I didn't exactly refuse. I must say he talks well, he makes out a good case against me, but he never says what I should have done instead. Should I have gone to the general and said: "General, I decline to fight"? A mug's game; they'd have promptly locked me up. But I wanted to show my colors, my true colors, do you understand? I wasn't going to be silenced. So I--I took the train.... They caught me at the frontier. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where were you trying to go? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To Mexico. I meant to launch a pacifist newspaper down there. Well, why don't you speak? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What could I say? You acted quite rightly, as you didn't want to fight. But, darling, how on earth can I guess what you want me to answer? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Can't you guess? Well, I can. He wants you to tell him that he bolted like a lion. For "bolt" he did, and that's what biting him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > "Bolted," "went away,"-- we won't quarrel over words. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But you had to run away. If you'd stayed they'd have sent you to jail, wouldn't they? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of course. Well, Estelle, am I a coward? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How can I say? Don't be so unreasonable, darling. I can't put myself in your skin. You must decide that for yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I can't decide. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Anyway, you must remember. You must have had reasons for acting as you did. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I had. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But were they the real reasons? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You've a twisted mind, that's your trouble. Plaguing yourself over such trifles! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'd thought it all out, and I wanted to make a stand. But was that my real motive? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Exactly. That's the question. Was that your real motive? No doubt you argued it out with yourself, you weighed the pros and cons, you found good reasons for what you did. But fear and hatred and all the dirty little instincts one keeps dark--- they're motives too. So carry on, Mr. Garcin, and try to be honest with yourself-- for once. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do I really need you to tell me that? Day and night I paced my cell, from the window to the door, from the door to the window. I pried into my heart, I sleuthed myself like a detective. By the end of it I felt as if I'd given my whole life to introspection. But always I harked back to the one thing certain--- that I had acted as I did, I'd taken that train to the frontier. But why? Why? Finally I thought: My death will settle it. If I face death courageously, I'll prove I am no coward. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And how did you face death? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Miserably. Rottenly. Oh, it was only a physical lapse--- that might happen to anyone; I'm not ashamed of it. Only everything's been left in suspense forever. Come here, Estelle. Look at me. I want to feel someone looking at me while they're talking about me on earth... I like green eyes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Green eyes! Just hark to him! And you, Estelle, do you like cowards? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If you knew how little I care! Coward or hero, it's all one-- provided he kisses well. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There they are, slumped in their chairs, sucking at their cigars. Bored they look. Half-asleep. They're thinking:"Garcin's a coward." But only vaguely, dreamily. One's got to think of something. "That chap Garcin was a coward." That's what they've decided, those dear friends of mine. In six months'time they'll be saying: "Cowardly as that skunk Garcin." You're lucky, you two; no one on earth is giving you another thought. But I--I'm long in dying. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What about your wife, Garcin? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, didn't I tell you? She's dead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dead? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, she died just now. About two months ago. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of grief? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What else should she die of? So all is for the best, you see; the war's over, my wife's dead, and I've carved out my place in history. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > My poor darling! Look at me. Please look. Touch me. Touch me. There! Keep your hand there. No, don't move. Why trouble what those men are thinking? They'll die off one by one. Forget them. There's only me, now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But THEY won't forget me, not they! They'll die, but others will come after them to carry on the legend. I've left my fate in their hands. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You think too much, that's your trouble. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What else is there to do now? I was a man of action once... Oh, if only I could be with them again, for just one day--I'd fling their lie in their teeth. But I'm locked out; they're passing judgment on my life without troubling about me, and they're right, because I'm dead. Dead and done with. A back number. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Garcin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Still there? Now listen! I want you to do me a service. No, don't shrink away. I know it must seem strange to you, having someone asking you for help; you're not used to that. But if you'll make the effort, if you'll only WILL it hard enough, I dare say we can really love each other. Look at it this way. A thousand of them are proclaiming I'm a coward; but what do numbers matter? If there's someone, just one person, to say quite positively I did not run away, that I'm not the sort who runs away, that I'm brave and decent and the rest of it-- well, that one person's faith would save me. Will you have that faith in me? Then I shall love you and cherish you for ever. Estelle-- will you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, you dear silly man, do you think I could love a coward? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But just now you said-- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was only teashing you. I like men, my dear, who're real men, with tough skin and strong hands. You haven't a coward's chin, or a coward's mouth, or a coward's voice, or a coward's hair. And it's for your mouth, your hair, your voice, I love. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you mean this? REALLY mean it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Shall I swear it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then I snap my fingers at them all, those below and those in here. Estelle, we shall climb out of hell. (Inez laughs.) What's that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But she doesn't mean a word of what she says. How can you be such a simpleton? "Estelle, am I a coward?" As if she cared a damn either way. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Inez, how dare you? Don't listen to her. If you want me to have faith in you, you must begin by trusting me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's right! That's right! Trust away! She wants a man-- that far you can trust her-- she wants a man's arm round her waist, a man's smell, a man's eyes glowing with desire. And that's all she wants. She'd assure you you were God Almighty if she thought it would give you pleasure. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estelle, is it true? Answer me. Is it true? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do you expect me to say? Don't you realize how maddening it is to have to answer questions one can't make head or tail of? You do make things difficult...Anyhow, I'd love you just the same, even if you were a coward. Isn't that enough? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You disgust me, both of you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What are you up to? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You won't get far. The door is locked. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll MAKE them open it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Please! Please! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't worry, my pet. The bell doesn't work. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you they shall open. I can't endure it any longer, I'm through with you both. Go away.(to Estelle) You're even fouler than she. I won't let myself get bogged in your eyes. You're soft and slimy. Ugh! Like an octopus. Like a quagmire. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg you, oh, I beg you not to leave me. I'll promise not to speak again, I won't trouble you in any way-- but don't go. I daren't be left alone with Inez, now she's shown her claws. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look after yourself. I never asked you to come here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, how mean you are! Yes, it's quite true you're a coward. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, my little sparrow fallen from the nest, I hope you're satisfied now. You spat in my face-- playing up to him, of course-- and we had a tiff on his accound. But he's going, and a good riddance it will be. We two women will have the place to ourselves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You won't gain anything. If that door opens, I'm going too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't care where. As far from you as I can. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Open the door! Open,blast you! I'll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes-- all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears-- I'll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough. Now will you open? (THE DOOR FLIES OPEN: a long silence.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, Garcin? You're free to go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Now I wonder why that door opened. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What are you waiting for? Hurry up and go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I shall not go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And you, Estelle? So what? Which shall it be? Which of the three of us will leave? The barrier's down, why are we waiting? But what a situation! It's a scream! We're inseparables! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Inseparables? Garcin, come and lend a hand. Quickly. We'll push her out and slam the door on her. That'll teach her a lesson. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (Struggling with Inez) Estelle, I beg you, let me stay. I won't go, I won't go! Not into the passage. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let go of her. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're crazy. She hates you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's because of her I'm staying here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Because of me? All right, shut the door. It's ten times hotter here since it opened. Because of me, you said? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. YOU, anyhow, know what it means to be a coward. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, I know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And you know what wickedness is, and shame, and fear. There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it, you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsted the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs. And when you say I'm a coward, you know from experience what that means. Is that so? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So it's you whom I have to convince; you are of my kind. Did you suppose I meant to go? No, I couldn't leave you here, gloating over my defeat, with all those thoughts about me running in your head. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you really wish to convince me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > THat's the one and only thing I wish for now. I can't hear them any longer, you know. Probably that means they're through with me. For good and all. The curtain's down, nothing of me is left on earth-- not even the name of coward. So, Inez, we're alone. Only you two remain to give a thought to me. She- she doesn't count. It's you who matter; you who hate me. If you'll have faith in me I'm saved. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It won't be easy. Have a look at me. I'm a hard-headed woman. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll give you all the time that's needed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, we've lots of time in hand. ALL time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Listen! Each man has an aim in life, a leading motive; that's so, isn't it? Well, I didn't give a damn for wealth, or for love. I aimed at being a real man. A tough, as they say. I staked everything on the same horse... Can one possibly be a coward when one's deliberately courted danger at every turn? And can judge a life by a single action? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? For thirty years you dreamt you were a hero, and condoned a thousand petty lapses--because a hero, of course, can do no wrong. An easy method, obviously. Then a day came when you were up against it, the red light of real danger-- and you took the train to Mexico. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I "dreamt," you say. It was no dream. When I chose the hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he wills himself to be. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Prove it. Prove it was no dream.It's what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I died too soon. I wasn't allowed time to--to do my deeds. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One always dies too soon-- or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are-- your life, and nothing else. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What a poisonous woman you are! With an answer for everything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Now then! Don't lose heart. It shouldn't be so hard, convincing me. Pull yourself together , man, rake up some arguments. Ah, wasn't I right when I said you were vulnerable? Now you're going to pay the price, and what a price! You're a coward, Garcin, because I wish it! I wish it-- do you hear?-- I wish it. And yet, just look at me, see how weak I am, a mere breath on the air, a gaze observing you, a formless thought that thinks you. Ah, they're open now, those big hands, those coarse, man's hands! But what do you hope to do? You can't throttle thoughts with hands. So you've no choice, you must convince me, and you're at my mercy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Garcin! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Revenge yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Kiss me, darling---then you'll hear her squeal. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's true, Inez. I'm at your mercy, but you're at mine as well. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh, you coward, you weakling, running to women to console you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's right, Inez. Squeal away. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What a lovely pair you make! If you could see his big paw splayed out on your back, rucking up your skin and creasing the silk. Be careful, though! He's perspiring, his hand will leave a blue stain on your dress. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Squeal away, Inez, squeal away!...Hug me tight, darling; tighter still---that'll finish her off, and a good thing too! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, Garcin, she's right. Carry on with it, press her to you till you feel your bodies melting into each other; a lump of warm, throbbing flesh... Loe's a grand solace, isn't it, my friend? Deep and dark as sleep. But I'll see you don't sleep. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't listen to her. Press your lips to my mouth. Oh, I'm yours, yours, yours. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, what are you waiting for? Do as you're told. What a lovely scene: coward Garcin holding baby-killer Estelle in his manly arms! Make your stakes, everyone. Will coward Garcin kiss the lady, or won't he dare? What's the betting? I'm watching you, everybody's watching, I'm a crowd all by myself. Do you hear the crowd? Do you hear them muttering, Garcin? "Coward!Coward!" ---that's what they're saying...It's no use trying to escape, I'll never let you go. What do you hope to get from her silly lips? Forgetfulness? But I shan't forget you, not I! "It's I you must convince." So come to me. I'm waiting. Come along, now...Look how obedient he is, like a well-trained dog who comes when his mistress calls. You can't hold him, and you never will. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Will night never come? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Never. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You will always see me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Always. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This bronze. Yes, now's the moment; I'm looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's been thoughtout beforehand. They knew I'd stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS--OTHER PEOPLE! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > My darling! Please- </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, let me be. She is between us. I cannot love you when she's watching. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Right! In that case, I'll stop her watching. (She picks up the PAPER knife and stabs Inez several times.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But, you crazy creature, what do you think you're doing? You know quite well I'm dead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dead? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INEZ:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dead! Dead! Dead! Knives, poison, ropes--useless. It has happened already, do you understand? Once and for all. So here we are, forever. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ESTELLE:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Forever. My God, how funny! Forever. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > For ever, and ever, and ever. (A long silence.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GARCIN:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, well, let's get on with it...<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2011/01/no-exit-poll.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No Exit" poll </span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-90303710582137570042011-01-16T06:35:00.001-08:002011-01-16T16:34:05.585-08:00"Waiting for Godot"<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiting for Godot</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >tragicomedy in 2 acts</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Samuel Beckett</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > a boy</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ACT I</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A country road. A tree.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Evening.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As before. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Enter Vladimir.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (giving up again). Nothing to be done. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Am I? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Me too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (irritably). Not now, not now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In a ditch. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (admiringly). A ditch! Where? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (without gesture). Over there. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And they didn't beat you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Beat me? Certainly they beat me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The same lot as usual? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The same? I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And what of it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (gloomily). It's too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Taking off my boot. Did that never happen to you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Boots must be taken off every day, I'm tired telling you that. Why don't you listen to me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (feebly). Help me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It hurts? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (angrily). No one ever suffers but you. I don't count. I'd like to hear what you'd say if you had what I have. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It hurts? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (angrily). Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (pointing). You might button it all the same. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (stooping). True. (He buttons his fly.) Never neglect the little things of life. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do you expect, you always wait till the last moment. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (musingly). The last moment . . . (He meditates.) Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why don't you help me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer. (He takes off his hat, peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, puts it on again.) How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time . . . (he searches for the word) . . . appalled. (With emphasis.) AP-PALLED. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it.) Funny. (He knocks on the crown as though to dislodge a foreign body, peers into it again, puts it on again.) Nothing to be done. (Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He peers inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him.) Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Show me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's nothing to show. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Try and put it on again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (examining his foot). I'll air it for a bit. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) This is getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Suppose we repented. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Repented what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh . . . (He reflects.) We wouldn't have to go into the details. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our being born? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir breaks into a hearty laugh which he immediately stifles, his hand pressed to his pubis, his face contorted. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One daren't even laugh any more. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dreadful privation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It's not the same thing. Nothing to be done. (Pause.) Gogo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (irritably). What is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you ever read the Bible? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Bible . . . (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you remember the Gospels? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You should have been a poet. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn't that obvious? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where was I . . . How's your foot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Swelling visibly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Shall I tell it to you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It'll pass the time. (Pause.) Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other . . . (he searches for the contrary of saved) . . . damned. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Saved from what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Hell. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He does not move. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And yet . . . (pause) . . . how is it –this is not boring you I hope– how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there –or thereabouts– and only one speaks of a thief being saved. (Pause.) Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can't you, once in a while? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (with exaggerated enthusiasm). I find this really most extraordinarily interesting. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One out of four. Of the other three two don't mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's all this about? Abused who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Saviour. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Because he wouldn't save them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > From hell? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Imbecile! From death. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I thought you said hell. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > From death, from death. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well what of it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then the two of them must have been damned. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But one of the four says that one of the two was saved. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? They don't agree and that's all there is to it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who believes him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Everybody. It's the only version they know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > People are bloody ignorant apes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He rises painfully, goes limping to extreme left, halts, gazes into distance off with his hand screening his eyes, turns, goes to extreme right, gazes into distance. Vladimir watches him, then goes and picks up the boot, peers into it, drops it hastily. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He spits. Estragon moves to center, halts with his back to auditorium. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Charming spot. (He turns, advances to front, halts facing auditorium.) Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're waiting for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You're sure it was here? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That we were to wait. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. A willow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where are the leaves? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It must be dead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No more weeping. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Or perhaps it's not the season. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Looks to me more like a bush. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A shrub. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A bush. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A—. What are you insinuating? That we've come to the wrong place? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He should be here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He didn't say for sure he'd come. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And if he doesn't come? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We'll come back tomorrow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And then the day after tomorrow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Possibly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And so on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The point is— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Until he comes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're merciless. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We came here yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah no, there you're mistaken. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What did we do yesterday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What did we do yesterday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why . . . (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when you're about. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In my opinion we were here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking round). You recognize the place? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I didn't say that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That makes no difference. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All the same . . . that tree . . . (turning towards auditorium) that bog . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're sure it was this evening? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That we were to wait. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He said Saturday. (Pause.) I think. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You think. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I must have made a note of it. (He fumbles in his pockets, bursting with miscellaneous rubbish.) </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (very insidious). But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? (Pause.) Or Monday? (Pause.) Or Friday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking wildly about him, as though the date was inscribed in the landscape). It's not possible! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Or Thursday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What'll we do? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If he came yesterday and we weren't here you may be sure he won't come again today. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But you say we were here yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I may be mistaken. (Pause.) Let's stop talking for a minute, do you mind? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (feebly). All right. (Estragon sits down on the mound. Vladimir paces agitatedly to and fro, halting from time to time to gaze into distance off. Estragon falls asleep. Vladimir halts finally before Estragon.) Gogo! . . . Gogo! . . . GOGO! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon wakes with a start. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (restored to the horror of his situation). I was asleep! (Despairingly.) Why will you never let me sleep? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I felt lonely. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I had a dream. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't tell me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I dreamt that— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > DON'T TELL ME! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (gesture toward the universe). This one is enough for you? (Silence.) It's not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let them remain private. You know I can't bear that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (coldly.) There are times when I wonder if it wouldn't be better for us to part. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You wouldn't go far. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That would be too bad, really too bad. (Pause.) Wouldn't it, Didi, be really too bad? (Pause.) When you think of the beauty of the way. (Pause.) And the goodness of the wayfarers. (Pause. Wheedling.) Wouldn't it, Didi? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Calm yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (voluptuously.) Calm . . . calm . . . The English say cawm. (Pause.) You know the story of the Englishman in the brothel? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell it to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah stop it! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > An Englishman having drunk a little more than usual proceeds to a brothel. The bawd asks him if he wants a fair one, a dark one or a red-haired one. Go on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > STOP IT! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Exit Vladimir hurriedly. Estragon gets up and follows him as far as the limit of the stage. Gestures of Estragon like those of a spectator encouraging a pugilist. Enter Vladimir. He brushes past Estragon, crosses the stage with bowed head. Estragon takes a step towards him, halts. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (gently.) You wanted to speak to me? (Silence. Estragon takes a step forward.) You had something to say to me? (Silence. Another step forward.) Didi . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (without turning). I've nothing to say to you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (step forward). You're angry? (Silence. Step forward). Forgive me. (Silence. Step forward. Estragon lays his hand on Vladimir's shoulder.) Come, Didi. (Silence.) Give me your hand. (Vladimir half turns.) Embrace me! (Vladimir stiffens.) Don't be stubborn! (Vladimir softens. They embrace. #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon recoils.) You stink of garlic! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's for the kidneys. (Silence. Estragon looks attentively at the tree.) What do we do now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, but while waiting. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What about hanging ourselves? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Hmm. It'd give us an erection. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (highly excited). An erection! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's hang ourselves immediately! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > From a bough? (They go towards the tree.) I wouldn't trust it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can always try. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Go ahead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > After you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no, you first. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're lighter than I am. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Just so! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't understand. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Use your intelligence, can't you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir uses his intelligence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (finally). I remain in the dark. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This is how it is. (He reflects.) The bough . . . the bough . . . (Angrily.) Use your head, can't you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're my only hope. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (with effort). Gogo light—bough not break—Gogo dead. Didi heavy—bough break—Didi alone. Whereas— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I hadn't thought of that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If it hangs you it'll hang anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But am I heavier than you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So you tell me. I don't know. There's an even chance. Or nearly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? What do we do? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't let's do anything. It's safer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's wait and see what he says. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Good idea. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On the other hand it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What exactly did we ask him for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Were you not there? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I can't have been listening. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh . . . Nothing very definite. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A kind of prayer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Precisely. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A vague supplication. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Exactly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And what did he reply? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That he'd see. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That he couldn't promise anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That he'd have to think it over. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the quiet of his home. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Consult his family. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His friends. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His agents. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His correspondents. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His books. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His bank account. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Before taking a decision. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the normal thing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is it not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I think it is. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I think so too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (anxious). And we? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg your pardon? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I said, And we? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't understand. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where do we come in? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come in? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Take your time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come in? On our hands and knees. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As bad as that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Your Worship wishes to assert his prerogatives? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've no rights any more? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Laugh of Vladimir, stifled as before, less the smile. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'd make me laugh if it wasn't prohibited. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've lost our rights? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (distinctly). We got rid of them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. They remain motionless, arms dangling, heads sunk, sagging at the knees. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (feebly). We're not tied? (Pause.) We're not— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Listen! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They listen, grotesquely rigid. #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I hear nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Hsst! (They listen. Estragon loses his balance, almost falls. He clutches the arm of Vladimir, who totters. They listen, huddled together.) Nor I. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Sighs of relief. They relax and separate. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You gave me a fright. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I thought it was he. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pah! The wind in the reeds. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I could have sworn I heard shouts. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And why would he shout? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > At his horse. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (violently). I'm hungry! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you want a carrot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is that all there is? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I might have some turnips. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Give me a carrot. (Vladimir rummages in his pockets, takes out a turnip and gives it to Estragon who takes a bite out of it. Angrily.) It's a turnip! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh pardon! I could have sworn it was a carrot. (He rummages again in his pockets, finds nothing but turnips.) All that's turnips. (He rummages.) You must have eaten the last. (He rummages.) Wait, I have it. (He brings out a carrot and gives it to Estragon.) There, dear fellow. (Estragon wipes the carrot on his sleeve and begins to eat it.) Make it last, that's the end of them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (chewing). I asked you a question. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you reply? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How's the carrot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's a carrot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So much the better, so much the better. (Pause.) What was it you wanted to know? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I've forgotten. (Chews.) That's what annoys me. (He looks at the carrot appreciatively, dangles it between finger and thumb.) I'll never forget this carrot. (He sucks the end of it meditatively.) Ah yes, now I remember. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (his mouth full, vacuously). We're not tied? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't hear a word you're saying. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (chews, swallows). I'm asking you if we're tied. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tied? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ti-ed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How do you mean tied? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Down. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But to whom? By whom? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To your man. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To Godot? Tied to Godot! What an idea! No question of it. (Pause.) For the moment. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His name is Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I think so. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Fancy that. (He raises what remains of the carrot by the stub of leaf, twirls it before his eyes.) Funny, the more you eat the worse it gets. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With me it's just the opposite. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In other words? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I get used to the muck as I go along. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (after prolonged reflection). Is that the opposite? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Question of temperament. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of character. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing you can do about it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No use struggling. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One is what one is. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No use wriggling. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The essential doesn't change. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing to be done. (He proffers the remains of the carrot to Vladimir.) Like to finish it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A terrible cry, close at hand. Estragon drops the carrot. They remain motionless, then together make a sudden rush towards the wings. Estragon stops halfway, runs back, picks up the carrot, stuffs it in his pocket, runs to rejoin Vladimir who is waiting for him, stops again, runs back, picks up his boot, runs to rejoin Vladimir. Huddled together, shoulders hunched, cringing away from the menace, they wait. #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Enter Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo drives Lucky by means of a rope passed round his neck, so that Lucky is the first to enter, followed by the rope which is long enough to let him reach the middle of the stage before Pozzo appears. Lucky carries a heavy bag, a folding stool, a picnic basket and a greatcoat, Pozzo a whip. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (off). On! (Crack of whip. Pozzo appears. They cross the stage. Lucky passes before Vladimir and Estragon and exit. Pozzo at the sight of Vladimir and Estragon stops short. The rope tautens. Pozzo jerks at it violently.) Back! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Noise of Lucky falling with all his baggage. Vladimir and Estragon turn towards him, half wishing half fearing to go to his assistance. Vlamdimir takes a step towards Lucky, Estragon holds him back by the sleeve. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let me go! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Stay where you are! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Be careful! He's wicked. (Vladimir and Estragon turn towards Pozzo.) With strangers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (undertone). Is that him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (trying to remember the name). Er . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I present myself: Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). Not at all! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He said Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not at all! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (timidly, to Pozzo). You're not Mr. Godot, Sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (terrifying voice). I am Pozzo! (Silence.) Pozzo! (Silence.) Does that name mean nothing to you? (Silence.) I say does that name mean nothing to you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir and Estragon look at each other questioningly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (pretending to search). Bozzo . . . Bozzo . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (ditto). Pozzo . . . Pozzo . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > PPPOZZZO! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! Pozzo . . . let me see . . . Pozzo . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is it Pozzo or Bozzo? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo . . . no . . . I'm afraid I . . . no . . . I don't seem to . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo advances threateningly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (conciliating). I once knew a family called Gozzo. The mother had the clap. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (hastily). We're not from these parts, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (halting). You are human beings none the less. (He puts on his glasses.) As far as one can see. (He takes off his glasses.) Of the same species as myself. (He bursts into an enormous laugh.) Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God's image! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well you see— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (peremptory). Who is Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You took me for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh no, Sir, not for an instant, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who is he? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh he's a . . . he's a kind of acquaintance. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing of the kind, we hardly know him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True . . . we don't know him very well . . . but all the same . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Personally, I wouldn't even know him if I saw him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You took me for him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (recoiling before Pozzo). That's to say . . . you understand . . . the dusk . . . the strain . . . waiting . . . I confess . . . I imagined . . . for a second . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Waiting? So you were waiting for him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well you see— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Here? On my land? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We didn't intend any harm. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We meant well. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The road is free to all. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's how we looked at it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's a disgrace. But there you are. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing we can do about it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (with magnanimous gesture). Let's say no more about it. (He jerks the rope.) Up pig! (Pause.) Every time he drops he falls asleep. (Jerks the rope.) Up hog! (Noise of Lucky getting up and picking up his baggage. Pozzo jerks the rope.) Back! (Enter Lucky backwards.) Stop! (Lucky stops.) Turn! (Lucky turns. To Vladimir and Estragon, affably.) Gentlemen, I am happy to have met you. (Before their incredulous expression.) Yes yes, sincerely happy. (He jerks the rope.) Closer! (Lucky advances.) Stop! (Lucky stops.) Yes, the road seems long when one journeys all alone for . . . (he consults his watch) . . . yes . . . (he calculates) . . . yes, six hours, that's right, six hours on end, and never a soul in sight. (To Lucky.) Coat! (Lucky puts down the bag, advances, gives the coat, goes back to his place, takes up the bag.) Hold that! (Pozzo holds out the whip. Lucky advances and, both his hands being occupied, takes the whip in his mouth, then goes back to his place. Pozzo begins to put on his coat, stops.) Coat! (Lucky puts down the bag, basket and stool, helps Pozzo on with his coat, goes back to his place and takes up bag, basket and stool.) Touch of autumn in the air this evening. (Pozzo finishes buttoning up his coat, stoops, inspects himself, straightens up.) Whip! (Lucky advances, stoops, Pozzo snatches the whip from his mouth, Lucky goes back to his place.) Yes, gentlemen, I cannot go for long without the society of my likes (he puts on his glasses and looks at the two likes) even when the likeness is an imperfect one. (He takes off his glasses.) Stool! (Lucky puts down bag and basket, advances, opens stool, puts it down, goes back to his place, takes up bag and basket.) Closer! (Lucky puts down bag and basket, advances, moves stool, goes back to his place, takes up bag and basket. Pozzo sits down, places the butt of his whip against Lucky's chest and pushes.) Back! (Lucky takes a step back.) Further! (Lucky takes another step back.) Stop! (Lucky stops. To Vladimir and Estragon.) That is why, with your permission, I propose to dally with you a moment, before I venture any further. Basket! (Lucky advances, gives the basket, goes back to his place.) The fresh air stimulates the jaded appetite. (He opens the basket, takes out a piece of chicken and a bottle of wine.) Basket! (Lucky advances, picks up the basket and goes back to his place.) Further! (Lucky takes a step back.) He stinks. Happy days! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He drinks from the bottle, puts it down and begins to eat. Silence. #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir and Estragon, cautiously at first, then more boldly, begin to circle about Lucky, inspecting him up and down. Pozzo eats his chicken voraciously, throwing away the bones after having sucked them. Lucky sags slowly, until bag and basket touch the ground, then straightens up with a start and begins to sag again. Rhythm of one sleeping on his feet. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What ails him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He looks tired. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why doesn't he put down his bags? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How do I know? (They close in on him.) Careful! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Say something to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (pointing). His neck! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking at the neck). I see nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon goes over beside Vladimir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh I say! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A running sore! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the rope. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the rubbing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's inevitable. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the knot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the chafing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They resume their inspection, dwell on the face. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (grudgingly). He's not bad looking. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (shrugging his shoulders, wry face.) Would you say so? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A trifle effeminate. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look at the slobber. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's inevitable. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look at the slaver. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps he's a halfwit. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A cretin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking closer). Looks like a goiter. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (ditto). It's not certain. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's panting. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's inevitable. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And his eyes! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What about them? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Goggling out of his head. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Looks like his last gasp to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's not certain. (Pause.) Ask him a question. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Would that be a good thing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do we risk? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (timidly). Mister . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Louder. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (louder). Mister . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Leave him in peace! (They turn toward Pozzo who, having finished eating, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.) Can't you see he wants to rest? Basket! (He strikes a match and begins to light his pipe. Estragon sees the chicken bones on the ground and stares at them greedily. As Lucky does not move Pozzo throws the match angrily away and jerks the rope.) Basket! (Lucky starts, almost falls, recovers his senses, advances, puts the bottle in the basket and goes back to his place. Estragon stares at the bones. Pozzo strikes another match and lights his pipe.) What can you expect, it's not his job. (He pulls at his pipe, stretches out his legs.) Ah! That's better. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (timidly). Please Sir . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is it, my good man? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Er . . . you've finished with the . . . er . . . you don't need the . . . er . . . bones, Sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (scandalized). You couldn't have waited? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no, he does well to ask. Do I need the bones? (He turns them over with the end of his whip.) No, personally I do not need them any more. (Estragon takes a step towards the bones.) But . . . (Estragon stops short) . . . but in theory the bones go to the carrier. He is therefore the one to ask. (Estragon turns towards Lucky, hesitates.) Go on, go on, don't be afraid, ask him, he'll tell you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon goes towards Lucky, stops before him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Mister . . . excuse me, Mister . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're being spoken to, pig! Reply! (To Estragon.) Try him again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Excuse me, Mister, the bones, you won't be wanting the bones? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky looks long at Estragon. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (in raptures). Mister! (Lucky bows his head.) Reply! Do you want them or don't you? (Silence of Lucky. To Estragon.) They're yours. (Estragon makes a dart at the bones, picks them up and begins to gnaw them.) I don't like it. I've never known him to refuse a bone before. (He looks anxiously at Lucky.) Nice business it'd be if he fell sick on me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He puffs at his pipe. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (exploding). It's a scandal! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. Flabbergasted, Estragon stops gnawing, looks at Pozzo and Vladimir in turn. Pozzo outwardly calm. Vladimir embarrassed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (To Vladimir). Are you alluding to anything in particular? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (stutteringly resolute). To treat a man . . . (gesture towards Lucky) . . . like that . . . I think that . . . no . . . a human being . . . no . . . it's a scandal! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (not to be outdone). A disgrace! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He resumes his gnawing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You are severe. (To Vladimir.) What age are you, if it's not a rude question? (Silence.) Sixty? Seventy? (To Estragon.) What age would you say he was? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Eleven. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I am impertinent. (He knocks out his pipe against the whip, gets up.) I must be getting on. Thank you for your society. (He reflects.) Unless I smoke another pipe before I go. What do you say? (They say nothing.) Oh I'm only a small smoker, a very small smoker, I'm not in the habit of smoking two pipes one on top of the other, it makes (hand to heart, sighing) my heart go pit-a-pat. (Silence.) It's the nicotine, one absorbs it in spite of one's precautions. (Sighs.) You know how it is. (Silence.) But perhaps you don't smoke? Yes? No? It's of no importance. (Silence.) But how am I to sit down now, without affectation, now that I have risen? Without appearing to –how shall I say– without appearing to falter. (To Vladimir.) I beg your pardon? (Silence.) Perhaps you didn't speak? (Silence.) It's of no importance. Let me see . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He reflects. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! That's better. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He puts the bones in his pocket. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So soon? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One moment! (He jerks the rope.) Stool! (He points with his whip. Lucky moves the stool.) More! There! (He sits down. Lucky goes back to his place.) Done it! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He fills his pipe. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (vehemently). Let's go! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I hope I'm not driving you away. Wait a little longer, you'll never regret it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (scenting charity). We're in no hurry. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (having lit his pipe). The second is never so sweet . . . (he takes the pipe out of his mouth, contemplates it) . . . as the first I mean. (He puts the pipe back in his mouth.) But it's sweet just the same. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He can no longer endure my presence. I am perhaps not particularly human, but who cares? (To Vladimir.) Think twice before you do anything rash. Suppose you go now while it is still day, for there is no denying it is still day. (They all look up at the sky.) Good. (They stop looking at the sky.) What happens in that case– (he takes the pipe out of his mouth, examines it) –I'm out– (he relights his pipe) –in that case– (puff) –in that case– (puff) –what happens in that case to your appointment with this . . . Godet . . . Godot . . . Godin . . . anyhow you see who I mean, who has your future in his hands . . . (pause) . . . at least your immediate future? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who told you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He speaks to me again! If this goes on much longer we'll soon be old friends. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why doesn't he put down his bags? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I too would be happy to meet him. The more people I meet the happier I become. From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one's blessings. Even you . . . (he looks at them ostentatiously in turn to make it clear they are both meant) . . . even you, who knows, will have added to my store. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why doesn't he put down his bags? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But that would surprise me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're being asked a question. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (delighted). A question! Who? What? A moment ago you were calling me Sir, in fear and trembling. Now you're asking me questions. No good will come of this! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). I think he's listening. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (circling about Lucky). What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You can ask him now. He's on the alert. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ask him what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why he doesn't put down his bags. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I wonder. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ask him, can't you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (who has followed these exchanges with anxious attention, fearing lest the question get lost). You want to know why he doesn't put down his bags, as you call them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). You are sure you agree with that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's puffing like a grampus. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The answer is this. (To Estragon). But stay still, I beg of you, you're making me nervous! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's about to speak. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon goes over beside Vladimir. Motionless, side by side, they wait. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Good. Is everybody ready? Is everybody looking at me? (He looks at Lucky, jerks the rope. Lucky raises his head.) Will you look at me, pig! (Lucky looks at him.) Good. (He puts the pipe in his pocket, takes out a little vaporizer and sprays his throat, puts back the vaporizer in his pocket, clears his throat, spits, takes out the vaporizer again, sprays his throat again, puts back the vaporizer in his pocket.) I am ready. Is everybody listening? Is everybody ready? (He looks at them all in turn, jerks the rope.) Hog! (Lucky raises his head.) I don't like talking in a vacuum. Good. Let me see. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He reflects. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What was it exactly you wanted to know? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why he— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (angrily). Don't interrupt me! (Pause. Calmer.) If we all speak at once we'll never get anywhere. (Pause.) What was I saying? (Pause. Louder.) What was I saying? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir mimics one carrying a heavy burden. Pozzo looks at him, puzzled. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (forcibly). Bags. (He points at Lucky.) Why? Always hold. (He sags, panting.) Never put down. (He opens his hands, straightens up with relief.) Why? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! Why couldn't you say so before? Why he doesn't make himself comfortable? Let's try and get this clear. Has he not the right to? Certainly he has. It follows that he doesn't want to. There's reasoning for you. And why doesn't he want to? (Pause.) Gentlemen, the reason is this. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). Make a note of this. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He wants to impress me, so that I'll keep him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps I haven't got it quite right. He wants to mollify me, so that I'll give up the idea of parting with him. No, that's not exactly it either. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You want to get rid of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He wants to con me, but he won't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You want to get rid of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He imagines that when I see how well he carries I'll be tempted to keep him on in that capacity. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You've had enough of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In reality he carries like a pig. It's not his job. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You want to get rid of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I'll regret my decision. Such is his miserable scheme. As though I were short of slaves! (All three look at Lucky.) Atlas, son of Jupiter! (Silence.) Well, that's that, I think. Anything else? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vaporizer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You want to get rid of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Remark that I might just as well have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed otherwise. To each one his due. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You waagerrim? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg your pardon? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You want to get rid of him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I do. But instead of driving him away as I might have done, I mean instead of simply kicking him out on his arse, in the goodness of my heart I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him. The truth is you can't drive such creatures away. The best thing would be to kill them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky weeps. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's crying! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Old dogs have more dignity. (He proffers his handkerchief to Estragon.) Comfort him, since you pity him. (Estragon hesitates.) Come on. (Estragon takes the handkerchief.) Wipe away his tears, he'll feel less forsaken. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon hesitates. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Here, give it to me, I'll do it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon refuses to give the handkerchief. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Childish gestures. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Make haste, before he stops. (Estragon approaches Lucky and makes to wipe his eyes. Lucky kicks him violently in the shins. Estragon drops the handkerchief, recoils, staggers about the stage howling with pain.) Hanky! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky puts down bag and basket, picks up handkerchief and gives it to Pozzo, goes back to his place, picks up bag and basket. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh the swine! (He pulls up the leg of his trousers.) He's crippled me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I told you he didn't like strangers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). Show me. (Estragon shows his leg. To Pozzo, angrily.) He's bleeding! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's a good sign. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (on one leg). I'll never walk again! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (tenderly). I'll carry you. (Pause.) If necessary. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's stopped crying. (To Estragon.) You have replaced him as it were. (Lyrically.) The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all. (Pause. Judiciously.) It is true the population has increased. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Try and walk. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon takes a few limping steps, stops before Lucky and spits on him, then goes and sits down on the mound. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Guess who taught me all these beautiful things. (Pause. Pointing to Lucky.) My Lucky! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking at the sky.) Will night never come? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But for him all my thoughts, all my feelings, would have been of common things. (Pause. With extraordinary vehemence.) Professional worries! (Calmer.) Beauty, grace, truth of the first water, I knew they were all beyond me. So I took a knook. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (startled from his inspection of the sky). A knook? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That was nearly sixty years ago . . . (he consults his watch) . . . yes, nearly sixty. (Drawing himself up proudly.) You wouldn't think it to look at me, would you? Compared to him I look like a young man, no? (Pause.) Hat! (Lucky puts down the basket and takes off his hat. His long white hair falls about his face. He puts his hat under his arm and picks up the basket.) Now look. (Pozzo takes off his hat. [All four wear bowlers.] He is completely bald. He puts on his hat again.) Did you see? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And now you turn him away? Such an old and faithful servant! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Swine! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo more and more agitated. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > After having sucked all the good out of him you chuck him away like a . . . like a banana skin. Really . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (groaning, clutching his head). I can't bear it . . . any longer . . . the way he goes on . . . you've no idea . . . it's terrible . . . he must go . . . (he waves his arms) . . . I'm going mad . . . (he collapses, his head in his hands) . . . I can't bear it . . . any longer . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. All look at Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He can't bear it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Any longer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's going mad. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's terrible. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Lucky). How dare you! It's abominable! Such a good master! Crucify him like that! After so many years! Really! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (sobbing). He used to be so kind . . . so helpful . . . and entertaining . . . my good angel . . . and now . . . he's killing me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ( to Vladimir). Does he want to replace him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Does he want someone to take his place or not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't think so. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ask him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (calmer). Gentlemen, I don't know what came over me. Forgive me. Forget all I said. (More and more his old self.) I don't remember exactly what it was, but you may be sure there wasn't a word of truth in it. (Drawing himself up, striking his chest.) Do I look like a man that can be made to suffer? Frankly? (He rummages in his pockets.) What have I done with my pipe? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Charming evening we're having. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Unforgettable. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And it's not over. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Apparently not. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's only beginning. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's awful. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Worse than the pantomime. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The circus. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The music-hall. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The circus. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What can I have done with that briar? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's a scream. He's lost his dudeen. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Laughs noisily. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll be back. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He hastens towards the wings. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > End of the corridor, on the left. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Keep my seat. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Exit Vladimir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (on the point of tears). I've lost my Kapp and Peterson! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (convulsed with merriment). He'll be the death of me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You didn't see by any chance– (He misses Vladimir.) Oh! He's gone! Without saying goodbye! How could he! He might have waited! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He would have burst. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh! (Pause.) Oh well then of course in that case . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'll see. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You want me to get up? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Quick! (Pozzo gets up and goes over beside Estragon. Estragon points off.) Look! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (having put on his glasses). Oh I say! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's all over. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Enter Vladimir, somber. He shoulders Lucky out of his way, kicks over the stool, comes and goes agitatedly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's not pleased. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Vladimir). You missed a treat. Pity. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir halts, straightens the stool, comes and goes, calmer. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He subsides. (Looking round.) Indeed all subsides. A great calm descends. (Raising his hand.) Listen! Pan sleeps. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Will night never come? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All three look at the sky. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You don't feel like going until it does? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well you see— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why it's very natural, very natural. I myself in your situation, if I had an appointment with a Godin . . . Godet . . . Godot . . . anyhow, you see who I mean, I'd wait till it was black night before I gave up. (He looks at the stool.) I'd very much like to sit down, but I don't quite know how to go about it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Could I be of any help? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If you asked me perhaps. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If you asked me to sit down. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Would that be a help? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I fancy so. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Here we go. Be seated, Sir, I beg of you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no, I wouldn't think of it! (Pause. Aside.) Ask me again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come come, take a seat I beseech you, you'll get pneumonia. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You really think so? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why it's absolutely certain. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No doubt you are right. (He sits down.) Done it again! (Pause.) Thank you, dear fellow. (He consults his watch.) But I must really be getting along, if I am to observe my schedule. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Time has stopped. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (cuddling his watch to his ear). Don't you believe it, Sir, don't you believe it. (He puts his watch back in his pocket.) Whatever you like, but not that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Pozzo). Everything seems black to him today. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Except the firmament. (He laughs, pleased with this witticism.) But I see what it is, you are not from these parts, you don't know what our twilights can do. Shall I tell you? (Silence. Estragon is fiddling with his boot again, Vladimir with his hat.) I can't refuse you. (Vaporizer.) A little attention, if you please. (Vladimir and Estragon continue their fiddling, Lucky is half asleep. Pozzo cracks his whip feebly.) What's the matter with this whip? (He gets up and cracks it more vigorously, finally with success. Lucky jumps. Vladimir's hat, Estragon's boot, Lucky's hat, fall to the ground. Pozzo throws down the whip.) Worn out, this whip. (He looks at Vladimir and Estragon.) What was I saying? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But take the weight off your feet, I implore you, you'll catch your death. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. (He sits down. To Estragon.) What is your name? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Adam. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (who hasn't listened). Ah yes! The night. (He raises his head.) But be a little more attentive, for pity's sake, otherwise we'll never get anywhere. (He looks at the sky.) Look! (All look at the sky except Lucky who is dozing off again. Pozzo jerks the rope.) Will you look at the sky, pig! (Lucky looks at the sky.) Good, that's enough. (They stop looking at the sky.) What is there so extraordinary about it? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at this hour of the day. (Pause.) In these latitudes. (Pause.) When the weather is fine. (Lyrical.) An hour ago (he looks at his watch, prosaic) roughly (lyrical) after having poured forth even since (he hesitates, prosaic) say ten o'clock in the morning (lyrical) tirelessly torrents of red and white light it begins to lose its effulgence, to grow pale (gesture of the two hands lapsing by stages) pale, ever a little paler, a little paler until (dramatic pause, ample gesture of the two hands flung wide apart) pppfff! finished! it comes to rest. But– (hand raised in admonition)– but behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging (vibrantly) and will burst upon us (snaps his fingers) pop! like that! (his inspiration leaves him) just when we least expect it. (Silence. Gloomily.) That's how it is on this bitch of an earth. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Long silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So long as one knows. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One can bide one's time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One knows what to expect. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No further need to worry. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Simply wait. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're used to it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He picks up his hat, peers inside it, shakes it, puts it on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How did you find me? (Vladimir and Estragon look at him blankly.) Good? Fair? Middling? Poor? Positively bad? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (first to understand). Oh very good, very very good. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). And you, Sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh tray bong, tray tray tray bong. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (fervently). Bless you, gentlemen, bless you! (Pause.) I have such need of encouragement! (Pause.) I weakened a little towards the end, you didn't notice? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh perhaps just a teeny weeny little bit. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I thought it was intentional. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You see my memory is defective. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the meantime, nothing happens. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You find it tedious? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Somewhat. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Vladimir). And you, Sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I've been better entertained. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. Pozzo struggles inwardly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Gentlemen, you have been . . . civil to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not at all! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What an idea! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes yes, you have been correct. So that I ask myself is there anything I can do in my turn for these honest fellows who are having such a dull, dull time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Even ten francs would be a help. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We are not beggars! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is there anything I can do, that's what I ask myself, to cheer them up? I have given them bones, I have talked to them about this and that, I have explained the twilight, admittedly. But is it enough, that's what tortures me, is it enough? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Even five. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon, indignantly). That's enough! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I couldn't accept less. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is is enough? No doubt. But I am liberal. It's my nature. This evening. So much the worse for me. (He jerks the rope. Lucky looks at him.) For I shall suffer, no doubt about that. (He picks up the whip.) What do you prefer? Shall we have him dance, or sing, or recite, or think, or— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who! You know how to think, you two? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He thinks? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Certainly. Aloud. He even used to think very prettily once, I could listen to him for hours. Now . . . (he shudders). So much the worse for me. Well, would you like him to think something for us? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'd rather he dance, it'd be more fun. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not necessarily. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wouldn't it, Didi, be more fun? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'd like well to hear him think. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn't too much to ask him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Pozzo). Would that be possible? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > By all means, nothing simpler. It's the natural order. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He laughs briefly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then let him dance. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you hear, hog? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He never refuses? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He refused once. (Silence.) Dance, misery! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky puts down bag and basket, advances towards front, turns to Pozzo. Lucky dances. He stops. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is that all? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Encore! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky executes the same movements, stops. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pooh! I'd do as well myself. (He imitates Lucky, almost falls.) With a little practice. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He used to dance the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the fandango and even the hornpipe. He capered. For joy. Now that's the best he can do. Do you know what he calls it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Scapegoat's Agony. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Hard Stool. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Net. He thinks he's entangled in a net. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (squirming like an aesthete). There's something about it . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky makes to return to his burdens. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Woaa! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky stiffens. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell us about the time he refused. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With pleasure, with pleasure. (He fumbles in his pockets.) Wait. (He fumbles.) What have I done with my spray? (He fumbles.) Well now isn't that . . . (He looks up, consternation on his features. Faintly.) I can't find my pulverizer! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (faintly). My left lung is very weak! (He coughs feebly. In ringing tones.) But my right lung is as sound as a bell! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (normal voice). No matter! What was I saying. (He ponders.) Wait. (Ponders.) Well now isn't that . . . (He raises his head.) Help me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All three take off their hats simultaneously, press their hands to their foreheads, concentrate. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (triumphantly). Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He has it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (impatient). Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why doesn't he put down his bags? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Rubbish! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are you sure? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Damn it haven't you already told us? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I've already told you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's already told us? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Anyway he has put them down. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (glance at Lucky). So he has. And what of it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Since he has put down his bags it is impossible we should have asked why he does not do so. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Stoutly reasoned! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And why has he put them down? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Answer us that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In order to dance. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. They put on their hats. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Pozzo). Tell him to think. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Give him his hat. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His hat? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He can't think without his hat. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). Give him his hat. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Me! After what he did to me! Never! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll give it to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He does not move. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Pozzo). Tell him to go and fetch it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's better to give it to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll give it to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He picks up the hat and tenders it at arm's length to Lucky, who does not move. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You must put it on his head. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Pozzo). Tell him to take it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's better to put it on his head. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll put it on his head. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He goes round behind Lucky, approaches him cautiously, puts the hat on his head and recoils smartly. Lucky does not move. Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's he waiting for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Stand back! (Vladimir and Estragon move away from Lucky. Pozzo jerks the rope. Lucky looks at Pozzo.) Think, pig! (Pause. Lucky begins to dance.) Stop! (Lucky stops.) Forward! (Lucky advances.) Stop! (Lucky stops.) Think! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > LUCKY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On the other hand with regard to— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Stop! (Lucky stops.) Back! (Lucky moves back.) Stop! (Lucky stops.) Turn! (Lucky turns towards auditorium.) Think!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > During Lucky's tirade the others react as follows. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > 1) Vladimir and Estragon all attention, Pozzo dejected and disgusted. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > 2) Vladimir and Estragon begin to protest, Pozzo's sufferings increase. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > 3) Vladimir and Estragon attentive again, Pozzo more and more agitated and groaning. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > 4) Vladimir and Estragon protest violently. Pozzo jumps up, pulls on the rope. General outcry. Lucky pulls on the rope, staggers, shouts his text. All three throw themselves on Lucky who struggles and shouts his text. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > LUCKY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labors of men that as a result of the labors unfinished of Testew and Cunnard it is established as hereinafter but not so fast for reasons unknown that as a result of the public works of Puncher and Wattmann it is established beyond all doubt that in view of the labors of Fartov and Belcher left unfinished for reasons unknown of Testew and Cunard left unfinished it is established what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines wastes and pines and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea in a word I resume flying gliding golf over nine and eighteen holes tennis of all sorts in a word for reasons unknown in Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham namely concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown but time will tell fades away I resume Fulham Clapham in a word the dead loss per head since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per head approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much more grave that in the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by the seas by the rivers running water running fire the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas in the year of their Lord six hundred and something the air the earth the sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps the great cold on sea on land and in the air I resume for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard (mêlée, final vociferations) tennis . . . the stones . . . so calm . . . Cunard . . . unfinished . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His hat! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir seizes Lucky's hat. Silence of Lucky. He falls. Silence. Panting of the victors. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Avenged! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir examines the hat, peers inside it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Give me that! (He snatches the hat from Vladimir, throws it on the ground, tramples on it.) There's an end to his thinking! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But will he be able to walk? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Walk or crawl! (He kicks Lucky.) Up pig! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps he's dead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'll kill him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Up scum! (He jerks the rope.) Help me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Raise him up! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir and Estragon hoist Lucky to his feet, support him an instant, then let him go. He falls. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's doing it on purpose! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You must hold him. (Pause.) Come on, come on, raise him up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To hell with him! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come on, once more. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What does he take us for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They raise Lucky, hold him up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't let him go! (Vladimir and Estragon totter.) Don't move! (Pozzo fetches bag and basket and brings them towards Lucky.) Hold him tight! (He puts the bag in Lucky's hand. Lucky drops it immediately.) Don't let him go! (He puts back the bag in Lucky's hand. Gradually, at the feel of the bag, Lucky recovers his senses and his fingers finally close round the handle.) Hold him tight! (As before with basket.) #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Now! You can let him go. (Vladimir and Estragon move away from Lucky who totters, reels, sags, but succeeds in remaining on his feet, bag and basket in his hands. Pozzo steps back, cracks his whip.) Forward! (Lucky totters forward.) Back! (Lucky totters back.) Turn! (Lucky turns.) Done it! He can walk. (Turning to Vladimir and Estragon.) Thank you, gentlemen, and let me . . . (he fumbles in his pockets) . . . let me wish you . . . (fumbles) . . . wish you . . . (fumbles) . . . what have I done with my watch? (Fumbles.) A genuine half-hunter, gentlemen, with deadbeat escapement! (Sobbing.) Twas my granpa gave it to me! (He searches on the ground, Vladimir and Estragon likewise. Pozzo turns over with his foot the remains of Lucky's hat.) Well now isn't that just— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps it's in your fob. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait! (He doubles up in an attempt to apply his ear to his stomach, listens. Silence.) I hear nothing. (He beckons them to approach, Vladimir and Estragon go over to him, bend over his stomach.) Surely one should hear the tick-tick. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All listen, bent double. #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I hear something. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the heart. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (disappointed). Damnation! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps it has stopped. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They straighten up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Which of you smells so bad? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He has stinking breath and I have stinking feet. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I must go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And your half-hunter? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I must have left it at the manor. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then adieu. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Adieu. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Adieu. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Adieu. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. No one moves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Adieu. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Adieu. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Adieu. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And thank you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Thank you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not at all. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't seem to be able . . . (long hesitation) . . . to depart. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Such is life. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo turns, moves away from Lucky towards the wings, paying out the rope as he goes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're going the wrong way. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I need a running start. (Having come to the end of the rope, i.e., off stage, he stops, turns and cries.) Stand back! (Vladimir and Estragon stand back, look towards Pozzo. Crack of whip.) On! On! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky moves off. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Faster! (He appears, crosses the stage preceded by Lucky. Vladimir and Estragon wave their hats. Exit Lucky.) On! On! (On the point of disappearing in his turn he stops and turns. The rope tautens. Noise of Lucky falling off.) Stool! (Vladimir fetches stool and gives it to Pozzo who throws it to Lucky.) Adieu! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (waving). Adieu! Adieu! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Up! Pig! (Noise of Lucky getting up.) On! (Exit Pozzo.) Faster! On! Adieu! Pig! Yip! Adieu! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Long silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That passed the time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It would have passed in any case. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, but not so rapidly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pause. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do we do now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're waiting for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (despairingly). Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pause. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How they've changed! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Those two. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's the idea, let's make a little conversation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Haven't they? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Changed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Very likely. They all change. Only we can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Likely! It's certain. Didn't you see them? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I suppose I did. But I don't know them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes you do know them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No I don't know them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We know them, I tell you. You forget everything. (Pause. To himself.) Unless they're not the same . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why didn't they recognize us then? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That means nothing. I too pretended not to recognize them. And then nobody ever recognizes us. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Forget it. What we need– Ow! (Vladimir does not react.) Ow! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to himself). Unless they're not the same . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Didi! It's the other foot! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He goes hobbling towards the mound. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Unless they're not the same . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (off). Mister! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon halts. Both look towards the voice. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Off we go again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Approach, my child. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Enter Boy, timidly. He halts. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Mister Albert . . . ? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do you want? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Approach! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Boy does not move. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (forcibly). Approach when you're told, can't you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Boy advances timidly, halts. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Mr. Godot . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Obviously . . . (Pause.) Approach. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (violently). Will you approach! (The Boy advances timidly.) What kept you so late? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You have a message from Mr. Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, what is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What kept you so late? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Boy looks at them in turn, not knowing to which he should reply. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). Let him alone. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (violently). You let me alone. (Advancing, to the Boy.) Do you know what time it is? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (recoiling). It's not my fault, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And whose is it? Mine? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was afraid, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Afraid of what? Of us? (Pause.) Answer me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I know what it is, he was afraid of the others. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How long have you been here? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A good while, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You were afraid of the whip? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The roars? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The two big men. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you know them? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are you a native of these parts? (Silence.) Do you belong to these parts? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's all a pack of lies. (Shaking the Boy by the arm.) Tell us the truth! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (trembling). But it is the truth, Sir! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Will you let him alone! What's the matter with you? #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (Estragon releases the Boy, moves away, covering his face with his hands. Vladimir and the Boy observe him. Estragon drops his hands. His face is convulsed.) What's the matter with you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm unhappy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not really! Since when? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'd forgotten. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Extraordinary the tricks that memory plays! (Estragon tries to speak, renounces, limps to his place, sits down and begins to take off his boots. To Boy.) Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Mr. Godot— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I've seen you before, haven't I? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You don't know me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It wasn't you came yesterday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This is your first time? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Words words. (Pause.) Speak. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (in a rush). Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening but surely tomorrow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is that all? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You work for Mr. Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do you do? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I mind the goats, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is he good to you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He doesn't beat you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir, not me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Whom does he beat? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He beats my brother, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah, you have a brother? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What does he do? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He minds the sheep, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And why doesn't he beat you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He must be fond of you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Does he give you enough to eat? (The Boy hesitates.) Does he feed you well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Fairly well, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're not unhappy? (The Boy hesitates.) Do you hear me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You don't know if you're unhappy or not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're as bad as myself. (Silence.) Where do you sleep? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the loft, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With your brother? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the hay? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All right, you may go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw us. (Pause.) You did see us, didn't you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He steps back, hesitates, turns and exit running. The light suddenly fails. In a moment it is night. The moon rises at back, mounts in the sky, stands still, shedding a pale light on the scene. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > At last! #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (Estragon gets up and goes towards Vladimir, a boot in each hand. He puts them down at edge of stage, straightens and contemplates the moon.) What are you doing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pale for weariness. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Eh? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Your boots, what are you doing with your boots? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (turning to look at the boots). I'm leaving them there. (Pause.) Another will come, just as . . . as . . . as me, but with smaller feet, and they'll make him happy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But you can't go barefoot! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Christ did. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Christ! What has Christ got to do with it. You're not going to compare yourself to Christ! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All my life I've compared myself to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But where he lived it was warm, it was dry! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. And they crucified quick. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've nothing more to do here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nor anywhere else. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah Gogo, don't go on like that. Tomorrow everything will be better. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How do you make that out? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you not hear what the child said? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He said that Godot was sure to come tomorrow. (Pause.) What do you say to that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then all we have to do is to wait on here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are you mad? We must take cover. (He takes Estragon by the arm.) Come on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He draws Estragon after him. Estragon yields, then resists. They halt. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking at the tree). Pity we haven't got a bit of rope. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come on. It's cold. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He draws Estragon after him. As before. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Remind me to bring a bit of rope tomorrow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. Come on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He draws him after him. As before. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How long have we been together all the time now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. Fifty years maybe. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you remember the day I threw myself into the Rhone? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We were grape harvesting. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You fished me out. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's all dead and buried. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > My clothes dried in the sun. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's no good harking back on that. Come on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He draws him after him. As before. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm cold! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait! (He moves away from Vladimir.) I sometimes wonder if we wouldn't have been better off alone, each one for himself. (He crosses the stage and sits down on the mound.) We weren't made for the same road. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (without anger). It's not certain. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, nothing is certain. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir slowly crosses the stage and sits down beside Estragon. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can still part, if you think it would be better. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's not worthwhile now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, it's not worthwhile now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well, shall we go? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They do not move.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Curtain.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ACT II</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Next day. Same time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Same place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon's boots front center, heels together, toes splayed. Lucky's hat at same place. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The tree has four or five leaves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Enter Vladimir agitatedly. He halts and looks long at the tree, then suddenly begins to move feverishly about the stage. He halts before the boots, picks one up, examines it, sniffs it, manifests disgust, puts it back carefully. Comes and goes. Halts extreme right and gazes into distance off, shading his eyes with his hand. Comes and goes. Halts extreme left, as before. Comes and goes. Halts suddenly and begins to sing loudly. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A dog came in–</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Having begun too high he stops, clears his throat, resumes:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A dog came in the kitchen</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And stole a crust of bread.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then cook up with a ladle</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And beat him till he was dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then all the dogs came running</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And dug the dog a tomb–</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He stops, broods, resumes:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then all the dogs came running</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And dug the dog a tomb</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And wrote upon the tombstone</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > For the eyes of dogs to come:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A dog came in the kitchen</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And stole a crust of bread.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then cook up with a ladle</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And beat him till he was dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then all the dogs came running</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And dug the dog a tomb–</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He stops, broods, resumes:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then all the dogs came running</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And dug the dog a tomb–</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He stops, broods. Softly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And dug the dog a tomb . . .</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He remains a moment silent and motionless, then begins to move feverishly about the stage. He halts before the tree, comes and goes, before the boots, comes and goes, halts extreme right, gazes into distance, extreme left, gazes into distance. Enter Estragon right, barefoot, head bowed. He slowly crosses the stage. Vladimir turns and sees him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You again! (Estragon halts but does not raise his head. Vladimir goes towards him.) Come here till I embrace you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't touch me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir holds back, pained. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you want me to go away? (Pause.) Gogo! (Pause. Vladimir observes him attentively.) Did they beat you? (Pause.) Gogo! (Estragon remains silent, head bowed.) Where did you spend the night? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did I ever leave you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You let me go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look at me. (Estragon does not raise his head. Violently.) Will you look at me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon raises his head. They look long at each other, then suddenly embrace, clapping each other on the back. End of the embrace. Estragon, no longer supported, almost falls. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What a day! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who beat you? Tell me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Another day done with. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not yet. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > For me it's over and done with, no matter what happens. (Silence.) I heard you singing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's right, I remember. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That finished me. I said to myself, He's all alone, he thinks I'm gone for ever, and he sings. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One is not master of one's moods. All day I've felt in great form. (Pause.) I didn't get up in the night, not once! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (sadly). You see, you piss better when I'm not there. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I missed you . . . and at the same time I was happy. Isn't that a strange thing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (shocked). Happy? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps it's not quite the right word. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Now? . . . (Joyous.) There you are again . . . (Indifferent.) There we are again. . . (Gloomy.) There I am again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (vexed). Then why do you always come crawling back? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, but I do. It's because you don't know how to defend yourself. I wouldn't have let them beat you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You couldn't have stopped them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There was ten of them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, I mean before they beat you. I would have stopped you from doing whatever it was you were doing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I wasn't doing anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then why did they beat you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah no, Gogo, the truth is there are things that escape you that don't escape me, you must feel it yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you I wasn't doing anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps you weren't. But it's the way of doing it that counts, the way of doing it, if you want to go on living. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I wasn't doing anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You must be happy too, deep down, if you only knew it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Happy about what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To be back with me again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Would you say so? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Say you are, even if it's not true. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What am I to say? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Say, I am happy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I am happy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So am I. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So am I. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We are happy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait for Godot. (Estragon groans. Silence.) Things have changed here since yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And if he doesn't come? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (after a moment of bewilderment). We'll see when the time comes. (Pause.) I was saying that things have changed here since yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Everything oozes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look at the tree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's never the same pus from one second to the next. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The tree, look at the tree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon looks at the tree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Was is not there yesterday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember? We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn't. Do you not remember? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You dreamt it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is it possible you've forgotten already? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And Pozzo and Lucky, have you forgotten them too? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo and Lucky? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's forgotten everything! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I remember a lunatic who kicked the shins off me. Then he played the fool. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That was Lucky. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I remember that. But when was it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And his keeper, do you not remember him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He gave me a bone. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That was Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And all that was yesterday, you say? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes of course it was yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And here where we are now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where else do you think? Do you not recognize the place? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (suddenly furious). Recognize! What is there to recognize? All my lousy life I've crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! (Looking wildly about him.) Look at this muckheap! I've never stirred from it! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Calm yourself, calm yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All the same, you can't tell me that this (gesture) bears any resemblance to . . . (he hesitates) . . . to the Macon country for example. You can't deny there's a big difference. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The Macon country! Who's talking to you about the Macon country? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But you were there yourself, in the Macon country. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No I was never in the Macon country! I've puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Cackon country! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But we were there together, I could swear to it! Picking grapes for a man called . . . (he snaps his fingers) . . . can't think of the name of the man, at a place called . . . (snaps his fingers) . . . can't think of the name of the place, do you not remember? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (a little calmer). It's possible. I didn't notice anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But down there everything is red! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (exasperated). I didn't notice anything, I tell you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. Vladimir sighs deeply. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're a hard man to get on with, Gogo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It'd be better if we parted. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You always say that and you always come crawling back. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The best thing would be to kill me, like the other. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What other? (Pause.) What other? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like billions of others. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (sententious). To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're right, we're inexhaustible. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's so we won't think. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We have that excuse. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's so we won't hear. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We have our reasons. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All the dead voices. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They make a noise like wings. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like leaves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like sand. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like leaves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They all speak at once. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Each one to itself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Rather they whisper. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They rustle. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They murmur. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They rustle. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do they say? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They talk about their lives. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To have lived is not enough for them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They have to talk about it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To be dead is not enough for them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It is not sufficient. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They make a noise like feathers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like leaves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Likes ashes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like leaves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Long silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Say something! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm trying. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Long silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (in anguish). Say anything at all! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do we do now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This is awful! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Sing something. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no! (He reflects.) We could start all over again perhaps. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That should be easy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the start that's difficult. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You can start from anything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, but you have to decide. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm trying. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > When you seek you hear. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You do. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That prevents you from finding. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It does. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That prevents you from thinking. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You think all the same. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no, it's impossible. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's the idea, let's contradict each another. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Impossible. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You think so? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're in no danger of ever thinking any more. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then what are we complaining about? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Thinking is not the worst. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps not. But at least there's that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's the idea, let's ask each other questions. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do you mean, at least there's that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That much less misery. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? If we gave thanks for our mercies? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is terrible is to have thought. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But did that ever happen to us? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where are all these corpses from? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > These skeletons. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell me that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We must have thought a little. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > At the very beginning. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A charnel-house! A charnel-house! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You don't have to look. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You can't help looking. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Try as one may. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg your pardon? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Try as one may. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We should turn resolutely towards Nature. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've tried that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On it's not the worst, I know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To have thought. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Obviously. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But we could have done without it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Que voulez-vous? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I beg your pardon? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Que voulez-vouz. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! que voulez-vous. Exactly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That wasn't such a bad little canter. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, but now we'll have to find something else. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let me see. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He takes off his hat, concentrates. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let me see. (He takes off his hat, concentrates. Long silence.) Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They put on their hats, relax. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What was I saying, we could go on from there. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What were you saying when? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > At the very beginning. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The very beginning of WHAT? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This evening . . . I was saying . . . I was saying . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm not a historian. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait . . . we embraced . . . we were happy . . . happy . . . what do we do now that we're happy . . . go on waiting . . . waiting . . . let me think . . . it's coming . . . go on waiting . . . now that we're happy . . . let me see . . . ah! The tree! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The tree? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you not remember? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm tired. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Look at it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They look at the tree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I see nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But yesterday evening it was all black and bare. And now it's covered with leaves. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Leaves? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In a single night. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It must be the Spring. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But in a single night! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you we weren't here yesterday. Another of your nightmares. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And where were we yesterday evening according to you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How would I know? In another compartment. There's no lack of void. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (sure of himself). Good. We weren't here yesterday evening. Now what did we do yesterday evening? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Try and remember. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do . . . I suppose we blathered. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (controlling himself). About what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh . . . this and that I suppose, nothing in particular. (With assurance.) Yes, now I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That's been going on now for half a century. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You don't remember any fact, any circumstance? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (weary). Don't torment me, Didi. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The sun. The moon. Do you not remember? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They must have been there, as usual. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You didn't notice anything out of the ordinary? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Alas! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And Pozzo? And Lucky? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The bones. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They were like fishbones. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It was Pozzo gave them to you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And the kick. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's right, someone gave me a kick. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It was Lucky gave it to you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And all that was yesterday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Show me your leg. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Which? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Both. Pull up your trousers. (Estragon gives a leg to Vladimir, staggers. Vladimir takes the leg. They stagger.) Pull up your trousers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir pulls up the trousers, looks at the leg, lets it go. Estragon almost falls. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The other. (Estragon gives the same leg.) The other, pig! (Estragon gives the other leg. Triumphantly.) There's the wound! Beginning to fester! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And what about it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (letting go the leg). Where are your boots? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I must have thrown them away. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > When? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (exasperated). I don't know why I don't know! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, I mean why did you throw them away? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (exasperated). Because they were hurting me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (triumphantly, pointing to the boots). There they are! (Estragon looks at the boots.) At the very spot where you left them yesterday! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon goes towards the boots, inspects them closely. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They're not mine. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (stupefied). Not yours! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Mine were black. These are brown. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're sure yours were black? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well they were a kind of gray. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And these are brown. Show me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (picking up a boot). Well they're a kind of green. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Show me. (Estragon hands him the boot. Vladimir inspects it, throws it down angrily.) Well of all the— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You see, all that's a lot of bloody— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! I see what it is. Yes, I see what's happened. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All that's a lot of bloody— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's elementary. Someone came and took yours and left you his. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > His were too tight for him, so he took yours. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But mine were too tight. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > For you. Not for him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (having tried in vain to work it out). I'm tired! (Pause.) Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're waiting for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! (Pause. Despairing.) What'll we do, what'll we do! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's nothing we can do. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But I can't go on like this! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Would you like a radish? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is that all there is? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There are radishes and turnips. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are there no carrots? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. Anyway you overdo it with your carrots. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then give me a radish. (Vladimir fumbles in his pockets, finds nothing but turnips, finally brings out a radish and hands it to Estragon who examines it, sniffs it.) It's black! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's a radish. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I only like the pink ones, you know that! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then you don't want it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I only like the pink ones! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then give it back to me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon gives it back. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll go and get a carrot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He does not move. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This is becoming really insignificant. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not enough. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What about trying them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I've tried everything. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, I mean the boots. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Would that be a good thing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It'd pass the time. (Estragon hesitates.) I assure you, it'd be an occupation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A relaxation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A recreation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A relaxation. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Try. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'll help me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I will of course. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We don't manage too badly, eh Didi, between the two of us? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes yes. Come on, we'll try the left first. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget. (He picks up a boot.) Come on, give me your foot. (Estragon raises his foot.) The other, hog! (Estragon raises the other foot.) Higher! (Wreathed together they stagger about the stage. Vladimir succeeds finally in getting on the boot.) Try and walk. (Estragon walks.) Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It fits. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (taking string from his pocket). We'll try and lace it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (vehemently). No no, no laces, no laces! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'll be sorry. Let's try the other. (As before.) Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (grudgingly). It fits too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They don't hurt you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not yet. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then you can keep them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They're too big. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps you'll have socks some day. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then you'll keep them? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's enough about these boots. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, but— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (violently). Enough! (Silence.) I suppose I might as well sit down. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He looks for a place to sit down, then goes and sits down on the mound. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's where you were sitting yesterday evening. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If I could only sleep. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yesterday you slept. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll try. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He resumes his foetal posture, his head between his knees. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait. (He goes over and sits down beside Estragon and begins to sing in a loud voice.) </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Bye bye bye bye</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Bye bye– #</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking up angrily). Not so loud! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (softly). </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Bye bye bye bye</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Bye bye bye bye</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Bye bye bye bye</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Bye bye . . .</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon sleeps. Vladimir gets up softly, takes off his coat and lays it across Estragon's shoulders, then starts walking up and down, swinging his arms to keep himself warm. Estragon wakes with a start, jumps up, casts about wildly. Vladimir runs to him, puts his arms around him.) There . . . there . . . Didi is here . . . don't be afraid . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There . . . there . . . it's all over. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was falling— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's all over, it's all over. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was on top of a— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't tell me! Come, we'll walk it off. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He takes Estragon by the arm and walks him up and down until Estragon refuses to go any further. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's enough. I'm tired. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'd rather be stuck there doing nothing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Please yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He releases Estragon, picks up his coat and puts it on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're waiting for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! (Vladimir walks up and down.) Can you not stay still? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm cold. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We came too soon. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's always at nightfall. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But night doesn't fall. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It'll fall all of a sudden, like yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then it'll be night. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And we can go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then it'll be day again. (Pause. Despairing.) What'll we do, what'll we do! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (halting, violently). Will you stop whining! I've had about my bellyful of your lamentations! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (seeing Lucky's hat). Well! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Farewell. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky's hat. (He goes towards it.) I've been here an hour and never saw it. (Very pleased.) Fine! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'll never see me again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I knew it was the right place. Now our troubles are over. (He picks up the hat, contemplates it, straightens it.) Must have been a very fine hat. (He puts it on in place of his own which he hands to Estragon.) Here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Hold that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon takes Vladimir's hat. Vladimir adjusts Lucky's hat on his head. Estragon puts on Vladimir's hat in place of his own which he hands to Vladimir. Vladimir takes Estragon's hat. Estragon adjusts Vladimir's hat on his head. Vladimir puts on Estragon's hat in place of Lucky's which he hands to Estragon. Estragon takes Lucky's hat. Vladimir adjusts Estragon's hat on his head. Estragon puts on Lucky's hat in place of Vladimir's which he hands to Vladimir. Vladimir takes his hat, Estragon adjusts Lucky's hat on his head. Vladimir puts on his hat in place of Estragon's which he hands to Estragon. Estragon takes his hat. Vladimir adjusts his hat on his head. Estragon puts on his hat in place of Lucky's which he hands to Vladimir. Vladimir takes Lucky's hat. Estragon adjusts his hat on his head. Vladimir puts on Lucky's hat in place of his own which he hands to Estragon. Estragon takes Vladimir's hat. Vladimir adjusts Lucky's hat on his head. Estragon hands Vladimir's hat back to Vladimir who takes it and hands it back to Estragon who takes it and hands it back to Vladimir who takes it and throws it down. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How does it fit me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How would I know? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, but how do I look in it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He turns his head coquettishly to and fro, minces like a mannequin. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Hideous. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, but not more so than usual? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Neither more nor less. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then I can keep it. Mine irked me. (Pause.) How shall I say? (Pause.) It itched me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He takes off Lucky's hat, peers into it, shakes it, knocks on the crown, puts it on again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Will you not play? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Play at what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We could play at Pozzo and Lucky. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Never heard of it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll do Lucky, you do Pozzo. (He imitates Lucky sagging under the weight of his baggage. Estragon looks at him with stupefaction.) Go on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What am I to do? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Curse me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (after reflection). Naughty! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Stronger! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Gonococcus! Spirochete! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir sways back and forth, doubled in two. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell me to think. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Say, Think, pig! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Think, pig! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's enough of that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell me to dance. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dance, hog! (He writhes. Exit Estragon left, precipitately.) I can't! (He looks up, misses Estragon.) Gogo! (He moves wildly about the stage. Enter Estragon left, panting. He hastens towards Vladimir, falls into his arms.) There you are again at last! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm accursed! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where were you? I thought you were gone for ever. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They're coming! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How many? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (triumphantly). It's Godot! At last! Gogo! It's Godot! We're saved! Let's go and meet him! (He drags Estragon towards the wings. Estragon resists, pulls himself free, exit right.) Gogo! Come back! (Vladimir runs to extreme left, scans the horizon. Enter Estragon right, he hastens towards Vladimir, falls into his arms.) There you are again again! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm in hell! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where were you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They're coming there too! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're surrounded! (Estragon makes a rush towards back.) Imbecile! There's no way out there. (He takes Estragon by the arm and drags him towards front. Gesture towards front.) There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go! Quick! (He pushes Estragon towards auditorium. Estragon recoils in horror.) You won't? (He contemplates auditorium.) Well I can understand that. Wait till I see. (He reflects.) Your only hope left is to disappear. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Behind the tree. (Estragon hesitates.) Quick! Behind the tree. (Estragon goes and crouches behind the tree, realizes he is not hidden, comes out from behind the tree.) Decidedly this tree will not have been the slightest use to us. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (calmer). I lost my head. Forgive me. It won't happen again. Tell me what to do. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There's nothing to do. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You go and stand there. (He draws Vladimir to extreme right and places him with his back to the stage.) There, don't move, and watch out. (Vladimir scans horizon, screening his eyes with his hand. Estragon runs and takes up same position extreme left. They turn their heads and look at each other.) Back to back like in the good old days. (They continue to look at each other for a moment, then resume their watch. Long silence.) Do you see anything coming? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (turning his head). What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (louder). Do you see anything coming? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nor I. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They resume their watch. Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You must have had a vision. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (turning his head). What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (louder). You must have had a vision. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No need to shout! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They resume their watch. Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (turning simultaneously). Do you— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh pardon! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Carry on. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no, after you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no, you first. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I interrupted you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On the contrary. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They glare at each other angrily. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ceremonious ape! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Punctilious pig! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Finish your phrase, I tell you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Finish your own! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. They draw closer, halt. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Moron! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's the idea, let's abuse each other. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Moron! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vermin! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Abortion! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Morpion! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Sewer-rat! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Curate! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Cretin! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (with finality). Crritic! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He wilts, vanquished, and turns away. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Now let's make it up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Gogo! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Didi! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Your hand! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Take it! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come to my arms! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yours arms? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > My breast! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Off we go! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They embrace. #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They separate. Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How time flies when one has fun! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do we do now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > While waiting. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > While waiting. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We could do our exercises. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our movements. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our elevations. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our relaxations. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our elongations. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Our relaxations. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To warm us up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To calm us down. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Off we go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir hops from one foot to the other. Estragon imitates him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (stopping). That's enough. I'm tired. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (stopping). We're not in shape. What about a little deep breathing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm tired breathing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You're right. (Pause.) Let's just do the tree, for the balance. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The tree? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir does the tree, staggering about on one leg. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (stopping). Your turn. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon does the tree, staggers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you think God sees me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You must close your eyes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon closes his eyes, staggers worse. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (stopping, brandishing his fists, at the top of his voice.) God have pity on me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (vexed). And me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On me! On me! Pity! On me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Enter Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo is blind. Lucky burdened as before. Rope as before, but much shorter, so that Pozzo may follow more easily. Lucky wearing a different hat. At the sight of Vladimir and Estragon he stops short. Pozzo, continuing on his way, bumps into him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Gogo! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (clutching onto Lucky who staggers). What is it? Who is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky falls, drops everything and brings down Pozzo with him. They lie helpless among the scattered baggage. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is it Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > At last! (He goes towards the heap.) Reinforcements at last! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is it Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We were beginning to weaken. Now we're sure to see the evening out. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you hear him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We are no longer alone, waiting for the night, waiting for Godot, waiting for . . . waiting. All evening we have struggled, unassisted. Now it's over. It's already tomorrow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Time flows again already. The sun will set, the moon rise, and we away . . . from here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pity! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Poor Pozzo! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I knew it was him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But it's not Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's not Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's not Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then who is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Here! Here! Help me up! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He can't get up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're waiting for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps he has another bone for you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Bone? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Chicken. Do you not remember? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It was him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ask him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps we should help him first. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To do what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To get up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He can't get up? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He wants to get up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then let him get up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo writhes, groans, beats the ground with his fists. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We should ask him for the bone first. Then if he refuses we'll leave him there. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You mean we have him at our mercy? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And that we should subordinate our good offices to certain conditions? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That seems intelligent all right. But there's one thing I'm afraid of. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we'd be ballocksed. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The one that went for you yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you there was ten of them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, before that, the one that kicked you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is he there? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As large as life. (Gesture towards Lucky.) For the moment he is inert. But he might run amuck any minute. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And suppose we gave him a good beating the two of us? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You mean if we fell on him in his sleep? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That seems a good idea all right. But could we do it? Is he really asleep? (Pause.) No, the best would be to take advantage of Pozzo's calling for help— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To help him— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We help him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In anticipation of some tangible return. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And suppose he— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? (Estragon says nothing.) It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflection, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Or for night to fall. (Pause.) We have kept our appointment and that's an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Billions. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You think so? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You may be right. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All I know is that the hours are long, under these conditions, and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which –how shall I say– which may at first sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit. You may say it is to prevent our reason from foundering. No doubt. But has it not long been straying in the night without end of the abysmal depths? That's what I sometimes wonder. You follow my reasoning? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (aphoristic for once). We are all born mad. Some remain so. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! I'll pay you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How much? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > One hundred francs! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's not enough. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I wouldn't go so far as that. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You think it's enough? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, I mean so far as to assert that I was weak in the head when I came into the world. But that is not the question. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Two hundred! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He broods. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Two hundred! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're coming! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He tries to pull Pozzo to his feet, fails, tries again, stumbles, falls, tries to get up, fails. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's the matter with you all? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't leave me! They'll kill me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where am I? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Gogo! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help me up first, then we'll go together. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You promise? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I swear it! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And we'll never come back? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Never! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We'll go to the Pyrenees. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wherever you like. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I've always wanted to wander in the Pyrenees. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You'll wander in them. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (recoiling). Who farted? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Here! Here! Pity! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's revolting! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Quick! Give me your hand! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. (Pause. Louder.) I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well I suppose in the end I'll get up by myself. (He tries, fails.) In the fullness of time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's the matter with you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Go to hell. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are you staying there? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > For the time being. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come on, get up, you'll catch a chill. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't worry about me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Come on, Didi, don't be pig-headed! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He stretches out his hand which Vladimir makes haste to seize. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pull! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon pulls, stumbles, falls. Long silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've arrived. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who are you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We are men. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Sweet mother earth! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Can you get up? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Try. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not now, not now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What happened? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (violently). Will you stop it, you! Pest! He can think of nothing but himself! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What about a little snooze? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you hear him? He wants to know what happened! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't mind him. Sleep. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pity! Pity! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (with a start). What is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Were you asleep? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I must have been. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's this bastard Pozzo at it again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Make him stop it. Kick him in the crotch. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (striking Pozzo). Will you stop it! Crablouse! (Pozzo extricates himself with cries of pain and crawls away. He stops, saws the air blindly, calling for help. Vladimir, propped on his elbow, observes his retreat.) He's off! (Pozzo collapses.) He's down! #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do we do now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps I could crawl to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't leave me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Or I could call to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, call to him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo! (Silence.) Pozzo! (Silence.) No reply. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Together. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR and ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo! Pozzo! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He moved. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are you sure his name is Pozzo? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (alarmed). Mr. Pozzo! Come back! We won't hurt you! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We might try him with other names. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm afraid he's dying. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It'd be amusing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What'd be amusing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To try him with other names, one after the other. It'd pass the time. And we'd be bound to hit on the right one sooner or later. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you his name is Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We'll soon see. (He reflects.) Abel! Abel! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Got it in one! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I begin to weary of this motif. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps the other is called Cain. Cain! Cain! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's all humanity. (Silence.) Look at the little cloud. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (raising his eyes). Where? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > There. In the zenith. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? (Pause.) What is there so wonderful about it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's pass on now to something else, do you mind? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was just going to suggest it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But to what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Suppose we got up to begin with? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No harm trying. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They get up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Child's play. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Simple question of will-power. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We're waiting for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! (Despairing.) What'll we do, what'll we do! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Help! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What about helping him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What does he want? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He wants to get up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then why doesn't he? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He wants us to help him get up. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then why don't we? What are we waiting for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They help Pozzo to his feet, let him go. He falls. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We must hold him. (They get him up again. Pozzo sags between them, his arms round their necks.) #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Feeling better? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who are you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Do you not recognize us? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I am blind. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps he can see into the future. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Since when? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I used to have wonderful sight— but are you friends? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (laughing noisily). He wants to know if we are friends! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No, he means friends of his. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We've proved we are, by helping him. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Exactly. Would we have helped him if we weren't his friends? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Possibly. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't let's quibble about that now. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You are not highwaymen? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Highwaymen! Do we look like highwaymen? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Damn it can't you see the man is blind! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Damn it so he is. (Pause.) So he says. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't leave me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No question of it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > For the moment. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What time is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (inspecting the sky). Seven o'clock . . . eight o'clock . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That depends what time of year it is. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is it evening? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. Vladimir and Estragon scrutinize the sunset. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's rising. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Impossible. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps it's the dawn. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't be a fool. It's the west over there. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How do you know? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (anguished). Is it evening? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Anyway, it hasn't moved. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I tell you it's rising. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why don't you answer me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Give us a chance. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (reassuring). It's evening, Sir, it's evening, night is drawing nigh. My friend here would have me doubt it and I must confess he shook me for a moment. But it is not for nothing I have lived through this long day and I can assure you it is very near the end of its repertory. (Pause.) How do you feel now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How much longer are we to cart him around? (They half release him, catch him again as he falls.) We are not caryatids! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You were saying your sight used to be good, if I heard you right. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wonderful! Wonderful, wonderful sight! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (irritably). Expand! Expand! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let him alone. Can't you see he's thinking of the days when he was happy. (Pause.) Memoria praeteritorum bonorum— that must be unpleasant. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We wouldn't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And it came on you all of a sudden? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Quite wonderful! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm asking you if it came on you all of a sudden. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I woke up one fine day as blind as Fortune. (Pause.) Sometimes I wonder if I'm not still asleep. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And when was that? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But no later than yesterday— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (violently). Don't question me! The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well just fancy that! I could have sworn it was just the opposite. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where are we? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I couldn't tell you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It isn't by any chance the place known as the Board? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Never heard of it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is it like? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking round). It's indescribable. It's like nothing. There's nothing. There's a tree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then it's not the Board. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (sagging). Some diversion! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where is my menial? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's about somewhere. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why doesn't he answer when I call? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. He seems to be sleeping. Perhaps he's dead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What happened exactly? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Exactly! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The two of you slipped. (Pause.) And fell. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Go and see is he hurt. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't leave you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You needn't both go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). You go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > After what he did to me? Never! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes yes, let your friend go, he stinks so. (Silence.) What is he waiting for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What are you waiting for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm waiting for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What exactly should he do? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well to begin with he should pull on the rope, as hard as he likes so long as he doesn't strangle him. He usually responds to that. If not he should give him a taste of his boot, in the face and the privates as far as possible. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (to Estragon). You see, you've nothing to be afraid of. It's even an opportunity to revenge yourself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And if he defends himself? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No no, he never defends himself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'll come flying to the rescue. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't take your eyes off me. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He goes towards Lucky. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Make sure he's alive before you start. No point in exerting yourself if he's dead. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (bending over Lucky). He's breathing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then let him have it. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With sudden fury Estragon starts kicking Lucky, hurling abuse at him as he does so. But he hurts his foot and moves away, limping and groaning. Lucky stirs. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh the brute! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He sits down on the mound and tries to take off his boot. But he soon desists and disposes himself for sleep, his arms on his knees and his head on his arms. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's gone wrong now? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > My friend has hurt himself. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And Lucky? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So it is he? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It is Lucky? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't understand. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And you are Pozzo? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Certainly I am Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The same as yesterday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yesterday? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We met yesterday. (Silence.) Do you not remember? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won't remember having met anyone today. So don't count on me to enlighten you. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Enough! Up pig! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You were bringing him to the fair to sell him. You spoke to us. He danced. He thought. You had your sight. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As you please. Let me go! (Vladimir moves away.) Up! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky gets up, gathers up his burdens. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where do you go from here? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On. (Lucky, laden down, takes his place before Pozzo.) Whip! (Lucky puts everything down, looks for whip, finds it, puts it into Pozzo's hand, takes up everything again.) Rope! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky puts everything down, puts end of rope into Pozzo's hand, takes up everything again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What is there in the bag? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Sand. (He jerks the rope.) On! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Don't go yet. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What do you do when you fall far from help? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Before you go tell him to sing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lucky. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To sing? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. Or to think. Or to recite. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But he is dumb. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dumb! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dumb. He can't even groan. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dumb! Since when? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > POZZO:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. (He jerks the rope.) On! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Exeunt Pozzo and Lucky. Vladimir follows them to the edge of the stage, looks after them. The noise of falling, reinforced by mimic of Vladimir, announces that they are down again. Silence. Vladimir goes towards Estragon, contemplates him a moment, then shakes him awake. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (wild gestures, incoherent words. Finally.) Why will you never let me sleep? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I felt lonely. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was dreaming I was happy. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That passed the time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I was dreaming that— </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (violently). Don't tell me! (Silence.) I wonder is he really blind. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Blind? Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Blind? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He told us he was blind. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well what about it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It seemed to me he saw us. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You dreamt it. (Pause.) Let's go. We can't. Ah! (Pause.) Are you sure it wasn't him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But who? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pozzo. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not at all! (Less sure.) Not at all! (Still less sure.) Not at all! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I suppose I might as well get up. (He gets up painfully.) Ow! Didi! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know what to think any more. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > My feet! (He sits down again and tries to take off his boots.) Help me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? (Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can't go on! (Pause.) What have I said? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He goes feverishly to and fro, halts finally at extreme left, broods. Enter Boy right. He halts. Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Mister . . . (Vladimir turns.) Mister Albert . . . </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Off we go again. (Pause.) Do you not recognize me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It wasn't you came yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > This is your first time. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You have a message from Mr. Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He won't come this evening. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But he'll come tomorrow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Without fail. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you meet anyone? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Two other . . . (he hesitates) . . . men? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I didn't see anyone, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What does he do, Mr. Godot? (Silence.) Do you hear me? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He does nothing, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > How is your brother? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He's sick, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Perhaps it was he came yesterday. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (softly). Has he a beard, Mr. Godot? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Fair or . . . (he hesitates) . . . or black? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I think it's white, Sir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Christ have mercy on us! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > BOY:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he hesitates) . . . that you saw me. (Pause. Vladimir advances, the Boy recoils. Vladimir halts, the Boy halts. With sudden violence.) You're sure you saw me, you won't come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me! </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. Vladimir makes a sudden spring forward, the Boy avoids him and exits running. Silence. The sun sets, the moon rises. As in Act 1. Vladimir stands motionless and bowed. Estragon wakes, takes off his boots, gets up with one in each hand and goes and puts them down center front, then goes towards Vladimir. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What's wrong with you? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nothing. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I'm going. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > So am I. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Was I long asleep? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where shall we go? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not far. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh yes, let's go far away from here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why not? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We have to come back tomorrow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What for? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To wait for Godot. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ah! (Silence.) He didn't come? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And now it's too late. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, now it's night. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And if we dropped him? (Pause.) If we dropped him? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He'd punish us. (Silence. He looks at the tree.) Everything's dead but the tree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (looking at the tree). What is it? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's the tree. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, but what kind? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I don't know. A willow. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Estragon draws Vladimir towards the tree. They stand motionless before it. Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Why don't we hang ourselves? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With what? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You haven't got a bit of rope? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then we can't. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Wait, there's my belt. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It's too short. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You could hang onto my legs. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And who'd hang onto mine? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Show me all the same. (Estragon loosens the cord that holds up his trousers which, much too big for him, fall about his ankles. They look at the cord.) It might do in a pinch. But is it strong enough? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We'll soon see. Here. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They each take an end of the cord and pull. #</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > It breaks. They almost fall. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Not worth a curse. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You say we have to come back tomorrow? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Then we can bring a good bit of rope. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silence. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Didi? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I can't go on like this. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > That's what you think. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > If we parted? That might be better for us. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We'll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And if he comes? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We'll be saved. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Vladimir takes off his hat (Lucky's), peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, knocks on the crown, puts it on again. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? Shall we go? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pull on your trousers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pull on your trousers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > You want me to pull off my trousers? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pull ON your trousers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (realizing his trousers are down). True. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > He pulls up his trousers. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > VLADIMIR:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Well? Shall we go? </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > ESTRAGON:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yes, let's go. </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > They do not move.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Curtain.<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2011/01/godot-poll.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Godot" poll </span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-63440491775935112792011-01-14T14:43:00.000-08:002011-01-14T15:01:44.611-08:00Conrad-Ford..."The Inheritors"<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" >THE INHERITORS</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An Extravagant Story</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JOSEPH CONRAD & FORD M. HUEFFER</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sardanapalus builded seven cities in a day. Let us eat, drink and sleep, for to-morrow we die."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >New York</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MCMI</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >London, William Heinemann. 1901, by MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Trow Printing Company New York</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To BORYS & CHRISTINA</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >THE INHERITORS</span><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER ONE</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ideas," she said. "Oh, as for ideas—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well?" I hazarded, "as for ideas—?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder. The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints' effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white streaks of bird-dropping.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There," I said, pointing toward it, "doesn't that suggest something to you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She made a motion with her head—half negative, half contemptuous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But," I stuttered, "the associations—the ideas—the historical ideas—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She said nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You Americans," I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if she were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of the daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confident of superseding one fatally.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the superiority—superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker, proud of my conversational powers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance at her. I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was. She had good hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes. And something besides—a something—a something that was not an attribute of her beauty. The modelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce an effect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them from somewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was strange.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Which way are you going?" she asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am going to walk to Dover," I answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And I may come with you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I looked at her—intent on divining her in that one glance. It was of course impossible. "There will be time for analysis," I thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The roads are free to all," I said. "You are not an American?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She shook her head. No. She was not an Australian either, she came from none of the British colonies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are not English," I affirmed. "You speak too well." I was piqued. She did not answer. She smiled again and I grew angry. In the cathedral she had smiled at the verger's commendation of particularly abominable restorations, and that smile had drawn me toward her, had emboldened me to offer deferential and condemnatory remarks as to the plaster-of-Paris mouldings. You know how one addresses a young lady who is obviously capable of taking care of herself. That was how I had come across her. She had smiled at the gabble of the cathedral guide as he showed the obsessed troop, of which we had formed units, the place of martyrdom of Blessed Thomas, and her smile had had just that quality of superseder's contempt. It had pleased me then; but, now that she smiled thus past me—it was not quite at me—in the crooked highways of the town, I was irritated. After all, I was somebody; I was not a cathedral verger. I had a fancy for myself in those days—a fancy that solitude and brooding had crystallised into a habit of mind. I was a writer with high—with the highest—ideals. I had withdrawn myself from the world, lived isolated, hidden in the countryside, lived as hermits do, on the hope of one day doing something—of putting greatness on paper. She suddenly fathomed my thoughts: "You write," she affirmed. I asked how she knew, wondered what she had read of mine—there was so little.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Are you a popular author?" she asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Alas, no!" I answered. "You must know that."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You would like to be?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We should all of us like," I answered; "though it is true some of us protest that we aim for higher things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I see," she said, musingly. As far as I could tell she was coming to some decision. With an instinctive dislike to any such proceeding as regarded myself, I tried to cut across her unknown thoughts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But, really—" I said, "I am quite a commonplace topic. Let us talk about yourself. Where do you come from?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It occurred to me again that I was intensely unacquainted with her type.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here was the same smile—as far as I could see, exactly the same smile.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are fine shades in smiles as in laughs, as in tones of voice. I</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >seemed unable to hold my tongue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Where do you come from?" I asked. "You must belong to one of the new nations. You are a foreigner, I'll swear, because you have such a fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a Prussian. But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is beginning to find itself."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean," she said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The phrase is comprehensive," I said. I was determined not to give myself away. "Where in the world do you come from?" I repeated. The question, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope, I suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You know, fair play's a jewel. Now I'm quite willing to give you information as to myself. I have already told you the essentials—you ought to tell me something. It would only be fair play."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why should there be any fair play?" she asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What have you to say against that?" I said. "Do you not number it among your national characteristics?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You really wish to know where I come from?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Listen," she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day. "What—what!" I cried.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me," I said, "I have not been very well. I missed what you said." I was certainly out of breath.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension," she repeated with admirable gravity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, come," I expostulated, "this is playing it rather low down. You walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand. Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obvious enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that brought out her national characteristics. She must be of some race, perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav—of some incomprehensible race. I had never seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that Circassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What was repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one does not understand one shies at—finds sinister, in fact. And she struck me as sinister.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You won't tell me who you are?" I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have done so," she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She turned round and pointed at the city.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Look!" she said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow, filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the last word. She said something—uttered some sound.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster—vaster than cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity of space.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked at her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What the devil," I said, hysterically—"what the devil do you play these tricks upon me for?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see," she answered, "the rudiments of the sense are there."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You must excuse me if I fail to understand," I said, grasping after fragments of dropped dignity. "I am subject to fits of giddiness." I felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. "Pardon my swearing," I added; a proof of recovered equanimity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken; and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You insist then in preserving your—your incognito."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I make no mystery of myself," she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension," I remarked, ironically.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I come from the Fourth Dimension," she said, patiently. She had the air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point of the multiplication table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording. She even said "yes" at the opening of her next speech.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes," she said. "It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of any age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused, seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the cockney school of poetry."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I understand," I said, "that you wish me to consider myself as relatively a Choctaw. But what I do not understand is; what bearing that has upon—upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will explain," she replied.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw," I said, pleasantly, "you must be concise and convincing."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She answered: "I will."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She made a long speech of it; I condense. I can't remember her exact words—there were so many; but she spoke like a book. There was something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her expressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting a technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad, that appealed to me—the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the straight, white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw running for miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering down through the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of innumerable skylarks. And I was listening to a parody of a scientific work recited by a phonograph.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension—heard that it was an inhabited plane—invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I had seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes. I heard the Dimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical, incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable and immortal. She did not say that they were immortal, however. "You would—you will—hate us," she concluded. And I seemed only then to come to myself. The power of her imagination was so great that I fancied myself face to face with the truth. I supposed she had been amusing herself; that she should have tried to frighten me was inadmissible. I don't pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I said, amiably: "You certainly have succeeded in making these beings hateful."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have made nothing," she said with a faint smile, and went on amusing herself. She would explain origins, now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your"—she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of the country, or the populations of the earth—"your ancestors were mine, but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day, you overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted diseases, as we shall contract them,—beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity … of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts—you have forgotten!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and dispassionate assurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith. We approached a little roadside inn. On a bench before the door a dun-clad country fellow was asleep, his head on the table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Put your fingers in your ears," my companion commanded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I humoured her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I saw her lips move. The countryman started, shuddered, and by a clumsy, convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his eyes. Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion," I commented. "I know there are words that have certain effects. But you shouldn't play pranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It isn't good form, I suppose?" she sneered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, "the poor fellow has lost his beer."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What's that to me?" she commented, with the air of one affording a concrete illustration.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's a good deal to him," I answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But what to me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I said nothing. She ceased her exposition immediately afterward, growing silent as suddenly as she had become discoursive. It was rather as if she had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it. I was quite at a loss as to what she was driving at. There was a newness, a strangeness about her; sometimes she struck me as mad, sometimes as frightfully sane. We had a meal somewhere—a meal that broke the current of her speech—and then, in the late afternoon, took a by-road and wandered in secluded valleys. I had been ill; trouble of the nerves, brooding, the monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess. I had an errand in this part of the world and had been approaching it deviously, seeking the normal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to my old self. I did not wish to think of how I should get through the year—of the thousand little things that matter. So I talked and she—she listened very well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last, I myself brought the talk round to the Fourth Dimension. We were sauntering along the forgotten valley that lies between Hardves and Stelling Minnis; we had been silent for several minutes. For me, at least, the silence was pregnant with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run in currents between man and woman. The sun was getting low and it was shadowy in those shrouded hollows. I laughed at some thought, I forget what, and then began to badger her with questions. I tried to exhaust the possibilities of the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque suggestions. I said: "And when a great many of you have been crowded out of the Dimension and invaded the earth you will do so and so—" something preposterous and ironical. She coldly dissented, and at once the irony appeared as gross as the jocularity of a commercial traveller. Sometimes she signified: "Yes, that is what we shall do;" signified it without speaking—by some gesture perhaps, I hardly know what. There was something impressive—something almost regal—in this manner of hers; it was rather frightening in those lonely places, which were so forgotten, so gray, so closed in. There was something of the past world about the hanging woods, the little veils of unmoving mist—as if time did not exist in those furrows of the great world; and one was so absolutely alone; anything might have happened. I grew weary of the sound of my tongue. But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on me the effect of some incredible stimulant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We came to the end of the valley where the road begins to climb the southern hill, out into the open air. I managed to maintain an uneasy silence. From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to a clear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception—allegory, madness, or whatever it was. She certainly forced it home. The Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable. They were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out and find the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to sap the strength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles. As to methods, we should be treated as we ourselves treat the inferior races. There would be no fighting, no killing; we—our whole social system—would break as a beam snaps, because we were worm-eaten with altruism and ethics. We, at our worst, had a certain limit, a certain stage where we exclaimed: "No, this is playing it too low down," because we had scruples that acted like handicapping weights. She uttered, I think, only two sentences of connected words: "We shall race with you and we shall not be weighted," and, "We shall merely sink you lower by our weight." All the rest went like this:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But then," I would say … "we shall not be able to trust anyone. Anyone may be one of you…." She would answer: "Anyone." She prophesied a reign of terror for us. As one passed one's neighbour in the street one would cast sudden, piercing glances at him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was silent. The birds were singing the sun down. It was very dark among the branches, and from minute to minute the colours of the world deepened and grew sombre.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But—" I said. A feeling of unrest was creeping over me. "But why do you tell me all this?" I asked. "Do you think I will enlist with you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You will have to in the end," she said, "and I do not wish to waste my strength. If you had to work unwittingly you would resist and resist and resist. I should have to waste my power on you. As it is, you will resist only at first, then you will begin to understand. You will see how we will bring a man down—a man, you understand, with a great name, standing for probity and honour. You will see the nets drawing closer and closer, and you will begin to understand. Then you will cease resisting, that is all."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was silent. A June nightingale began to sing, a trifle hoarsely. We seemed to be waiting for some signal. The things of the night came and went, rustled through the grass, rustled through the leafage. At last I could not even see the white gleam of her face….</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I stretched out my hand and it touched hers. I seized it without an instant of hesitation. "How could I resist you?" I said, and heard my own whisper with a kind of amazement at its emotion. I raised her hand. It was very cold and she seemed to have no thought of resistance; but before it touched my lips something like a panic of prudence had overcome me. I did not know what it would lead to—and I remembered that I did not even know who she was. From the beginning she had struck me as sinister and now, in the obscurity, her silence and her coldness seemed to be a passive threatening of unknown entanglement. I let her hand fall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We must be getting on," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The road was shrouded and overhung by branches. There was a kind of translucent light, enough to see her face, but I kept my eyes on the ground. I was vexed. Now that it was past the episode appeared to be a lost opportunity. We were to part in a moment, and her rare mental gifts and her unfamiliar, but very vivid, beauty made the idea of parting intensely disagreeable. She had filled me with a curiosity that she had done nothing whatever to satisfy, and with a fascination that was very nearly a fear. We mounted the hill and came out on a stretch of soft common sward. Then the sound of our footsteps ceased and the world grew more silent than ever. There were little enclosed fields all round us. The moon threw a wan light, and gleaming mist hung in the ragged hedges. Broad, soft roads ran away into space on every side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And now …" I asked, at last, "shall we ever meet again?" My voice came huskily, as if I had not spoken for years and years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, very often," she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Very often?" I repeated. I hardly knew whether I was pleased or dismayed. Through the gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a white house front. It seemed to belong to another world; to another order of things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah … here is Callan's," I said. "This is where I was going…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I know," she answered; "we part here."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To meet again?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh … to meet again; why, yes, to meet again."</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER TWO</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned. The episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a riddle, and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing. She, too, would be a very trivial thing when I had found a solution. It occurred to me that she wished me to regard her as a symbol, perhaps, of the future—as a type of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact. She had been playing the fool with me, in her insolent modernity. She had wished me to understand that I was old-fashioned; that the frame of mind of which I and my fellows were the inheritors was over and done with. We were to be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superannuated. It was obvious that she was better equipped for the swiftness of life. She had a something—not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination, but a something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive. Perhaps it was only the confidence of the superseder, the essential quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental. But I was not a negro—not even relatively a Hindoo. I was somebody, confound it, I was somebody.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As an author, I had been so uniformly unsuccessful, so absolutely unrecognised, that I had got into the way of regarding myself as ahead of my time, as a worker for posterity. It was a habit of mind—the only revenge that I could take upon despiteful Fate. This girl came to confound me with the common herd—she declared herself to be that very posterity for which I worked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She was probably a member of some clique that called themselves Fourth Dimensionists—just as there had been pre-Raphaelites. It was a matter of cant allegory. I began to wonder how it was that I had never heard of them. And how on earth had they come to hear of me!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"She must have read something of mine," I found myself musing: "the Jenkins story perhaps. It must have been the Jenkins story; they gave it a good place in their rotten magazine. She must have seen that it was the real thing, and…." When one is an author one looks at things in that way, you know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By that time I was ready to knock at the door of the great Callan. I seemed to be jerked into the commonplace medium of a great, great—oh, an infinitely great—novelist's home life. I was led into a well-lit drawing-room, welcomed by the great man's wife, gently propelled into a bedroom, made myself tidy, descended and was introduced into the sanctum, before my eyes had grown accustomed to the lamp-light. Callan was seated upon his sofa surrounded by an admiring crowd of very local personages. I forget what they looked like. I think there was a man whose reddish beard did not become him and another whose face might have been improved by the addition of a reddish beard; there was also an extremely moody dark man and I vaguely recollect a person who lisped.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They did not talk much; indeed there was very little conversation. What there was Callan supplied. He—spoke—very—slowly—and—very —authoritatively, like a great actor whose aim is to hold the stage as long as possible. The raising of his heavy eyelids at the opening door conveyed the impression of a dark, mental weariness; and seemed somehow to give additional length to his white nose. His short, brown beard was getting very grey, I thought. With his lofty forehead and with his superior, yet propitiatory smile, I was of course familiar. Indeed one saw them on posters in the street. The notables did not want to talk. They wanted to be spell-bound—and they were. Callan sat there in an appropriate attitude—the one in which he was always photographed. One hand supported his head, the other toyed with his watch-chain. His face was uniformly solemn, but his eyes were disconcertingly furtive. He cross-questioned me as to my walk from Canterbury; remarked that the cathedral was a—magnificent—Gothic—Monument and set me right as to the lie of the roads. He seemed pleased to find that I remembered very little of what I ought to have noticed on the way. It gave him an opportunity for the display of his local erudition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"A—remarkable woman—used—to—live—in—the—cottage—next—the—mill—at—Stelling," he said; "she was the original of Kate Wingfield."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"In your 'Boldero?'" the chorus chorussed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Remembrance of the common at Stelling—of the glimmering white faces of the shadowy cottages—was like a cold waft of mist to me. I forgot to say "Indeed!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"She was—a very—remarkable—woman—She——"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I found myself wondering which was real; the common with its misty hedges and the blurred moon; or this room with its ranks of uniformly bound books and its bust of the great man that threw a portentous shadow upward from its pedestal behind the lamp.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Before I had entirely recovered myself, the notables were departing to catch the last train. I was left alone with Callan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He did not trouble to resume his attitude for me, and when he did speak, spoke faster.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Interesting man, Mr. Jinks?" he said; "you recognised him?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No," I said; "I don't think I ever met him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan looked annoyed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I thought I'd got him pretty well. He's Hector Steele. In my</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >'Blanfield,'" he added.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Indeed!" I said. I had never been able to read "Blanfield." "Indeed, ah, yes—of course."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was an awkward pause.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The whiskey will be here in a minute," he said, suddenly. "I don't have it in when Whatnot's here. He's the Rector, you know; a great temperance man. When we've had a—a modest quencher—we'll get to business."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh," I said, "your letters really meant—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course," he answered. "Oh, here's the whiskey. Well now, Fox was down here the other night. You know Fox, of course?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Didn't he start the rag called—?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, yes," Callan answered, hastily, "he's been very successful in launching papers. Now he's trying his hand with a new one. He's any amount of backers—big names, you know. He's to run my next as a feuilleton. This—this venture is to be rather more serious in tone than any that he's done hitherto. You understand?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see where I come in."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan took a meditative sip of whiskey, added a little more water, a little more whiskey, and then found the mixture to his liking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see," he said, "Fox got a letter here to say that Wilkinson had died suddenly—some affection of the heart. Wilkinson was to have written a series of personal articles on prominent people. Well, Fox was nonplussed and I put in a word for you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm sure I'm much—" I began.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not at all, not at all," Callan interrupted, blandly. "I've known you and you've known me for a number of years."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A sudden picture danced before my eyes—the portrait of the Callan of the old days—the fawning, shady individual, with the seedy clothes, the furtive eyes and the obliging manners.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see that that gives me any claim."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan cleared his throat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The lapse of time," he said in his grand manner, "rivets what we may call the bands of association."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He paused to inscribe this sentence on the tablets of his memory. It would be dragged in—to form a purple patch—in his new serial.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see," he went on, "I've written a good deal of autobiographical matter and it would verge upon self-advertisement to do more. You know how much I dislike that. So I showed Fox your sketch in the Kensington."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The Jenkins story?" I said. "How did you come to see it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Then send me the Kensington," he answered. There was a touch of sourness in his tone, and I remembered that the Kensington I had seen had been ballasted with seven goodly pages by Callan himself—seven unreadable packed pages of a serial.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"As I was saying," Callan began again, "you ought to know me very well, and I suppose you are acquainted with my books. As for the rest, I will give you what material you want."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But, my dear Callan," I said, "I've never tried my hand at that sort of thing."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan silenced me with a wave of his hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It struck both Fox and myself that your—your 'Jenkins' was just what was wanted," he said; "of course, that was a study of a kind of broken-down painter. But it was well done."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I bowed my head. Praise from Callan was best acknowledged in silence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see, what we want, or rather what Fox wants," he explained, "is a kind of series of studies of celebrities chez eux. Of course, they are not broken down. But if you can treat them as you treated Jenkins —get them in their studies, surrounded by what in their case stands for the broken lay figures and the faded serge curtains—it will be exactly the thing. It will be a new line, or rather—what is a great deal better, mind you—an old line treated in a slightly, very slightly different way. That's what the public wants."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," I said, "that's what the public wants. But all the same, it's been done time out of mind before. Why, I've seen photographs of you and your arm-chair and your pen-wiper and so on, half a score of times in the sixpenny magazines."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan again indicated bland superiority with a wave of his hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You undervalue yourself," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I murmured—"Thanks."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is to be—not a mere pandering to curiosity—but an attempt to get at the inside of things—to get the atmosphere, so to speak; not merely to catalogue furniture."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was quoting from the prospectus of the new paper, and then cleared his throat for the utterance of a tremendous truth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Photography—is not—Art," he remarked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The fantastic side of our colloquy began to strike me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"After all," I thought to myself, "why shouldn't that girl have played at being a denizen of another sphere? She did it ever so much better than Callan. She did it too well, I suppose."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The price is very decent," Callan chimed in. "I don't know how much per thousand, …but…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I found myself reckoning, against my will as it were.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You'll do it, I suppose?" he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I thought of my debts … "Why, yes, I suppose so," I answered. "But who are the others that I am to provide with atmospheres?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan shrugged his shoulders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, all sorts of prominent people—soldiers, statesmen, Mr. Churchill, the Foreign Minister, artists, preachers—all sorts of people."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"All sorts of glory," occurred to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The paper will stand expenses up to a reasonable figure," Callan reassured me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It'll be a good joke for a time," I said. "I'm infinitely obliged to you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He warded off my thanks with both hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'll just send a wire to Fox to say that you accept," he said, rising. He seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude. He had an appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life. These he had struck before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning he was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of labour-saver; every kind of literary knick-knack. There were book-holders that swung into positions suitable to appropriate attitudes; there were piles of little green boxes with red capital letters of the alphabet upon them, and big red boxes with black small letters. There was a writing-lamp that cast an æsthetic glow upon another appropriate attitude—and there was one typewriter with note-paper upon it, and another with MS. paper already in position.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My God!" I thought—"to these heights the Muse soars."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As I looked at the gleaming pillars of the typewriters, the image of my own desk appeared to me; chipped, ink-stained, gloriously dusty. I thought that when again I lit my battered old tin lamp I should see ashes and match-ends; a tobacco-jar, an old gnawed penny penholder, bits of pink blotting-paper, match-boxes, old letters, and dust everywhere. And I knew that my attitude—when I sat at it—would be inappropriate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan was ticking off the telegram upon his machine. "It will go in the morning at eight," he said.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER THREE</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To encourage me, I suppose, Callan gave me the proof-sheets of his next to read in bed. The thing was so bad that it nearly sickened me of him and his jobs. I tried to read the stuff; to read it conscientiously, to read myself to sleep with it. I was under obligations to old Cal and I wanted to do him justice, but the thing was impossible. I fathomed a sort of a plot. It dealt in fratricide with a touch of adultery; a Great Moral Purpose loomed in the background. It would have been a dully readable novel but for that; as it was, it was intolerable. It was amazing that Cal himself could put out such stuff; that he should have the impudence. He was not a fool, not by any means a fool. It revolted me more than a little.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I came to it out of a different plane of thought. I may not have been able to write then—or I may; but I did know enough to recognise the flagrantly, the indecently bad, and, upon my soul, the idea that I, too, must cynically offer this sort of stuff if I was ever to sell my tens of thousands very nearly sent me back to my solitude. Callan had begun very much as I was beginning now; he had even, I believe, had ideals in his youth and had starved a little. It was rather trying to think that perhaps I was really no more than another Callan, that, when at last I came to review my life, I should have much such a record to look back upon. It disgusted me a little, and when I put out the light the horrors settled down upon me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I woke in a shivering frame of mind, ashamed to meet Callan's eye. It was as if he must be aware of my over-night thoughts, as if he must think me a fool who quarrelled with my victuals. He gave no signs of any such knowledge—was dignified, cordial; discussed his breakfast with gusto, opened his letters, and so on. An anæmic amanuensis was taking notes for appropriate replies. How could I tell him that I would not do the work, that I was too proud and all the rest of it? He would have thought me a fool, would have stiffened into hostility, I should have lost my last chance. And, in the broad light of day, I was loath to do that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He began to talk about indifferent things; we glided out on to a current of mediocre conversation. The psychical moment, if there were any such, disappeared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Someone bearing my name had written to express an intention of offering personal worship that afternoon. The prospect seemed to please the great Cal. He was used to such things; he found them pay, I suppose. We began desultorily to discuss the possibility of the writer's being a relation of mine; I doubted. I had no relations that I knew of; there was a phenomenal old aunt who had inherited the acres and respectability of the Etchingham Grangers, but she was not the kind of person to worship a novelist. I, the poor last of the family, was without the pale, simply because I, too, was a novelist. I explained these things to Callan and he commented on them, found it strange how small or how large, I forget which, the world was. Since his own apotheosis shoals of Callans had claimed relationship.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I ate my breakfast. Afterward, we set about the hatching of that article—the thought of it sickens me even now. You will find it in the volume along with the others; you may see how I lugged in Callan's surroundings, his writing-room, his dining-room, the romantic arbour in which he found it easy to write love-scenes, the clipped trees like peacocks and the trees clipped like bears, and all the rest of the background for appropriate attitudes. He was satisfied with any arrangements of words that suggested a gentle awe on the part of the writer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, yes," he said once or twice, "that's just the touch, just the touch—very nice. But don't you think…." We lunched after some time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was so happy. Quite pathetically happy. It had come so easy to me. I had doubted my ability to do the sort of thing; but it had written itself, as money spends itself, and I was going to earn money like that. The whole of my past seemed a mistake—a childishness. I had kept out of this sort of thing because I had thought it below me; I had kept out of it and had starved my body and warped my mind. Perhaps I had even damaged my work by this isolation. To understand life one must live—and I had only brooded. But, by Jove, I would try to live now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan had retired for his accustomed siesta and I was smoking pipe after pipe over a confoundedly bad French novel that I had found in the book-shelves. I must have been dozing. A voice from behind my back announced:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Miss Etchingham Granger!" and added—"Mr. Callan will be down directly." I laid down my pipe, wondered whether I ought to have been smoking when Cal expected visitors, and rose to my feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You!" I said, sharply. She answered, "You see." She was smiling. She had been so much in my thoughts that I was hardly surprised—the thing had even an air of pleasant inevitability about it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You must be a cousin of mine," I said, "the name—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, call it sister," she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was feeling inclined for farce, if blessed chance would throw it in my way. You see, I was going to live at last, and life for me meant irresponsibility.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah!" I said, ironically, "you are going to be a sister to me, as they say." She might have come the bogy over me last night in the moonlight, but now … There was a spice of danger about it, too, just a touch lurking somewhere. Besides, she was good-looking and well set up, and I couldn't see what could touch me. Even if it did, even if I got into a mess, I had no relatives, not even a friend, to be worried about me. I stood quite alone, and I half relished the idea of getting into a mess—it would be part of life, too. I was going to have a little money, and she excited my curiosity. I was tingling to know what she was really at.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And one might ask," I said, "what you are doing in this—in this…." I was at a loss for a word to describe the room—the smugness parading as professional Bohemianism.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I am about my own business," she said, "I told you last night—have you forgotten?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Last night you were to inherit the earth," I reminded her, "and one doesn't start in a place like this. Now I should have gone—well—I should have gone to some politician's house—a cabinet minister's—say to Gurnard's. He's the coming man, isn't he?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," she answered, "he's the coming man."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >You will remember that, in those days, Gurnard was only the dark horse of the ministry. I knew little enough of these things, despised politics generally; they simply didn't interest me. Gurnard I disliked platonically; perhaps because his face was a little enigmatic—a little repulsive. The country, then, was in the position of having no Opposition and a Cabinet with two distinct strains in it—the Churchill and the Gurnard—and Gurnard was the dark horse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you should join your flats," I said, pleasantly. "If he's the coming man, where do you come in?… Unless he, too, is a Dimensionist."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, both—both," she answered. I admired the tranquillity with which she converted my points into her own. And I was very happy—it struck me as a pleasant sort of fooling….</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I suppose you will let me know some day who you are?" I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have told you several times," she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you won't frighten me to-day," I asserted, "not here, you know, and anyhow, why should you want to?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have told you," she said again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You've told me you were my sister," I said; "but my sister died years and years ago. Still, if it suits you, if you want to be somebody's sister …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It suits me," she answered—"I want to be placed, you see."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I knew that my name was good enough to place anyone. We had been the Grangers of Etchingham since—oh, since the flood. And if the girl wanted to be my sister and a Granger, why the devil shouldn't she, so long as she would let me continue on this footing? I hadn't talked to a woman—not to a well set-up one—for ages and ages. It was as if I had come back from one of the places to which younger sons exile themselves, and for all I knew it might be the correct thing for girls to elect brothers nowadays in one set or another.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, tell me some more," I said, "one likes to know about one's sister. You and the Right Honourable Charles Gurnard are Dimensionists, and who are the others of your set?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There is only one," she answered. And would you believe it!—it seems he was Fox, the editor of my new paper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You select your characters with charming indiscriminateness," I said.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Fox is only a sort of toad, you know—he won't get far."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, he'll go far," she answered, "but he won't get there. Fox is fighting against us."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, so you don't dwell in amity?" I said. "You fight for your own hands."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We fight for our own hands," she answered, "I shall throw Gurnard over when he's pulled the chestnuts out of the fire."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was beginning to get a little tired of this. You see, for me, the scene was a veiled flirtation and I wanted to get on. But I had to listen to her fantastic scheme of things. It was really a duel between Fox, the Journal-founder, and Gurnard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Fox, with Churchill, the Foreign Minister, and his supporters, for pieces, played what he called "the Old Morality business" against Gurnard, who passed for a cynically immoral politician.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I grew more impatient. I wanted to get out of this stage into something more personal. I thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep me from getting at her errand at Callan's. But I didn't want to know her errand; I wanted to make love to her. As for Fox and Gurnard and Churchill, the Foreign Minister, who really was a sympathetic character and did stand for political probity, she might be uttering allegorical truths, but I was not interested in them. I wanted to start some topic that would lead away from this Dimensionist farce.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear sister," I began…. Callan always moved about like a confounded eavesdropper, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the corners of screens. I expect he got copy like that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So, she's your sister?" he said suddenly, from behind me. "Strange that you shouldn't recognise the handwriting…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, we don't correspond," I said light-heartedly, "we are so different." I wanted to take a rise out of the creeping animal that he was. He confronted her blandly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You must be the little girl that I remember," he said. He had known my parents ages ago. That, indeed, was how I came to know him; I wouldn't have chosen him for a friend. "I thought Granger said you were dead … but one gets confused…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, we see very little of each other," she answered. "Arthur might have said I was dead—he's capable of anything, you know." She spoke with an assumption of sisterly indifference that was absolutely striking. I began to think she must be an actress of genius, she did it so well. She was the sister who had remained within the pale; I, the rapscallion of a brother whose vagaries were trying to his relations. That was the note she struck, and she maintained it. I didn't know what the deuce she was driving at, and I didn't care. These scenes with a touch of madness appealed to me. I was going to live, and here, apparently, was a woman ready to my hand. Besides, she was making a fool of Callan, and that pleased me. His patronising manners had irritated me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I assisted rather silently. They began to talk of mutual acquaintances—as one talks. They both seemed to know everyone in this world. She gave herself the airs of being quite in the inner ring; alleged familiarity with quite impossible persons, with my portentous aunt, with Cabinet Ministers—that sort of people. They talked about them—she, as if she lived among them; he, as if he tried very hard to live up to them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She affected reverence for his person, plied him with compliments that he swallowed raw—horribly raw. It made me shudder a little; it was tragic to see the little great man confronted with that woman. It shocked me to think that, really, I must appear much like him—must have looked like that yesterday. He was a little uneasy, I thought, made little confidences as if in spite of himself; little confidences about the Hour, the new paper for which I was engaged. It seemed to be run by a small gang with quite a number of assorted axes to grind. There was some foreign financier—a person of position whom she knew (a noble man in the best sense, Callan said); there was some politician (she knew him too, and he was equally excellent, so Callan said), Mr. Churchill himself, an artist or so, an actor or so—and Callan. They all wanted a little backing, so it seemed. Callan, of course, put it in another way. The Great—Moral—Purpose turned up, I don't know why. He could not think he was taking me in and she obviously knew more about the people concerned than he did. But there it was, looming large, and quite as farcical as all the rest of it. The foreign financier—they called him the Duc de Mersch—was by way of being a philanthropist on megalomaniac lines. For some international reason he had been allowed to possess himself of the pleasant land of Greenland. There was gold in it and train-oil in it and other things that paid—but the Duc de Mersch was not thinking of that. He was first and foremost a State Founder, or at least he was that after being titular ruler of some little spot of a Teutonic grand-duchy. No one of the great powers would let any other of the great powers possess the country, so it had been handed over to the Duc de Mersch, who had at heart, said Cal, the glorious vision of founding a model state—the model state, in which washed and broadclothed Esquimaux would live, side by side, regenerated lives, enfranchised equals of choicely selected younger sons of whatever occidental race. It was that sort of thing. I was even a little overpowered, in spite of the fact that Callan was its trumpeter; there was something fine about the conception and Churchill's acquiescence seemed to guarantee an honesty in its execution.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Duc de Mersch wanted money, and he wanted to run a railway across Greenland. His idea was that the British public should supply the money and the British Government back the railway, as they did in the case of a less philanthropic Suez Canal. In return he offered an eligible harbour and a strip of coast at one end of the line; the British public was to be repaid in casks of train-oil and gold and with the consciousness of having aided in letting the light in upon a dark spot of the earth. So the Duc de Mersch started the Hour. The Hour was to extol the Duc de Mersch's moral purpose; to pat the Government's back; influence public opinion; and generally advance the cause of the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I tell the story rather flippantly, because I heard it from Callan, and because it was impossible to take him seriously. Besides, I was not very much interested in the thing itself. But it did interest me to see how deftly she pumped him—squeezed him dry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was even a little alarmed for poor old Cal. After all, the man had done me a service; had got me a job. As for her, she struck me as a potentially dangerous person. One couldn't tell, she might be some adventuress, or if not that, a speculator who would damage Cal's little schemes. I put it to her plainly afterward; and quarrelled with her as well as I could. I drove her down to the station. Callan must have been distinctly impressed or he would never have had out his trap for her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You know," I said to her, "I won't have you play tricks with</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan—not while you're using my name. It's very much at your service</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >as far as I'm concerned—but, confound it, if you're going to injure him</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I shall have to show you up—to tell him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You couldn't, you know," she said, perfectly calmly, "you've let yourself in for it. He wouldn't feel pleased with you for letting it go as far as it has. You'd lose your job, and you're going to live, you know—you're going to live…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was taken aback by this veiled threat in the midst of the pleasantry. It wasn't fair play—not at all fair play. I recovered some of my old alarm, remembered that she really was a dangerous person; that …</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But I sha'n't hurt Callan," she said, suddenly, "you may make your mind easy."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You really won't?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Really not," she answered. It relieved me to believe her. I did not want to quarrel with her. You see, she fascinated me, she seemed to act as a stimulant, to set me tingling somehow—and to baffle me…. And there was truth in what she said. I had let myself in for it, and I didn't want to lose Callan's job by telling him I had made a fool of him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't care about anything else," I said. She smiled.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER FOUR</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went up to town bearing the Callan article, and a letter of warm commendation from Callan to Fox. I had been very docile; had accepted emendations; had lavished praise, had been unctuous and yet had contrived to retain the dignified savour of the editorial "we." Callan himself asked no more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was directed to seek Fox out—to find him immediately. The matter was growing urgent. Fox was not at the office—the brand new office that I afterward saw pass through the succeeding stages of business-like comfort and dusty neglect. I was directed to ask for him at the stage door of the Buckingham.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I waited in the doorkeeper's glass box at the Buckingham. I was eyed by the suspicious commissionaire with the contempt reserved for resting actors. Resting actors are hungry suppliants as a rule. Call-boys sought Mr. Fox. "Anybody seen Mr. Fox? He's gone to lunch."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Mr. Fox is out," said the commissionaire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I explained that the matter was urgent. More call-boys disappeared through the folding doors. Unenticing personages passed the glass box, casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool. A message came back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If it's Mr. Etchingham Granger, he's to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's at once."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's—to a little flat in a neighbourhood that I need not specify. The eminent journalist was lunching with the eminent actress. A husband was in attendance—a nonentity with a heavy yellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner. Mrs. Hartly was—well, she was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we all fell in love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way she used her hands. She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to her husband with that very voice, and rose from table with that same graceful management of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me; at her husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus—great round grey eyes. She was just the same. The curtain never fell on that eternal dress rehearsal. I don't wonder the husband was forever looking at his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mr. Fox was a friend of the house. He dispensed with ceremony, read my manuscript over his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the savour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are going to do me for Mr. Fox," Mrs. Hartly said, turning her large grey eyes upon me. They were very soft. They seemed to send out waves of intense sympatheticism. I thought of those others that had shot out a razor-edged ray.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why," I answered, "there was some talk of my doing somebody for the Hour."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fox put my manuscript under his empty tumbler.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes," he said, sharply. "He will do, I think. H'm, yes. Why, yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You're a friend of Mr. Callan's, aren't you?" Mrs. Hartly asked, "What a dear, nice man he is! You should see him at rehearsals. You know I'm doing his 'Boldero'; he's given me a perfectly lovely part—perfectly lovely. And the trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the stage."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"H'm; yes," Fox interjected, "he likes to have his own way."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We all like that," the great actress said. She was quoting from her first great part. I thought—but, perhaps, I was mistaken—that all her utterances were quotations from her first great part. Her husband looked at his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Are you coming to this confounded flower show?" he asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes," she said, turning her mysterious eyes upon him, "I'll go and get ready."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She disappeared through an inner door. I expected to hear the pistol-shot and the heavy fall from the next room. I forgot that it was not the end of the fifth act.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fox put my manuscript into his breast pocket.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come along, Granger," he said to me, "I want to speak to you. You'll have plenty of opportunity for seeing Mrs. Hartly, I expect. She's tenth on your list. Good-day, Hartly."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hartly's hand was wavering between his moustache and his watch pocket.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good-day," he said sulkily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You must come and see me again, Mr. Granger," Mrs. Hartly said from the door. "Come to the Buckingham and see how we're getting on with your friend's play. We must have a good long talk if you're to get my local colour, as Mr. Fox calls it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > "To gild refined gold; to paint the lily,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To throw a perfume on the violet—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I quoted banally.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's it," she said, with a tender smile. She was fastening a button in her glove. I doubt her recognition of the quotation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When we were in our hansom, Fox began:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm relieved by what I've seen of your copy. One didn't expect this sort of thing from you. You think it a bit below you, don't you? Oh, I know, I know. You literary people are usually so impracticable; you know what I mean. Callan said you were the man. Callan has his uses; but one has something else to do with one's paper. I've got interests of my own. But you'll do; it's all right. You don't mind my being candid, do you, now?" I muttered that I rather liked it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well then," he went on, "now I see my way."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm glad you do," I murmured. "I wish I did."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, that will be all right," Fox comforted. "I dare say Callan has rather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain't used to it. But you won't find the others as trying. There's Churchill now, he's your next. You'll have to mind him. You'll find him a decent chap. Not a bit of side on him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What Churchill?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The Foreign Minister."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The devil," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you'll find him all right," Fox reassured; "you're to go down to his place to-morrow. It's all arranged. Here we are. Hop out." He suited his own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta steps of the Hour's home. He left me to pay the cabman.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebody through folding doors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come along," he said, breathlessly. "Can't see him," he added to a little boy, who held a card in his hands. "Tell him to go to Mr. Evans. One's life isn't one's own here," he went on, when he had reached his own room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold—Louis Quinze, or something of the sort—with very new decorations after Watteau covering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had already begun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a matchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hullo, Evans," Fox shouted across it, "just see that man from Grant's, will you? Heard from the Central News yet?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was looking through the papers on the desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not yet, I've just rung them up for the fifth time," the answer came.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Keep on at it," Fox exhorted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Here's Churchill's letter," he said to me. "Have an arm-chair; those blasted things are too uncomfortable for anything. Make yourself comfortable. I'll be back in a minute."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I took an arm-chair and addressed myself to the Foreign Minister's letter. It expressed bored tolerance of a potential interviewer, but it seemed to please Fox. He ran into the room, snatched up a paper from his desk, and ran out again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Read Churchill's letter?" he asked, in passing. "I'll tell you all about it in a minute." I don't know what he expected me to do with it—kiss the postage stamp, perhaps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the same time, it was pleasant to sit there idle in the midst of the hurry, the breathlessness. I seemed to be at last in contact with real life, with the life that matters. I was somebody, too. Fox treated me with a kind of deference—as if I were a great unknown. His "you literary men" was pleasing. It was the homage that the pretender pays to the legitimate prince; the recognition due to the real thing from the machine-made imitation; the homage of the builder to the architect.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," it seemed to say, "we jobbing men run up our rows and rows of houses; build whole towns and fill the papers for years. But when we want something special—something monumental—we have to come to you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fox came in again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Very sorry, my dear fellow, find I can't possibly get a moment for a chat with you. Look here, come and dine with me at the Paragraph round the corner—to-night at six sharp. You'll go to Churchill's to-morrow."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Paragraph Club, where I was to meet Fox, was one of those sporadic establishments that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand. It is one of their qualities that they are always just round the corner; another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they—in the opinion of the other members—are run too much for the convenience of one in particular.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner waiting. I sat in the little smoking-room and, from behind a belated morning paper, listened to the conversation of the three or four journalists who represented the members. I felt as a new boy in a new school feels on his first introduction to his fellows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in an arm-chair before the fire. At dinner-time he woke up, remarked:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You should have seen Fanny Ellsler," and went to sleep again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a beau jeune homme, with the necktie of a Parisian-American student. On a chair beside him sat a personage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful lack of h's, I took for a distinguished foreigner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They were talking about a splendid subject for a music-hall dramatic sketch of some sort—afforded by a bus driver, I fancy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I heard afterward that my Frenchman had been a costermonger and was now half journalist, half financier, and that my art student was an employee of one of the older magazines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dinner's on the table, gents," the steward said from the door. He went toward the sleeper by the fire. "I expect Mr. Cunningham will wear that arm-chair out before he's done," he said over his shoulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Poor old chap; he's got nowhere else to go to," the magazine employee said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why doesn't he go to the work'ouse," the journalist financier retorted. "Make a good sketch that, eh?" he continued, reverting to his bus-driver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Jolly!" the magazine employee said, indifferently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now, then, Mr. Cunningham," the steward said, touching the sleeper on the shoulder, "dinner's on the table."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"God bless my soul," the dramatic critic said, with a start. The steward left the room. The dramatic critic furtively took a set of false teeth out of his waistcoat pocket; wiped them with a bandanna handkerchief, and inserted them in his mouth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He tottered out of the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I got up and began to inspect the pen-and-ink sketches on the walls.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The faded paltry caricatures of faded paltry lesser lights that confronted me from fly-blown frames on the purple walls almost made me shiver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There you are, Granger," said a cheerful voice behind me. "Come and have some dinner."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went and had some dinner. It was seasoned by small jokes and little personalities. A Teutonic journalist, a musical critic, I suppose, inquired as to the origin of the meagre pheasant. Fox replied that it had been preserved in the back-yard. The dramatic critic mumbled unheard that some piece or other was off the bills of the Adelphi. I grinned vacantly. Afterward, under his breath, Fox put me up to a thing or two regarding the inner meaning of the new daily. Put by him, without any glamour of a moral purpose, the case seemed rather mean. The dingy smoking-room depressed me and the whole thing was, what I had, for so many years, striven to keep out of. Fox hung over my ear, whispering. There were shades of intonation in his sibillating. Some of those "in it," the voice implied, were not above-board; others were, and the tone became deferential, implied that I was to take my tone from itself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course, a man like the Right Honourable C. does it on the straight, … quite on the straight, … has to have some sort of semi-official backer…. In this case, it's me, … the Hour. They're a bit splitty, the Ministry, I mean…. They say Gurnard isn't playing square … they say so." His broad, red face glowed as he bent down to my ear, his little sea-blue eyes twinkled with moisture. He enlightened me cautiously, circumspectly. There was something unpleasant in the business—not exactly in Fox himself, but the kind of thing. I wish he would cease his explanations—I didn't want to hear them. I have never wanted to know how things are worked; preferring to take the world at its face value. Callan's revelations had been bearable, because of the farcical pompousness of his manner. But this was different, it had the stamp of truth, perhaps because it was a little dirty. I didn't want to hear that the Foreign Minister was ever so remotely mixed up in this business. He was only a symbol to me, but he stood for the stability of statesmanship and for the decencies that it is troublesome to have touched.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course," he was proceeding, "the Churchill gang would like to go on playing the stand-off to us. But it won't do, they've got to come in or see themselves left. Gurnard has pretty well nobbled their old party press, so they've got to begin all over again."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That was it—that was precisely it. Churchill ought to have played the stand-off to people like us—to have gone on playing it at whatever cost. That was what I demanded of the world as I conceived it. It was so much less troublesome in that way. On the other hand, this was life—I was living now and the cost of living is disillusionment; it was the price I had to pay. Obviously, a Foreign Minister had to have a semi-official organ, or I supposed so…. "Mind you," Fox whispered on, "I think myself, that it's a pity he is supporting the Greenland business. The thing's not altogether straight. But it's going to be made to pay like hell, and there's the national interest to be considered. If this Government didn't take it up, some other would—and that would give Gurnard and a lot of others a peg against Churchill and his. We can't afford to lose any more coaling stations in Greenland or anywhere else. And, mind you, Mr. C. can look after the interests of the niggers a good deal better if he's a hand in the pie. You see the position, eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I wasn't actually listening to him, but I nodded at proper intervals. I knew that he wanted me to take that line in confidential conversations with fellows seeking copy. I was quite resigned to that. Incidentally, I was overcome by the conviction—perhaps it was no more than a sensation—that that girl was mixed up in this thing, that her shadow was somewhere among the others flickering upon the sheet. I wanted to ask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that absurd business, I did not even know her name, and the whole story would have sounded a little mad. Just now, it suited me that Fox should have a moderate idea of my sanity. Besides, the thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. One wouldn't talk about her in a smoking-room full of men telling stories, and one wouldn't talk about her at all to Fox.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The musical critic had been prowling about the room with Fox's eyes upon him. He edged suddenly nearer, pushed a chair aside, and came toward us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hullo," he said, in an ostentatiously genial, after-dinner voice, "what are you two chaps a-talking about?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Private matters," Fox answered, without moving a hair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Then I suppose I'm in the way?" the other muttered. Fox did not answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Wants a job," he said, watching the discomfited Teuton's retreat, "but, as I was saying—oh, it pays both ways." He paused and fixed his eyes on me. He had been explaining the financial details of the matter, in which the Duc de Mersch and Callan and Mrs. Hartly and all these people clubbed together and started a paper which they hired Fox to run, which was to bring their money back again, which was to scratch their backs, which…. It was like the house that Jack built; I wondered who Jack was. That was it, who was Jack? It all hinged upon that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," I said. "It seems rather neat."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course," Fox wandered on, "you are wondering why the deuce I tell you all this. Fact is, you'd hear it all if I didn't, and a good deal more that isn't true besides. But I believe you're the sort of chap to respect a confidence."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I didn't rise to the sentiment. I knew as well as he did that he was bamboozling me, that he was, as he said, only telling me—not the truth, but just what I should hear everywhere. I did not bear him any ill-will; it was part of the game, that. But the question was, who was Jack? It might be Fox himself…. There might, after all, be some meaning in the farrago of nonsense that that fantastic girl had let off upon me. Fox really and in a figure of speech such as she allowed herself, might be running a team consisting of the Duc de Mersch and Mr. Churchill.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER FOUR</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He might really be backing a foreign, philanthropic ruler and State-founder, and a British Foreign Minister, against the rather sinister Chancellor of the Exchequer that Mr. Gurnard undoubtedly was. It might suit him; perhaps he had shares in something or other that depended on the success of the Duc de Mersch's Greenland Protectorate. I knew well enough, you must remember, that Fox was a big man—one of those big men that remain permanently behind the curtain, perhaps because they have a certain lack of comeliness of one sort or another and don't look well on the stage itself. And I understood now that if he had abandoned—as he had done—half a dozen enterprises of his own for the sake of the Hour, it must be because it was very well worth his while. It was not merely a question of the editorship of a paper; there was something very much bigger in the background. My Dimensionist young lady, again, might have other shares that depended on the Chancellor of the Exchequer's blocking the way. In that way she might very well talk allegorically of herself as in alliance with Gurnard against Fox and Churchill. I was at sea in that sort of thing—but I understood vaguely that something of the sort was remotely possible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I didn't feel called upon to back out of it on that account, yet I very decidedly wished that the thing could have been otherwise. For myself, I came into the matter with clean hands—and I was going to keep my hands clean; otherwise, I was at Fox's disposal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I understand," I said, the speech marking my decision, "I shall have dealings with a good many of the proprietors—I am the scratcher, in fact, and you don't want me to make a fool of myself."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well," he answered, gauging me with his blue, gimlet eyes, "it's just as well to know."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's just as well to know," I echoed. It was just as well to know.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER FIVE</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had gone out into the blackness of the night with a firmer step, with a new assurance. I had had my interview, the thing was definitely settled; the first thing in my life that had ever been definitely settled; and I felt I must tell Lea before I slept. Lea had helped me a good deal in the old days—he had helped everybody, for that matter. You would probably find traces of Lea's influence in the beginnings of every writer of about my decade; of everybody who ever did anything decent, and of some who never got beyond the stage of burgeoning decently. He had given me the material help that a publisher's reader could give, until his professional reputation was endangered, and he had given me the more valuable help that so few can give. I had grown ashamed of this one-sided friendship. It was, indeed, partly because of that that I had taken to the wilds—to a hut near a wood, and all the rest of what now seemed youthful foolishness. I had desired to live alone, not to be helped any more, until I could make some return. As a natural result I had lost nearly all my friends and found myself standing there as naked as on the day I was born.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All around me stretched an immense town—an immense blackness. People—thousands of people hurried past me, had errands, had aims, had others to talk to, to trifle with. But I had nobody. This immense city, this immense blackness, had no interiors for me. There were house fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but nothing within; no rooms, no hollow places. The houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than the solid earth. Lea remained the only one the thought of whom was not like the reconsideration of an ancient, a musty pair of gloves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He lived just anywhere. Being a publisher's reader, he had to report upon the probable commercial value of the manuscripts that unknown authors sent to his employer, and I suppose he had a settled plan of life, of the sort that brought him within the radius of a given spot at apparently irregular, but probably ordered, intervals. It seemed to be no more than a piece of good luck that let me find him that night in a little room in one of the by-ways of Bloomsbury. He was sprawling angularly on a cane lounge, surrounded by whole rubbish heaps of manuscript, a grey scrawl in a foam of soiled paper. He peered up at me as I stood in the doorway.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hullo!" he said, "what's brought you here? Have a manuscript?" He waved an abstracted hand round him. "You'll find a chair somewhere." A claret bottle stood on the floor beside him. He took it by the neck and passed it to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He bent his head again and continued his reading. I displaced three bulky folio sheaves of typewritten matter from a chair and seated myself behind him. He continued to read.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I hadn't seen these rooms before," I said, for want of something to say.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The room was not so much scantily as arbitrarily furnished. It contained a big mahogany sideboard; a common deal table, an extraordinary kind of folding wash-hand-stand; a deal bookshelf, the cane lounge, and three unrelated chairs. There were three framed Dutch prints on the marble mantel-shelf; striped curtains before the windows. A square, cheap looking-glass, with a razor above it, hung between them. And on the floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the unmade bed, the profusion of manuscripts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He scribbled something on a blue paper and began to roll a cigarette. He took off his glasses, rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, and how's Sussex?" he asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was nostalgia. The fact that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. He stood for the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish qualities, were my own importations. I was a little ashamed to tell him, that—that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out. But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I congratulate you," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see," I began to combat the objections he had not had time to utter, "even for my work it will be a good thing—I wasn't seeing enough of life to be able to…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, of course not," he answered—"it'll be a good thing. You must have been having a pretty bad time."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It struck me as abominably unfair. I hadn't taken up with the Hour because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons: because I had felt my soul being crushed within me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You're mistaken," I said. And I explained. He answered, "Yes, yes," but I fancied that he was adding to himself—"They all say that." I grew more angry. Lea's opinion formed, to some extent, the background of my life. For many years I had been writing quite as much to satisfy him as to satisfy myself, and his coldness chilled me. He thought that my heart was not in my work, and I did not want Lea to think that of me. I tried to explain as much to him—but it was difficult, and he gave me no help.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I knew there had been others that he had fostered, only to see them, in the end, drift into the back-wash. And now he thought I was going too….</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Here," he said, suddenly breaking away from the subject, "look at that."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He threw a heavy, ribbon-bound mass of matter into my lap, and recommenced writing his report upon its saleability as a book. He was of opinion that it was too delicately good to attract his employer's class of readers. I began to read it to get rid of my thoughts. The heavy black handwriting of the manuscript sticks in my mind's eye. It must have been good, but probably not so good as I then thought it—I have entirely forgotten all about it; otherwise, I remember that we argued afterward: I for its publication; he against. I was thinking of the wretched author whose fate hung in the balance. He became a pathetic possibility, hidden in the heart of the white paper that bore pen-markings of a kind too good to be marketable. There was something appalling in Lea's careless—"Oh, it's too good!" He was used to it, but as for me, in arguing that man's case I suddenly became aware that I was pleading my own—pleading the case of my better work. Everything that Lea said of this work, of this man, applied to my work; and to myself. "There's no market for that sort of thing, no public; this book's been all round the trade. I've had it before. The man will never come to the front. He'll take to inn-keeping, and that will finish him off." That's what he said, and he seemed to be speaking of me. Some one was knocking at the door of the room—tentative knocks of rather flabby knuckles. It was one of those sounds that one does not notice immediately. The man might have been knocking for ten minutes. It happened to be Lea's employer, the publisher of my first book. He opened the door at last, and came in rather peremptorily. He had the air of having worked himself into a temper—of being intellectually rather afraid of Lea, but of being, for this occasion, determined to assert himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The introduction to myself—I had never met him—which took place after he had hastily brought out half a sentence or so, had the effect of putting him out of his stride, but, after having remotely acknowledged the possibility of my existence, he began again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The matter was one of some delicacy. I myself should have hesitated to broach it before a third party, even one so negligible as myself. But Mr. Polehampton apparently did not. He had to catch the last post.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lea, it appeared, had advised him to publish a manuscript by a man called Howden—a moderately known writer….</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But I am disturbed to find, Mr. Lea, that is, my daughter tells me that the manuscript is not … is not at all the thing…. In fact, it's quite—and—eh … I suppose it's too late to draw back?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it's altogether too late for that" Lea said, nonchalantly.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Besides, Howden's theories always sell."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, yes, of course, of course," Mr. Polehampton interjected, hastily, "but don't you think now … I mean, taking into consideration the damage it may do our reputation … that we ought to ask Mr. Howden to accept, say fifty pounds less than…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should think it's an excellent idea," Lea said. Mr. Polehampton glanced at him suspiciously, then turned to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see," he began to explain, "one has to be so careful about these things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I can quite understand," I answered. There was something so naïve in the man's point of view that I had felt my heart go out to him. And he had taught me at last how it is that the godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Mr. Polehampton, however, was not fat. He was even rather thin, and his peaked grey hair, though it was actually well brushed, looked as if it ought not to have been. He had even an anxious expression. People said he speculated in some stock or other, and I should say they were right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I … eh … believe I published your first book … I lost money by it, but I can assure you that I bear no grudge—almost a hundred pounds. I bear no grudge…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man was an original. He had no idea that I might feel insulted; indeed, he really wanted to be pleasant, and condescending, and forgiving. I didn't feel insulted. He was too big for his clothes, gave that impression at least, and he wore black kid gloves. Moreover, his eyes never left the cornice of the room. I saw him rather often after that night, but never without his gloves and never with his eyes lowered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And … eh …" he asked, "what are you doing now, Mr. Granger?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lea told him Fox had taken me up; that I was going to go. I suddenly remembered it was said of Fox that everyone he took up did "go." The fact was obviously patent to Mr. Polehampton. He unbent with remarkable suddenness; it reminded me of the abrupt closing of a stiff umbrella. He became distinctly and crudely cordial—hoped that we should work together again; once more reminded me that he had published my first book (the words had a different savour now), and was enchanted to discover that we were neighbours in Sussex. My cottage was within four miles of his villa, and we were members of the same golf club.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We must have a game—several games," he said. He struck me as the sort of man to find a difficulty in getting anyone to play with him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After that he went away. As I had said, I did not dislike him—he was pathetic; but his tone of mind, his sudden change of front, unnerved me. It proved so absolutely that I was "going to go," and I did not want to go—in that sense. The thing is a little difficult to explain, I wanted to take the job because I wanted to have money—for a little time, for a year or so, but if I once began to go, the temptation would be strong to keep on going, and I was by no means sure that I should be able to resist the temptation. So many others had failed. What if I wrote to Fox, and resigned?… Lea was deep in a manuscript once more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Shall I throw it up?" I asked suddenly. I wanted the thing settled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, go on with it, by all means go on with it," Lea answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And …?" I postulated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Take your chance of the rest," he supplied; "you've had a pretty bad time."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I suppose," I reflected, "if I haven't got the strength of mind to get out of it in time, I'm not up to much."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There's that, too," he commented, "the game may not be worth the candle." I was silent. "You must take your chance when you get it," he added.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had resumed his reading, but he looked up again when I gave way, as I did after a moment's thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course," he said, "it will probably be all right. You do your best.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It's a good thing … might even do you good."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In that way the thing went through. As I was leaving the room, the idea occurred to me, "By the way, you don't know anything of a clique: the Dimensionists—Fourth Dimensionists?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Never heard of them," he negatived. "What's their specialty?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They're going to inherit the earth," I answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I wish them joy," he closed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You don't happen to be one yourself? I believe it's a sort of secret society." He wasn't listening. I went out quietly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The night effects of that particular neighbourhood have always affected me dismally. That night they upset me, upset me in much the same way, acting on much the same nerves as the valley in which I had walked with that puzzling girl. I remembered that she had said she stood for the future, that she was a symbol of my own decay—the whole silly farrago, in fact. I reasoned with myself—that I was tired, out of trim, and so on, that I was in a fit state to be at the mercy of any nightmare. I plunged into Southampton Row. There was safety in the contact with the crowd, in jostling, in being jostled.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER SIX</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was Saturday and, as was his custom during the session, the Foreign Secretary had gone for privacy and rest till Monday to a small country house he had within easy reach of town. I went down with a letter from Fox in my pocket, and early in the afternoon found myself talking without any kind of inward disturbance to the Minister's aunt, a lean, elderly lady, with a keen eye, and credited with a profound knowledge of European politics. She had a rather abrupt manner and a business-like, brown scheme of coloration. She looked people very straight in the face, bringing to bear all the penetration which, as rumour said, enabled her to take a hidden, but very real part in the shaping of our foreign policy. She seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay me on the shelf, before I had given my first answer to her first question.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You ought to know this part of the country well," she said. I think she was considering me as a possible canvasser—an infinitesimal thing, but of a kind possibly worth remembrance at the next General Election.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No," I said, "I've never been here before."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Etchingham is only three miles away."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was new to me to be looked upon as worth consideration for my place-name. I realised that Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its account, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers of Etchingham, who had taken to literature.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I met your aunt yesterday," Miss Churchill continued. She had met everybody yesterday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes," I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither land-owner, nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged—but I knew that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging on my shortcomings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Has she found a companion to suit her yet?" I said, absent-mindedly. I was thinking of an old legend of my mother's. Miss Churchill looked me in between the eyes again. She was preparing to relabel me, I think. I had become a spiteful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for platform malice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," she said, the faintest of twinkles in her eyes, "she has adopted a niece."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The legend went that, at a hotly contested election in which my aunt had played a prominent part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls. "Who starved her governess?" it had inquired.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an excellent footing with Miss Churchill. I seemed quite unawares to have asserted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual journalist. I became, in fact, not the representative of the Hour—but an Etchingham Granger that competitive forces had compelled to accept a journalistic plum. I began to see the line I was to take throughout my interviewing campaign. On the one hand, I was "one of us," who had temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of great author's bottle-holder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently. There was something very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar. It seemed to say: "Why any noisy vigour?" It seemed to be propelled by a contemplative person with many things on his mind. A tall, grey man in the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was stretched down to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully at a letter that he held in his other hand. A face familiar enough in caricatures suddenly grew real to me—more real than the face of one's nearest friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect. It was as if I had gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had found him older and greyer than he had ever seemed before—as if I had begun to realise that the world had moved on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He said, languidly—almost protestingly, "What am I to do about the Duc de Mersch?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him. She uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance—a start that meant, "Why wasn't I warned before?" This irritated me; I knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose. His attitudes were rather grotesque, of the sort that would pass in a person of his eminence. He stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose, looked at me short-sightedly, took them off and looked again. He had the air of looking down from an immense height—of needing a telescope.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, ah … Mrs. Granger's son, I presume…. I wasn't aware…." The hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get anywhere—not for years and years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No," I said, rather brusquely, "I'm only from the Hour."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He thought me one of Fox's messengers then, said that Fox might have written: "Have saved you the trouble, I mean … or…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of wishing, even, to please me by proving that he was aware of my identity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh," I said, a little loftily, "I haven't any message, I've only come to interview you." An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To…." he began, "but I've never allowed—" He recovered himself sharply, and set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he had found the right track. "Oh, I remember now," he said, "I hadn't looked at it in that way."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way, furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was clean-handed in the matter; I hadn't any axe to grind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," he said, hastily, "you are to draw my portrait—as Fox put it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it—it struck a very nice note. And so—." He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find the process a bore.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not more for me than for you," he answered, seriously—"one has to do these things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," I echoed, "one has to do these things." It struck me that he regretted it—regretted it intensely; that he attached a bitter meaning to the words.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And … what is the procedure?" he asked, after a pause. "I am new to the sort of thing." He had the air, I thought, of talking to some respectable tradesman that one calls in only when one is in extremis—to a distinguished pawnbroker, a man quite at the top of a tree of inferior timber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, for the matter of that, so am I," I answered. "I'm supposed to get your atmosphere, as Callan put it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Indeed," he answered, absently, and then, after a pause, "You know</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan?" I was afraid I should fall in his estimation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"One has to do these things," I said; "I've just been getting his atmosphere."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked again at the letter in his hand, smoothed his necktie and was silent. I realised that I was in the way, but I was still so disturbed that I forgot how to phrase an excuse for a momentary absence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Perhaps, …" I began.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked at me attentively.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I mean, I think I'm in the way," I blurted out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well," he answered, "it's quite a small matter. But, if you are to get my atmosphere, we may as well begin out of doors." He hesitated, pleased with his witticism; "Unless you're tired," he added.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will go and get ready," I said, as if I were a lady with bonnet-strings to tie. I was conducted to my room, where I kicked my heels for a decent interval. When I descended, Mr. Churchill was lounging about the room with his hands in his trouser-pockets and his head hanging limply over his chest. He said, "Ah!" on seeing me, as if he had forgotten my existence. He paused for a long moment, looked meditatively at himself in the glass over the fireplace, and then grew brisk. "Come along," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We took a longish walk through a lush home-country meadow land. We talked about a number of things, he opening the ball with that infernal Jenkins sketch. I was in the stage at which one is sick of the thing, tired of the bare idea of it—and Mr. Churchill's laboriously kind phrases made the matter no better.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You know who Jenkins stands for?" I asked. I wanted to get away on the side issues.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I guessed it was——" he answered. They said that Mr. Churchill was an enthusiast for the school of painting of which Jenkins was the last exponent. He began to ask questions about him. Did he still paint? Was he even alive?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I once saw several of his pictures," he reflected. "His work certainly appealed to me … yes, it appealed to me. I meant at the time … but one forgets; there are so many things." It seemed to me that the man wished by these detached sentences to convey that he had the weight of a kingdom—of several kingdoms—on his mind; that he could spare no more than a fragment of his thoughts for everyday use.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You must take me to see him," he said, suddenly. "I ought to have something." I thought of poor white-haired Jenkins, and of his long struggle with adversity. It seemed a little cruel that Churchill should talk in that way without meaning a word of it—as if the words were a polite formality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nothing would delight me more," I answered, and added, "nothing in the world."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He asked me if I had seen such and such a picture, talked of artists, and praised this and that man very fittingly, but with a certain timidity—a timidity that lured me back to my normally overbearing frame of mind. In such matters I was used to hearing my own voice. I could talk a man down, and, with a feeling of the unfitness of things, I talked Churchill down. The position, even then, struck me as gently humorous. It was as if some infinitely small animal were bullying some colossus among the beasts. I was of no account in the world, he had his say among the Olympians. And I talked recklessly, like any little school-master, and he swallowed it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We reached the broad market-place of a little, red and grey, home county town; a place of but one street dominated by a great inn-signboard a-top of an enormous white post. The effigy of So-and-So of gracious memory swung lazily, creaking, overhead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is Etchingham," Churchill said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a pleasant commentary on the course of time, this entry into the home of my ancestors. I had been without the pale for so long, that I had never seen the haunt of ancient peace. They had done very little, the Grangers of Etchingham—never anything but live at Etchingham and quarrel at Etchingham and die at Etchingham and be the monstrous important Grangers of Etchingham. My father had had the undesirable touch, not of the genius, but of the Bohemian. The Grangers of Etchingham had cut him adrift and he had swum to sink in other seas. Now I was the last of the Grangers and, as things went, was quite the best known of all of them. They had grown poor in their generation; they bade fair to sink, even as, it seemed, I bade fair to rise, and I had come back to the old places on the arm of one of the great ones of the earth. I wondered what the portentous old woman who ruled alone in Etchingham thought of these times—the portentous old woman who ruled, so they said, the place with a rod of iron; who made herself unbearable to her companions and had to fall back upon an unfortunate niece. I wondered idly who the niece could be; certainly not a Granger of Etchingham, for I was the only one of the breed. One of her own nieces, most probably. Churchill had gone into the post-office, leaving me standing at the foot of the sign-post. It was a pleasant summer day, the air very clear, the place very slumbrous. I looked up the street at a pair of great stone gate-posts, august, in their way, standing distinctly aloof from the common houses, a little weather-stained, staidly lichened. At the top of each column sat a sculptured wolf—as far as I knew, my own crest. It struck me pleasantly that this must be the entrance of the Manor house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The tall iron gates swung inward, and I saw a girl on a bicycle curve out, at the top of the sunny street. She glided, very clear, small, and defined, against the glowing wall, leaned aslant for the turn, and came shining down toward me. My heart leapt; she brought the whole thing into composition—the whole of that slumbrous, sunny street. The bright sky fell back into place, the red roofs, the blue shadows, the red and blue of the sign-board, the blue of the pigeons walking round my feet, the bright red of a postman's cart. She was gliding toward me, growing and growing into the central figure. She descended and stood close to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You?" I said. "What blessed chance brought you here?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I am your aunt's companion," she answered, "her niece, you know."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Then you must be a cousin," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No; sister," she corrected, "I assure you it's sister. Ask anyone—ask your aunt." I was braced into a state of puzzled buoyancy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But really, you know," I said. She was smiling, standing up squarely to me, leaning a little back, swaying her machine with the motion of her body.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's a little ridiculous, isn't it?" she said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Very," I answered, "but even at that, I don't see—. And I'm not phenomenally dense."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not phenomenally," she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Considering that I'm not a—not a Dimensionist," I bantered. "But you have really palmed yourself off on my aunt?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Really," she answered, "she doesn't know any better. She believes in me immensely. I am such a real Granger, there never was a more typical one. And we shake our heads together over you." My bewilderment was infinite, but it stopped short of being unpleasant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Might I call on my aunt?" I asked. "It wouldn't interfere—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it wouldn't interfere," she said, "but we leave for Paris to-morrow. We are very busy. We—that is, my aunt; I am too young and too, too discreet—have a little salon where we hatch plots against half the régimes in Europe. You have no idea how Legitimate we are."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't understand in the least," I said; "not in the least."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you must take me literally if you want to understand," she answered, "and you won't do that. I tell you plainly that I find my account in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling them. Everywhere. You will see."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke with her monstrous dispassionateness, and I felt a shiver pass down my spine, very distinctly. I was thinking what she might do if ever she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced to stand in her way—as her husband, for example.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I wish you would talk sense—for one blessed minute," I said; "I want to get things a little settled in my mind."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I'll talk sense," she said, "by the hour, but you won't listen. Take your friend, Churchill, now. He's the man that we're going to bring down. I mentioned it to you, and so…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But this is sheer madness," I answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, no, it's a bald statement of fact," she went on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't see how," I said, involuntarily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your article in the Hour will help. Every trifle will help," she said. "Things that you understand and others that you cannot…. He is identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch. That looks nothing, but it's fatal. There will be friendships … and desertions."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah!" I said. I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her insight into home politics. She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom everybody—perhaps from fear—pretended to trust. She looked at me and smiled again. It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day and pensive to-morrow. "Do you know I don't like to hear that?" I began.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, there's irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing," she said, with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation. "He goes into it clean-handed enough and he only half likes it. But he sees that it's his last chance. It's not that he's worn out—but he feels that his time has come—unless he does something. And so he's going to do something. You understand?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not in the least," I said, light-heartedly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it's the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions—the Greenland affair of my friend de Mersch. Churchill is going to make a grand coup with that—to keep himself from slipping down hill, and, of course, it would add immensely to your national prestige. And he only half sees what de Mersch is or isn't."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is all Greek to me," I muttered rebelliously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I know, I know," she said. "But one has to do these things, and I want you to understand. So Churchill doesn't like the whole business. But he's under the shadow. He's been thinking a good deal lately that his day is over—I'll prove it to you in a minute—and so—oh, he's going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the times that he doesn't like and doesn't understand. So he lets you get his atmosphere. That's all."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, that's all," I said, ironically.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course he'd have liked to go on playing the stand-off to chaps like you and me," she mimicked the tone and words of Fox himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is witchcraft," I said. "How in the world do you know what Fox said to me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I know," she said. It seemed to me that she was playing me with all this nonsense—as if she must have known that I had a tenderness for her and were fooling me to the top of her bent. I tried to get my hook in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now look here," I said, "we must get things settled. You …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She carried the speech off from under my nose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you won't denounce me," she said, "not any more than you did before; there are so many reasons. There would be a scene, and you're afraid of scenes—and our aunt would back me up. She'd have to. My money has been reviving the glories of the Grangers. You can see, they've been regilding the gate."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I looked almost involuntarily at the tall iron gates through which she had passed into my view. It was true enough—some of the scroll work was radiant with new gold.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well," I said, "I will give you credit for not wishing to—to prey upon my aunt. But still …" I was trying to make the thing out. It struck me that she was an American of the kind that subsidizes households like that of Etchingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister. And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning passed between word and word … "You are no sister of mine!" I was continuing my sentence quite amiably.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her face brightened to greet someone approaching behind me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Did you hear him?" she said. "Did you hear him, Mr. Churchill. He casts off—he disowns me. Isn't he a stern brother? And the quarrel is about nothing." The impudence—or the presence of mind of it—overwhelmed me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Churchill smiled pleasantly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh—one always quarrels about nothing," Churchill answered. He spoke a few words to her; about my aunt; about the way her machine ran—that sort of thing. He behaved toward her as if she were an indulged child, impertinent with licence and welcome enough. He himself looked rather like the short-sighted, but indulgent and very meagre lion that peers at the unicorn across a plum-cake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So you are going back to Paris," he said. "Miss Churchill will be sorry. And you are going to continue to—to break up the universe?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, yes," she answered, "we are going on with that, my aunt would never give it up. She couldn't, you know."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You'll get into trouble," Churchill said, as if he were talking to a child intent on stealing apples. "And when is our turn coming? You're going to restore the Stuarts, aren't you?" It was his idea of badinage, amiable without consequence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, not quite that," she answered, "not quite that." It was curious to watch her talking to another man—to a man, not a bagman like Callan. She put aside the face she always showed me and became at once what Churchill took her for—a spoiled child. At times she suggested a certain kind of American, and had that indefinable air of glib acquaintance with the names, and none of the spirit of tradition. One half expected her to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you know," she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, "we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like—" Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the road, he had produced a big "C H U." She had erased it with the point of her foot—"like that," she concluded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He laid his head back and laughed almost heartily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dear me," he said, "I had no idea that I was so much in the way of—of yourself and Mrs. Granger."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it's not only that," she said, with a little smile and a cast of the eye to me. "But you've got to make way for the future."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Churchill's face changed suddenly. He looked rather old, and grey, and wintry, even a little frail. I understood what she was proving to me, and I rather disliked her for it. It seemed wantonly cruel to remind a man of what he was trying to forget.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," he said, with the gentle sadness of quite an old man, "I dare say there is more in that than you think. Even you will have to learn."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But not for a long time," she interrupted audaciously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I hope not," he answered, "I hope not." She nodded and glided away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We resumed the road in silence. Mr. Churchill smiled at his own thoughts once or twice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"A most amusing …" he said at last. "She does me a great deal of good, a great deal."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I think he meant that she distracted his thoughts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Does she always talk like that?" I asked. He had hardly spoken to me, and I felt as if I were interrupting a reverie—but I wanted to know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should say she did," he answered; "I should say so. But Miss Churchill says that she has a real genius for organization. She used to see a good deal of them, before they went to Paris, you know."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What are they doing there?" It was as if I were extracting secrets from a sleep-walker.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, they have a kind of a meeting place, for all kinds of Legitimist pretenders—French and Spanish, and that sort of thing. I believe Mrs. Granger takes it very seriously." He looked at me suddenly. "But you ought to know more about it than I do," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, we see very little of each other," I answered, "you could hardly call us brother and sister."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I see," he answered. I don't know what he saw. For myself, I saw nothing.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER SEVEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I succeeded in giving Fox what his journal wanted; I got the atmosphere of Churchill and his house, in a way that satisfied the people for whom it was meant. His house was a pleasant enough place, of the sort where they do you well, but not nauseously well. It stood in a tranquil countryside, and stood there modestly. Architecturally speaking, it was gently commonplace; one got used to it and liked it. And Churchill himself, when one had become accustomed to his manner, one liked very well—very well indeed. He had a dainty, dilettante mind, delicately balanced, with strong limitations, a fantastic temperament for a person in his walk of life—but sane, mind you, persistent. After a time, I amused myself with a theory that his heart was not in his work, that circumstance had driven him into the career of politics and ironical fate set him at its head. For myself, I had an intense contempt for the political mind, and it struck me that he had some of the same feeling. He had little personal quaintnesses, too, a deference, a modesty, an open-mindedness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was with him for the greater part of his weekend holiday; hung, perforce, about him whenever he had any leisure. I suppose he found me tiresome—but one has to do these things. He talked, and I talked; heavens, how we talked! He was almost always deferential, I almost always dogmatic; perhaps because the conversation kept on my own ground. Politics we never touched. I seemed to feel that if I broached them, I should be checked—politely, but very definitely. Perhaps he actually contrived to convey as much to me; perhaps I evolved the idea that if I were to say:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What do you think about the 'Greenland System'"—he would answer:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I try not to think about it," or whatever gently closuring phrase his mind conceived. But I never did so; there were so many other topics.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was then writing his Life of Cromwell and his mind was very full of his subject. Once he opened his heart, after delicately sounding me for signs of boredom. It happened, by the merest chance—one of those blind chances that inevitably lead in the future—that I, too, was obsessed at that moment by the Lord Oliver. A great many years before, when I was a yearling of tremendous plans, I had set about one of those glorious novels that one plans—a splendid thing with Old Noll as the hero or the heavy father. I had haunted the bookstalls in search of local colour and had wonderfully well invested my half-crowns. Thus a company of seventeenth century tracts, dog-eared, coverless, but very glorious under their dust, accompany me through life. One parts last with those relics of a golden age, and during my late convalescence I had reread many of them, the arbitrary half-remembered phrases suggesting all sorts of scenes—lamplight in squalid streets, trays full of weather-beaten books. So, even then, my mind was full of Mercurius Rusticus. Mr. Churchill on Cromwell amused me immensely and even excited me. It was life, this attending at a self-revelation of an impossible temperament. It did me good, as he had said of my pseudo-sister. It was fantastic—as fantastic as herself—and it came out more in his conversation than in the book itself. I had something to do with that, of course. But imagine the treatment accorded to Cromwell by this delicate, negative, obstinately judicial personality. It was the sort of thing one wants to get into a novel. It was a lesson to me—in temperament, in point of view; I went with his mood, tried even to outdo him, in the hope of spurring him to outdo himself. I only mention it because I did it so well that it led to extraordinary consequences.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were walking up and down his lawn, in the twilight, after his Sunday supper. The pale light shone along the gleaming laurels and dwelt upon the soft clouds of orchard blossoms that shimmered above them. It dwelt, too, upon the silver streaks in his dark hair and made his face seem more pallid, and more old. It affected me like some intense piece of irony. It was like hearing a dying man talk of the year after next. I had the sense of the unreality of things strong upon me. Why should nightingale upon nightingale pour out volley upon volley of song for the delight of a politician whose heart was not in his task of keeping back the waters of the deluge, but who grew animated at the idea of damning one of the titans who had let loose the deluge?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >About a week after—or it may have been a fortnight—Churchill wrote to me and asked me to take him to see the Jenkins of my Jenkins story. It was one of those ordeals that one goes through when one has tried to advance one's friends. Jenkins took the matter amiss, thought it was a display of insulting patronage on the part of officialism. He was reluctant to show his best work, the forgotten masterpieces, the things that had never sold, that hung about on the faded walls and rotted in cellars. He would not be his genial self; he would not talk. Churchill behaved very well—I think he understood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jenkins thawed before his gentle appreciations. I could see the change operating within him. He began to realise that this incredible visit from a man who ought to be hand and glove with Academicians was something other than a spy's encroachment. He was old, you must remember, and entirely unsuccessful. He had fought a hard fight and had been worsted. He took his revenge in these suspicions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We younger men adored him. He had the ruddy face and the archaic silver hair of the King of Hearts; and a wonderful elaborate politeness that he had inherited from his youth—from the days of Brummell. And, whilst all his belongings were rotting into dust, he retained an extraordinarily youthful and ingenuous habit of mind. It was that, or a little of it, that gave the charm to my Jenkins story.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a disagreeable experience. I wished so much that the perennial hopefulness of the man should at last escape deferring and I was afraid that Churchill would chill before Jenkins had time to thaw. But, as I have said, I think Churchill understood. He smiled his kindly, short-sighted smile over canvas after canvas, praised the right thing in each, remembered having seen this and that in such and such a year, and Jenkins thawed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He happened to leave the room—to fetch some studies, to hurry up the tea or for some such reason. Bereft of his presence the place suddenly grew ghostly. It was as if the sun had died in the sky and left us in that nether world where dead, buried pasts live in a grey, shadowless light. Jenkins' palette glowed from above a medley of stained rags on his open colour table. The rush-bottom of his chair resembled a wind-torn thatch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"One can draw morals from a life like that," I said suddenly. I was thinking rather of Jenkins than of the man I was talking to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," he said, absently, "I suppose there are men who haven't the knack of getting on."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's more than a knack," I said, with unnecessary bitterness. "It's a temperament."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I think it's a habit, too. It may be acquired, mayn't it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, no," I fulminated, "it's precisely because it can't be acquired that the best men—the men like …" I stopped suddenly, impressed by the idea that the thing was out of tone. I had to assert myself more than I liked in talking to Churchill. Otherwise I should have disappeared. A word from him had the weight of three kingdoms and several colonies behind it, and I was forced to get that out of my head by making conversation a mere matter of temperament. In that I was the stronger. If I wanted to say a thing, I said it; but he was hampered by a judicial mind. It seemed, too, that he liked a dictatorial interlocutor, else he would hardly have brought himself into contact with me again. Perhaps it was new to him. My eye fell upon a couple of masks, hanging one on each side of the fireplace. The room was full of a profusion of little casts, thick with dust upon the shoulders, the hair, the eyelids, on every part that projected outward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"By-the-bye," I said, "that's a death-mask of Cromwell."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah!" he answered, "I knew there was…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He moved very slowly toward it, rather as if he did not wish to bring it within his field of view. He stopped before reaching it and pivotted slowly to face me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"About my book," he opened suddenly, "I have so little time." His briskness dropped into a half complaint, like a faintly suggested avowal of impotence. "I have been at it four years now. It struck me—you seemed to coincide so singularly with my ideas."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His speech came wavering to a close, but he recommenced it apologetically—as if he wished me to help him out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I went to see Smithson the publisher about it, and he said he had no objection…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked appealingly at me. I kept silence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course, it's not your sort of work. But you might try…. You see…." He came to a sustained halt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't understand," I said, rather coldly, when the silence became embarrassing. "You want me to 'ghost' for you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"'Ghost,' good gracious no," he said, energetically; "dear me, no!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Then I really don't understand," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I thought you might see your … I wanted you to collaborate with me.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Quite publicly, of course, as far as the epithet applies."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To collaborate," I said slowly. "You…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was looking at a miniature of the Farnese Hercules—I wondered what it meant, what club had struck the wheel of my fortune and whirled it into this astounding attitude.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course you must think about it," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't know," I muttered; "the idea is so new. It's so little in my line. I don't know what I should make of it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I talked at random. There were so many thoughts jostling in my head. It seemed to carry me so much farther from the kind of work I wanted to do. I did not really doubt my ability—one does not. I rather regarded it as work upon a lower plane. And it was a tremendous—an incredibly tremendous—opportunity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You know pretty well how much I've done," he continued. "I've got a good deal of material together and a good deal of the actual writing is done. But there is ever so much still to do. It's getting beyond me, as I said just now."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I looked at him again, rather incredulously. He stood before me, a thin parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat. The slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his abstracted earnestness. He so much meant what he said that he ignored what his hands were doing, or his body or his head. He had taken a very small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was absently turning over the rusty leaves, while he talked with his head bent over it. What was I to him, or he to me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I could give my Saturday afternoons to it," he was saying, "whenever you could come down."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's immensely kind of you," I began.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not at all, not at all," he waived. "I've set my heart on doing it and, unless you help me, I don't suppose I ever shall get it done."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But there are hundreds of others," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There may be," he said, "there may be. But I have not come across them."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was beset by a sudden emotion of blind candour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, nonsense, nonsense," I said. "Don't you see that you are offering me the chance of a lifetime?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Churchill laughed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"After all, one cannot refuse to take what offers," he said. "Besides, your right man to do the work might not suit me as a collaborator."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's very tempting," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, then, succumb," he smiled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I could not find arguments against him, and I succumbed as Jenkins re-entered the room.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER EIGHT</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After that I began to live, as one lives; and for forty-nine weeks. I know it was forty-nine, because I got fifty-two atmospheres in all; Callan's and Churchill's, and those forty-nine and the last one that finished the job and the year of it. It was amusing work in its way; people mostly preferred to have their atmospheres taken at their country houses—it showed that they had them, I suppose. Thus I spent a couple of days out of every week in agreeable resorts, and people were very nice to me—it was part of the game.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So I had a pretty good time for a year and enjoyed it, probably because I had had a pretty bad one for several years. I filled in the rest of my weeks by helping Fox and collaborating with Mr. Churchill and adoring Mrs. Hartly at odd moments. I used to hang about the office of the Hour on the chance of snapping up a blank three lines fit for a subtle puff of her. Sometimes they were too hurried to be subtle, and then Mrs. Hartly was really pleased.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I never understood her in the least, and I very much doubt whether she ever understood a word I said. I imagine that I must have talked to her about her art or her mission—things obviously as strange to her as to the excellent Hartly himself. I suppose she hadn't any art; I am certain she hadn't any mission, except to be adored. She walked about the stage and one adored her, just as she sat about her flat and was adored, and there the matter ended.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As for Fox, I seemed to suit him—I don't in the least know why. No doubt he knew me better than I knew myself. He used to get hold of me whilst I was hanging about the office on the chance of engaging space for Mrs. Hartly, and he used to utilise me for the ignoblest things. I saw men for him, scribbled notes for him, abused people through the telephone, and wrote articles. Of course, there were the pickings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I never understood Fox—not in the least, not more than I understood Mrs. Hartly. He had the mannerisms of the most incredible vulgarian and had, apparently, the point of view of a pig. But there was something else that obscured all that, that forced one to call him a wonderful man. Everyone called him that. He used to say that he knew what he wanted and that he got it, and that was true, too. I didn't in the least want to do his odd jobs, even for the ensuing pickings, and I didn't want to be hail-fellow with him. But I did them and I was, without even realising that it was distasteful to me. It was probably the same with everybody else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I used to have an idea that I was going to reform him; that one day I should make him convert the Hour into an asylum for writers of merit. He used to let me have my own way sometimes—just often enough to keep my conscience from inconveniencing me. He let me present Lea with an occasional column and a half; and once he promised me that one day he would allow me to get the atmosphere of Arthur Edwards, the novelist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then there was Churchill and the Life of Cromwell that progressed slowly. The experiment succeeded well enough, as I grew less domineering and he less embarrassed. Toward the end I seemed to have become a familiar inmate of his house. I used to go down with him on Saturday afternoons and we talked things over in the train. It was, to an idler like myself, wonderful the way that essential idler's days were cut out and fitted in like the squares of a child's puzzle; little passages of work of one kind fitting into quite unrelated passages of something else. He did it well, too, without the remotest semblance of hurry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I suppose that actually the motive power was his aunt. People used to say so, but it did not appear on the surface to anyone in close contact with the man; or it appeared only in very small things. We used to work in a tall, dark, pleasant room, book-lined, and giving on to a lawn that was always an asylum for furtive thrushes. Miss Churchill, as a rule, sat half forgotten near the window, with the light falling over her shoulder. She was always very absorbed in papers; seemed to be spending laborious days in answering letters, in evolving reports. Occasionally she addressed a question to her nephew, occasionally received guests that came informally but could not be refused admittance. Once it was a semi-royal personage, once the Duc de Mersch, my reputed employer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The latter, I remember, was announced when Churchill and I were finally finishing our account of the tremendous passing of the Protector. In that silent room I had a vivid sense of the vast noise of the storm in that twilight of the crowning mercy. I seemed to see the candles a-flicker in the eddies of air forced into the gloomy room; the great bed and the portentous uncouth form that struggled in the shadows of the hangings. Miss Churchill looked up from the card that had been placed in her hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Edward," she said, "the Duc de Mersch."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Churchill rose irritably from his low seat. "Confound him," he said, "I won't see him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You can't help it, I think," his aunt said, reflectively; "you will have to settle it sooner or later."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I know pretty well what it was they had to settle—the Greenland affair that had hung in the air so long. I knew it from hearsay, from Fox, vaguely enough. Mr. Gurnard was said to recommend it for financial reasons, the Duc to be eager, Churchill to hang back unaccountably. I never had much head for details of this sort, but people used to explain them to me—to explain the reasons for de Mersch's eagerness. They were rather shabby, rather incredible reasons, that sounded too reasonable to be true. He wanted the money for his railways—wanted it very badly. He was vastly in want of money, he was this, that, and the other in certain international-philanthropic concerns, and had a finger in this, that, and the other pie. There was an "All Round the World Cable Company" that united hearts and hands, and a "Pan-European Railway, Exploration, and Civilisation Company" that let in light in dark places, and an "International Housing of the Poor Company," as well as a number of others. Somewhere at the bottom of these seemingly bottomless concerns, the Duc de Mersch was said to be moving, and the Hour certainly contained periodically complimentary allusions to their higher philanthropy and dividend-earning prospects. But that was as much as I knew. The same people—people one met in smoking-rooms—said that the Trans-Greenland Railway was the last card of de Mersch. British investors wouldn't trust the Duc without some sort of guarantee from the British Government, and no other investor would trust him on any terms. England was to guarantee something or other—the interest for a number of years, I suppose. I didn't believe them, of course—one makes it a practice to believe nothing of the sort. But I recognised that the evening was momentous to somebody—that Mr. Gurnard and the Duc de Mersch and Churchill were to discuss something and that I was remotely interested because the Hour employed me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Churchill continued to pace up and down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Gurnard dines here to-night," his aunt said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I see." His hands played with some coins in his trouser-pockets. "I see," he said again, "they've …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The occasion impressed me. I remember very well the manner of both nephew and aunt. They seemed to be suddenly called to come to a decision that was no easy one, that they had wished to relegate to an indefinite future.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She left Churchill pacing nervously up and down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I could go on with something else, if you like," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But I don't like," he said, energetically; "I'd much rather not see the man. You know the sort of person he is."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, no," I answered, "I never studied the Almanac de Gotha."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I forgot," he said. He seemed vexed with himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Churchill's dinners were frequently rather trying to me. Personages of enormous importance used to drop in—and reveal themselves as rather asinine. At the best of times they sat dimly opposite to me, discomposed me, and disappeared. Sometimes they stared me down. That night there were two of them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Gurnard I had heard of. One can't help hearing of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The books of reference said that he was the son of one William Gurnard, Esq., of Grimsby; but I remember that once in my club a man who professed to know everything, assured me that W. Gurnard, Esq. (whom he had described as a fish salesman), was only an adoptive father. His rapid rise seemed to me inexplicable till the same man accounted for it with a shrug: "When a man of such ability believes in nothing, and sticks at nothing, there's no saying how far he may go. He has kicked away every ladder. He doesn't mean to come down."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This, no doubt, explained much; but not everything in his fabulous career. His adherents called him an inspired statesman; his enemies set him down a mere politician. He was a man of forty-five, thin, slightly bald, and with an icy assurance of manner. He was indifferent to attacks upon his character, but crushed mercilessly every one who menaced his position. He stood alone, and a little mysterious; his own party was afraid of him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Gurnard was quite hidden from me by table ornaments; the Duc de Mersch glowed with light and talked voluminously, as if he had for years and years been starved of human society. He glowed all over, it seemed to me. He had a glorious beard, that let one see very little of his florid face and took the edge away from an almost non-existent forehead and depressingly wrinkled eyelids. He spoke excellent English, rather slowly, as if he were forever replying to toasts to his health. It struck me that he seemed to treat Churchill in nuances as an inferior, whilst for the invisible Gurnard, he reserved an attitude of nervous self-assertion. He had apparently come to dilate on the Système Groënlandais, and he dilated. Some mistaken persons had insinuated that the Système was neither more nor less than a corporate exploitation of unhappy Esquimaux. De Mersch emphatically declared that those mistaken people were mistaken, declared it with official finality. The Esquimaux were not unhappy. I paid attention to my dinner, and let the discourse on the affairs of the Hyperborean Protectorate lapse into an unheeded murmur. I tried to be the simple amanuensis at the feast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly, however, it struck me that de Mersch was talking at me; that he had by the merest shade raised his intonation. He was dilating upon the immense international value of the proposed Trans-Greenland Railway. Its importance to British trade was indisputable; even the opposition had no serious arguments to offer. It was the obvious duty of the British Government to give the financial guarantee. He would not insist upon the moral aspect of the work—it was unnecessary. Progress, improvement, civilisation, a little less evil in the world—more light! It was our duty not to count the cost of humanising a lower race. Besides, the thing would pay like another Suez Canal. Its terminus and the British coaling station would be on the west coast of the island…. I knew the man was talking at me—I wondered why.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly he turned his glowing countenance full upon me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I think I must have met a member of your family," he said. The solution occurred to me. I was a journalist, he a person interested in a railway that he wished the Government to back in some way or another. His attempts to capture my suffrage no longer astonished me. I murmured:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Indeed!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"In Paris—Mrs. Etchingham Granger," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I said, "Oh, yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Miss Churchill came to the rescue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The Duc de Mersch means our friend, your aunt," she explained. I had an unpleasant sensation. Through fronds of asparagus fern I caught the eyes of Gurnard fixed upon me as though something had drawn his attention. I returned his glance, tried to make his face out. It had nothing distinctive in its half-hidden pallid oval; nothing that one could seize upon. But it gave the impression of never having seen the light of day, of never having had the sun upon it. But the conviction that I had aroused his attention disturbed me. What could the man know about me? I seemed to feel his glance bore through the irises of my eyes into the back of my skull. The feeling was almost physical; it was as if some incredibly concentrant reflector had been turned upon me. Then the eyelids dropped over the metallic rings beneath them. Miss Churchill continued to explain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"She has started a sort of Salon des Causes Perdues in the Faubourg Saint Germain." She was recording the vagaries of my aunt. The Duc laughed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," he said, "what a menagerie—Carlists, and Orleanists, and</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Papal Blacks. I wonder she has not held a bazaar in favour of your White</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Rose League."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," I echoed, "I have heard that she was mad about the divine right of kings."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Miss Churchill rose, as ladies rise at the end of a dinner. I followed her out of the room, in obedience to some minute signal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were on the best of terms—we two. She mothered me, as she mothered everybody not beneath contempt or above a certain age. I liked her immensely—the masterful, absorbed, brown lady. As she walked up the stairs, she said, in half apology for withdrawing me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They've got things to talk about."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, yes," I answered; "I suppose the railway matter has to be settled." She looked at me fixedly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You—you mustn't talk," she warned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh," I answered, "I'm not indiscreet—not essentially."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The other three were somewhat tardy in making their drawing-room appearance. I had a sense of them, leaning their heads together over the edges of the table. In the interim a rather fierce political dowager convoyed two well-controlled, blond daughters into the room. There was a continual coming and going of such people in the house; they did with Miss Churchill social business of some kind, arranged electoral rarée-shows, and what not; troubled me very little. On this occasion the blond daughters were types of the sixties' survivals—the type that unemotionally inspected albums. I was convoying them through a volume of views of Switzerland, the dowager was saying to Miss Churchill:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You think, then, it will be enough if we have…." When the door opened behind my back. I looked round negligently and hastily returned to the consideration of a shining photograph of the Dent du Midi. A very gracious figure of a girl was embracing the grim Miss Churchill, as a gracious girl should virginally salute a grim veteran.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, my dear Miss Churchill!" a fluting voice filled the large room, "we were very nearly going back to Paris without once coming to see you. We are only over for two days—for the Tenants' Ball, and so my aunt … but surely that is Arthur…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I turned eagerly. It was the Dimensionist girl. She continued talking to Miss Churchill. "We meet so seldom, and we are never upon terms," she said lightly. "I assure you we are like cat and dog." She came toward me and the blond maidens disappeared, everybody, everything disappeared. I had not seen her for nearly a year. I had vaguely gathered from Miss Churchill that she was regarded as a sister of mine, that she had, with wealth inherited from a semi-fabulous Australian uncle, revived the glories of my aunt's house. I had never denied it, because I did not want to interfere with my aunt's attempts to regain some of the family's prosperity. It even had my sympathy to a small extent, for, after all, the family was my family too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As a memory my pseudo-sister had been something bright and clear-cut and rather small; seen now, she was something that one could not look at for glow. She moved toward me, smiling and radiant, as a ship moves beneath towers of shining canvas. I was simply overwhelmed. I don't know what she said, what I said, what she did or I. I have an idea that we conversed for some minutes. I remember that she said, at some point,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Go away now; I want to talk to Mr. Gurnard."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As a matter of fact, Gurnard was making toward her—a deliberate, slow progress. She greeted him with nonchalance, as, beneath eyes, a woman greets a man she knows intimately. I found myself hating him, thinking that he was not the sort of man she ought to know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's settled?" she asked him, as he came within range. He looked at me inquiringly—insolently. She said, "My brother," and he answered:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, yes," as I moved away. I hated the man and I could not keep my eyes off him and her. I went and stood against the mantel-piece. The Duc de Mersch bore down upon them, and I welcomed his interruption until I saw that he, too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pomposity of flourishes as irritating as Gurnard's nonchalance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I stood there and glowered at them. I noted her excessive beauty; her almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empressé, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that—there was something … something. I could not quite make out his face, I never could. I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise hers. I wondered vaguely how Churchill could work in harness with such a man, how he could bring himself to be closeted, as he had just been, with him and with a fool like de Mersch—I should have been afraid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As for de Mersch, standing between those two, he seemed like a country lout between confederate sharpers. It struck me that she let me see, made me see, that she and Gurnard had an understanding, made manifest to me by glances that passed when the Duc had his unobservant eyes turned elsewhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I saw Churchill, in turn, move desultorily toward them, drawn in, like a straw toward a little whirlpool. I turned my back in a fury of jealousy.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER NINE</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had a pretty bad night after that, and was not much in the mood for Fox on the morrow. The sight of her had dwarfed everything; the thought of her disgusted me with everything, made me out of conceit with the world—with that part of the world that had become my world. I wanted to get up into hers—and I could not see any way. The room in which Fox sat seemed to be hopelessly off the road—to be hopelessly off any road to any place; to be the end of a blind alley. One day I might hope to occupy such a room—in my shirt-sleeves, like Fox. But that was not the end of my career—not the end that I desired. She had upset me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You've just missed Polehampton," Fox said; "wanted to get hold of your</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >'Atmospheres.'"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, damn Polehampton," I said, "and particularly damn the</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >'Atmospheres.'"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Willingly," Fox said, "but I told Mr. P. that you were willing if…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't want to know," I repeated. "I tell you I'm sick of the things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What a change," he asserted, sympathetically, "I thought you would."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It struck me as disgusting that a person like Fox should think about me at all. "Oh, I'll see it through," I said. "Who's the next?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We've got to have the Duc de Mersch now," he answered, "De Mersch as State Founder—written as large as you can—all across the page. The moment's come and we've got to rope it in, that's all. I've been middling good to you…. You understand…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He began to explain in his dark sentences. The time had come for an energetically engineered boom in de Mersch—a boom all along the line. And I was to commence the campaign. Fox had been good to me and I was to repay him. I listened in a sort of apathetic indifference.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, very well," I said. I was subconsciously aware that, as far as I was concerned, the determining factor of the situation was the announcement that de Mersch was to be in Paris. If he had been in his own particular grand duchy I wouldn't have gone after him. For a moment I thought of the interview as taking place in London. But Fox—ostensibly, at least—wasn't even aware of de Mersch's visit; spoke of him as being in Paris—in a flat in which he was accustomed to interview the continental financiers who took up so much of his time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I realised that I wanted to go to Paris because she was there. She had said that she was going to Paris on the morrow of yesterday. The name was pleasant to me, and it turned the scale.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fox's eyes remained upon my face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you good, eh?" he dimly interpreted my thoughts. "A run over. I thought you'd like it and, look here, Polehampton's taken over the Bi-Monthly; wants to get new blood into it, see? He'd take something. I've been talking to him—a short series…. 'Aspects.' That sort of thing." I tried to work myself into some sort of enthusiasm of gratitude. I knew that Fox had spoken well of me to Polehampton—as a sort of set off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You go and see Mr. P.," he confirmed; "it's really all arranged. And then get off to Paris as fast as you can and have a good time."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Have I been unusually cranky lately?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you've been a little off the hooks, I thought, for the last week or so."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He took up a large bottle of white mucilage, and I accepted it as a sign of dismissal. I was touched by his solicitude for my health. It always did touch me, and I found myself unusually broad-minded in thought as I went down the terra-cotta front steps into the streets. For all his frank vulgarity, for all his shirt-sleeves—I somehow regarded that habit of his as the final mark of the Beast—and the Louis Quinze accessories, I felt a warm good-feeling for the little man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I made haste to see Polehampton, to beard him in a sort of den that contained a number of shelves of books selected for their glittering back decoration. They gave the impression that Mr. Polehampton wished to suggest to his visitors the fitness and propriety of clothing their walls with the same gilt cloth. They gave that idea, but I think that, actually, Mr. Polehampton took an aesthetic delight in the gilding. He was not a publisher by nature. He had drifted into the trade and success, but beneath a polish of acquaintance retained a fine awe for a book as such. In early life he had had such shining things on a shiny table in a parlour. He had a similar awe for his daughter, who had been born after his entry into the trade, and who had the literary flavour—a flavour so pronounced that he dragged her by the heels into any conversation with us who hewed his raw material, expecting, I suppose, to cow us. For the greater good of this young lady he had bought the Bi-Monthly—one of the portentous political organs. He had, they said, ideas of forcing a seat out of the party as a recompense.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It didn't matter much what was the nature of my series of articles. I was to get the atmosphere of cities as I had got those of the various individuals. I seemed to pay on those lines, and Miss Polehampton commended me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My daughter likes … eh … your touch, you know, and…." His terms were decent—for the man, and were offered with a flourish that indicated special benevolence and a reference to the hundred pounds. I was at a loss to account for his manner until he began to stammer out an indication. Its lines were that I knew Fox, and I knew Churchill and the Duc de Mersch, and the Hour. "And those financial articles … in the Hour … were they now?… Were they … was the Trans -Greenland railway actually … did I think it would be worth one's while … in fact…." and so on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I never was any good in a situation of that sort, never any good at all. I ought to have assumed blank ignorance, but the man's eyes pleaded; it seemed a tremendous matter to him. I tried to be non-committal, and said: "Of course I haven't any right." But I had a vague, stupid sense that loyalty to Churchill demanded that I should back up a man he was backing. As a matter of fact, nothing so direct was a-gate, it couldn't have been. It was something about shares in one of de Mersch's other enterprises. Polehampton was going to pick them up for nothing, and they were going to rise when the boom in de Mersch's began—something of the sort. And the boom would begin as soon as the news of the agreement about the railway got abroad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I let him get it out of me in a way that makes the thought of that bare place with its gilt book-backs and its three uncomfortable office-chairs and the ground-glass windows through which one read the inversion of the legend "Polehampton," all its gloom and its rigid lines and its pallid light, a memory of confusion. And Polehampton was properly grateful, and invited me to dine with him and his phantasmal daughter—who wanted to make my acquaintance. It was like a command to a state banquet given by a palace official, and Lea would be invited to meet me. Miss Polehampton did not like Lea, but he had to be asked once a year—to encourage good feeling, I suppose. The interview dribbled out on those lines. I asked if it was one of Lea's days at the office. It was not. I tried to put in a good word for Lea, but it was not very effective. Polehampton was too subject to his assistant's thorns to be responsive to praise of him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So I hurried out of the place. I wanted to be out of this medium in which my ineffectiveness threatened to proclaim itself to me. It was not a very difficult matter. I had, in those days, rooms in one of the political journalists' clubs—a vast mausoleum of white tiles. But a man used to pack my portmanteau very efficiently and at short notice. At the station one of those coincidences that are not coincidences made me run against the great Callan. He was rather unhappy—found it impossible to make an already distracted porter listen to the end of one of his sentences with two-second waits between each word. For that reason he brightened to see me—was delighted to find a through-journey companion who would take him on terms of greatness. In the railway carriage, divested of troublesome bags that imparted anxiety to his small face and a stagger to his walk, he swelled to his normal dimensions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So you're—going to—Paris," he meditated, "for the Hour."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm going to Paris for the Hour," I agreed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah!" he went on, "you're going to interview the Elective Grand</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Duke…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We call him the Duc de Mersch," I interrupted, flippantly. It was a matter of nuances. The Elective Grand Duke was a philanthropist and a State Founder, the Duc de Mersch was the hero as financier.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of Holstein-Launewitz," Callan ignored. The titles slipped over his tongue like the last drops of some inestimable oily vintage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I might have saved you the trouble. I'm going to see him myself."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You," I italicised. It struck me as phenomenal and rather absurd that everybody that I came across should, in some way or other, be mixed up with this portentous philanthropist. It was as if a fisherman were drawing in a ground line baited with hundreds of hooks. He had a little offended air.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He, or, I should say, a number of people interested in a philanthropic society, have asked me to go to Greenland."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do they want to get rid of you?" I asked, flippantly. I was made to know my place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear fellow," Callan said, in his most deliberate, most Olympian tone. "I believe you're entirely mistaken, I believe … I've been informed that the Système Groënlandais is one of the healthiest places in the Polar regions. There are interested persons who…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So I've heard," I interrupted, "but I can assure you I've heard nothing but good of the Système and the … and its philanthropists. I meant nothing against them. I was only astonished that you should go to such a place."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have been asked to go upon a mission," he explained, seriously, "to ascertain what the truth about the Système really is. It is a new country with, I am assured, a great future in store. A great deal of English money has been invested in its securities, and naturally great interest is taken in its affairs."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So it seems," I said, "I seem to run upon it at every hour of the day and night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," Callan rhapsodised, "it has a great future in store, a great future. The Duke is a true philanthropist. He has taken infinite pains—infinite pains. He wished to build up a model state, the model protectorate of the world, a place where perfect equality shall obtain for all races, all creeds, and all colours. You would scarcely believe how he has worked to ensure the happiness of the native races. He founded the great society to protect the Esquimaux, the Society for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions—the S.R.A.R.—as you called it, and now he is only waiting to accomplish his greatest project—the Trans-Greenland railway. When that is done, he will hand over the Système to his own people. That is the act of a great man."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well," Callan began again, but suddenly paused. "By-the-bye, this must go no farther," he said, anxiously, "I will let you have full particulars when the time is ripe."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear Callan," I said, touchily, "I can hold my tongue."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He went off at tangent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't want you to take my word—I haven't seen it yet. But I feel assured about it myself. The most distinguished people have spoken to me in its favour. The celebrated traveller, Aston, spoke of it with tears in his eyes. He was the first governor-general, you know. Of course I should not take any interest in it, if I were not satisfied as to that. It is percisely because I feel that the thing is one of the finest monuments of a grand century that I am going to lend it the weight of my pen."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I quite understand," I assured him; then, solicitously, "I hope they don't expect you to do it for nothing."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, dear, no," Callan answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, well, I wish you luck," I said. "They couldn't have got a better man to win over the National conscience. I suppose it comes to that."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Callan nodded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I fancy I have the ear of the public," he said. He seemed to get satisfaction from the thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The train entered Folkestone Harbour. The smell of the sea and the easy send of the boat put a little heart into me, but my spirits were on the down grade. Callan was a trying companion. The sight of him stirred uneasy emotions, the sound of his voice jarred.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Are you coming to the Grand?" he said, as we passed St. Denis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My God, no," I answered, hotly, "I'm going across the river."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah," he murmured, "the Quartier Latin. I wish I could come with you. But I've my reputation to think of. You'd be surprised how people get to hear of my movements. Besides, I'm a family man."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was agitatedly silent. The train steamed into the glare of the electric lights, and, getting into a fiacre, I breathed again. I seemed to be at the entrance of a new life, a better sort of paradise, during that drive across the night city. In London one is always a passenger, in Paris one has reached a goal. The crowds on the pavements, under the plane-trees, in the black shadows, in the white glare of the open spaces, are at leisure—they go nowhere, seek nothing beyond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We crossed the river, the unwinking towers of Notre Dame towering pallidly against the dark sky behind us; rattled into the new light of the resuming boulevard; turned up a dark street, and came to a halt before a half-familiar shut door. You know how one wakes the sleepy concierge, how one takes one's candle, climbs up hundreds and hundreds of smooth stairs, following the slipshod footfalls of a half-awakened guide upward through Rembrandt's own shadows, and how one's final sleep is sweetened by the little inconveniences of a strange bare room and of a strange hard bed.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER TEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Before noon of the next day I was ascending the stairs of the new house in which the Duc had his hermitage. There was an air of secrecy in the broad publicity of the carpeted stairs that led to his flat; a hush in the atmosphere; in the street itself, a glorified cul de sac that ran into the bustling life of the Italiens. It had the sudden sluggishness of a back-water. One seemed to have grown suddenly deaf in the midst of the rattle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was an incredible suggestion of silence—the silence of a private detective—in the mien of the servant who ushered me into a room. He was the English servant of the theatre—the English servant that foreigners affect. The room had a splendour of its own, not a cheaply vulgar splendour, but the vulgarity of the most lavish plush and purple kind. The air was heavy, killed by the scent of exotic flowers, darkened by curtains that suggested the voluminous velvet backgrounds of certain old portraits. The Duc de Mersch had carried with him into this place of retirement the taste of the New Palace, that show-place of his that was the stupefaction of swarms of honest tourists.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I remembered soon enough that the man was a philanthropist, that he might be an excellent man of heart and indifferent of taste. He must be. But I was prone to be influenced by things of this sort, and felt depressed at the thought that so much of royal excellence should weigh so heavily in the wrong scale of the balance of the applied arts. I turned my back on the room and gazed at the blazing white decorations of the opposite house-fronts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A door behind me must have opened, for I heard the sounds of a concluding tirade in a high-pitched voice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Et quant à un duc de farce, je ne m'en fiche pas mal, moi," it said in an accent curiously compounded of the foreign and the coulisse. A muttered male remonstrance ensued, and then, with disconcerting clearness:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Gr-r-rangeur—Eschingan—eh bien—il entend. Et moi, j'entends, moi aussi. Tu veux me jouer centre elle. La Grangeur—pah! Consoles-toi avec elle, mon vieux. Je ne veux plus de toi. Tu m'as donné de tes sales rentes Groenlandoises, et je n'ai pas pu les vendre. Ah, vieux farceur, tu vas voir ce que fen vais faire."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A glorious creature—a really glorious creature—came out of an adjoining room. She was as frail, as swaying as a garden lily. Her great blue eyes turned irefully upon me, her bowed lips parted, her nostrils quivered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Et quant à vous, M. Grangeur Eschingan," she began, "je vais vous donner mon idée à moi …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I did not understand the situation in the least, but I appreciated the awkwardness of it. The world seemed to be standing on its head. I was overcome; but I felt for the person in the next room. I did not know what to do. Suddenly I found myself saying:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am extremely sorry, madam, but I don't understand French." An expression of more intense vexation passed into her face—her beautiful face. I fancy she wished—wished intensely—to give me the benefit of her "idée à elle." She made a quick, violent gesture of disgusted contempt, and turned toward the half-open door from which she had come. She began again to dilate upon the little weaknesses of the person behind, when silently and swiftly it closed. We heard the lock click. With extraordinary quickness she had her mouth at the keyhole: "Peeg, peeg," she enunciated. Then she stood to her full height, her face became calm, her manner stately. She glided half way across the room, paused, looked at me, and pointed toward the unmoving door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Peeg, peeg," she explained, mysteriously. I think she was warning me against the wiles of the person behind the door. I gazed into her great eyes. "I understand," I said, gravely. She glided from the room. For me the incident supplied a welcome touch of comedy. I had leisure for thought. The door remained closed. It made the Duc a more real person for me. I had regarded him as a rather tiresome person in whom a pompous philanthropism took the place of human feelings. It amused me to be called Le Grangeur. It amused me, and I stood in need of amusement. Without it I might never have written the article on the Duc. I had started out that morning in a state of nervous irritation. I had wanted more than ever to have done with the thing, with the Hour, with journalism, with everything. But this little new experience buoyed me up, set my mind working in less morbid lines. I began to wonder whether de Mersch would funk, or whether he would take my non-comprehension of the woman's tirades as a thing assured.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The door at which I had entered, by which she had left, opened.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He must have impressed me in some way or other that evening at the Churchills. He seemed a very stereotyped image in my memory. He spoke just as he had spoken, moved his hands just as I expected him to move them. He called for no modification of my views of his person. As a rule one classes a man so-and-so at first meeting, modifies the classification at each subsequent one, and so on. He seemed to be all affability, of an adipose turn. He had the air of the man of the world among men of the world; but none of the unconscious reserve of manner that one expects to find in the temporarily great. He had in its place a kind of sub-sulkiness, as if he regretted the pedestal from which he had descended.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In his slow commercial English he apologised for having kept me waiting; he had been taking the air of this fine morning, he said. He mumbled the words with his eyes on my waistcoat, with an air that accorded rather ill with the semblance of portentous probity that his beard conferred on him. But he set an eye-glass in his left eye immediately afterward, and looked straight at me as if in challenge. With a smiling "Don't mention," I tried to demonstrate that I met him half way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You want to interview me," he said, blandly. "I am only too pleased. I suppose it is about my Arctic schemes that you wish to know. I will do what I can to inform you. You perhaps remember what I said when I had the pleasure of meeting you at the house of the Right Honourable Mr. Churchill. It has been the dream of my life to leave behind me a happy and contented State—as much as laws and organisation can make one. This is what I should most like the English to know of me." He was a dull talker. I supposed that philanthropists and state founders kept their best faculties for their higher pursuits. I imagined the low, receding forehead and the pink-nailed, fleshy hands to belong to a new Solon, a latter-day Æneas. I tried to work myself into the properly enthusiastic frame of mind. After all, it was a great work that he had undertaken. I was too much given to dwell upon intellectual gifts. These the Duc seemed to lack. I credited him with having let them be merged in his one noble idea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He furnished me with statistics. They had laid down so many miles of railways, used so many engines of British construction. They had taught the natives to use and to value sewing-machines and European costumes. So many hundred of English younger sons had gone to make their fortunes and, incidentally, to enlighten the Esquimaux—so many hundreds of French, of Germans, Greeks, Russians. All these lived and moved in harmony, employed, happy, free labourers, protected by the most rigid laws. Man-eating, fetich-worship, slavery had been abolished, stamped out. The great international society for the preservation of Polar freedom watched over all, suggested new laws, modified the old. The country was unhealthy, but not to men of clean lives—hominibus bonæ voluntatis. It asked for no others.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have had to endure much misrepresentation. I have been called names," the Duc said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The figure of the lady danced before my eyes, lithe, supple—a statue endued with the motion of a serpent. I seemed to see her sculptured white hand pointing to the closed door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," I said, "but one knows the people that call you names."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, then," he answered, "it is your task to make them know the truth.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Your nation has so much power. If it will only realise."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will do my best," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I saw the apotheosis of the Press—a Press that makes a State Founder suppliant to a man like myself. For he had the tone of a deprecating petitioner. I stood between himself and a people, the arbiter of the peoples, of the kings of the future. I was nothing, nobody; yet here I stood in communion with one of those who change the face of continents. He had need of me, of the power that was behind me. It was strange to be alone in that room with that man—to be there just as I might be in my own little room alone with any other man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was not unduly elated, you must understand. It was nothing to me. I was just a person elected by some suffrage of accidents. Even in my own eyes I was merely a symbol—the sign visible of incomprehensible power.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will do my best," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes, do," he said, "Mr. Churchill told me how nicely you can do such things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I said that it was very kind of Mr. Churchill. The tension of the conversation was relaxed. The Duc asked if I had yet seen my aunt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I had forgotten her," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you must see her," he said; "she is a most remarkable lady. She is one of my relaxations. All Paris talks about her, I can assure you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I had no idea," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, cultivate her," he said; "you will be amused."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will," I said, as I took my leave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went straight home to my little room above the roofs. I began at once to write my article, working at high pressure, almost hysterically. I remember that place and that time so well. In moments of emotion one gazes fixedly at things, hardly conscious of them. Afterward one remembers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I can still see the narrow room, the bare, brown, discoloured walls, the incongruous marble clock on the mantel-piece, the single rickety chair that swayed beneath me. I could almost draw the tortuous pattern of the faded cloth that hid the round table at which I sat. The ink was thick, pale, and sticky; the pen spluttered. I wrote furiously, anxious to be done with it. Once I went and leaned over the balcony, trying to hit on a word that would not come. Miles down below, little people crawled over the cobbled street, little carts rattled, little workmen let down casks into a cellar. It was all very grey, small, and clear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Through the open window of an opposite garret I could see a sculptor working at a colossal clay model. In his white blouse he seemed big, out of all proportion to the rest of the world. Level with my eyes there were flat lead roofs and chimneys. On one of these was scrawled, in big, irregular, blue-painted letters: "A has Coignet."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Great clouds began to loom into view over the house-tops, rounded, toppling masses of grey, lit up with sullen orange against the pale limpid blue of the sky. I stood and looked at all these objects. I had come out here to think—thoughts had deserted me. I could only look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The clouds moved imperceptibly, fatefully onward, a streak of lightning tore them apart. They whirled like tortured smoke and grew suddenly black. Large spots of rain with jagged edges began to fall on the lead floor of my balcony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I turned into the twilight of my room and began to write. I can still feel the tearing of my pen-point on the coarse paper. It was a hindrance to thought, but my flow of words ignored it, gained impetus from it, as a stream does at the breaking of a dam.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was writing a pæan to a great coloniser. That sort of thing was in the air then. I was drawn into it, carried away by my subject. Perhaps I let it do so because it was so little familiar to my lines of thought. It was fresh ground and I revelled in it. I committed myself to that kind of emotional, lyrical outburst that one dislikes so much on re-reading. I was half conscious of the fact, but I ignored it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thunderstorm was over, and there was a moist sparkling freshness in the air when I hurried with my copy to the Hour office in the Avenue de l'Opéra. I wished to be rid of it, to render impossible all chance of revision on the morrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I wanted, too, to feel elated; I expected it. It was a right. At the office I found the foreign correspondent, a little cosmopolitan Jew whose eyebrows began their growth on the bridge of his nose. He was effusive and familiar, as the rest of his kind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hullo, Granger," was his greeting. I was used to regarding myself as fallen from a high estate, but I was not yet so humble in spirit as to relish being called Granger by a stranger of his stamp. I tried to freeze him politely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Read your stuff in the Hour," was his rejoinder; "jolly good I call it. Been doing old Red-Beard? Let's have a look. Yes, yes. That's the way—that's the real thing—I call it. Must have bored you to death … old de Mersch I mean. I ought to have had the job, you know. My business, interviewing people in Paris. But I don't mind. Much rather you did it than I. You do it a heap better."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I murmured thanks. There was a pathos about the sleek little man—a pathos that is always present in the type. He seemed to be trying to assume a deprecating equality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Where are you going to-night?" he asked, with sudden effusiveness. I was taken aback. One is not used to being asked these questions after five minutes' acquaintance. I said that I had no plans.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Look here," he said, brightening up, "come and have dinner with me at Breguet's, and look in at the Opera afterward. We'll have a real nice chat."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was too tired to frame an adequate excuse. Besides, the little man was as eager as a child for a new toy. We went to Breguet's and had a really excellent dinner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Always come here," he said; "one meets a lot of swells. It runs away with a deal of money—but I don't care to do things on the cheap, not for the Hour, you know. You can always be certain when I say that I have a thing from a senator that he is a senator, and not an old woman in a paper kiosque. Most of them do that sort of thing, you know."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I always wondered," I said, mildly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's de Sourdam I nodded to as we came in, and that old chap there is Pluyvis—the Affaire man, you know. I must have a word with him in a minute, if you'll excuse me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He began to ask affectionately after the health of the excellent Fox, asked if I saw him often, and so on and so on. I divined with amusement that was pleasurable that the little man had his own little axe to grind, and thought I might take a turn at the grindstone if he managed me well. So he nodded to de Sourdam of the Austrian embassy and had his word with Pluyvis, and rejoiced to have impressed me—I could see him bubble with happiness and purr. He proposed that we should stroll as far as the paper kiosque that he patronised habitually—it was kept by a fellow-Israelite—a snuffy little old woman.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I understood that in the joy of his heart he was for expanding, for wasting a few minutes on a stroll.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Haven't stretched my legs for months," he explained.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We strolled there through the summer twilight. It was so pleasant to saunter through the young summer night. There were so many little things to catch the eyes, so many of the little things down near the earth; expressions on faces of the passers, the set of a collar, the quaint foreign tightness of waist of a good bourgeoise who walked arm in arm with her perspiring spouse. The gilding on the statue of Joan of Arc had a pleasant littleness of Philistinism, the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli broke up the grey light pleasantly too. I remembered a little shop—a little Greek affair with a windowful of pinch-beck—where I had been given a false five-franc piece years and years ago. The same villainous old Levantine stood in the doorway, perhaps the fez that he wore was the same fez. The little old woman that we strolled to was bent nearly double. Her nose touched her wares as often as not, her mittened hands sought quiveringly the papers that the correspondent asked for. I liked him the better for his solicitude for this forlorn piece of flotsam of his own race.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Always come here," he exclaimed; "one gets into habits. Very honest woman, too, you can be certain of getting your change. If you're a stranger you can't be sure that they won't give you Italian silver, you know."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I know," I answered. I knew, too, that he wished me to purchase something. I followed the course of her groping hands, caught sight of the Revue Rouge, and remembered that it contained something about Greenland. I helped myself to it, paid for it, and received my just change. I felt that I had satisfied the little man, and felt satisfied with myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I want to see Radet's article on Greenland," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, yes," he explained, once more exhibiting himself in the capacity of the man who knows, "Radet gives it to them. Rather a lark, I call it, though you mustn't let old de Mersch know you read him. Radet got sick of Cochin, and tried Greenland. He's getting touched by the Whites you know. They say that the priests don't like the way the Système's playing into the hands of the Protestants and the English Government. So they set Radet on to write it down. He's going in for mysticism and all that sort of thing—just like all these French jokers are doing. Got deuced thick with that lot in the F. St. Germain—some relation of yours, ain't they? Rather a lark that lot, quite the thing just now, everyone goes there; old de Mersch too. Have frightful rows sometimes, such a mixed lot, you see." The good little man rattled amiably along beside me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Seems quite funny to be buying books," he said. "I haven't read a thing</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I've bought, not for years."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We reached the Opera in time for the end of the first act—it was Aïda, I think. My little friend had a free pass all over the house. I had not been in it for years. In the old days I had always seen the stage from a great height, craning over people's heads in a sultry twilight; now I saw it on a level, seated at my ease. I had only the power of the Press to thank for the change.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come here as often as I can," my companion said; "can't do without music when it's to be had." Indeed he had the love of his race for it. It seemed to soften him, to change his nature, as he sat silent by my side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But the closing notes of each scene found him out in the cool of the corridors, talking, and being talked to by anyone that would vouchsafe him a word.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pick up a lot here," he explained.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the finale we leaned over one of the side balconies to watch the crowd streaming down the marble staircases. It is a scene that I never tire of. There is something so fantastically tawdry in the coloured marble of the architecture. It is for all the world like a triumph of ornamental soap work; one expects to smell the odours. And the torrent of humanity pouring liquidly aslant through the mirror-like light, and the spaciousness…. Yes, it is fantastic, somehow; ironical, too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was watching the devious passage of a rather drunken, gigantic, florid</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Englishman, wondering, I think, how he would reach his bed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That must be a relation of yours," the correspondent said, pointing. My glance followed the line indicated by his pale finger. I made out the glorious beard of the Duc de Mersch, on his arm was an old lady to whom he seemed to pay deferential attention. His head was bent on one side; he was smiling frankly. A little behind them, on the stairway, there was a space. Perhaps I was mistaken; perhaps there was no space—I don't know. I was only conscious of a figure, an indescribably clear-cut woman's figure, gliding down the way. It had a coldness, a self-possession, a motion of its own. In that clear, transparent, shimmering light, every little fold of the dress, every little shadow of the white arms, the white shoulders, came up to me. The face turned up to meet mine. I remember so well the light shining down on the face, not a shadow anywhere, not a shadow beneath the eyebrows, the nostrils, the waves of hair. It was a vision of light, theatening, sinister.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She smiled, her lips parted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You come to me to-morrow," she said. Did I hear the words, did her lips merely form them? She was far, far down below me; the air was alive with the rustling of feet, of garments, of laughter, full of sounds that made themselves heard, full of sounds that would not be caught.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You come to me … to-morrow."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The old lady on the Duc de Mersch's arm was obviously my aunt. I did not see why I should not go to them to-morrow. It struck me suddenly and rather pleasantly that this was, after all, my family. This old lady actually was a connection more close than anyone else in the world. As for the girl, to all intents and, in everyone else's eyes, she was my sister. I cannot say I disliked having her for my sister, either. I stood looking down upon them and felt less alone than I had done for many years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A minute scuffle of the shortest duration was taking place beside me. There were a couple of men at my elbow. I don't in the least know what they were—perhaps marquises, perhaps railway employees—one never can tell over there. One of them was tall and blond, with a heavy, bow-shaped red moustache—Irish in type; the other of no particular height, excellently groomed, dark, and exemplary. I knew he was exemplary from some detail of costume that I can't remember—his gloves or a strip of silk down the sides of his trousers—something of the sort. The blond was saying something that I did not catch. I heard the words "de Mersch" and "Anglaise," and saw the dark man turn his attention to the little group below. Then I caught my own name mispronounced and somewhat of a stumbling-block to a high-pitched contemptuous intonation. The little correspondent, who was on my other arm, started visibly and moved swiftly behind my back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Messieurs," he said in an urgent whisper, and drew them to a little distance. I saw him say something, saw them pivot to look at me, shrug their shoulders and walk away. I didn't in the least grasp the significance of the scene—not then.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What's the matter?" I asked my returning friend; "were they talking about me?" He answered nervously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it was about your aunt's Salon, you know. They might have been going to say something awkward … one never knows."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They really do talk about it then?" I said. "I've a good mind to attend one of their exhibitions."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, of course," he said, "you ought. I really think you ought."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'll go to-morrow," I answered.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER ELEVEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I couldn't get to sleep that night, but lay and tossed, lit my candle and read, and so on, for ever and ever—for an eternity. I was confoundedly excited; there were a hundred things to be thought about; clamouring to be thought about; out-clamouring the re-current chimes of some near clock. I began to read the article by Radet in the Revue Rouge—the one I had bought of the old woman in the kiosque. It upset me a good deal—that article. It gave away the whole Greenland show so completely that the ecstatic bosh I had just despatched to the Hour seemed impossible. I suppose the good Radet had his axe to grind—just as I had had to grind the State Founder's, but Radet's axe didn't show. I was reading about an inland valley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing; immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense, half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country. A little band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in those mists, crept slowly up it. A man among them was speaking; I seemed to hear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and the silence and the vastness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And how well it was done—how the man could write; how skilfully he made his points. There was no slosh about it, no sentiment. The touch was light, in places even gay. He saw so well the romance of that dun band that had cast remorse behind; that had no return, no future, that spread desolation desolately. This was merely a review article—a thing that in England would have been unreadable; the narrative of a nomad of some genius. I could never have written like that—I should have spoilt it somehow. It set me tingling with desire, with the desire that transcends the sexual; the desire for the fine phrase, for the right word—for all the other intangibles. And I had been wasting all this time; had been writing my inanities. I must go away; must get back, right back to the old road, must work. There was so little time. It was unpleasant, too, to have been mixed up in this affair, to have been trepanned into doing my best to help it on its foul way. God knows I had little of the humanitarian in me. If people must murder in the by-ways of an immense world they must do murder and pay the price. But that I should have been mixed up in such was not what I had wanted. I must have dine with it all; with all this sort of thing, must get back to my old self, must get back. I seemed to hear the slow words of the Duc de Mersch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We have increased exports by so much; the imports by so much. We have protected the natives, have kept their higher interests ever present in our minds. And through it all we have never forgotten the mission entrusted to us by Europe—to remove the evil of darkness from the earth—to root out barbarism with its nameless horrors, whose existence has been a blot on our consciences. Men of good-will and self-sacrifice are doing it now—are laying down their priceless lives to root out … to root our…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of course they were rooting them out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It didn't matter to me. One supposes that that sort of native exists for that sort of thing—to be rooted out by men of good-will, with careers to make. The point was that that was what they were really doing out there—rooting out the barbarians as well as the barbarism, and proving themselves worthy of their hire. And I had been writing them up and was no better than the farcical governor of a department who would write on the morrow to protest that that was what they did not do. You see I had a sort of personal pride in those days; and preferred to think of myself as a decent person. I knew that people would say the same sort of thing about me that they said about all the rest of them. I couldn't very well protest. I had been scratching the backs of all sorts of creatures; out of friendship, out of love—for all sorts of reasons. This was only a sort of last straw—or perhaps it was the sight of her that had been the last straw. It seemed naïvely futile to have been wasting my time over Mrs. Hartly and those she stood for, when there was something so different in the world—something so like a current of east wind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That vein of thought kept me awake, and a worse came to keep it company. The men from the next room came home—students, I suppose. They talked gaily enough, their remarks interspersed by the thuds of falling boots and the other incomprehensible noises of the night. Through the flimsy partition I caught half sentences in that sort of French intonation that is so impossible to attain. It reminded me of the voices of the two men at the Opera. I began to wonder what they had been saying—what they could have been saying that concerned me and affected the little correspondent to interfere. Suddenly the thing dawned upon me with the startling clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern—a clearness from which one cannot take one's eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It threw everything—the whole world—into more unpleasant relations with me than even the Greenland affair. They had not been talking about my aunt and her Salon, but about my … my sister. She was De Mersch's "Anglaise." I did not believe it, but probably all Paris—the whole world—said she was. And to the whole world I was her brother! Those two men who had looked at me over their shoulders had shrugged and said, "Oh, he's …" And the whole world wherever I went would whisper in asides, "Don't you know Granger? He's the brother. De Mersch employs him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I began to understand everything; the woman in de Mersch's room with her "Eschingan-Grangeur-r-r"; the deference of the little Jew—the man who knew. He knew that I—that I, who patronised him, was a person to stand well with because of my—my sister's hold over de Mersch. I wasn't, of course, but you can't understand how the whole thing maddened me all the same. I hated the world—this world of people who whispered and were whispered to, of men who knew and men who wanted to know—the shadowy world of people who didn't matter, but whose eyes and voices were all round one and did somehow matter. I knew well enough how it had come about. It was de Mersch—the State Founder, with his shamed face and his pallid hands. She had been attracted by his air of greatness, by his elective grand-dukedom, by his protestations. Women are like that. She had been attracted and didn't know what she was doing, didn't know what the world was over here—how people talked. She had been excited by the whirl and flutter of it, and perhaps she didn't care. The thing must come to an end, however. She had said that I should go to her on the morrow. Well, I would go, and I would put a stop to this. I had suddenly discovered how very much I was a Granger of Etchingham, after all I had family traditions and graves behind me. And for the sake of all these people whose one achievement had been the making of a good name I had to intervene now. After all—"Bon sang ne" —does not get itself talked about in that way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The early afternoon of the morrow found me in a great room—a faded, sombre salon of the house my aunt had taken in the Faubourg Saint Germain. Numbers of strong-featured people were talking in groups among the tables and chairs of a time before the Revolution. I rather forget how I had got there, and what had gone before. I must have arisen late and passed the intervening hours in a state of trepidation. I was going to see her, and I was like a cub in love, with a man's place to fill. It was a preposterous state of things that set the solid world in a whirl. Once there, my eyes suddenly took in things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had a sense of her standing by my side. She had just introduced me to my aunt—a heavy-featured, tired-eyed village tyrant. She was so obviously worn out, so obviously "not what she had been," that her face would have been pitiful but for its immovable expression of class pride. The Grangers of Etchingham, you see, were so absolutely at the top of their own particular kind of tree that it was impossible for them to meet anyone who was not an inferior. A man might be a cabinet minister, might even be a prince, but he couldn't be a Granger of Etchingham, couldn't have such an assortment of graves, each containing a Granger, behind his back. The expression didn't even lift for me who had. It couldn't, it was fixed there. One wondered what she was doing in this galère. It seemed impossible that she should interest herself in the restoration of the Bourbons—they were all very well, but they weren't even English, let alone a county family. I figured it out that she must have set her own village so much in order that there remained nothing but the setting in order of the rest of the world. Her bored eyes wandered sleepily over the assemblage. They seemed to have no preferences for any of them. They rested on the vacuously Bonaparte prince, on the moribund German Jesuit to whom he was listening, on the darkly supple young Spanish priest, on the rosy-gilled English Passionist, on Radet, the writer of that article in the Revue Rouge, who was talking to a compatriot in one of the tall windows. She seemed to accept the saturnine-looking men, the political women, who all spoke a language not their own, with an accent and a fluency, and a dangerous far-away smile and a display of questionable teeth all their own. She seemed to class the political with the pious, the obvious adventurer with the seeming fanatic. It was amazing to me to see her there, standing with her county family self-possession in the midst of so much that was questionable. She offered me no explanation; I had to find one for myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We stood and talked in the centre of the room. It did not seem a place in which one could sit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why have you never been to see me?" she asked languidly. "I might never have known of your existence if it had not been for your sister." My sister was standing at my side, you must remember. I don't suppose that I started, but I made my aunt no answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Indeed," she went on, "I should never have known that you had a sister. Your father was so very peculiar. From the day he married, my husband never heard a word from him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They were so very different," I said, listlessly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes," she answered, "brothers so often are." She sighed, apropos of nothing. She continued to utter disjointed sentences from which I gathered a skeleton history of my soi distant sister's introduction of herself and of her pretensions. She had, it seemed, casually introduced herself at some garden-party or function of the sort, had represented herself as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too, had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an appartement in the less lugubrious Avenue Marceau.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We have tastes so much in common," my aunt explained, as she moved away to welcome a new arrival. I was left alone with the woman who called herself my sister.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We stood a little apart. Each little group of talkers in the vast room seemed to stand just without earshot of the next. I had my back to the door, my face to her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And so you have come," she said, maliciously it seemed to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was impossible to speak in such a position; in such a place; impossible to hold a discussion on family affairs when a diminutive Irishwoman with too mobile eyebrows, and a couple of gigantic, raw-boned, lugubrious Spaniards, were in a position to hear anything that one uttered above a whisper. One might want to raise one's voice. Besides, she was so—so terrible; there was no knowing what she might not say. She so obviously did not care what the Irish or the Spaniards or the Jesuits heard or thought, that I was forced to the mortifying conclusion that I did.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I've come," I answered. I felt as outrageously out of it as one does at a suburban hop where one does not know one animal of the menagerie. I did not know what to do or what to say, or what to do with my hands. I was pervaded by the unpleasant idea that all those furtive eyes were upon me; gauging me because I was the brother of a personality. I was concerned about the fit of my coat and my boots, and all the while I was in a furious temper; my errand was important.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She stood looking at me, a sinuous, brilliant thing, with a light in the eyes half challenging, half openly victorious.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have come," she said, "and …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I became singularly afraid of her; and wanted to stop her mouth. She might be going to say anything. She overpowered me so that I actually dwindled—into the gawkiness of extreme youth. I became a goggle-eyed, splay-footed boy again and made a boy's desperate effort after a recovery at one stroke of an ideal standard of dignity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I must have a word with you," I said, remembering. She made a little gesture with her hands, signifying "I am here." "But in private," I added.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, everything's in private here," she said. I was silent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I must," I added after a time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I can't retire with you," she said; "'it would look odd,' you'd say, wouldn't you?" I shrugged my shoulders in intense irritation. I didn't want to be burlesqued. A flood of fresh people came into the room. I heard a throaty "ahem" behind me. The Duc de Mersch was introducing himself to notice. It was as I had thought—the man was an habitue, with his well-cut clothes, his air of protestation, and his tremendous golden poll. He was the only sunlight that the gloomy place rejoiced in. He bowed low over my oppressor's hand, smiled upon me, and began to utter platitudes in English.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you may speak French," she said carelessly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But your brother…." he answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I understand French very well," I said. I was in no mood to spare him embarrassments; wanted to show him that I had a hold over him, and knew he wasn't the proper person to talk to a young lady. He glared at me haughtily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But yesterday …" he began in a tone that burlesqued august displeasure. I was wondering what he had looked like on the other side of the door—whilst that lady had been explaining his nature to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yesterday I wished to avoid embarrassments," I said; "I was to represent your views about Greenland. I might have misunderstood you in some important matter."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I see, I see," he said conciliatorily. "Yesterday we spoke English for the benefit of the British public. When we speak French we are not in public, I hope." He had a semi-supplicating manner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Everything's rather too much in public here," I answered. My part as I imagined it was that of a British brother defending his sister from questionable attentions—the person who "tries to show the man he isn't wanted." But de Mersch didn't see the matter in that light at all. He could not, of course. He was as much used to being purred to as my aunt to looking down on non-county persons. He seemed to think I was making an incomprehensible insular joke, and laughed non-committally. It wouldn't have been possible to let him know he wasn't wanted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you needn't be afraid of my brother," she said suddenly. "He is quite harmless. He is even going to give up writing for the papers except when we want him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Duc turned from me to her, smiled and bowed. His smile was inane, but he bowed very well; he had been groomed into that sort of thing or had it in the blood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We work together still?" he asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why not?" she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A hubbub of angry voices raised itself behind my back. It was one of the contretemps that made the Salon Grangeur famous throughout the city.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You forced yourself upon me. Did I say anywhere that you were responsible? If it resembles your particular hell upon earth, what is that to me? You do worse things; you, yourself, monsieur. Haven't I seen … haven't I seen it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Duc de Mersch looked swiftly over his shoulder toward the window.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They seem to be angry there," he said nervously. "Had not something better be done, Miss Granger?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Miss Granger followed the direction of his eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why," she said, "we're used to these differences of opinion. Besides, it's only Monsieur Radet; he's forever at war with someone or other."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He ought to be shown the door," the Duc grumbled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, as for that," she answered, "we couldn't. My aunt would be desolated by such a necessity. He is very influential in certain quarters. My aunt wants to catch him for the—He's going to write an article."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He writes too many articles," the Duc said, with heavy displeasure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, he has written one too many," she answered, "but that can be traversed…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But no one believes," the Duc objected … Radet's voice intermittently broke in upon his sotto-voce, coming to our ears in gusts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Haven't I seen you … and then … and you offer me the cross … to bribe me to silence … me…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the general turning of faces toward the window in which stood Radet and the other, mine turned too. Radet was a cadaverous, weatherworn, passion-worn individual, badger-grey, and worked up into a grotesquely attitudinised fury of injured self-esteem. The other was a denationalised, shifty-eyed, sallow, grey-bearded governor of one of the provinces of the Système Groënlandais; had a closely barbered head, a bull neck, and a great belly. He cast furtive glances round him, uncertain whether to escape or to wait for his say. He looked at the ring that encircled the window at a little distance, and his face, which had betrayed a half-apparent shame, hardened at sight of the cynical masks of the cosmopolitan conspirators. They were amused by the scene. The Holsteiner gained confidence, shrugged his shoulders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have had the fever very badly since you came back," he said, showing a level row of white teeth. "You did not talk like that out there."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No—pas si bête—you would have hanged me, perhaps, as you did that poor devil of a Swiss. What was his name? Now you offer me the cross. Because I had the fever, hein?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had been watching the Duc's face; a first red flush had come creeping from under the roots of his beard, and had spread over the low forehead and the sides of the neck. The eye-glass fell from the eye, a signal for the colour to retreat. The full lips grew pallid, and began to mutter unspoken words. His eyes wandered appealingly from the woman beside him to me. I didn't want to look him in the face. The man was a trafficker in human blood, an evil liver, and I hated him. He had to pay his price; would have to pay—but I didn't want to see him pay it. There was a limit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I began to excuse myself, and slid out between the groups of excellent plotters. As I was going, she said to me:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You may come to me to-morrow in the morning."</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER TWELVE</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was at the Hôtel de Luynes—or Granger—early on the following morning. The mists were still hanging about the dismal upper windows of the inscrutable Faubourg; the toilet of the city was being completed; the little hoses on wheels were clattering about the quiet larger streets. I had not much courage thus early in the day. I had started impulsively; stepping with the impulse of immediate action from the doorstep of the dairy where I had breakfasted. But I made detours; it was too early, and my pace slackened into a saunter as I passed the row of porters' lodges in that dead, inscrutable street. I wanted to fly; had that impulse very strongly; but I burnt my boats with my inquiry of the incredibly ancient, one-eyed porteress. I made my way across the damp court-yard, under the enormous portico, and into the chilly stone hall that no amount of human coming and going sufficed to bring back to a semblance of life. Mademoiselle was expecting me. One went up a great flight of stone steps into one of the immensely high, narrow, impossibly rectangular ante-rooms that one sees in the frontispieces of old plays. The furniture looked no more than knee-high until one discovered that one's self had no appreciable stature. The sad light slanted in ruled lines from the great height of the windows; an army of motes moved slowly in and out of the shadows. I went after awhile and looked disconsolately out into the court-yard. The porteress was making her way across the gravelled space, her arms, her hands, the pockets of her black apron full of letters of all sizes. I remembered that the facteur had followed me down the street. A noise of voices came confusedly to my ears from between half-opened folding-doors; the thing reminded me of my waiting in de Mersch's rooms. It did not last so long. The voices gathered tone, as they do at the end of a colloquy, succeeded each other at longer intervals, and at last came to a sustained halt. The tall doors moved ajar and she entered, followed by a man whom I recognized as the governor of a province of the day before. In that hostile light he looked old and weazened and worried; seemed to have lost much of his rotundity. As for her, she shone with a light of her own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He greeted me dejectedly, and did not brighten when she let him know that we had a mutual friend in Callan. The Governor, it seemed, in his capacity of Supervisor of the Système, was to conduct that distinguished person through the wilds of Greenland; was to smooth his way and to point out to him excellences of administration.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I wished him a good journey; he sighed and began to fumble with his hat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Alors, c'est entendu," she said; giving him leave to depart. He looked at her in an odd sort of way, took her hand and applied it to his lips.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"C'est entendu," he said with a heavy sigh, drops of moisture spattering from beneath his white moustache, "mais …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He ogled again with infinitesimal eyes and went out of the room. He had the air of wishing to wipe the perspiration from his brows and to exclaim, "Quelle femme!" But if he had any such wish he mastered it until the door hid him from sight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why the …" I began before it had well closed, "do you allow that thing to make love to you?" I wanted to take up my position before she could have a chance to make me ridiculous. I wanted to make a long speech—about duty to the name of Granger. But the next word hung, and, before it came, she had answered:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He?—Oh, I'm making use of him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To inherit the earth?" I asked ironically, and she answered gravely:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To inherit the earth."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She was leaning against the window, playing with the strings of the blinds, and silhouetted against the leaden light. She seemed to be, physically, a little tired; and the lines of her figure to interlace almost tenderly—to "compose" well, after the ideas of a certain school. I knew so little of her—only just enough to be in love with her—that this struck me as the herald of a new phase, not so much in her attitude to me as in mine to her; she had even then a sort of gravity, the gravity of a person on whom things were beginning to weigh.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But," I said, irresolutely. I could not speak to her; to this new conception of her, in the way I had planned; in the way one would talk to a brilliant, limpid—oh, to a woman of sorts. But I had to take something of my old line. "How would flirting with that man help you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's quite simple," she answered, "he's to show Callan all Greenland, and Callan is to write … Callan has immense influence over a great class, and he will have some of the prestige of—of a Commissioner."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I know about Callan," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And," she went on, "this man had orders to hide things from Callan; you know what it is they have to hide. But he won't now; that is what I was arranging. It's partly by bribery and partly because he has a belief in his beaux yeux—so Callan will be upset and will write an … exposure; the sort of thing Callan would write if he were well upset. And he will be, by what this man will let him see. You know what a little man like Callan will feel … he will be made ill. He would faint at the sight of a drop of blood, you know, and he will see—oh, the very worst, worse than what Radet saw. And he will write a frightful article, and it will be a thunderclap for de Mersch…. And de Mersch will be getting very shaky by then. And your friend Churchill will try to carry de Mersch's railway bill through in the face of the scandal. Churchill's motives will be excellent, but everyone will say … You know what people say … That is what I and Gurnard want. We want people to talk; we want them to believe…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I don't know whether there really was a hesitation in her voice, or whether I read that into it. She stood there, playing with the knots of the window-cords and speaking in a low monotone. The whole thing, the sad twilight of the place, her tone of voice, seemed tinged with unavailing regret. I had almost forgotten the Dimensionist story, and I had never believed in it. But now, for the first time I began to have my doubts. I was certain that she had been plotting something with one of the Duc de Mersch's lieutenants. The man's manner vouched for that; he had not been able to look me in the face. But, more than anything, his voice and manner made me feel that we had passed out of a realm of farcical allegory. I knew enough to see that she might be speaking the truth. And, if she were, her calm avowal of such treachery proved that she was what she had said the Dimensionists were; cold, with no scruples, clear-sighted and admirably courageous, and indubitably enemies of society.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't understand," I said. "But de Mersch then?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She made a little gesture; one of those movements that I best remember of her; the smallest, the least noticeable. It reduced de Mersch to nothing; he no longer even counted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, as for him," she said, "he is only a detail." I had still the idea that she spoke with a pitying intonation—as if she were speaking to a dog in pain. "He doesn't really count; not really. He will crumble up and disappear, very soon. You won't even remember him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But," I said, "you go about with him, as if you…. You are getting yourself talked about…. Everyone thinks—" … The accusation that I had come to make seemed impossible, now I was facing her. "I believe," I added, with the suddenness of inspiration. "I'm certain even, that he thinks that you …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, they think that sort of thing. But it is only part of the game.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Oh, I assure you it is no more than that."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was silent. I felt that, for one reason or another, she wished me to believe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes," she said, "I want you to believe. It will save you a good deal of pain."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If you wanted to save me pain," I maintained, "you would have done with de Mersch … for good." I had an idea that the solution was beyond me. It was as if the controlling powers were flitting, invisible, just above my head, just beyond my grasp. There was obviously something vibrating; some cord, somewhere, stretched very taut and quivering. But I could think of no better solution than: "You must have done with him." It seemed obvious, too, that that was impossible, was outside the range of things that could be done—but I had to do my best. "It's a—it's vile," I added, "vile."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I know, I know," she said, "for you…. And I'm even sorry. But it has to be gone on with. De Mersch has to go under in just this way. It can't be any other."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why not?" I asked, because she had paused. I hadn't any desire for enlightenment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It isn't even only Churchill," she said, "not even only that de Mersch will bring down Churchill with him. It is that he must bring down everything that Churchill stands for. You know what that is—the sort of probity, all the old order of things. And the more vile the means used to destroy de Mersch the more vile the whole affair will seem. People—the sort of people—have an idea that a decent man cannot be touched by tortuous intrigues. And the whole thing will be—oh, malodorous. You understand."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't," I answered, "I don't understand at all."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, yes, you do," she said, "you understand…." She paused for a long while, and I was silent. I understood vaguely what she meant; that if Churchill fell amid the clouds of dust of such a collapse, there would be an end of belief in probity … or nearly an end. But I could not see what it all led up to; where it left us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see," she began again, "I want to make it as little painful to you as I can; as little painful as explanations can make it. I can't feel as you feel, but I can see, rather dimly, what it is that hurts you. And so … I want to; I really want to."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But you won't do the one thing," I returned hopelessly to the charge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I cannot," she answered, "it must be like that; there isn't any way. You are so tied down to these little things. Don't you see that de Mersch, and—and all these people—don't really count? They aren't anything at all in the scheme of things. I think that, even for you, they aren't worth bothering about. They're only accidents; the accidents that—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That what?" I asked, although I began to see dimly what she meant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That lead in the inevitable," she answered. "Don't you see? Don't you understand? We are the inevitable … and you can't keep us back. We have to come and you, you will only hurt yourself, by resisting." A sense that this was the truth, the only truth, beset me. It was for the moment impossible to think of anything else—of anything else in the world. "You must accept us and all that we mean, you must stand back; sooner or later. Look even all round you, and you will understand better. You are in the house of a type—a type that became impossible. Oh, centuries ago. And that type too, tried very hard to keep back the inevitable; not only because itself went under, but because everything that it stood for went under. And it had to suffer—heartache … that sort of suffering. Isn't it so?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I did not answer; the illustration was too abominably just. It was just that. There were even now all these people—these Legitimists—sneering ineffectually; shutting themselves away from the light in their mournful houses and suffering horribly because everything that they stood for had gone under.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But even if I believe you," I said, "the thing is too horrible, and your tools are too mean; that man who has just gone out and—and Callan—are they the weapons of the inevitable? After all, the Revolution …" I was striving to get back to tangible ideas—ideas that one could name and date and label … "the Revolution was noble in essence and made for good. But all this of yours is too vile and too petty. You are bribing, or something worse, that man to betray his master. And that you call helping on the inevitable…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They used to say just that of the Revolution. That wasn't nice of its tools. Don't you see? They were the people that went under…. They couldn't see the good…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And I—I am to take it on trust," I said, bitterly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You couldn't see the good," she answered, "it isn't possible, and there is no way of explaining. Our languages are different, and there's no bridge—no bridge at all. We can't meet…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was that revolted me. If there was no bridge and we could not meet, we must even fight; that is, if I believed her version of herself. If I did not, I was being played the fool with. I preferred to think that. If she were only fooling me she remained attainable. If it was as she said, there was no hope at all—not any.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't believe you," I said, suddenly. I didn't want to believe her. The thing was too abominable—too abominable for words, and incredible. I struggled against it as one struggles against inevitable madness, against the thought of it. It hung over me, stupefying, deadening. One could only fight it with violence, crudely, in jerks, as one struggles against the numbness of frost. It was like a pall, like descending clouds of smoke, seemed to be actually present in the absurdly lofty room—this belief in what she stood for, in what she said she stood for.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't believe you," I proclaimed, "I won't…. You are playing the fool with me … trying to get round me … to make me let you go on with these—with these—It is abominable. Think of what it means for me, what people are saying of me, and I am a decent man—You shall not. Do you understand, you shall not. It is unbearable … and you … you try to fool me … in order to keep me quiet …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She had an accent that touched grief, as nearly as she could touch it. I remember it now, as one remembers these things. But then I passed it over. I was too much moved myself to notice it more than subconsciously, as one notices things past which one is whirled. And I was whirled past these things, in an ungovernable fury at the remembrance of what I had suffered, of what I had still to suffer. I was speaking with intense rage, jerking out words, ideas, as floodwater jerks through a sluice the débris of once ordered fields.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are," I said, "you are—you—you—dragging an ancient name through the dust—you …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I forget what I said. But I remember, "dragging an ancient name." It struck me, at the time, by its forlornness, as part of an appeal to her. It was so pathetically tiny a motive, so out of tone, that it stuck in my mind. I only remember the upshot of my speech; that, unless she swore—oh, yes, swore—to have done with de Mersch, I would denounce her to my aunt at that very moment and in that very house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And she said that it was impossible.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER THIRTEEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had a sense of walking very fast—almost of taking flight—down a long dim corridor, and of a door that opened into an immense room. All that I remember of it, as I saw it then, was a number of pastel portraits of weak, vacuous individuals, in dulled, gilt, oval frames. The heads stood out from the panelling and stared at me from between ringlets, from under powdered hair, simpering, or contemptuous with the expression that must have prevailed in the monde of the time before the Revolution. At a great distance, bent over account—books and pink cheques on the flap of an escritoire, sat my aunt, very small, very grey, very intent on her work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The people who built these rooms must have had some property of the presence to make them bulk large—if they ever really did so—in the eyes of dependents, of lackeys. Perhaps it was their sense of ownership that gave them the necessary prestige. My aunt, who was only a temporary occupant, certainly had none of it. Bent intently over her accounts, peering through her spectacles at columns of figures, she was nothing but a little old woman alone in an immense room. It seemed impossible that she could really have any family pride, any pride of any sort. She looked round at me over her spectacles, across her shoulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah … Etchingham," she said. She seemed to be trying to carry herself back to England, to the England of her land-agent and her select visiting list. Here she was no more superior than if we had been on a desert island. I wanted to enlighten her as to the woman she was sheltering—wanted to very badly; but a necessity for introducing the matter seemed to arise as she gradually stiffened into assertiveness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear aunt," I said, "the woman…." The alien nature of the theme grew suddenly formidable. She looked at me arousedly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You got my note then," she said. "But I don't think a woman can have brought it. I have given such strict orders. They have such strange ideas here, though. And Madame—the portière—is an old retainer of M. de Luynes, I haven't much influence over her. It is absurd, but…." It seems that the old lady in the lodge made a point of carrying letters that went by hand. She had an eye for gratuities—and the police, I should say, were concerned. They make a good deal of use of that sort of person in that neighbourhood of infinitesimal and unceasing plotting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I didn't mean that," I said, "but the woman who calls herself my sister…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear nephew," she interrupted, with tranquil force, as if she were taking an arranged line, "I cannot—I absolutely cannot be worried with your quarrels with your sister. As I said to you in my note of this morning, when you are in this town you must consider this house your home. It is almost insulting of you to go to an inn. I am told it is even … quite an unfit place that you are stopping at—for a member of our family."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I maintained for a few seconds a silence of astonishment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But," I returned to the charge, "the matter is one of importance. You must understand that she…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My aunt stiffened and froze. It was as if I had committed some flagrant sin against etiquette.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If I am satisfied as to her behaviour," she said, "I think that you might be." She paused as if she were satisfied that she had set me hopelessly in the wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't withdraw my invitation," she said. "You must understand I wish you to come here. But your quarrels you and she must settle. On those terms…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She had the air of conferring an immense favour, as if she believed that I had, all my life through, been waiting for her invitation to come within the pale. As for me, I felt a certain relief at having the carrying out of my duty made impossible for me. I did not want to tell my aunt and thus to break things off definitely and for good. Something would have happened; the air might have cleared as it clears after a storm; I should have learnt where I stood. But I was afraid of the knowledge. Light in these dark places might reveal an abyss at my feet. I wanted to let things slide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My aunt had returned to her accounts, the accounts which were the cog-wheels that kept running the smooth course of the Etchingham estates. She seemed to wish to indicate that I counted for not very much in the scheme of things as she saw it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should like to make your better acquaintance," she said, with her head still averted, "there are reasons…." It came suddenly into my head that she had an idea of testamentary dispositions, that she felt she was breaking up, that I had my rights. I didn't much care for the thing, but the idea of being the heir of Etchingham was—well, was an idea. It would make me more possible to my pseudo-sister. It would be, as it were, a starting-point, would make me potentially a somebody of her sort of ideal. Moreover, I should be under the same roof, near her, with her sometimes. One asks so little more than that, that it seemed almost half the battle. I began to consider phrases of thanks and acceptance and then uttered them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I never quite understood the bearings of that scene; never quite whether my aunt really knew that my sister was not my sister. She was a wonderfully clever woman of the unscrupulous order, with a sang-froid and self-possession well calculated to let her cut short any inconvenient revelations. It was as if she had had long practice in the art, though I cannot say what occasion she can have had for its practice—perhaps for the confounding of wavering avowers of Dissent at home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I used to think that she knew, if not all, at least a portion; that the weight that undoubtedly was upon her mind was nothing else but that. She broke up, was breaking up from day to day, and I can think of no other reason. She had the air of being disintegrated, like a mineral under an immense weight—quartz in a crushing mill; of being dulled and numbed as if she were under the influence of narcotics.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is little enough wonder, if she actually carried that imponderable secret about with her. I used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if she, too, saw the oncoming of the inevitable. She was limited enough in her ideas, but not too stupid to take that in if it presented itself. Indeed they have that sort of idea rather grimly before them all the time—that class.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It must have been that that was daily, and little by little, pressing down her eyelids and deepening the quivering lines of her impenetrable face. She had a certain solitary grandeur, the pathos attaching to the last of a race, of a type; the air of waiting for the deluge, of listening for an inevitable sound—the sound of oncoming waters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was weird, the time that I spent in that house—more than weird—deadening. It had an extraordinary effect on me—an effect that my "sister," perhaps, had carefully calculated. She made pretensions of that sort later on; said that she had been breaking me in to perform my allotted task in the bringing on of the inevitable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I have nowhere come across such an intense solitude as there was there, a solitude that threw one so absolutely upon one's self and into one's self. I used to sit working in one of those tall, panelled rooms, very high up in the air. I was writing at the series of articles for the Bi-Monthly, for Polehampton. I was to get the atmosphere of Paris, you remember. It was rather extraordinary, that process. Up there I seemed to be as much isolated from Paris as if I had been in—well, in Hampton Court. It was almost impossible to write; I had things to think about: preoccupations, jealousies. It was true I had a living to make, but that seemed to have lost its engrossingness as a pursuit, or at least to have suspended it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The panels of the room seemed to act as a sounding-board, the belly of an immense 'cello. There were never any noises in the house, only whispers coming from an immense distance—as when one drops stones down an unfathomable well and hears ages afterward the faint sound of disturbed waters. When I look back at that time I figure myself as forever sitting with uplifted pen, waiting for a word that would not come, and that I did not much care about getting. The panels of the room would creak sympathetically to the opening of the entrance-door of the house, the faintest of creaks; people would cross the immense hall to the room in which they plotted; would cross leisurely, with laughter and rustling of garments that after a long time reached my ears in whispers. Then I should have an access of mad jealousy. I wanted to be part of her life, but I could not stand that Salon of suspicious conspirators. What could I do there? Stand and look at them, conscious that they all dropped their voices instinctively when I came near them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That was the general tone of that space of time, but, of course, it was not always that. I used to emerge now and then to breakfast sympathetically with my aunt, sometimes to sit through a meal with the two of them. I danced attendance on them singly; paid depressing calls with my aunt; calls on the people in the Faubourg; people without any individuality other than a kind of desiccation, the shrivelled appearance and point of view of a dried pippin. In revenge, they had names that startled one, names that recalled the generals and flaneurs of an impossibly distant time; names that could hardly have had any existence outside the memoirs of Madame de Sévigné, the names of people that could hardly have been fitted to do anything more vigorous than be reflected in the mirrors of the Salle des Glaces. I was so absolutely depressed, so absolutely in a state of suspended animation, that I seemed to conform exactly to my aunt's ideas of what was desirable in me as an attendant on her at these functions. I used to stand behind chairs and talk, like a good young man, to the assorted Pères and Abbés who were generally present.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And then I used to go home and get the atmospheres of these people. I must have done it abominably badly, for the notes that brought Polehampton's cheques were accompanied by the bravos of that gentleman and the assurances that Miss Polehampton liked my work—liked it very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I suppose I exhibited myself in the capacity of the man who knew—who could let you into a thing or two. After all, anyone could write about students' balls and the lakes in the Bois, but it took someone to write "with knowledge" of the interiors of the barred houses in the Rue de l'Université.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, too, I attended the more showy entertainments with my sister. I had by now become so used to hearing her styled "your sister" that the epithet had the quality of a name. She was "mademoiselle votre soeur," as she might have been Mlle. Patience or Hope, without having anything of the named quality. What she did at the entertainments, the charitable bazaars, the dismal dances, the impossibly bad concerts, I have no idea. She must have had some purpose, for she did nothing without. I myself descended into fulfilling the functions of a rudimentarily developed chaperon—functions similar in importance to those performed by the eyes of a mole. I had the maddest of accesses of jealousy if she talked to a man—and such men—or danced with one. And then I was forever screwing my courage up and feeling it die away. We used to drive about in a coupe, a thing that shut us inexorably together, but which quite as inexorably destroyed all opportunities for what one calls making love. In smooth streets its motion was too glib, on the pavé it rattled too abominably. I wanted to make love to her—oh, immensely, but I was never in the mood, or the opportunity was never forthcoming. I used to have the wildest fits of irritation; not of madness or of depression, but of simple wildness at the continual recurrence of small obstacles. I couldn't read, couldn't bring myself to it. I used to sit and look dazedly at the English newspapers—at any newspaper but the Hour. De Mersch had, for the moment, disappeared. There were troubles in his elective grand duchy—he had, indeed, contrived to make himself unpopular with the electors, excessively unpopular. I used to read piquant articles about his embroglio in an American paper that devoted itself to matters of the sort. All sorts of international difficulties were to arise if de Mersch were ejected. There was some other obscure prince of a rival house, Prussian or Russian, who had desires for the degree of royalty that sat so heavily on de Mersch. Indeed, I think there were two rival princes, each waiting with portmanteaux packed and manifestos in their breast pockets, ready to pass de Mersch's frontiers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The grievances of his subjects—so the Paris-American Gazette said—were intimately connected with matters of finance, and de Mersch's personal finances and his grand ducal were inextricably mixed up with the wild-cat schemes with which he was seeking to make a fortune large enough to enable him to laugh at half a dozen elective grand duchies. Indeed, de Mersch's own portmanteau was reported to be packed against the day when British support of his Greenland schemes would let him afford to laugh at his cantankerous Diet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thing interested me so little that I never quite mastered the details of it. I wished the man no good, but so long as he kept out of my way I was not going to hate him actively. Finally the affairs of Holstein-Launewitz ceased to occupy the papers—the thing was arranged and the Russian and Prussian princes unpacked their portmanteaux, and, I suppose, consigned their manifestos to the flames, or adapted them to the needs of other principalities. De Mersch's affairs ceded their space in the public prints to the topic of the dearness of money. Somebody, somewhere, was said to be up to something. I used to try to read the articles, to master the details, because I disliked finding a whole field of thought of which I knew absolutely nothing. I used to read about the great discount houses and other things that conveyed absolutely nothing to my mind. I only gathered that the said great houses were having a very bad time, and that everybody else was having a very much worse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One day, indeed, the matter was brought home to me by the receipt from Polehampton of bills instead of my usual cheques. I had a good deal of trouble in cashing the things; indeed, people seemed to look askance at them. I consulted my aunt on the subject, at breakfast. It was the sort of thing that interested the woman of business in her, and we were always short of topics of conversation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We breakfasted in rather a small room, as rooms went there; my aunt sitting at the head of the table, with an early morning air of being en famille that she wore at no other time of day. It was not a matter of garments, for she was not the woman to wear a peignoir; but lay, I supposed, in her manner, which did not begin to assume frigidity until several watches of the day had passed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I handed her Polehampton's bills and explained that I was at a loss to turn them to account; that I even had only the very haziest of ideas as to their meaning. Holding the forlorn papers in her hand, she began to lecture me on the duty of acquiring the rudiments of what she called "business habits."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course you do not require to master details to any considerable extent," she said, "but I always have held that it is one of the duties of a…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She interrupted herself as my sister came into the room; looked at her, and then held out the papers in her hand. The things quivered a little; the hand must have quivered too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are going to Halderschrodt's?" she said, interrogatively. "You could get him to negotiate these for Etchingham?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Miss Granger looked at the papers negligently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am going this afternoon," she answered. "Etchingham can come…." She suddenly turned to me: "So your friend is getting shaky," she said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It means that?" I asked. "But I've heard that he has done the same sort of thing before."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He must have been shaky before," she said, "but I daresay</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Halderschrodt…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it's hardly worth while bothering that personage about such a sum," I interrupted. Halderschrodt, in those days, was a name that suggested no dealings in any sum less than a million.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear Etchingham," my aunt interrupted in a shocked tone, "it is quite worth his while to oblige us…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I didn't know," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That afternoon we drove to Halderschrodt's private office, a sumptuous—that is the mot juste—suite of rooms on the first floor of the house next to the Duc de Mersch's Sans Souci. I sat on a plush-bottomed gilded chair, whilst my pseudo-sister transacted her business in an adjoining room—a room exactly corresponding with that within which de Mersch had lurked whilst the lady was warning me against him. A clerk came after awhile, carried me off into an enclosure, where my bill was discounted by another, and then reconducted me to my plush chair. I did not occupy it, as it happened. A meagre, very tall Alsatian was holding the door open for the exit of my sister. He said nothing at all, but stood slightly inclined as she passed him. I caught a glimpse of a red, long face, very tired eyes, and hair of almost startling whiteness—the white hair of a comparatively young man, without any lustre of any sort—a dead white, like that of snow. I remember that white hair with a feeling of horror, whilst I have almost forgotten the features of the great Baron de Halderschrodt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had still some of the feeling of having been in contact with a personality of the most colossal significance as we went down the red carpet of the broad white marble stairs. With one foot on the lowest step, the figure of a perfectly clothed, perfectly groomed man was standing looking upward at our descent. I had thought so little of him that the sight of the Duc de Mersch's face hardly suggested any train of emotions. It lit up with an expression of pleasure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She stood looking down upon him from the altitude of two steps, looking with intolerable passivity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So you use the common stairs," she said, "one had the idea that you communicated with these people through a private door." He laughed uneasily, looking askance at me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I …" he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She moved a little to one side to pass him in her descent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So things have arranged themselves—là bas," she said, referring, I supposed, to the elective grand duchy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it was like a miracle," he answered, "and I owed a great deal—a great deal—to your hints…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You must tell me all about it to-night," she said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >De Mersch's face had an extraordinary quality that I seemed to notice in all the faces around me—a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the sight of the world. When he brightened to answer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a weight were on the mind of the whole world—a preoccupation that I shared without understanding. She herself, a certain absent-mindedness apart, seemed the only one that was entirely unaffected.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As we sat side by side in the little carriage, she said suddenly:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They are coming to the end of their tether, you see." I shrank away from her a little—but I did not see and did not want to see. I said so. It even seemed to me that de Mersch having got over the troubles là bas, was taking a new lease of life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I did think," I said, "a little time ago that …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The wheels of the coupe suddenly began to rattle abominably over the cobbles of a narrow street. It was impossible to talk, and I was thrown back upon myself. I found that I was in a temper—in an abominable temper. The sudden sight of that man, her method of greeting him, the intimacy that the scene revealed … the whole thing had upset me. Of late, for want of any alarms, in spite of groundlessness I had had the impression that I was the integral part of her life. It was not a logical idea, but strictly a habit of mind that had grown up in the desolation of my solitude.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We passed into one of the larger boulevards, and the thing ran silently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That de Mersch was crumbling up," she suddenly completed my unfinished sentence; "oh, that was only a grumble—premonitory. But it won't take long now. I have been putting on the screw. Halderschrodt will … I suppose he will commit suicide, in a day or two. And then the—the fun will begin."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I didn't answer. The thing made no impression—no mental impression at all.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER FOURTEEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That afternoon we had a scene, and late that night another. The memory of the former is a little blotted out. Things began to move so quickly that, try as I will to arrange their sequence in my mind, I cannot. I cannot even very distinctly remember what she told me at that first explanation. I must have attacked her fiercely—on the score of de Mersch, in the old vein; must have told her that I would not in the interest of the name allow her to see the man again. She told me things, too, rather abominable things, about the way in which she had got Halderschrodt into her power and was pressing him down. Halderschrodt was de Mersch's banker-in-chief; his fall would mean de Mersch's, and so on. The "so on" in this case meant a great deal more. Halderschrodt, apparently, was the "somebody who was up to something" of the American paper—that is to say the allied firms that Halderschrodt represented. I can't remember the details. They were too huge and too unfamiliar, and I was too agitated by my own share in the humanity of it. But, in sum, it seemed that the fall of Halderschrodt would mean a sort of incredibly vast Black Monday—a frightful thing in the existing state of public confidence, but one which did not mean much to me. I forget how she said she had been able to put the screw on him. Halderschrodt, as you must remember, was the third of his colossal name, a man without much genius and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the idea of operating some enormous coup, like the founder of his dynasty, something in which foresight in international occurrence played a chief part. That idea was his weakness, the defect of his mind, and she had played on that weakness. I forget, I say, the details, if I ever heard them; they concerned themselves with a dynastic revolution somewhere, a revolution that was to cause a slump all over the world, and that had been engineered in our Salon. And she had burked the revolution—betrayed it, I suppose—and the consequences did not ensue, and Halderschrodt and all the rest of them were left high and dry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The whole thing was a matter of under-currents that never came to the surface, a matter of shifting sands from which only those with the clearest heads could come forth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And we … we have clear heads," she said. It was impossible to listen to her without shuddering. For me, if he stood for anything, Halderschrodt stood for stability; there was the tremendous name, and there was the person I had just seen, the person on whom a habit of mind approaching almost to the royal had conferred a presence that had some of the divinity that hedges a king. It seemed frightful merely to imagine his ignominious collapse; as frightful as if she had pointed out a splendid-limbed man and said: "That man will be dead in five minutes." That, indeed, was what she said of Halderschrodt…. The man had saluted her, going to his death; the austere inclination that I had seen had been the salutation of such a man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was so moved by one thing and another that I hardly noticed that Gurnard had come into the room. I had not seen him since the night when he had dined with the Duc de Mersch at Churchill's, but he seemed so part of the emotion, of the frame of mind, that he slid noiselessly into the scene and hardly surprised me. I was called out of the room—someone desired to see me, and I passed, without any transition of feeling, into the presence of an entire stranger—a man who remains a voice to me. He began to talk to me about the state of my aunt's health. He said she was breaking up; that he begged respectfully to urge that I would use my influence to take her back to London to consult Sir James—I, perhaps, living in the house and not having known my aunt for very long, might not see; but he … He was my aunt's solicitor. He was quite right; my aunt was breaking up, she had declined visibly in the few hours that I had been away from her. She had been doing business with this man, had altered her will, had seen Mr. Gurnard; and, in some way had received a shock that seemed to have deprived her of all volition. She sat with her head leaning back, her eyes closed, the lines of her face all seeming to run downward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It is obvious to me that arrangements ought to be made for your return to England," the lawyer said, "whatever engagements Miss Granger or Mr. Etchingham Granger or even Mr. Gurnard may have made."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I wondered vaguely what the devil Mr. Gurnard could have to say in the matter, and then Miss Granger herself came into the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They want me," my aunt said in a low voice, "they have been persuading me … to go back … to Etchingham, I think you said, Meredith."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I became conscious that I wanted to return to England, wanted it very much, wanted to be out of this; to get somewhere where there was stability and things that one could understand. Everything here seemed to be in a mist, with the ground trembling underfoot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why …" Miss Granger's verdict came, "we can go when you like.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To-morrow."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Things immediately began to shape themselves on these unexpected lines, a sort of bustle of departure to be in the air. I was employed to conduct the lawyer as far as the porter's lodge, a longish traverse. He beguiled the way by excusing himself for hurrying back to London.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I might have been of use; in these hurried departures there are generally things. But, you will understand, Mr.—Mr. Etchingham; at a time like this I could hardly spare the hours that it cost me to come over. You would be astonished what a deal of extra work it gives and how far-spreading the evil is. People seem to have gone mad. Even I have been astonished."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I had no idea," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course not, of course not—no one had. But, unless I am much mistaken—much—there will have to be an enquiry, and people will be very lucky who have had nothing to do with it …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I gathered that things were in a bad way, over there as over here; that there were scandals and a tremendous outcry for purification in the highest places. I saw the man get into his fiacre and took my way back across the court-yard rather slowly, pondering over the part I was to fill in the emigration, wondering how far events had conferred on me a partnership in the family affairs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I found that my tacitly acknowledged function was that of supervising nurse-tender, the sort of thing that made for personal tenderness in the aridity of profuse hired help. I was expected to arrange a rug just a little more comfortably than the lady's maid who would travel in the compartment—to give the finishing touches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was astonishing how well the thing was engineered; the removal, I mean. It gave me an even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than even the panic of her solicitor. The thing went as smoothly as the disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that night as if from a household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in the morning we had disappeared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ball itself was a finishing touch—the finishing touch of my sister's affairs and the end of my patience. I spent an interminable night, one of those nights that never end and that remain quivering and raw in the memory. I seemed to be in a blaze of light, watching, through a shifting screen of shimmering dresses—her and the Duc de Mersch. I don't know whether the thing was really noticeable, but it seemed that everyone was—that everyone must be—remarking it. I thought I caught women making smile-punctuated remarks behind fans, men answering inaudibly with eyes discreetly on the ground. It was a mixed assembly, somebody's liquidation of social obligations, and there was a sprinkling of the kind of people who do make remarks. It was not the noticeability for its own sake that I hated, but the fact that their relations by their noticeability made me impossible, whilst the notice itself confirmed my own fears. I hung, glowering in corners, noticeable enough myself, I suppose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thing reached a crisis late in the evening. There was a kind of winter-garden that one strolled in, a place of giant palms stretching up into a darkness of intense shadow. I was prowling about in the shadows of great metallic leaves, cursing under my breath, in a fury of nervous irritation; quivering like a horse martyrised by a stupidly merciless driver. I happened to stand back for a moment in the narrowest of paths, with the touch of spiky leaves on my hand and on my face. In front of me was the glaring perspective of one of the longer alleys, and, stepping into it, a great band of blue ribbon cutting across his chest, came de Mersch with her upon his arm. De Mersch himself hardly counted. He had a way of glowing, but he paled ineffectual fires beside her mænadic glow. There was something overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy—the long steps—of a triumphing Diana.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was more than terrible for me to stand there longing with a black, baffled longing, with some of the base quality of an eavesdropper and all the baseness of the unsuccessful.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then Gurnard loomed in the distance, moving insensibly down the long, glaring corridor, a sinister figure, suggesting in the silence of his oncoming the motionless flight of a vulture. Well within my field of sight he overtook them and, with a lack of preliminary greeting that suggested supreme intimacy, walked beside them. I stood for some moments—for some minutes, and then hastened after them. I was going to do something. After a time I found de Mersch and Gurnard standing facing each other in one of the doorways of the place—Gurnard, a small, dark, impassive column; de Mersch, bulky, overwhelming, florid, standing with his legs well apart and speaking vociferously with a good deal of gesture. I approached them from the side, standing rather insistently at his elbow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I want," I said, "I would be extremely glad if you would give me a minute, monsieur." I was conscious that I spoke with a tremour of the voice, a sort of throaty eagerness. I was unaware of what course I was to pursue, but I was confident of calmness, of self-control—I was equal to that. They had a pause of surprised silence. Gurnard wheeled and fixed me critically with his eye-glass. I took de Mersch a little apart, into a solitude of palm branches, and began to speak before he had asked me my errand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You must understand that I would not interfere without a good deal of provocation," I was saying, when he cut me short, speaking in a thick, jovial voice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, we will understand that, my good Granger, and then …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It is about my sister," I said—"you—you go too far. I must ask you, as a gentleman, to cease persecuting her."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He answered "The devil!" and then: "If I do not——?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was evident in his voice, in his manner, that the man was a little—well, gris. "If you do not," I said, "I shall forbid her to see you and I shall …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, oh!" he interjected with the intonation of a reveller at a farce. "We are at that—we are the excellent brother." He paused, and then added: "Well, go to the devil, you and your forbidding." He spoke with the greatest good humour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am in earnest," I said; "very much in earnest. The thing has gone too far, and even for your own sake, you had better …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He said "Ah, ah!" in the tone of his "Oh, oh!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"She is no friend to you," I struggled on, "she is playing with you for her own purposes; you will …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He swayed a little on his feet and said: "Bravo … bravissimo. If we can't forbid him, we will frighten him. Go on, my good fellow …" and then, "Come, go on …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I looked at his great bulk of a body. It came into my head dimly that I wanted him to strike me, to give me an excuse—anything to end the scene violently, with a crash and exclamations of fury.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?" I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, absolutely," he answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You know that I can do something, that I can expose you." I had a vague idea that I could, that the number of small things that I knew to his discredit and the mass of my hatred could be welded into a damning whole. He laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. The dawn was beginning to spread pallidly above us, gleaming mournfully through the glass of the palm-house. People began to pass, muffled up, on their way out of the place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You may go …" he was beginning. But the expression of his face altered. Miss Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the world, was coming out of the inner door. "We have been having a charming …" he began to her. She touched me gently on the arm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come, Arthur," she said, and then to him, "You have heard the news?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked at her rather muzzily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Baron Halderschrodt has committed suicide," she said. "Come, Arthur."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We passed on slowly, but de Mersch followed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You—you aren't in earnest?" he said, catching at her arm so that we swung round and faced him. There was a sort of mad entreaty in his eyes, as if he hoped that by unsaying she could remedy an irremediable disaster, and there was nothing left of him but those panic-stricken, beseeching eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Monsieur de Sabran told me," she answered; "he had just come from making the constatation. Besides, you can hear …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Half-sentences came to our ears from groups that passed us. A very old man with a nose that almost touched his thick lips, was saying to another of the same type:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Shot himself … through the left temple … Mon Dieu!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >De Mersch walked slowly down the long corridor away from us. There was an extraordinary stiffness in his gait, as if he were trying to emulate the goose step of his days in the Prussian Guard. My companion looked after him as though she wished to gauge the extent of his despair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You would say 'Habet,' wouldn't you?" she asked me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I thought we had seen the last of him, but as in the twilight of the dawn we waited for the lodge gates to open, a furious clatter of hoofs came down the long street, and a carriage drew level with ours. A moment after, de Mersch was knocking at our window.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You will … you will …" he stuttered, "speak … to Mr. Gurnard. That is our only chance … now." His voice came in mingled with the cold air of the morning. I shivered. "You have so much power … with him and…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I …" she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The thing must go through," he said again, "or else …" He paused. The great gates in front of us swung noiselessly open, one saw into the court-yard. The light was growing stronger. She did not answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I tell you," he asseverated insistently, "if the British Government abandons my railway all our plans …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, the Government won't abandon it," she said, with a little emphasis on the verb. He stepped back out of range of the wheels, and we turned in and left him standing there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >* * * * *</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the great room which was usually given up to the political plotters stood a table covered with eatables and lit by a pair of candles in tall silver sticks. I was conscious of a raging hunger and of a fierce excitement that made the thought of sleep part of a past of phantoms. I began to eat unconsciously, pacing up and down the while. She was standing beside the table in the glow of the transparent light. Pallid blue lines showed in the long windows. It was very cold and hideously late; away in those endless small hours when the pulse drags, when the clock-beat drags, when time is effaced.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You see?" she said suddenly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I see," I answered—"and … and now?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now we are almost done with each other," she answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I felt a sudden mental falling away. I had never looked at things in that way, had never really looked things in the face. I had grown so used to the idea that she was to parcel out the remainder of my life, had grown so used to the feeling that I was the integral portion of her life … "But I—" I said, "What is to become of me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She stood looking down at the ground … for a long time. At last she said in a low monotone:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, you must try to forget."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A new idea struck me—luminously, overwhelming. I grew reckless. "You—you are growing considerate," I taunted. "You are not so sure, not so cold. I notice a change in you. Upon my soul …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her eyes dilated suddenly, and as suddenly closed again. She said nothing. I grew conscious of unbearable pain, the pain of returning life. She was going away. I should be alone. The future began to exist again, looming up like a vessel through thick mist, silent, phantasmal, overwhelming—a hideous future of irremediable remorse, of solitude, of craving.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are going back to work with Churchill," she said suddenly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How did you know?" I asked breathlessly. My despair of a sort found vent in violent interjecting of an immaterial query.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You leave your letters about," she said, "and…. It will be best for you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It will not," I said bitterly. "It could never be the same. I don't want to see Churchill. I want…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You want?" she asked, in a low monotone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You," I answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke at last, very slowly:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, as for me, I am going to marry Gurnard."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I don't know just what I said then, but I remember that I found myself repeating over and over again, the phrases running metrically up and down my mind: "You couldn't marry Gurnard; you don't know what he is. You couldn't marry Gurnard; you don't know what he is." I don't suppose that I knew anything to the discredit of Gurnard—but he struck me in that way at that moment; struck me convincingly—more than any array of facts could have done.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh—as for what he is—" she said, and paused. "I know…." and then suddenly she began to speak very fast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't you see?—can't you see?—that I don't marry Gurnard for what he is in that sense, but for what he is in the other. It isn't a marriage in your sense at all. And … and it doesn't affect you … don't you see? We have to have done with one another, because … because…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had an inspiration.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I believe," I said, very slowly, "I believe … you do care…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She said nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You care," I repeated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke then with an energy that had something of a threat in it. "Do you think I would? Do you think I could?… or dare? Don't you understand?" She faltered—"but then…." she added, and was silent for a long minute. I felt the throb of a thousand pulses in my head, on my temples. "Oh, yes, I care," she said slowly, "but that—that makes it all the worse. Why, yes, I care—yes, yes. It hurts me to see you. I might…. It would draw me away. I have my allotted course. And you—Don't you see, you would influence me; you would be—you are—a disease—for me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But," I said, "I could—I would—do anything."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had only the faintest of ideas of what I would do—for her sake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, no," she said, "you must not say that. You don't understand…. Even that would mean misery for you—and I—I could not bear. Don't you see? Even now, before you have done your allotted part, I am wanting—oh, wanting—to let you go…. But I must not; I must not. You must go on … and bear it for a little while more—and then…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a tension somewhere, a string somewhere that was stretched tight and vibrating. I was tremulous with an excitement that overmastered my powers of speech, that surpassed my understanding.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't you see …" she asked again, "you are the past—the passing. We could never meet. You are … for me … only the portrait of a man—of a man who has been dead—oh, a long time; and I, for you, only a possibility … a conception…. You work to bring me on—to make me possible."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But—" I said. The idea was so difficult to grasp. "I will—there must be a way—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No," she answered, "there is no way—you must go back; must try. There will be Churchill and what he stands for—He won't die, he won't even care much for losing this game … not much…. And you will have to forget me. There is no other way—no bridge. We can't meet, you and I…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The words goaded me to fury. I began to pace furiously up and down. I wanted to tell her that I would throw away everything for her, would crush myself out, would be a lifeless tool, would do anything. But I could tear no words out of the stone that seemed to surround me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You may even tell him, if you like, what I and Gurnard are going to do. It will make no difference; he will fall. But you would like him to—to make a good fight for it, wouldn't you? That is all I can do … for your sake."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I began to speak—as if I had not spoken for years. The house seemed to be coming to life; there were noises of opening doors, of voices outside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I believe you care enough," I said "to give it all up for me. I believe you do, and I want you." I continued to pace up and down. The noises of returning day grew loud; frightfully loud. It was as if I must hasten, must get said what I had to say, as if I must raise my voice to make it heard amid the clamour of a world awakening to life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I believe you do … I believe you do…." I said again and again, "and I want you." My voice rose higher and higher. She stood motionless, an inscrutable white figure, like some silent Greek statue, a harmony of falling folds of heavy drapery perfectly motionless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I want you," I said—"I want you, I want you, I want you." It was unbearable to myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, be quiet," she said at last. "Be quiet! If you had wanted me I have been here. It is too late. All these days; all these—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But …" I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From without someone opened the great shutters of the windows, and the light from the outside world burst in upon us.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER FIFTEEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We parted in London next day, I hardly know where. She seemed so part of my being, was for me so little more than an intellectual force, so little of a physical personality, that I cannot remember where my eyes lost sight of her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had desolately made the crossing from country to country, had convoyed my aunt to her big house in one of the gloomy squares in a certain district, and then we had parted. Even afterward it was as if she were still beside me, as if I had only to look round to find her eyes upon me. She remained the propelling force, I a boat thrust out upon a mill-pond, moving more and more slowly. I had been for so long in the shadow of that great house, shut in among the gloom, that all this light, this blazing world—it was a June day in London—seemed impossible, and hateful. Over there, there had been nothing but very slow, fading minutes; now there was a past, a future. It was as if I stood between them in a cleft of unscalable rocks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went about mechanically, made arrangements for my housing, moved in and out of rooms in the enormous mausoleum of a club that was all the home I had, in a sort of stupor. Suddenly I remembered that I had been thinking of something; that she had been talking of Churchill. I had had a letter from him on the morning of the day before. When I read it, Churchill and his "Cromwell" had risen in my mind like preposterous phantoms; the one as unreal as the other—as alien. I seemed to have passed an infinity of æons beyond them. The one and the other belonged as absolutely to the past as a past year belongs. The thought of them did not bring with it the tremulously unpleasant sensations that, as a rule, come with the thoughts of a too recent temps jadis, but rather as a vein of rose across a gray evening. I had passed his letter over; had dropped it half-read among the litter of the others. Then there had seemed to be a haven into whose mouth I was drifting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now I should have to pick the letters up again, all of them; set to work desolately to pick up the threads of the past; and work it back into life as one does half-drowned things. I set about it listlessly. There remained of that time an errand for my aunt, an errand that would take me to Etchingham; something connected with her land steward. I think the old lady had ideas of inducting me into a position that it had grown tacitly acknowledged I was to fill. I was to go down there; to see about some alterations that were in progress; and to make arrangements for my aunt's return. I was so tired, so dog tired, and the day still had so many weary hours to run, that I recognised instinctively that if I were to come through it sane I must tire myself more, must keep on going—until I sank. I drifted down to Etchingham that evening, I sent a messenger over to Churchill's cottage, waited for an answer that told me that Churchill was there, and then slept, and slept.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I woke back in the world again, in a world that contained the land steward and the manor house. I had a sense of recovered power from the sight of them, of the sunlight on the stretches of turf, of the mellow, golden stonework of the long range of buildings, from the sound of a chime of bells that came wonderfully sweetly over the soft swelling of the close turf. The feeling came not from any sense of prospective ownership, but from the acute consciousness of what these things stood for. I did not recognise it then, but later I understood; for the present it was enough to have again the power to set my foot on the ground, heel first. In the streets of the little town there was a sensation of holiday, not pronounced enough to call for flags, but enough to convey the idea of waiting for an event.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The land steward, at the end of a tour amongst cottages, explained there was to be a celebration in the neighbourhood—a "cock-and-hen show with a political annex"; the latter under the auspices of Miss Churchill. Churchill himself was to speak; there was a possibility of a pronouncement. I found London reporters at my inn, men I half knew. They expressed mitigated delight at the view of me, and over a lunch-table let me know what "one said"—what one said of the outside of events I knew too well internally. They most of them had the air of my aunt's solicitor when he had said, "Even I did not realise…." their positions saving them the necessity of concealing surprise. "One can't know everything." They fumbled amusingly about the causes, differed with one another, but were surprisingly unanimous as to effects, as to the panic and the call for purification. It was rather extraordinary, too, how large de Mersch loomed on the horizon over here. It was as if the whole world centred in him, as if he represented the modern spirit that must be purified away by burning before things could return to their normal state. I knew what he represented … but there it was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was part of my programme, the attendance at the poultry show; I was to go back to the cottage with Churchill, after he had made his speech. It was rather extraordinary, the sensations of that function. I went in rather late, with the reporter of the Hour, who was anxious to do me the favour of introducing me without payment—it was his way of making himself pleasant, and I had the reputation of knowing celebrities. It was rather extraordinary to be back again in the midst of this sort of thing, to be walking over a crowded, green paddock, hedged in with tall trees and dotted here and there with the gaily striped species of tent that is called marquee. And the type of face, and the style of the costume! They would have seemed impossible the day before yesterday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were all Miss Churchill's gang of great dames, muslin, rustling, marriageable daughters, a continual twitter of voices, and a sprinkling of the peasantry, dun-coloured and struck speechless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of the great ladies surveyed me as I stood in the centre of an open space, surveyed me through tortoise-shell glasses on the end of a long handle, and beckoned me to her side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are unattached?" she asked. She had pretensions to voice the county, just as my aunt undoubtedly set the tone of its doings, decided who was visitable, and just as Miss Churchill gave the political tone. "You may wait upon me, then," she said; "my daughter is with her young man. That is the correct phrase, is it not?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She was a great lady, who stood nearly six foot high, and whom one would have styled buxom, had one dared. "I have a grievance," she went on; "I must talk to someone. Come this way. There!" She pointed with the handle of her glasses to a pen of glossy blackbirds. "You see!… Not even commended!—and I assure you the trouble I have taken over them, with the idea of setting an example to the tenantry, is incredible. They give a prize to one of our own tenants … which is as much as telling the man that he is an example to me. Then they wonder that the country is going to the dogs. I assure you that after breakfast I have had the scraps collected from the plates—that was the course recommended by the poultry manuals—and have taken them out with my own hands."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The sort of thing passed for humour in the county, and, being delivered with an air and a half Irish ruefulness, passed well enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And that reminds me," she went on, "—I mean the fact that the country is going to the dogs, as my husband [You haven't seen him anywhere, have you? He is one of the judges, and I want to have a word with him about my Orpingtons] says every morning after he has looked at his paper—that … oh, that you have been in Paris, haven't you? with your aunt. Then, of course, you have seen this famous Duc de Mersch?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She looked at me humourously through her glasses. "I'm going to pump you, you know," she said, "it is the duty that is expected of me. I have to talk for a countyful of women without a tongue in their heads. So tell me about him. Is it true that he is at the bottom of all this mischief? Is it through him that this man committed suicide? They say so. He was mixed up in that Royalist plot, wasn't he?—and the people that have been failing all over the place are mixed up with him, aren't they?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I … I really don't know," I said; "if you say so…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I assure you I'm sound enough," she answered, "the Churchills—I know you're a friend of his—haven't a stauncher ally than I am, and I should only be too glad to be able to contradict. But it's so difficult. I assure you I go out of my way; talk to the most outrageous people, deny the very possibility of Mr. Churchill's being in any way implicated. One knows that it's impossible, but what can one do? I have said again and again—to people like grocers' wives; even to the grocers, for that matter—that Mr. Churchill is a statesman, and that if he insists that this odious man's railway must go through, it is in the interests of the country that it should. I tell them…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She paused for a minute to take breath and then went on: "I was speaking to a man of that class only this morning, rather an intelligent man and quite nice—I was saying, 'Don't you see, my dear Mr. Tull, that it is a question of international politics. If the grand duke does not get the money for his railway, the grand duke will be turned out of his—what is it—principality? And that would be most dangerous—in the present condition of affairs over there, and besides….' The man listened very respectfully, but I could see that he was not convinced. I buckled to again…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"'And besides,' I said, 'there is the question of Greenland itself. We English must have Greenland … sooner or later. It touches you, even. You have a son who's above—who doesn't care for life in a country town, and you want to send him abroad—with a little capital. Well, Greenland is just the place for him.' The man looked at me, and almost shook his head in my face."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"'If you'll excuse me, my lady,' he said, 'it won't do. Mr. Churchill is a man above hocus-pocus. Well I know it that have had dealings with him. But … well, the long and the short of it is, my lady, that you can't touch pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people'll think you've been defiled—those that don't know you. The foreign nations are all very well, and the grand duchy—and the getting hold of Greenland, but what touches me is this—My neighbour Slingsby had a little money, and he gets a prospectus. It looked very well—very well—and he brings it in to me. I did not have anything to do with it, but Slingsby did. Well, now there's Slingsby on the rates and his wife a lady born, almost. I might have been taken in the same way but for—for the grace of God, I'm minded to say. Well, Slingsby's a good man, and used to be a hard-working man—all his life, and now it turns out that that prospectus came about by the man de Mersch's manoeuvres—"wild-cat schemes," they call them in the paper that I read. And there's any number of them started by de Mersch or his agents. Just for what? That de Mersch may be the richest man in the world and a philanthropist. Well, then, where's Slingsby, if that's philanthropy? So Mr. Churchill comes along and says, in a manner of speaking, "That's all very well, but this same Mr. Mersch is the grand duke of somewhere or other, and we must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with the powers." Powers—what's powers to me?—or Greenland? when there's Slingsby, a man I've smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life, in the workhouse? And there's hundreds of Slingsbys all over the country.'"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The man was working himself—Slingsby was a good sort of man. It shocked even me. One knows what goes on in one's own village, of course. And it's only too true that there's hundreds of Slingsbys—I'm not boring you, am I?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I did not answer for a moment. "I—I had no idea," I said; "I have been so long out of it and over there one did not realise the … the feeling."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You've been well out of it," she answered; "one has had to suffer, I assure you." I believed that she had had to suffer; it must have taken a good deal to make that lady complain. Her large, ruddy features followed the droop of her eyes down to the fringe of the parasol that she was touching the turf with. We were sitting on garden seats in the dappled shade of enormous elms.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was in the air a touch of the sounds discoursed by a yeomanry band at the other end of the grounds. One could see the red of their uniforms through moving rifts in the crowd of white dresses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That wasn't even the worst," she said suddenly, lifting her eyes and looking away between the trunks of the trees. "The man has been reading the papers and he gave me the benefit of his reflections. 'Someone's got to be punished for this;' he said, 'we've got to show them that you can't be hand-and-glove with that sort of blackguard, without paying for it. I don't say, mind you, that Mr. Churchill is or ever has been. I know him, and I trust him. But there's more than me in the world, and they can't all know him. Well, here's the papers saying—or they don't say it, but they hint, which is worse in a way—that he must be, or he wouldn't stick up for the man. They say the man's a blackguard out and out—in Greenland too; has the blacks murdered. Churchill says the blacks are to be safe-guarded, that's the word. Well, they may be—but so ought Slingsby to have been, yet it didn't help him. No, my lady, we've got to put our own house in order and that first, before thinking of the powers or places like Greenland. What's the good of the saner policy that Mr. Churchill talks about, if you can't trust anyone with your money, and have to live on the capital? If you can't sleep at night for thinking that you may be in the workhouse to-morrow—like Slingsby? The first duty of men in Mr. Churchill's position—as I see it—is to see that we're able to be confident of honest dealing. That's what we want, not Greenlands. That's how we all feel, and you know it, too, or else you, a great lady, wouldn't stop to talk to a man like me. And, mind you, I'm true blue, always have been and always shall be, and, if it was a matter of votes, I'd give mine to Mr. Churchill to-morrow. But there's a many that wouldn't, and there's a many that believe the hintings.'"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My lady stopped and sighed from a broad bosom. "What could I say?" she went on again. "I know Mr. Churchill and I like him—and everyone that knows him likes him. I'm one of the stalwarts, mind you; I'm not for giving in to popular clamour; I'm for the 'saner policy,' like Churchill. But, as the man said: 'There's a many that believe the hintings.' And I almost wish Churchill…. However, you understand what I meant when I said that one had had to suffer."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I understand," I said. I was beginning to. "And Churchill?" I asked later, "he gives no sign of relenting?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Would you have him?" she asked sharply; "would you make him if you could?" She had an air of challenging. "I'm for the 'saner policy!' cost what it may. He owes it to himself to sacrifice himself, if it comes to that."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm with you too," I answered, "over boot and spur." Her enthusiasm was contagious, and unnecessary.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, he'll stick," she began again after consultation with the parasol fringe. "You'll hear him after a minute. It's a field day to-day. You'll miss the other heavy guns if you stop with me. I do it ostentatiously—wait until they've done. They're all trembling; all of them. My husband will be on the platform—trembling too. He is a type of them. All day long and at odd moments at night I talk to him—out-talk him and silence him. What's the state of popular feeling to him? He's for the country, not the town—this sort of thing has nothing to do with him. It's a matter to be settled by Jews in the City. Well, he sees it at night, and then in the morning the papers undo all my work. He begins to talk about his seat—which I got for him. I've been the 'voice of the county' for years now. Well, it'll soon be a voice without a county…. What is it? 'The old order changeth.' So, I've arranged it that I shall wait until the trembling big-wigs have stuttered their speeches out, and then I'm going to sail down the centre aisle and listen to Churchill with visible signs of approval. It won't do much to-day, but there was a time when it would have changed the course of an election…. Ah, there's Effie's young man. It's time."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She rose and marched, with the air of going to a last sacrifice, across the deserted sward toward a young man who was passing under the calico flag of the gateway.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's all right, Willoughby," she said, as we drew level, "I've found someone else to face the music with me; you can go back to Effie." A bronzed and grateful young man murmured thanks to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's an awful relief, Granger," he said; "can't think how you can do it. I'm hooked, but you…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's the better man," his mother-in-law-elect said, over her shoulder. She sailed slowly up the aisle beside me, an almost heroic figure of a matron. "Splendidly timed, you see," she said, "do you observe my husband's embarrassment?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was splendid to see Churchill again, standing there negligently, with the diffidence of a boy amid the bustle of applause. I understood suddenly why I loved him so, this tall, gray man with the delicate, almost grotesque, mannerisms. He appealed to me by sheer force of picturesqueness, appealed as some forgotten mediaeval city might. I was concerned for him as for some such dying place, standing above the level plains; I was jealous lest it should lose one jot of its glory, of its renown. He advocated his saner policy before all those people; stood up there and spoke gently, persuasively, without any stress of emotion, without more movement than an occasional flutter of the glasses he held in his hand. One would never have recognised that the thing was a fighting speech but for the occasional shiver of his audience. They were thinking of their Slingsbys; he affecting, insouciantly, to treat them as rational people.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was extraordinary to sit there shut in by that wall of people all of one type, of one idea; the idea of getting back; all conscious that a force of which they knew nothing was dragging them forward over the edge of a glacier, into a crevasse. They wanted to get back, were struggling, panting even—as a nation pants—to get back by their own way that they understood and saw; were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the weighted rope that was dragging them forward. Churchill stood up there and repeated: "Mine is the only way—the saner policy," and his words would fly all over the country to fall upon the deaf ears of the panic-stricken, who could not understand the use of calmness, of trifling even, in the face of danger, who suspected the calmness as one suspects the thing one has not. At the end of it I received his summons to a small door at the back of the building. The speech seemed to have passed out of his mind far more than out of mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So you have come," he said; "that's good, and so…. Let us walk a little way … out of this. My aunt will pick us up on the road." He linked his arm into mine and propelled me swiftly down the bright, broad street. "I'm sorry you came in for that, but—one has to do these things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a sort of resisted numbness in his voice, a lack of any resiliency. My heart sank a little. It was as if I were beside an invalid who did not—must not—know his condition; as if I were pledged not to notice anything. In the open the change struck home as a hammer strikes; in the pitiless searching of the unrestrained light, his grayness, his tremulousness, his aloofness from the things about him, came home to me like a pang.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You look a bit fagged," I said, "perhaps we ought not to talk about work." His thoughts seemed to come back from a great distance, oh, from an infinite distance beyond the horizon, the soft hills of that fat country. "You want rest," I added.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I—oh, no," he answered, "I can't have it … till the end of the session. I'm used to it too."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He began talking briskly about the "Cromwell;" proofs had emerged from the infinite and wanted attention. There were innumerable little matters, things to be copied for the appendix and revisions. It was impossible for me to keep my mind upon them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It had come suddenly home to me that this was the world that I belonged to; that I had come back to it as if from an under world; that to this I owed allegiance. She herself had recognised that; she herself had bidden me tell him what was a-gate against him. It was a duty too; he was my friend. But, face to face with him, it became almost an impossibility. It was impossible even to put it into words. The mere ideas seemed to be untranslatable, to savour of madness. I found myself in the very position that she had occupied at the commencement of our relations: that of having to explain—say, to a Persian—the working principles of the telegraph. And I was not equal to the task. At the same time I had to do something. I had to. It would be abominable to have to go through life forever, alone with the consciousness of that sort of treachery of silence. But how could I tell him even the comprehensibles? What kind of sentence was I to open with? With pluckings of an apologetic string, without prelude at all—or how? I grew conscious that there was need for haste; he was looking behind him down the long white road for the carriage that was to pick us up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear fellow…." I began. He must have noted a change in my tone, and looked at me with suddenly lifted eyebrows. "You know my sister is going to marry Mr. Gurnard."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, no," he answered—"that is … I've heard…." he began to offer good wishes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, no," I interrupted him hurriedly, "not that. But I happen to know that Gurnard is meditating … is going to separate from you in public matters." An expression of dismay spread over his face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear fellow," he began.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I'm not drunk," I said bitterly, "but I've been behind the scenes—for a long time. And I could not … couldn't let the thing go on without a word."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stopped in the road and looked at me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, yes," he said, "I daresay…. But what does it lead to?… Even if I could listen to you—I can't go behind the scenes. Mr. Gurnard may differ from me in points, but don't you see?…" He had walked on slowly, but he came to a halt again. "We had better put these matters out of our minds. Of course you are not drunk; but one is tied down in these matters…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He spoke very gently, as if he did not wish to offend me by this closing of the door. He seemed suddenly to grow very old and very gray. There was a stile in the dusty hedge-row, and he walked toward it, meditating. In a moment he looked back at me. "I had forgotten," he said; "I meant to suggest that we should wait here—I am a little tired." He perched himself on the top bar and became lost in the inspection of the cord of his glasses. I went toward him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I knew," I said, "that you could not listen to … to the sort of thing. But there were reasons. I felt forced. You will forgive me." He looked up at me, starting as if he had forgotten my presence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, yes," he said, "I have a certain—I can't think of the right word—say respect—for your judgment and—and motives … But you see, there are, for instance, my colleagues. I couldn't go to them …" He lost the thread of his idea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To tell the truth," I said, with a sudden impulse for candour, "it isn't the political aspect of the matter, but the personal. I spoke because it was just possible that I might be of service to you—personally—and because I would like you … to make a good fight for it." I had borrowed her own words.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked up at me and smiled. "Thank you," he said. "I believe you think it's a losing game," he added, with a touch of gray humour that was like a genial hour of sunlight on a wintry day. I did not answer. A little way down the road Miss Churchill's carriage whirled into sight, sparkling in the sunlight, and sending up an attendant cloud of dust that melted like smoke through the dog-roses of the leeward hedge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So you don't think much of me as a politician," Churchill suddenly deduced smilingly. "You had better not tell that to my aunt."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went up to town with Churchill that evening. There was nothing waiting for me there, but I did not want to think. I wanted to be among men, among crowds of men, to be dazed, to be stupefied, to hear nothing for the din of life, to be blinded by the blaze of lights.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were plenty of people in Churchill's carriage; a military member and a local member happened to be in my immediate neighbourhood. Their minds were full of the financial scandals, and they dinned their alternating opinions into me. I assured them that I knew nothing about the matter, and they grew more solicitous for my enlightenment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It all comes from having too many eggs in one basket," the local member summed up. "The old-fashioned small enterprises had their disadvantages, but—mind you—these gigantic trusts…. Isn't that so, General?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I quite agree with you," the general barked; "at the same time…." Their voices sounded on, intermingling, indistinguishable, soothing even. I seemed to be listening to the hum of a threshing-machine—a passage of sound booming on one note, a passage, a half-tone higher, and so on, and so on. Visible things grew hazy, fused into one another.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER SIXTEEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We reached London somewhat late in the evening—in the twilight of a summer day. There was the hurry and bustle of arrival, a hurry and bustle that changed the tenor of my thoughts and broke their train. As I stood reflecting before the door of the carriage, I felt a friendly pressure of a hand on my shoulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You'll see to that," Churchill's voice said in my ear. "You'll set the copyists to work."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'll go to the Museum to-morrow," I said. There were certain extracts to be made for the "Life of Cromwell"—extracts from pamphlets that we had not conveniently at disposal. He nodded, walked swiftly toward his brougham, opened the door and entered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I remember so well that last sight of him—of his long, slim figure bending down for the entrance, woefully solitary, woefully weighted; remember so well the gleam of the carriage panels reflecting the murky light of the bare London terminus, the attitude of the coachman stiffly reining back the horse; the thin hand that reached out, a gleam of white, to turn the gleaming handle. There was something intimately suggestive of the man in the motion of that hand, in its tentative outstretching, its gentle, half-persuasive—almost theoretic—grasp of the handle. The pleasure of its friendly pressure on my shoulder carried me over some minutes of solitude; its weight on my body removing another from my mind. I had feared that my ineffective disclosure had chilled what of regard he had for me. He had said nothing, his manner had said nothing, but I had feared. In the railway carriage he had sat remote from me, buried in papers. But that touch on my shoulder was enough to set me well with myself again, if not to afford scope for pleasant improvisation. It at least showed me that he bore me no ill-will, otherwise he would hardly have touched me. Perhaps, even, he was grateful to me, not for service, but for ineffectual good-will. Whatever I read into it, that was the last time he spoke to me, and the last time he touched me. And I loved him very well. Things went so quickly after that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In a moderately cheerful frame of mind I strolled the few yards that separated me from my club—intent on dining. In my averseness to solitude I sat down at a table where sat already a little, bald-headed, false-toothed Anglo-Indian, a man who bored me into fits of nervous excitement. He was by way of being an incredibly distant uncle of my own. As a rule I avoided him, to-night I dined with him. He was a person of interminable and incredibly inaccurate reminiscences. His long residence in an indigo-producing swamp had affected his memory, which was supported by only very occasional visits to England.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He told me tales of my poor father and of my poor, dear mother, and of Mr. Bromptons and Mrs. Kenwards who had figured on their visiting lists away back in the musty sixties.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your poor, dear father was precious badly off then," he said; "he had a hard struggle for it. I had a bad time of it too; worm had got at all my plantations, so I couldn't help him, poor chap. I think, mind you, Kenny Granger treated him very badly. He might have done something for him—he had influence, Kenny had."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Kenny was my uncle, the head of the family, the husband of my aunt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They weren't on terms," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I know, I know," the old man mumbled, "but still, for one's only brother … However, you contrive to do yourselves pretty well. You're making your pile, aren't you? Someone said to me the other day—can't remember who it was—that you were quite one of the rising men—quite one of the men."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Very kind of someone," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And now I see," he went on, lifting up a copy of a morning paper, over which I had found him munching his salmon cutlet, "now I see your sister is going to marry a cabinet minister. Ah!" he shook his poor, muddled, baked head, "I remember you both as tiny little dots."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why," I said, "she can hardly have been born then."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, yes," he affirmed, "that was when I came over in '78. She remembered, too, that I brought her over an ivory doll—she remembered."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have seen her?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I called two or three weeks—no, months—ago. She's the image of your poor, dear mother," he added, "at that age; I remarked upon it to your aunt, but, of course, she could not remember. They were not married until after the quarrel."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A sudden restlessness made me bolt the rest of my tepid dinner. With my return to the upper world, and the return to me of a will, despair of a sort had come back. I had before me the problem—the necessity—of winning her. Once I was out of contact with her she grew smaller, less of an idea, more of a person—that one could win. And there were two ways. I must either woo her as one woos a person barred; must compel her to take flight, to abandon, to cast away everything; or I must go to her as an eligible suitor with the Etchingham acres and possibilities of a future on that basis. This fantastic old man with his mumbled reminiscences spoilt me for the last. One remembers sooner or later that a county-man may not marry his reputed sister without scandal. And I craved her intensely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She had upon me the effect of an incredible stimulant; away from her I was like a drunkard cut off from his liquor; an opium-taker from his drug. I hardly existed; I hardly thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had an errand at my aunt's house; had a message to deliver, sympathetic enquiries to make—and I wanted to see her, to gain some sort of information from her; to spy out the land; to ask her for terms. There was a change in the appearance of the house, an adventitious brightness that indicated the rise in the fortunes of the family. For me the house was empty and the great door closed hollowly behind me. My sister was not at home. It seemed abominable to me that she should be out; that she could be talking to anyone, or could exist without me. I went sullenly across the road to the palings of the square. As I turned the corner I found my head pivoting on my neck. I was looking over my shoulder at the face of the house, was wondering which was her window.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Like a love-sick boy—like a damn love-sick boy," I growled at myself. My sense of humour was returning to me. There began a pilgrimage in search of companionship.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >London was a desert more solitary than was believable. On those brilliant summer evenings the streets were crowded, were alive, bustled with the chitter-chatter of footsteps, with the chitter-chatter of voices, of laughter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was impossible to walk, impossible to do more than tread on one's own toes; one was almost blinded by the constant passing of faces. It was like being in a wheat-field with one's eyes on a level with the indistinguishable ears. One was alone in one's intense contempt for all these faces, all these contented faces; one towered intellectually above them; one towered into regions of rarefaction. And down below they enjoyed themselves. One understood life better; they better how to live. That struck me then—in Oxford Street. There was the intense good-humour, the absolute disregard of the minor inconveniences, of the inconveniences of a crowd, of the ignominy of being one of a crowd. There was the intense poetry of the soft light, the poetry of the summer-night coolness, and they understood how to enjoy it. I turned up an ancient court near Bedford Row.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"In the name of God," I said, "I will enjoy …" and I did. The poetry of those old deserted quarters came suddenly home to me—all the little commonplace thoughts; all the commonplace associations of Georgian London. For the time I was done with the meanings of things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was seeking Lea—he was not at home. The quarter was honeycombed with the homes of people one knows; of people one used to know, excellent young men who wrote for the papers, who sub-edited papers, who designed posters, who were always just the same. One forgot them for a year or two, one came across them again and found them just the same—still writing for the same papers, still sub-editing the same papers, designing the same posters. I was in the mood to rediscover them in the privacies of their hearths, with the same excellent wives making fair copies of the same manuscripts, with the same gaiety of the same indifferent whiskey, brown or pale or suspicious-looking, in heavy, square, cut-glass stoppered decanters, and with the same indifferent Virginian tobacco at the same level in the same jars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was in the mood for this stability, for the excellent household article that was their view of life and literature. I wanted to see it again, to hear again how it was filling the unvarying, allotted columns of the daily, the weekly, or the monthly journals. I wanted to breathe again this mild atmosphere where there are no longer hopes or fears. But, alas!…</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I rang bell after bell of that gloomy central London district. You know what happens. One pulls the knob under the name of the person one seeks—pulls it three, or, it may be, four times in vain. One rings the housekeeper's bell; it reverberates, growing fainter and fainter, gradually stifled by a cavernous subterranean atmosphere. After an age a head peeps round the opening door, the head of a hopeless anachronism, the head of a widow of early Victorian merit, or of an orphan of incredible age. One asks for So-and-so—he's out; for Williams—he's expecting an increase of family, and has gone into the country with madame. And Waring? Oh, he's gone no one knows where, and Johnson who used to live at Number 44 only comes up to town on Tuesdays now. I exhausted the possibilities of that part of Bloomsbury, the possibilities of variety in the types of housekeepers. The rest of London divided itself into bands—into zones. Between here and Kensington the people that I knew could not be called on after dinner, those who lived at Chiswick and beyond were hyperborean—one was bound by the exigencies of time. It was ten o'clock as I stood reflecting on a doorstep—on Johnson's doorstep. I must see somebody, must talk to somebody, before I went to bed in the cheerless room at the club. It was true I might find a political stalwart in the smoking-room—but that was a last resort, a desperate and ignominious pis aller.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was Fox, I should find him at the office. But it needed a change of tone before I could contemplate with equanimity the meeting of that individual. I had been preparing myself to confront all the ethically excellent young men and Fox was, ethically speaking, far from excellent, middle-aged, rubicund, leery—a free lance of genius. I made the necessary change in my tone of mind and ran him to earth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Watteau room was further enlivened by the introduction of a scarlet plush couch of sumptuous design. By its side stood a couple of electric lights. The virulent green of their shades made the colours of the be-shepherded wall-panels appear almost unearthly, and threw impossible shadows on the deal partition. Round the couch stood chairs with piles of papers neatly arranged on them; round it, on the floor, were more papers lying like the leaves of autumn that one sings of. On it lay Fox, enveloped in a Shetland shawl—a good shawl that was the only honest piece of workmanship in the torn-tawdry place. Fox was as rubicund as ever, but his features were noticeably peaked and there were heavy lines under his eyes—lines cast into deep shadow by the light by which he was reading. I entered unannounced, and was greeted by an indifferent upward glance that changed into one of something like pleasure as he made out my features in the dim light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hullo, you old country hawbuck," he said, with spasmodic jocularity; "I'm uncommon glad to see you." He came to a jerky close, with an indrawing of his breath. "I'm about done," he went on. "Same old thing—sciatica. Took me just after I got here this afternoon; sent out one of the messengers to buy me a sofa, and here I've been ever since. Well, and what's brought you up—don't answer, I know all about it. I've got to keep on talking until this particular spasm's over, or else I shall scream and disturb the flow of Soane's leader. Well, and now you've come, you'll stop and help me to put the Hour to bed, won't you? And then you can come and put me to bed."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He went on talking at high pressure, exaggerating his expressions, heightening his humorous touches with punctuations of rather wild laughter. At last he came to a stop with a half suppressed "Ah!" and a long indrawing of the breath.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's over," he said. "Give me a drop of brandy—there's a good fellow." I gave him his nip. Then I explained to him that I couldn't work for the Hour; that I wasn't on terms with de Mersch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Been dropping money over him?" he asked, cheerfully. I explained a little more—that there was a lady.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, it's that," Fox said. "The man is a fool … But anyhow Mersch don't count for much in this particular show. He's no money in it even, so you may put your pride in your pocket, or wherever you keep it. It's all right. Straight. He's only the small change."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But," I said, "everyone says; you said yourself…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To be sure," he answered. "But you don't think that I play second fiddle to a bounder of that calibre. Not really?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked at me with a certain seriousness. I remembered, as I had remembered once before, that Fox was a personality—a power. I had never realised till then how entirely—fundamentally—different he was from any other man that I knew. He was surprising enough to have belonged to another race. He looked at me, not as if he cared whether I gave him his due or no, but as if he were astonished at my want of perception of the fact. He let his towzled head fall back upon the plush cushions. "You might kick him from here to Greenland for me," he said; "I wouldn't weep. It suits me to hold him up, and a kicking might restore his equilibrium. I'm sick of him—I've told him so. I knew there was a woman. But don't you worry; I'm the man here."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If that's the case …" I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, that's it," he answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I helped him to put the paper to bed; took some of the work off his hands. It was all part of the getting back to life; of the resuming of rusty armour; and I wanted to pass the night. I was not unused to it, as it happened. Fox had had several of these fits during my year, and during most of them I had helped him through the night; once or twice for three on end. Once I had had entire control for a matter of five nights. But they gave me a new idea of Fox, those two or three weird hours that night. It was as if I had never seen him before. The attacks grew more virulent as the night advanced. He groaned and raved, and said things—oh, the most astounding things in gibberish that upset one's nerves and everything else. At the height he sang hymns, and then, as the fits passed, relapsed into incredible clear-headedness. It gave me, I say, a new idea of Fox. It was as if, for all the time I had known him, he had been playing a part, and that only now, in the delirium of his pain, in the madness into which he drank himself, were fragments of the real man thrown to the surface. I grew, at last, almost afraid to be alone with him in the dead small hours of the morning, and longed for the time when I could go to bed among the uninspiring, marble-topped furniture of my club.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER SEVENTEEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At noon of the next day I gave Fox his look in at his own flat. He was stretched upon a sofa—it was evident that I was to take such of his duties as were takeable. He greeted me with words to that effect.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't go filling the paper with your unbreeched geniuses," he said, genially, "and don't overwork yourself. There's really nothing to do, but you're being there will keep that little beast Evans from getting too cock-a-hoop. He'd like to jerk me out altogether; thinks they'd get on just as well without me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I expressed in my manner general contempt for Evans, and was taking my leave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, and—" Fox called after me. I turned back. "The Greenland mail ought to be in to-day. If Callan's contrived to get his flood-gates open, run his stuff in, there's a good chap. It's a feature and all that, you know."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I suppose Soane's to have a look at it," I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, yes," he answered; "but tell him to keep strictly to old Cal's lines—rub that into him. If he were to get drunk and run in some of his own tips it'd be awkward. People are expecting Cal's stuff. Tell you what: you take him out to lunch, eh? Keep an eye on the supplies, and ram it into him that he's got to stick to Cal's line of argument."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Soane's as bad as ever, then?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh," Fox answered, "he'll be all right for the stuff if you get that one idea into him." A prolonged and acute fit of pain seized him. I fetched his man and left him to his rest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the office of the Hour I was greeted by the handing to me of a proof of Callan's manuscript. Evans, the man across the screen, was the immediate agent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I suppose it's got to go in, so I had it set up," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, of course it's got to go in," I answered. "It's to go to Soane first, though."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Soane's not here yet," he answered. I noted the tone of sub-acid pleasure in his voice. Evans would have enjoyed a fiasco.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, well," I answered, nonchalantly, "there's plenty of time. You allow space on those lines. I'll send round to hunt Soane up."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I felt called to be upon my mettle. I didn't much care about the paper, but I had a definite antipathy to being done by Evans—by a mad Welshman in a stubborn fit. I knew what was going to happen; knew that Evans would feign inconceivable stupidity, the sort of black stupidity that is at command of individuals of his primitive race. I was in for a day of petty worries. In the circumstances it was a thing to be thankful for; it dragged my mind away from larger issues. One has no time for brooding when one is driving a horse in a jibbing fit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Evans was grimly conscious that I was moderately ignorant of technical details; he kept them well before my eyes all day long.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At odd moments I tried to read Callan's article. It was impossible. It opened with a description of the squalor of the Greenlander's life, and contained tawdry passages of local colour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I knew what was coming. This was the view of the Greenlanders of pre-Merschian Greenland, elaborated, after the manner of Callan—the Special Commissioner—so as to bring out the glory and virtue of the work of regeneration. Then in a gush of superlatives the work itself would be described. I knew quite well what was coming, and was temperamentally unable to read more than the first ten lines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Everything was going wrong. The printers developed one of their sudden crazes for asking idiotic questions. Their messengers came to Evans, Evans sent them round the pitch-pine screen to me. "Mr. Jackson wants to know——"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The fourth of the messengers that I had despatched to Soane returned with the news that Soane would arrive at half-past nine. I sent out in search of the strongest coffee that the city afforded. Soane arrived. He had been ill, he said, very ill. He desired to be fortified with champagne. I produced the coffee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soane was the son of an Irish peer. He had magnificent features—a little blurred nowadays—and a remainder of the grand manner. His nose was a marvel of classic workmanship, but the floods of time had reddened and speckled it—not offensively, but ironically; his hair was turning grey, his eyes were bloodshot, his heavy moustache rather ragged. He inspired one with the respect that one feels for a man who has lived and does not care a curse. He had a weird intermittent genius that made it worth Fox's while to put up with his lapses and his brutal snubs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I produced the coffee and pointed to the sofa of the night before.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Damn it," he said, "I'm ill, I tell you; I want …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Exactly!" I cut in. "You want a rest, old fellow. Here's Cal's article. We want something special about it. If you don't feel up to it I'll send round to Jenkins."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Damn Jenkins," he said; "I'm up to it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You understand," I said, "you're to write strictly on Callan's lines. Don't insert any information from extraneous sources. And make it as slashing as you like—on those lines."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He grunted in acquiescence. I left him lying on the sofa, drinking the coffee. I had tenderly arranged the lights for him as Fox had arranged them the night before. As I went out to get my dinner I was comfortably aware of him, holding the slips close to his muddled eyes and philosophically damning the nature of things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When I returned, Soane, from his sofa, said something that I did not catch—something about Callan and his article.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, for God's sake," I answered, "don't worry me. Have some more coffee and stick to Cal's line of argument. That's what Fox said. I'm not responsible."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Deuced queer," Soane muttered. He began to scribble with a pencil. From the tone of his voice I knew that he had reached the precise stage at which something brilliant—the real thing of its kind—might be expected.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Very late Soane finished his leader. He looked up as he wrote the last word.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I've got it written," he said. "But … I say, what the deuce is up?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It's like being a tall clock with the mainspring breaking, this."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I rang the bell for someone to take the copy down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your metaphor's too much for me, Soane," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's appropriate all the way along," he maintained, "if you call me a mainspring. I've been wound up and wound up to write old de Mersch and his Greenland up—and it's been a tight wind, these days, I tell you. Then all of a sudden …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A boy appeared and carried off the copy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"All of a sudden," Soane resumed, "something gives—I suppose something's given—and there's a whirr-rr-rr and the hands fly backwards and old de Mersch and Greenland bump to the bottom, like the weights."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The boom of the great presses was rattling the window frames. Soane got up and walked toward one of the cupboards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dry work," he said; "but the simile's just, isn't it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I gave one swift step toward the bell-button beside the desk. The proof of Callan's article, from which Soane had been writing, lay a crumpled white streamer on the brown wood of Fox's desk. I made toward it. As I stretched out my hand the solution slipped into my mind, coming with no more noise than that of a bullet; impinging with all the shock and remaining with all the pain. I had remembered the morning, over there in Paris, when she had told me that she had invited one of de Mersch's lieutenants to betray him by not concealing from Callan the real horrors of the Systeme Groënlandais—flogged, butchered, miserable natives, the famines, the vices, diseases, and the crimes. There came suddenly before my eyes the tall narrow room in my aunt's house, the opening of the door and her entry, followed by that of the woebegone governor of a province—the man who was to show Callan things—with his grating "Cest entendu …"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I remembered the scene distinctly; her words; her looks; my utter unbelief. I remembered, too, that it had not saved me from a momentary sense of revolt against that inflexible intention of a treachery which was to be another step toward the inheritance of the earth. I had rejected the very idea, and here it had come; it was confronting me with all its meaning and consequences. Callan had been shown things he had not been meant to see, and had written the truth as he had seen it. His article was a small thing in itself, but he had been sent out there with tremendous flourishes of de Mersch's trumpets. He was the man who could be believed. De Mersch's supporters had practically said: "If he condemns us we are indeed damned." And now that the condemnation had come, it meant ruin, as it seemed to me, for everybody I had known, worked for, seen, or heard of, during the last year of my life. It was ruin for Fox, for Churchill, for the ministers, and for the men who talk in railway carriages, for shopkeepers and for the government; it was a menace to the institutions which hold us to the past, that are our guarantees for the future. The safety of everything one respected and believed in was involved in the disclosure of an atrocious fraud, and the disclosure was in my hands. For that night I had the power of the press in my keeping. People were waiting for this pronouncement. De Mersch's last card was his philanthropy; his model state and his happy natives.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The drone of the presses made the floor under my feet quiver, and the whole building vibrated as if the earth itself had trembled. I was alone with my knowledge. Did she know; had she put the power in my hand? But I was alone, and I was free.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I took up the proof and began to read, slanting the page to the fall of the light. It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric of the man there was genuine indignation and pain. There were revolting details of cruelty to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked; but more revolting to see without a mask was that falsehood which had been hiding under the words that for ages had spurred men to noble deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism. What was appalling was the sudden perception that all the traditional ideals of honour, glory, conscience, had been committed to the upholding of a gigantic and atrocious fraud. The falsehood had spread stealthily, had eaten into the very heart of creeds and convictions that we lean upon on our passage between the past and the future. The old order of things had to live or perish with a lie. I saw all this with the intensity and clearness of a revelation; I saw it as though I had been asleep through a year of work and dreams, and had awakened to the truth. I saw it all; I saw her intention. What was I to do?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Without my marking its approach emotion was upon me. The fingers that held up the extended slips tattooed one on another through its negligible thickness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pretty thick that," Soane said. He was looking back at me from the cupboard he had opened. "I've rubbed it in, too … there'll be hats on the green to-morrow." He had his head inside the cupboard, and his voice came to me hollowly. He extracted a large bottle with a gilt-foiled neck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Won't it upset the apple cart to-morrow," he said, very loudly; "won't it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His voice acted on me as the slight shake upon a phial full of waiting chemicals; crystallised them suddenly with a little click. Everything suddenly grew very clear to me. I suddenly understood that all the tortuous intrigue hinged upon what I did in the next few minutes. It rested with me now to stretch out my hand to that button in the wall or to let the whole world—"the … the probity … that sort of thing," she had said—fall to pieces. The drone of the presses continued to make itself felt like the quiver of a suppressed emotion. I might stop them or I might not. It rested with me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Everybody was in my hands; they were quite small. If I let the thing go on, they would be done for utterly, and the new era would begin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soane had got hold of a couple of long-stalked glasses. They clinked together whilst he searched the cupboard for something.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Eh, what?" he said. "It is pretty strong, isn't it? Ought to shake out some of the supporters, eh? Bill comes on to-morrow … do for that, I should think." He wanted a corkscrew very badly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But that was precisely it—it would "shake out some of the supporters," and give Gurnard his patent excuse. Churchill, I knew, would stick to his line, the saner policy. But so many of the men who had stuck to Churchill would fall away now, and Gurnard, of course, would lead them to his own triumph.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a criminal verdict. Callan had gone out as a commissioner—with a good deal of drum-beating. And this was his report, this shriek. If it sounded across the house-tops—if I let it—good-by to the saner policy and to Churchill. It did not make any difference that Churchill's was the saner policy, because there was no one in the nation sane enough to see it. They wanted purity in high places, and here was a definite, criminal indictment against de Mersch. And de Mersch would—in a manner of speaking, have to be lynched, policy or no policy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She wanted this, and in all the earth she was the only desirable thing.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If I thwarted her—she would … what would she do now? I looked at</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soane.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What would happen if I stopped the presses?" I asked. Soane was twisting his corkscrew in the wire of the champagne bottle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was fatal; I could see nothing on earth but her. What else was there</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >in the world. Wine? The light of the sun? The wind on the heath? Honour!</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My God, what was honour to me if I could see nothing but her on earth?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Would honour or wine or sun or wind ever give me what she could give?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let them go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What would happen if what?" Soane grumbled, "D—n this wire."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I was thinking about something," I answered. The wire gave with a little snap and he began to ease the cork. Was I to let the light pass me by for the sake of … of Fox, for instance, who trusted me? Well, let Fox go. And Churchill and what Churchill stood for; the probity; the greatness and the spirit of the past from which had sprung my conscience and the consciences of the sleeping millions around me—the woman at the poultry show with her farmers and shopkeepers. Let them go too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soane put into my hand one of his charged glasses. He seemed to rise out of the infinite, a forgotten shape. I sat down at the desk opposite him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Deuced good idea," he said, suddenly, "to stop the confounded presses and spoof old Fox. He's up to some devilry. And, by Jove, I'd like to get my knife in him; Jove, I would. And then chuck up everything and leave for the Sandwich Islands. I'm sick of this life, this dog's life…. One might have made a pile though, if one'd known this smash was coming. But one can't get at the innards of things.—No such luck—no such luck, eh?" I looked at him stupidly; took in his blood-shot eyes and his ruffled grizzling hair. I wondered who he was. "Il s'agissait de…?" I seemed to be back in Paris, I couldn't think of what I had been thinking of. I drank his glass of wine and he filled me another. I drank that too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ah yes—even then the thing wasn't settled, even now that I had recognized that Fox and the others were of no account … What remained was to prove to her that I wasn't a mere chattel, a piece in the game. I was at the very heart of the thing. After all, it was chance that had put me there, the blind chance of all the little things that lead in the inevitable, the future. If, now, I thwarted her, she would … what would she do? She would have to begin all over again. She wouldn't want to be revenged; she wasn't revengeful. But how if she would never look upon me again?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thing had reduced itself to a mere matter of policy. Or was it passion?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A clatter of the wheels of heavy carts and of the hoofs of heavy horses on granite struck like hammer blows on my ears, coming from the well of the court-yard below. Soane had finished his bottle and was walking to the cupboard. He paused at the window and stood looking down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Strong beggars, those porters," he said; "I couldn't carry that weight of paper—not with my rot on it, let alone Callan's. You'd think it would break down the carts."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I understood that they were loading the carts for the newspaper mails. There was still time to stop them. I got up and went toward the window, very swiftly. I was going to call to them to stop loading. I threw the casement open.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >* * * * *</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of course, I did not stop them. The solution flashed on me with the breath of the raw air. It was ridiculously simple. If I thwarted her, well, she would respect me. But her business in life was the inheritance of the earth, and, however much she might respect me—or by so much the more—she would recognise that I was a force to deflect her from the right line—"a disease for me," she had said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What I have to do," I said, "is to show her that … that I had her in my hands and that I co-operated loyally."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thing was so simple that I triumphed; triumphed with the full glow of wine, triumphed looking down into that murky court-yard where the lanthorns danced about in the rays of a great arc lamp. The gilt letters scattered all over the windows blazed forth the names of Fox's innumerable ventures. Well, he … he had been a power, but I triumphed. I had co-operated loyally with the powers of the future, though I wanted no share in the inheritance of the earth. Only, I was going to push into the future. One of the great carts got into motion amidst a shower of sounds that whirled upward round and round the well. The black hood swayed like the shoulders of an elephant as it passed beneath my feet under the arch. It disappeared—it was co-operating too; in a few hours people at the other end of the country—of the world—would be raising their hands. Oh, yes, it was co-operating loyally.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I closed the window. Soane was holding a champagne bottle in one hand. In the other he had a paper knife of Fox's—a metal thing, a Japanese dagger or a Deccan knife. He sliced the neck off the bottle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Thought you were going to throw yourself out," he said; "I wouldn't stop you. I'm sick of it … sick."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Look at this … to-night … this infernal trick of Fox's…. And I helped too…. Why?… I must eat." He paused "… and drink," he added. "But there is starvation for no end of fools in this little move. A few will be losing their good names too…. I don't care, I'm off…. By-the-bye: What is he doing it for? Money? Funk?—You ought to know. You must be in it too. It's not hunger with you. Wonderful what people will do to keep their pet vice going…. Eh?" He swayed a little. "You don't drink—what's your pet vice?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked at me very defiantly, clutching the neck of the empty bottle. His drunken and overbearing glare seemed to force upon me a complicity in his squalid bargain with life, rewarded by a squalid freedom. He was pitiful and odious to my eyes; and somehow in a moment he appeared menacing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You can't frighten me," I said, in response to the strange fear he had inspired. "No one can frighten me now." A sense of my inaccessibility was the first taste of an achieved triumph. I had done with fear. The poor devil before me appeared infinitely remote. He was lost; but he was only one of the lost; one of those that I could see already overwhelmed by the rush from the flood-gates opened at my touch. He would be destroyed in good company; swept out of my sight together with the past they had known and with the future they had waited for. But he was odious. "I am done with you," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Eh; what?… Who wants to frighten?… I wanted to know what's your pet vice…. Won't tell? You might safely—I'm off…. No…. Want to tell me mine?… No time…. I'm off…. Ask the policeman … crossing sweeper will do…. I'm going."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You will have to," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What…. Dismiss me?… Throw the indispensable Soane overboard like a squeezed lemon?… Would you?… What would Fox say?… Eh? But you can't, my boy—not you. Tell you … tell you … can't…. Beforehand with you … sick of it…. I'm off … to the Islands—the Islands of the Blest…. I'm going to be an … no, not an angel like Fox … an … oh, a beachcomber. Lie on white sand, in the sun … blue sky and palm-trees—eh?… S.S. Waikato. I'm off…. Come too … lark … dismiss yourself out of all this. Warm sand, warm, mind you … you won't?" He had an injured expression. "Well, I'm off. See me into the cab, old chap, you're a decent fellow after all … not one of these beggars who would sell their best friend … for a little money … or some woman. Will see the last of me…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I didn't believe he would reach the South Seas, but I went downstairs and watched him march up the street with a slight stagger under the pallid dawn. I suppose it was the lingering chill of the night that made me shiver. I felt unbounded confidence in the future, there was nothing now between her and me. The echo of my footsteps on the flagstones accompanied me, filling the empty earth with the sound of my progress.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER EIGHTEEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I walked along, got to my club and upstairs into my room peaceably. A feeling of entire tranquillity had come over me. I rested after a strife which had issued in a victory whose meaning was too great to comprehend and enjoy at once. I only knew that it was great because there seemed nothing more left to do. Everything reposed within me—even conscience, even memory, reposed as in death. I had risen above them, and my thoughts moved serenely as in a new light, as men move in sunshine above the graves of the forgotten dead. I felt like a man at the beginning of a long holiday—an indefinite space of idleness with some great felicity—a felicity too great for words, too great for joy—at the end. Everything was delicious and vague; there were no shapes, no persons. Names flitted through my mind—Fox, Churchill, my aunt; but they were living people seen from above, flitting in the dusk, without individuality; things that moved below me in a valley from which I had emerged. I must have been dreaming of them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I know I dreamed of her. She alone was distinct among these shapes. She appeared dazzling; resplendent with a splendid calmness, and I braced myself to the shock of love, the love I had known, that all men had known; but greater, transcendental, almost terrible, a fit reward for the sacrifice of a whole past. Suddenly she spoke. I heard a sound like the rustling of a wind through trees, and I felt the shock of an unknown emotion made up of fear and of enthusiasm, as though she had been not a woman but only a voice crying strange, unknown words in inspiring tones, promising and cruel, without any passion of love or hate. I listened. It was like the wind in the trees of a little wood. No hate … no love. No love. There was a crash as of a falling temple. I was borne to the earth, overwhelmed, crushed by an immensity of ruin and of sorrow. I opened my eyes and saw the sun shining through the window-blinds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I seem to remember I was surprised at it. I don't know why. Perhaps the lingering effect of the ruin in the dream, which had involved sunshine itself. I liked it though, and lay for a time enjoying the—what shall I say?—usualness of it. The sunshine of yesterday—of to-morrow. It occurred to me that the morning must be far advanced, and I got up briskly, as a man rises to his work. But as soon as I got on my legs I felt as if I had already over-worked myself. In reality there was nothing to do. All my muscles twitched with fatigue. I had experienced the same sensations once after an hour's desperate swimming to save myself from being carried out to sea by the tide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No. There was nothing to do. I descended the staircase, and an utter sense of aimlessness drove me out through the big doors, which swung behind me without noise. I turned toward the river, and on the broad embankment the sunshine enveloped me, friendly, familiar, and warm like the care of an old friend. A black dumb barge drifted, clumsy and empty, and the solitary man in it wrestled with the heavy sweep, straining his arms, throwing his face up to the sky at every effort. He knew what he was doing, though it was the river that did his work for him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His exertions impressed me with the idea that I too had something to do. Certainly I had. One always has. Somehow I could not remember. It was intolerable, and even alarming, this blank, this emptiness of the many hours before night came again, till suddenly, it dawned upon me I had to make some extracts in the British Museum for our "Cromwell." Our Cromwell. There was no Cromwell; he had lived, had worked for the future—and now he had ceased to exist. His future—our past, had come to an end. The barge with the man still straining at the oar had gone out of sight under the arch of the bridge, as through a gate into another world. A bizarre sense of solitude stole upon me, and I turned my back upon the river as empty as my day. Hansoms, broughams, streamed with a continuous muffled roll of wheels and a beat of hoofs. A big dray put in a note of thunder and a clank of chains. I found myself curiously unable to understand what possible purpose remained to keep them in motion. The past that had made them had come to an end, and their future had been devoured by a new conception. And what of Churchill? He, too, had worked for the future; he would live on, but he had already ceased to exist. I had evoked him in this poignant thought and he came not alone. He came with a train of all the vanquished in this stealthy, unseen contest for an immense stake in which I was one of the victors. They crowded upon me. I saw Fox, Polehampton, de Mersch himself, crowds of figures without a name, women with whom I had fancied myself in love, men I had shaken by the hand, Lea's reproachful, ironical face. They were near; near enough to touch; nearer. I did not only see them, I absolutely felt them all. Their tumultuous and silent stir seemed to raise a tumult in my breast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I sprang suddenly to my feet—a sensation that I had had before, that was not new to me, a remembered fear, had me fast; a remembered voice seemed to speak clearly incomprehensible words that had moved me before. The sheer faces of the enormous buildings near at hand seemed to topple forwards like cliffs in an earthquake, and for an instant I saw beyond them into unknown depths that I had seen into before. It was as if the shadow of annihilation had passed over them beneath the sunshine. Then they returned to rest; motionless, but with a changed aspect.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is too absurd," I said to myself. "I am not well." I was certainly unfit for any sort of work. "But I must get through the day somehow." To-morrow … to-morrow…. I had a pale vision of her face as it had appeared to me at sunset on the first day I had met her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went back to my club—to lunch, of course. I had no appetite, but I was tormented by the idea of an interminable afternoon before me. I sat idly for a long time. Behind my back two men were talking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Churchill … oh, no better than the rest. He only wants to be found out. If I've any nose for that sort of thing, there's something in the air. It's absurd to be told that he knew nothing about it…. You've seen the Hour?" I got up to go away, but suddenly found myself standing by their table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are unjust," I said. They looked up at me together with an immense surprise. I didn't know them and I passed on. But I heard one of them ask:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Who's that fellow?" …</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh—Etchingham Granger…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Is he queer?" the other postulated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went slowly down the great staircase. A knot of men was huddled round the tape machine; others came, half trotting, half walking, to peer over heads, under arm-pits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What's the matter with that thing?" I asked of one of them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, Grogram's up," he said, and passed me. Someone from a point of vantage read out:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The Leader of the House (Sir C. Grogram, Devonport) said that…." The words came haltingly to my ears as the man's voice followed the jerks of the little instrument "… the Government obviously could not … alter its policy at … eleventh hour … at dictates of … quite irresponsible person in one of … the daily … papers."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was wondering whether it was Soane or Callan who was poor old Grogram's "quite irresponsible person," when I caught the sound of Gurnard's name. I turned irritably away. I didn't want to hear that fool read out the words of that…. It was like the warning croak of a raven in an old ballad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I began desultorily to descend to the smoking-room. In the Cimmerian gloom of the stairway the voice of a pursuer hailed me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I say, Granger! I say, Granger!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I looked back. The man was one of the rats of the lower journalism, large-boned, rubicund, asthmatic; a mass of flesh that might, to the advantage of his country and himself, have served as a cavalry trooper. He puffed stertorously down towards me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I say, I say," his breath came rattling and wheezing. "What's up at the Hour?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm sure I don't know," I answered curtly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They said you took it yesterday. You've been playing the very devil, haven't you? But I suppose it was not off your own bat?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, I never play off my own bat," I answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course I don't want to intrude," he said again. In the gloom I was beginning to discern the workings of the tortured apoplectic face. "But, I say, what's de Mersch's little game?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You'd better ask him," I answered. It was incredibly hateful, this satyr's mask in the dim light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's not in London," it answered, with a wink of the creased eyelids, "but, I suppose, now, Fox and de Mersch haven't had a row, now, have they?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I did not answer. The thing was wearily hateful, and this was only the beginning. Hundreds more would be asking the same question in a few minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The head wagged on the mountainous shoulders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Looks fishy," he said. I recognised that, to force words from me, he was threatening a kind of blackmail. Another voice began to call from the top of the stairs—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I say, Granger! I say, Granger…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I pushed the folding-doors apart and went slowly down the gloomy room. I heard the doors swing again, and footsteps patter on the matting behind me. I did not turn; the man came round me and looked at my face. It was Polehampton. There were tears in his eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I say," he said, "I say, what does it mean; what does it mean?" It was very difficult for me to look at him. "I tell you…." he began again. He had the dictatorial air of a very small, quite hopeless man, a man mystified by a blow of unknown provenance. "I tell you…." he began again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But what has it to do with me?" I said roughly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, but you … you advised me to buy." He had become supplicatory. "Didn't you, now?… Didn't you…. You said, you remember … that…." I didn't answer the man. What had I got to say? He remained looking intently at me, as if it were of the greatest moment to him that I should make the acknowledgment and share the blame—as if it would take an immense load from his shoulders. I couldn't do it; I hated him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Didn't you," he began categorically; "didn't you advise me to buy those debentures of de Mersch's?" I did not answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What does it all mean?" he said again. "If this bill doesn't get through, I tell you I shall be ruined. And they say that Mr. Gurnard is going to smash it. They are all saying it, up there; and that you—you on the Hour … are … are responsible." He took out a handkerchief and began to blow his nose. I didn't say a single word.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But what's to be done?" he started again; "what's to be done…. I tell you…. My daughter, you know, she's very brave, she said to me this morning she could work; but she couldn't, you know; she's not been brought up to that sort of thing … not even typewriting … and so … we're all ruined … everyone of us. And I've more than fifty hands, counting Mr. Lea, and they'll all have to go. It's horrible…. I trusted you, Granger, you know; I trusted you, and they say up there that you…." I turned away from him. I couldn't bear to see the bewildered fear in his eyes. "So many of us," he began again, "everyone I know…. I told them to buy and … But you might have let us know, Granger, you might have. Think of my poor daughter."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I wanted to say something to the man, wanted to horribly; but there wasn't anything to say—not a word. I was sorry. I took up a paper that sprawled on one of the purple ottomans. I stood with my back to this haggard man and pretended to read.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I noticed incredulously that I was swaying on my legs. I looked round me. Two old men were asleep in armchairs under the gloomy windows. One had his head thrown back, the other was crumpled forward into himself; his frail, white hand just touched the floor. A little further off two young men were talking; they had the air of conspirators over their empty coffee cups.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was conscious that Polehampton had left me, that he had gone from behind me; but I don't think I was conscious of the passage of time. God knows how long I stood there. Now and then I saw Polehampton's face before my eyes, with the panic-stricken eyes, the ruffled hair, the lines of tears seaming the cheeks, seeming to look out at me from the crumple of the paper that I held. I knew too, that there were faces like that everywhere; everywhere, faces of panic-stricken little people of no more account than the dead in graveyards, just the material to make graveyards, nothing more; little people of absolutely no use but just to suffer horribly from this blow coming upon them from nowhere. It had never occurred to me at the time that their inheritance had passed to me … to us. And yet, I began to wonder stupidly, what was the difference between me to-day and me yesterday. There wasn't any, not any at all. Only to-day I had nothing more to do.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The doors at the end of the room flew open, as if burst by a great outcry penetrating from without, and a man appeared running up the room—one of those men who bear news eternally, who catch the distant clamour and carry it into quiet streets. Why did he disturb me? Did I want to hear his news? I wanted to think of Churchill; to think of how to explain…. The man was running up the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I say … I say, you beggars…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was beginning to wonder how it was that I felt such an absolute conviction of being alone, and it was then, I believe, that in this solitude that had descended upon my soul I seemed to see the shape of an approaching Nemesis. It is permitted to no man to break with his past, with the past of his kind, and to throw away the treasure of his future. I began to suspect I had gained nothing; I began to understand that even such a catastrophe was possible. I sat down in the nearest chair. Then my fear passed away. The room was filling; it hummed with excited voices. "Churchill! No better than the others," I heard somebody saying. Two men had stopped talking. They were middle-aged, a little gray, and ruddy. The face of one was angry, and of the other sad. "He wanted only to be found out. What a fall in the mud." "No matter," said the other, "one is made a little sad. He stood for everything I had been pinning my faith to." They passed on. A brazen voice bellowed in the distance. "The greatest fall of any minister that ever was." A tall, heavy journalist in a white waistcoat was the centre of a group that turned slowly upon itself, gathering bulk. "Done for—stood up to the last. I saw him get into his brougham. The police had a job…. There's quite a riot down there…. Pale as a ghost. Gurnard? Gurnard magnificent. Very cool and in his best form. Threw them over without as much as a wink. Outraged conscience speech. Magnificent. Why it's the chance of his life." … And then for a time the voices and the faces seemed to pass away and die out. I had dropped my paper, and as I stooped to pick it up the voices returned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >—"Granger … Etchingham Granger…. Sister is going to marry</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Gurnard."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I got on to my hands and knees to pick up the paper, of course. What I did not understand was where the water came from. Otherwise it was pretty clear. Somebody seemed to be in a fit. No, he wasn't drunk; look at his teeth. What did they want to look at his teeth for; was he a horse?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >* * * * *</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It must have been I that was in the fit. There were a lot of men round me, the front row on their knees—holding me, some of them. A man in a red coat and plush breeches—a waiter—was holding a glass of water; another had a small bottle. They were talking about me under their breaths. At one end of the horseshoe someone said:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's the man who…." Then he caught my eye. He lowered his voice, and the abominable whisper ran round among the heads. It was easy to guess: "the man who was got at." I was to be that for the rest of my life. I was to be famous at last. There came the desire to be out of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I struggled to my feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Someone said: "Feel better now?" I answered: "I—oh, I've got to go and see…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was rather difficult to speak distinctly; my tongue got in the way. But I strove to impress the fool with the idea that I had affairs that must be attended to—that I had private affairs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You aren't fit. Let me…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I pushed him roughly aside—what business was it of his? I slunk hastily out of the room. The others remained. I knew what they were going to do—to talk things over, to gabble about "the man who…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was treacherous walking, that tessellated pavement in the hall.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Someone said: "Hullo, Granger," as I passed. I took no notice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Where did I wish to go to? There was no one who could minister to me; the whole world had resolved itself into a vast solitary city of closed doors. I had no friend—no one. But I must go somewhere, must hide somewhere, must speak to someone. I mumbled the address of Fox to a cabman. Some idea of expiation must have been in my mind; some idea of seeing the thing through, mingled with that necessity for talking to someone—anyone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was afraid too; not of Fox's rage; not even of anything that he could do—but of the sight of his despair. He had become a tragic figure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I reached his flat and I had said: "It is I," and again, "It is I," and he had not stirred. He was lying on the sofa under a rug, motionless as a corpse. I had paced up and down the room. I remember that the pile of the carpet was so long that it was impossible to walk upon it easily. Everything else in the room was conceived in an exuberance of luxury that now had something of the macabre in it. It was that now—before, it had been unclean. There was a great bed whose lines suggested sinking softness, a glaring yellow satin coverlet, vast, like a sea. The walls were covered with yellow satin, the windows draped with lace worth a king's ransom, the light was softened, the air dead, the sounds hung slumbrously. And, in the centre of it, that motionless body. It stirred, pivoted on some central axis beneath the rug, and faced me sitting. There was no look of inquiry in the bloodshot eyes—they turned dully upon me, topaz-coloured in a blood-red setting. There was no expression in the suffused face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You want?" he said, in a voice that was august by dint of hopelessness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I want to explain," I said. I had no idea that this was what I had come for.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He answered only: "You!" He had the air of one speaking to something infinitely unimportant. It was as if I had no inkling of the real issue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With a bravery of desperation I began to explain that I hadn't stumbled into the thing; that I had acted open-eyed; for my own ends … "My own ends." I repeated it several times. I wanted him to understand, and I did explain. I kept nothing from him; neither her coming, nor her words, nor my feelings. I had gone in with my eyes open.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For the first time Fox looked at me as if I were a sentient being. "Oh, you know that much," he said listlessly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's no disgrace to have gone under to her," I said; "we had to." His despair seemed to link him into one "we" with myself. I wanted to put heart into him. I don't know why.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He didn't look at me again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, that," he said dully, "I—I understand who you mean…. If I had known before I might have done something. But she came of a higher plane." He seemed to be talking to himself. The half-forgotten horror grew large; I remembered that she had said that Fox, like herself, was one of a race apart, that was to supersede us—Dimensionists. And, when I looked at him now, it was plain to me that he was of a race different to my own, just as he had always seemed different from any other man. He had had a different tone in triumph; he was different now, in his despair. He went on: "I might have managed Gurnard alone, but I never thought of her coming. You see one does one's best, but, somehow, here one grows rather blind. I ought to have stuck to Gurnard, of course; never to have broken with him. We ought all to have kept together.—But I kept my end up as long as he was alone."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He went on talking in an expressionless monotone, perhaps to himself, perhaps to me. I listened as one listens to unmeaning sounds—to that of a distant train at night. He was looking at the floor, his mouth moving mechanically. He sat perfectly square, one hand on either knee, his back bowed out, his head drooping forward. It was as if there were no more muscular force in the whole man—as if he were one of those ancient things one sees sunning themselves on benches by the walls of workhouses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But," I said angrily, "it's not all over, you can make a fight for it still."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You don't seem to understand," he answered, "it is all over—the whole thing. I ran Churchill and his conscious rectitude gang for all they were worth…. Well, I liked them, I was a fool to give way to pity.—But I did.—One grows weak among people like you. Of course I knew that their day was over…. And it's all over," he said again after a long pause.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And what will you do?" I asked, half hysterically.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't just know," he answered; "we've none of us gone under before.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There haven't been enough really to clash until she came."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The dead tranquillity of his manner was overwhelming; there was nothing to be said. I was in the presence of a man who was not as I was, whose standard of values, absolute to himself, was not to be measured by any of mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I suppose I shall cut my throat," he began again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I noticed with impersonal astonishment that the length of my right side was covered with the dust of a floor. In my restless motions I came opposite the fireplace. Above it hung a number of tiny, jewelled frames, containing daubs of an astonishing lewdness. The riddle grew painful. What kind of a being could conceive this impossibly barbaric room, could enshrine those impossibly crude designs, and then fold his hands? I turned fiercely upon him. "But you are rich enough to enjoy life," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What's that?" he asked wearily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"In the name of God," I shouted, "what do you work for—what have you been plotting and plotting for, if not to enjoy your life at the last?" He made a small indefinite motion of ignorance, as if I had propounded to him a problem that he could not solve, that he did not think worth the solving.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It came to me as the confirmation of a suspicion—that motion. They had no joy, these people who were to supersede us; their clear-sightedness did nothing more for them than just that enabling them to spread desolation among us and take our places. It had been in her manner all along, she was like Fate; like the abominable Fate that desolates the whole length of our lives; that leaves of our hopes, of our plans, nothing but a hideous jumble of fragments like those of statues, smashed by hammers; the senseless, inscrutable, joyless Fate that we hate, and that debases us forever and ever. She had been all that to me … and to how many more?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I used to be a decent personality," I vociferated at him. "Do you hear—decent. I could look a man in the face. And you cannot even enjoy. What do you come for? What do you live for? What is at the end of it all?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, if I knew …" he answered, negligently.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER NINETEEN</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I wanted to see her, to finish it one way or another, and, at my aunt's house, I found her standing in an immense white room; waiting for me. There was a profusion of light. It left her absolutely shadowless, like a white statue in a gallery; inscrutable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have come," I said. I had it in my mind to say: "Because there is nothing for me to do on earth." But I did not, I looked at her instead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have come," she repeated. She had no expression in her voice, in her eyes. It was as if I were nothing to her; as if I were the picture of a man. Well, that was it; I was a picture, she a statue. "I did it," I said at last.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And you want?" she asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You know," I answered, "I want my…." I could not think of the word. It was either a reward or a just due. She looked at me, quite suddenly. It made an effect as if the Venus of Milo had turned its head toward me. She began to speak, as if the statue were speaking, as if a passing bell were speaking; recording a passing passionlessly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have done nothing at all," she said. "Nothing."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And yet," I said, "I was at the heart of it all."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nothing at all," she repeated. "You were at the heart, yes; but at the heart of a machine." Her words carried a sort of strong conviction. I seemed suddenly to see an immense machine—unconcerned, soulless, but all its parts made up of bodies of men: a great mill grinding out the dust of centuries; a great wine-press. She was continuing her speech.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"As for you—you are only a detail, like all the others; you were set in a place because you would act as you did. It was in your character. We inherit the earth and you, your day is over…. You remember that day, when I found you—the first day?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I remembered that day. It was on the downland, under the immense sky, amid the sound of larks. She had explained the nature of things. She had talked expressionlessly in pregnant words; she was talking now. I knew no more of her to-day, after all these days, after I had given up to her my past and my future.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You remember that day. I was looking for such a man, and I found you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And you …" I said, "you have done this thing! Think of it!… I have nobody—nothing—nowhere in the world. I cannot look a man in the face, not even Churchill. I can never go to him again." I paused, expecting a sign of softening. None came. "I have parted with my past and you tell me there is no future."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"None," she echoed. Then, coldly, as a swan takes the water, she began to speak:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, yes! I've hurt you. You have suffered and in your pain you think me vile, but remember that for ages the virtue of to-morrow has been the vileness of to-day. That which outstrips one, one calls vile. My virtue lies in gaining my end. Pity for you would have been a crime for me. You have suffered. And then? What are you to me? As I came among you I am to-day; that is where I am triumphant and virtuous. I have succeeded. When I came here I came into a world of—of shadows of men. What were their passions, their joys, their fears, their despair, their outcry, to me? If I had ears, my virtue was to close them to the cries. There was no other way. There was one of us—your friend Fox, I mean. He came into the world, but had not the virtue to hold himself aloof. He has told you, 'One goes blind down here.' He began to feel a little like the people round him. He contracted likings and dislikings. He liked you … and you betrayed him. So he went under. He grew blind down here. I have not grown blind. I see as I saw. I move as I did in a world of … of the pictures of men. They despair. I hear groans … well, they are the groans of the dead to me. This to you, down near it, is a mass of tortuous intrigue; vile in its pettiest detail. But come further off; stand beside me, and what does it look like? It is a mighty engine of disintegration. It has crushed out a whole fabric, a whole plane of society. It has done that. I guided it. I had to have my eyes on every little strand of it; to be forever on the watch."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And now I stand alone. Yesterday that fabric was everything to you; it seemed solid enough. And where is it to-day? What is it to you more than to me? There stood Virtue … and Probity … and all the things that all those people stood for. Well, to-day they are gone; the very belief in them is gone. Who will believe in them, now that it is proved that their tools were people … like de Mersch? And it was I that did it. That, too, is to be accounted to me for virtue."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I have inherited the earth. I am the worm at the very heart of the rose of it. You are thinking that all that I have gained is the hand of Gurnard. But it is more than that. It is a matter of a chess-board; and Gurnard is the only piece that remains. And I am the hand that moves him. As for a marriage; well, it is a marriage of minds, a union for a common purpose. But mine is the master mind. As for you. Well, you have parted with your past … and there is no future for you. That is true. You have nowhere to go to; have nothing left, nothing in the world. That is true too. But what is that to me? A set of facts—that you have parted with your past and have no future. You had to do the work; I had to make you do it. I chose you because you would do it. That is all…. I knew you; knew your secret places, your weaknesses. That is my power. I stand for the Inevitable, for the future that goes on its way; you for the past that lies by the roadside. If for your sake I had swerved one jot from my allotted course, I should have been untrue. There was a danger, once, for a minute…. But I stood out against it. What would you have had me do? Go under as Fox went under? Speak like him, look as he looks now…. Me? Well, I did not."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I was in the hands of the future; I never swerved; I went on my way. I had to judge men as I judged you; to corrupt, as I corrupted you. I cajoled; I bribed; I held out hopes; and with every one, as with you, I succeeded. It is in that power that the secret of the greatness which is virtue, lies. I had to set about a work of art, of an art strange to you; as strange, as alien as the arts of dead peoples. You are the dead now, mine the art of an ensuing day. All that remains to you is to fold your hands and wonder, as you wondered before the gates of Nineveh. I had to sound the knell of the old order; of your virtues, of your honours, of your faiths, of … of altruism, if you like. Well, it is sounded. I was forever on the watch; I foresaw; I forestalled; I have never rested. And you…."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And I …" I said, "I only loved you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a silence. I seemed for a moment to see myself a tenuous, bodiless thing, like a ghost in a bottomless cleft between the past and the to come. And I was to be that forever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You only loved me," she repeated. "Yes, you loved me. But what claim upon me does that give you? You loved me…. Well, if I had loved you it would have given you a claim…. All your misery; your heartache comes from … from love; your love for me, your love for the things of the past, for what was doomed…. You loved the others too … in a way, and you betrayed them and you are wretched. If you had not loved them you would not be wretched now; if you had not loved me you would not have betrayed your—your very self. At the first you stood alone; as much alone as I. All these people were nothing to you. I was nothing to you. But you must needs love them and me. You should have let them remain nothing to the end. But you did not. What were they to you?—Shapes, shadows on a sheet. They looked real. But were they—any one of them? You will never see them again; you will never see me again; we shall be all parts of a past of shadows. If you had been as I am, you could have looked back upon them unmoved or could have forgotten…. But you … 'you only loved' and you will have no more ease. And, even now, it is only yourself that matters. It is because you broke; because you were false to your standards at a supreme moment; because you have discovered that your honour will not help you to stand a strain. It is not the thought of the harm you have done the others…. What are they—what is Churchill who has fallen or Fox who is dead—to you now? It is yourself that you bemoan. That is your tragedy, that you can never go again to Churchill with the old look in your eyes, that you can never go to anyone for fear of contempt…. Oh, I know you, I know you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She knew me. It was true, what she said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had had my eyes on the ground all this while; now I looked at her, trying to realise that I should never see her again. It was impossible. There was that intense beauty, that shadowlessness that was like translucence. And there was her voice. It was impossible to understand that I was never to see her again, never to hear her voice, after this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She was silent for a long time and I said nothing—nothing at all. It was the thought of her making Fox's end; of her sitting as Fox had sat, hopelessly, lifelessly, like a man waiting at the end of the world. At last she said: "There is no hope. We have to go our ways; you yours, I mine. And then if you will—if you cannot forget—you may remember that I cared; that, for a moment, in between two breaths, I thought of … of failing. That is all I can do … for your sake."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That silenced me. Even if I could have spoken to any purpose, I would have held my tongue now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had not looked at her; but stood with my eyes averted, very conscious of her standing before me; of her great beauty, of her great glory.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >* * * * *</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a long time I went away. I never saw her again. I never saw any one of them all again. Fox was dead and Churchill I have never had the heart to face. That was the end of all that part of my life. It passed away and left me only a consciousness of weakness and … and regrets. She remains. One recognises her hand in the trend of events. Well, it is not a very gay world. Gurnard, they say, is the type of the age—of its spirit. And they say that I, the Granger of Etchingham, am not on terms with my brother-in-law.<br /><br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2011/01/conrad-ford-science-fictionthe.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Conrad, Ford--science fiction..."The Inheritors"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-76639553571688404612010-07-04T11:53:00.000-07:002010-07-04T12:03:09.431-07:00"Poor Richard’s Almanack"<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" ><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Poor Richard’s Almanack</span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1734</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Would you live with ease,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Do what you ought, and not what you please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Principiis obsta.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Latin: Resist the first advances]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Better slip with foot than tongue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >You cannot pluck roses without fear of thorns,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nor enjoy a fair wife without danger of horns.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Without justice, courage is weak.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Many dishes many diseases,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Many medicines few cures.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Where carcasses are, eagles will gather,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And where good laws are, much people flock thither.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hot things, sharp things, sweet things, cold things</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All rot the teeth, and make them look like old things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Blame-all and Praise-all are two blockheads.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, & sloth;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Or the Gout will seize you and plague you both.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No man e’er was glorious, who was not laborious.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What pains our Justice takes his faults to hide,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With half that pains sure he might cure ’em quite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In success be moderate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Take this remark from Richard poor and lame,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Whate’er’s begun in anger ends in shame.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What one relishes, nourishes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fools multiply folly.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1735</span></span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Look before, or you’ll find yourself behind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bad Commentators spoil the best of books,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So God sends meat (they say) the devil Cooks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Approve not of him who commends all you say.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By diligence and patience, the mouse bit in two the cable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Full of courtesie, full of craft.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A little House well fill’d, a little Field well till’d, and a little Wife well will’d, are great Riches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Old Maids lead Apes there, where the old Batchelors are turn’d to Apes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Some are weatherwise, some are otherwise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >*** Dyrro lynn y ddoeth e fydd ddoethach. [Welsh: Who gives drink to the wise, he is wiser. Please send better translation to Rich Hall]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach, the rich man to get a stomach to his meat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that goes far to marry, will either deceive or be deceived.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eyes and Priests</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bear no Jests.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Family of Fools is ancient.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Necessity never made a good bargain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If Pride leads the Van, Beggary brings up the Rear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There’s many witty men whose brains can’t fill their bellies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Weighty Questions ask for deliberate Answers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When *** and *** in *** lie,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, Maids, whate’er is ask’d of you, deny.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Be slow in chusing a Friend, slower in changing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Old Hob was lately married in the Night,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What needed Day, his fair young Wife is light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pain wastes the Body, Pleasures the Understanding.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The cunning man steals a horse, the wise man lets him alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nothing but Money,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Is sweeter than Honey.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Humility makes great men twice honourable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Ship under sail and a big-bellied Woman,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Keep thy shop, & thy shop will keep thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The King’s cheese is half wasted in parings: But no matter, ’tis made of the peoples milk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What’s given shines,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What’s receiv’d is rusty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sloth and Silence are a Fool’s Virtues.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of learned Fools I have seen ten times ten,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of unlearned wise men I have seen a hundred.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poverty wants some things, Luxury many things, Avarice all things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Lie stands on 1 leg, Truth on 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There’s small Revenge in Words, but Words may be greatly revenged.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Great wits jump (says the Poet) and hit his Head against the Post.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A man is never so ridiculous by those Qualities that are his own as by those that he affects to have.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Deny Self for Self’s sake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tim moderate fare and abstinence much prizes,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In publick, but in private gormandizes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ever since Follies have pleas’d, Fools have been able to divert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is better to take many Injuries than to give one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Opportunity is the great Bawd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To be humble to Superiors is Duty, to Equals Courtesy, to Inferiors Nobleness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here comes the Orator! with his Flood of Words, and his Drop of Reason.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An old young man, will be a young old man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sal laughs at every thing you say. Why? Because she has fine Teeth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If what most men admire, they would despise,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >’Twould look as if mankind were growing wise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Sun never repents of the good he does, nor does he ever demand a recompence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Are you angry that others disappoint you? remember you cannot depend upon yourself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One Mend-fault is worth two Findfaults, but one Findfault is better than two Makefaults.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Reader, I wish thee Health, Wealth, Happiness,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And may kind Heaven thy Year’s Industry bless.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1736</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He is no clown that drives the plow, but he that doth clownish things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the Philosophers-Stone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The good Paymaster is Lord of another man’s Purse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fish & Visitors stink in 3 days.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that has neither fools, whores nor beggars among his kindred, is the son of a thunder-gust.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Diligence is the Mother of Good-Luck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that lives upon Hope, dies farting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Do not do that which you would not have known.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Never praise your Cyder, Horse, or Bedfellow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tis easy to see, hard to foresee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In a discreet man’s mouth, a publick thing is private.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Keep flax from fire, youth from gaming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bargaining has neither friends nor relations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Admiration is the Daughter of Ignorance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There’s more old Drunkards than old Doctors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She that paints her Face, thinks of her Tail.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here comes Courage! that seiz’d the lion absent, and run away from the present mouse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that takes a wife, takes care.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nor Eye in a letter, nor Hand in a purse, nor Ear in the secret of another.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that buys by the penny, maintains not only himself, but other people.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that can have Patience, can have what he will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now I’ve a sheep and a cow, every body bids me good morrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >God helps them that help themselves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Why does the blind man’s wife paint herself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Gifts burst rocks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If wind blows on you thro’ a hole, Make your will and take care of your soul.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The rotten Apple spoils his Companion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that sells upon trust, loses many friends, and always wants money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Don’t throw stones at your neighbours, if your own windows are glass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The excellency of hogs is fatness, of men virtue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Good wives and good plantations are made by good husbands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pox take you, is no curse to some people.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Force s—s upon Reason’s Back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lovers, Travellers, and Poets, will give money to be heard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that speaks much, is much mistaken.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Creditors have better memories than debtors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Forwarn’d, forearm’d, unless in the case of Cuckolds, who are often forearm’d before warn’d.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Three things are men most liable to be cheated in, a Horse, a Wig, and a Wife.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that lives well, is learned enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poverty, Poetry, and new Titles of Honour, make Men ridiculous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that scatters Thorns, let him not go barefoot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There’s none deceived but he that trusts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >God heals, and the Doctor takes the Fees.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you desire many things, many things will seem but a few.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary’s mouth costs her nothing, for she never opens it but at others expence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Receive before you write, but write before you pay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I saw few die of Hunger, of Eating 100000.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maids of America, who gave you bad teeth?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Answ. Hot Soupings & frozen Apples.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Marry your Daughter and eat fresh Fish betimes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If God blesses a Man, his [Dog] brings forth Pigs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that would live in peace & at ease, Must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Beauty & folly are old companions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hope of gain</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lessens pain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All things are easy to Industry,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All things difficult to Sloth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you ride a Horse, sit close and tight,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you ride a Man, sit easy and light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A new truth is a truth, an old error is an error,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tho’ Clodpate wont allow either.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Don’t think to hunt two hares with one dog.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Astrologers say,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This is a good Day,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To make Love in May.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who pleasure gives,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Shall joy receive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Be not sick too late, nor well too soon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Where there’s Marriage without Love, there will be Love without Marriage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lawyers, Preachers, and Tomtits Eggs, there are more of them hatch’d than come to perfection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Be neither silly, nor cunning, but wise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Neither a Fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jack Little sow’d little, & little he’ll reap.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not of Reason.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Some men grow mad by studying much to know,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But who grows mad by studying good to grow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Happy’s the Woing, that’s not long a doing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Don’t value a man for the Quality he is of, but for the Qualities he possesses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bucephalus the Horse of Alexand hath as lasting fame as his Master.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Rain or Snow,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To Chili go,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >You’ll find it so,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For ought we know.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Time will show.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There have been as great Souls unknown to fame as any of the most famous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Do good to thy Friend to keep him, to thy enemy to gain him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A good Man is seldom uneasy, an ill one never easie.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Teach your child to hold his tongue, he’l learn fast enough to speak.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that cannot obey, cannot command.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An innocent Plowman is more worthy than a vicious Prince.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sam’s Religion is like a Chedder Cheese, ’tis made of the milk of one & twenty Parishes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Grief for a dead Wife, & a troublesome Guest,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Continues to the threshold, and there is at rest;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But I mean such wives as are none of the best.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As Charms are nonsence, Nonsence is a Charm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An Egg to day is better than a Hen to-morrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Drink Water, Put the Money in your Pocket, and leave the Dry-bellyach in the Punchbowl.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly need not be rich.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you wou’d be reveng’d of your enemy, govern your self.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A wicked Hero will turn his back to an innocent coward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Laws like to Cobwebs catch small Flies,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Great ones break thro’ before your eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Strange, that he who lives by Shifts, can seldom shift himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As sore places meet most rubs, proud folks meet most affronts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The magistrate should obey the Laws, the People should obey the magistrate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When ’tis fair be sure take your Great coat with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He does not possess Wealth, it possesses him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Necessity has no Law; I know some Attorneys of the name.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Onions can make ev’n Heirs and Widows weep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Avarice and Happiness never saw each other, how then shou’d they become acquainted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thrifty maxim of the wary Dutch,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Is to save all the Money they can touch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that waits upon Fortune, is never sure of a Dinner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Marry your Son when you will, but your Daughter when you can.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By Mrs. Bridget Saunders, my Dutchess, in Answer to the December Verses of last Year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that for sake of Drink neglects his Trade,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And spends each Night in Taverns till ’tis late,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And rises when the Sun is four hours high,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And ne’er regards his starving Family;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >God in his Mercy may do much to save him.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But, woe to the poor Wife, whose Lot it is to have him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that knows nothing of it, may by chance be a Prophet; while the wisest that is may happen to miss.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you wou’d have Guests merry with your cheer,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Be so your self, or so at least appear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Famine, Plague, War, and an unnumber’d throng</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of Guilt-avenging Ills, to Man belong;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Is’t not enough Plagues, Wars, and Famines rise</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To lash our crimes, but must our Wives be wise?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Reader, farewel, all Happiness attend thee:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >May each New-Year better and richer find thee.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1737</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Use of Money is all the Advantage there is in having Money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For 6 £. a Year, you may have the Use of 100 £. if you are a Man of known Prudence and Honesty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that spends a Groat a day idly, spends idly above 6 £. a year, which is the Price of using 100 £.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that wastes idly a Groat’s worth of his Time per Day, one Day with another, wastes the Privilege of using 100 £. each Day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that idly loses 5 s. worth of time, loses 5 s. & might as prudently throw 5 s. in the River.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that loses 5 s. not only loses that Sum, but all the Advantage that might be made by turning it in Dealing, which by the time that a young Man becomes old, amounts to a comfortable Bag of Mony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Again, He that sells upon Credit, asks a Price for what he sells, equivalent to the Principal and Interest of his Money for the Time he is like to be kept out of it: therefore</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that buys upon Credit, pays Interest for what he buys.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And he that pays ready Money, might let that Money out to Use: so that</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that possesses any Thing he has bought, pays Interest for the Use of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Consider then, when you are tempted to buy any unnecessary Housholdstuff, or any superfluous thing, whether you will be willing to pay Interest, and Interest upon Interest for it as long as you live; and more if it grows worse by using.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet, in buying Goods, ’tis best to pay ready Money, because,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that sells upon Credit, expects to lose 5 per Cent. by bad Debts; therefore he charges, on all he sells upon Credit, an Advance that shall make up that Deficiency.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Those who pay for what they buy upon Credit, pay their Share of this Advance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that pays ready Money, escapes or may escape that Charge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Penny sav’d is Twopence clear, A Pin a day is a Groat a Year. Save & have. Every little makes a mickle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig’d to sit upon his own arse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Master-piece of Man, is to live to the purpose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that steals the old man’s supper, do’s him no wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A countryman between 2 Lawyers, is like a fish between two cats.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that can take rest is greater than he that can take cities.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The misers cheese is wholesomest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Felix quem, &c.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Latin, for 'Felix quem faciunt aliena Pericula cautum,' Fortunate the man who learns caution from the perils of others.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Love & lordship hate companions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The nearest way to come at glory, is to do that for conscience which we do for glory.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is much money given to be laught at, though the purchasers don’t know it; witness A’s fine horse, & B’s fine house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that can compose himself, is wiser than he that composes books.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poor Dick, eats like a well man, and drinks like a sick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After crosses and losses men grow humbler & wiser.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Love, Cough, & a Smoke, can’t well be hid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Well done is better than well said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fine linnen, girls and gold so bright,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Chuse not to take by candle-light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that can travel well afoot, keeps a good horse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are no ugly Loves, nor handsome Prisons.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No better relation than a prudent & faithful Friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Traveller should have a hog’s nose, deer’s legs, and an ass’s back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the working man’s house hunger looks in but dares not enter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A good Lawyer a bad Neighbour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Certainlie these things agree,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Priest, the Lawyer, & Death all three:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Death takes both the weak and the strong.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The lawyer takes from both right and wrong,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And the priest from living and dead has his Fee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The worst wheel of the cart makes the most noise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Don’t misinform your Doctor nor your Lawyer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I never saw an oft-transplanted tree,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nor yet an oft-removed family,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That throve so well as those that settled be.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let the Letter stay for the Post, and not the Post for the Letter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Three good meals a day is bad living.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tis better leave for an enemy at one’s death, than beg of a friend in one’s life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To whom thy secret thou dost tell,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To him thy freedom thou dost sell.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you’d have a Servant that you like, serve your self.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that pursues two Hares at once, does not catch one and lets t’other go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you want a neat wife, chuse her on a Saturday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you have time dont wait for time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tell a miser he’s rich, and a woman she’s old, you’ll get no money of one, nor kindness of t’other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Don’t go to the doctor with every distemper, nor to the lawyer with every quarrel, nor to the pot for every thirst.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The noblest question in the world is What Good may I do in it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nec sibi, sed toto, genitum se credere mundo.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Latin: And not to each, but all together, he created the world to believe.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nothing so popular as GOODNESS.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1738</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are three faithful friends, an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Great talkers should be cropt, for they’ve no need of ears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you’d have your shoes last, put no nails in ’em.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who has deceiv’d thee so oft as thy self?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Is there any thing Men take more pains about than to render themselves unhappy?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nothing brings more pain than too much pleasure; nothing more bondage than too much liberty, (or libertinism.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Read much, but not many Books.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that would have a short Lent, let him borrow Money to be repaid at Easter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fly Pleasures, and they’ll follow you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Squirrel-like she covers her back with her tail.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Caesar did not merit the triumphal Car, more than he that conquers himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hast thou virtue? acquire also the graces & beauties of virtue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Buy what thou hast no need of; and e’er long thou shalt sell thy necessaries.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If thou hast wit & learning, add to it Wisdom and Modesty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >You may be more happy than Princes, if you will be more virtuous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you wou’d not be forgotten</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As soon as you are dead and rotten,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Either write things worth reading,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >or do things worth the writing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >God bless the King, and grant him long to Reign.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let thy vices die before thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ancients tell us what is best; but we must learn of the moderns what is fittest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Since I cannot govern my own tongue, tho’ within my own teeth, how can I hope to govern the tongues of others?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >’Tis less discredit to abridge petty charges, than to stoop to petty Gettings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you do what you should not, you must hear what you would not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Defer not thy well-doing; be not like St. George, who is always a horseback, and never rides on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wish not so much to live long as to live well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle silence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I have never seen the Philosopher’s Stone that turns lead into Gold, but I have known the pursuit of it turn a Man’s Gold into Lead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Never intreat a servant to dwell with thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Time is an herb that cures all Diseases.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, discourse a clear Man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If any man flatters me, I’ll flatter him again; tho’ he were my best Friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wish a miser long life, and you wish him no good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >None but the well-bred man knows how to confess a fault, or acknowledge himself in an error.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Drive thy business; let not that drive thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is much difference between imitating a good man, and counterfeiting him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wink at small faults; remember thou hast great ones.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Never spare the Parson’s wine, nor Baker’s Pudding.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Each year one vicious habit rooted out,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In time might make the worst Man good throughout.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1739</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When Death puts out our Flame, the Snuff will tell,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If we were Wax, or Tallow by the Smell.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At a great Pennyworth, pause a while.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As to his Wife, John minds St. Paul, He’s one</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That hath a Wife, and is as if he’d none.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Kings a be an Honour to them tho’ they are dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If thou wouldst live long, live well; for Folly and Wickedness shorten Life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prythee isn’t Miss Cloe’s a comical Case?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She lends out her Tail, and she borrows her Face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Trust thy self, and another shall not betray thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that pays for Work before it’s done, has but a pennyworth for twopence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what they would have believed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >O Maltster! break that cheating Peck; ’tis plain,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When e’er you use it, you’re a Knave in Grain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doll learning propria quae maribus [from William Lily’s text on Latin noun gender] without book,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Like Nomen crescentis genitivo [Latin: Name of the fruitful crescent] doth look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Grace thou thy House, and let not that grace thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thou canst not joke an Enemy into a Friend; but thou may’st a Friend into an Enemy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eyes & Priests</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bear no Jests.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that falls in love with himself, will have no Rivals.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let thy Child’s first Lesson be Obedience, and the second may be what thou wilt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Rather go to bed supperless, than run in debt for a Breakfast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let thy Discontents be Secrets.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An infallible Remedy for the Tooth-ach, viz Wash the Root of an aching Tooth, in Elder Vinegar, and let it dry half an hour in the Sun; after which it will never ach more; Probatum est.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Man of Knowledge like a rich Soil, feeds</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If not a world of Corn, a world of Weeds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A modern Wit is one of David’s Fools.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No Resolution of Repenting hereafter, can be sincere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pollio, who values nothing that’s within,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Buys books as men hunt Beavers, — for their Skin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Honour thy Father and Mother, i.e. Live so as to be an Honour to them tho’ they are dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If thou injurest Conscience, it will have its Revenge on thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hear no ill of a Friend, nor speak any of an Enemy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pay what you owe, and you’ll know what’s your own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Be not niggardly of what costs thee nothing, as courtesy, counsel, & countenance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thirst after Desert, not Reward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Beware of him that is slow to anger: He is angry for something, and will not be pleased for nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No longer virtuous no longer free; is a Maxim as true with regard to a private Person as a Common-wealth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When Man and Woman die, as Poets sung,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His Heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Proclaim not all thou knowest, all thou owest, all thou hast, nor all thou canst.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let our Fathers and Grandfathers be valued for their Goodness, ourselves for our own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Industry need not wish.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden but it is forbidden because it’s hurtful. Nor is a Duty beneficial because it is commanded, but it is commanded, because it’s beneficial.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A ---- , they say, has Wit; for what?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For writing? — No; For writing not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >George came to the Crown without striking a Blow.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ah! quoth the Pretender, would I could do so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Love, and be lov’d.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >O Lazy-Bones! Dost thou think God would have given thee Arms and Legs, if he had not design’d thou should’st use them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Cure for Poetry,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Seven wealthy Towns contend for Homer, dead,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thro’ which the living Homer beg’d his Bread.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Great Beauty, great strength, & great Riches, are really & truly of no great Use; a right Heart exceeds all.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1740</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To bear other Peoples Afflictions, every one has Courage enough, and to spare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No wonder Tom grows fat, th’ unwieldy Sinner,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Makes his whole Life but one continual Dinner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An empty Bag cannot stand upright.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Happy that nation, fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What is a butterfly? At best</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He’s but a caterpiller drest.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The gaudy Fop’s his picture just.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >None are deceived but they that confide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An open Foe may prove a curse;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But a pretended friend is worse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A wolf eats sheep but now and then,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ten Thousands are devour’d by Men.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man’s tongue is soft, and bone doth lack;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet a stroke therewith may break a man’s back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Many a Meal is lost for want of meat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To all apparent Beauties blind</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Each Blemish strikes an envious Mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Poor have little, Beggars none;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >the Rich too much, enough not one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are lazy Minds as well as lazy Bodies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tricks and Treachery are the Practice of Fools, that have not Wit enough to be honest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who says Jack is not generous? he is always fond of giving, and cares not for receiving. — What? Why; Advice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Man who with undaunted toils,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >sails unknown seas to unknown soils,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With various wonders feasts his Sight:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What stranger wonders does he write?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fear not Death; for the sooner we die, the longer shall we be immortal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Those who in quarrels interpose,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Must often wipe a bloody nose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Promises may get thee Friends, but Nonperformance will turn them into Enemies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In other men we faults can spy,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And blame the mote that dims their eye;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Each little speck and blemish find;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To our own stronger errors blind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When you speak to a man, look on his eyes; when he speaks to thee, look on his mouth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jane, why those tears? why droops your head?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Is then your other husband dead?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Or doth a worse disgrace betide?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hath no one since his death apply’d?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Observe all men; thy self most.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thou hadst better eat salt with the Philosophers of Greece, than sugar with the Courtiers of Italy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Seek Virtue, and, of that possest,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To Providence, resign the rest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Marry above thy match, and thou’lt get a Master.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fear to do ill, and you need fear nought else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He makes a Foe who makes a jest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Can grave and formal pass for wise,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When Men the solemn Owl despise?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Some are justly laught at for keeping their Money foolishly, others for spending it idly: He is the greatest fool that lays it out in a purchase of repentance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who knows a fool, must know his brother;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For one will recommend another.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Avoid dishonest Gain: No price;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Can recompence the Pangs of Vice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When befriended, remember it:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When you befriend, forget it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Great souls with gen’rous pity melt;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Which coward tyrants never felt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Flatterer never seems absurd:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Flatter’d always take his Word.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lend Money to an Enemy, and thou’lt gain him, to a Friend and thou’lt lose him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Neither praise nor dispraise, till seven Christmasses be over.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1741</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Enjoy the present hour, be mindful of the past;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And neither fear nor wish the Approaches of the last.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Learn of the skilful: He that teaches himself, hath a fool for his master.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Best is the Tongue that feels the rein; —</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that talks much, must talk in vain;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We from the wordy Torrent fly:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who listens to the chattering Pye?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Think Cato sees thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No Wood without Bark.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Monkeys warm with envious spite,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Their most obliging FRIENDS will bite; —</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And, fond to copy human Ways,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Practise new Mischiefs all their days.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Joke went out, and brought home his fellow, and they two began a quarrel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let thy discontents be thy Secrets; — if the world knows them, ’twill despise thee and increase them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >E’er you remark another’s Sin,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bid your own Conscience look within.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Anger and Folly walk cheek-by-jole; Repentance treads on both their Heels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Turn Turk Tim, and renounce thy Faith in Words as well as Actions: Is it worse to follow Mahomet than the Devil?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Don’t overload Gratitude; if you do, she’ll kick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Be always asham’d to catch thy self idle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Where yet was ever found the Mother,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who’d change her booby for another?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At 20 years of age the Will reigns; at 30 the Wit; at 40 the Judgment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Christianity commands us to pass by Injuries; Policy, to let them pass by us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lying rides upon Debt’s back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They who have nothing to be troubled at, will be troubled at nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife from thy Spouse each blemish hide</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >More than from all the World beside:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let DECENCY be all thy Pride.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick’s Passions grow fat and hearty; his Understanding looks consumptive!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If evils come not, then our fears are vain:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And if they do, Fear but augments the pain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you would keep your Secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Rob not for burnt offerings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bess brags she ’as Beauty, and can prove the same;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As how? why thus, Sir, ’tis her puppy’s name.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Up, Sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Well done, is twice done.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Clearly spoken, Mr. Fog! You explain English by Greek.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Formio bewails his Sins with the same heart,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As Friends do Friends when they’re about to part.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Believe it Formio will not entertain,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One chearful Thought till they do meet again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Honours change Manners.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jack eating rotten cheese, did say,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Like Sampson I my thousands slay;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I vow, quoth Roger, so you do,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And with the self-same weapon too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are no fools so troublesome as those that have wit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Quarrels never could last long,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If on one side only lay the wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let no Pleasure tempt thee, no Profit allure thee, no Ambition corrupt thee, no Example sway thee, no Persuasion move thee, to do any thing which thou knowest to be Evil; So shalt thou always live jollily: for a good Conscience is a continual Christmass.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1742</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Strange! that a Man who has wit enough to write a Satyr; should have folly enough to publish it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that hath a Trade, hath an Estate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Have you somewhat to do to-morrow; do it to-day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No workman without tools,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nor Lawyer without Fools,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Can live by their Rules.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The painful Preacher, like a candle bright,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Consumes himself in giving others Light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Speak and speed: the close mouth catches no flies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Visit your Aunt, but not every Day; and call at your Brother’s, but not every night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bis dat, qui cito dat. [Latin: Twice he gives, who quickly gives.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Money and good Manners make the Gentleman.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Late Children, early Orphans.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ben beats his Pate, and fancys wit will come;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But he may knock, there’s no body at home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The good Spinner hath a large Shift.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tom, vain’s your Pains; They all will fail:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ne’er was good Arrow made of a Sow’s Tail.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Empty Free-booters, cover’d with Scorn:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They went out for Wealth, & come ragged and torn,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As the Ram went for Wool, and was sent back shorn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ill Customs & bad Advice are seldom forgotten.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that sows thorns, should not go barefoot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Reniego de grillos, aunque sean d’oro. [Spanish: I refuse to worship crickets, though they be of gold.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Men meet, mountains never.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When Knaves fall out, honest Men get their goods: When Priests dispute, we come at the Truth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Kate would have Thomas, no one blame her can:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tom won’t have Kate, and who can blame the Man?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A large train makes a light Purse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Death takes no bribes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One good Husband is worth two good Wives; for the scarcer things are the more they’re valued.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that speaks ill of the Mare, will buy her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >You may drive a gift without a gimblet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eat few Suppers, and you’ll need few Medicines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >You will be careful, if you are wise;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How you touch Men’s Religion, or Credit, or Eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After Fish,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Milk do not wish.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Heb Dduw heb ddim, a Duw a digon. [Welsh: Without God, without anything; with God, with enough.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They who have nothing to trouble them, will be troubled at nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Against Diseases here, the strongest Fence,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Is the defensive Virtue, Abstinence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fient de chien, & marc d’argent,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Seront tout un au jour du jugement.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[French: Trust of dog, and grounds of silver,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >will all be one on Judgment Day]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If thou dost ill, the joy fades, not the pains;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If well, the pain doth fade, the joy remains.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To err is human, to repent divine, to persist devilish.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Money & Man a mutual Friendship show:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man makes false Money, Money makes Man so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Industry pays Debts, Despair increases them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bright as the day and as the morning fair,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such Cloe is, & common as the air.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here comes Glib-tongue: who can out-flatter a Dedication; and lie, like ten Epitaphs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hope and a Red-Rag, are Baits for Men and Mackrel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With the old Almanack and the old Year,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Leave thy old Vices, tho’ ever so dear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Rules of Health and long Life, and to preserve from Malignant Fevers, and Sickness in general. [Next 10 days]</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eat and drink such an exact Quantity as the Constitution of thy Body allows of, in reference to the Services of the Mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They that study much, ought not to eat so much as those that work hard, their Digestion being not so good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Of Eat and Drink:] The exact Quantity and Quality being found out, is to be kept to constantly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Excess in all other Things whatever, as well as in Meat and Drink, is also to be avoided.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Youth, Age, and Sick require a different Quantity [of Eat and Drink].</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And so do those of contrary Complexions; for that which is too much [of Eat and Drink] for a flegmatick Man, is not sufficient for a Cholerick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Measure of Food ought to be (as much as possibly may be) exactly proportionable to the Quality and Condition of the Stomach, because the Stomach digests it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That Quantity that is sufficient, the Stomach can perfectly concoct and digest, and it sufficeth the due Nourishment of the Body.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A greater Quantity of some things may be eaten than of others, some being of lighter Digestion than others.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Difficulty lies, in finding out an exact Measure; but eat for Necessity, not Pleasure, for Lust knows not where Necessity ends.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wouldst thou enjoy a long Life, a healthy Body, and a vigorous Mind, and be acquainted also with the wonderful Works of God? labour in the first place to bring thy Appetite into Subjection to Reason.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Rules to find out a fit Measure of Meat and Drink. [Next 10 days]</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If thou eatest so much as makes thee unfit for Study, or other Business, thou exceedest the due Measure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If thou art dull and heavy after Meat, it’s a sign thou hast exceeded the due Measure; for Meat and Drink ought to refresh the Body, and make it chearful, and not to dull and oppress it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If thou findest these ill Symptoms, consider whether too much Meat, or too much Drink occasions it, or both, and abate by little and little, till thou findest the Inconveniency removed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Keep out of the Sight of Feasts and Banquets as much as may be; for ’tis more difficult to refrain good Cheer, when it’s present, than from the Desire of it when it is away; the like you may observe in the Objects of all the other Senses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If a Man casually exceeds, let him fast the next Meal, and all may be well again, provided it be not too often done; as if he exceed at Dinner, let him refrain a Supper, &c.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A temperate Diet frees from Diseases; such are seldom ill, but if they are surprised with Sickness, they bear it better, and recover sooner; for most Distempers have their Original from Repletion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Use now and then a little Exercise a quarter of an Hour before Meals, as to swing a Weight, or swing your Arms about with a small Weight in each Hand; to leap, or the like, for that stirs the Muscles of the Breast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A temperate Diet arms the Body against all external Accidents; so that they are not so easily hurt by Heat, Cold or Labour; if they at any time should be prejudiced, they are more easily cured, either of Wounds, Dislocations or Bruises.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But when malignant Fevers are rife in the Country or City where thou dwelst, ’tis adviseable to eat and drink more freely, by Way of Prevention; for those are Diseases that are not caused by Repletion, and seldom attack Full-feeders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A sober Diet makes a Man die without Pain; it maintains the Senses in Vigour; it mitigates the Violence of Passions and Affections.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It preserves the Memory, it helps the Understanding, it allays the Heat of Lust; it brings a Man to a Consideration of his latter End; it makes the Body a fit Tabernacle for the Lord to dwell in; which makes us happy in this World, and eternally happy in the World to come, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1743</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How few there are who have courage enough to own their Faults, or resolution enough to mend them!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Men differ daily, about things which are subject to Sense, is it likely then they should agree about things invisible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mark with what insolence and pride,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Blown Bufo takes his haughty stride;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As if no toad was toad beside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ill Company is like a dog who dirts those most, that he loves best.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In prosperous fortunes be modest and wise,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The greatest may fall, and the lowest may rise:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But insolent People that fall in disgrace,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Are wretched and no-body pities their Case.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >*** Le sage entend a demi mot.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[French: The wise one listens to half the word.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sorrow is dry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The World is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet every one has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the Affairs of his neighbour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Beware, beware! he’ll cheat ’ithout scruple, who can without fear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The D—l wipes his B—ch with poor Folks Pride.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Content and Riches seldom meet together,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Riches take thou, contentment I had rather.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Speak with contempt of none, from slave to king,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The meanest Bee hath, and will use, a sting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The church the state, and the poor, are 3 daughters which we should maintain, but not portion off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >*** A achwyno heb achos; gwneler achos iddo.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Welsh: He who complains without reason may be without reason. Please send better translation to Rich Hall.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A little well-gotten will do us more good,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Than lordships and scepters by Rapine and Blood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Borgen macht sorgen.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[German: Neither a borrower nor a lender be.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let all Men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely ford that see the shallows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tis easy to frame a good bold resolution;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >but hard is the Task that concerns execution.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Cold & cunning come from the north:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But cunning sans wisdom is nothing worth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tis vain to repine,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tho’ a learned Divine</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Will die this day at nine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >*** A noddo duw, ry noddir. [Welsh: He who protects God, receives protection.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ah simple Man! when a boy two precious jewels were given thee, Time, and good Advice; one thou hast lost, and the other thrown away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >*** Na funno i hun.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Na wnaid i un.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Welsh: Please send translation to Rich Hall]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dick told his spouse, he durst be bold to swear,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Whate’er she pray’d for, Heav’n would thwart her pray’r:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Indeed! says Nell, ’tis what I’m pleas’d to hear;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For now I’ll pray for your long life, my dear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The sleeping Fox catches no poultry. Up! up!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you’d be wealthy, think of saving, more than of getting: The Indies have not made Spain rich, because her Outgoes equal her Incomes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tugend bestehet wen alles vergehet.[German: Virtue is the requirement whom all offend.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Came you from Court? for in your Mien,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A self-important air is seen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hear what Jack Spaniard says,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Con todo el Mundo Guerra,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Y Paz con Ingalatierra.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Spanish: However the World is at War,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >be at Peace with Foreigners.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you’d have it done, Go: If not, send.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Many a long dispute among Divines may be thus abridg’d, It is so: It is not so. It is so; It is not so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Latin: Blessed is he who learns caution from the perils of others.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How many observe Christ’s Birth-day! How few, his Precepts! O! ’tis easier to keep Holidays than Commandments.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1744</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that drinks his Cyder alone, let him catch his Horse alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad Habits. Who is rich? He that rejoices in his Portion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that has not got a Wife, is not yet a compleat Man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What you would seem to be, be really.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you’d lose a troublesome Visitor, lend him Money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tart Words make no Friends: a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than Gallon of Vinegar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Make haste slowly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dine with little, sup with less:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Do better still; sleep supperless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Industry, Perseverance, & Frugality, make Fortune yield.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I’ll warrant ye, goes before Rashness; Who’d-a-tho’t it? comes sneaking after.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prayers and Provender hinder no Journey.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hear Reason, or she’ll make you feel her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Give me yesterday’s Bread, this Day’s Flesh, and last Year’s Cyder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >God heals, and the Doctor takes the Fees.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sloth (like Rust) consumes faster than Labour wears: the used Key is always bright.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Light Gains heavy Purses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Keep thou from the Opportunity, and God will keep thee from the Sin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Where there’s no Law, there’s no Bread.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As Pride increases, Fortune declines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Drive thy Business, or it will drive thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A full Belly is the Mother of all Evil.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The same man cannot be both Friend and Flatterer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He who multiplies Riches multiplies Cares.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An old Man in a House is a good Sign.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Those who are fear’d, are hated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Things which hurt, instruct.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Eye of a Master, will do more Work than his Hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A soft Tongue may strike hard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you’d be belov’d, make yourself amiable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A true Friend is the best Possession.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fear God, and your Enemies will fear you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Epitaph on a Scolding Wife by her Husband.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here my poor Bridgets’s Corps doth lie,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >she is at rest, — and so am I.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1745</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Beware of little Expences, a small Leak will sink a great Ship.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wars bring scars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A light purse is a heavy Curse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As often as we do good, we sacrifice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Help, Hands;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For I have no Lands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It’s common for Men to give 6 pretended Reasons instead of one real one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Vanity backbites more than Malice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He’s a Fool that cannot conceal his Wisdom.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Great spenders are bad lenders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All blood is alike ancient.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >You may talk too much on the best of subjects.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Man without ceremony has need of great merit in its place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No gains without pains.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Had I revenged wrong, I had not worn my skirts so long.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Graft good Fruit all, or graft not at all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idleness is the greatest Prodigality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Old young and old long.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Punch-coal, cut-candle, and set brand on end,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >is neither good house wife, nor good house-wife’s friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He who buys had need have 100 Eyes,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >but one’s enough for him that sells the Stuff.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are no fools so troublesome as those that have wit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Many complain of their Memory, few of their Judgment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One Man may be more cunning than another, but not more cunning than every body else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To God we owe fear and love; to our neighbours justice and charity; to our selves prudence and sobriety.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fools make feasts and wise men eat them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Light-heel’d mothers make leaden-heel’d daughters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The good or ill hap of a good or ill life,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >is the good or ill choice of a good or ill wife.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tis easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Every Man has Assurance enough to boast of his honesty, few of their Understanding.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Interest which blinds some People, enlightens others.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An ounce of wit that is bought,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Is worth a pound that is taught.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that resolves to mend hereafter, resolves not to mend now.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1746</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Observe the Mean, the Motive and the End;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mending our selves, or striving still to mend.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Our Souls sincere, our Purpose fair and free,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Without Vain Glory or Hypocrisy:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thankful if well; if ill, we kiss the Rod;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Resign with Hope, and put our Trust in GOD.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the Well’s dry, we know the Worth of Water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that whines for Glass without G</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Take away L and that’s he.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A good Wife & Health,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >is a Man’s best Wealth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A quarrelsome Man has no good Neighbours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wide will wear,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >but Narrow will tear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Silks and Sattins put out the Kitchen Fire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Vice knows she’s ugly, so puts on her Mask.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It’s the easiest Thing in the World for a Man to deceive himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Women & Wine, Game & Deceit,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Make the Wealth small and the Wants great.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All Mankind are beholden to him that is kind to the Good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Plowman on his Legs is higher than a Gentleman on his Knees.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The generous Mind least regards money, and yet most feels the Want of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For one poor Man there are an hundred indigent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dost thou love Life? then do not squander Time; for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Good Sense is a Thing all need, few have, and none think they want.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What’s proper, is becoming: See the Blacksmith with his white Silk Apron!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Tongue is ever turning to the aching Tooth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Want of Care does us more Damage than Want of Knowledge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Take Courage, Mortal; Death can’t banish thee out of the Universe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Sting of a Reproach, is the Truth of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Do me the Favour to deny me at once.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The most exquisite Folly is made of Wisdom spun too fine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A life of leisure, and a life of laziness, are two things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mad Kings and mad Bulls, are not to be held by treaties & packthread.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Changing Countries or Beds, cures neither a bad Manager, nor a Fever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A true great Man will neither trample on a Worm, nor sneak to an Emperor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >*** Ni ffyddra llaw dyn, er gwneithr da idd ei hun. [Welsh: We have frozen a hand tightly, but without God's help, it can do no good for itself. Please send a better translation to Rich Hall.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tim and his Handsaw are good in their Place,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tho’ not fit for preaching or shaving a face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Half-Hospitality opens his Doors and shuts up his Countenance.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1747</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Strive to be the greatest Man in your Country, and you may be disappointed; Strive to be the best, and you may succeed: He may well win the race that runs by himself. [In Franklin’s writings, to be greatest is to be most powerful, while to be best is to be most righteous.]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tis a strange Forest that has no rotten Wood in’t.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And a strange Kindred that all are good in’t.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >None know the unfortunate, and the fortunate do not know themselves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There’s a time to wink as well as to see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Honest Tom! you may trust him with a house-full of untold Milstones.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is no Man so bad, but he secretly respects the Good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When there’s more Malice shown than Matter:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the Writer falls the satyr.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Courage would fight, but Discretion won’t let him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Delicate Dick! whisper’d the Proclamation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Cornelius ought to be Tacitus.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pride and the Gout,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >are seldom cur’d throughout.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A good Example is the best sermon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Father’s a Treasure; a Brother’s a Comfort; a Friend is both.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Despair ruins some, Presumption many.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A quiet Conscience sleeps in Thunder,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >but Rest and Guilt live far asunder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that won’t be counsell’d, can’t be help’d.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Craft must be at charge for clothes, but Truth can go naked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Write Injuries in Dust, Benefits in Marble.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What is Serving God? ’Tis doing Good to Man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What maintains one Vice would bring up two Children.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Many have been ruin’d by buying good pennyworths.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Better is a little with content than much with contention.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Slip of the Foot you may soon recover:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But a Slip of the Tongue you may never get over.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What signifies your Patience, if you can’t find it when you want it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >¢. wise, £. foolish.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Time enough, always proves little enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is wise not to seek a Secret, and Honest not to reveal it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Mob’s a Monster; Heads enough, but no Brains.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Devil sweetens Poison with Honey.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that cannot bear with other People’s Passions, cannot govern his own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He that by the Plow would thrive,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >himself must either hold or drive.<br /><br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2010/07/bit-of-ben-franklin-insight-and-humor.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Return</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-74887084128840531092010-06-10T06:45:00.000-07:002010-06-10T07:13:55.572-07:00Lucian's "Trips to the Moon"<h1 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial; font-style: italic;">TRIPS TO THE MOON</h1><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">by Lucian.</p><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> </div><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> </div><p style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Translated from the Greek by Thomas Francklin, D.D.</p><h2 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">INTRODUCTION</h2> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucian, in Greek Loukianos, was a Syrian, born about the year 120 at Samosata, where a bend of the Euphrates brings that river nearest to the borders of Cilicia in Asia Minor. He had in him by nature a quick flow of wit, with a bent towards Greek literature. It was thought at home that he showed as a boy the artist nature by his skill in making little waxen images. An uncle on his mother’s side happened to be a sculptor. The home was poor, Lucian would have his bread to earn, and when he was fourteen he was apprenticed to his uncle that he might learn to become a sculptor. Before long, while polishing a marble tablet he pressed on it too heavily and broke it. His uncle thrashed him. Lucian’s spirit rebelled, and he went home giving the comic reason that his uncle beat him because jealous of the extraordinary power he showed in his art.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">After some debate Lucian abandoned training as a sculptor, studied literature and rhetoric, and qualified himself for the career of an advocate and teacher at a time when rhetoric had still a chief place in the schools. He practised for a short time unsuccessfully at Antioch, and then travelled for the cultivation of his mind in Greece, Italy, and Gaul, making his way by use of his wits, as Goldsmith did long afterwards when he started, at the outset also of his career as a writer, on a grand tour of the continent with nothing in his pocket. Lucian earned as he went by public use of his skill as a rhetorician. His travel was not unlike the modern American lecturing tour, made also for the money it may bring and for the new experience acquired by it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucian stayed long enough in Athens to acquire a mastery of Attic Greek, and his public discourses could not have been without full seasoning of Attic salt. In Italy and Gaul his success brought him money beyond his present needs, and he went back to Samosata, when about forty years old, able to choose and follow his own course in life.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He then ceased to be a professional talker, and became a writer, bold and witty, against everything that seemed to him to want foundation for the honour that it claimed. He attacked the gods of Greece, and the whole system of mythology, when, in its second century, the Christian Church was ready to replace the forms of heathen worship. He laughed at the philosophers, confounding together in one censure deep conviction with shallow convention. His vigorous winnowing sent chaff to the winds, but not without some scattering of wheat. Delight in the power of satire leads always to some excess in its use. But if the power be used honestly—and even if it be used recklessly—no truth can be destroyed. Only the reckless use of it breeds in minds of the feebler sort mere pleasure in ridicule, that weakens them as helpers in the real work of the world, and in that way tends to retard the forward movement. But on the whole, ridicule adds more vigour to the strong than it takes from the weak, and has its use even when levelled against what is good and true. In its own way it is a test of truth, and may be fearlessly applied to it as jewellers use nitric acid to try gold. If it be uttered for gold and is not gold, let it perish; but if it be true, it will stand trial.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The best translation of the works of Lucian into English was that by Dr. Thomas Francklin, sometime Greek Professor in the University of Cambridge, which was published in two large quarto volumes in the year 1780, and reprinted in four volumes in 1781. Lucian had been translated before in successive volumes by Ferrand Spence and others, an edition, completed in 1711, for which Dryden had written the author’s Life. Dr. Francklin, who produced also the best eighteenth century translation of Sophocles, joined to his translation of Lucian a little apparatus of introductions and notes by which the English reader is often assisted, and he has skilfully avoided the translation of indecencies which never were of any use, and being no longer sources of enjoyment, serve only to exclude good wit, with which, under different conditions of life, they were associated, from the welcome due to it in all our homes. There is a just and scholarly, as well as a meddlesome and feeble way of clearing an old writer from uncleannesses that cause him now to be a name only where he should be a power. Dr. Francklin has understood his work in that way better than Dr. Bowdler did. He does not Bowdlerise who uses pumice to a blot, but he who rubs the copy into holes wherever he can find an honest letter with a downstroke thicker than becomes a fine-nibbed pen. A trivial play of fancy in one of the pieces in this volume, easily removed, would have been as a dead fly in the pot of ointment, and would have deprived one of Lucian’s best works of the currency to which it is entitled.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucian’s works are numerous, and they have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The “Instructions for Writing History” was probably one of the earliest pieces written by him after Lucian had settled down at Samosata to the free use of his pen, and it has been usually regarded as his best critical work. With ridicule of the affectations of historians whose names and whose books have passed into oblivion, he joins sound doctrine upon sincerity of style. “Nothing is lasting that is feigned,” said Ben Jonson; “it will have another face ere long.” Long after Lucian’s day an artificial dignity, accorded specially to work of the historian, bound him by its conventions to an artificial style. He used, as Johnson said of Dr. Robertson, “too big words and too many of them.” But that was said by Johnson in his latter days, with admission of like fault in the convention to which he had once conformed: “If Robertson’s style is bad, that is to say, too big words and too many of them, I am afraid he caught it of me.” Lucian would have dealt as mercilessly with that later style as Archibald Campbell, ship’s purser and son of an Edinburgh Professor, who used the form of one of Lucian’s dialogues, “Lexiphanes,” for an assault of ridicule upon pretentious sentence-making, and helped a little to get rid of it. Lucian laughed in his day at small imitators of the manner of Thucydides, as he would laugh now at the small imitators of the manner of Macaulay. He bade the historian first get sure facts, then tell them in due order, simply and without exaggeration or toil after fine writing; though he should aim not the less at an enduring grace given by Nature to the Art that does not stray from her, and simply speaks the highest truth it knows.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The endeavour of small Greek historians to add interest to their work by magnifying the exploits of their countrymen, and piling wonder upon wonder, Lucian first condemned in his “Instructions for Writing History,” and then caricatured in his “True History,” wherein is contained the account of a trip to the moon, a piece which must have been enjoyed by Rabelais, which suggested to Cyrano de Bergerac his Voyages to the Moon and to the Sun, and insensibly contributed, perhaps, directly or through Bergerac, to the conception of “Gulliver’s Travels.” I have added the Icaro-Menippus, because that Dialogue describes another trip to the moon, though its satire is more especially directed against the philosophers.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Menippus was born at Gadara in Coele-Syria, and from a slave he grew to be a Cynic philosopher, chiefly occupied with scornful jests on his neighbours, and a money-lender, who made large gains and killed himself when he was cheated of them all. He is said to have written thirteen pieces which are lost, but he has left his name in literature, preserved by important pieces that have taken the name of “Menippean Satire.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucian married in middle life, and had a son. He was about fifty years old when he went to Paphlagonia, and visited a false oracle to detect the tricks of an Alexander who made profit out of it, and who professed to have a daughter by the Moon. When the impostor offered Lucian his hand to kiss, Lucian bit his thumb; he also intervened to the destruction of a profitable marriage for the daughter of the Moon. Alexander lent Lucian a vessel of his own for the voyage onward, and gave instructions to the sailors that they were to find a convenient time and place for throwing their passenger into the sea; but when the convenient time had come the goodwill of the master of the vessel saved Lucian’s life. He was landed, therefore, at Ægialos, where he found some ambassadors to Eupator, King of Bithynia, who took him onward upon his way.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is believed that Lucian lived to be ninety, and it is assumed, since he wrote a burlesque drama on gout, that the cause of his death was not simply old age. Gout may have been the immediate cause of death. Lucian must have spent much time at Athens, and he held office at one time in his later years as Procurator of a part of Egypt.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The works of Lucian consist largely of dialogues, in which he battled against what he considered to be false opinions by bringing the satire of Aristophanes and the sarcasm of Menippus into disputations that sought chiefly to throw down false idols before setting up the true. He made many enemies by bold attacks upon the ancient faiths. His earlier “Dialogues of the Gods” only brought out their stories in a way that made them sound ridiculous. Afterwards he proceeded to direct attack on the belief in them. In one Dialogue Timocles a Stoic argues for belief in the old gods against Damis an Epicurean, and the gods, in order of dignity determined by the worth of the material out of which they are made, assemble to hear the argument. Damis confutes the Stoic, and laughs him into fury. Zeus is unhappy at all this, but Hermes consoles him with the reflection that although the Epicurean may speak for a few, the mass of Greeks, and all the barbarians, remain true to the ancient opinions. Suidas, who detested such teaching, wrote a Life of him, in which he said that Lucian was at last torn to pieces by dogs.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Dr. Francklin prefaced his edition with a Life, written by a friend in the form of a Dialogue of the Dead in the Elysian Fields between Lord Lyttelton—who had been, in his Dialogues of the Dead, an imitator of the Dialogues so called in Lucian—and Lucian himself. “By that shambling gait and length of carcase,” says Lucian, “it must be Lord Lyttelton coming this way.” “And by that arch look and sarcastic smile,” says Lyttelton, “you are my old friend Lucian, whom I have not seen this many a day. Fontenelle and I have just now been talking of you, and the obligations we both had to our old master: I assure you that there was not a man in all antiquity for whom, whilst on earth, I had a greater regard than yourself.” After Lucian has told Lyttelton something about his life, his lordship thanks Lucian for the little history, and says, “I wish with all my heart I could convey it to a friend of mine in the other world”—meaning Dr. Francklin—“to whom, at this juncture, it would be of particular service: I mean a bold adventurer who has lately undertaken to give a new and complete translation of all your works. It is a noble design, but an arduous one; I own I tremble for him.” Lucian replies, “I heard of it the other day from Goldsmith, who knew the man. I think he may easily succeed in it better than any of his countrymen, who hitherto have made but miserable work with me; nor do I make a much better appearance in my French habit, though that I know has been admired. D’Ablancourt has made me say a great many things, some good, some bad, which I never thought of, and, upon the whole, what he has done is more a paraphrase than a translation.” Then, says Lord Lyttelton, “All the attempts to represent you, at least in our language, which I have yet seen, have failed, and all from the same cause, by the translator’s departing from the original, and substituting his own manners, phraseology, expression, wit, and humour instead of yours. Nothing, as it has been observed by one of our best critics, is so grave as true humour, and every line of Lucian is a proof of it; it never laughs itself, whilst it sets the table in a roar; a circumstance which these gentlemen seem all to have forgotten: instead of the set features and serious aspect which you always wear when most entertaining, they present us for ever with a broad grin, and if you have the least smile upon your countenance make you burst into a vulgar horse-laugh: they are generally, indeed, such bad painters, that the daubing would never be taken for you if they had not written ‘Lucian’ under the picture. I heartily wish the Doctor better luck.” Upon which the Doctor’s friend makes Lucian reply: “And there is some reason to hope it, for I hear he has taken pains about me, has studied my features well before he sat down to trace them on the canvas, and done it <i>con amore</i>: if he brings out a good resemblance, I shall excuse the want of grace and beauty in his piece. I assure you I am not without pleasing expectation; especially as my friend Sophocles, who, you know, sat to him some time ago, tells me, though he is no Praxiteles, he does not take a bad likeness. But I must be gone, for yonder come Swift and Rabelais, whom I have made a little party with this morning: so, my good lord, fare you well.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucian had another translator in 1820, who in no way superseded Dr. Francklin. The reader of this volume is reminded that the notes are Dr. Francklin’s, and that any allusion in them to a current topic, has to be read as if this present year of grace were 1780.<br /> H. M.</p> <h2 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">INSTRUCTIONS FOR WRITING HISTORY</h2> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><i>Lucian, in this letter to his friend Philo, after having, with infinite humour, exposed the absurdities of some contemporary historians, whose works, being consigned to oblivion, have never reached us, proceeds, in the latter part of it, to lay down most excellent rules and directions for writing history. My readers will find the one to the last degree pleasant and entertaining; and the other no less useful, sensible, and instructive. This is, indeed, one of Lucian’s best pieces.</i></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">My Dear Philo,—In the reign of Lysimachus, <a name="citation17"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote17">{17}</a> we are told that the people of Abdera were seized with a violent epidemical fever, which raged through the whole city, continuing for seven days, at the expiration of which a copious discharge of blood from the nostrils in some, and in others a profuse sweat, carried it off. It was attended, however, with a very ridiculous circumstance: every one of the persons affected by it being suddenly taken with a fit of tragedising, spouting iambics, and roaring out most furiously, particularly the <i>Andromeda</i> <a name="citation18a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote18a">{18a}</a> of Euripides, and the speech of Perseus, which they recited in most lamentable accents. The city swarmed with these pale seventh-day patients, who, with loud voices, were perpetually bawling out—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “O tyrant love, o’er gods and men supreme,” etc.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And this they continued every day for a long time, till winter and the cold weather coming on put an end to their delirium. For this disorder they seem, in my opinion, indebted to Archelaus, a tragedian at that time in high estimation, who, in the middle of summer, at the very hottest season <a name="citation18b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote18b">{18b}</a> of the year, exhibited the <i>Andromeda</i>, which had such an effect on the spectators that several of them, as soon as they rose up from it, fell insensibly into the tragedising vein; the <i>Andromeda</i> naturally occurring to their memories, and Perseus, with his Medusa, still hovering round them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Now if, as they say, one may compare great things with small, this Abderian disorder seems to have seized on many of our <i>literati</i> of the present age; not that it sets them on acting tragedies (for the folly would not be so great in repeating other people’s verses, especially if they were good ones), but ever since the war was begun against the barbarians, the defeat in Armenia, <a name="citation19a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote19a">{19a}</a> and the victories consequent on it, not one is there amongst us who does not write a history; or rather, I may say, we are all Thucydideses, Herodotuses, and Xenophons. Well may they say war is the parent of all things, <a name="citation19b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote19b">{19b}</a> when one action can make so many historians. This puts me in mind of what happened at Sinope. <a name="citation20a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote20a">{20a}</a> When the Corinthians heard that Philip was going to attack them, they were all alarmed, and fell to work, some brushing up their arms, others bringing stones to prop up their walls and defend their bulwarks, every one, in short, lending a hand. Diogenes observing this, and having nothing to do (for nobody employed him), tucked up his robe, and, with all his might, fell a rolling his tub which he lived in up and down the Cranium. <a name="citation20b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote20b">{20b}</a> “What are you about?” said one of his friends. “Rolling my tub,” replied he, “that whilst everybody is busy around me, I may not be the only idle person in the kingdom.” In like manner, I, my dear Philo, being very loath in this noisy age to make no noise at all, or to act the part of a mute in the comedy, think it highly proper that I should roll my tub also; not that I mean to write history myself, or be a narrator of facts; you need not fear me, I am not so rash, knowing the danger too well if I roll it amongst the stones, especially such a tub as mine, which is not over-strong, so that the least pebble I strike against would dash it in pieces. I will tell you, however, what my design is—how I mean to be present at the battle and yet keep out of the reach of danger. I intend to shelter myself from the waves and the smoke, <a name="citation21"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote21">{21}</a> and the cares that writers are liable to, and only give them a little good advice and a few precepts; to have, in short, some little hand in the building, though I do not expect my name will be inscribed on it, as I shall but just touch the mortar with the tip of my finger.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">There are many, I know, who think there is no necessity for instruction at all with regard to this business, any more than there is for walking, seeing, or eating, and that it is the easiest thing in the world for a man to write history if he can but say what comes uppermost. But you, my friend, are convinced that it is no such easy matter, nor should it be negligently and carelessly performed; but that, on the other hand, if there be anything in the whole circle of literature that requires more than ordinary care and attention, it is undoubtedly this. At least, if a man would wish, as Thucydides says, to labour for posterity. I very well know that I cannot attack so many without rendering myself obnoxious to some, especially those whose histories are already finished and made public; even if what I say should be approved by them, it would be madness to expect that they should retract anything or alter that which had been once established and, as it were, laid up in royal repositories. It may not be amiss, however, to give them these instructions, that in case of another war, the Getæ against the Gauls, or the Indians, perhaps, against the barbarians (for with regard to ourselves there is no danger, our enemies being all subdued), by applying these rules if they like them, they may know better how to write for the future. If they do not choose this, they may even go on by their old measure; the physician will not break his heart if all the people of Abdera follow their own inclination and continue to act the <i>Andromeda</i>. <a name="citation23"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote23">{23}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Criticism is twofold: that which teaches us what we are to choose, and that which teaches us what to avoid. We will begin with the last, and consider what those faults are which a writer of history should be free from; next, what it is that will lead him into the right path, how he should begin, what order and method he should observe, what he should pass over in silence, and what he should dwell upon, how things may be best illustrated and connected. Of these, and such as these, we will speak hereafter; in the meantime let us point out the faults which bad writers are most generally guilty of, the blunders which they commit in language, composition, and sentiment, with many other marks of ignorance, which it would be tedious to enumerate, and belong not to our present argument. The principal faults, as I observed to you, are in the language and composition.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">You will find on examination, that history in general has a great many of this kind, which, if you listen to them all, you will be sufficiently convinced of; and for this purpose it may not be unseasonable to recollect some of them by way of example. And the first that I shall mention is that intolerable custom which most of them have of omitting facts, and dwelling for ever on the praises of their generals and commanders, extolling to the skies their own leaders, and degrading beyond measure those of their enemies, not knowing how much history differs from panegyric, that there is a great wall between them, or that, to use a musical phrase, they are a double octave <a name="citation24a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote24a">{24a}</a> distant from each other; the sole business of the panegyrist is, at all events and by every means, to extol and delight the object of his praise, and it little concerns him whether it be true or not. But history will not admit the least degree of falsehood any more than, as physicians say, the wind-pipe <a name="citation24b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote24b">{24b}</a> can receive into it any kind of food.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">These men seem not to know that poetry has its particular rules and precepts; and that history is governed by others directly opposite. That with regard to the former, the licence is immoderate, and there is scarce any law but what the poet prescribes to himself. When he is full of the Deity, and possessed, as it were, by the Muses, if he has a mind to put winged horses <a name="citation25a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote25a">{25a}</a> to his chariot, and drive some through the waters, and others over the tops of unbending corn, there is no offence taken. Neither, if his Jupiter <a name="citation25b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote25b">{25b}</a> hangs the earth and sea at the end of a chain, are we afraid that it should break and destroy us all. If he wants to extol Agamemnon, who shall forbid his bestowing on him the head and eyes of Jupiter, the breast of his brother Neptune, and the belt of Mars? The son of Atreus and Ærope must be a composition of all the gods; nor are Jupiter, Mars, and Neptune sufficient, perhaps, of themselves to give us an idea of his perfection. But if history admits any adulation of this kind, it becomes a sort of prosaic poetry, without its numbers or magnificence; a heap of monstrous stories, only more conspicuous by their incredibility. He is unpardonable, therefore, who cannot distinguish one from the other; but lays on history the paint of poetry, its flattery, fable, and hyperbole: it is just as ridiculous as it would be to clothe one of our robust wrestlers, who is as hard as an oak, in fine purple, or some such meretricious garb, and put paint <a name="citation26"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote26">{26}</a> on his cheeks; how would such ornaments debase and degrade him! I do not mean by this, that in history we are not to praise sometimes, but it must be done at proper seasons, and in a proper degree, that it may not offend the readers of future ages; for future ages must be considered in this affair, as I shall endeavour to prove hereafter.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Those, I must here observe, are greatly mistaken who divide history into two parts, the useful and the agreeable; and in consequence of it, would introduce panegyric as always delectable and entertaining to the reader. But the division itself is false and delusive; for the great end and design of history is to be useful: a species of merit which can only arise from its truth. If the agreeable follows, so much the better, as there may be beauty in a wrestler. And yet Hercules would esteem the brave though ugly Nicostratus as much as the beautiful Alcæus. And thus history, when she adds pleasure to utility, may attract more admirers; though as long as she is possessed of that greatest of perfections, truth, she need not be anxious concerning beauty.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable; and flattery is disgusting to all readers, except the very dregs of the people; good judges look with the eyes of Argus on every part, reject everything that is false and adulterated, and will admit nothing but what is true, clear, and well expressed. These are the men you are to have a regard to when you write, rather than the vulgar, though your flattery should delight them ever so much. If you stuff history with fulsome encomiums and idle tales, you will make her like Hercules in Lydia, as you may have seen him painted, waiting upon Omphale, who is dressed in the lion’s skin, with his club in her hand; whilst he is represented clothed in yellow and purple, and spinning, and Omphale beating him with her slipper; a ridiculous spectacle, wherein everything manly and godlike is sunk and degraded to effeminacy.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The multitude perhaps, indeed, may admire such things; but the judicious few whose opinion you despise will always laugh at what is absurd, incongruous, and inconsistent. Everything has a beauty peculiar to itself; but if you put one instead of another, the most beautiful becomes ugly, because it is not in its proper place. I need not add, that praise is agreeable only to the person praised, and disgustful to everybody else, especially when it is lavishly bestowed; as is the practice of most writers, who are so extremely desirous of recommending themselves by flattery, and dwell so much upon it as to convince the reader it is mere adulation, which they have not art enough to conceal, but heap up together, naked, uncovered, and totally incredible, so that they seldom gain what they expected from it; for the person flattered, if he has anything noble or manly in him, only abhors and despises them for it as mean parasites. Aristobulus, after he had written an account of the single combat between Alexander and Porus, showed that monarch a particular part of it, wherein, the better to get into his good graces, he had inserted a great deal more than was true; when Alexander seized the book and threw it (for they happened at that time to be sailing on the Hydaspes) directly into the river: “Thus,” said he, “ought you to have been served yourself for pretending to describe my battles, and killing half a dozen elephants for me with a single spear.” This anger was worthy of Alexander, of him who could not bear the adulation of that architect <a name="citation29"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote29">{29}</a> who promised to transform Mount Athos into a statue of him; but he looked upon the man from that time as a base flatterer, and never employed him afterwards.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">What is there in this custom, therefore, that can be agreeable, unless to the proud and vain; to deformed men or ugly women, who insist on being painted handsome, and think they shall look better if the artist gives them a little more red and white! Such, for the most part, are the historians of our times, who sacrifice everything to the present moment and their own interest and advantage; who can only be despised as ignorant flatterers of the age they live in; and as men, who, at the same time, by their extravagant stories, make everything which they relate liable to suspicion. If notwithstanding any are still of opinion, that the agreeable should be admitted in history, let them join that which is pleasant with that which is true, by the beauties of style and diction, instead of foisting in, as is commonly done, what is nothing to the purpose.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I will now acquaint you with some things I lately picked up in Ionia and Achaia, from several historians, who gave accounts of this war. By the graces I beseech you to give me credit for what I am going to tell you, as I could swear to the truth of it, if it were polite to swear in a dissertation. One of these gentlemen begins by invoking the Muses, and entreats the goddesses to assist him in the performance. What an excellent setting out and how properly is this form of speech adapted to history! A little farther on, he compares our emperor to Achilles, and the Persian king to Thersites; not considering that his Achilles would have been a much greater man if he had killed Hector rather than Thersites; if the brave should fly, he who pursues must be braver. Then follows an encomium on himself, showing how worthy he is to recite such noble actions; and when he is got on a little, he extols his own country, Miletus, adding that in this he had acted better than Homer, who never tells us where he was born. He informs us, moreover, at the end of his preface, in the most plain and positive terms, that he shall take care to make the best he can of our own affairs, and, as far as lies in his power, to get the upper hand of our enemies the barbarians. After investigating the cause of the war, he begins thus: “That vilest of all wretches, Vologesus, entered upon the war for these reasons.” Such is this historian’s manner. Another, a close imitator of Thucydides, that he may set out as his master does, gives us an exordium that smells of the true Attic honey, and begins thus: “Creperius Calpurnianus, a citizen of Pompeia, hath written the history of the war between the Parthians and the Romans, showing how they fought with one another, commencing at the time when it first broke out.” After this, need I inform you how he harangued in Armenia, by another Corcyræan orator? or how, to be revenged of the Nisibæans for not taking part with the Romans, he sent the plague amongst them, taking the whole from Thucydides, excepting the long walls of Athens. He had begun from Æthiopia, descended into Egypt, and passed over great part of the royal territory. Well it was that he stopped there. When I left him, he was burying the miserable Athenians at Nisibis; but as I knew what he was going to tell us, I took my leave of him.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Another thing very common with these historians is, by way of imitating Thucydides, to make use of his phrases, perhaps with a little alteration, to adopt his manner, in little modes and expressions, such as, “you must yourself acknowledge,” “for the same reason,” “a little more, and I had forgot,” and the like. This same writer, when he has occasion to mention bridges, fosses, or any of the machines used in war, gives them Roman names; but how does it suit the dignity of history, or resemble Thucydides, to mix the Attic and Italian thus, as if it was ornamental and becoming?</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Another of them gives us a plain simple journal of everything that was done, such as a common soldier might have written, or a sutler who followed the camp. This, however, was tolerable, because it pretended to nothing more; and might be useful by supplying materials for some better historian. I only blame him for his pompous introduction: “Callimorphus, physician to the sixth legion of spearmen, his history of the Parthian war.” Then his books are all carefully numbered, and he entertains us with a most frigid preface, which he concludes with saying that “a physician must be the fittest of all men to write history, because Æsculapius was the son of Apollo, and Apollo is the leader of the Muses, and the great prince of literature.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Besides this, after setting out in delicate Ionic, he drops, I know not how, into the most vulgar style and expressions, used only by the very dregs of the people.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And here I must not pass over a certain wise man, whose name, however, I shall not mention; his work is lately published at Corinth, and is beyond everything one could have conceived. In the very first sentence of his preface he takes his readers to task, and convinces them by the most sagacious method of reasoning that “none but a wise man should ever attempt to write history.” Then comes syllogism upon syllogism; every kind of argument is by turns made use of, to introduce the meanest and most fulsome adulation; and even this is brought in by syllogism and interrogation. What appeared to me the most intolerable and unbecoming the long beard of a philosopher, was his saying in the preface that our emperor was above all men most happy, whose actions even philosophers did not disdain to celebrate; surely this, if it ought to be said at all, should have been left for us to say rather than himself.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Neither must we here forget that historian who begins thus: “I come to speak of the Romans and Persians;” and a little after he says, “for the Persians ought to suffer;” and in another place, “there was one Osroes, whom the Greeks call Oxyrrhoes,” with many things of this kind. This man is just such a one as him I mentioned before, only that one is like Thucydides, and the other the exact resemblance of Herodotus.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">But there is yet another writer, renowned for eloquence, another Thucydides, or rather superior to him, who most elaborately describes every city, mountain, field, and river, and cries out with all his might, “May the great averter of evil turn it all on our enemies!” This is colder than Caspian snow, or Celtic ice. The emperor’s shield takes up a whole book to describe. The Gorgon’s <a name="citation35"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote35">{35}</a> eyes are blue, and black, and white; the serpents twine about his hair, and his belt has all the colours of the rainbow. How many thousand lines does it cost him to describe Vologesus’s breeches and his horse’s bridle, and how Osroes’ hair looked when he swam over the Tigris, what sort of a cave he fled into, and how it was shaded all over with ivy, and myrtle, and laurel, twined together. You plainly see how necessary this was to the history, and that we could not possibly have understood what was going forward without it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">From inability, and ignorance of everything useful, these men are driven to descriptions of countries and caverns, and when they come into a multiplicity of great and momentous affairs, are utterly at a loss. Like a servant enriched on a sudden by coming into his master’s estate, who does not know how to put on his clothes, or to eat as he should do; but when fine birds, fat sows, and hares are placed before him, falls to and eats till he bursts, of salt meat and pottage. The writer I just now mentioned describes the strangest wounds, and the most extraordinary deaths you ever heard of; tells us of a man’s being wounded in the great toe, and expiring immediately; and how on Priscus, the general, bawling out loud, seven-and-twenty of the enemy fell down dead upon the spot. He has told lies, moreover, about the number of the slain, in contradiction to the account given in by the leaders. He will have it that seventy thousand two hundred and thirty-six of the enemy died at Europus, and of the Romans only two, and nine wounded. Surely nobody in their senses can bear this.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Another thing should be mentioned here also, which is no little fault. From the affectation of Atticism, and a more than ordinary attention to purity of diction, he has taken the liberty to turn the Roman names into Greek, to call Saturninus, Κρονιος , Chronius; Fronto, Φροντις, Frontis; Titianus, Τιτανιος , Titanius, and others still more ridiculous. With regard to the death of Severian, he informs us that everybody else was mistaken when they imagined that he perished by the sword, for that the man starved himself to death, as he thought that the easiest way of dying; not knowing (which was the case) that he could only have fasted three days, whereas many have lived without food for seven; unless we are to suppose that Osroes stood waiting till Severian had starved himself completely, and for that reason he would not live out the whole week.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">But in what class, my dear Philo, shall we rank those historians who are perpetually making use of poetical expressions, such as “the engine crushed, the wall thundered,” and in another place, “Edessa resounded with the shock of arms, and all was noise and tumult around;” and again, “often the leader in his mind revolved how best he might approach the wall.” At the same time amongst these were interspersed some of the meanest and most beggarly phrases, such as “the leader of the army epistolised his master,” “the soldiers bought utensils,” “they washed and waited on them,” with many other things of the same kind, like a tragedian with a high cothurnus on one foot and a slipper on the other. You will meet with many of these writers, who will give you a fine heroic long preface, that makes you hope for something extraordinary to follow, when after all, the body of the history shall be idle, weak, and trifling, such as puts you in mind of a sporting Cupid, who covers his head with the mask of a Hercules or Titan. The reader immediately cries out, “The mountain <a name="citation39"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote39">{39}</a> has brought forth!” Certainly it ought not to be so; everything should be alike and of the same colour; the body fitted to the head, not a golden helmet, with a ridiculous breast-plate made of stinking skins, shreds, and patches, a basket shield, and hog-skin boots; and yet numbers of them put the head of a Rhodian Colossus on the body of a dwarf, whilst others show you a body without a head, and step directly into the midst of things, bringing in Xenophon for their authority, who begins with “Darius and Parysatis had two sons;” so likewise have other ancient writers; not considering that the narration itself may sometimes supply the place of preface, or exordium, though it does not appear to the vulgar eye, as we shall show hereafter.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">All this, however, with regard to style and composition, may be borne with, but when they misinform us about places, and make mistakes, not of a few leagues, but whole day’s journeys, what shall we say to such historians? One of them, who never, we may suppose, so much as conversed with a Syrian, or picked up anything concerning them in the barbers’ <a name="citation40"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote40">{40}</a> shop, when he speaks of Europus, tells us, “it is situated in Mesopotamia, two days’ journey from Euphrates, and was built by the Edessenes.” Not content with this, the same noble writer has taken away my poor country, Samosata, and carried it off, tower, bulwarks, and all, to Mesopotamia, where he says it is shut up between two rivers, which at least run close to, if they do not wash the walls of it. After this, it would be to no purpose, my dear Philo, for me to assure you that I am not from Parthia, nor do I belong to Mesopotamia, of which this admirable historian has thought fit to make me an inhabitant.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">What he tells us of Severian, and which he swears he heard from those who were eye-witnesses of it, is no doubt extremely probable; that he did not choose to drink poison, or to hang himself, but was resolved to find out some new and tragical way of dying; that accordingly, having some large cups of very fine glass, as soon as he had taken the resolution to finish himself, he broke one of them in pieces, and with a fragment of it cut his throat; he would not make use of sword or spear, that his death might be more noble and heroic.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">To complete all, because Thucydides <a name="citation41"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote41">{41}</a> made a funeral oration on the heroes who fell at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, he also thought something should be said of Severian. These historians, you must know, will always have a little struggle with Thucydides, though he had nothing to do with the war in Armenia; our writer, therefore, after burying Severian most magnificently, places at his sepulchre one Afranius Silo, a centurion, the rival of Pericles, who spoke so fine a declamation upon him as, by heaven, made me laugh till I cried again, particularly when the orator seemed deeply afflicted, and with tears in his eyes, lamented the sumptuous entertainments and drinking bouts which he should no more partake of. To crown all with an imitation of Ajax, <a name="citation42"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote42">{42}</a> the orator draws his sword, and, as it became the noble Afranius, before all the assembly, kills himself at the tomb. So Mars defend me! but he deserved to die much sooner for making such a declamation. When those, says he, who were present beheld this, they were filled with admiration, and beyond measure extolled Afranius. For my own part, I pitied him for the loss of the cakes and dishes which he so lamented, and only blamed him for not destroying the writer of the history before he made an end of himself.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Others there are who, from ignorance and want of skill, not knowing what should be mentioned, and what passed over in silence, entirely omit or slightly run through things of the greatest consequence, and most worthy of attention, whilst they most copiously describe and dwell upon trifles; which is just as absurd as it would be not to take notice of or admire the wonderful beauty of the Olympian Jupiter, <a name="citation43"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote43">{43}</a> and at the same time to be lavish in our praises of the fine polish, workmanship, and proportion of the base and pedestal.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I remember one of these who despatches the battle at Europus in seven lines, and spends some hundreds in a long frigid narration, that is nothing to the purpose, showing how “a certain Moorish cavalier, wandering on the mountains in search of water, lit on some Syrian rustics, who helped him to a dinner; how they were afraid of him at first, but afterwards became intimately acquainted with him, and received him with hospitality; for one of them, it seems, had been in Mauritania, where his brother bore arms.” Then follows a long tale, “how he hunted in Mauritania, and saw several elephants feeding together; how he had like to have been devoured by a lion; and how many fish he bought at Cæsarea.” This admirable historian takes no notice of the battle, the attacks or defences, the truces, the guards on each side, or anything else; but stands from morning to night looking upon Malchion, the Syrian, who buys cheap fish at Cæsarea: if night had not come on, I suppose he would have supped there, as the chars <a name="citation44"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote44">{44}</a> were ready. If these things had not been carefully recorded in the history we should have been sadly in the dark, and the Romans would have had an insufferable loss, if Mausacas, the thirsty Moor, could have found nothing to drink, or returned to the camp without his supper; not to mention here, what is still more ridiculous, as how “a piper came up to them out of the neighbouring village, and how they made presents to each other, Mausacas giving Malchion a spear, and Malchion presenting Mausacas with a buckle.” Such are the principal occurrences in the history of the battle of Europus. One may truly say of such writers that they never saw the roses on the tree, but took care to gather the prickles that grew at the bottom of it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Another of them, who had never set a foot out of Corinth, or seen Syria or Armenia, begins thus: “It is better to trust our eyes than our ears; I write, therefore, what I have seen, and not what I have heard;” he saw everything so extremely well that he tells us, “the Parthian dragons (which amongst them signifies no more than a great number, <a name="citation45"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote45">{45}</a> for one dragon brings a thousand) are live serpents of a prodigious size, that breed in Persia, a little above Iberia; that these are lifted up on long poles, and spread terror to a great distance; and that when the battle begins, they let them loose on the enemy.” Many of our soldiers, he tells us, were devoured by them, and a vast number pressed to death by being locked in their embraces: this he beheld himself from the top of a high tree, to which he had retired for safety. Well it was for us that he so prudently determined not to come nigh them; we might otherwise have lost this excellent writer, who with his own brave hand performed such feats in this battle; for he went through many dangers, and was wounded somewhere about Susa, I suppose, in his journey from Cranium to Lerna. All this he recited to the Corinthians, who very well knew that he had never so much as seen a view of this battle painted on a wall; neither did he know anything of arms, or military machines, the method of disposing troops, or even the proper names of them. <a name="citation46"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote46">{46}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Another famous writer has given an account of everything that passed, from beginning to end, in Armenia, Syria, Mesopotamia, upon the Tigris, and in Media, and all in less than five hundred lines; and when he had done this, tells us, he has written a history. The title, which is almost as long as the work, runs thus: “A narrative of everything done by the Romans in Armenia, Media, and Mesopotamia, by Antiochianus, who gained a prize in the sacred games of Apollo.” I suppose, when he was a boy, he had conquered in a running match.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I have heard of another likewise, who wrote a history of what was to happen hereafter, <a name="citation47"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote47">{47}</a> and describes the taking of Vologesus prisoner, the murder of Osroes, and how he was to be given to a lion; and above all, our own much-to-be-wished-for triumph, as things that must come to pass. Thus prophesying away, he soon got to the end of the story. He has built, moreover, a new city in Mesopotamia, most magnificently magnificent, and most beautifully beautiful, and is considering with himself whether he shall call it Victoria, from victory, or the City of Concord, or Peace, which of them, however, is not yet determined, and this fine city must remain without a name, filled as it is with nothing but this writer’s folly and nonsense. He is now going about a long voyage, and to give us a description of what is to be done in India; and this is more than a promise, for the preface is already made, and the third legion, the Gauls, and a small part of the Mauritanian forces under Cassius, have already passed the river; what they will do afterwards, or how they will succeed against the elephants, it will be some time before our wonderful writer can be able to learn, either from Mazuris or the Oxydraci.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Thus do these foolish fellows trifle with us, neither knowing what is fit to be done, nor if they did, able to execute it, at the same time determined to say anything that comes into their ridiculous heads; affecting to be grand and pompous, even in their titles: of “the Parthian victories so many books;” Parthias, says another, like Atthis; another more elegantly calls his book the Parthonicica of Demetrius.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I could mention many more of equal merit with these, but shall now proceed to make my promise good, and give some instructions how to write better. I have not produced these examples merely to laugh at and ridicule these noble histories; but with the view of real advantages, that he who avoids their errors, may himself learn to write well—if it be true, as the logicians assert, that of two opposites, between which there is no medium, the one being taken away, the other must remain. <a name="citation49"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote49">{49}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Somebody, perhaps, will tell me that the field is now cleansed and weeded, that the briars and brambles are cut up, the rubbish cleared off, and the rough path made smooth; that I ought therefore to build something myself, to show that I not only can pull down the structures of others, but am able to raise up and invent a work truly great and excellent, which nobody could find fault with, nor Momus himself turn into ridicule.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I say, therefore, that he who would write history well must be possessed of these two principal qualifications, a fine understanding and a good style: one is the gift of nature, and cannot be taught; the other may be acquired by frequent exercise, perpetual labour and an emulation of the ancients. To make men sensible and sagacious, who were not born so, is more than I pretend to; to create and new-model things in this manner would be a glorious thing indeed; but one might as easily make gold out of lead, silver out of tin, a Titornus out of a Conon, or a Milo out of a Leotrophides. <a name="citation50"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote50">{50}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">What then is in the power of art or instruction to perform? not to create qualities and perfections already bestowed, but to teach the proper use of them; for as Iccus, Herodicus, Theon, <a name="citation51"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote51">{51}</a> or any other famous wrestler, would not promise to make Antiochus a conqueror in the Olympic games, or equal to a Theagenes, or Polydamas; but only that where a man had natural abilities for this exercise he could, by his instruction, render him a greater proficient in it: far be it from me, also, to promise the invention of an art so difficult as this, nor do I say that I can make anybody an historian; but that I will point out to one of good understanding, and who has been in some measure used to writing, certain proper paths (if such they appear to him), which if any man shall tread in, he may with greater ease and despatch do what he ought to do, and attain the end which he is in pursuit of.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Neither can it be here asserted, be he ever so sensible or sagacious, that he doth not stand in need of assistance with regard to those things which he is ignorant of; otherwise he might play on the flute or any other instrument, who had never learned, and perform just as well; but without teaching, the hands will do nothing; whereas, if there be a master, we quickly learn, and are soon able to play by ourselves.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Give me a scholar, therefore, who is able to think and to write, to look with an eye of discernment into things, and to do business himself, if called upon, who hath both civil and military knowledge; one, moreover, who has been in camps, and has seen armies in the field and out of it; knows the use of arms, and machines, and warlike engines of every kind; can tell what the front, and what the horn is, how the ranks are to be disposed, how the horse is to be directed, and from whence to advance or to retreat; one, in short, who does not stay at home and trust to the reports of others: but, above all, let him be of a noble and liberal mind; let him neither fear nor hope for anything; otherwise he will only resemble those unjust judges who determine from partiality or prejudice, and give sentence for hire: but, whatever the man is, as such let him be described. The historian must not care for Philip, when he loses his eye by the arrow of Aster, <a name="citation53a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote53a">{53a}</a> at Olynthus, nor for Alexander, when he so cruelly killed Clytus at the banquet: Cleon must not terrify him, powerful as he was in the senate, and supreme at the tribunal, nor prevent his recording him as a furious and pernicious man; the whole city of Athens must not stop his relation of the Sicilian slaughter, the seizure of Demosthenes, <a name="citation53b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote53b">{53b}</a> the death of Nicias, their violent thirst, the water which they drank, and the death of so many of them whilst they were drinking it. He will imagine (which will certainly be the case) that no man in his senses will blame him for recording things exactly as they fell out. However some may have miscarried by imprudence, or others by ill fortune, he is only the relator, not the author of them. If they are beaten in a sea-fight, it is not he who sinks them; if they fly, it is not he who pursues them; all he can do is to wish well to, and offer up his vows for them; but by passing over or contradicting facts, he cannot alter or amend them. It would have been very easy indeed for Thucydides, with a stroke of his pen, to have thrown down the walls of Epipolis, sunk the vessel of Hermocrates, or made an end of the execrable Gylippus, who stopped up all the avenues with his walls and ditches; to have thrown the Syracusans on the Lautumiæ, and have let the Athenians go round Sicily and Italy, according to the early hopes of Alcibiades: but what is past and done Clotho cannot weave again, nor Atropos recall.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid of Artaxerxes, whose physician <a name="citation55a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote55a">{55a}</a> he is; as long as he looks for the purple robe, the golden chain, or the Nisæan horse, <a name="citation55b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote55b">{55b}</a> as the reward of his labours; but Xenophon, that just writer, will not do this, nor Thucydides. The good historian, though he may have private enmity against any man, will esteem the public welfare of more consequence to him, and will prefer truth to resentment; and, on the other hand, be he ever so fond of any man, will not spare him when he is in the wrong; for this, as I before observed, is the most essential thing in history, to sacrifice to truth alone, and cast away all care for everything else. The great universal rule and standard is, to have regard not to those who read now, but to those who are to peruse our works hereafter.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">To speak impartially, the historians of former times were too often guilty of flattery, and their works were little better than games and sports, the effects of art. Of Alexander, this memorable saying is recorded: “I should be glad,” said he, “Onesicritus, after my death, to come to life again for a little time, only to hear what the people then living will say of me; for I am not surprised that they praise and caress me now, as every one hopes by baiting well to catch my favour.” Though Homer wrote a great many fabulous things concerning Achilles, the world was induced to believe him, for this only reason, because they were written long after his death, and no cause could be assigned why he should tell lies about him.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The good historian, <a name="citation56"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote56">{56}</a> then, must be thus described: he must be fearless, uncorrupted, free, the friend of truth and of liberty; one who, to use the words of the comic poet, calls a fig a fig, <a name="citation57a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote57a">{57a}</a> and a skiff a skiff, neither giving nor withholding from any, from favour or from enmity, not influenced by pity, by shame, or by remorse; a just judge, so far benevolent to all as never to give more than is due to any in his work; a stranger to all, of no country, bound only by his own laws, acknowledging no sovereign, never considering what this or that man may say of him, but relating faithfully everything as it happened.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">This rule therefore Thucydides observed, distinguishing properly the faults and perfections of history: not unmindful of the great reputation which Herodotus had acquired, insomuch that his books were called by the names of the Muses. <a name="citation57b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote57b">{57b}</a> Thucydides tells us that he “wrote for posterity, and not for present delight; that he by no means approved of the fabulous, but was desirous of delivering down the truth alone to future ages.” It is the useful, he adds, which must constitute the merit of history, that by the retrospection of what is past, when similar events occur, men may know how to act in present exigencies.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such an historian would I wish to have under my care: with regard to language and expression, I would not have it rough and vehement, consisting of long periods, <a name="citation58"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote58">{58}</a> or complex arguments; but soft, quiet, smooth, and peaceable. The reflections, short and frequent, the style clear and perspicuous; for as freedom and truth should be the principal perfections of the writer’s mind, so, with regard to language, the great point is to make everything plain and intelligible, not to use remote and far-fetched phrases or expressions, at the same time avoiding such as are mean and vulgar: let it be, in short, what the lowest may understand; and, at the same time, the most learned cannot but approve. The whole may be adorned with figure and metaphor, provided they are not turgid or bombast, nor seem stiff and laboured, which, like meat too highly seasoned, always give disgust.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">History may sometimes assume a poetical form, and rise into a magnificence of expression, when the subject demands it; and especially when it is describing armies, battles, and sea-fights. The Pierian spirit <a name="citation59"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote59">{59}</a> is wanting then to swell the sails with a propitious breeze, and carry the lofty ship over the tops of the waves. In general, the diction should creep humbly on the ground, and only be raised as the grand and beautiful occurring shall require it; keeping, in the meantime, within proper bounds, and never soaring into enthusiasm; for then it is in danger of ranging beyond its limits, into poetic fury: we must then pull in the rein and act with caution, well knowing that it is the worst vice of a writer, as well as of a horse, to be wanton and unmanageable. The best way therefore is, whilst the mind of the historian is on horseback, for his style to walk on foot, and take hold of the rein, that it may not be left behind.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">With regard to composition, the words should not be so blended and transposed as to appear harsh and uncouth; nor should you, as some do, subject them entirely to the rhythmus; <a name="citation60"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote60">{60}</a> one is always faulty, and the other disagreeable to the reader.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Facts must not be carelessly put together, but with great labour and attention. If possible, let the historian be an eye-witness of everything he means to record; or, if that cannot be, rely on those only who are incorrupt, and who have no bias from passion or prejudice, to add or to diminish anything. And here much sagacity will be requisite to find out the real truth. When he has collected all or most of his materials, he will first make a kind of diary, a body whose members are not yet distinct; he will then bring it into order and beautify it, add the colouring of style and language, adopt his expression to the subject, and harmonise the several parts of it; then, like Homer’s Jupiter, <a name="citation61"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote61">{61}</a> who casts his eye sometimes on the Thracian, and sometimes on the Mysian forces, he beholds now the Roman, and now the Persian armies, now both, if they are engaged, and relates what passes in them. Whilst they are embattled, his eye is not fixed on any particular part, nor on any one leader, unless, perhaps, a Brasidas <a name="citation62a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote62a">{62a}</a> steps forth to scale the walls, or a Demosthenes to prevent him. To the generals he gives his first attention, listens to their commands, their counsels, and their determination; and, when they come to the engagement, he weighs in equal scale the actions of both, and closely attends the pursuer and the pursued, the conqueror and the conquered. All this must be done with temper and moderation, so as not to satiate or tire, not inartificially, not childishly, but with ease and grace. When these things are properly taken care of, he may turn aside to others, ever ready and prepared for the present event, keeping time, <a name="citation62b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote62b">{62b}</a> as it were, with every circumstance and event: flying from Armenia to Media, and from thence with clattering wings to Italy, or to Iberia, that not a moment may escape him.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The mind of the historian should resemble a looking-glass, shining clear and exactly true, representing everything as it really is, and nothing distorted, or of a different form or colour. He writes not to the masters of eloquence, but simply relates what is done. It is not his to consider what he shall say, but only how it is to be said. He may be compared to Phidias, Praxiteles, Alcamenus, or other eminent artists; for neither did they make the gold, the silver, the ivory, or any of the materials which they worked upon. These were supplied by the Elians, the Athenians, and Argives; their only business was to cut and polish the ivory, to spread the gold into various forms, and join them together; their art was properly to dispose what was put into their hands; and such is the work of the historians, to dispose and adorn the actions of men, and to make them known with clearness and precision: to represent what he hath heard, as if he had been himself an eye-witness of it. To perform this well, and gain the praise resulting from it, is the business of our historical Phidias.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When everything is thus prepared, he may begin if he pleases without preface or exordium, unless the subject particularly demands it; he may supply the place of one, by informing us what he intends to write upon, in the beginning of the work itself: if, however, he makes use of any preface, he need not divide it as our orators do, into three parts, but confine it to two, leaving out his address to the benevolence of his readers, and only soliciting their attention and complacency: their attention he may be assured of, if he can convince them that he is about to speak of things great, or necessary, or interesting, or useful; nor need he fear their want of complacency, if he clearly explains to them the causes of things, and gives them the heads of what he intends to treat of.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such are the exordiums which our best historians have made use of. Herodotus tells us, “he wrote his history, lest in process of time the memory should be lost of those things which in themselves were great and wonderful, which showed forth the victories of Greece, and the slaughter of the barbarians;” and Thucydides sets out with saying, “he thought that war most worthy to be recorded, as greater than any which had before happened; and that, moreover, some of the greatest misfortunes had accompanied it.” The exordium, in short, may be lengthened or contracted according to the subject matter, and the transition from thence to the narration easy and natural. The body of the history is only a long narrative, and as such it must go on with a soft and even motion, alike in every part, so that nothing should stand too forward, or retreat too far behind. Above all, the style should be clear and perspicuous, which can only arise, as I before observed, from a harmony in the composition: one thing perfected, the next which succeeds should be coherent with it; knit together, as it were, by one common chain, which must never be broken: they must not be so many separate and distinct narratives, but each so closely united to what follows, as to appear one continued series.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Brevity is always necessary, especially when you have a great deal to say, and this must be proportioned to the facts and circumstances which you have to relate. In general, you must slightly run through little things, and dwell longer on great ones. When you treat your friends, you give them boars, hares, and other dainties; you would not offer them beans, saperda, <a name="citation66a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote66a">{66a}</a> or any other common food.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When you describe mountains, rivers, and bulwarks, avoid all pomp and ostentation, as if you meant to show your own eloquence; pass over these things as slightly as you can, and rather aim at being useful and intelligible. Observe how the great and sublime Homer acts on these occasions! as great a poet as he is, he says nothing about Tantalus, Ixion, Tityus, and the rest of them. But if Parthenius, Euphorion, or Callimachus, had treated this subject, what a number of verses they would have spent in rolling Ixion’s wheel, and bringing the water up to the very lips of Tantalus! Mark, also, how quickly Thucydides, who is very sparing <a name="citation66b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote66b">{66b}</a> of his descriptions, breaks off when he gives an account of any military machine, explains the manner of a siege, even though it be ever so useful and necessary, or describes cities or the port of Syracuse. Even in his narrative of the plague which seems so long, if you consider the multiplicity of events, you will find he makes as much haste as possible, and omits many circumstances, though he was obliged to retain so many more.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When it is necessary to make any one speak, you must take care to let him say nothing but what is suitable to the person, and to what he speaks about, and let everything be clear and intelligible: here, indeed, you may be permitted to play the orator, and show the power of eloquence. With regard to praise, or dispraise, you cannot be too modest and circumspect; they should be strictly just and impartial, short and seasonable: your evidence otherwise will not be considered as legal, and you will incur the same censure as Theopompus <a name="citation67"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote67">{67}</a> did, who finds fault with everybody from enmity and ill-nature; and dwells so perpetually on this, that he seems rather to be an accuser than an historian.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">If anything occurs that is very extraordinary or incredible, you may mention without vouching for the truth of it, leaving everybody to judge for themselves concerning it: by taking no part yourself, you will remain safe.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Remember, above all, and throughout your work, again and again, I must repeat it, that you write not with a view to the present times only, that the age you live in may applaud and esteem you, but with an eye fixed on posterity; from future ages expect your reward, that men may say of you, “that man was full of honest freedom, never flattering or servile, but in all things the friend of truth.” This commendation, the wise man will prefer to all the vain hopes of this life, which are but of short duration.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Recollect the story of the Cnidian architect, when he built the tower in Pharos, where the fire is kindled to prevent mariners from running on the dangerous rocks of Parætonia, that most noble and most beautiful of all works; he carved his own name on a part of the rock on the inside, then covered it over with mortar, and inscribed on it the name of the reigning sovereign: well knowing that, as it afterwards happened, in a short space of time these letters would drop off with the mortar, and discover under it this inscription: “Sostratus the Cnidian, son of Dexiphanes, to those gods who preserve the mariner.” Thus had he regard not to the times he lived in, not to his own short existence, but to the present period, and to all future ages, even as long as his tower shall stand, and his art remain upon earth.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Thus also should history be written, rather anxious to gain the approbation of posterity by truth and merit, than to acquire present applause by adulation and falsehood.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such are the rules which I would prescribe to the historian, and which will contribute to the perfection of his work, if he thinks proper to observe them; if not, at least, I have rolled my tub. <a name="citation69"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote69">{69}</a></p> <h2 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">THE TRUE HISTORY</h2><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> </div><h3 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">BOOK I</h3> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><i>Lucian’s True History is, as the author himself acknowledges in the Preface to it, a collection of ingenious lies, calculated principally to amuse the reader, not without several allusions, as he informs us, to the works of ancient Poets, Historians, and Philosophers, as well as, most probably, the performances of contemporary writers, whose absurdities are either obliquely glanced at, or openly ridiculed and exposed. We cannot but lament that the humour of the greatest part of these allusions must be lost to us, the works themselves being long since buried in oblivion. Lucian’s True History, therefore, like the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, cannot be half so agreeable as when it was first written; there is, however, enough remaining to secure it from contempt. The vein of rich fancy, and wildness of a luxuriant imagination, which run through the whole, sufficiently point out the author as a man of uncommon genius and invention. The reader will easily perceive that Bergerac, Swift, and other writers have read this work of Lucian’s, and are much indebted to him for it.</i></p> <h3 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">PREFACE</h3> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As athletics of all kinds hold it necessary, not only to prepare the body by exercise and discipline, but sometimes to give it proper relaxation, which they esteem no less requisite, so do I think it highly necessary also for men of letters, after their severer studies, to relax a little, that they may return to them with the greater pleasure and alacrity; and for this purpose there is no better repose than that which arises from the reading of such books as not only by their humour and pleasantry may entertain them, but convey at the same time some useful instruction, both which, I flatter myself, the reader will meet with in the following history; for he will not only be pleased with the novelty of the plan, and the variety of lies, which I have told with an air of truth, but with the tacit allusions so frequently made, not, I trust, without some degree of humour, to our ancient poets, historians, and philosophers, who have told us some most miraculous and incredible stories, and which I should have pointed out to you, but that I thought they would be sufficiently visible on the perusal.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Ctesias the Cnidian, son of Ctesiochus, wrote an account of India and of things there, which he never saw himself, nor heard from anybody else. Iambulus also has acquainted us with many wonders which he met with in the great sea, and which everybody knew to be absolute falsehoods: the work, however, was not unentertaining. Besides these, many others have likewise presented us with their own travels and peregrinations, where they tell us of wondrous large beasts, savage men, and unheard-of ways of living. The great leader and master of all this rhodomontade is Homer’s “Ulysses,” who talks to Alcinous about the winds <a name="citation75"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote75">{75}</a> pent up in bags, man-eaters, and one-eyed Cyclops, wild men, creatures with many heads, several of his companions turned into beasts by enchantment, and a thousand things of this kind, which he related to the ignorant and credulous Phæacians.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">These, notwithstanding, I cannot think much to blame for their falsehoods, seeing that the custom has been sometimes authorised, even by the pretenders to philosophy: I only wonder that they should ever expect to be believed: being, however, myself incited, by a ridiculous vanity, with the desire of transmitting something to posterity, that I may not be the only man who doth not indulge himself in the liberty of fiction, as I could not relate anything true (for I know of nothing at present worthy to be recorded), I turned my thoughts towards falsehood, a species of it, however, much more excusable than that of others, as I shall at least say one thing true, when I tell you that I lie, and shall hope to escape the general censure, by acknowledging that I mean to speak not a word of truth throughout. Know ye, therefore, that I am going to write about what I never saw myself, nor experienced, nor so much as heard from anybody else, and, what is more, of such things as neither are, nor ever can be. I give my readers warning, therefore, not to believe me.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Once upon a time, <a name="citation77"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote77">{77}</a> then, I set sail from the Pillars of Hercules, and getting into the Western Ocean, set off with a favourable wind; the cause of my peregrination was no more than a certain impatience of mind and thirst after novelty, with a desire of knowing where the sea ended, and what kind of men inhabited the several shores of it; for this purpose I laid in a large stock of provisions, and as much water as I thought necessary, taking along with me fifty companions of the same mind as myself. I prepared withal, a number of arms, with a skilful pilot, whom we hired at a considerable expense, and made our ship (for it was a pinnace), as tight as we could in case of a long and dangerous voyage.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We sailed on with a prosperous gale for a day and a night, but being still in sight of land, did not make any great way; the next day, however, at sun-rising, the wind springing up, the waves ran high, it grew dark, and we could not unfurl a sail; we gave ourselves up to the winds and waves, and were tossed about in a storm, which raged with great fury for threescore and nineteen days, but on the eightieth the sun shone bright, and we saw not far from us an island, high and woody, with the sea round it quite calm and placid, for the storm was over: we landed, got out, and happy to escape from our troubles, laid ourselves down on the ground for some time, after which we arose, and choosing out thirty of our company to take care of the vessel, I remained on shore with the other twenty, in order to take a view of the interior part of the island.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">About three stadia from the sea, as we passed through a wood, we found a pillar of brass, with a Greek inscription on it, the characters almost effaced; we could make out however these words, “thus far came Hercules and Bacchus:” near it were the marks of two footsteps on a rock, one of them measured about an acre, the other something less; the smaller one appeared to me to be that of Bacchus, the larger that of Hercules; we paid our adorations to the deities and proceeded. We had not got far before we met with a river, which seemed exactly to resemble wine, particularly that of Chios; <a name="citation79"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote79">{79}</a> it was of a vast extent, and in many places navigable; this circumstance induced us to give more credit to the inscription on the pillar, when we perceived such visible marks of Bacchus’s presence here. As I had a mind to know whence this river sprung, I went back to the place from which it seemed to arise, but could not trace the spring; I found, however, several large vines full of grapes, at the root of every one the wine flowed in great abundance, and from them I suppose the river was collected. We saw a great quantity of fish in it which were extremely like wine, both in taste and colour, and after we had taken and eaten a good many of them we found ourselves intoxicated; and when we cut them up, observed that they were full of grape stones; it occurred to us afterwards that we should have mixed them with some water fish, as by themselves they tasted rather too strong of the wine.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We passed the river in a part of it which was fordable, and a little farther on met with a most wonderful species of vine, the bottoms of them that touched the earth were green and thick, and all the upper part most beautiful women, with the limbs perfect from the waist, only that from the tops of the fingers branches sprung out full of grapes, just as Daphne is represented as turned into a tree when Apollo laid hold on her; on the head, likewise, instead of hair they had leaves and tendrils; when we came up to them they addressed us, some in the Lydian tongue, some in the Indian, but most of them in Greek; they would not suffer us to taste their grapes, but when anybody attempted it, cried out as if they were hurt.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We left them and returned to our companions in the ship. We then took our casks, filled some of them with water, and some with wine from the river, slept one night on shore, and the next morning set sail, the wind being very moderate. About noon, the island being now out of sight, on a sudden a most violent whirlwind arose, and carried the ship above three thousand stadia, lifting it up above the water, from whence it did not let us down again into the seas but kept us suspended <a name="citation81a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote81a">{81a}</a> in mid air, in this manner we hung for seven days and nights, and on the eighth beheld a large tract of land, like an island, <a name="citation81b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote81b">{81b}</a> round, shining, and remarkably full of light; we got on shore, and found on examination that it was cultivated and full of inhabitants, though we could not then see any of them. As night came on other islands appeared, some large, others small, and of a fiery colour; there was also below these another land with seas, woods, mountains, and cities in it, and this we took to be our native country: as we were advancing forwards, we were seized on a sudden by the Hippogypi, <a name="citation82a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote82a">{82a}</a> for so it seems they were called by the inhabitants; these Hippogypi are men carried upon vultures, which they ride as we do horses. These vultures have each three heads, and are immensely large; you may judge of their size when I tell you that one of their feathers is bigger than the mast of a ship. The Hippogypi have orders, it seems, to fly round the kingdom, and if they find any stranger, to bring him to the king: they took us therefore, and carried us before him. As soon as he saw us, he guessed by our garb what we were. “You are Grecians,” said he, “are you not?” We told him we were. “And how,” added he, “got ye hither through the air?” We told him everything that had happened to us; and he, in return, related to us his own history, and informed us, that he also was a man, that his name was Endymion, <a name="citation82b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote82b">{82b}</a> that he had been taken away from our earth in his sleep, and brought to this place where he reigned as sovereign. That spot, <a name="citation83a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote83a">{83a}</a> he told us, which now looked like a moon to us, was the earth. He desired us withal not to make ourselves uneasy, for that we should soon have everything we wanted. “If I succeed,” says he, “in the war which I am now engaged in against the inhabitants of the sun, you will be very happy here.” We asked him then what enemies he had, and what the quarrel was about? “Phaëton,” he replied, “who is king of the sun <a name="citation83b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote83b">{83b}</a> (for that is inhabited as well as the moon), has been at war with us for some time past. The foundation of it was this: I had formerly an intention of sending some of the poorest of my subjects to establish a colony in Lucifer, which was uninhabited: but Phaëton, out of envy, put a stop to it, by opposing me in the mid-way with his Hippomyrmices; <a name="citation84"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote84">{84}</a> we were overcome and desisted, our forces at that time being unequal to theirs. I have now, however, resolved to renew the war and fix my colony; if you have a mind, you shall accompany us in the expedition; I will furnish you everyone with a royal vulture and other accoutrements; we shall set out to-morrow.” “With all my heart,” said I, “whenever you please.” We stayed, however, and supped with him; and rising early the next day, proceeded with the army, when the spies gave us notice that the enemy was approaching. The army consisted of a hundred thousand, besides the scouts and engineers, together with the auxiliaries, amongst whom were eighty thousand Hippogypi, and twenty thousand who were mounted on the Lachanopteri; <a name="citation85a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote85a">{85a}</a> these are very large birds, whose feathers are of a kind of herb, and whose wings look like lettuces. Next to these stood the Cinchroboli, <a name="citation85b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote85b">{85b}</a> and the Schorodomachi. <a name="citation85c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote85c">{85c}</a> Our allies from the north were three thousand Psyllotoxotæ <a name="citation85d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote85d">{85d}</a> and five thousand Anemodromi; <a name="citation85e"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote85e">{85e}</a> the former take their names from the fleas which they ride upon, every flea being as big as twelve elephants; the latter are foot-soldiers, and are carried about in the air without wings, in this manner: they have large gowns hanging down to their feet, these they tuck up and spread in a form of a sail, and the wind drives them about like so many boats: in the battle they generally wear targets. It was reported that seventy thousand Strathobalani <a name="citation86a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote86a">{86a}</a> from the stars over Cappadocia were to be there, together with five thousand Hippogerani; <a name="citation86b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote86b">{86b}</a> these I did not see, for they never came: I shall not attempt, therefore, to describe them; of these, however, most wonderful things were related.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such were the forces of Endymion; their arms were all alike; their helmets were made of beans, for they have beans there of a prodigious size and strength, and their scaly breast-plates of lupines sewed together, for the skins of their lupines are like a horn, and impenetrable; their shields and swords the same as our own.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The army ranged themselves in this manner: the right wing was formed by the Hippogypi, with the king, and round him his chosen band to protect him, amongst which we were admitted; on the left were the Lachanopteri; the auxiliaries in the middle, the foot were in all about sixty thousand myriads. They have spiders, you must know, in this country, in infinite numbers, and of pretty large dimensions, each of them being as big as one of the islands of the Cyclades; these were ordered to cover the air from the moon quite to the morning star; this being immediately done, and the field of battle prepared, the infantry was drawn up under the command of Nycterion, the son of Eudianax.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The left wing of the enemy, which was commanded by Phaëton himself, consisted of the Hippomyrmices; these are large birds, and resemble our ants, except with regard to size, the largest of them covering two acres; these fight with their horns and were in number about fifty thousand. In the right wing were the Aeroconopes, <a name="citation87a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote87a">{87a}</a> about five thousand, all archers, and riding upon large gnats. To these succeeded the Aerocoraces, <a name="citation87b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote87b">{87b}</a> light infantry, but remarkably brave and useful warriors, for they threw out of slings exceeding large radishes, which whoever was struck by, died immediately, a most horrid stench exhaling from the wound; they are said, indeed, to dip their arrows in a poisonous kind of mallow. Behind these stood ten thousand Caulomycetes, <a name="citation88a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote88a">{88a}</a> heavy-armed soldiers, who fight hand to hand; so called because they use shields made of mushrooms, and spears of the stalks of asparagus. Near them were placed the Cynobalani, <a name="citation88b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote88b">{88b}</a> about five thousand, who were sent by the inhabitants of Sirius; these were men with dog’s heads, and mounted upon winged acorns: some of their forces did not arrive in time; amongst whom there were to have been some slingers from the Milky-way, together with the Nephelocentauri; <a name="citation88c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote88c">{88c}</a> they indeed came when the first battle was over, and I wish <a name="citation88d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote88d">{88d}</a> they had never come at all: the slingers did not appear, which, they say, so enraged Phaëton that he set their city on fire.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Thus prepared, the enemy began the attack: the signal being given, and the asses braying on each side, for such are the trumpeters they make use of on these occasions, the left wing of the Heliots, unable to sustain the onset of our Hippogypi, soon gave way, and we pursued them with great slaughter: their right wing, however, overcame our left. The Aeroconopes falling upon us with astonishing force, and advancing even to our infantry, by their assistance we recovered; and they now began to retreat, when they found the left wing had been beaten. The defeat then becoming general, many of them were taken prisoners and many slain; the blood flowed in such abundance that the clouds were tinged with it and looked red, just as they appear to us at sunset; from thence it distilled through upon the earth. Some such thing, I suppose, happened formerly amongst the gods, which made Homer believe that Jove <a name="citation89"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote89">{89}</a> rained blood at the death of Sarpedon.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When we returned from our pursuit of the enemy we set up two trophies; one, on account of the infantry engagement in the spider’s web, and another in the clouds, for our battle in the air. Thus prosperously everything went on, when our spies informed us that the Nephelocentaurs, who should have been with Phaëton before the battle, were just arrived: they made, indeed, as they approached towards us, a most formidable appearance, being half winged horses and half men; the men from the waist upwards, about as big as the Rhodian Colossus, and the horses of the size of a common ship of burthen. I have not mentioned the number of them, which was really so great, that it would appear incredible: they were commanded by Sagittarius, <a name="citation90a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote90a">{90a}</a> from the Zodiac. As soon as they learned that their friends had been defeated they sent a message to Phaëton to call him back, whilst they put their forces into order of battle, and immediately fell upon the Selenites, <a name="citation90b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote90b">{90b}</a> who were unprepared to resist them, being all employed in the division of the spoil; they soon put them to flight, pursued the king quite to his own city, and slew the greatest part of his birds; they then tore down the trophies, ran over all the field woven by the spiders, and seized me and two of my companions. Phaëton at length coming up, they raised other trophies for themselves; as for us, we were carried that very day to the palace of the Sun, our hands bound behind us by a cord of the spider’s web.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The conquerors determined not to besiege the city of the Moon, but when they returned home, resolved to build a wall between them and the Sun, that his rays might not shine upon it; this wall was double and made of thick clouds, so that the moon was always eclipsed, and in perpetual darkness. Endymion, sorely distressed at these calamities, sent an embassy, humbly beseeching them to pull down the wall, and not to leave him in utter darkness, promising to pay them tribute, to assist them with his forces, and never more to rebel; he sent hostages withal. Phaëton called two councils on the affair, at the first of which they were all inexorable, but at the second changed their opinion; a treaty at length was agreed to on these conditions:—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Heliots <a name="citation92"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote92">{92}</a> and their allies on one part, make the following agreement with the Selenites and their allies on the other:—“That the Heliots shall demolish the wall now erected between them, that they shall make no irruptions into the territories of the Moon; and restore the prisoners according to certain articles of ransom to be stipulated concerning them; that the Selenites shall permit all the other stars to enjoy their rights and privileges; that they shall never wage war with the Heliots, but assist them whenever they shall be invaded; that the king of the Selenites shall pay to the king of the Heliots an annual tribute of ten thousand casks of dew, for the insurance of which, he shall send ten thousand hostages; that they shall mutually send out a colony to the Morning-star, in which, whoever of either nation shall think proper, may become a member; that the treaty shall be inscribed on a column of amber, in the midst of the air, and on the borders of the two kingdoms. This treaty was sworn to on the part of the Heliots, by Pyronides, <a name="citation93"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote93">{93}</a> and Therites, and Phlogius; and on the part of the Selenites, by Nyctor, and Menarus, and Polylampus.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such was the peace made between them; the wall was immediately pulled down, and we were set at liberty. When we returned to the Moon, our companions met and embraced us, shedding tears of joy, as did Endymion also. He intreated us to remain there, or to go along with the new colony; this I could by no means be persuaded to, but begged he would let us down into the sea. As he found I could not be prevailed on to stay, after feasting us most nobly for seven days, he dismissed us.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I will now tell you every thing which I met with in the Moon that was new and extraordinary. Amongst them, when a man grows old he does not die, but dissolves into smoke and turns to air. They all eat the same food, which is frogs roasted on the ashes from a large fire; of these they have plenty which fly about in the air, they get together over the coals, snuff up the scent of them, and this serves them for victuals. Their drink is air squeezed into a cup, which produces a kind of dew.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He who is quite bald is esteemed a beauty amongst them, for they abominate long hair; whereas, in the comets, it is looked upon as a perfection at least; so we heard from some strangers who were speaking of them; they have, notwithstanding, small beards a little above the knee; no nails to their feet, and only one great toe. They have honey here which is extremely sharp, and when they exercise themselves, wash their bodies with milk; this, mixed with a little of their honey, makes excellent cheese. <a name="citation94"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote94">{94}</a> Their oil is extracted from onions, is very rich, and smells like ointment. Their wines, which are in great abundance, yield water, and the grape stones are like hail; I imagine, indeed, that whenever the wind shakes their vines and bursts the grape, then comes down amongst us what we call hail. They make use of their belly, which they can open and shut as they please, as a kind of bag, or pouch, to put anything in they want; it has no liver or intestines, but is hairy and warm within, insomuch, that new-born children, when they are cold, frequently creep into it. The garments of the rich amongst them are made of glass, but very soft: the poor have woven brass, which they have here in great abundance, and by pouring a little water over it, so manage as to card it like wool. I am afraid to mention their eyes, lest, from the incredibility of the thing, you should not believe me. I must, however, inform you that they have eyes which they take in and out whenever they please: so that they can preserve them anywhere till occasion serves, and then make use of them; many who have lost their own, borrow from others; and there are several rich men who keep a stock of eyes by them. Their ears are made of the leaves of plane-trees, except of those who spring, as I observed to you, from acorns, these alone have wooden ones. I saw likewise another very extraordinary thing in the king’s palace, which was a looking-glass that is placed in a well not very deep; whoever goes down into the well hears everything that is said upon earth, and if he looks into the glass, beholds all the cities and nations of the world as plain as if he was close to them. I myself saw several of my friends there, and my whole native country; whether they saw me also I will not pretend to affirm. He who does not believe these things, whenever he goes there will know that I have said nothing but what is true.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">To return to our voyage. We took our leave of the king and his friends, got on board our ship, and set sail. Endymion made me a present of two glass robes, two brass ones, and a whole coat of armour made of lupines, all which I left in the whale’s belly. <a name="citation96"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote96">{96}</a> He likewise sent with us a thousand Hippogypi, who escorted us five hundred stadia.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We sailed by several places, and at length reached the new colony of the Morning-star, where we landed and took in water; from thence we steered into the Zodiac; leaving the Sun on our left, we passed close by his territory, and would have gone ashore, many of our companions being very desirous of it, but the wind would not permit us; we had a view, however, of that region, and perceived that it was green, fertile, and well-watered, and abounding in everything necessary and agreeable. The Nephelocentaurs, who are mercenaries in the service of Phaëton, saw us and flew aboard our ship, but, recollecting that we were included into the treaty, soon departed; the Hippogypi likewise took their leave of us.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">All the next night and day we continued our course downwards, and towards evening came upon Lycnopolis: <a name="citation97"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote97">{97}</a> this city lies between the Pleiades and the Hyades, and a little below the Zodiac: we landed, but saw no men, only a number of lamps running to and fro in the market-place and round the port: some little ones, the poor, I suppose, of the place; others the rich and great among them, very large, light, and splendid: every one had its habitation or candlestick to itself, and its own proper name, as men have. We heard them speak: they offered us no injury, but invited us in the most hospitable manner; we were afraid, notwithstanding: neither would any of us venture to take any food or sleep. The king’s court is in the middle of the city; here he sits all night, calls every one by name, and if they do not appear, condemns them to death for deserting their post; their death is, to be put out; we stood by and heard several of them plead their excuses for non-attendance. Here I found my own lamp, talked to him, and asked him how things went on at home; he told me everything that had happened. We stayed there one night, and next day loosing our anchor, sailed off very near the clouds; where we saw, and greatly admired the city of Nephelo-coccygia, <a name="citation98a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote98a">{98a}</a> but the wind would not permit us to land. Coronus, the son of Cottiphion, is king there. I remember Aristophanes, <a name="citation98b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote98b">{98b}</a> the poet, speaks of him, a man of wisdom and veracity, the truth of whose writings nobody can call in question. About three days after this, we saw the ocean very plainly, but no land, except those regions which hang in the air, and which appeared to us all bright and fiery. The fourth day about noon, the wind subsiding, we got safe down into the sea. No sooner did we touch the water, but we were beyond measure rejoiced. We immediately gave every man his supper, as much as we could afford, and afterwards jumped into the sea and swam, for it was quite calm and serene.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It often happens, that prosperity is the forerunner of the greatest misfortunes. We had sailed but two days in the sea, when early in the morning of the third, at sun-rise, we beheld on a sudden several whales, and one amongst them, of a most enormous size, being not less than fifteen hundred stadia in length, he came up to us with his mouth wide open, disturbing the sea for a long way before him, the waves dashing round on every side; he whetted his teeth, which looked like so many long spears, and were white as ivory; we embraced and took leave of one another, expecting him every moment; he came near, and swallowed us up at once, ship and all; he did not, however, crush us with his teeth, for the vessel luckily slipped through one of the interstices; when we were got in, for some time it was dark, and we could see nothing; but the whale happening to gape, we beheld a large space big enough to hold a city with ten thousand men in it; in the middle were a great number of small fish, several animals cut in pieces, sails and anchors of ships, men’s bones, and all kinds of merchandise; there was likewise a good quantity of land and hills, which seemed to have been formed of the mud which he had swallowed; there was also a wood, with all sorts of trees in it, herbs of every kind; everything, in short, seemed to vegetate; the extent of this might be about two hundred and forty stadia. We saw also several sea-birds, gulls, and kingfishers, making their nests in the branches. At our first arrival in these regions, we could not help shedding tears; in a little time, however, I roused my companions, and we repaired our vessel; after which, we sat down to supper on what the place afforded. Fish of all kinds we had here in plenty, and the remainder of the water which we brought with us from the Morning-star. When we got up the next day, as often as the whale gaped, we could see mountains and islands, sometimes only the sky, and plainly perceived by our motion that he travelled through the sea at a great rate, and seemed to visit every part of it. At length, when our abode become familiar to us, I took with me seven of my companions, and advanced into the wood in order to see everything I could possibly; we had not gone above five stadia, before we met with a temple dedicated to Neptune, as we learned by the inscription on it, and a little farther on, several sepulchres, monumental stones, and a fountain of clear water; we heard the barking of a dog, and seeing smoke at some distance from us, concluded there must be some habitation not far off; we got on as fast as we could, and saw an old man and a boy very busy in cultivating a little garden, and watering it from a fountain; we were both pleased and terrified at the sight, and they, as you may suppose, on their part not less affected, stood fixed in astonishment and could not speak: after some time, however, “Who are you?” said the old man; “and whence come ye? are you daemons of the sea, or unfortunate men, like ourselves? for such we are, born and bred on land, though now inhabitants of another element; swimming along with this great creature, who carries us about with him, not knowing what is to become of us, or whether we are alive or dead.” To which I replied, “We, father, are men as you are, and but just arrived here, being swallowed up, together with our ship, but three days ago; we came this way to see what the wood produced, for it seemed large and full of trees; some good genius led us towards you, and we have the happiness to find we are not the only poor creatures shut up in this great monster; but give us an account of your adventures, let us know who you are, and how you came here.” He would not however, tell us anything himself, or ask us any questions, till he had performed the rites of hospitality; he took us into his house, therefore, where he had got beds, and made everything very commodious; here he presented us with herbs, fruit, fish, and wine: and when we were satisfied, began to inquire into our history; when I acquainted him with everything that had happened to us; the storm we met with; our adventures in the island; our sailing through the air, the war, etc., from our first setting out, even to our descent into the whale’s belly.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He expressed his astonishment at what had befallen us, and then told us his own story, which was as follows:—“Strangers,” said he, “I am a Cyprian by birth, and left my country to merchandise with this youth, who is my son, and several servants. We sailed to Italy with goods of various kinds, some of which you may, perhaps, have seen in the mouth of the whale; we came as far as Sicily with a prosperous gale, when a violent tempest arose, and we were tossed about in the ocean for three days, where we were swallowed up, men, ship and all, by the whale, only we two remaining alive; after burying our companions we built a temple to Neptune, and here we have lived ever since, cultivating our little garden, raising herbs, and eating fish or fruit. The wood, as you see, is very large, and produces many vines, from which we have excellent wine; there is likewise a fountain, which perhaps you have observed, of fresh and very cold water. We make our bed of leaves, have fuel sufficient, and catch a great many birds and live fish. Getting out upon the gills of the whale, there we wash ourselves when we please. There is a salt lake, about twenty stadia round, which produces fish of all kinds, and where we row about in a little boat which we built on purpose. It is now seven-and-twenty years since we were swallowed up. Everything here, indeed, is very tolerable, except our neighbours, who are disagreeable, troublesome, savage, and unsociable.” “And are there more,” replied I, “besides ourselves in the whale?” “A great many,” said he, “and those very unhospitable, and of a most horrible appearance: towards the tail, on the western parts of the wood, live the Tarichanes, <a name="citation104a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote104a">{104a}</a> a people with eel’s eyes, and faces like crabs, bold, warlike, and that live upon raw flesh. On the other side, at the right hand wall, are the Tritonomendetes, <a name="citation104b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote104b">{104b}</a> in their upper parts men, and in the lower resembling weasels. On the left are the Carcinochires, <a name="citation104c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote104c">{104c}</a> and the Thynnocephali, <a name="citation104d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote104d">{104d}</a> who have entered into a league offensive and defensive with each other. The middle part is occupied by the Paguradæ, <a name="citation105a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote105a">{105a}</a> and the Psittopodes, <a name="citation105b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote105b">{105b}</a> a warlike nation, and remarkably swift-footed. The eastern parts, near the whale’s mouth, being washed by the sea, are most of them uninhabited. I have some of these, however, on condition of paying an annual tribute to the Psittopodes of five hundred oysters. Such is the situation of this country; our difficulty is how to oppose so many people, and find sustenance for ourselves.” “How many may there be?” said I. “More than a thousand,” said he. “And what are their arms?” “Nothing,” replied he, “but fish-bones.” “Then,” said I, “we had best go to war with them, for we have arms and they none; if we conquer them we shall live without fear for the future.” This was immediately agreed upon, and, as soon as we returned to our ship, we began to prepare. The cause of the war was to be the non-payment of the tribute, which was just now becoming due: they sent to demand it; he returned a contemptuous answer to the messengers: the Psittopodes and Paguradæ were both highly enraged, and immediately fell upon Scintharus (for that was the old man’s name), in a most violent manner.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We, expecting to be attacked, sent out a detachment of five-and-twenty men, with orders to lie concealed till the enemy was past, and then to rise upon them, which they did, and cut off their rear. We, in the meantime, being likewise five-and-twenty in number, with the old man and his son, waited their coming up, met, and engaged them with no little danger, till at length they fled, and we pursued them even into their trenches. Of the enemy there fell an hundred and twenty; we lost only one, our pilot, who was run through by the rib of a mullet. That day, and the night after it, we remained on the field of battle, and erected the dried backbone of a dolphin as a trophy. Next day some other forces, who had heard of the engagement, arrived, and made head against us; the Tarichanes; under the command of Pelamus, in the right wing, the Thynnocephali on the left, and the Carcinochires in the middle; the Tritonomendetes remained neutral, not choosing to assist either party: we came round upon all the rest by the temple of Neptune, and with a hideous cry, rushed upon them. As they were unarmed, we soon put them to flight, pursued them into the wood, and took possession of their territory. They sent ambassadors a little while after to take away their dead, and propose terms of peace; but we would hear of no treaty, and attacking them the next day, obtained a complete victory, and cut them all off, except the Tritonomendetes, who, informed of what had passed, ran away up to the whale’s gills, and from thence threw themselves into the sea. The country being now cleared of all enemies, we rambled through it, and from that time remained without fear, used what exercise we pleased, went a-hunting, pruned our vines, gathered our fruit, and lived, in short, in every respect like men put together in a large prison, which there was no escaping from, but where they enjoy everything they can wish for in ease and freedom; such was our way of life for a year and eight months.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the fifteenth day of the ninth month, about the second opening of the whale’s mouth (for this he did once every hour, and by that we calculated our time), we were surprised by a sudden noise, like the clash of oars; being greatly alarmed, we crept up into the whale’s mouth, where, standing between his teeth, we beheld one of the most astonishing spectacles that was ever seen; men of an immense size, each of them not less than half a stadium in length, sailing on islands like boats. I know what I am saying is incredible, I shall proceed, notwithstanding: these islands were long, but not very high, and about a hundred stadia in circumference; there were about eight-and-twenty of these men in each of them, besides the rowers on the sides, who rowed with large cypresses, with their branches and leaves on; in the stern stood a pilot raised on an eminence and guiding a brazen helm; on the forecastle were forty immense creatures resembling men, except in their hair, which was all a flame of fire, so that they had no occasion for helmets; these were armed, and fought most furiously; the wind rushing in upon the wood, which was in every one of them, swelled it like a sail and drove them on, according to the pilot’s direction; and thus, like so many long ships, the islands, by the assistance of the oars, also moved with great velocity. At first we saw only two or three, but afterwards there appeared above six hundred of them, which immediately engaged; many were knocked to pieces by running against each other, and many sunk; others were wedged in close together and, not able to get asunder, fought desperately; those who were near the prows showed the greatest alacrity, boarding each other’s ships, and making terrible havoc; none, however, were taken prisoners. For grappling-irons they made use of large sharks chained together, who laid hold of the wood and kept the island from moving: they threw oysters at one another, one of which would have filled a waggon, and sponges of an acre long. Æolocentaurus was admiral of one of the fleets, and Thalassopotes <a name="citation109"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote109">{109}</a> of the other: they had quarrelled, it seems, about some booty; Thalassopotes, as it was reported, having driven away a large tribe of dolphins belonging to Æolocentaurus: this we picked up from their own discourse, when we heard them mention the names of their commanders. At length the forces of Æolocentaurus prevailed, and sunk about a hundred and fifty of the islands of the enemy, and taking three more with the men in them: the rest took to their oars and fled. The conquerors pursued them a little way, and in the evening returned to the wreck, seizing the remainder of the enemy’s vessels, and getting back some of their own, for they had themselves lost no less than fourscore islands in the engagement. They erected a trophy for this victory, hanging one of the conquered islands on the head of the whale, which they fastened their hawsers to, and casting anchor close to him, for they had anchors immensely large and strong, spent the night there: in the morning, after they had returned thanks, and sacrificed on the back of the whale, they buried their dead, sung their Io Pæans, and sailed off. Such was the battle of the islands.</p> <h3 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">BOOK II</h3> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">From this time our abode in the whale growing rather tedious and disagreeable, not able to bear it any longer, I began to think within myself how we might make our escape. My first scheme was to undermine the right-hand wall and get out there; and accordingly we began to cut away, but after getting through about five stadia, and finding it was to no purpose, we left off digging, and determined to set fire to the wood, which we imagined would destroy the whale, and secure us a safe retreat. We began, therefore, by burning the parts near his tail; for seven days and nights he never felt the heat, but on the eighth we perceived he grew sick, for he opened his mouth very seldom, and when he did, shut it again immediately; on the tenth and the eleventh he declined visibly, and began to stink a little; on the twelfth it occurred to us, which we had never thought of before, that unless, whilst he was gaping, somebody could prop up his jaws, to prevent his closing them, we were in danger of being shut up in the carcase, and perishing there: we placed some large beams, therefore, in his mouth, got our ship ready, and took in water, and everything necessary: Scintharus was to be our pilot: the next day the whale died; we drew our vessel through the interstices of his teeth, and let her down from thence into the sea: then, getting on the whale’s back, sacrificed to Neptune, near the spot where the trophy was erected. Here we stayed three days, it being a dead calm, and on the fourth set sail; we struck upon several bodies of the giants that had been slain in the sea-fight, and measured them with the greatest astonishment: for some days we had very mild and temperate weather, but the north-wind arising, it grew so extremely cold, that the whole sea was froze up, not on the surface only, but three or four hundred feet deep, so that we got out and walked on the ice. The frost being so intense that we could not bear it, we put in practice the following scheme, which Scintharus put us in the head of: we dug a cave in the ice, where we remained for thirty days, lighting a fire, and living upon the fish which we found in it; but, our provisions failing, we were obliged to loosen our ship which was stuck fast in, and hoisting a sail, slid along through the ice with an easy pleasant motion; on the fifth day from that time, it grew warm, the ice broke, and it was all water again.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">After sailing about three hundred stadia, we fell in upon a little deserted island: here we took in water, for ours was almost gone, killed with our arrows two wild oxen, and departed. These oxen had horns, not on their heads, but, as Momus seemed to wish, under their eyes. A little beyond this, we got into a sea, not of water, but of milk; and upon it we saw an island full of vines; this whole island was one compact well-made cheese, as we afterwards experienced by many a good meal, which we made upon it, and is in length five-and-twenty stadia. The vines have grapes upon them, which yield not wine, but milk. In the middle of the island was a temple to the Nereid <a name="citation113"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote113">{113}</a> Galatæa, as appeared by an inscription on it: as long as we stayed there, the land afforded us victuals to eat, and the vines supplied us with milk to drink. Tyro, <a name="citation114a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote114a">{114a}</a> the daughter of Salmoneus, we were told, was queen of it, Neptune having, after her death, conferred that dignity upon her.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We stopped five days on this island, and on the sixth set sail with a small breeze, which gently agitated the waves, and on the eighth, changed our milky sea for a green and briny one, where we saw a great number of men running backwards and forwards, resembling ourselves in every part, except the feet, which were all of cork, whence, I suppose, they are called Phellopodes. <a name="citation114b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote114b">{114b}</a> We were surprised to see them not sinking, but rising high above the waves, and making their way without the least fear or apprehension; they came up to, and addressed us in the Greek tongue, telling us they were going to Phello, their native country; they accompanied us a good way, and then taking their leave, wished us a good voyage. A little after we saw several islands, amongst which, to the left of us, stood Phello, to which these men were going, a city built in the middle of a large round cork; towards the right hand, and at a considerable distance, were many others, very large and high, on which we saw a prodigious large fire: fronting the prow of our ship, we had a view of one very broad and flat, and which seemed to be about five hundred stadia off; as we approached near to it, a sweet and odoriferous air came round us, such as Herodotus tells us blows from Arabia Felix; from the rose, the narcissus, the hyacinth, the lily, the violet, the myrtle, the laurel, and the vine. Refreshed with these delightful odours, and in hopes of being at last rewarded for our long sufferings, we came close up to the island; here we beheld several safe and spacious harbours, with clear transparent rivers rolling placidly into the sea; meadows, woods, and birds of all kinds, chanting melodiously on the shore; and, on the trees, the soft and sweet air fanning the branches on every side, which sent forth a soft, harmonious sound, like the playing on a flute; at the same time we heard a noise, not of riot or tumult, but a kind of joyful and convivial sound, as of some playing on the lute or harp, with others joining in the chorus, and applauding them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We cast anchor and landed, leaving our ship in the harbour with Scintharus and two more of our companions. As we were walking through a meadow full of flowers, we met the guardians of the isle, who, immediately chaining us with manacles of roses, for these are their only fetters, conducted us to their king. From these we learned, on our journey, that this place was called the Island of the Blessed, <a name="citation116a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote116a">{116a}</a> and was governed by Rhadamanthus. We were carried before him, and he was sitting that day as judge to try some causes; ours was the fourth in order. The first was that of Ajax Telamonius, <a name="citation116b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote116b">{116b}</a> to determine whether he was to rank with the heroes or not. The accusation ran that he was mad, and had made an end of himself. Much was said on both sides. At length Rhadamanthus pronounced that he should be consigned to the care of Hippocrates, and go through a course of hellebore, after which he might be admitted to the Symposium. The second was a love affair, to decide whether Theseus or Menelaus should possess Helen in these regions; and the decree of Rhadamanthus was, that she should live with Menelaus, who had undergone so many difficulties and dangers for her; besides, that Theseus had other women, the Amazonian lady and the daughters of Minos. The third cause was a point of precedency between Alexander the son of Philip, and Hannibal the Carthaginian, which was given in favour of Alexander, who was placed on a throne next to the elder Cyrus, the Persian. Our cause came on the last. The king asked us how we dared to enter, alone as we were, into that sacred abode. We told him everything that had happened; he commanded us to retire, and consulted with the assessors concerning us. There were many in council with him, and amongst them Aristides, the just Athenian, and pursuant to his opinion it was determined that we should suffer the punishment of our bold curiosity after our deaths, but at present might remain in the island for a certain limited time, associate with the heroes, and then depart; this indulgence was not to exceed seven months.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">At this instant our chains, if so they might be called, dropped off, and we were left at liberty to range over the city, and to partake of the feast of the blessed. The whole city was of gold, <a name="citation118"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote118">{118}</a> and the walls of emerald; the seven gates were all made out of one trunk of the cinnamon-tree; the pavement, within the walls, of ivory; the temples of the gods were of beryl, and the great altars, on which they offered the hecatombs, all of one large amethyst. Round the city flowed a river of the most precious ointment, a hundred cubits in breadth, and deep enough to swim in; the baths are large houses of glass perfumed with cinnamon, and instead of water filled with warm dew. For clothes they wear spider’s webs, very fine, and of a purple colour. They have no bodies, but only the appearance of them, insensible to the touch, and without flesh, yet they stand, taste, move, and speak. Their souls seem to be naked, and separated from them, with only the external similitude of a body, and unless you attempt to touch, you can scarce believe but they have one; they are a kind of upright shadows, <a name="citation119"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote119">{119}</a> only not black. In this place nobody ever grows old: at whatever age they enter here, at that they always remain. They have no night nor bright day, but a perpetual twilight; one equal season reigns throughout the year; it is always spring with them, and no wind blows but Zephyrus. The whole region abounds in sweet flowers and shrubs of every kind; their vines bear twelve times in the year, yielding fruit every month, their apples, pomegranates, and the rest of our autumnal produce, thirteen times, bearing twice in the month of Minos. Instead of corn the fields bring forth loaves of ready-made bread, like mushrooms. There are three hundred and sixty-five fountains of water round the city, as many of honey, and five hundred rather smaller of sweet-scented oil, besides seven rivers of milk and eight of wine.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Their symposia are held in a place without the city, which they call the Elysian Field. This is a most beautiful meadow, skirted by a large and thick wood, affording an agreeable shade to the guests, who repose on couches of flowers; the winds attend upon and bring them everything necessary, except wine, which is otherwise provided, for there are large trees on every side made of the finest glass, the fruit of which are cups of various shapes and sizes. Whoever comes to the entertainment gathers one or more of these cups, which immediately, becomes full of wine, and so they drink of it, whilst the nightingales and other birds of song, with their bills peck the flowers out of the neighbouring fields, and drop them on their heads; thus are they crowned with perpetual garlands. Their manner of perfuming them is this. The clouds suck up the scented oils from the fountains and rivers, and the winds gently fanning them, distil it like soft dew on those who are assembled there. At supper they have music also, and singing, particularly the verses of Homer, who is himself generally at the feast, and sits next above Ulysses, with a chorus of youths and virgins. He is led in accompanied by Eunomus the Locrian, <a name="citation121a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote121a">{121a}</a> Arion of Lesbos, Anacreon, and Stesichorus, <a name="citation121b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote121b">{121b}</a> whom I saw there along with them, and who at length is reconciled to Helen. When they have finished their songs, another chorus begins of swans, <a name="citation122a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote122a">{122a}</a> swallows, and nightingales, and to these succeeds the sweet rustling of the zephyrs, that whistle through the woods and close the concert. What most contributes to their happiness is, that near the symposium are two fountains, the one of milk, the other of pleasure; from the first they drink at the beginning of the feast; there is nothing afterwards but joy and festivity.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I will now tell you what men of renown I met with there. And first there were all the demigods, and all the heroes that fought at Troy except Ajax the Locrian, <a name="citation122b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote122b">{122b}</a> who alone, it seems, was condemned to suffer for his crimes in the habitations of the wicked. Then there were of the barbarians both the Cyruses, Anacharsis the Scythian, Zamolxis of Thrace, <a name="citation123a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote123a">{123a}</a> and Numa the Italian; <a name="citation123b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote123b">{123b}</a> besides these I met with Lycurgus the Spartan, Phocion and Tellus of Athens, and all the wise men except Periander. <a name="citation123c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote123c">{123c}</a> I saw also Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, prating with Nestor and Palamedes; near him were Hyacinthus of Sparta, Narcissus the Thespian, Hylas, and several other beauties: he seemed very fond of Hyacinthus. Some things were laid to his charge: it was even reported that Rhadamanthus was very angry with him, and threatened to turn him out of the island if he continued to play the fool, and would not leave off his irony and sarcasm. Of all the philosophers, Plato <a name="citation123d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote123d">{123d}</a> alone was not to be found there, but it seems he lived in a republic of his own building, and which was governed by laws framed by himself. Aristippus and Epicurus were in the highest esteem here as the most polite, benevolent, and convivial of men. Even Æsop the Phrygian was here, whom they made use of by way of buffoon. Diogenes of Sinope had so wonderfully changed his manners in this place, that he married Lais the harlot, danced and sang, got drunk, and played a thousand freaks. Not one Stoic did I see amongst them; they, it seems, were not yet got up to the top of the high hill <a name="citation124a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote124a">{124a}</a> of virtue; and as to Chrysippus, we were told that he was not to enter the island till he had taken a fourth dose of hellebore. The Academicians, we heard, were very desirous of coming here, but they stood doubting and deliberating about it, neither were they quite certain whether there was such a place as Elysium or not; perhaps they were afraid of Rhadamanthus’s judgment <a name="citation124b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote124b">{124b}</a> on them, as decisive judgments are what they would never allow. Many of them, it is reported, followed those who were coming to the island, but being too lazy to proceed, turned back when they were got half way.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such were the principal persons whom I met with here. Achilles is had in the greatest honour among them, and next to him Theseus.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Two or three days after my arrival I met with the poet Homer, and both of us being quite at leisure, asked him several questions, and amongst the rest where he was born, that, as I informed him, having been long a matter of dispute amongst us. We were very ignorant indeed, he said, for some had made him a Chian, others a native of Smyrna, others of Colophon, but that after all he was a Babylonian, and amongst them was called Tigranes, though, after being a hostage in Greece, they had changed his name to Homer. I then asked him about those of his verses which are rejected as spurious, and whether they were his or not. He said they were all his own, which made me laugh at the nonsense of Zenodotus and Aristarchus the grammarians. I then asked him how he came to begin his “Iliad” with the wrath of Achilles; he said it was all by chance. I desired likewise to know whether, as it was generally reported, he wrote the “Odyssey” before the “Iliad.” He said, no. It is commonly said he was blind, but I soon found he was not so; for he made use of his eyes and looked at me, so that I had no reason to ask him that question. Whenever I found him disengaged, I took the opportunity of conversing with him, and he very readily entered into discourse with me, especially after the victory which he obtained over Thersites, who had accused him of turning him into ridicule in some of his verses. The cause was heard before Rhadamanthus, and Homer came off victorious. Ulysses pleaded for him.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I met also Pythagoras the Samian, who arrived in these regions after his soul had gone a long round in the bodies of several animals, having been changed seven times. All his right side was of gold, and there was some dispute whether he should be called Pythagoras or Euphorbus. Empedocles came likewise, who looked sodden and roasted all over. He desired admittance, but though he begged hard for it, was rejected.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A little time after the games came on, which they call here Thanatusia. <a name="citation126"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote126">{126}</a> Achilles presided for the fifth time, and Theseus for the seventh. A narrative of the whole would be tedious; I shall only, therefore, recount a few of the principal circumstances in the wrestling match. Carus, a descendant of Hercules, conquered Ulysses at the boxing match; Areus the Egyptian, who was buried at Corinth, and Epeus contended, but neither got the victory. The Pancratia was not proposed amongst them. In the race I do not remember who had the superiority. In poetry Homer was far beyond them all; Hesiod, however, got a prize. The reward to all was a garland of peacock’s feathers.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When the games were over word was brought that the prisoners in Tartarus had broken loose, overcome the guard, and were proceeding to take possession of the island under the command of Phalaris the Agrigentine, <a name="citation127a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote127a">{127a}</a> Busiris of Egypt, <a name="citation127b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote127b">{127b}</a> Diomede the Thracian, <a name="citation128a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote128a">{128a}</a> Scyron, <a name="citation128b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote128b">{128b}</a> and Pityocamptes. As soon as Rhadamanthus heard of it he despatched the heroes to the shore, conducted by Theseus, Achilles, and Ajax Telamonius, who was now returned to his senses. A battle ensued, wherein the heroes were victorious, owing principally to the valour of Achilles. Socrates, who was placed in the right wing, behaved much better than he had done at Delius <a name="citation128c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote128c">{128c}</a> in his life-time, for when the enemy approached he never fled, nor so much as turned his face about. He had a very extraordinary present made him as the reward of his courage, no less than a fine spacious garden near the city; here he summoned his friends and disputed, calling the place by the name of the Academy of the Dead. They then bound the prisoners and sent them back to Tartarus, to suffer double punishment. Homer wrote an account of this battle, and gave it me to show it to our people when I went back, but I lost it afterwards, together with a great many other things. It began thus—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Sing, Muse, the battles of the heroes dead—”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The campaign thus happily finished, they made an entertainment to celebrate the victory, which, as is usual amongst them, was a bean-feast. Pythagoras alone absented himself on that day, and fasted, holding in abomination the wicked custom of eating beans.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Six months had now elapsed, when a new and extraordinary affair happened. Cinyrus, the son of Scintharus, a tall, well-made, handsome youth, fell in love with Helen, and she no less desperately with him. They were often nodding and drinking to one another at the public feasts, and would frequently rise up and walk out together alone into the wood. The violence of his passion, joined to the impossibility of possessing her any other way, put Cinyrus on the resolution of running away with her. She imagined that they might easily get off to some of the adjacent islands, either to Phellus or Tyroessa. He selected three of the bravest of our crew to accompany them; never mentioning the design to his father, who he knew would never consent to it, but the first favourable opportunity, put it in execution; and one night when I was not with them (for it happened that I stayed late at the feast, and slept there) carried her off.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Menelaus, rising in the middle of the night, and perceiving that his wife was gone, made a dreadful noise about it, and, taking his brother along with him, proceeded immediately to the king’s palace. At break of day the guards informed him that they had seen a vessel a good distance from land. He immediately put fifty heroes on board a ship made out of one large piece of the asphodelus, with orders to pursue them. They made all the sail they possibly could, and about noon came up with and seized on them, just as they were entering into the Milky Sea, close to Tyroessa; so near were they to making their escape. The pursuers threw a rosy chain over the vessel and brought her home again. Helen began to weep, blushed, and hid her face. Rhadamanthus asked Cinyrus and the rest of them if they had any more accomplices: they told him they had none. He then ordered them to be chained, whipped with mallows, and sent to Tartarus.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It was now determined that we should stay no longer on the island than the time limited, and the very next day was fixed for our departure. This gave me no little concern, and I wept to think I must leave so many good things, and be once more a wanderer. They endeavoured to administer consolation to me by assuring me that in a few years I should return to them again; they even pointed out the seat that should be allotted to me, and which was near the best and worthiest inhabitants of these delightful mansions. I addressed myself to Rhadamanthus, and humbly entreated him to inform me of my future fate, and let me know beforehand whether I should travel. He told me that, after many toils and dangers, I should at last return in safety to my native country, but would not point out the time when. He then showed me the neighbouring islands, five of which appeared near to me, and a sixth at a distance. “Those next to you,” said he, “where you see a great fire burning, are the habitations of the wicked; the sixth is the city of dreams; behind that lies the island of Calypso, which you cannot see yet. When you get beyond these you will come to a large tract of land inhabited by those who live on the side of the earth directly opposite to you, <a name="citation132"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote132">{132}</a> there you will suffer many things, wander through several nations, and meet with some very savage and unsociable people, and at length get into another region.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Having said thus, he took a root of mallow out of the earth, and putting it into my hand, bade me remember, when I was in any danger, to call upon that; and added, moreover, that if, when I came to the Antipodes, I took care “never to stir the fire with a sword, and never to eat lupines,” I might have hopes of returning to the Island of the Blessed.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I then got everything ready for the voyage, supped with, and took my leave of them. Next day, meeting Homer, I begged him to make me a couple of verses for an inscription, which he did, and I fixed them on a little column of beryl, at the mouth of the harbour; the inscription was as follows:</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Dear to the gods, and favourite of heaven,<br /> Here Lucian lived: to him alone ’twas given,<br /> Well pleased these happy regions to explore,<br /> And back returning, seek his native shore.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I stayed that day, and the next set sail; the heroes attending to take their leave of us; when Ulysses, unknown to Penelope, slipped a letter into my hand for Calypso, at the island of Ogygia. Rhadamanthus was so obliging as to send with us Nauplius the pilot, that, if we stopped at the neighbouring islands, and they should lay hold on us, he might acquaint them that we were only on our passage to another place.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As soon as we got out of the sweet-scented air, we came into another that smelt of asphaltus, pitch, and sulphur burning together, with a most intolerable stench, as of burned carcases: the whole element above us was dark and dismal, distilling a kind of pitchy dew upon our heads; we heard the sound of stripes, and the yellings of men in torment.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We saw but one of these islands; that which we landed on I will give you some description of. Every part of it was steep and filthy, abounding in rocks and rough mountains. We crept along, over precipices full of thorns and briers, and, passing through a most horrid country, came to the dungeon, and place of punishment, which we beheld with an admiration full of horror: the ground was strewed with swords and prongs, and close to us were three rivers, one of mire, another of blood, and another of fire, immense and impassable, that flowed in torrents, and rolled like waves in the sea; it had many fish in it, some like torches, others resembling live coals; which they called lychnisci. There is but one entrance into the three rivers, and at the mouth of them stood, as porter, Timon of Athens. By the assistance, however, of our guide, Nauplius, we proceeded, and saw several punished, <a name="citation135a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote135a">{135a}</a> as well kings as private persons, and amongst these some of our old acquaintance; we saw Cinyrus, <a name="citation135b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote135b">{135b}</a> hung up and roasting there. Our guides gave us the history of several of them, and told us what they were punished for; those, we observed, suffered most severely who in their lifetimes had told lies, or written what was not true, amongst whom were Ctesias the Cnidian, Herodotus, and many others. When I saw these I began to conceive good hopes of hereafter, as I am not conscious of ever having told a story.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Not able to bear any longer such melancholy spectacles, we took our leave of Nauplius, and returned to our ship. In a short time after we had a view, but confused and indistinct, of the Island of Dreams, which itself was not unlike a dream, for as we approached towards it, it seemed as it were to retire and fly from us. At last, however, we got up to it, and entered the harbour, which is called Hypnus, <a name="citation136a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote136a">{136a}</a> near the ivory gates, where there is a harbour dedicated to the cock. <a name="citation136b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote136b">{136b}</a> We landed late in the evening, and saw several dreams of various kinds. I propose, however, at present, to give you an account of the place itself, which nobody has ever written about, except Homer, whose description is very imperfect.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Round the island is a very thick wood; the trees are all tall poppies, or mandragoræ, <a name="citation136c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote136c">{136c}</a> in which are a great number of bats; for these are the only birds they have here; there is likewise a river which they call Nyctiporus, <a name="citation136d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote136d">{136d}</a> and round the gates two fountains: the name of one is Negretos, <a name="citation137a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote137a">{137a}</a> and of the other Pannychia. <a name="citation137b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote137b">{137b}</a> The city has a high wall, of all the colours of the rainbow. It has not two gates, as Homer <a name="citation137c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote137c">{137c}</a> tells us, but four; two of which look upon the plain of Indolence, one made of iron, the other of brick; through these are said to pass all the dreams that are frightful, bloody, and melancholy; the other two, fronting the sea and harbour, one of horn, the other, which we came through, of ivory; on the right hand, as you enter the city, is the temple of Night, who, together with the cock, is the principal object of worship amongst them. This is near the harbour; on the left is the palace of Somnus, for he is their sovereign, and under him are two viceroys, Taraxion, <a name="citation138a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote138a">{138a}</a> the son of Matæogenes, and Plutocles, <a name="citation138b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote138b">{138b}</a> the son of Phantasion. In the middle of the market-place stands a fountain, which they call Careotis, <a name="citation138c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote138c">{138c}</a> and two temples of Truth and Falsehood; there is an oracle here, at which Antiphon presides as high-priest; he is inventor of the dreams, an honourable employment, which Somnus bestowed upon him.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The dreams themselves are of different kinds, some long, beautiful, and pleasant, others little and ugly; there are likewise some golden ones, others poor and mean; some winged and of an immense size, others tricked out as it were for pomps and ceremonies, for gods and kings; some we met with that we had seen at home; these came up to and saluted us as their old acquaintance, whilst others putting us first to sleep, treated us most magnificently, and promised that they would make us kings and noblemen: some carried us into our own country, showed us our friends and relations, and brought us back again the same day. Thirty days and nights we remained in this place, being most luxuriously feasted, and fast asleep all the time, when we were suddenly awaked by a violent clap of thunder, and immediately ran to our ship, put in our stores, and set sail. In three days we reached the island of Ogygia. Before we landed, I broke open the letter, and read the contents, which were as follows:</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><i>ULYSSES TO CALYPSO</i></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">“This comes to inform you, that after my departure from your coasts in the vessel which you were so kind as to provide me with, I was shipwrecked, and saved with the greatest difficulty by Leucothea, who conveyed me to the country of the Phæacians, and from thence I got home; where I found a number of suitors about my wife, revelling there at my expense. I destroyed every one of them, and was afterwards slain myself by Telegonus, a son whom I had by Circe. I still lament the pleasures which I left behind at Ogygia, and the immortality which you promised me; if I can ever find an opportunity, I will certainly make my escape from hence, and come to you.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">This was the whole of the epistle except, that at the end of it he recommended us to her protection.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On our landing, at a little distance from the sea, I found the cave, as described by Homer, and in it Calypso, spinning; she took the letter, put it in her bosom, and wept; then invited us to sit down, and treated us magnificently. She then asked us several questions about Ulysses, and inquired whether Penelope was handsome and as chaste as Ulysses had reported her to be. We answered her in such a manner as we thought would please her best; and then returning to our ship, slept on board close to the shore.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the morning, a brisk gale springing up, we set sail. For two days we were tossed about in a storm; the third drove us on the pirates of Colocynthos. These are a kind of savages from the neighbouring islands, who commit depredations on all that sail that way. They have large ships made out of gourds, six cubits long; when the fruit is dry, they hollow and work it into this shape, using reeds for masts, and making their sails out of the leaves of the plant. They joined the crews of two ships and attacked us, wounding many of us with cucumber seeds, which they threw instead of stones. After fighting some time without any material advantage on either side, about noon we saw just behind them some of the Caryonautæ, <a name="citation141a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote141a">{141a}</a> whom we found to be avowed enemies to the Colocynthites, <a name="citation141b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote141b">{141b}</a> who, on their coming up, immediately quitted us, and fell upon them. We hoisted our sail, and got off, leaving them to fight it out by themselves; the Caryonautæ were most probably the conquerors, as they were more in number, for they had five ships, which besides were stronger and better built than those of the enemy, being made of the shells of nuts cut in two, and hollowed, every half-nut being fifty paces long. As soon as we got out of their sight, we took care of our wounded men, and from that time were obliged to be always armed and prepared in case of sudden attack. We had too much reason to fear, for scarce was the sun set when we saw about twenty men from a desert island advancing towards us, each on the back of a large dolphin. These were pirates also: the dolphins carried them very safely, and seemed pleased with their burden, neighing like horses. When they came up, they stood at a little distance, and threw dried cuttle-fish and crabs’-eyes at us; but we, in return, attacking them with our darts and arrows, many of them were wounded; and, unable to stand it any longer, they retreated to the island.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the middle of the night, the sea being quite calm, we unfortunately struck upon a halcyon’s nest, of an immense size, being about sixty stadia in circumference; the halcyon was sitting upon it, and was herself not much less; as she flew off, she was very near oversetting our ship with the wind of her wings, and, as she went, made a most hideous groaning. As soon as it was day we took a view of the nest, which was like a great ship, and built of trees; in it were five hundred eggs, each of them longer than a hogshead of Chios. We could hear the young ones croaking within; so, with a hatchet we broke one of the eggs, and took the chicken out unfledged; it was bigger than twenty vultures put together.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When we were got about two hundred stadia from the nest, we met with some surprising prodigies. A cheniscus came, and sitting on the prow of our ship, clapped his wings and made a noise. Our pilot Scintharus had been bald for many years, when on a sudden his hair came again. But what was still more wonderful, the mast of our ship sprouted out, sent forth several branches, and bore fruit at the top of it, large figs, and grapes not quite ripe. We were greatly astonished, as you may suppose, and prayed most devoutly to the gods to avert the evil which was portended.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We had not gone above five hundred stadia farther before we saw an immensely large and thick wood of pines and cypresses; we took it for a tract of land, but it was all a deep sea, planted with trees that had no root, which stood, however, unmoved, upright, and, as it were, swimming in it. Approaching near to it, we began to consider what we could do best. There was no sailing between the trees, which were close together, nor did we know how to get back. I got upon one of the highest of them, to see how far they reached, and perceived that they continued for about fifty stadia or more, and beyond that it was all sea again; we resolved therefore to drag the ship up to the top boughs, which were very thick, and so convey it along, which, by fixing a great rope to it, with no little toil and difficulty, we performed; got it up, spread our sails, and were driven on by the wind. It put me in mind of that verse of Antimachus the poet, where he says—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “The ship sailed smoothly through the sylvan sea.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We at length got over the wood, and, letting our ship down in the same manner, fell into smooth clear water, till we came to a horrid precipice, hollow and deep, resembling the cavity made by an earthquake. We furled our sails, or should soon have been swallowed up in it. Stooping forward, and looking down, we beheld a gulf of at least a thousand stadia deep, a most dreadful and amazing sight, for the sea as it were was split in two. Looking towards our right hand, however, we saw a small bridge of water that joined the two seas, and flowed from one into the other; we got the ship in here, and with great labour rowed her over, which we never expected.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">From thence we passed into a smooth and calm sea, wherein was a small island with a good landing place, and which was inhabited by the Bucephali: a savage race of men, with bulls’ heads and horns, as they paint the minotaur. As soon as we got on shore we went in search of water and provision, for we had none left; water we found soon, but nothing else; we heard, indeed, a kind of lowing at a distance, and expected to find a herd of oxen, but, advancing a little farther, perceived that it came from the men. As soon as they saw us, they ran after and took two of our companions; the rest of us got back to the ship as fast as we could. We then got our arms, and, determined to revenge our friends, attacked them as they were dividing the flesh of our poor companions: they were soon thrown into confusion and totally routed; we slew about fifty of them, and took two prisoners, whom we returned with. All this time we could get no provision. Some were for putting the captives to death, but not approving of this, I kept them bound till the enemy should send ambassadors to redeem them, which they did; for we soon heard them lowing in a melancholy tone, and most humbly beseeching us to release their friends. The ransom agreed on was a quantity of cheeses, dried fish, and onions, together with four stags, each having three feet, two behind and one before. In consideration of this, we released the prisoners, stayed one day there, and set sail.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We soon observed the fish swimming and the birds flying round about us, with other signs of our being near the land; and in a very little time after saw some men in the sea, who made use of a very uncommon method of sailing, being themselves both ships and passengers. I will tell you how they did it; they laid themselves all along in the water, they fastened to their middle a sail, and holding the lower part of the rope in their hands, were carried along by the wind. Others we saw, sitting on large casks, driving two dolphins who were yoked together, and drew the carriage after them: these did not run away from, nor attempt to do us any injury; but rode round about us without fear, observing our vessel with great attention, and seeming greatly astonished at it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It was now almost dark, when we came in sight of a small island inhabited by women, as we imagined, for such they appeared to us, being all young and handsome, with long garments reaching to their feet. The island was called Cabalusa, and the city Hydamardia. <a name="citation147a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote147a">{147a}</a> I stopped a little, for my mind misgave me, and looking round, saw several bones and skulls of men on the ground; to make a noise, call my companions together, and take up arms, I thought would be imprudent. I pulled out my mallow, <a name="citation147b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote147b">{147b}</a> therefore, and prayed most devoutly that I might escape the present evil; and a little time afterwards, as one of the strangers was helping us to something, I perceived, instead of a woman’s foot, the hoof of an ass. Upon this I drew my sword, seized on and bound her, and insisted on her telling me the truth with regard to everything about them. She informed me, much against her will, that she and the rest of the inhabitants were women belonging to the sea, that they were called Onoscileas, <a name="citation148"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote148">{148}</a> and that they lived upon travellers who came that way. “We make them drunk,” said she, “and when they are asleep, make an end of them.” As soon as she had told me this, I left her bound there, and getting upon the house, called out to my companions, brought them together, showed them the bones, and led them in to her; when on a sudden she dissolved away into water, and disappeared. I dipped my sword into it by way of experiment, and the water turned into blood.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We proceeded immediately to our vessel and departed. At break of day we had a view of that continent which we suppose lies directly opposite to our own. Here, after performing our religious rites, and putting up our prayers, we consulted together about what was to be done next. Some were of opinion that, after making a little descent on the coast, we should turn back again; others were for leaving the ship there, and marching up into the heart of the country, to explore the inhabitants. Whilst we were thus disputing a violent storm arose, and driving our ship towards the land, split it in pieces. We picked up our arms, and what little things we could lay hold on, and with difficulty swam ashore.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such were the adventures which befell us during our voyage, at sea, in the islands, in the air, in the whale, amongst the heroes, in the land of dreams, and lastly, amongst the Bucephali, and the Onoscileæ. What we met with on the other side of the world, shall be related in the ensuing books. <a name="citation149"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote149">{149}</a></p> <h3 style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">ICARO-MENIPPUS. A DIALOGUE</h3> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><i>This Dialogue, which is also called by the commentators</i> ‘Υπερνεφελος, <i>or, “Above the Clouds,” has a great deal of easy wit and humour in it, without the least degree of stiffness or obscurity; it is equally severe on the gods and philosophers; and paints, in the warmest colours, the glaring absurdity of the whole pagan system.</i></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS AND A FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Three thousand stadia <a name="citation153"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote153">{153}</a> from the earth to the moon, my first resting-place; from thence up to the sun about five hundred parasangas; and from the sun to the highest heaven, and the palace of Jupiter, as far as a swift eagle could fly in a day.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">What are you muttering to yourself, Menippus, talking about the stars, and pretending to measure distances? As I walk behind you, I hear of nothing but suns and moons, parasangas, stations, and I know not what.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Marvel not, my friend, if I utter things aërial and sublime; for I am recounting the wonders of my late journey.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">What! tracing your road by the stars, as the Phœnicians <a name="citation154"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote154">{154}</a> do!</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Not so, by Jove! I have been amongst the stars themselves.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">You must have had a long dream, indeed, to travel so many leagues in it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is no dream, I assure you; I am just arrived from Jupiter.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">How say you? Menippus let down from heaven?</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Even so: this moment come from thence, where I have seen and heard things most strange and miraculous. If you doubt the truth of them, the happier shall I be to have seen what is past belief.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">How is it possible, most heavenly and divine Menippus, that a mere mortal, like me, should dispute the veracity of one who has been carried above the clouds: one, to speak in the language of Homer, of the inhabitants <a name="citation155"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote155">{155}</a> of heaven? But inform me, I beseech you, which way you got up, and how you procured so many ladders; for, by your appearance, I should not take you for another Phrygian boy, <a name="citation156"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote156">{156}</a> to be carried up by an eagle, and made a cup-bearer of.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">You are an old scoffer, I know, and therefore I am not surprised that an account of things above the comprehensions of the vulgar should appear like a fable to you; but, let me tell you, I wanted no ladders, nor an eagle’s beak, to transport me thither, for I had wings of my own.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">This was beyond Dædalus himself, to be metamorphosed thus into a hawk, or jay, and we know nothing of it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">You are not far from the mark, my friend; for my wings were a kind of Dædalian contrivance.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Thou art a bold rogue indeed, and meant no doubt, if you had chanced to fall into any part of the ocean, to have called it, as Icarus <a name="citation157a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote157a">{157a}</a> did, by your own name, and styled it the Menippean Sea.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Not so; his wings were glued on with wax, and when the sun melted it, could not escape falling; but mine had no wax in them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Indeed! now shall I quickly know the truth of this affair.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">You shall: I took, you must know, a very large eagle <a name="citation157b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote157b">{157b}</a> and a vulture also, one of the strongest I could get, and cut off their wings; but, if you have leisure, I will tell you the whole expedition from beginning to end.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Pray do, for I long to hear it: by Jove the Friendly, I entreat thee, keep me no longer in suspense, for I am hung by the ears.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Listen, then, for I would by no means baulk an inquisitive friend, especially one who is nailed by the ears, as you are. Finding, on a close examination, that everything here below, such as riches, honours, empire, and dominion, were all ridiculous and absurd, of no real value or estimation, considering them, withal, as so many obstacles to the study of things more worthy of contemplation, I looked up towards nobler objects, and meditated on the great universe before me; doubts immediately arose concerning what philosophers call the world; nor could I discover how it came into existence, its creator, the beginning or the end of it. When I descended to its several parts, I was still more in the dark: I beheld the stars, scattered as it were by the hand of chance, over the heavens; I saw the sun, and wished to know what it was; above all, the nature of the Moon appeared to me most wonderful and extraordinary; the diversity of its forms pointed out some hidden cause which I could not account for; the lightning also, which pierces through everything, the impetuous thunder, the rain, hail, and snow, <a name="citation159"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote159">{159}</a> all raised my admiration, and seemed inexplicable to human reason. In this situation of mind, the best thing I thought which I could possibly do was to consult the philosophers; they, I made no doubt, were acquainted with the truth, and could impart it to me. Selecting, therefore, the best of them, as well as I could judge from the paleness and severity of their countenances, and the length of their beards (for they seemed all to be high-speaking and heavenly-minded men), into the hands of these I entirely resigned myself, and partly by ready money, partly by the promise of more, when they had made me completely wise, I engaged them to teach me the perfect knowledge of the universe, and how to talk on sublime subjects; but so far were they from removing my ignorance, that they only threw me into greater doubt and uncertainty, by puzzling me with atoms, vacuums, beginnings, ends, ideas, forms, and so forth: and the worst of all was, that though none agreed with the rest in what they advanced, but were all of contrary opinions, yet did every one of them expect that I should implicitly embrace his tenets, and subscribe to his doctrine.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is astonishing that such wise men should disagree, and, with regard to the same things, should not all be of the same opinion.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">You will laugh, my friend, when I shall tell you of their pride and impudence in the relation of extraordinary events; to think that men, who creep upon this earth, and are not a whit wiser, or can see farther than ourselves, some of them old, blind, and lazy, should pretend to know the limits and extent of heaven, measure the sun’s circuit, and walk above the moon; that they should tell us the size and form of the stars, as if they were just come down from them; that those who scarcely know how many furlongs it is from Athens to Megara, should inform you exactly how many cubits distance the sun is from the moon, should mark out the height of the air, and the depth of the sea, describe circles, from squares upon triangles, make spheres, and determine the length and breadth of heaven itself: is it not to the last degree impudent and audacious? When they talk of things thus obscure and unintelligible, not merely to offer their opinions as conjectures, but boldly to urge and insist upon them: to do everything but swear, that the sun <a name="citation161"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote161">{161}</a> is a mass of liquid fire, that the moon is inhabited, that the stars drink water, and that the sun draws up the moisture from the sea, as with a well-rope, and distributes his draught over the whole creation? How little they agree upon any one thing, and what a variety of tenets they embrace, is but too evident; for first, with regard to the world, their opinions are totally different; some affirm that it hath neither beginning nor end; some, whom I cannot but admire, point out to us the manner of its construction, and the maker of it, a supreme deity, whom they worship as creator of the universe; but they have not told us whence he came, nor where he exists; neither, before the formation of this world, can we have any idea of time or place.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">These are, indeed, bold and presumptuous diviners.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">But what would you say, my dear friend, were you to hear them disputing, concerning ideal <a name="citation162"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote162">{162}</a> and incorporeal substances, and talking about finite and infinite? for this is a principal matter of contention between them; some confining all things within certain limits, others prescribing none. Some assert that there are many worlds, <a name="citation163a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote163a">{163a}</a> and laugh at those who affirm there is but one; whilst another, <a name="citation163b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote163b">{163b}</a> no man of peace, gravely assures us that war is the original parent of all things. Need I mention to you their strange opinions concerning the deities? One says, that number <a name="citation163c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote163c">{163c}</a> is a god; others swear by dogs, <a name="citation164"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote164">{164}</a> geese, and plane-trees. Some give the rule of everything to one god alone, and take away all power from the rest, a scarcity of deities which I could not well brook; others more liberal, increased the number of gods, and gave to each his separate province and employment, calling one the first, and allotting to others the second or third rank of divinity. Some held that gods were incorporeal, and without form; others supposed them to have bodies. It was by no means universally acknowledged that the gods took cognisance of human affairs; some there were who exempted them from all care and solicitude, as we exonerate our old men from business and trouble; bringing them in like so many mute attendants on the stage. There are some too, who go beyond all this, and deny that there are any gods at all, but assert that the world is left without any guide or master.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I could not tell how to refuse my assent to these high-sounding and long-bearded gentlemen, and yet could find no argument amongst them all, that had not been refuted by some or other of them; often was I on the point of giving credit to one, when, as Homer says,</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “To other thoughts,<br /> My heart inclined.” <a name="citation165a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote165a">{165a}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The only way, therefore, to put an end to all my doubts, was, I thought, to make a bird of myself, and fly up to heaven. This my own eager desires represented as probable, and the fable-writer Æsop <a name="citation165b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote165b">{165b}</a> confirmed it, who carries up, not only his eagles, but his beetles, and camels thither. To make wings for myself was impossible, but to fit those of a vulture and an eagle to my body, might, I imagined, answer the same purpose. I resolved, therefore, to try the experiment, and cut off the right wing of one, and the left of the other; bound them on with thongs, and at the extremities made loops for my hands; then, raising myself by degrees, just skimmed above the ground, like the geese. When, finding my project succeed, I made a bold push, got upon the Acropolis <a name="citation166a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote166a">{166a}</a> and from thence slid down to the theatre. Having got so far without danger or difficulty, I began to meditate greater things, and setting off from Parnethes or Hymettus <a name="citation166b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote166b">{166b}</a> flew to Geranea, <a name="citation166c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote166c">{166c}</a> and from thence to the top of the tower at Corinth; from thence over Pholoe <a name="citation166d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote166d">{166d}</a> and Erymanthus quite to Taygetus. And now, resolving to strike a bold stroke, as I was already become a high flyer, and perfect in my art, I no longer confined myself to chicken flights, but getting upon Olympus, and taking a little light provision with me, I made the best of my way directly towards heaven. The extreme height which I soared to brought on a giddiness at first, but this soon went off; and when I got as far the Moon, having left a number of clouds behind me, I found a weariness, particularly in my vulture wing. I halted, therefore, to rest myself a little, and looking down from thence upon the earth, like Homer’s Jupiter, beheld the places—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Where the brave Mycians prove their martial force,<br /> And hardy Thracians tame the savage horse;<br /> Then India, Persia, and all-conquering Greece.” <a name="citation167"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote167">{167}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">which gave me wonderful pleasure and satisfaction.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Let me have an exact account of all your travels, I beseech you, omit not the least particular, but give me your observations upon everything; I expect to hear a great deal about the form and figure of the earth, and how it all appeared to you from such an eminence.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And so you shall; ascend, therefore, in imagination with me to the Moon, and consider the situation and appearance of the earth from thence: suppose it to seem, as it did to me, much less than the moon, insomuch, that when I first looked down, I could not find the high mountains, and the great sea; and, if it had not been for the Rhodian Colossus, <a name="citation168"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote168">{168}</a> and the tower of Pharos, should not have known where the earth stood. At length, however, by the reflection of the sunbeams, the ocean appeared, and showed me the land, when, keeping my eyes fixed upon it, I beheld clearly and distinctly everything that was doing upon earth, not only whole nations and cities, but all the inhabitants of them, whether waging war, cultivating their fields, trying causes, or anything else; their women, animals, everything, in short, was before me.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Most improbable, all this, and contradictory; you told me but just before, that the earth was so little by its great distance, that you could scarce find it, and, if it had not been for the Colossus, it would not have appeared at all; and now, on a sudden, like another Lynceus, you can spy out men, trees, animals, nay, I suppose, even a flea’s nest, if you chose it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I thank you for putting me in mind of what I had forgot to mention. When I beheld the earth, but could not distinguish the objects upon it, on account of the immense distance, I was horribly vexed at it, and ready to cry, when, on a sudden, Empedocles <a name="citation169"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote169">{169}</a> the philosopher stood behind me, all over ashes, as black as a coal, and dreadfully scorched: when I saw him, I must own I was frightened, and took him for some demon of the moon; but he came up to me, and cried out, “Menippus, don’t be afraid,</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “I am no god, why call’st thou me divine?” <a name="citation170"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote170">{170}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I am Empedocles, the naturalist: after I had leaped into the furnace, a vapour from Ætna carried me up hither, and here I live in the moon and feed upon dew: I am come to free you from your present distress.” “You are very kind,” said I, “most noble Empedocles, and when I fly back to Greece, I shall not forget to pay my devotions to you in the tunnel of my chimney every new moon.” “Think not,” replied he, “that I do this for the sake of any reward I might expect for it; by Endymion, <a name="citation171"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote171">{171}</a> that is not the case, but I was really grieved to see you so uneasy: and now, how shall we contrive to make you see clear?” “That, by Jove,” said I, “I cannot guess, unless you can take off this mist from my eyes, for they are horribly dim at present.” “You have brought the remedy along with you.” “How so?” “Have you not got an eagle’s wing?” “True, but what has that to do with an eye?” “An eagle, you know, is more sharp-sighted than any other creature, and the only one that can look against the sun: your true royal bird is known by never winking at the rays, be they ever so strong.” “So I have heard, and I am sorry I did not, before I came up, take out my own eyes and put in the eagle’s; thus imperfect, to be sure, I am not royally furnished, but a kind of bastard bird.” “You may have one royal eye, for all that, if you please; it is only when you rise up to fly, holding the vulture’s wing still, and moving the eagle’s only; by which means, you will see clearly with one, though not at all with the other.” “That will do, and is sufficient for me; I have often seen smiths, and other artists, look with one eye only, to make their work the truer.” This conversation ended, Empedocles vanished into smoke, and I saw no more of him. I acted as he advised me, and no sooner moved my eagle’s wing, than a great light came all around me, and I saw everything as clear as possible: looking down to earth, I beheld distinctly cities and men, and everything that passed amongst them; not only what they did openly, but whatever was going on at home, and in their own houses, where they thought to conceal it. I saw Lysimachus betrayed by his son; <a name="citation172a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote172a">{172a}</a> Antiochus intriguing with his mother-in-law; <a name="citation172b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote172b">{172b}</a> Alexander the Thessalian slain by his wife; and Attalus poisoned by his son: in another place I saw Arsaces killing his wife, and the eunuch Arbaces drawing his sword upon Arsaces; Spartim, the Mede, dragged by the heels from the banquet by his guards, and knocked on the head with a cup. In the palaces of Scythia and Thrace the same wickedness was going forward; and nothing could I see but murderers, adulterers, conspirators, false swearers, men in perpetual terrors, and betrayed by their dearest friends and acquaintance.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Such was the employment of kings and great men: in private houses there was something more ridiculous; there I saw Hermodorus the Epicurean forswearing himself for a thousand drachmas; Agathocles the Stoic quarrelling with his disciples about the salary for tuition; Clinias the orator stealing a phial out of the temple; not to mention a thousand others, who were undermining walls, litigating in the forum, extorting money, or lending it upon usury; a sight, upon the whole, of wonderful variety.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It must have been very entertaining; let us have it all, I desire.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I had much ado to see, to relate it to you is impossible; it was like Homer’s shield, <a name="citation173"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote173">{173}</a> on one side were feasting and nuptials, on the other haranguing and decrees; here a sacrifice, and there a burial; the Getæ at war, the Scythians travelling in their caravans, the Egyptians tilling their fields, the Phœnicians merchandising, the Cilicians robbing and plundering, the Spartans flogging their children, and the Athenians perpetually quarrelling and going to law with one another.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When all this was doing, at the same time, you may conceive what a strange medley this appeared to me; it was just as if a number of dancers, or rather singers, were met together, and every one was ordered to leave the chorus, and sing his own song, each striving to drown the other’s voice, by bawling as loud as he could; you may imagine what kind of a concert this would make.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Truly ridiculous and confused, no doubt.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And yet such, my friend, are all the poor performers upon earth, and of such is composed the discordant music of human life; the voices not only dissonant and inharmonious, but the forms and habits all differing from each other, moving in various directions, and agreeing in nothing; till at length the great master <a name="citation175a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote175a">{175a}</a> of the choir drives everyone of them from the stage, and tells him he is no longer wanted there; then all are silent, and no longer disturb each other with their harsh and jarring discord. But in this wide and extensive theatre, full of various shapes and forms, everything was matter of laughter and ridicule. Above all, I could not help smiling at those who quarrel about the boundaries of their little territory, and fancy themselves great because they occupy a Sicyonian <a name="citation175b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote175b">{175b}</a> field, or possess that part of Marathon which borders on Oenoe, or are masters of a thousand acres in Acharnæ; when after all, to me, who looked from above, Greece was but four fingers in breadth, and Attica a very small portion of it indeed. I could not but think how little these rich men had to be proud of; he who was lord of the most extensive country owned a spot that appeared to me about as large as one of Epicurus’s atoms. When I looked down upon Peloponnesus, and beheld Cynuria, <a name="citation176a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote176a">{176a}</a> I reflected with astonishment on the number of Argives and Lacedemonians who fell in one day, fighting for a piece of land no bigger than an Egyptian lentil; and when I saw a man brooding over his gold, and boasting that he had got four cups or eight rings, I laughed most heartily at him: whilst the whole Pangæus, <a name="citation176b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote176b">{176b}</a> with all its mines, seemed no larger than a grain of millet.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">FRIEND</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A fine sight you must have had; but how did the cities and the men look?</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">MENIPPUS</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">You have often seen a crowd of ants running to and fro in and out of their city, some turning up a bit of dung, others dragging a bean-shell, or running away with half a grain of wheat. I make no doubt but they have architects, demagogues, senators, musicians, and philosophers amongst them. Men, my friend, are exactly like these: if you approve not of the comparison, recollect, if you please, the ancient Thessalian fables, and you will find that the Myrmidons, <a name="citation177"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote177">{177}</a> a most warlike nation, sprung originally from pismires.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When I had thus seen and diverted myself with everything, I shook my wings and flew off,</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “To join the sacred senate of the skies.” <a name="citation178a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote178a">{178a}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Scarce had I gone a furlong, when the Moon, in a soft female voice, cried out to me, “Menippus, will you carry something for me to Jupiter, so may your journey be prosperous?” “With all my heart,” said I, “if it is nothing very heavy.” “Only a message,” replied she, “a small petition to him: my patience is absolutely worn out by the philosophers, who are perpetually disputing about me, who I am, of what size, how it happens that I am sometimes round and full, at others cut in half; some say I am inhabited, others that I am only a looking-glass hanging over the sea, and a hundred conjectures of this kind; even my light, <a name="citation178b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote178b">{178b}</a> they say, is none of my own, but stolen from the Sun; thus endeavouring to set me and my brother together by the ears, not content with abusing him, and calling him a hot stone, and a mass of fire. In the meantime, I am no stranger to what these men, who look so grave and sour all day, are doing o’ nights; but I see and say nothing, not thinking it decent to lay open their vile and abominable lives to the public; for when I catch them thieving, or practising any of their nocturnal tricks, I wrap myself up in a cloud, that I may not expose to the world a parcel of old fellows, who, in spite of their long beards, and professions of virtue, are guilty of every vice, and yet they are always railing at and abusing me. I swear by night I have often resolved to move farther off to get out of reach of their busy tongues; and I beg you would tell Jupiter that I cannot possibly stay here any longer, unless he will destroy these naturalists, stop the mouths of the logicians, throw down the Portico, burn the Academy, and make an end of the inhabitants of Peripatus; so may I enjoy at last a little rest, which these fellows are perpetually disturbing.” “It shall be done,” said I, and away I set out for heaven, where</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “No tracks of beasts or signs of men are found.” <a name="citation179"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote179">{179}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In a little time the earth was invisible, and the moon appeared very small; and now, leaving the sun on my right hand, I flew amongst the stars, and on the third day reached my journey’s end. At first I intended to fly in just as I was, thinking that, being half an eagle, I should not be discovered, as that bird was an old acquaintance of Jupiter’s, but then it occurred to me that I might be found out by my vulture’s wing, and laid hold on: deeming it, therefore, most prudent not to run the hazard, I went up, and knocked at the door: Mercury heard me, and asking my name, went off immediately, and carried it to his master; soon after I was let in, and, trembling and quaking with fear, found all the gods sitting together, and seemingly not a little alarmed at my appearance there, expecting probably that they should soon have a number of winged mortals travelling up to them in the same manner: when Jupiter, looking at me with a most severe and Titanic <a name="citation180a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote180a">{180a}</a> countenance, cried out,</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Say who thou art, and whence thy country, name<br /> Thy parents—” <a name="citation180b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote180b">{180b}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">At this I thought I should have died with fear; I stood motionless, and astonished at the awfulness and majesty of his voice; but recovering myself in a short time, I related to him everything from the beginning, how desirous I was of knowing sublime truths, how I went to the philosophers, and hearing them contradict one another, and driven to despair, thought on the scheme of making me wings, with all that had happened in my journey quite up to heaven. I then delivered the message to him from the Moon, at which, softening his contracted brow, he smiled at me, and cried, “What were Otus and Ephialtes <a name="citation181"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote181">{181}</a> in comparison of Menippus, who has thus dared to fly up to heaven; but come, we now invite you to supper with us; to-morrow we will attend to your business, and dismiss you.” At these words he rose up and went to that part of heaven where everything from below could be heard most distinctly; for this, it seems, was the time appointed to hear petitions. As we went along, he asked me several questions about earthly matters, such as, “How much corn is there at present in Greece? had you a hard winter last year? and did your cabbages want rain? is any of Phidias’s <a name="citation182"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote182">{182}</a> family alive now? what is the reason that the Athenians have left off sacrificing to me for so many years? do they think of building up the Olympian temple again? are the thieves taken that robbed the Dodonæan?” When I had answered all these, “Pray, Menippus,” said he, “what does mankind really think of me?” “How should they think of you,” said I, “but with the utmost veneration, that you are the great sovereign of the gods.” “There you jest,” said he, “I am sure; I know well enough how fond they are of novelty, though you will not own it. There was a time, indeed, when I was held in some estimation, when I was the great physician, when I was everything, in short—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “When streets, and lanes, and all was full of Jove.” <a name="citation183a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote183a">{183a}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Pisa <a name="citation183b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote183b">{183b}</a> and Dodona <a name="citation183c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote183c">{183c}</a> were distinguished above every place, and I could not see for the smoke of sacrifices; but, since Apollo has set up his oracle at Delphi, and Æsculapius practises physic at Pergamus; since temples have been erected to Bendis <a name="citation183d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote183d">{183d}</a> at Thrace, to Anubis in Egypt, and to Diana at Ephesus, everybody runs after them; with them they feast, to them they offer up their hecatombs, and think it honour enough for a worn-out god, as I am, if they sacrifice once in six years at Olympia; whilst my altars are as cold and neglected as Plato’s laws, <a name="citation184"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote184">{184}</a> or the syllogisms of Chrysippus.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">With this and such-like chat we passed away the time, till we came to the place where the petitions were to be heard. Here we found several holes, with covers to them, and close to every one was placed a golden chair. Jupiter sat down in the first he came to, and lifting up the lid, listened to the prayers, which, as you may suppose, were of various kinds. I stooped down and heard several of them myself, such as, “O Jupiter, grant me a large empire!” “O Jupiter, may my leeks and onions flourish and increase!” “Grant Jupiter, that my father may die soon!” “Grant I may survive my wife!” “Grant I may not be discovered, whilst I lay wait for my brother!” “Grant that I may get my cause!” “Grant that I may be crowned at Olympia!” One sailor asked for a north wind, another for a south; the husbandman prayed for rain, and the fuller for sunshine. Jupiter heard them all, but did not promise everybody—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “—some the just request,<br /> He heard propitious, and denied the rest.” <a name="citation185a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote185a">{185a}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Those prayers which he thought right and proper he let up through the hole, and blew the wicked and foolish ones back, that they might not rise to heaven. One petition, indeed, puzzled him a little; two men asking favours of him directly contrary to each other, at the same time, and promising the same sacrifice; he was at a loss which to oblige; he became immediately a perfect Academic, and like Pyrrho, <a name="citation185b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote185b">{185b}</a> was held in suspense between them. When he had done with the prayers, he sat down upon the next chair, over another hole, and listened to those who were swearing and making vows. When he had finished this business, and destroyed Hermodorus, the Epicurean, for perjury, he removed to the next seat, and gave audience to the auguries, oracles, and divinations; which having despatched, he proceeded to the hole that brought up the fume of the victims, together with the name of the sacrificer. Then he gave out his orders to the winds and storms: “Let there be rain to-day in Scythia, lightning in Africa, and snow in Greece; do you, Boreas, blow in Lydia, and whilst Notus lies still, let the north wind raise the waves of the Adriatic, and about a thousand measures of hail be sprinkled over Cappadocia.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">When Jupiter had done all his business we repaired to the feast, for it was now supper-time, and Mercury bade me sit down by Pan, the Corybantes, Attis, and Sabazius, a kind of demi-gods who are admitted as visitors there. Ceres served us with bread, and Bacchus with wine; Hercules handed about the flesh, Venus scattered myrtles, and Neptune brought us fish; not to mention that I got slyly a little nectar and ambrosia, for my friend Ganymede, out of good-nature, if he saw Jove looking another way, would frequently throw me in a cup or two. The greater gods, as Homer tells us <a name="citation187a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote187a">{187a}</a> (who, I suppose, had seen them as well as myself,) never taste meat or wine, but feed upon ambrosia and get drunk with nectar, at the same time their greatest luxury is, instead of victuals, to suck in the fumes that rise from the victims, and the blood of the sacrifices that are offered up to them. Whilst we were at supper, Apollo played on the harp, Silenus danced a cordax, and the Muses repeated Hesiod’s Theogony, and the first Ode of Pindar. When these recreations were over we all retired tolerably well soaked, <a name="citation187b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote187b">{187b}</a> to bed,</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Now pleasing rest had sealed each mortal eye,<br /> And even immortal gods in slumber lie,<br /> All but myself—” <a name="citation187c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote187c">{187c}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">I could not help thinking of a thousand things, and particularly how it came to pass that, during so long a time Apollo <a name="citation188a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote188a">{188a}</a> should never have got him a beard, and how there came to be night in heaven, though the sun is always present there and feasting with them. I slept a little, and early in the morning Jupiter ordered the crier to summon a council of the gods, and when they were all assembled, thus addressed himself to them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">“The stranger who came here yesterday, is the chief cause of my convening you this day. I have long wanted to talk with you concerning the philosophers, and the complaints now sent to us from the Moon make it immediately necessary to take the affair into consideration. There is lately sprung up a race of men, slothful, quarrelsome, vain-glorious, foolish, petulant, gluttonous, proud, abusive, in short what Homer calls,</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “An idle burthen to the ground.” <a name="citation188b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote188b">{188b}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">These, dividing themselves into sects, run through all the labyrinths of disputation, calling themselves Stoics, Academics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, and a hundred other names still more ridiculous; then wrapping themselves up in the sacred veil of virtue, they contract their brows and let down their beards, under a specious appearance hiding the most abandoned profligacy; like one of the players on the stage, if you strip him of his fine habits wrought with gold, all that remains behind is a ridiculous spectacle of a little contemptible fellow, hired to appear there for seven drachmas. And yet these men despise everybody, talk absurdly of the gods, and drawing in a number of credulous boys, roar to them in a tragical style about virtue, and enter into disputations that are endless and unprofitable. To their disciples they cry up fortitude and temperance, a contempt of riches and pleasures, and, when alone, indulge in riot and debauchery. The most intolerable of all is, that though they contribute nothing towards the good and welfare of the community, though they are</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Unknown alike in council and in field;” <a name="citation189"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote189">{189}</a></p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">yet are they perpetually finding fault with, abusing, and reviling others, and he is counted the greatest amongst them who is most impudent, noisy, and malevolent; if one should say to one of these fellows who speak ill of everybody, ‘What service are you of to the commonwealth?’ he would reply, if he spoke fairly and honestly, ‘To be a sailor or a soldier, or a husbandman, or a mechanic, I think beneath me; but I can make a noise and look dirty, wash myself in cold water, go barefoot all winter, and then, like Momus, find fault with everybody else; if any rich man sups luxuriously, I rail at, and abuse him; but if any of my friends or acquaintance fall sick, and want my assistance, I take no notice of them.’</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">“Such, my brother gods, are the cattle <a name="citation190"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#footnote190">{190}</a> which I complain of; and of all these the Epicureans are the worst, who assert that the gods take no care of human affairs, or look at all into them: it is high time, my brethren, that we should take this matter into consideration, for if once they can persuade the people to believe these things, you must all starve; for who will sacrifice to you, when they can get nothing by it? What the Moon accuses you of, you all heard yesterday from the stranger; consult, therefore, amongst yourselves, and determine what may best promote the happiness of mankind, and our own security.” When Jupiter had thus spoken, the assembly rung with repeated cries, of “thunder, and lightning! burn, consume, destroy! down with them into the pit, to Tartarus, and the giants!” Jove, however, once more commanding silence, cried out, “It shall be done as you desire; they and their philosophy shall perish together: but at present, no punishments must be inflicted; for these four months to come, as you all know, it is a solemn feast, and I have declared a truce: next year, in the beginning of the spring, my lightning shall destroy them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">“As to Menippus, first cutting off his wings that he may not come here again, let Mercury carry him down to the earth.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Saying this, he broke up the assembly, and Mercury taking me up by my right ear, brought me down, and left me yesterday evening in the Ceramicus. And now, my friend, you have heard everything I had to tell you from heaven; I must take my leave, and carry this good news to the philosophers, who are walking in the Pœcile.</p> <h2 style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">NOTES</h2> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote17"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation17">{17}</a> One of Alexander’s generals, to whose share, on the division of the empire, after that monarch’s death, fell the kingdom of Thrace, in which was situated the city of Abdera.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote18a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation18a">{18a}</a> A small fragment of this tragedy, which has in it the very line here quoted by Lucian, is yet extant in Barnes’s edition of Euripides.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote18b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation18b">{18b}</a> This story may afford no useless admonition to the managers of the Haymarket and other summer theatres, who, it is to be hoped, will not run the hazard of inflaming their audiences with too much tragedy in the dog days.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote19a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation19a">{19a}</a> This alludes to the Parthian War, in the time of Severian; the particulars of which, except the few here occasionally glanced at, we are strangers to. Lucian, most probably, by this tract totally knocked up some of the historians who had given an account of it, and prevented many others, who were intimidated by the severity of his strictures, attempting to transmit the history of it to posterity.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote19b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation19b">{19b}</a> This saying is attributed to Empedocles.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote20a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation20a">{20a}</a> The most famous of the Pontic cities, and well known as the residence of the renowned Cynic philosopher. It is still called by the same name, and is a port town of Asiatic Turkey, on the Euxine.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote20b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation20b">{20b}</a> A kind of school or gymnasium where the young men performed their exercises. The choice of such a place by a philosopher to roll a tub in heightens the ridicule.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote21"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation21">{21}</a> See Homer’s “Odyssey,” M 1. 219.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote23"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation23">{23}</a> Alluding to the story he set out with.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote24a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation24a">{24a}</a> διοδιαπασων. Gr. The Latin translation renders it “<i>octava duplici</i>.” See Burney’s “Dissertation on Music,” Sect. 1.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote24b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation24b">{24b}</a> Gr. Την αρτηριαν τραχειαν, <i>aspera arteria</i>, or the wind-pipe. The comparison is strictly just and remarkably true, as we may all recollect how dreadful the sensation is when any part of our food slips down what is generally called “the wrong way.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote25a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation25a">{25a}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” Υ 1. 227, and Virgil’s “Camilla,” in the 7th book of the “Æneid.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote25b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation25b">{25b}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” υ 1. 18. One of the blind bard’s <i>speciosa miracula</i>, which Lucian is perpetually laughing at.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote26"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation26">{26}</a> ψιμμυδιον, or cerussa. Painting, we see, both amongst men and women, was practised long ago, and has at least the plea of antiquity in its favour. According to Lucian, the men laid on white; for the ψιμμυδιον was probably ceruse, or white lead; the ladies, we may suppose, as at present, preferred the rouge.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote29"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation29">{29}</a> Dinocrates. The same story is told of him, with some little alteration, by Vitruvius. Mention is made of it likewise by Pliny and Strabo.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote35"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation35">{35}</a> “His buckler’s mighty orb was next displayed;<br /> Tremendous Gorgon frowned upon its field,<br /> And circling terrors filled the expressive shield.<br /> Within its concave hung a silver thong,<br /> On which a mimic serpent creeps along,<br /> His azure length in easy waves extends,<br /> Till, in three heads, th’ embroidered monster ends.”<br /> <i>See</i> Pope’s “Homer’s Iliad,” book xi., 1. 43.<br />Lucian here means to ridicule, not Homer, but the historian’s absurd imitation of him.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote39"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation39">{39}</a> The Greek expression was proverbial. Horace has adopted it: “Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote40"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation40">{40}</a> Lucian adds, το λεγομενον, ut est in proverbio, by which it appears that barbers and their shops were as remarkable for gossiping and tittle-tattle in ancient as they are in modern times. Aristophanes mentions them in his “Plutus,” they are recorded also by Plutarch, and Theophrastus styles them αοινα συμποσια.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote41"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation41">{41}</a> See Thucydides, book ii., cap. 34.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote42"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation42">{42}</a> Who fell upon his sword. See the “Ajax” of Sophocles.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote43"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation43">{43}</a> For a description of this famous statue, see Pausanias.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote44"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation44">{44}</a> The σκαρος, or scarus, is mentioned by several ancient authors, as a fish of the most delicate flavour, and is supposed to be of the same nature with our chars in Cumberland, and some other parts of this kingdom. I have ventured, therefore, to call it by this name, till some modern Apicius can furnish me with a better.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote45"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation45">{45}</a> Dragons, or fiery serpents, were used by the Parthians, and Suidas tells us, by the Scythians also, as standards, in the same manner as the Romans made use of the eagle, and under every one of these standards were a thousand men. See Lips. de Mil. Rom., cap. 4.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote46"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation46">{46}</a> See Arrian.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote47"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation47">{47}</a> The idea here so deservedly laughed at, of a history of what was to come, if treated, not seriously, as this absurd writer treated it, but ludicrously, as Lucian would probably have treated it himself, might open a fine field for wit and humour. Something of this kind appeared in a newspaper a few years ago, which, I think, was called “News for a Hundred Years Hence;” and though but a rough sketch, was well executed. A larger work, on the same ground, and by a good hand, might afford much entertainment.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote49"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation49">{49}</a> This kind of scholastic jargon was much in vogue in the time of Lucian, and it is no wonder he should take every opportunity of laughing at it, as nothing can be more opposite to true genius, wit, and humour, than such pedantry.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote50"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation50">{50}</a> Milo, the Crotonian wrestler, is reported to have been a man of most wonderful bodily strength, concerning which a number of lies are told, for which the reader, if he pleases, may consult his dictionary. He lost his life, we are informed, by trying to rend with his hands an old oak, which wedged him in, and pressed him to death; the poet says—<br /> “—he met his end,<br /> Wedged in that timber which he strove to rend.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Titornus was a rival of Milo’s, and, according to Ælian, who is not always to be credited, rolled a large stone with ease, which Milo with all his force could not stir. Conon was some slim Macaroni of that age, remarkable only for his debility, as was Leotrophides also, of crazy memory, recorded by Aristophanes, in his comedy called <i>The Birds</i>.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote51"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation51">{51}</a> The Broughtons of antiquity; men, we may suppose, renowned in their time for teaching the young nobility of Greece to bruise one another <i>secundum artem</i>.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote53a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation53a">{53a}</a> See Diodorus Siculus, lib. vii., and Plutarch.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote53b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation53b">{53b}</a> Concerning some of these facts, even recent as they were then with regard to us, historians are divided. Thucydides and Plutarch tell the story one way, Diodorus and Justin another. Well might our author, therefore, find fault with their uncertainty.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote55a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation55a">{55a}</a> Lucian alludes, it is supposed, to Ctesias, the physician to Artaxerxes, whose history is stuffed with encomiums on his royal patron. See Plutarch’s “Artaxerxes.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote55b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation55b">{55b}</a> The Campus Nisæus, a large plain in Media, near the Caspian mountains, was famous for breeding the finest horses, which were allotted to the use of kings only; or, according to Xenophon, those favourites on whom the sovereign thought proper to bestow them. See the “Cyropæd.,” book viii.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote56"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation56">{56}</a> This fine picture of a good historian has been copied by Tully, Strabo, Polybius, and other writers; it is a standard of perfection, however, which few writers, ancient or modern, have been able to reach. Thuanus has prefixed to his history these lines of Lucian; but whether he, or any other historian, hath answered in every point to the description here given, is, I believe, yet undetermined.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote57a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation57a">{57a}</a> The saying is attributed to Aristophanes, though I cannot find it there. It is observable that this proverbial kind of expression, for freedom of words and sentiments, has been adopted into almost every language, though the image conveying it is different. Thus the Greeks call a fig a fig, etc. We say, an honest man calls a spade a spade; and the French call “un chat un chat.” Boileau says, “J’appelle un chat un chat, et Rolet un fripon.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote57b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation57b">{57b}</a> Herodotus’s history is comprehended in nine books, to each of which is prefixed the name of a Muse; the first is called Clio, the second Euterpe, and so on. A modern poet, I have been told, the ingenious Mr. Aaron Hill, improved upon this thought, and christened (if we may properly so call it), not his books, but his daughters by the same poetical names of Miss Cli, Miss Melp-y, Miss Terps-y, Miss Urania, etc.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote58"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation58">{58}</a> Both Thucydides and Livy are reprehensible in this particular; and the same objection may be made to Thuanus, Clarendon, Burnet, and many other modern historians.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote59"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation59">{59}</a> How just is this observation of Lucian’s, and at the same time how truly poetical is the image which he makes use of to express it! It puts us in mind of his rival critic Longinus, who, as Pope has observed, is himself the great sublime he draws.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote60"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation60">{60}</a> By this very just observation, Lucian means to censure all those writers—and we have many such now amongst us—who take so much pains to smooth and round their periods, as to disgust their readers by the frequent repetition of it, as it naturally produces a tiresome sameness in the sound of them; and at the same time discovers too much that laborious art and care, which it is always the author’s business as much as possible to conceal.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote61"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation61">{61}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” bk. xiii., 1. 4.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote62a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation62a">{62a}</a> The famous Lacedæmonian general. The circumstance alluded to is in Thucydides, bk. iv.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote62b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation62b">{62b}</a> Gr. ομοχρονειτω, a technical term, borrowed from music, and signifying that tone of the voice which exactly corresponds with the instrument accompanying it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote66a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation66a">{66a}</a> A coarse fish that came from Pontus, or the Black Sea.—Saperdas advehe Ponto. See Pers. Sat. v. 1. 134.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote66b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation66b">{66b}</a> Here doctors differ. Several of Thucydides’s descriptions are certainly very long, many of them, perhaps, rather tedious.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote67"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation67">{67}</a> Lucian is rather severe on this writer. Cicero only says, De omnibus omnia libere palam dixit; he spoke freely of everybody. Other writers, however, are of the same opinion with our satirist with regard to him. See Dions. Plutarch. Cornelius Nepos, etc.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote69"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation69">{69}</a> Alluding to the story of Diogenes, as related in the beginning.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote75"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation75">{75}</a> See Homer’s “Odyssey.”—The strange stories which Lucian here mentions may certainly be numbered, with all due deference to so great a name, amongst the nugæ canoræ of old Homer. Juvenal certainly considers them in this light when he says:—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> Tam vacui capitis populum Phæaca putavit.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Some modern critics, however, have endeavoured to defend them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote77"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation77">{77}</a> Here the history begins, what goes before may be considered as the author’s preface, and should have been marked as such in the original.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote79"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation79">{79}</a> Among the Greek wines, so much admired by ancient Epicures, those of the islands of the Archipelago were the most celebrated, and of these the Chian wine, the product of Chios, bore away the palm from every other, and particularly that which was made from vines growing on the mountain called Arevisia, in testimony of which it were easy, if necessary, to produce an amphora full of classical quotations.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The present inhabitants of that island make a small quantity of excellent wine for their own use and are liberal of it to strangers who travel that way, but dare not, being under Turkish government, cultivate the vines well, or export the product of them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote81a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation81a">{81a}</a> In the same manner as Gulliver’s island of Laputa.—From this passage it is not improbable but that Swift borrowed the idea.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote81b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation81b">{81b}</a> The account which Lucian here gives us of his visit to the moon, perhaps suggested to Bergerac the idea of his ingenious work, called “A Voyage to the Moon.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote82a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation82a">{82a}</a> <i>Equi vultures</i>, horse vultures; from ιππος, a horse: and γυψ, a vulture.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote82b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation82b">{82b}</a> Lucian, we see, has founded his history on matter of fact. Endymion, we all know, was a king of Elis, though some call him a shepherd. Shepherd or king, however, he was so handsome, that the moon, who saw him sleeping on Mount Latmos, fell in love with him. This no orthodox heathen ever doubted: Lucian, who was a freethinker, laughs indeed at the tale; but has made him ample amends in this history by creating him emperor of the moon.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote83a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation83a">{83a}</a> Modern astronomers are, I, think, agreed, that we are to the moon just the same as the moon is to us. Though Lucian’s history may be false, therefore his philosophy, we see, was true (1780). (The moon is not habitable, 1887.)</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote83b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation83b">{83b}</a> This I am afraid, is not so agreeable to the modern system; our philosophers all asserting that the sun is not habitable. As it is a place, however, which we are very little acquainted with, they may be mistaken, and Lucian may guess as well as ourselves, for aught we can prove to the contrary.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote84"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation84">{84}</a> Horse ants, from ιππος, a horse; and μυρμηξ, an ant.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote85a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation85a">{85a}</a> From λαχανον, <i>olus</i>, any kind of herb; and πτεπον, <i>penna</i>, a wing.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote85b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation85b">{85b}</a> <i>Millii jaculatores</i>, darters of millet; millet is a kind of small grain.—A strange species of warriors!</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote85c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation85c">{85c}</a> <i>Alliis pugnantes</i>, garlic fighters: these we are to suppose threw garlic at the enemy, and served as a kind of stinkpots.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote85d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation85d">{85d}</a> <i>Pulici sagittarii</i>, flea-archers.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote85e"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation85e">{85e}</a> <i>Venti cursores</i>, wind courser.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote86a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation86a">{86a}</a> <i>Passeres glandium</i>, acorn sparrows.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote86b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation86b">{86b}</a> <i>Equi grues</i>, horse-cranes.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote87a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation87a">{87a}</a> Air-flies.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote87b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation87b">{87b}</a> Gr. ’Λεροκορακες, air-crows; but as all crows fly through the air, I would rather read ’Λερκορδακες, which may be translated air-dancers, from κορδαξ, cordax, a lascivious kind of dance, so called.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote88a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation88a">{88a}</a> Gr. Καυλομυκητες, <i>Caulo fungi</i>, stalk and mushroom men.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote88b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation88b">{88b}</a> Gr. Κυνοβαλανοι, <i>cani glandacii</i>, acorn-dogs.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote88c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation88c">{88c}</a> Gr. Νεφελοκενταυροι, <i>nubicentauri</i>, cloud-centaurs.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote88d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation88d">{88d}</a> The reason for this wish is given a little farther on in the History.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote89"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation89">{89}</a> See Hom. Il. II.. 1, 459.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote90a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation90a">{90a}</a> Some authors tell us that Sagittarius was the same as Chiron the centaur; others, that he was Crocus, a famous hunter, the son of Euphemia, who nursed the Muses, at whose intercession, he was, after his death, promoted to the ninth place in the Zodiac, under the name of Sagittarius.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote90b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation90b">{90b}</a> The inhabitants of the moon.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote92"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation92">{92}</a> A good burlesque on the usual form and style of treaties.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote93"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation93">{93}</a> Gr. Πυρωνιδης, <i>ignens</i>, fiery, Φλογιος, flaming, Νυκτωρ, <i>nocturnus</i>, nightly, Μηναιος, <i>menstruus</i>, monthly, Πολυλαμπης, <i>multi lucius</i>, many lights. These all make good proper names in Greek, and sound magnificently, but do not answer so well in English. I have therefore preserved the original words in the translation.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote94"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation94">{94}</a> Here Lucian, like other story-tellers, is a little deficient in point of memory. If they eat, as he tells us, nothing but frogs, what use could they have for cheese?</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote96"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation96">{96}</a> Of which we shall see an account in the next adventure.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote97"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation97">{97}</a> The city of Lamps.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote98a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation98a">{98a}</a> The cloud cuckoo.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote98b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation98b">{98b}</a> See his comedy of the Birds.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote104a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation104a">{104a}</a> <i>Salsamentarii</i>: Salt-fish-men.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote104b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation104b">{104b}</a> Triton-weasels.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote104c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation104c">{104c}</a> Greek, καρκινορειχες, <i>cancri-mani</i>, crab’s hands.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote104d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation104d">{104d}</a> <i>Thynno-cipites</i>, tunny-heads, <i>i.e</i>., men with heads like those of the tunny-fish.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote105a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation105a">{105a}</a> Greek, παγουραδοι, crab-men.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote105b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation105b">{105b}</a> ψηττοποδες, sparrow-footed, from ψηττα, <i>passer marinus</i>.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote109"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation109">{109}</a> <i>Maris potor</i>, the drinker up of the sea. Æolocentaurus and Thalassopotes were, I suppose, two Leviathans.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote113"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation113">{113}</a> One of the fifty Nereids, or Sea-Nymphs; so called, on account of the fairness of her skin: from γαλα, gala, milk; of the milky island, therefore, she was naturally the presiding deity.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote114a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation114a">{114a}</a> Tyro, according to Homer, fell in love with the famous river Enipeus, and was always wandering on its banks, where Neptune found her, covered her with his waves, and throwing her into a deep sleep, supplied the place of Enipeus. Lucian has made her amends, by bestowing one of his imaginary kingdoms upon her. His part of the story, however, is full as probable as the rest.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote114b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation114b">{114b}</a> <i>Suberipedes</i>, cork-footed.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote116a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation116a">{116a}</a> This description of the Pagan Elysium, or Island of the Blessed, is well drawn, and abounds in fanciful and picturesque imagery, interspersed with strokes of humour and satire. The second book is, indeed, throughout, more entertaining and better written than the first.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote116b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation116b">{116b}</a> See the Ajax Flagellifer of Sophocles. Lucian humorously degrades him from the character of a hero, and gives him hellebore as a madman.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote118"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation118">{118}</a> It is not improbable but that Voltaire’s El Dorado in his “Candide,” might have been suggested to him by this passage.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote119"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation119">{119}</a> <i>I.e</i>. Their appearance is exactly like that of shadows made by the sun at noonday, with this only difference, that one lies flat on the ground, the other is erect, and one is dark, the other light or diaphanous. Our vulgar idea of ghosts, especially with regard to their not being tangible, corresponds with this of Lucian’s.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote121a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation121a">{121a}</a> A famous musician. Clemens Alexandrinus gives us a full account of him, to whom I refer the curious reader.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote121b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation121b">{121b}</a> This poet, we are told, wrote some severe verses on Helen, for which he was punished by Castor and Pollux with loss of sight, but on making his recantation in a palinodia, his eyes were graciously restored to him. Lucian has affronted her still more grossly by making her run away with Cinyrus; but he, we are to suppose, being not over superstitious, defied the power of Castor and Pollux.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote122a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation122a">{122a}</a> Nothing appears more ridiculous to a modern reader than the perpetual encomiums on the musical merit of swans and swallows, which we meet with in all the writers of antiquity. A proper account and explanation of this is, I think, amongst the desiderata of literature. There is an entertaining tract on this subject in the “Hist. de l’Acad.” tom. v., by M. Morin.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote122b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation122b">{122b}</a> Who ravished Cassandra, the daughter of Priam and priestess of Minerva, who sent a tempest, dispersed the Grecian navy in their return home, and sunk Ajax with a thunder-bolt.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote123a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation123a">{123a}</a> A scholar of Pythagoras.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote123b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation123b">{123b}</a> The second king of Rome.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote123c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation123c">{123c}</a> One of the seven sages, but excepted against by Lucian, because he was king of Corinth and a tyrant.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote123d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation123d">{123d}</a> See his Treatise “de Republica.” His quitting Elysium, to live in his own republic, is a stroke of true humour.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote124a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation124a">{124a}</a> Alluding to a passage in Hesiod already quoted.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote124b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation124b">{124b}</a> Lucian laughs at the sceptics, though he was himself one of them.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote126"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation126">{126}</a> Death-games, or games after death, in imitation of wedding-games, funeral-games, etc.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote127a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation127a">{127a}</a> The famous tyrant of Agrigentum, renowned for his ingenious contrivance of roasting his enemies in a brazen bull, and not less memorable for some excellent epistles, which set a wit and scholar together by the ears concerning the genuineness of them. See the famous contest between Bentley and Boyle.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote127b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation127b">{127b}</a> Who sacrificed to Jupiter all the strangers that came into his kingdom. “Hospites violabat,” says Seneca, “ut eorum sanguine pluviam eliceret, cujus penuria Ægyptus novem annis laboraverat.” A most ingenious contrivance.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote128a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation128a">{128a}</a> A king of Thrace who fed his horses with human flesh.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote128b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation128b">{128b}</a> Scyron and Pityocamptes were two famous robbers, who used to seize on travellers and commit the most horrid cruelties upon them. They were slain by Theseus. See Plutarch’s “Life of Theseus.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote128c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation128c">{128c}</a> Where he ran away, but, as we are told, in very good company. See Diog. Laert. Strabo, etc.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote132"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation132">{132}</a> The Antipodes. We never heard whether Lucian performed this voyage. D’Ablancourt, however, his French translator, in his continuation of the “True History,” has done it for him, not without some humour, though it is by no means equal to the original.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote135a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation135a">{135a}</a> Voltaire has improved on this passage, and given us a very humorous account of “les Habitans de l’Enfer,” in his wicked “Pucelle.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote135b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation135b">{135b}</a> Who, the reader will remember, had just before run off with Helen.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote136a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation136a">{136a}</a> Greek, υπνος, sleep.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote136b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation136b">{136b}</a> As herald of the morn.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote136c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation136c">{136c}</a> A root which, infused, is supposed to promote sleep, consequently very proper for the Island of Dreams.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Not poppy, nor mandragora,<br /> Nor all the drowsy syrups of the East,<br /> Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep<br /> Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”<br /> <i>See</i> Shakespeare’s “Othello.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote136d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation136d">{136d}</a> Night wanderer.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote137a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation137a">{137a}</a> Gr. νεγρητος, <i>inexperrectus</i>, unwaked or wakeful.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote137b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation137b">{137b}</a> Gr. παννυχια, <i>pernox</i>, all night.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote137c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation137c">{137c}</a> “Two portals firm the various phantoms keep;<br /> Of ev’ry one; whence flit, to mock the brain,<br /> Of wingéd lies a light fantastic train;<br /> The gate opposed pellucid valves adorn,<br /> And columns fair, encased with polished horn;<br /> Where images of truth for passage wait.”<br /> <i>See</i> Pope’s Homer’s “Odyssey,” bk. xix., 1. 637.<br />See also Virgil, who has pretty closely imitated his master.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote138a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation138a">{138a}</a> Gr. ταραξιωνα τον ματαιογενους, <i>terriculum vanipori</i>: fright, the son of vain hope, or disappointment.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote138b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation138b">{138b}</a> Gr. πλουτοκλεα τον φαντασιωνος, <i>divitiglorium</i>, the pride of riches—<i>i.e</i>., arising from riches; son of phantasy, or deceit.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote138c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation138c">{138c}</a> Gr. καρεωτιν, <i>gravi-somnem</i>, heavy sleep.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote141a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation141a">{141a}</a> Nut sailors; or, sailors in a nut-shell.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote141b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation141b">{141b}</a> Those who sailed in the gourds.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote147a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation147a">{147a}</a> Cabalusa and Hydamardia are hard words, which the commentators confess they can make nothing of. Various, however, are the derivations, and numerous the guesses made about them. The English reader may, if he pleases, call them not improperly, especially the first, Cabalistic.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote147b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation147b">{147b}</a> Which the reader will remember was given him by way of charm, on his departure from the Happy Island.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote148"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation148">{148}</a> Gr. ονοσκελεας, <i>asini-eruras</i>, ass-legged.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote149"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation149">{149}</a> The ensuing books never appeared. The “True History,” like</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> —“the bear and fiddle,<br /> Begins, but breaks off in the middle.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D’Ablancourt, as I observed above, has carried it on a little farther. There is still room for any ingenious modern to take the plan from Lucian, and improve upon it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote153"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation153">{153}</a> The ancient Greek stadium is supposed to have contained a hundred and twenty-five geometrical paces, or six hundred and twenty-five Roman feet, corresponding to our furlong. Eight stadia make a geometrical, or Italian mile; and twenty, according to Dacier, a French league. It is observed, notwithstanding, by Guilletiere, a famous French writer, that the stadium was only six hundred Athenian feet, six hundred and four English feet, or a hundred and three geometrical paces.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Greeks measured all their distances by stadia, which, after all we can discover concerning them, are different in different times and places.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote154"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation154">{154}</a> The Phœnicians, it is supposed, were the first sailors, and steered their course according to the appearance of the stars.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote155"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation155">{155}</a> Greek, ουρανιων, <i>cœlicolœ</i>, Homer’s general name for the gods.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote156"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation156">{156}</a> Ganymede, whom Jupiter fell in love with, as he was hunting on Mount Ida, and turning himself into an eagle, carried up with him to heaven. “I am sure,” says Menippus’s friend, archly enough, “you were not carried up there, like Ganymede, for your beauty.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote157a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation157a">{157a}</a> “Icarus Icariis nomina fecit aquis.” The story is too well known to stand in need of any illustration. This accounts for the title of Icaro-Menippus.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote157b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation157b">{157b}</a> See Bishop Wilkins’s “Art of Flying,” where this ingenious contrivance of Menippus’s is greatly improved upon. For a humorous detail of the many advantages attending this noble art, I refer my readers to the <i>Spectator</i>.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote159"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation159">{159}</a> Even Lucian’s Menippus, we see, could not reflect on the works of God without admiration; but with how much more dignity are they considered by the holy Psalmist!—</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">“O praise the Lord of heaven, praise Him in the height. Praise Him, sun and moon; praise Him, all ye stars; praise the Lord upon earth, ye dragons and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and vapours, wind and storm fulfilling His word.”—Psalm cxlviii.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote161"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation161">{161}</a> This was the opinion of Anaxagoras, one of the Ionic philosophers, born at Clazomene, in the first year of the seventieth Olympiad. See Plutarch and Diogenes Laert.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote162"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation162">{162}</a> Alluding to the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote163a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation163a">{163a}</a> This was the opinion of Democritus, who held that there were infinite worlds in infinite space, according to all circumstances, some of which are not only like to one another, but every way so perfectly and absolutely equal, that there is no difference betwixt them. See Plutarch, and Tully, Quest. Acad.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote163b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation163b">{163b}</a> Empedocles, of Agrigentum, a Pythagorean; he held that there are two principal powers in nature, amity and discord, and that</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Sometimes by friendship, all are knit in one,<br /> Sometimes by discord, severed and undone.”<br /> See Stanley’s “Lives of the Philosophers.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote163c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation163c">{163c}</a> Alluding to the doctrine of Pythagoras, according to whom, number is the principle most providential of all heaven and earth, the root of divine beings, of gods and demons, the fountain and root of all things; that which, before all things, exists in the divine mind, from which, and out of which, all things are digested into order, and remain numbered by an indissoluble series. The whole system of the Pythagoreans is at large explained and illustrated by Stanley. See his “Lives of Philosophers.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote164"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation164">{164}</a> See our author’s “Auction of Lives,” where Socrates swears by the dog and the plane-tree.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">This was called the ορκος Ραδαμανθιος, or oath of Rhadamanthus, who, as Porphyry informs us, made a law that men should swear, if they needs must swear, by geese, dogs, etc. υπερ που μη τους θεους επι πασιν ονομαζω, that they might not, on every trifling occasion, call in the name of the gods. This is a kind of religious reason, the custom was therefore, Porphyry tells us, adopted by the wise and pious Socrates. Lucian, however, who laughs at everything here (as well as the place above quoted), ridicules him for it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote165a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation165a">{165a}</a> See Homer’s “Odyssey,” book ix. 1. 302. Pope translates it badly,</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"> “Wisdom held my hand.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Homer says nothing but—my mind changed.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote165b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation165b">{165b}</a> One of the fables here alluded to is yet extant amongst those ascribed to Æsop, but that concerning the camel I never met with.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote166a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation166a">{166a}</a> That part of Athens which was called the upper city, in opposition to the lower city. The Acropolis was on the top of a high rock.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote166b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation166b">{166b}</a> Mountains near Athens.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote166c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation166c">{166c}</a> A mountain between Geranea and Corinth.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote166d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation166d">{166d}</a> A high mountain in Arcadia, to the west of Elis. Erymanthus another, bordering upon Achaia. Taygetus another, reaching northwards, to the foot of the mountains of Arcadia.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote167"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation167">{167}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” book xiii. 1. 4</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote168"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation168">{168}</a> See note on this in a former dialogue.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote169"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation169">{169}</a> It is reported of Empedocles, that he went to Ætna, where he leaped into the fire, that he might leave behind him an opinion that he was a god, and that it was afterwards discovered by one of his sandals, which the fire cast up again, for his sandals were of brass. See Stanley’s “Lives of the Philosophers.” The manner of his death is related differently by different authors. This was, however, the generally received fable. Lucian, with an equal degree of probability, carries him up to the moon.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote170"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation170">{170}</a> See Homer’s Odyssey, b. xvi. 1. 187. The speech of Ulysses to his son, on the discovery.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote171"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation171">{171}</a> When Empedocles is got into the moon, Lucian makes him swear by Endymion in compliment to his sovereign lady.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote172a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation172a">{172a}</a> Agathocles.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote172b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation172b">{172b}</a> Stratonice.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote173"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation173">{173}</a> Of Achilles. See the 18th book of the “Iliad.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote175a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation175a">{175a}</a> Greek, ο χορηγος.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote175b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation175b">{175b}</a> Sicyon was a city near Corinth, famous for the richness and felicity of its soil.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote176a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation176a">{176a}</a> The famous Ager Cynurius, a little district of Laconia, on the confines of Argolis; the Argives and Spartans, whom it laid between, agreed to decide the property of it by three hundred men of a side in the field: the battle was bloody and desperate, only one man remaining alive, Othryades, the Lacedæmonian, who immediately, though covered with wounds, raised a trophy, which he inscribed with his own blood, to Jupiter Tropæus. This victory the Spartans, who from that time had quiet possession of the field, yearly celebrated with a festival, to commemorate the event.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote176b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation176b">{176b}</a> A mountain of Thrace. Dion Cassius places it near Philippi. It was supposed to have abounded in golden mines in some parts of it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote177"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation177">{177}</a> When Æacus was king of Thessaly, his kingdom was almost depopulated by a dreadful pestilence; he prayed to Jupiter to avert the distemper, and dreamed that he saw an innumerable quantity of ants creep out of an old oak, which were immediately turned into men; when he awoke the dream was fulfilled, and he found his kingdom more populous than ever; from that time the people were called Myrmidons. Such is the fable, which owed its rise merely to the name of Myrmidons, which it was supposed must come from μυρμηξ, an ant. To some such trifling circumstances as these we are indebted for half the fables of antiquity.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote178a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation178a">{178a}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” book i. 1. 294.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote178b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation178b">{178b}</a> This was the opinion of Anaxagoras, and is confirmed by the more accurate observations of modern philosophy.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote179"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation179">{179}</a> <i>See</i> Pope’s Homer’s “Odyssey,” book x. 1. 113.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote180a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation180a">{180a}</a> <i>I.e</i>. Such a countenance as he put on when he slew the rebellious Titans.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote180b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation180b">{180b}</a> See Homer’s “Odyssey,” A. v. 170</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote181"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation181">{181}</a> Otus and Ephialtes were two giants of an enormous size; some of the ancients, who, no doubt, were exact in their measurement, assure us that, at nine years old, they were nine cubits round, and thirty-six high, and grew in proportion, till they thought proper to attack and endeavour to dethrone Jupiter; for which purpose they piled mount Ossa and Pelion upon Olympus, made Mars prisoner, and played several tricks of this kind, till Diana, by artifice, subdued them, contriving, some way or other, to make them shoot their arrows against, and destroy each other, after which Jupiter sent them down to Tartarus. Some attribute to Apollo the honour of conquering them. This story has been explained, and allegorised, and tortured so many different ways, that it is not easy to unravel the foundation of it.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote182"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation182">{182}</a> Jupiter thought himself, we may suppose, much obliged to Phidias for the famous statue which he had made of him, and therefore, in return, complaisantly inquires after his family.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote183a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation183a">{183a}</a> From Aratus.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote183b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation183b">{183b}</a> A city of Elis, where there was a temple dedicated to Olympian Jupiter, and public games celebrated every fifth year.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote183c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation183c">{183c}</a> A city of Thessaly, where there was a temple to Jove; this was likewise the seat of the famous oracle.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote183d"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation183d">{183d}</a> A goddess worshipped in Thrace. Hesychius says this was only another name for Diana. See Strabo.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote184"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation184">{184}</a> Alluding to his Republic, which probably was considered by Lucian and others as a kind of Utopian system.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote185a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation185a">{185a}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” book xvi. 1. 250.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote185b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation185b">{185b}</a> Of Elis, founder of the Sceptic sect, who doubted of everything. He flourished about the hundred and tenth Olympiad.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote187a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation187a">{187a}</a> ’Ου γαρ σιτον εδουα’, ου πινουσ’ αιθοπα οινον.<br /> “—Not the bread of man their life sustains,<br /> Nor wine’s inflaming juice supplies their veins.”<br /> See Pope’s Homer’s “Iliad,” book v. 1. 425.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote187b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation187b">{187b}</a> Greek, υποβεβρεγμενοι.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote187c"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation187c">{187c}</a> See the beginning of the second book of the “Iliad.”</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote188a"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation188a">{188a}</a> Apollo is always represented as <i>imberbis</i>, or without a beard, probably from a notion that Phoebus, or the sun, must be always young.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote188b"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation188b">{188b}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” book xviii. 1. 134.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote189"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation189">{189}</a> See Homer’s “Iliad,” book ii. 1. 238.</p> <p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a name="footnote190"></a><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10430/10430-h/10430-h.htm#citation190">{190}</a> Greek, θρεμματα, what Virgil calls, ignavum pecus.</p><p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><br /></p><p style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2010/06/lucian-of-samosata.html">Return</a></p>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-81493136880607947412010-06-09T17:37:00.000-07:002010-06-09T17:59:34.999-07:00Dime Novel...Nick Carter<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" >NICK CARTER DETECTIVE<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" >THE SOLUTION OF A REMARKABLE CASE</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NOTE.-The following story was told to the writer by Nick Carter as being the most remarkable, and in many respects, the most mysterious case in his experience. It baffled the shrewdest detectives on the regular force, and had practically been abandoned when Nick Carter took hold of it. I tell the story in my own way and in the third person, but the facts, scenes and incidents are reproduced as nearly as possible in the great detective's own words.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER I<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"THE MURDER IN FORTY-SEVENTH STREET</span>"<br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The city of New York was electrified one evening by the news that one of its greatest favorites had been foully murdered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie La Verde had been found dead in her room and the murderer had not left a single clew, however slight, by which he could be traced.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mademoiselle La Verde had been before the public for two seasons as a danseuse, and by her remarkable beauty and modesty, as well as by the unparalleled grace with which she executed her inimitable steps she had won her way to the hearts of all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the evening preceding her death she had danced as usual, winning round after round of applause, and a deluge of flowers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Immediately after the performance she had been driven to her home in Forty-seventh street, accompanied only by her maid, who had been with her for many years, and who scarcely ever left her presence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The maid had attended her as usual that night; had remained with her until she had disrobed, and then, at her mistress' request, had given her a book, and retired.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie had bade her servant good-night as usual, adding the injunction that she did not wish to be disturbed before ten o'clock on the following morning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At ten o'clock precisely on the morning of the succeeding day, the maid, whose name was Delia Dent, had gone to her mistress' room to assist her in dressing, and upon entering, had been so horrified by the sight that met her gaze that she had swooned away then and there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie La Verde was lying upon her bed, clad in the soft wrapper which the maid had helped her to don before leaving her on the preceding night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her face was distorted and swollen almost beyond recognition, and in spots was highly discolored, where the blood had coagulated beneath the skin. Her mouth was open, and her eyes were wide and staring, even yet filled with an expression of the horror through which she had passed just before her death. Her delicate hands, pretty enough for an artist's model, were clenched until the finger-nails had sunk into the tender flesh and drawn blood. The figure bore every evidence of a wild and terrific Struggle to escape from the grasp in which she had been seized, while the dull blue mark around her throat told only too plainly how her death had been accomplished.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The bed bore every evidence of a wild and terrific struggle. The coverings were tumbled in great confusion, one pillow had fallen upon the floor, and the book which the murdered girl had been engaged in reading when the grip of the assassin had seized her, was torn and crumpled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie was dead, and everything in the room bore mute evidence that she had died horribly, and that she had struggled desperately to free herself from the attack of her slayer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In searching for evidence of the presence of the murderer, not a clew of any kind could be found.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How he had gained access to the room where the danseuse was reading, or how he had left it after consummating the horrible deed, were mysteries which the keenest detectives failed to fathom</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Theories were as plenty as mosquitoes in June, but there was positively no proof in support of any of, them, and one by one they fell to the ground and were abandoned as useless or absurd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As a last resort, Delia Dent, the maid, fell under the ban of suspicion. But only for a time. The most stupid of investigators could not long believe her guilty of a crime so heinous, while, moreover, it was certain that she was not possessed of the necessary physical strength to accomplish the deed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Neither had she the will power, for beyond her love for her dead mistress, the woman was weak and yielding in her nature.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Delia Dent did not long survive her mistress.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The terrible shock caused by the discovery of Eugenie's dead body was more than her frail strength could bear. She was prostrated nervously, and after growing steadily worse for a period of four weeks, she died at the hospital where she had been taken.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One theory, which for a time found many supporters, was that Delia Dent had been in league with the murderer; had admitted him to the house, and had allowed him quietly to depart after the deed was done.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But that theory was also abandoned, as being even more absurd than the others that had been advanced. Delia was conscious to the last, during her sickness, at the hospital, and just before her death she devised all her savings-a sum amounting to nearly ten thousand dollars-to her lawyer, in trust for the person who should succeed in bringing the murderer of Eugenie La Verde to justice. The house in Forty-seventh street, where Eugenie had been killed, was, at the time, occupied solely by herself and the maid Delia, and the basement was never used by them at all. Once a month the man who examined the gas-meter came to attend to his duty, and upon such occasions he passed through the basement hall on his way to the cellar. But when his work was done, Delia always locked and chained the door which communicated between the basement and the parlor floor, and it was never again disturbed until the same necessity arose during the following month.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie never dined at home, and her maid never left her. Her breakfast, which consisted only of coffee and a roll, was always prepared by the maid over an alcoholic lamp in the room where Eugenie slept.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the discovery of the crime, a careful examination was made of every window and door in the house which communicated by any possibility with the outside world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All were found securely locked, and every door was provided with the additional security afforded by a chain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Even the scuttle had an intricate padlock:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nothing had been molested.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Window-fastenings, door-locks, chain-bolts, scuttle and sky-light were alike undisturbed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From the circumstances of the case as they were discovered after the commission of the crime, it was absolutely impossible for the murderer to have gained access to the house without leaving some evidence of the fact. Again, supposing the assassin to have been already concealed therein, it was equally impossible that he could have gotten out without furnishing some clew.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Delia Dent, as has been said, had fainted when she discovered the dead body of her young mistress. Upon reviving, she had staggered to a messenger call in the hallway, having barely strength to ring for the police. Then, still half-fainting, she had managed to reach the foot of the stairs, but had not yet unchained the front door when her call was answered. She believed that she fainted twice, or that site was in a state of semi-consciousness during the interval that elapsed between the discovery of the crime and the arrival of the police.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The more thorough the investigation, the deeper grew the mystery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Old and tried detectives were put upon the case. At first they looked wise and assured everybody of the speedy apprehension of the fiend who had committed the deed. Then they became puzzled, and finally utterly confounded. The bravest of them at last confessed that they were no nearer the truth than at the beginning, and one of them, the shrewdest of all, boldly stated that the only way in which the assassin would ever be discovered would be by his voluntary confession, which was not likely to ensue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus matters drifted on until the public mind found other things to think of. The papers at first devoted pages to the event; then a few columns. In a week, one column sufficed. Finally the reports dwindled down to a single comment, and then to nothing, and the mysterious murder was practically relegated to history and forgotten.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was one, however, who had not forgotten it, and that one was the Inspector in Chief, at Police Headquarters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Every resource at his command had been exhausted. His best men had taken the case in hand and failed. He had personally given all the time he could spare from his other duties to the murder of Eugenie La Verde, and was yet as greatly mystified as ever. There was no palpable or reasonable solution to the problem.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her jewels, of great value, were found untouched upon the dressing-case. A roll of bills amounting to several hundred dollars was in the top drawer, where it had evidently been carelessly thrown by the murdered girl that very night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The murderer had doubtless approached stealthily, giving her no warning. He had seized her in his vise-like grip, choked her to death, and left her as stealthily as he had come. Her body was undefiled by bruises, contusions, or other marks, showing that he had given his attention solely to the work of killing. It was even evident that he had not sought to put a stop to her struggles by the exercise of physical violence, other than that of choking his Victim.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The marks upon her throat were peculiar and very striking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Some of the detectives thought that the assassin had used both hands simultaneously; others believed that he had made use of a rope, holding one end in either hand and winding it twice around her neck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was one fact which seemed to upset every theory that was advanced. The door between the room and the hall-way was closed, although not locked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The bed on which Eugenie was murdered was so situated that it would have been absolutely impossible for anyone to enter the room without being seen by her. The gas was brilliantly lighted, and was so found in the morning after the crime. Delia Dent had never known her mistress to fall asleep while reading, or to neglect to extinguish the gas when ready to compose herself for the night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Was there a third person in the house, whose presence was known to her alone?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Preposterous! Delia could not have failed to be aware of such a fact, and the person could not have left the house without being discovered, or leaving traces of his manner of exit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nothing had. ever been whispered against the character of Eugenie La Verde, and the coroner's inquest proved that she had been worthy of her reputation for modesty and purity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The crime was a month old when, one evening shortly after dark, Inspector Byrnes went quietly up the steps of Nick Carter's residence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Everybody believed that the chief had given the matter up, and he was perfectly willing that the public should have that opinion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the meantime, he had decided that there was one man in New York who might be able to solve the mystery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hence, his quiet call upon Nick Carter. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER II</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"THE INTERVIEW</span>"<br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick Carter was at home when the inspector called, and he received him as he would have received no other man in the whole city of New York; in his own proper person. One of the cardinal points of Nick's faith in himself was that by keeping himself entirely unknown to everybody his various disguises were rendered absolutely impenetrable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am glad to see you, inspector," was his greeting to the chief. "Sit down, help yourself to a cigar and we will talk it all over, for I suppose you are here on business."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are right, Nick."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You never come unless there is something of importance on hand. What is it to-night?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The Eugenie La Verde affair."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, I thought that was given up."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So it is-by everybody except myself."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah! By the way, I see that-"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That Delia Dent is dead? Yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you take any stock in her knowing aught of the murder, inspector?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"None whatever. She was as innocent as you, or I."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My opinion, although of course I know nothing about the case."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Have you a theory, Nick?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No. I avoid theories as I do the typhus or the small-pox. They are dangerous and very catching."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Exactly. Still one thinks."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes-unfortunately."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nick, I want you to take this matter in hand and sift it to the bottom."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Easier said than done, inspector."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I believe that you can do it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It is a very blind case."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Everybody else has failed. Will you try it, Nick? There is a murderer somewhere, and he must be found if it takes years to do it. Will you try it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Thank you. I feared that you would refuse, and yet-----"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I may want a favor sometime, eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Precisely."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"When am I to begin, and what are your instructions?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Begin when you choose, and follow your own bent independently of everybody. I have only one order to give."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What is that?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That no one but ourselves must know that you are on the case."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should have made that point a condition of my taking it, inspector."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are familiar with the details of the case, I suppose?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, sufficiently to begin, unless you have some particular pointer to give me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, there are no pointers in the case."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Humph! Did Eugenie have any relatives living?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes; a mother."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"She left some property, did she not?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, her mother inherits. I have not learned very much regarding her connections."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What becomes of the house? Did she own it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes. It is at present locked and deserted."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah-and you have the key!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Certainly."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Will you give it to me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes. I have it with me. Here it is."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good. While I am at work upon the ease, inspector, will you see that the house remains undisturbed?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Did the newspapers recount everything concerning the murder correctly?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, yes. There was so little to say regarding the surroundings, that I am sure they covered the ground."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You looked for trap-doors, sliding panels, movable casings, and all such things, I suppose?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Certainly. We looked very thoroughly."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And found nothing!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nothing."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Still, it will do no harm for me to have a try."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Certainly not."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have found such things in houses where I least expected them before now. It may be that I will find something of the kind there."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It may be."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But you do not think so?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, frankly, I do not."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And yet, how else could the murderer have entered and left the house?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dear Nick, I have asked myself that question at least ten thousand times."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And found no answer?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"None."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I'm inclined to the belief that I will find something of the kind there."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I hope you will."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The case stands this way. A girl was murdered. To have been murdered it seems probable that a stranger gained access to her room."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And yet the condition in which the house was found was such that it is apparently impossible that any one did enter or leave the house after Delia Dent left her mistress that night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Precisely."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Therefore it must have been by some means or method of which you are ignorant."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How then, if not by a secret door, sliding panel, or some like contrivance?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That is the question. How, then?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, that is then the first thing that I am going to look for."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And the next?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Will depend upon my success with the first. Is that all, inspector?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nearly. You will find the house exactly as I found it when I first went there to investigate; and now, goodnight, Nick," continued the inspector, rising, and taking a large envelope from his pocket.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This," he said, "contains the entire case from first to last, and you may read it over at your own convenience. Nothing is omitted, and yet very little is said that is worth reading."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It is that Eugenie La Verde was choked to death, and that the murderer escaped and left not the slightest clew as to his identity or his haunts."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Exactly. And now you must find him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will try."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If anybody can succeed, you can and will."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Thanks; I will try."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good-night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good-night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The door closed, and the great director of detectives was gone. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER III<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"THE FIRST CLEW"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the following morning Nick went at once to Eugenie La Verde's house in Forty-seventh street, disguised as a plumber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The room which she had formerly occupied was nearly in the same condition in which it had been found on the morning after the murder, and a careful search offered no immediate suggestion to the detective.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From the sleeping room, he passed to the parlor floor, where he inspected all of the window-catches and appliances, casings, and panels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Again without result.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Presently, he approached the stairs which led from the parlor floor to that below.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The door of communication was at the foot of the stairs, and was both locked and chained on the inner, or parlorfloor side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was nothing faulty about either the lock, chain, or door. They were evidently perfect, and he turned his attention to the stairs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Stair-ways are convenient arrangements through which to construct a secret passage-way, and Nick never neglected them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly he made a discovery. The third step from the bottom was not secure in its place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For more than two hours he continued the search, but without further result.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was nearly dark when Nick was reminded of the fact that he was hungry, and he quietly left the house in search of a convenient restaurant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Two blocks away he found a beer saloon, which advertised meals at all hours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Having entered and ordered what he wanted, he was presently engaged in eating it, when two swarthy, ill-conditioned fellows entered the saloon and seated themselves at the second table from him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The very first words uttered by the men caused him to listen attentively:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Captain, Inspector Byrnes made a call last night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Where?" asked the one addressed as captain."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Upon that devil of a detective. I don't care to mention his name here."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah; the one whom Sindahr calls the little giant? Exactly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, what of it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It may be that he has set him upon us."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Bah! No. There are no reasons for that. The inspector does not even know that we exist."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He knows most things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, but nothing of us. Still it may be well to-did you watch for the 'the little giant.'?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Has he gone out?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"One never can tell, but I think not. I left there an hour ago, and Tony has taken my place. I could swear that he had not left the house when I came away."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick smiled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come, John," said the captain. "We have been here long enough and we have other work to do. It is dark now. Come."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They rose quickly and left the place, and upon the instant Nick decided to shadow them. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IV<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"SHADOWING"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick did not rush from the saloon as soon as the two men left, but sauntered carelessly to the bar, paid for what he had eaten and drank, and then went slowly out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As he had suspected, they were not far away. They were standing upon the curbstone apparently engaged in earnest conversation, but in reality waiting to see if they would be followed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The fact that they were so cautious, gave added zest to the chase.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick sauntered carelessly past them, to the avenue which was only about two hundred feet farther on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A hall-way door between two stores stood conveniently ajar on the opposite side, and he entered it with the air of one who lived there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pausing in the dark hall-way, he began a rapid change in his disguise, and presently he looked like an old man in poor circumstances who worked hard all day, and took an airing and a glass or two of toddy in the evening.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Five or ten minutes passed, and then the two men suddenly separated, the one called John going away rapidly in the opposite direction, and the captain jumped upon a car that was passing at that moment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He took his stand upon the rear platform with his back toward the car, as though he thought that he might be followed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A car was coming up the avenue. It had to pass between Nick and the car that the captain had boarded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For a moment, Nick would be screened from view from the platform of the down-town car.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He utilized that moment to the best advantage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He leaped nimbly into the street and succeeded in getting two doors away before the cars had passed each other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When they had passed, he was standing idly before the door of a "gin-mill" leisurely picking his teeth, as though he had just come out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Presently he walked down the street, rather rapidly, to be sure, but not fast enough to excite the suspicion that he was following anybody.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soon a second car overtook him, and he got upon the front platform.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The two cars were less than a block apart, and the detective could see his man easily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At Fourteenth street the captain turned and abruptly entered the car on which he was riding and passed out upon the front platform.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here the spasmodic flashing of a match presently denoted that he was lighting a cigar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, with a quick run, Nick left his car and overtook the one in which the captain was a passenger, and going inside, seated himself at the forward end.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is more comfortable," he thought. "It is much less work to watch him from here."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Block after block was passed, but the captain showed no sign of leaving the car, nor did he, until it reached the end of the route at the Astor House.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then he stepped off and boarded a south-bound Broadway car, upon which he remained until it reached South Ferry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There the captain took the Hamilton Ferry boat, landed in Brooklyn, and started away down the street along the water-front.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick followed for a mile or more, when suddenly the captain turned and went out upon a pier.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He will stop and look around when he gets out there," thought Nick, "so I will wait here."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He dodged into a deep shadow close to the water's edge, just where a boat was tied by a rope to a cleat upon the dock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The very thing!" thought Nick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In an instant he had untied the rope and seized one of the oars; the next, he was sculling the little craft rapidly and silently along in the shadow of the pier.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly the man whom he was following, paused. Then turning, he came to the edge of the pier and looked over, full at Nick. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER V<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"TRAPPED"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hey, there!" said the captain, in a voice loud enough for Nick to hear, and yet with considerable caution.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick ceased sculling, but did not reply.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you want to earn a dollar or two?" was the first question.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sure!" was Nick's laconic reply.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Take me aboard, then."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What fur?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I want to go down the bay a little way."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ye've struck the wrong party, boss. I ain't on that kind of a lay."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'll make it five."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Haw fur d'ye wanter go?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"About half a mile."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What fur?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's my business. Come, will you take me or won't you? I can't stand here arguing all night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Cops after you, boss?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man shrugged his shoulders and turned away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'll take ye ef it ain't too fur," called Nick. "Climb in."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The captain returned. The boat was drawn up close to the dock, and with a quick spring the stranger alighted upon one of the midship seats.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now make haste," he ordered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Which way, boss?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Down."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How fur?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Go until I tell you to stop."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick obeyed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The tide was with them and was running like a millrace, so that they made quick time, and a mile was passed over in silence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then Nick stopped rowing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Say, boss," he remarked, "you said half a mile, an' we've already came over a mile. - Is the place much furder?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Only a little way. Row on."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I want my five dollars afore I go any furder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You do, eh? Well, look at this."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was pointing a six-shooter directly at Nick's heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm a-lookin'," said Nick, coolly, "but that ain't no five dollars."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Will you row on?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, not till I gits me pay."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Curse you, do as I tell you or I'll put a hole in you big enough to see through."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick calmly drew the oars into the boat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Look ahere," he said, "wot d'ye take me fur, anyhow, boss? D'ye think that I'm a rabbit that I'm afraid o' that pop-gun o' yourn? Not much! Don't ye s'pose I know ye dassent use it out here at this time o' night?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's too early for killin', boss. I've done a job 'r two of that kind myself, an' I'm posted. Fork over, an' I'll row ye where ye wanter go, but I'm blowed ef I will ef ye don't, see?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The passenger growled out something which sounded very much like a curse, but he drew a gold piece from his pocket and flung it to Nick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now go ahead," he muttered, "for I'm losing time."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nobody's fault but yer own," was Nick's reply, and then he seized the oars and the boat shot ahead again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Easy, there, easy," said the passenger, suddenly. "Do you see that sloop yonder?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I do."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Put me aboard of her."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Keyreckt, boss. I've had my eye on her before."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have, eh? Why?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's my bizness, see? To have my eye on such things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah! a river pirate, eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Me? Oh, no! I'm a harbor-broker. Here you are. Ketch hold of the rail. So."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The passenger climbed aboard of the sloop, while Nick allowed his boat to remain just where it was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, what are you waiting for?" asked the captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Fur you. Don't ye want me to take ye back?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No. I do not."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nor come after ye?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What are ye goin' ter do? Swim ashore?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Perhaps."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, good-night, boss. Be keerful of the pop-gun; it may go off sometime."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It will be very apt to if you don't become scarce around here pretty soon."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick laughed lightly and pushed his boat away from the sloop. Then he picked up his oars and rowed away in the darkness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I wonder what he would say if he knew that it was Nick Carter who rowed him down the river to-night?" thought the young detective.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Not very far away from where the sloop was anchored was another craft of less pretentious build, although considerably larger.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a schooner, and Nick pointed his boat's prow directly at it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The outlines were just visible, for the night was growing steadily darker.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Huge clouds were rolling up from the eastward, and the detective noticed with satisfaction that ere another half-hour the night would be literally black.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He reached the schooner, passed it, and then ceased rowing, allowing his boat to drift slowly back until he was thoroughly concealed behind the black hull.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then an entire half hour he sat there and waited.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Darker and darker grew the night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The darkness became so intense that he could not see his hand before his eyes, and great drops of rain began to spatter upon him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"A perfect night for this sort of work," he mused, as he pushed his boat free from thes schooner's side, "and unless I am greatly mistaken, I can make fast to that sloop without being seen or heard. I'm going to try, anyhow."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The tide was still running very strong, and it was hardly necessary for him to do more than steer in order to reach the desired spot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Not a thing could be seen. It seemed as though the whole world had suddenly gone out of existence, having naught but blackness behind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Presently he drew in his oar and went to the bow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was not a moment too soon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Knowing instinctively, rather than seeing, that he was about to collide with the hull of the sloop, he put out his right hand, and was thus enabled to prevent the shock and noise of a collision. Certain discovery would have followed, and his plans would have failed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus far he had made not a sound.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick climbed aboard, and crept softly toward the companion-way, pausing every second step to listen, but hearing nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He went over the entire deck, and finally descended to the cabin, - moving with the same stealthy caution.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick had almost decided that he had been outwitted, and that the sloop was deserted, when suddenly, without any warning whatever, he received a violent blow on the head and sank senseless to the deck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Did you lay him out, John?" asked the cool tone of the man whom we know as captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"As stiff as a door, cap."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good. Close the hatch so that no light can get out, and we'll have a look at him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Better chuck him into the river now," said John, gruffly. "I hit him hard enough to break a dozen heads."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No. Do as I say. Time enough to throw him overboard when we know he's dead."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The hatch-way was closed and a light procured.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The captain bent over the senseless form of Nick Carter and closely examined his face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Boys," he said, presently, "this fellow is made up. He is a fly cop, as I more than half suspected, and he must die." </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VI<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"TONY, THE STRANGLER"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An ominous silence followed the captain's discovery, which was presently broken by the voice of John, who growled:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Shall I stick him now?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No-no; wait. Haste never does any good. Besides, I want to question him before he takes his bath."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Some brandy was poured into Nick's mouth, and he presently opened his eyes, and looked around him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He saw that five men were in the cabin with him, and realized instantly that he was in the hands of a gang who would not hesitate at murder, and by the expression of their faces he judged that they meant to mete out small mercy for him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That he was right, the sequel proved.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The captain stood nearest him, and Nick noticed that his face was hard and cruel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He also noticed another thing with a great amount of satisfaction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The men were so confident of the strength of superior numbers, and the meekness consequent upon the force of the blow that their victim had received, that they had not thought it worth their while to bind him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It did not occur to them that one man could get away from five, particularly when they surrounded him in a little cabin like that of the sloop.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Who are you?" asked the captain, coldly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Jest what I was wonderin'," replied Nick. "I feel sorter dazed with the hit on my head."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Answer me!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The voice was cold and stern, and the demand was emphasized by the exhibition of a glittering knife held menacingly before the detective's eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm a river broker," said Nick, coolly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let me remind you that we are not now on the open river, young man, and that this thing makes no noise. You were plucky enough when you knew that I would not shoot, but I promise you that I will cut if you trifle with us now. Answer me; who are you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm Flood-tide-Billy. Ever heard of me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's too thin, my friend. We all know Billy."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do,eh? Allright. Then what did ye ask me fur?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your name?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, ye got it, didn't ye?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not the right one."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Mebby you know more about it than I do."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why did you return to this sloop?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why do I go to any sloop, or schooner, or any other craft? say!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come-come! you can't play that game on us. We're onto you, my man. River pirates don't go around with wigs and false mustaches."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You're a fly cop."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Am, eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And we want to know your lay."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do, eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, we do, eh I We're not out here to-night for pleasure."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Neither was I."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"For what, then?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Profit."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick had been gaining both time and strength during the short conference, as well as studying the faces and comparative strength of the men around him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had made up his mind to make a bold dash for liberty, relying upon his wonderful strength and agility to accomplish it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was still flat upon the deck, but to him that fact made little difference, for his muscles were so active that he could leap to his feet from such a position as quickly as from a chair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The captain quietly took out his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will give you one minute in which to decide whether you will make a clean breast of the whole thing, or die," he said. "Draw your knives, boys, and when I drop this handkerchief, you may make short work of the cop."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Five knives glittered in as many hands upon the instant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Fifteen seconds," said the captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick's eyes roamed from face to face, seeking that which belonged to the man whom he wanted to attack first.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Thirty seconds."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Still Nick remained quiet, while the ruffians seemed to grow eager for the instant to arrive when they could fall upon him and hack him to pieces.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Forty-five seconds."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nothing could be heard but the ticking of the watch which the captain held in his hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Fifty seconds."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then Nick acted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Like a flash of lightning he was upon his feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His fist shot out like a cannon-ball, and John, who was a little in advance of the others, fell back like a stricken bullock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With cries resembling the roar of wild beasts, the others then threw themselves forward with uplifted knives and murderous hearts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But again Nick was too much for them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His foot flew up and knocked the knife from the foremost man's hand. His fist followed, and the fellow was hurled backward against his companion, utterly confusing them for an instant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick quickly followed up the advantage thus gained.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He bounded forward and seized in an iron grasp the man whom he had just struck,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, raising him from the floor as though he were a babe, the detective hurled him bodily, straight at the now advancing men.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The human missile flew true to its aim, and three of the ruffians went down as though laid low by the sweep of a scythe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The fourth was the captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He leaped toward Nick, doubly infuriated by the fact that he was now thoroughly satisfied that it was none other than Nick Carter, the little giant, who was before him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But Nick met him half way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With a lightning-like movement be seized the hand which held the knife.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, exerting all of his great strength, he bent the captain's wrist quickly backward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a snap like the breaking of a pipe-stem, and a yell of pain from the captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick's left arm shot out and his fist landed with terrific force squarely on the fellow's nose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now was the detective's time, if ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turned, and with one bound reached the hatchway.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was closed and fastened, but again his strength proved too great for ordinary opposition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In an instant he tore the hatch open and leaped out into the darkness, followed by the report of two revolvers and the ringing of a couple of bullets in his ears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But he was unhurt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The night was as black as Erebus as he bounded forward and crouched behind a small boat that was overturned upon the sloop's deck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The men rushed upon the deck in their eager haste to capture him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of them had been thoughtful enough to seize a bull's-eye lantern which was already lighted, and with it he searched the water around the sloop as far as the rays ,would reach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of course he could see nothing of Nick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let's search the deck," said one of them. "Mebby he didn't go overboard."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Bah! d'ye think held stay here? Not much!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's a terror, ain't he?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Lightnin's nothin' to that feller."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Who is he?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Look here, Tony, there's only one man in New York who could do what he did, an' that's the young devil they call Nick Carter."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah! the little giant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's him, an' he's, got to be done up."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man called Tony chuckled audibly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"A job for me, eh, Morgan?" he said; and Nick was conscious of a shiver when he heard the exultation in the man's voice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes-you an' yer string."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am never without it, Morgan. The time I spent in India wasn't lost, and there is nothing like the string for making a corpse. Do you remember Red Mike?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"B-i-r-r-r!" said Morgan. "You give me the horrors, Tony. I kin stand knifin' a man, or puttin' a chunk o' cold lead into him, but when it comes to windin' that cord o' yourn 'round a feller's throat, and a-makin' his tongue an' his eyeballs stick out like fingers, I ain't in it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A low laugh was Tony's reply, and then the men began a search of the deck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But they had no idea that Nick remained aboard of the sloop, and not expecting to find their man, the search was only a half-hearted one, so that the detective had no difficulty in keeping out of their way by dodging around the boat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The light thrown by a bull's-eye lantern reaches only the point at which it is directed, and renders the surrounding darkness much greater by contrast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This fact was a great advantage to Nick, and he did not fail to make the most of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When he had first heard, the word string mentioned in connection with killing he had become greatly interested in the conversation, and from the subsequent remarks made by the men it became evident that Tony was a strangler.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His reference to India as the place where he had learned the art of using his peculiar yet terrible weapon was full of meaning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Everybody knows of that strange wild sect The are as stealthy as a cat, as determined as Fate, and as deadly as a cobra.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie La Verde was strangled to death. Could it be possible that there was any connection between her murder and this gang of men who made a sloop in New York Bay their place of rendezvous?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Had Nick stumbled upon a clew to the crime in Forty-seventh street, where he least expected it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At all events he resolved to have a good look at the man Tony, and to learn more concerning the purposes of these five men. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VII<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"THE STRANGLER'S THREAT"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After satisfying themselves that the detective had made good his escape, the three men, Tony, Morgan and their companion, who was known among them as Crofty, returned to the cabin of the sloop.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick followed them closely, and reached the hatchway in time to hear all that was said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well?" demanded the captain when the three men returned from the deck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Skipped," replied Morgan, laconically.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Flew away, I guess. There was not a sign of him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"See!" and the captain held up his right arm, the wrist of which Nick had broken in the struggle. "My wrist is broken. He must pay for it. Do you know who it was, Tony?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Morgan told me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What did he say?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The little giant."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Right. He could have been none other. I have heard of him often, but have never seen him before. Tony, he must die."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"At my hands?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"When?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"At once. the sooner, the better."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Tomorrow, then."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Bah! If you get him foul within a week, I will give you a thousand dollars."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Done, cap. He's a dead man. My string never failed me yet. More than one has gone down beneath it, and oh, how I love to see them gasp for breath."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How is the wind?" asked the captain, curtly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"None at all," replied Morgan, "The rain has knocked it all out. We could not reach the nest to-night if we tried."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Then let us go ashore. Sindahr will be there. Come."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick waited to hear no more, but went hastily to his boat and untied the painter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As he drifted away, he heard the low murmur of voices as the men came upon deck from the cabin of the sloop.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soon there came a gentle splash in the water, and he knew that they had put the boat over the side-the very one behind which he had hidden, when they were searching for him so eagerly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That they had some rendezvous on shore near that point, Nick felt certain, and he resolved to follow them at all risks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Standing in the stern of his own boat with a single oar, he could force her through the water as silently as a shadow, while he conjectured that they would row, and that he could thus follow the sound of their oars in the water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They were soon in the boat and rowing rapidly away, while Nick followed them, sculling as fast as they rowed. A long pier stretched far out into the bay, near by, and they made directly for it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The noise made by their oars in the water ceased, and Nick paused, knowing that they had gone beneath the pier.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Presently he sculled cautiously forward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His boat touched the pier, and drawing in his oar, he used his hands upon the planking, to force his boat ahead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When far beneath the pier, he stopped and listened again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The silence of death and the blackness of the Styx reigned supreme.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Cautiously Nick drew his little dark-lantern from his pocket, pressed the spring and opened the slide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A ray of light shot out over the water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The empty boat employed by the men in coming from the sloop was immediately before him, but the men had disappeared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The boat was fastened to a cross-beam of the pier, just where a crib was sunk into the water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was not likely that they had jumped into the river, and therefore it followed that there must be a way of passing through the crib, or of reaching the dock from that point.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick pulled his boat forward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He searched the crib and was examining it intently, when something, he knew not what, caused him to turn his head suddenly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The act saved his life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a flash and a loud report, and a bullet whizzed past his ear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Like a shot he turned and leaped toward the point from whence the flash had proceeded, for in that one instant he had seen the dark form of a man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He reached him and seized him in his iron grasp, but even as he did so, the man who had fired the shot was endeavoring to escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They grappled just as he was balanced on the gunwale of the boat, and the next instant they were in the river and floating away with the tide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The struggle was short, for one man was no match for Nick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As soon as they came to the surface, Nick twisted himself free from his opponent's grasp, and struck him a violent blow in the face with his fist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He would not have been rendered senseless more quickly if struck with a hammer, and Nick quietly swam to the nearest wharf with his prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Having reached it, he pulled the fellow upon the planks, and then with all the expertness of a pickpocket, searched him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He found nothing of interest to him, and so left the man upon the dock, to revive as best he could, or to stay there senseless until found. Nick, who was an extremely expert swimmer, again plunged boldly into the water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He headed straight for the pier where he had left his boat, and reached it without accident. Then he set out at once for the pier where the boat had been procured, realizing that the men were too much on their guard for him to learn more that night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Once landed, he hurried to the ferry, crossed to New York, and took the elevated road.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His destination was the house in Forty-seventh street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It is my belief that these men know something about the death of Eugenie La Verde," he thought, "and that Tony knows more of the particulars than the others."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"For the sake of the argument, I will premise that Tony went to the house on the night of the murder, and that he strangled the girl with his cord.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What was the motive for the crime, if he committed it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What did these men expect to gain by murdering a danseuse? Not money or jewels, certainly, for they left both, to a considerable amount, on the bureau.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How did they enter the house from the street, and how leave it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"In what way is this captain, who is evidently an American, to be benefited by Eugenie's death?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Those fellows are on their guard, now, They know that I am after them and they will be more than ordinarily cautious, unless Tony succeeds in getting his deadly string around my neck!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was soon again in the house in Forty-seventh street, where the beautiful Eugenie La Verde had met her sudden and mysterious fate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When he entered, he went straight to Eugenie's room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As he stood upon the threshold, he thought he heard a rustling noise not unlike that made by the dress of a woman as she passed across a floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He paused suddenly and listened.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The noise came again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Quickly he brought forth his little lantern, and touched the button, throwing a gleam of light into the apartment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From point to point he turned the ray of light, himself remaining standing in the door-way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The room was empty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A moment's search satisfied him on that point, but he was equally sure that he had heard something.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Had a person been there when he stepped over the threshold? and if so, by what means had that person left the room?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The noises that he had heard could not have been made by a rat, or a mouse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If the room had been tenanted by a human being who wished to escape observation, why had that person not gone while he was yet in the lower hall, instead of waiting until he stood upon the very threshold of the room?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perhaps the occupant of the apartment was sleeping when he entered, and did not rouse until the last moment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wonderingly, Nick approached the bed, for he had a peculiar feeling that it was not a human being that had been in the room when he entered, and yet his reason told him that it was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly, having lighted the gas and turned toward the bed, he started.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Before him was the proof that somebody or something had been there since he had left the place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He remembered perfectly how the pillows had been placed when he was there before, and now they were differently located. One of them was near the foot of the bed and the other was on the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Both were crushed, as though they had been used. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VIII<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"A FIGHT WITH A "SHADOW""</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick did not know, until some time afterward, how near he had been to death at the moment when he crossed the threshold of Eugenie La Verde's room that night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nevertheless strange thoughts suggested themselves to his mind as he prosecuted his search through the place, and examined the pillows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was conscious, too, of a peculiar odor that he did not recognize, and which made his nerves tingle with an odd sensation that he could not explain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The pillow on the floor looked as though somebody had pounded it out of all shape, as one will do at times in order to lie more comfortably. But the bed gave no signs of recent occupancy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Had a man or a woman been there and lain upon the bed, some marked evidence of the fact would have been left. However, there was none.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It had been Nick's intention to take a hasty survey of the house and then go home and rest until the following day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now, however, he hesitated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Presently he went slowly down the stairs, opened and closed the front door, and instead of going out, returned silently to the foot of the stairs and stood, listening.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For an hour he remained perfectly motionless, but not a sound came to him to reveal the presence of anyone, and at last, satisfied that he would gain nothing by waiting longer that night, he noiselessly left the house and started homeward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As Nick drew near to his own residence, a slight motion made by a dark shadow on the opposite side of the street attracted his attention.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Somebody watching for me," was his mental comment. "I wonder if it is Tony, with his string? If so, he has made good time, and his presence here so quickly may account for the noise I heard in the house in Forty-seventh street. In case it is the strangler, I'll give him a little sport before dawn."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He went directly up the Steps of his own house and entered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >People knew well enough the house where Nick lived, but nobody knew that he also owned the house directly back of it, fronting upon the other street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had purchased it some time before, and had so arranged that he could enter or leave his own house by the other one without fear of being seen or shadowed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Just now, however, his purpose was to let Tony know that he was Nick Carter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hastening to his room, he hurriedly removed his wet clothes, placed a few necessary things in his pockets; and again went out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Turning down the street, he soon became convinced that Tony was following him, and then he set out in earnest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hurrying over to Third avenue, he ran up the steps and caught a down train, just as it was moving out of the station.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The purpose in that was to compel Tony to run also, for Nick's real idea in "having some fun" with the strangler was only to get a good view of his face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >True, he had seen him in the cabin of the sloop, at the time of the row. But he had also seen them all, and he had no idea which one was Tony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick saw his "shadow" running, and watched him as, disregarding the rules of the road, he leaped upon the platform of the train after it was in motion, in spite of the efforts of the guard to thrust him back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The detective walked back through the cars until he came to the one in which Tony was quietly seated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a seat directly opposite the strangler, and Nick took it, while, without any effort to conceal his purpose, he carefully studied the man's face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the train reached Houston street, Nick rose and left the car.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony did likewise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick passed down the stairs and boarded an up town surface car.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony did the same.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Cheeky!" muttered Nick. "I wonder if he thinks I'm a fool? Well, I'm tired of this, and I'll shake him and go home."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He remained on the car until he reached Fourteenth street, when he got down and went westward as far as the Morton House.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turned the corner of Broadway and Fourteenth street about two hundred feet in advance of Tony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The distance was not much, but it was enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As soon as he turned, Nick began making a rapid change.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had not gone twenty feet before his appearance was entirely altered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From a young man he was changed to a very old one. A light mustache had given place to a set of snow-white whiskers patterned a la Greeley. The derby hat that he had worn had disappeared-for it was of the "crush" kind -and in its place was a broad brimmed felt. The jaunty cane that he had carried was taken apart and thrust into a pocket. A pair of spectacles adorned his nose, and he walked with the hesitation of one who has long suffered the tortures of rheumatism.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The entire change had not occupied more than one minute of actual time, and as soon as it was completed Nick wheeled abruptly and retraced his steps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turned the corner and went on toward Third avenue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He met Tony and passed him, smiling when he saw that the strangler had quickened his steps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He could have touched the fellow as he passed, and he felt a strong inclination to do so with no very gentle hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >However, he did not, and in another moment Tony had turned the comer and disappeared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I guess I am done with him for to-night," thought Nick, "and now I'll go home and go to bed."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He reached Third avenue, boarded a car, rode to his corner and got down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then he paused, while an amused smile stole over his features.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony was standing on the corner as though awaiting his arrival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That fellow is smarter than I thought," muttered Nick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Has he penetrated my disguise, or is he only waiting here in the hope that I will show up in the old shape?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Again he passed Tony, but the fellow did not look at him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Walking on down the street, he presently took a small mirror from his pocket and held it up before him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The glass reflected the form of Tony skulking along rapidly behind, and gaining with every step.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The scoundrel is going to try his game on to-night," muttered Nick. "I hope he may succeed if I don't give him a dose that he'll remember many a day."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony drew nearer and nearer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick still held the mirror so that he could see the skulkin', snake-like figure of the would-be murderer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He could see something of eagerness in the man's gait, as though he thirsted for blood, and could ill-restrain his passion for murder when the moment drew near for its accomplishment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nearer and yet nearer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They had reached a place along the block where the darkness was greater than in the portion that they had already traversed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly Tony darted forward, moving like a cat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the same instant Nick turned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stooped and jumped aside in the selfsame second.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Just in time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was an angry swish through the air, made by the cord of the strangler as he attempted to wind it around Nick's throat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With a quick bound Nick was at Tony's side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He seized him and was about to hurl him to the pavement when the fellow seemed to slip from his grasp like an eel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Again the swish of the cord, and again Nick dodged just in time to avoid the strange but deadly weapon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The detective knew that, strong as he was, if the cord once touched his neck, nothing could save him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Once more he leaped toward Tony. Again he seized him, and this time the fellow did not slip away as before.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He could not play the same trick twice upon Nick Carter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But even as the detective seized the man, he heard a loud hiss, and a noxious odor filled the air.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was the suffocating smell of the cobra. Like a flash Nick realized that the man was a snake-charmer and that his pets would protect him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He loosened his hold and leaped back out of danger,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then his fist shot out, striking the strangler squarely between the eyes. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IX<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"A SCOUNDREL'S SCHEME"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is needless to say that Tony, the strangler, went down beneath the fist of Nick Carter as though he had been shot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Neither did he attempt to rise, for the force of the blow had rendered him as senseless as a dead man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick drew nearer and regarded him earnestly, but an angry hiss warned him not to go too close, and at the same instant, two bead-like eyes, glowing like sparks of fire, swayed to and fro above the strangler's heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The deadly cobra was there, and with a serpent's wisdom, it knew that its master had been hurt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With a shudder Nick turned away, knowing that Tony would presently revive, and that the snake would not leave him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fearing, however, that some person might come along who would attempt to rouse the senseless form of Tony and so get bitten by the cobra, he stepped into a door-way near at hand and waited.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No one came, fortunately, and presently Tony began to show signs of returning consciousness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a little he sat up and rubbed his head in a dazed sort of way, as though he wondered where he was and how he got there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Recollection returned very suddenly when it did come, for he leaped quickly to his feet and started away at a rapid pace.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick followed, changing his disguise again as he went.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The opportunity was too good a one to be lost.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Evidently Tony had no use for cars, for he continued to walk until he had covered the whole distance from Forty-seventh street to East Houston.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Down that he went to Georck street, where he suddenly darted into the hall-way of a high and dirty tenement, house of the very worst description.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick was not far behind him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The strangler mounted to the topmost floor of the house and Nick kept close behind, moving silently as a shadow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He reached the door through which Tony had passed, almost as soon as it was closed, and his ear was instantly at the keyhole.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well!" he heard the gruff voice of John demand, "did you do it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let that be your answer!" and Tony pointed to the contusion between his eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >John laughed audibly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ye found one feller that yer string didn't fit, didn't ye?" he jeered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It will fit you," was the meaning reply, and it evidently had its effect upon John, for he jeered no more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I went out to strangle the detective to-night," continued Tony, "because the captain wished him out of the way. Now I will pursue him until he is dead, because he struck me-because he defeated me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Mebby he'll be so fly that ye can't git the string onto him at all."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Then there is another way, even surer."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Look!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A loud hiss told Nick that Tony had taken the cobra from his breast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ugh!" grunted John. "I hate that thing! What d'ye bring it here for anyway?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The cobra is always with me. We are never apart."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ugh! whew! Say Tony, I've had snakes afore now! but I'm blamed if I'd want 'em always. I don't like 'em."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They were not of this kind."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, most of mine were green, an' some of 'em had seven heads. Say, put that thing away, or I'll have 'em again; it makes me shake all over."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You're a fool, John!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why? 'Cos I don't like snakes? Mebby so, but that's a matter of opinion. . Now that that pretty little pet o' yourn is outer sight, tell me how you'd use it to 'do up' the fly cop if the string didn't work."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I would not use this one, but others like it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ye've got more, hey?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have many. What would be easier than to turn them loose in the detective's house?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"By thunder! that's a great idea!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"A bite from the cobra means certain death."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But, I say!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Others would be bitten too, wouldn't they? The whole family, hey?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What matter?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, nothin'; jest curious, that's all."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So that the detective dies, I do not care how many go with him. And he shall die!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Shake, Tony."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The two men sealed the compact of death by clasping hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"When are ye goin' ter do it?" continued John.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I shall try the string once more. If it fails me again, then the snakes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Can ye git in the house?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Have you ever seen a house that I could not enter?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have but to open the front door, remove the cover from my basket and toss the whole thing inside. The jar and the sudden awakening will make the cobras angry. They will crawl out and scatter over the house. If they find a bed, they will enter it. If a person is there, so much the better, for it will be warmer. When the person moves, against whom they are coiled, the cobra will be angry again, for they have bad tempers. The person may turn over in his sleep and so roll upon the cobra; if so, he will be bitten. He may waken and attempt to leave the bed - if so, the cobra will do its work before he can got out of reach. He may wake suddenly and find a swaying head, a darting tongue, and two bright eyes within a foot of his face. He will scream with horror and attempt to escape. The scream and the attempt will be fatal. His only chance of safety would be in keeping perfectly still and closing his eyes, but what man would have strength enough to do it? Would you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, I'm cussed if I would."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Next time you have the snakes, try it, John."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have, Tony, and then, instead of one, I would have four thousand, But say."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There won't be anything left alive in the house but snakes, when morning comes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No-nothing."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"B-i-r-r! I think I'd rather be hung."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You will probably have your wish, unless you get familiar with my cobras."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Which I'll take care not to do. No offense, Tony, but it strikes me that you're a snakey lot. Even the girl Eug-"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Stop! How many times must I tell you never to mention that name!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony's voice was intense with anger. He paused a second and then continued : "John, I swear if you speak that name again, in my presence, or allude to the manner of her death, I will set my cobra upon you by throwing him in your face. Remember, for I mean what I say."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm sorry, Tony. I forgot."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"See that you do not forget again. You may rest assured that Sindahr will not. Bah! pass that bottle unless you want it all."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were a few moments of silence, and then John's voice asked:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"When are you going to the 'nest'?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Time enough for that when the detective, Nick Carter, is dead."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sure!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We can do nothing with that fellow constantly about our heels."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's a baby terror, he is."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ay, he has the strength of three men."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Of three? A dozen would be nearer the mark. He's quicker'n a flash, an' ain't afraid of nothin'."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He is doomed."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I'd rather be John Crispy than Nick Carter jest now. Where'd you meet him to-night?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"At his house. He went in and came out again."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Spose he hadn't come out again?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should have gone in."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And strangled him in bed, eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Precisely."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That's yer favorite way, ain't it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I like it best."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"When are ye goin' to try the trick on again, Tony?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The first time that I think he has gone to sleep in his own bed. Let him do that once, after to-night, and he will never waken. I will strangle him so quickly and so silently that a person in the same bed will not know what has happened until in his struggles he awakens somebody."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were short snatches of conversation after that, but in a few moments the two scoundrels threw themselves upon their beds and went soundly to sleep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then Nick turned away, well satisfied to go home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But his heart was filled with dread for his Ethel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of himself he did not think, but the recollection of Tony's threat, and the vivid description he had given of the consequences to be expected from the presence of cobras in the house, made Nick realize more than ever before, something of the danger to which he was constantly exposing himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, well; forewarned is forearmed," he murmured, "and I do not believe that Fate meant me or my beloved wife for a victim of Tony, the strangler. Tony will be after me early to-morrow, and I must be ready for him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And he was. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER X<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"SOLVING PROBLEMS"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the following day Nick went again to the house in Forty-seventh street in order to continue his researches, for he realized that a very necessary part of the evidence he had to furnish in the case, was an explanation of the murderer's method of entering and leaving the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He found everything just as he had left it on the previous night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Whoever had been in the room. when he crossed the threshold, had evidently deemed it unwise to return.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The detective went at once to the cellar, and began an exhaustive search for the secret passage-way, but after an hour vainly spent, he again sought the stair-way which had puzzled him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The greater discoveries are made by accident, and so it happened in this case.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had arranged a box on which to stand while examining the underside of the stairs, but in putting it in place, he had not fixed it securely, and accordingly, just as he was becoming interested in his task, the box toppled from its place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick lost his balance and would have fallen had he not thrown up his hands to save himself ; as he did so, he grasped a two-by-four inch timber which looked as though it had been placed there for additional support to the stairs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The timber was not stationary, however. It came loose in his hand, but with sufficient difficulty to save him from falling.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Leaping down, he rearranged the box and again mounted it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The necessity for searching was, however, ended.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The removal of the stick of wood disclosed an ordinary staple and hook which fastened the movable stairs in place. He removed the hook, and the stairs worked Just as he had expected them to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A person could go from the cellar to the parlor-floor without having to pass through a door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The discovery was one which filled Nick with pleasure, and there only remained now to find an equally easy way into the street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But hour after hour passed, and found him still searching</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At last he turned away, noticing, as he did so, that one of the stays which supported the floor above, was out of place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It did not occur to him that he could straighten it, and yet he put out his hand and gave it a sharp pull.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What was his surprise to find that it was loose at the top.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As he pulled there was resistance enough to satisfy him that the support acted as a lever, while behind him he heard a slight grating noise as of something moving on small iron wheels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Turning, he flashed his light along the wall, but saw nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nevertheless he pulled the lever away -over, and then placed a weight upon it to hold it down while he searched for the aperture of which he felt certain it was the instrument.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He paused with the glad exclamation on his lips.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Before him, close to the wall, was an opening in the cellar-floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of the stones, with which the floor was paved, had settled down nearly five feet, leaving an opening quite large enough to admit him, and when he flashed his light along, the underground gallery that he saw, he discovered that it led toward the street, and was, without doubt, the secret entrance for which he had been searching.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick took the precaution to put more weight upon the lever before descending into the forbidding opening that it had revealed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then with his dark-lantern in hand, he entered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The passage way was not high enough for him to stand upright, and was only sufficiently wide to accommodate his body.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It led him about twenty feet, diagonally in the direction of the street, and then abruptly ended.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Over his head were the stone steps which led to the front door of the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"More stairway doors," he muttered. "This will not be so well concealed."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nor was it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was an ordinary bolt such as are used for fastening doors, which he easily moved, noticing, as he did so, that the bolt was so arranged that it could be worked from the outside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That is, a portion of the next toe piece had been chipped off, leaving a space through which a small steel rod could be thrust, to move the fastening.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >First, he tried to push the stone up, but in vain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then he endeavored to pull it down toward him, but it refused to move.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was but one way left and that was to slide it away lengthwise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The effort met with instant success.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The stone slid along easily, offering little or no resistance, and thus afforded an- opening sufficiently large for an ordinary-sized man to squeeze through.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A means by which a murderer could have entered and left the house when Eugenie La Verde was choked to death was now found.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That portion of the case was no longer a mystery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was still daylight in the street, and Nick hastily closed the aperture, having studied out how he could open it from the outside if necessary.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He returned to the cellar and removed the weights that he had placed upon the lever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It remained down, as, indeed, he had expected it would.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then once more to the secret passage-way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There, he raised the stone and put it in place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the underside was a handle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He grasped that, pulled upon it, and the stone came down in his grasp.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The secret was now entirely his.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He could go either way through the hidden passage without any trouble.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The mystery was a mystery no longer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have only to satisfy myself, now, that Tony is the murderer, and then the whole story is in my possession. But I must find a motive," he thought. "Why did those men want Eugenie La Verde out of the way? There is another mystery still, to solve."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The flat stone which covered the opening in the cellarfloor, was worked by the lever, by means of a long steel rod and two cog-wheels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a clever mechanical device, and whoever planned it must have had a strong incentive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There is nothing more to do here now," he thought. "I will go home."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had been at home about an hour when he rose and went to the window, whistling softly to himself, and lost in thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly he started.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Darkness was just settling over the city, and half concealed in the door way of a vacant house opposite was Tony, the strangler.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I had forgotten all about him," mused Nick. "it won't do to let that fellow run at large. I think I will arrest him, cobra and all, and take him down to headquarters. If he gets a chance, he'll fill the house with snakes, and I don't want that, particularly in my absence."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick remained at the window several moments, lost in thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly he smiled. A good idea had occurred to him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He went to the telephone and called up Inspector Byrnes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am going to bring you a man whom I want you to hold for me till called for," he said, as soon as they were in communication.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"All right," replied the officer. "What do you know about him?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I know he is a murderer although perhaps not the murderer."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He will do to keep, anyhow."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Rather. Say!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hello."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This fellow is a snake-charmer, and in order to take him in, I have got to kill a cobra which he carries around with him. Will you have two men on the corner of Mott and Bleecker for me, in an hour?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes. How will they know you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Easily. They will see me knock my man down first. Then they will see a cobra stick its head out of the fellow's coat after which, it they look sharp, they will see me shoot the cobra."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good; but don't kill the man instead of the cobra."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I guess not."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How are you going to get him there?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's outside now, waiting for me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Waiting for you to take him in?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes. He's in the shadow business. He's made a contract to strangle me' to death with a cord, and is on my trail now."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah! Well, fetch him in; I'd like to have a look at him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"All right. Good-by."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good-by."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick hung up the ear-piece and hastily made-a few changes in his appearance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then he started out to lead Tony to the Central Office of the police, where he proposed to keep him out of mischief by locking him up in a cell.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now, my gentle Tony, come along," murmured Nick, as he ran down the steps. "I can't keep on with this case and feel easy about matters at home unless I put you where you will be out of mischief, and since you are kind enough to follow me, I'll show you the way."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In order to make it perfectly easy for the strangler to keep track of him, Nick avoided the elevated road, and took a surface car.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Bleecker street and the Bowery were duly reached by Nick with Tony a close second.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There the detective dismounted from the car and walked leisurely westward, purposely going slowly so that the strangler could gain upon him without the appearance of haste.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony came near. There were many people on Bleecker street at that hour, and in order to be sure of not losing sight of his prey, the strangler was obliged to keep quite close.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the corner of Mott street was reached, they were not more than ten feet apart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick kept steadily on until he reached the curbstone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then he turned suddenly and in an instant was face to face with the man who was seeking an opportunity to strangle him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony was evidently startled and puzzled by the maneuver, but Nick did not leave him long in doubt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The detective's fist shot out, propelled by all the force of which he was master.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was no withstanding such a blow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony fell as though he had been shot; his head struck the pavement first, and he was instantly deprived of consciousness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ere a single moment had passed the thing happened which Nick had expected.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The hooded and hideous head of the cobra was raised menacingly over the senseless man's breast, where it swayed to and fro like the pendulum of a clock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Several who had gathered around at the first sign of a disturbance, started back in horror when, they saw the snake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick waved them all back and then he drew his revolver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Stop!" cried somebody in the crowd; "you will kill the man."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But Nick Carter knew his own skill too well to fear such a result. He stooped low down, so that the bullet, after penetrating the snake's head, could not hit Tony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One quick glance satisfied him that there was no danger to others.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly there was a flash and a loud report.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The snake, pierced through the head, writhed and twisted until it was free from Tony's clothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The moment it was upon the pavement it was pounced upon by men and boys, who pounded it with clubs and paving stones until it would have been a hard matter to have recognized its original shape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >While the rabble were still annihilating the reptile, two men approached Nick and announced themselves at his service.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pick up that fellow and bring him along," said Nick, pointing to Tony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The men hesitated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They thought that perhaps there might be more snakes hidden away in his clothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A few words reassured them, and Tony was presently securely locked in a cell at Police Headquarters, while Nick was closeted with the inspector.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But he did not remain long, and only gave the chief a brief outline of all that he had accomplished..</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are a wonderful fellow, Nick," said the chief admiringly, "and that was a remarkable shot with no light but the flaring torch of a peanut stand. What next?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't know. Good-night. Keep my man securely for me, for I shall want him again. I'll drop in to-morrow and talk with him, if I have time."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick left hurriedly, and was quickly on his way to Goerck street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He felt confident that he would find John there, and he wanted to use him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When near his destination, he stepped into a hall-way for a few moments, and when he emerged, it was in the character of a negro, whose face was as black as the night which surrounded him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was just in time, for the captain and Morgan soon came out of their Goerck street rendezvous and went off together toward Houston street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick followed at a safe distance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The two men boarded a green car which took them to the foot of West Forty-second street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There they took the Weehawken ferry, and Nick did likewise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He felt that he was on his way to the "nest" at last.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At Weehawken, the captain and Morgan went directly to a little stable in a deserted quarter and presently were seated together in an open buggy behind a powerful horse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How was Nick to follow them without being seen?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a hard question to answer, and he begun to think that he would lose them after all, when he heard the captain tell Morgan to hold the horse while he went across the street for some cigars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Morgan went to the horse's head, and the captain started away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now, if ever, was Nick's time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He crept cautiously forward in the darkness until he reached the off- hind wheel of the buggy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A man of less strength than Nick Carter's, could not have accomplished what he did then.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He seized the nut which held the wheel upon the axle, and without the aid of a wrench he unscrewed it and put it in his pocket.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, as silently as a shadow, he shrank back again out of sight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The next moment the captain reappeared, and he and Morgan leaped into the buggy together.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They drove away rapidly, and Nick, running swiftly, followed them, knowing that they would not go far before the wheel would run off, and throw them into the road.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >However, the wheel did better than might have been expected, for they drove nearly a mile before the accident occurred.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick was glad of an opportunity to rest, for the pace had been very rapid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fortunately for the men in the buggy, they had just slowed down a little to give their horse a chance to breathe, when the axle dropped.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Morgan fell into the road, and cursed loudly at the bruises he received, but the captain escaped uninjured, by leaping out on the other side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then they examined the wheel, and quickly found what was the matter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, we haven't much farther to go," said the captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After considerable maneuvering they managed to fasten the wheel so that by driving very slowly they kept it in place, while Nick was enabled to follow them without any difficulty whatever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They traveled in that way for an hour or more, and then turned off from the main road into a lane. A quarter of a mile along the lane brought them to a commodious house which stood all alone at the edge of a wood, and looked as though it were uninhabited.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The nest,!" thought Nick. "The next few hours ought to tell me a good deal, and they must."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The two men drove behind the house to an old barn where they cared for the horse, Nick never for a moment losing sight of them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At last they entered the house, and as soon as it was safe to do so without unnecessary danger of immediate discovery, Nick followed. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER XI<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"TWO MURDERS IN ONE NIGHT"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick found himself in total darkness, but that was quickly dispelled by touching the button of his little bull's eye lantern and throwing a brilliant stream of light across the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Before him was a door, and he passed through it into a wide hall-way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He could not hear a sound until he reached the lower floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then the low murmur of voices came to him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He followed the direction of the sound until he came to a door which evidently opened into the room where the men were sitting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The gruff voice of Morgan was easily recognized, and now and then the even tones of the captain penetrated the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was another voice too, not loud enough to be distinguishable, but Nick decided that it belonged to Sindahr.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He could not catch a word of what they were saying, and he looked about him for a way to get nearer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Farther down the hall was another door which led into the room adjoining the one where the men were talking, and he crept along the hall and passed through it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At once the voices became plainer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Flashing his light around Nick saw that he was in what had once been a dining-room, and also that there were cupboards against the partition which separated it from the room where the men were talking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If it so happened that those cupboards opened through the partition, which was probable, it would be an easy matter for him to hear all that was being said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Exerting all his caution, and moving as silently as a shadow, Nick carefully opened one of the cupboard doors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The cupboards not only connected the two rooms, but the doors on the opposite side of the partition were made of glass and he could plainly see all that was taking place As well as hear every word that was uttered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The group that he saw was a strange one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were the captain, Morgan, Sindahr, and an aged negress who was listening intently to all that was said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They were all seated around a dining-table upon which were a bottle, some glasses, and a box of cigars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No," the captain was saying; "there is no danger of his coming here to-night. I wish there was. He will never escape me again, I swear."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's a devil!" ventured Morgan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Devil or not, if I ever have another opportunity such as I once had, he shall die. I will not wait to make terms with him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How do you know that he is onto this place?" asked Morgan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I do not know it, but I fear it. If he is, we will all be captured like so many rats in a trap."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sure!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"At all events it is safer to leave."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is a hard place to get to."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, and it would be an easy matter to shadow any of us for the greater part of the distance. The house in Forty-seventh street is the safest place for us now."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick became more interested.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Isn't that house watched?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Bah, no."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should think it would be."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"They gave up looking for the murderer long ago, and the house is as deserted as the grave."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Morgan chuckled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Fancy a detective smart enough to run that crime down," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then both men laughed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I think its funnier to fancy him getting his handcuffs on to the murderer."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thought evidently struck them as very funny, for they laughed uproariously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'd like to see him try it," said Morgan when his mirth had subsided, "particularly that fellow Nick Carter."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, I think we'd be well rid of him. His fists and his strength would not count for so much- I say', where do you suppose Tony was to-night?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't know. Perhaps Carter downed him and took him in."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Cobra and all?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That would make it difficult. Still, that fellow can do anything."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, cap, there's one thing he can't do."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What's that?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Capture the murderer of Eugenie La Verde."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He may."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, I thought you settled his hash."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, Tony didn't want me to, and I let him have his way."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He's a queer fish."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Rather. He takes food there every week!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The devil! Feeding the murderer of his own sister!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Exactly!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Say, cap!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I think you'll have to count me out on living in that house."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nonsense!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I mean it. I've no relish for the place, since we would not be alone."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The captain laughed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are afraid of Eugenie's slayer, eh?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Frankly, I am."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I don't know that I blame you, Morgan. Yet there is no danger."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To say that Nick was interested in the conversation that he had heard would be a feeble expression of his sensations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had learned many surprising things almost in one breath.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >First, neither Tony, nor Morgan, nor Sindahr, was the murderer of Eugenie La Verde, although they all seemed to know who was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Second, the murderer was in hiding in the very house where the crime had been committed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Third, Tony was Eugenie La Verde's brother, and he was not only protecting the murderer of his sister, but carrying food to him from time to time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick realized that he had not yet seen the real murderer, although he had once stood within a few feet of him in the dark, when he crossed the threshold of Eugenie La Verde's room and heard the rustle made by someone escaping from the place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If he is as dangerous as Morgan's fear of him would imply, why in the world didn't he try to choke me just as he did Eugenie?" muttered the detective.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The captain abruptly changed the subject.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looked at his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come," he said, "it is nearly midnight, and we must go."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The negress left the room to obey an order from the captain, and so left the three villains alone together.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Morgan," said the captain, "you had better go first and Sindahr and I will follow with the other horse. Drive right on to the ferry boat and thence to the house in Forty-seventh street. Go slowly after you get to New York, so that Sindahr and I can get to the house first."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sindahr not going," said the Arabian, calmly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What!" cried the captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sindahr will not go there."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You will have to, my friend."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sindahr never enter that house while he is alive."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So you refuse to obey me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sindahr has spoken."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Curse you! take that."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Like a flash the captain drew a revolver and discharged it almost in the Arabian's face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man sank back dead without a single groan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Shove him under the table; I was tired of him, anyhow," said the captain, coolly, replacing his revolver in his pocket, "and between you and me, Morgan, I am getting tired of Tony also."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let him kill the detective and then we can give him away. It will save the trouble of killing him," said Morgan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So that we get rid of him, I don't care how it's done."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What shall we do with this body?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let it lie there under the table and rot. We leave this house to-night, forever."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now, a word about other matters before Sal returns. Is everything ready for our scheme?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Everything."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"When do we spring it?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is Wednesday. The time is fixed for Friday at midnight."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And we get---"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"One hundred thousand."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good! One more question."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why need we share that with John and Tony?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Because John and Tony are alive."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Exactly; but if they were dead?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I suppose it would be all ours."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Would that please you, Phil?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I won't ask any questions if they don't show up for their share."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good! here comes Sal."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The next moment Sal entered the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Morgan presently, at a sign from the captain, rose, and left the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't go until I come out," said the captain, and then he was alone with the negress.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, Sal," he said, "we won't require your services any longer, and I'll pay you now."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, sah."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How much do I owe you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Twenty-fo' dollars, sah."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No more? Why, that is cheap. Come here and get it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The negress went around the table toward the captain unsuspiciously. Even Nick had no idea what was coming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Here is your pay!" exclaimed the villain, when Sal was close enough, and at the same instant he plunged a knife into her heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She uttered one loud gasp, and sank back lifeless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Captain Philip had committed two deliberate murders in one night. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER XII<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"BRINGING THREADS TOGETHER"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It would have been an easy matter for Nick to have captured the two men then and there, but from his standpoint it was not good judgment to do so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie La Verde's murderer was still unknown, and these men would be very valuable, at large, in helping him to solve the mystery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They were going directly to the house in Forty-seventh street, and he could arrest them there at any time, when he had used them all he cared to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As soon as the negress expired, the captain walked calmly from the room, leaving the corpses of his two victims there without an atom of remorse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick followed, not by leaving the house the way he had entered it, but by going directly in the path of Captain Philip.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Morgan had the horse and buggy nearly ready, and his companion helped him to finish the task.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Climb in," said the captain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What are you going to do with the other horse since we don't need him?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Leave him. He is worthless, anyway."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But he will starve."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"At least set him loose."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Bah! Chicken! Climb in, I tell you. I have no time for trifles."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Morgan obeyed, and Nick shuddered at the wanton cruelty of the two men.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nevertheless they had unwittingly done him a service, for he was now provided with a means of returning to the city without walking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had no thought of following them, for he knew where to find them when he wanted them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the meantime he had something else to do.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After waiting long enough to give them a good start, he brought the other horse out of the stable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was an old harness in the barn, which he adjusted after some trouble.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In his pocket was the missing nut for the open buggy, and he was soon bowling along the road at a rapid pace.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He did not stop at Weehawken, but continued on to Hoboken.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There he gave the horse in charge of a liveryman with instructions to keep it until called for, and hurried to New York.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He went straight to the house of Inspector Byrnes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Inspector," he said, when the chief had admitted him, "there were two murders committed to-night by the men I have been pursuing. They are also the ones who know all about the killing of Eugenie La Verde! The bodies of their victims are now lying where they left them in a house not far from the Palisades."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You're a marvel, Nick. Tell me where the house is and I'll wire the Jersey police."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick did so, but added:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't make the case too hot till I say the word. Tell Chief Murphy, in Jersey, that you know who the murderer is, and that you will hand him over before the week is out. In the meantime I don't want to scare my man."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Two more things."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Will you go with me in person to arrest the murderer of Eugenie La Verde?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will; when?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To-morrow night. Come to my house at eight."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'll be there. Now the other thing."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"An order from you to let me see the prisoner I took to headquarters. I want to talk with him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The order was quickly filled out, and Nick lost no time in reaching headquarters in Mulberry street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was shown at once to Tony's cell.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you know me, Tony?" he asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No. I don't know niggers."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't, eh? Well, I know you, and I want to ask you some questions."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ask 'em."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why do you feed your sister's murderer?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To keep him alive."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should think you would rather kill him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Bah! Why? I would rather strangle the man who killed my pet cobra."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You would, eh? What would you do if I brought you face to face with that man?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Anything you ask."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let me see you feed the murderer of your sister, Eugenie and I will do it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How do you know she was my sister?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Never mind. I do know it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He must be fed soon, or he will starve, or else leave the house."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Will to-morrow night do?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, but he will be cross."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Are you afraid of him?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I? No. He dare not hurt me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Very well. To-morrow night I will take you there, and I promise you that you shall be brought face to face with the man who shot your cobra."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"With my hands free?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Who are you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Does that matter, if I keep my word?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good-by then till to-morrow night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Promptly at eight o'clock on the following night Inspector Byrnes was at the house of Nick Carter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In a few words Nick related the entire story of his adventures from first to last.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, while the chief waited, Nick hurried to headquarters and got Tony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The strangler was kept securely handcuffed on the street, but Nick, who had again assumed the guise of the negro, assured him that he would be set free when once the house in Forty-seventh street was reached.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the house was reached, Nick, much to Tony's astonishment, entered by the secret passage-way under the steps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had asked Tony what food he should provide for the murderer, and the strangler had assured him that he had some concealed in the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So they entered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Leaving the others in the, cellar, Nick went silently up stairs and found that the captain was there alone. He was sitting calmly in the back parlor, reading a paper, as unconcerned as though he owned the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick made a slight noise to attract his attention, and the captain looked up quickly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, pistol in hand, he rose and went toward the hallway, where Nick was waiting in the dark for him</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As soon as the captain was in reach, Nick seized him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had no time to use his weapon, and in a twinkling he was thrown upon his back upon the floor, and handcuffed, and anklets were locked around his ankles,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There, Captain Philip, that settles your hash, I think," said Nick, pleasantly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The captain did not say a word. He did not even curse. He was calm, and evidently trying to think of a plan of escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When Nick returned to the cellar a surprise awaited him, for he found that Inspector Byrnes had captured Morgan in almost the same manner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had heard him coming through the secret passageway, and had nabbed him before he knew what had happened.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The two men were securely fastened together in the back parlor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now, Tony," said Nick, "we will feed the murderer. Come."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't let him see you," said Tony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No. We will keep out of sight."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Take off these bracelets."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick removed them and Tony led the way up stairs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Where is the food?" asked Nick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"In the same room; hidden away."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, go ahead."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony led the way to the door of Eugenie's room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There, he paused and listened.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Presently he opened the door, passed in quickly and lighted the gas. </span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER XIII<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"EUGENIE'S MURDERER FINDS ANOTHER VICTIM"</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony stood in the center of the room and clapped his hands loudly together.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Instantly a big picture which hung upon the wall trembled violently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly the head of a serpent issued from behind the picture, and swayed back and forth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony began to chant, and the serpent drew nearer, until Nick and the inspector saw a python over twelve feet in length swing itself to the bureau and thence to the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They drew back, keeping well out of sight, while Nick held his trusty revolver in readiness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony began to sway his head, chanting all the time, and keeping his place in the center of the room, while the python glided nearer and nearer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Presently it reared its head until its glaring eyes were but a few inches from those of Tony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then it rested its head upon him and gliding on and on wound its hideous body round and round the strangler.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then Tony turned and went toward another picture which he moved aside, revealing a grated aperture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He opened that, thrust in his arm, and drew forth a rabbit which dropped upon the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There it hopped around aimlessly for a moment, and then, discovering the open door, darted through it and disappeared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony attempted to intercept it, but he had not taken a step before he uttered a cry of pain, and stopped.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The python, angered by the escape of the rabbit, was tightening its coils around the body of the strangler.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In vain Tony chanted. In vain he used every trick known to his profession. The snake would not be charmed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tighter and tighter grew the coils, while the python's head swayed malignantly before the face of its victim.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly Tony fell to the floor, and the serpent seemed to change its hold.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Its coils seemed to glide up and encircle the neck of the strangler.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick had meanwhile been watching for a chance to use his revolver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The chance came when the python next raised its head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The bullet sped true to its aim, and the python's head was pierced by the lead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nick and the inspector leaped forward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They seized and raised him up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He was senseless, but not dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"He cannot live," said Nick. "Let us revive him if we can. His ribs are broken, and he is bleeding internally. It was terrible."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony at last opened his eyes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The story he told was disjointed, but in substance it was as follows</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He belonged to a family of snake-charmers, of which he and his sister Eugenie were the most expert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Long ago he and Eugenie had quarreled because of his dishonest ways. She would have no more to do with him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At Captain Phil's request, he had persuaded her to take the house in Forty-seventh street, which had long been a resort for certain criminals, who had managed to keep it so unsuspected by the police.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The secret passages were old. He did not know who had made them or where they were constructed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eugenie had given all the serpents to Tony except the python, of which she was very fond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Even her maid, Delia Dent, had been unaware of the python's presence, and know nothing of Eugenie's passion for snakes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony had come to the house on the night of his sister's death, accompanied by John and Sindahr, to demand money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had reached the door of his sister's room just as the python had glided from its hiding place in the wall behind the picture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His presence had seemed to anger the reptile, which had wound itself around its mistress' neck and hissed loudly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He saw that it was choking Eugenie, and rushed forward to save her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then the python would have attacked him, but, realizing it, he turned and fled, leaving her there to her fate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had told John and Sindahr all that he had seen, and had learned for the first time that Sindahr had been charmed by a serpent when a child, and could not go near one without falling under the peculiar magnetic spell which they exert. He had a horror of the house because of the presence of the python.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Later Tony had returned and, fed the reptile. Why, he did not know, except that he loved serpents.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He told them where his cobras were concealed, and the inspector took good care to have them exterminated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tony died from his injuries before he had- quite completed his story, and the true nativity of Eugenie La Verde was never known.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But her murderer was found and he was a serpent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A visit to Goerck street revealed the fact that Morgan had made good his threat, and killed John, for he was found with a dirk in his heart, and evidence was adduced to prove that Morgan put it there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Both he and Captain Philip subsequently paid the penalty of their crimes, the latter being given up to the tender mercies of Jersey justice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The schooner and the retreat under the pier in South Brooklyn were both searched. The former was sold and the latter was filled with stones.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The murder of Eugenie La Verde was a mystery no longer, and the murderer, a serpent, died by a bullet from Nick Carter's revolver.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" >THE END</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2010/06/dime-novelnot-great-literature-but.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Return</span></a><br /></div></div>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-3945223690242226482010-03-05T11:09:00.000-08:002010-03-05T11:26:36.194-08:00Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" Volume One<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Last Man</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary Shelley</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1826</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Volume One</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >INTRODUCTION.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I VISITED Naples in the year 1818. On the 8th of December of that year, my companion and I crossed the Bay, to visit the antiquities which are scattered on the shores of Baiae. The translucent and shining waters of the calm sea covered fragments of old Roman villas, which were interlaced by sea-weed, and received diamond tints from the chequering of the sun-beams; the blue and pellucid element was such as Galatea might have skimmed in her car of mother of pearl; or Cleopatra, more fitly than the Nile, have chosen as the path of her magic ship. Though it was winter, the atmosphere seemed more appropriate to early spring; and its genial warmth contributed to inspire those sensations of placid delight, which are the portion of every traveller, as he lingers, loath to quit the tranquil bays and radiant promontories of Baiae.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We visited the so called Elysian Fields and Avernus: and wandered through various ruined temples, baths, and classic spots; at length we entered the gloomy cavern of the Cumaean Sibyl. Our Lazzeroni bore flaring torches, which shone red, and almost dusky, in the murky subterranean passages, whose darkness thirstily surrounding them, seemed eager to imbibe more and more of the element of light. We passed by a natural archway, leading to a second gallery, and enquired, if we could not enter there also. The guides pointed to the reflection of their torches on the water that paved it, leaving us to form our own conclusion; but adding it was a pity, for it led to the Sibyl's Cave. Our curiosity and enthusiasm were excited by this circumstance, and we insisted upon attempting the passage. As is usually the case in the prosecution of such enterprizes, the difficulties decreased on examination. We found, on each side of the humid pathway, "dry land for the sole of the foot."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At length we arrived at a large, desert, dark cavern, which the Lazzeroni assured us was the Sibyl's Cave. We were sufficiently disappointed—Yet we examined it with care, as if its blank, rocky walls could still bear trace of celestial visitant. On one side was a small opening. Whither does this lead? we asked: can we enter here?—"Questo poi, no,"—said the wild looking savage, who held the torch; "you can advance but a short distance, and nobody visits it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nevertheless, I will try it," said my companion; "it may lead to the real cavern. Shall I go alone, or will you accompany me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I signified my readiness to proceed, but our guides protested against such a measure. With great volubility, in their native Neapolitan dialect, with which we were not very familiar, they told us that there were spectres, that the roof would fall in, that it was too narrow to admit us, that there was a deep hole within, filled with water, and we might be drowned. My friend shortened the harangue, by taking the man's torch from him; and we proceeded alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The passage, which at first scarcely admitted us, quickly grew narrower and lower; we were almost bent double; yet still we persisted in making our way through it. At length we entered a wider space, and the low roof heightened; but, as we congratulated ourselves on this change, our torch was extinguished by a current of air, and we were left in utter darkness. The guides bring with them materials for renewing the light, but we had none—our only resource was to return as we came. We groped round the widened space to find the entrance, and after a time fancied that we had succeeded. This proved however to be a second passage, which evidently ascended. It terminated like the former; though something approaching to a ray, we could not tell whence, shed a very doubtful twilight in the space. By degrees, our eyes grew somewhat accustomed to this dimness, and we perceived that there was no direct passage leading us further; but that it was possible to climb one side of the cavern to a low arch at top, which promised a more easy path, from whence we now discovered that this light proceeded. With considerable difficulty we scrambled up, and came to another passage with still more of illumination, and this led to another ascent like the former.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a succession of these, which our resolution alone permitted us to surmount, we arrived at a wide cavern with an arched dome-like roof. An aperture in the midst let in the light of heaven; but this was overgrown with brambles and underwood, which acted as a veil, obscuring the day, and giving a solemn religious hue to the apartment. It was spacious, and nearly circular, with a raised seat of stone, about the size of a Grecian couch, at one end. The only sign that life had been here, was the perfect snow-white skeleton of a goat, which had probably not perceived the opening as it grazed on the hill above, and had fallen headlong. Ages perhaps had elapsed since this catastrophe; and the ruin it had made above, had been repaired by the growth of vegetation during many hundred summers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The rest of the furniture of the cavern consisted of piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substance, resembling the inner part of the green hood which shelters the grain of the unripe Indian corn. We were fatigued by our struggles to attain this point, and seated ourselves on the rocky couch, while the sounds of tinkling sheep-bells, and shout of shepherd-boy, reached us from above.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At length my friend, who had taken up some of the leaves strewed about, exclaimed, "This is the Sibyl's cave; these are Sibylline leaves." On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark, and other substances, were traced with written characters. What appeared to us more astonishing, was that these writings were expressed in various languages: some unknown to my companion, ancient Chaldee, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, old as the Pyramids. Stranger still, some were in modern dialects, English and Italian. We could make out little by the dim light, but they seemed to contain prophecies, detailed relations of events but lately passed; names, now well known, but of modern date; and often exclamations of exultation or woe, of victory or defeat, were traced on their thin scant pages. This was certainly the Sibyl's Cave; not indeed exactly as Virgil describes it, but the whole of this land had been so convulsed by earthquake and volcano, that the change was not wonderful, though the traces of ruin were effaced by time; and we probably owed the preservation of these leaves, to the accident which had closed the mouth of the cavern, and the swift-growing vegetation which had rendered its sole opening impervious to the storm. We made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand; and then, laden with our treasure, we bade adieu to the dim hypaethric cavern, and after much difficulty succeeded in rejoining our guides.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During our stay at Naples, we often returned to this cave, sometimes alone, skimming the sun-lit sea, and each time added to our store. Since that period, whenever the world's circumstance has not imperiously called me away, or the temper of my mind impeded such study, I have been employed in deciphering these sacred remains. Their meaning, wondrous and eloquent, has often repaid my toil, soothing me in sorrow, and exciting my imagination to daring flights, through the immensity of nature and the mind of man. For awhile my labours were not solitary; but that time is gone; and, with the selected and matchless companion of my toils, their dearest reward is also lost to me—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Di mie tenere frondi altro lavoro</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Credea mostrarte; e qual fero pianeta</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ne' nvidio insieme, o mio nobil tesoro?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I present the public with my latest discoveries in the slight Sibylline pages. Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form. But the main substance rests on the truths contained in these poetic rhapsodies, and the divine intuition which the Cumaean damsel obtained from heaven.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I have often wondered at the subject of her verses, and at the English dress of the Latin poet. Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer. As if we should give to another artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration in St. Peter's; he would put them together in a form, whose mode would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent. Doubtless the leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl have suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands. My only excuse for thus transforming them, is that they were unintelligible in their pristine condition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My labours have cheered long hours of solitude, and taken me out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face from me, to one glowing with imagination and power. Will my readers ask how I could find solace from the narration of misery and woeful change? This is one of the mysteries of our nature, which holds full sway over me, and from whose influence I cannot escape. I confess, that I have not been unmoved by the development of the tale; and that I have been depressed, nay, agonized, at some parts of the recital, which I have faithfully transcribed from my materials. Yet such is human nature, that the excitement of mind was dear to me, and that the imagination, painter of tempest and earthquake, or, worse, the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man, softened my real sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fictitious ones in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I hardly know whether this apology is necessary. For the merits of my adaptation and translation must decide how far I have well bestowed my time and imperfect powers, in giving form and substance to the frail and attenuated Leaves of the Sibyl.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER I.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I AM the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless continents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population. So true it is, that man's mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister. England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor understanding an effort.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My fortunes have been, from the beginning, an exemplification of the power that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man's life. With regard to myself, this came almost by inheritance. My father was one of those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be impelled by these winds, without adding reason as the rudder, or judgment as the pilot for the voyage. His extraction was obscure; but circumstances brought him early into public notice, and his small paternal property was soon dissipated in the splendid scene of fashion and luxury in which he was an actor. During the short years of thoughtless youth, he was adored by the high-bred triflers of the day, nor least by the youthful sovereign, who escaped from the intrigues of party, and the arduous duties of kingly business, to find never-failing amusement and exhilaration of spirit in his society. My father's impulses, never under his own controul, perpetually led him into difficulties from which his ingenuity alone could extricate him; and the accumulating pile of debts of honour and of trade, which would have bent to earth any other, was supported by him with a light spirit and tameless hilarity; while his company was so necessary at the tables and assemblies of the rich, that his derelictions were considered venial, and he himself received with intoxicating flattery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This kind of popularity, like every other, is evanescent: and the difficulties of every kind with which he had to contend, increased in a frightful ratio compared with his small means of extricating himself. At such times the king, in his enthusiasm for him, would come to his relief, and then kindly take his friend to task; my father gave the best promises for amendment, but his social disposition, his craving for the usual diet of admiration, and more than all, the fiend of gambling, which fully possessed him, made his good resolutions transient, his promises vain. With the quick sensibility peculiar to his temperament, he perceived his power in the brilliant circle to be on the wane. The king married; and the haughty princess of Austria, who became, as queen of England, the head of fashion, looked with harsh eyes on his defects, and with contempt on the affection her royal husband entertained for him. My father felt that his fall was near; but so far from profiting by this last calm before the storm to save himself, he sought to forget anticipated evil by making still greater sacrifices to the deity of pleasure, deceitful and cruel arbiter of his destiny.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The king, who was a man of excellent dispositions, but easily led, had now become a willing disciple of his imperious consort. He was induced to look with extreme disapprobation, and at last with distaste, on my father's imprudence and follies. It is true that his presence dissipated these clouds; his warm-hearted frankness, brilliant sallies, and confiding demeanour were irresistible: it was only when at a distance, while still renewed tales of his errors were poured into his royal friend's ear, that he lost his influence. The queen's dextrous management was employed to prolong these absences, and gather together accusations. At length the king was brought to see in him a source of perpetual disquiet, knowing that he should pay for the short-lived pleasure of his society by tedious homilies, and more painful narrations of excesses, the truth of which he could not disprove. The result was, that he would make one more attempt to reclaim him, and in case of ill success, cast him off for ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such a scene must have been one of deepest interest and high-wrought passion. A powerful king, conspicuous for a goodness which had heretofore made him meek, and now lofty in his admonitions, with alternate entreaty and reproof, besought his friend to attend to his real interests, resolutely to avoid those fascinations which in fact were fast deserting him, and to spend his great powers on a worthy field, in which he, his sovereign, would be his prop, his stay, and his pioneer. My father felt this kindness; for a moment ambitious dreams floated before him; and he thought that it would be well to exchange his present pursuits for nobler duties. With sincerity and fervour he gave the required promise: as a pledge of continued favour, he received from his royal master a sum of money to defray pressing debts, and enable him to enter under good auspices his new career. That very night, while yet full of gratitude and good resolves, this whole sum, and its amount doubled, was lost at the gaming-table. In his desire to repair his first losses, my father risked double stakes, and thus incurred a debt of honour he was wholly unable to pay. Ashamed to apply again to the king, he turned his back upon London, its false delights and clinging miseries; and, with poverty for his sole companion, buried himself in solitude among the hills and lakes of Cumberland. His wit, his bon mots, the record of his personal attractions, fascinating manners, and social talents, were long remembered and repeated from mouth to mouth. Ask where now was this favourite of fashion, this companion of the noble, this excelling beam, which gilt with alien splendour the assemblies of the courtly and the gay—you heard that he was under a cloud, a lost man; not one thought it belonged to him to repay pleasure by real services, or that his long reign of brilliant wit deserved a pension on retiring. The king lamented his absence; he loved to repeat his sayings, relate the adventures they had had together, and exalt his talents—but here ended his reminiscence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Meanwhile my father, forgotten, could not forget. He repined for the loss of what was more necessary to him than air or food—the excitements of pleasure, the admiration of the noble, the luxurious and polished living of the great. A nervous fever was the consequence; during which he was nursed by the daughter of a poor cottager, under whose roof he lodged. She was lovely, gentle, and, above all, kind to him; nor can it afford astonishment, that the late idol of high-bred beauty should, even in a fallen state, appear a being of an elevated and wondrous nature to the lowly cottage-girl. The attachment between them led to the ill-fated marriage, of which I was the offspring. Notwithstanding the tenderness and sweetness of my mother, her husband still deplored his degraded state. Unaccustomed to industry, he knew not in what way to contribute to the support of his increasing family. Sometimes he thought of applying to the king; pride and shame for a while withheld him; and, before his necessities became so imperious as to compel him to some kind of exertion, he died. For one brief interval before this catastrophe, he looked forward to the future, and contemplated with anguish the desolate situation in which his wife and children would be left. His last effort was a letter to the king, full of touching eloquence, and of occasional flashes of that brilliant spirit which was an integral part of him. He bequeathed his widow and orphans to the friendship of his royal master, and felt satisfied that, by this means, their prosperity was better assured in his death than in his life. This letter was enclosed to the care of a nobleman, who, he did not doubt, would perform the last and inexpensive office of placing it in the king's own hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He died in debt, and his little property was seized immediately by his creditors. My mother, pennyless and burthened with two children, waited week after week, and month after month, in sickening expectation of a reply, which never came. She had no experience beyond her father's cottage; and the mansion of the lord of the manor was the chiefest type of grandeur she could conceive. During my father's life, she had been made familiar with the name of royalty and the courtly circle; but such things, ill according with her personal experience, appeared, after the loss of him who gave substance and reality to them, vague and fantastical. If, under any circumstances, she could have acquired sufficient courage to address the noble persons mentioned by her husband, the ill success of his own application caused her to banish the idea. She saw therefore no escape from dire penury: perpetual care, joined to sorrow for the loss of the wondrous being, whom she continued to contemplate with ardent admiration, hard labour, and naturally delicate health, at length released her from the sad continuity of want and misery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The condition of her orphan children was peculiarly desolate. Her own father had been an emigrant from another part of the country, and had died long since: they had no one relation to take them by the hand; they were outcasts, paupers, unfriended beings, to whom the most scanty pittance was a matter of favour, and who were treated merely as children of peasants, yet poorer than the poorest, who, dying, had left them, a thankless bequest, to the close-handed charity of the land.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I, the elder of the two, was five years old when my mother died. A remembrance of the discourses of my parents, and the communications which my mother endeavoured to impress upon me concerning my father's friends, in slight hope that I might one day derive benefit from the knowledge, floated like an indistinct dream through my brain. I conceived that I was different and superior to my protectors and companions, but I knew not how or wherefore. The sense of injury, associated with the name of king and noble, clung to me; but I could draw no conclusions from such feelings, to serve as a guide to action. My first real knowledge of myself was as an unprotected orphan among the valleys and fells of Cumberland. I was in the service of a farmer; and with crook in hand, my dog at my side, I shepherded a numerous flock on the near uplands. I cannot say much in praise of such a life; and its pains far exceeded its pleasures. There was freedom in it, a companionship with nature, and a reckless loneliness; but these, romantic as they were, did not accord with the love of action and desire of human sympathy, characteristic of youth. Neither the care of my flock, nor the change of seasons, were sufficient to tame my eager spirit; my out-door life and unemployed time were the temptations that led me early into lawless habits. I associated with others friendless like myself; I formed them into a band, I was their chief and captain. All shepherd-boys alike, while our flocks were spread over the pastures, we schemed and executed many a mischievous prank, which drew on us the anger and revenge of the rustics. I was the leader and protector of my comrades, and as I became distinguished among them, their misdeeds were usually visited upon me. But while I endured punishment and pain in their defence with the spirit of an hero, I claimed as my reward their praise and obedience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In such a school my disposition became rugged, but firm. The appetite for admiration and small capacity for self-controul which I inherited from my father, nursed by adversity, made me daring and reckless. I was rough as the elements, and unlearned as the animals I tended. I often compared myself to them, and finding that my chief superiority consisted in power, I soon persuaded myself that it was in power only that I was inferior to the chiefest potentates of the earth. Thus untaught in refined philosophy, and pursued by a restless feeling of degradation from my true station in society, I wandered among the hills of civilized England as uncouth a savage as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome. I owned but one law, it was that of the strongest, and my greatest deed of virtue was never to submit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet let me a little retract from this sentence I have passed on myself. My mother, when dying, had, in addition to her other half-forgotten and misapplied lessons, committed, with solemn exhortation, her other child to my fraternal guardianship; and this one duty I performed to the best of my ability, with all the zeal and affection of which my nature was capable. My sister was three years younger than myself; I had nursed her as an infant, and when the difference of our sexes, by giving us various occupations, in a great measure divided us, yet she continued to be the object of my careful love. Orphans, in the fullest sense of the term, we were poorest among the poor, and despised among the unhonoured. If my daring and courage obtained for me a kind of respectful aversion, her youth and sex, since they did not excite tenderness, by proving her to be weak, were the causes of numberless mortifications to her; and her own disposition was not so constituted as to diminish the evil effects of her lowly station.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She was a singular being, and, like me, inherited much of the peculiar disposition of our father. Her countenance was all expression; her eyes were not dark, but impenetrably deep; you seemed to discover space after space in their intellectual glance, and to feel that the soul which was their soul, comprehended an universe of thought in its ken. She was pale and fair, and her golden hair clustered on her temples, contrasting its rich hue with the living marble beneath. Her coarse peasant-dress, little consonant apparently with the refinement of feeling which her face expressed, yet in a strange manner accorded with it. She was like one of Guido's saints, with heaven in her heart and in her look, so that when you saw her you only thought of that within, and costume and even feature were secondary to the mind that beamed in her countenance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet though lovely and full of noble feeling, my poor Perdita (for this was the fanciful name my sister had received from her dying parent), was not altogether saintly in her disposition. Her manners were cold and repulsive. If she had been nurtured by those who had regarded her with affection, she might have been different; but unloved and neglected, she repaid want of kindness with distrust and silence. She was submissive to those who held authority over her, but a perpetual cloud dwelt on her brow; she looked as if she expected enmity from every one who approached her, and her actions were instigated by the same feeling. All the time she could command she spent in solitude. She would ramble to the most unfrequented places, and scale dangerous heights, that in those unvisited spots she might wrap herself in loneliness. Often she passed whole hours walking up and down the paths of the woods; she wove garlands of flowers and ivy, or watched the flickering of the shadows and glancing of the leaves; sometimes she sat beside a stream, and as her thoughts paused, threw flowers or pebbles into the waters, watching how those swam and these sank; or she would set afloat boats formed of bark of trees or leaves, with a feather for a sail, and intensely watch the navigation of her craft among the rapids and shallows of the brook. Meanwhile her active fancy wove a thousand combinations; she dreamt "of moving accidents by flood and field"—she lost herself delightedly in these self-created wanderings, and returned with unwilling spirit to the dull detail of common life. Poverty was the cloud that veiled her excellencies, and all that was good in her seemed about to perish from want of the genial dew of affection. She had not even the same advantage as I in the recollection of her parents; she clung to me, her brother, as her only friend, but her alliance with me completed the distaste that her protectors felt for her; and every error was magnified by them into crimes. If she had been bred in that sphere of life to which by inheritance the delicate framework of her mind and person was adapted, she would have been the object almost of adoration, for her virtues were as eminent as her defects. All the genius that ennobled the blood of her father illustrated hers; a generous tide flowed in her veins; artifice, envy, or meanness, were at the antipodes of her nature; her countenance, when enlightened by amiable feeling, might have belonged to a queen of nations; her eyes were bright; her look fearless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Although by our situation and dispositions we were almost equally cut off from the usual forms of social intercourse, we formed a strong contrast to each other. I always required the stimulants of companionship and applause. Perdita was all-sufficient to herself. Notwithstanding my lawless habits, my disposition was sociable, hers recluse. My life was spent among tangible realities, hers was a dream. I might be said even to love my enemies, since by exciting me they in a sort bestowed happiness upon me; Perdita almost disliked her friends, for they interfered with her visionary moods. All my feelings, even of exultation and triumph, were changed to bitterness, if unparticipated; Perdita, even in joy, fled to loneliness, and could go on from day to day, neither expressing her emotions, nor seeking a fellow-feeling in another mind. Nay, she could love and dwell with tenderness on the look and voice of her friend, while her demeanour expressed the coldest reserve. A sensation with her became a sentiment, and she never spoke until she had mingled her perceptions of outward objects with others which were the native growth of her own mind. She was like a fruitful soil that imbibed the airs and dews of heaven, and gave them forth again to light in loveliest forms of fruits and flowers; but then she was often dark and rugged as that soil, raked up, and new sown with unseen seed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She dwelt in a cottage whose trim grass-plat sloped down to the waters of the lake of Ulswater; a beech wood stretched up the hill behind, and a purling brook gently falling from the acclivity ran through poplar-shaded banks into the lake. I lived with a farmer whose house was built higher up among the hills: a dark crag rose behind it, and, exposed to the north, the snow lay in its crevices the summer through. Before dawn I led my flock to the sheep-walks, and guarded them through the day. It was a life of toil; for rain and cold were more frequent than sunshine; but it was my pride to contemn the elements. My trusty dog watched the sheep as I slipped away to the rendezvous of my comrades, and thence to the accomplishment of our schemes. At noon we met again, and we threw away in contempt our peasant fare, as we built our fire-place and kindled the cheering blaze destined to cook the game stolen from the neighbouring preserves. Then came the tale of hair-breadth escapes, combats with dogs, ambush and flight, as gipsey-like we encompassed our pot. The search after a stray lamb, or the devices by which we elude or endeavoured to elude punishment, filled up the hours of afternoon; in the evening my flock went to its fold, and I to my sister.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was seldom indeed that we escaped, to use an old-fashioned phrase, scot free. Our dainty fare was often exchanged for blows and imprisonment. Once, when thirteen years of age, I was sent for a month to the county jail. I came out, my morals unimproved, my hatred to my oppressors encreased tenfold. Bread and water did not tame my blood, nor solitary confinement inspire me with gentle thoughts. I was angry, impatient, miserable; my only happy hours were those during which I devised schemes of revenge; these were perfected in my forced solitude, so that during the whole of the following season, and I was freed early in September, I never failed to provide excellent and plenteous fare for myself and my comrades. This was a glorious winter. The sharp frost and heavy snows tamed the animals, and kept the country gentlemen by their firesides; we got more game than we could eat, and my faithful dog grew sleek upon our refuse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus years passed on; and years only added fresh love of freedom, and contempt for all that was not as wild and rude as myself. At the age of sixteen I had shot up in appearance to man's estate; I was tall and athletic; I was practised to feats of strength, and inured to the inclemency of the elements. My skin was embrowned by the sun; my step was firm with conscious power. I feared no man, and loved none. In after life I looked back with wonder to what I then was; how utterly worthless I should have become if I had pursued my lawless career. My life was like that of an animal, and my mind was in danger of degenerating into that which informs brute nature. Until now, my savage habits had done me no radical mischief; my physical powers had grown up and flourished under their influence, and my mind, undergoing the same discipline, was imbued with all the hardy virtues. But now my boasted independence was daily instigating me to acts of tyranny, and freedom was becoming licentiousness. I stood on the brink of manhood; passions, strong as the trees of a forest, had already taken root within me, and were about to shadow with their noxious overgrowth, my path of life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I panted for enterprises beyond my childish exploits, and formed distempered dreams of future action. I avoided my ancient comrades, and I soon lost them. They arrived at the age when they were sent to fulfil their destined situations in life; while I, an outcast, with none to lead or drive me forward, paused. The old began to point at me as an example, the young to wonder at me as a being distinct from themselves; I hated them, and began, last and worst degradation, to hate myself. I clung to my ferocious habits, yet half despised them; I continued my war against civilization, and yet entertained a wish to belong to it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I revolved again and again all that I remembered my mother to have told me of my father's former life; I contemplated the few relics I possessed belonging to him, which spoke of greater refinement than could be found among the mountain cottages; but nothing in all this served as a guide to lead me to another and pleasanter way of life. My father had been connected with nobles, but all I knew of such connection was subsequent neglect. The name of the king,—he to whom my dying father had addressed his latest prayers, and who had barbarously slighted them, was associated only with the ideas of unkindness, injustice, and consequent resentment. I was born for something greater than I was—and greater I would become; but greatness, at least to my distorted perceptions, was no necessary associate of goodness, and my wild thoughts were unchecked by moral considerations when they rioted in dreams of distinction. Thus I stood upon a pinnacle, a sea of evil rolled at my feet; I was about to precipitate myself into it, and rush like a torrent over all obstructions to the object of my wishes— when a stranger influence came over the current of my fortunes, and changed their boisterous course to what was in comparison like the gentle meanderings of a meadow-encircling streamlet.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER II.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I LIVED far from the busy haunts of men, and the rumour of wars or political changes came worn to a mere sound, to our mountain abodes. England had been the scene of momentous struggles, during my early boyhood. In the year 2073, the last of its kings, the ancient friend of my father, had abdicated in compliance with the gentle force of the remonstrances of his subjects, and a republic was instituted. Large estates were secured to the dethroned monarch and his family; he received the title of Earl of Windsor, and Windsor Castle, an ancient royalty, with its wide demesnes were a part of his allotted wealth. He died soon after, leaving two children, a son and a daughter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ex-queen, a princess of the house of Austria, had long impelled her husband to withstand the necessity of the times. She was haughty and fearless; she cherished a love of power, and a bitter contempt for him who had despoiled himself of a kingdom. For her children's sake alone she consented to remain, shorn of regality, a member of the English republic. When she became a widow, she turned all her thoughts to the educating her son Adrian, second Earl of Windsor, so as to accomplish her ambitious ends; and with his mother's milk he imbibed, and was intended to grow up in the steady purpose of re-acquiring his lost crown. Adrian was now fifteen years of age. He was addicted to study, and imbued beyond his years with learning and talent: report said that he had already begun to thwart his mother's views, and to entertain republican principles. However this might be, the haughty Countess entrusted none with the secrets of her family-tuition. Adrian was bred up in solitude, and kept apart from the natural companions of his age and rank. Some unknown circumstance now induced his mother to send him from under her immediate tutelage; and we heard that he was about to visit Cumberland. A thousand tales were rife, explanatory of the Countess of Windsor's conduct; none true probably; but each day it became more certain that we should have the noble scion of the late regal house of England among us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was a large estate with a mansion attached to it, belonging to this family, at Ulswater. A large park was one of its appendages, laid out with great taste, and plentifully stocked with game. I had often made depredations on these preserves; and the neglected state of the property facilitated my incursions. When it was decided that the young Earl of Windsor should visit Cumberland, workmen arrived to put the house and grounds in order for his reception. The apartments were restored to their pristine splendour, and the park, all disrepairs restored, was guarded with unusual care.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was beyond measure disturbed by this intelligence. It roused all my dormant recollections, my suspended sentiments of injury, and gave rise to the new one of revenge. I could no longer attend to my occupations; all my plans and devices were forgotten; I seemed about to begin life anew, and that under no good auspices. The tug of war, I thought, was now to begin. He would come triumphantly to the district to which my parent had fled broken-hearted; he would find the ill-fated offspring, bequeathed with such vain confidence to his royal father, miserable paupers. That he should know of our existence, and treat us, near at hand, with the same contumely which his father had practised in distance and absence, appeared to me the certain consequence of all that had gone before. Thus then I should meet this titled stripling—the son of my father's friend. He would be hedged in by servants; nobles, and the sons of nobles, were his companions; all England rang with his name; and his coming, like a thunderstorm, was heard from far: while I, unlettered and unfashioned, should, if I came in contact with him, in the judgment of his courtly followers, bear evidence in my very person to the propriety of that ingratitude which had made me the degraded being I appeared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With my mind fully occupied by these ideas, I might be said as if fascinated, to haunt the destined abode of the young Earl. I watched the progress of the improvements, and stood by the unlading waggons, as various articles of luxury, brought from London, were taken forth and conveyed into the mansion. It was part of the Ex-Queen's plan, to surround her son with princely magnificence. I beheld rich carpets and silken hangings, ornaments of gold, richly embossed metals, emblazoned furniture, and all the appendages of high rank arranged, so that nothing but what was regal in splendour should reach the eye of one of royal descent. I looked on these; I turned my gaze to my own mean dress.—Whence sprung this difference? Whence but from ingratitude, from falsehood, from a dereliction on the part of the prince's father, of all noble sympathy and generous feeling. Doubtless, he also, whose blood received a mingling tide from his proud mother—he, the acknowledged focus of the kingdom's wealth and nobility, had been taught to repeat my father's name with disdain, and to scoff at my just claims to protection. I strove to think that all this grandeur was but more glaring infamy, and that, by planting his gold-enwoven flag beside my tarnished and tattered banner, he proclaimed not his superiority, but his debasement. Yet I envied him. His stud of beautiful horses, his arms of costly workmanship, the praise that attended him, the adoration, ready servitor, high place and high esteem,—I considered them as forcibly wrenched from me, and envied them all with novel and tormenting bitterness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To crown my vexation of spirit, Perdita, the visionary Perdita, seemed to awake to real life with transport, when she told me that the Earl of Windsor was about to arrive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And this pleases you?" I observed, moodily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Indeed it does, Lionel," she replied; "I quite long to see him; he is the descendant of our kings, the first noble of the land: every one admires and loves him, and they say that his rank is his least merit; he is generous, brave, and affable."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have learnt a pretty lesson, Perdita," said I, "and repeat it so literally, that you forget the while the proofs we have of the Earl's virtues; his generosity to us is manifest in our plenty, his bravery in the protection he affords us, his affability in the notice he takes of us. His rank his least merit, do you say? Why, all his virtues are derived from his station only; because he is rich, he is called generous; because he is powerful, brave; because he is well served, he is affable. Let them call him so, let all England believe him to be thus—we know him—he is our enemy—our penurious, dastardly, arrogant enemy; if he were gifted with one particle of the virtues you call his, he would do justly by us, if it were only to shew, that if he must strike, it should not be a fallen foe. His father injured my father—his father, unassailable on his throne, dared despise him who only stooped beneath himself, when he deigned to associate with the royal ingrate. We, descendants from the one and the other, must be enemies also. He shall find that I can feel my injuries; he shall learn to dread my revenge!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A few days after he arrived. Every inhabitant of the most miserable cottage, went to swell the stream of population that poured forth to meet him: even Perdita, in spite of my late philippic, crept near the highway, to behold this idol of all hearts. I, driven half mad, as I met party after party of the country people, in their holiday best, descending the hills, escaped to their cloud-veiled summits, and looking on the sterile rocks about me, exclaimed—"They do not cry, long live the Earl!" Nor, when night came, accompanied by drizzling rain and cold, would I return home; for I knew that each cottage rang with the praises of Adrian; as I felt my limbs grow numb and chill, my pain served as food for my insane aversion; nay, I almost triumphed in it, since it seemed to afford me reason and excuse for my hatred of my unheeding adversary. All was attributed to him, for I confounded so entirely the idea of father and son, that I forgot that the latter might be wholly unconscious of his parent's neglect of us; and as I struck my aching head with my hand, I cried: "He shall hear of this! I will be revenged! I will not suffer like a spaniel! He shall know, beggar and friendless as I am, that I will not tamely submit to injury!" Each day, each hour added to these exaggerated wrongs. His praises were so many adder's stings infixed in my vulnerable breast. If I saw him at a distance, riding a beautiful horse, my blood boiled with rage; the air seemed poisoned by his presence, and my very native English was changed to a vile jargon, since every phrase I heard was coupled with his name and honour. I panted to relieve this painful heart-burning by some misdeed that should rouse him to a sense of my antipathy. It was the height of his offending, that he should occasion in me such intolerable sensations, and not deign himself to afford any demonstration that he was aware that I even lived to feel them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It soon became known that Adrian took great delight in his park and preserves. He never sported, but spent hours in watching the tribes of lovely and almost tame animals with which it was stocked, and ordered that greater care should be taken of them than ever. Here was an opening for my plans of offence, and I made use of it with all the brute impetuosity I derived from my active mode of life. I proposed the enterprize of poaching on his demesne to my few remaining comrades, who were the most determined and lawless of the crew; but they all shrunk from the peril; so I was left to achieve my revenge myself. At first my exploits were unperceived; I increased in daring; footsteps on the dewy grass, torn boughs, and marks of slaughter, at length betrayed me to the game-keepers. They kept better watch; I was taken, and sent to prison. I entered its gloomy walls in a fit of triumphant extasy: "He feels me now," I cried, "and shall, again and again!"—I passed but one day in confinement; in the evening I was liberated, as I was told, by the order of the Earl himself. This news precipitated me from my self-raised pinnacle of honour. He despises me, I thought; but he shall learn that I despise him, and hold in equal contempt his punishments and his clemency. On the second night after my release, I was again taken by the gamekeepers—again imprisoned, and again released; and again, such was my pertinacity, did the fourth night find me in the forbidden park. The gamekeepers were more enraged than their lord by my obstinacy. They had received orders that if I were again taken, I should be brought to the Earl; and his lenity made them expect a conclusion which they considered ill befitting my crime. One of them, who had been from the first the leader among those who had seized me, resolved to satisfy his own resentment, before he made me over to the higher powers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The late setting of the moon, and the extreme caution I was obliged to use in this my third expedition, consumed so much time, that something like a qualm of fear came over me when I perceived dark night yield to twilight. I crept along by the fern, on my hands and knees, seeking the shadowy coverts of the underwood, while the birds awoke with unwelcome song above, and the fresh morning wind, playing among the boughs, made me suspect a footfall at each turn. My heart beat quick as I approached the palings; my hand was on one of them, a leap would take me to the other side, when two keepers sprang from an ambush upon me: one knocked me down, and proceeded to inflict a severe horse-whipping. I started up—a knife was in my grasp; I made a plunge at his raised right arm, and inflicted a deep, wide wound in his hand. The rage and yells of the wounded man, the howling execrations of his comrade, which I answered with equal bitterness and fury, echoed through the dell; morning broke more and more, ill accordant in its celestial beauty with our brute and noisy contest. I and my enemy were still struggling, when the wounded man exclaimed, "The Earl!" I sprang out of the herculean hold of the keeper, panting from my exertions; I cast furious glances on my persecutors, and placing myself with my back to a tree, resolved to defend myself to the last. My garments were torn, and they, as well as my hands, were stained with the blood of the man I had wounded; one hand grasped the dead birds—my hard-earned prey, the other held the knife; my hair was matted; my face besmeared with the same guilty signs that bore witness against me on the dripping instrument I clenched; my whole appearance was haggard and squalid. Tall and muscular as I was in form, I must have looked like, what indeed I was, the merest ruffian that ever trod the earth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The name of the Earl startled me, and caused all the indignant blood that warmed my heart to rush into my cheeks; I had never seen him before; I figured to myself a haughty, assuming youth, who would take me to task, if he deigned to speak to me, with all the arrogance of superiority. My reply was ready; a reproach I deemed calculated to sting his very heart. He came up the while; and his appearance blew aside, with gentle western breath, my cloudy wrath: a tall, slim, fair boy, with a physiognomy expressive of the excess of sensibility and refinement stood before me; the morning sunbeams tinged with gold his silken hair, and spread light and glory over his beaming countenance. "How is this?" he cried. The men eagerly began their defence; he put them aside, saying, "Two of you at once on a mere lad— for shame!" He came up to me: "Verney," he cried, "Lionel Verney, do we meet thus for the first time? We were born to be friends to each other; and though ill fortune has divided us, will you not acknowledge the hereditary bond of friendship which I trust will hereafter unite us?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As he spoke, his earnest eyes, fixed on me, seemed to read my very soul: my heart, my savage revengeful heart, felt the influence of sweet benignity sink upon it; while his thrilling voice, like sweetest melody, awoke a mute echo within me, stirring to its depths the life-blood in my frame. I desired to reply, to acknowledge his goodness, accept his proffered friendship; but words, fitting words, were not afforded to the rough mountaineer; I would have held out my hand, but its guilty stain restrained me. Adrian took pity on my faltering mien: "Come with me," he said, "I have much to say to you; come home with me—you know who I am?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes," I exclaimed, "I do believe that I now know you, and that you will pardon my mistakes—my crime."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian smiled gently; and after giving his orders to the gamekeepers, he came up to me; putting his arm in mine, we walked together to the mansion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was not his rank—after all that I have said, surely it will not be suspected that it was Adrian's rank, that, from the first, subdued my heart of hearts, and laid my entire spirit prostrate before him. Nor was it I alone who felt thus intimately his perfections. His sensibility and courtesy fascinated every one. His vivacity, intelligence, and active spirit of benevolence, completed the conquest. Even at this early age, he was deep read and imbued with the spirit of high philosophy. This spirit gave a tone of irresistible persuasion to his intercourse with others, so that he seemed like an inspired musician, who struck, with unerring skill, the "lyre of mind," and produced thence divine harmony. In person, he hardly appeared of this world; his slight frame was overinformed by the soul that dwelt within; he was all mind; "Man but a rush against" his breast, and it would have conquered his strength; but the might of his smile would have tamed an hungry lion, or caused a legion of armed men to lay their weapons at his feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I spent the day with him. At first he did not recur to the past, or indeed to any personal occurrences. He wished probably to inspire me with confidence, and give me time to gather together my scattered thoughts. He talked of general subjects, and gave me ideas I had never before conceived. We sat in his library, and he spoke of the old Greek sages, and of the power which they had acquired over the minds of men, through the force of love and wisdom only. The room was decorated with the busts of many of them, and he described their characters to me. As he spoke, I felt subject to him; and all my boasted pride and strength were subdued by the honeyed accents of this blue-eyed boy. The trim and paled demesne of civilization, which I had before regarded from my wild jungle as inaccessible, had its wicket opened by him; I stepped within, and felt, as I entered, that I trod my native soil.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As evening came on, he reverted to the past. "I have a tale to relate," he said, "and much explanation to give concerning the past; perhaps you can assist me to curtail it. Do you remember your father? I had never the happiness of seeing him, but his name is one of my earliest recollections: he stands written in my mind's tablets as the type of all that was gallant, amiable, and fascinating in man. His wit was not more conspicuous than the overflowing goodness of his heart, which he poured in such full measure on his friends, as to leave, alas! small remnant for himself."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Encouraged by this encomium, I proceeded, in answer to his inquiries, to relate what I remembered of my parent; and he gave an account of those circumstances which had brought about a neglect of my father's testamentary letter. When, in after times, Adrian's father, then king of England, felt his situation become more perilous, his line of conduct more embarrassed, again and again he wished for his early friend, who might stand a mound against the impetuous anger of his queen, a mediator between him and the parliament. From the time that he had quitted London, on the fatal night of his defeat at the gaming-table, the king had received no tidings concerning him; and when, after the lapse of years, he exerted himself to discover him, every trace was lost. With fonder regret than ever, he clung to his memory; and gave it in charge to his son, if ever he should meet this valued friend, in his name to bestow every succour, and to assure him that, to the last, his attachment survived separation and silence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A short time before Adrian's visit to Cumberland, the heir of the nobleman to whom my father had confided his last appeal to his royal master, put this letter, its seal unbroken, into the young Earl's hands. It had been found cast aside with a mass of papers of old date, and accident alone brought it to light. Adrian read it with deep interest; and found there that living spirit of genius and wit he had so often heard commemorated. He discovered the name of the spot whither my father had retreated, and where he died; he learnt the existence of his orphan children; and during the short interval between his arrival at Ulswater and our meeting in the park, he had been occupied in making inquiries concerning us, and arranging a variety of plans for our benefit, preliminary to his introducing himself to our notice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The mode in which he spoke of my father was gratifying to my vanity; the veil which he delicately cast over his benevolence, in alledging a duteous fulfilment of the king's latest will, was soothing to my pride. Other feelings, less ambiguous, were called into play by his conciliating manner and the generous warmth of his expressions, respect rarely before experienced, admiration, and love—he had touched my rocky heart with his magic power, and the stream of affection gushed forth, imperishable and pure. In the evening we parted; he pressed my hand: "We shall meet again; come to me to-morrow." I clasped that kind hand; I tried to answer; a fervent "God bless you!" was all my ignorance could frame of speech, and I darted away, oppressed by my new emotions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I could not rest. I sought the hills; a west wind swept them, and the stars glittered above. I ran on, careless of outward objects, but trying to master the struggling spirit within me by means of bodily fatigue. "This," I thought, "is power! Not to be strong of limb, hard of heart, ferocious, and daring; but kind compassionate and soft."—Stopping short, I clasped my hands, and with the fervour of a new proselyte, cried, "Doubt me not, Adrian, I also will become wise and good!" and then quite overcome, I wept aloud.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As this gust of passion passed from me, I felt more composed. I lay on the ground, and giving the reins to my thoughts, repassed in my mind my former life; and began, fold by fold, to unwind the many errors of my heart, and to discover how brutish, savage, and worthless I had hitherto been. I could not however at that time feel remorse, for methought I was born anew; my soul threw off the burthen of past sin, to commence a new career in innocence and love. Nothing harsh or rough remained to jar with the soft feelings which the transactions of the day had inspired; I was as a child lisping its devotions after its mother, and my plastic soul was remoulded by a master hand, which I neither desired nor was able to resist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This was the first commencement of my friendship with Adrian, and I must commemorate this day as the most fortunate of my life. I now began to be human. I was admitted within that sacred boundary which divides the intellectual and moral nature of man from that which characterizes animals. My best feelings were called into play to give fitting responses to the generosity, wisdom, and amenity of my new friend. He, with a noble goodness all his own, took infinite delight in bestowing to prodigality the treasures of his mind and fortune on the long-neglected son of his father's friend, the offspring of that gifted being whose excellencies and talents he had heard commemorated from infancy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After his abdication the late king had retreated from the sphere of politics, yet his domestic circle afforded him small content. The ex-queen had none of the virtues of domestic life, and those of courage and daring which she possessed were rendered null by the secession of her husband: she despised him, and did not care to conceal her sentiments. The king had, in compliance with her exactions, cast off his old friends, but he had acquired no new ones under her guidance. In this dearth of sympathy, he had recourse to his almost infant son; and the early development of talent and sensibility rendered Adrian no unfitting depository of his father's confidence. He was never weary of listening to the latter's often repeated accounts of old times, in which my father had played a distinguished part; his keen remarks were repeated to the boy, and remembered by him; his wit, his fascinations, his very faults were hallowed by the regret of affection; his loss was sincerely deplored. Even the queen's dislike of the favourite was ineffectual to deprive him of his son's admiration: it was bitter, sarcastic, contemptuous—but as she bestowed her heavy censure alike on his virtues as his errors, on his devoted friendship and his ill-bestowed loves, on his disinterestedness and his prodigality, on his pre-possessing grace of manner, and the facility with which he yielded to temptation, her double shot proved too heavy, and fell short of the mark. Nor did her angry dislike prevent Adrian from imaging my father, as he had said, the type of all that was gallant, amiable, and fascinating in man. It was not strange therefore, that when he heard of the existence of the offspring of this celebrated person, he should have formed the plan of bestowing on them all the advantages his rank made him rich to afford. When he found me a vagabond shepherd of the hills, a poacher, an unlettered savage, still his kindness did not fail. In addition to the opinion he entertained that his father was to a degree culpable of neglect towards us, and that he was bound to every possible reparation, he was pleased to say that under all my ruggedness there glimmered forth an elevation of spirit, which could be distinguished from mere animal courage, and that I inherited a similarity of countenance to my father, which gave proof that all his virtues and talents had not died with him. Whatever those might be which descended to me, my noble young friend resolved should not be lost for want of culture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Acting upon this plan in our subsequent intercourse, he led me to wish to participate in that cultivation which graced his own intellect. My active mind, when once it seized upon this new idea, fastened on it with extreme avidity. At first it was the great object of my ambition to rival the merits of my father, and render myself worthy of the friendship of Adrian. But curiosity soon awoke, and an earnest love of knowledge, which caused me to pass days and nights in reading and study. I was already well acquainted with what I may term the panorama of nature, the change of seasons, and the various appearances of heaven and earth. But I was at once startled and enchanted by my sudden extension of vision, when the curtain, which had been drawn before the intellectual world, was withdrawn, and I saw the universe, not only as it presented itself to my outward senses, but as it had appeared to the wisest among men. Poetry and its creations, philosophy and its researches and classifications, alike awoke the sleeping ideas in my mind, and gave me new ones.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I felt as the sailor, who from the topmast first discovered the shore of America; and like him I hastened to tell my companions of my discoveries in unknown regions. But I was unable to excite in any breast the same craving appetite for knowledge that existed in mine. Even Perdita was unable to understand me. I had lived in what is generally called the world of reality, and it was awakening to a new country to find that there was a deeper meaning in all I saw, besides that which my eyes conveyed to me. The visionary Perdita beheld in all this only a new gloss upon an old reading, and her own was sufficiently inexhaustible to content her. She listened to me as she had done to the narration of my adventures, and sometimes took an interest in this species of information; but she did not, as I did, look on it as an integral part of her being, which having obtained, I could no more put off than the universal sense of touch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We both agreed in loving Adrian: although she not having yet escaped from childhood could not appreciate as I did the extent of his merits, or feel the same sympathy in his pursuits and opinions. I was for ever with him. There was a sensibility and sweetness in his disposition, that gave a tender and unearthly tone to our converse. Then he was gay as a lark carolling from its skiey tower, soaring in thought as an eagle, innocent as the mild-eyed dove. He could dispel the seriousness of Perdita, and take the sting from the torturing activity of my nature. I looked back to my restless desires and painful struggles with my fellow beings as to a troubled dream, and felt myself as much changed as if I had transmigrated into another form, whose fresh sensorium and mechanism of nerves had altered the reflection of the apparent universe in the mirror of mind. But it was not so; I was the same in strength, in earnest craving for sympathy, in my yearning for active exertion. My manly virtues did not desert me, for the witch Urania spared the locks of Sampson, while he reposed at her feet; but all was softened and humanized. Nor did Adrian instruct me only in the cold truths of history and philosophy. At the same time that he taught me by their means to subdue my own reckless and uncultured spirit, he opened to my view the living page of his own heart, and gave me to feel and understand its wondrous character.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ex-queen of England had, even during infancy, endeavoured to implant daring and ambitious designs in the mind of her son. She saw that he was endowed with genius and surpassing talent; these she cultivated for the sake of afterwards using them for the furtherance of her own views. She encouraged his craving for knowledge and his impetuous courage; she even tolerated his tameless love of freedom, under the hope that this would, as is too often the case, lead to a passion for command. She endeavoured to bring him up in a sense of resentment towards, and a desire to revenge himself upon, those who had been instrumental in bringing about his father's abdication. In this she did not succeed. The accounts furnished him, however distorted, of a great and wise nation asserting its right to govern itself, excited his admiration: in early days he became a republican from principle. Still his mother did not despair. To the love of rule and haughty pride of birth she added determined ambition, patience, and self-control. She devoted herself to the study of her son's disposition. By the application of praise, censure, and exhortation, she tried to seek and strike the fitting chords; and though the melody that followed her touch seemed discord to her, she built her hopes on his talents, and felt sure that she would at last win him. The kind of banishment he now experienced arose from other causes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ex-queen had also a daughter, now twelve years of age; his fairy sister, Adrian was wont to call her; a lovely, animated, little thing, all sensibility and truth. With these, her children, the noble widow constantly resided at Windsor; and admitted no visitors, except her own partizans, travellers from her native Germany, and a few of the foreign ministers. Among these, and highly distinguished by her, was Prince Zaimi, ambassador to England from the free States of Greece; and his daughter, the young Princess Evadne, passed much of her time at Windsor Castle. In company with this sprightly and clever Greek girl, the Countess would relax from her usual state. Her views with regard to her own children, placed all her words and actions relative to them under restraint: but Evadne was a plaything she could in no way fear; nor were her talents and vivacity slight alleviations to the monotony of the Countess's life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Evadne was eighteen years of age. Although they spent much time together at Windsor, the extreme youth of Adrian prevented any suspicion as to the nature of their intercourse. But he was ardent and tender of heart beyond the common nature of man, and had already learnt to love, while the beauteous Greek smiled benignantly on the boy. It was strange to me, who, though older than Adrian, had never loved, to witness the whole heart's sacrifice of my friend. There was neither jealousy, inquietude, or mistrust in his sentiment; it was devotion and faith. His life was swallowed up in the existence of his beloved; and his heart beat only in unison with the pulsations that vivified hers. This was the secret law of his life—he loved and was beloved. The universe was to him a dwelling, to inhabit with his chosen one; and not either a scheme of society or an enchainment of events, that could impart to him either happiness or misery. What, though life and the system of social intercourse were a wilderness, a tiger-haunted jungle! Through the midst of its errors, in the depths of its savage recesses, there was a disentangled and flowery pathway, through which they might journey in safety and delight. Their track would be like the passage of the Red Sea, which they might traverse with unwet feet, though a wall of destruction were impending on either side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alas! why must I record the hapless delusion of this matchless specimen of humanity? What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery? We are not formed for enjoyment; and, however we may be attuned to the reception of pleasureable emotion, disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us on to the shoals. Who was better framed than this highly-gifted youth to love and be beloved, and to reap unalienable joy from an unblamed passion? If his heart had slept but a few years longer, he might have been saved; but it awoke in its infancy; it had power, but no knowledge; and it was ruined, even as a too early-blowing bud is nipt by the killing frost.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I did not accuse Evadne of hypocrisy or a wish to deceive her lover; but the first letter that I saw of hers convinced me that she did not love him; it was written with elegance, and, foreigner as she was, with great command of language. The hand-writing itself was exquisitely beautiful; there was something in her very paper and its folds, which even I, who did not love, and was withal unskilled in such matters, could discern as being tasteful. There was much kindness, gratitude, and sweetness in her expression, but no love. Evadne was two years older than Adrian; and who, at eighteen, ever loved one so much their junior? I compared her placid epistles with the burning ones of Adrian. His soul seemed to distil itself into the words he wrote; and they breathed on the paper, bearing with them a portion of the life of love, which was his life. The very writing used to exhaust him; and he would weep over them, merely from the excess of emotion they awakened in his heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian's soul was painted in his countenance, and concealment or deceit were at the antipodes to the dreadless frankness of his nature. Evadne made it her earnest request that the tale of their loves should not be revealed to his mother; and after for a while contesting the point, he yielded it to her. A vain concession; his demeanour quickly betrayed his secret to the quick eyes of the ex-queen. With the same wary prudence that characterized her whole conduct, she concealed her discovery, but hastened to remove her son from the sphere of the attractive Greek. He was sent to Cumberland; but the plan of correspondence between the lovers, arranged by Evadne, was effectually hidden from her. Thus the absence of Adrian, concerted for the purpose of separating, united them in firmer bonds than ever. To me he discoursed ceaselessly of his beloved Ionian. Her country, its ancient annals, its late memorable struggles, were all made to partake in her glory and excellence. He submitted to be away from her, because she commanded this submission; but for her influence, he would have declared his attachment before all England, and resisted, with unshaken constancy, his mother's opposition. Evadne's feminine prudence perceived how useless any assertion of his resolves would be, till added years gave weight to his power. Perhaps there was besides a lurking dislike to bind herself in the face of the world to one whom she did not love—not love, at least, with that passionate enthusiasm which her heart told her she might one day feel towards another. He obeyed her injunctions, and passed a year in exile in Cumberland.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER III.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >HAPPY, thrice happy, were the months, and weeks, and hours of that year. Friendship, hand in hand with admiration, tenderness and respect, built a bower of delight in my heart, late rough as an untrod wild in America, as the homeless wind or herbless sea. Insatiate thirst for knowledge, and boundless affection for Adrian, combined to keep both my heart and understanding occupied, and I was consequently happy. What happiness is so true and unclouded, as the overflowing and talkative delight of young people. In our boat, upon my native lake, beside the streams and the pale bordering poplars—in valley and over hill, my crook thrown aside, a nobler flock to tend than silly sheep, even a flock of new-born ideas, I read or listened to Adrian; and his discourse, whether it concerned his love or his theories for the improvement of man, alike entranced me. Sometimes my lawless mood would return, my love of peril, my resistance to authority; but this was in his absence; under the mild sway of his dear eyes, I was obedient and good as a boy of five years old, who does his mother's bidding.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a residence of about a year at Ulswater, Adrian visited London, and came back full of plans for our benefit. You must begin life, he said: you are seventeen, and longer delay would render the necessary apprenticeship more and more irksome. He foresaw that his own life would be one of struggle, and I must partake his labours with him. The better to fit me for this task, we must now separate. He found my name a good passport to preferment, and he had procured for me the situation of private secretary to the Ambassador at Vienna, where I should enter on my career under the best auspices. In two years, I should return to my country, with a name well known and a reputation already founded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And Perdita?—Perdita was to become the pupil, friend and younger sister of Evadne. With his usual thoughtfulness, he had provided for her independence in this situation. How refuse the offers of this generous friend?—I did not wish to refuse them; but in my heart of hearts, I made a vow to devote life, knowledge, and power, all of which, in as much as they were of any value, he had bestowed on me—all, all my capacities and hopes, to him alone I would devote.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus I promised myself, as I journied towards my destination with roused and ardent expectation: expectation of the fulfilment of all that in boyhood we promise ourselves of power and enjoyment in maturity. Methought the time was now arrived, when, childish occupations laid aside, I should enter into life. Even in the Elysian fields, Virgil describes the souls of the happy as eager to drink of the wave which was to restore them to this mortal coil. The young are seldom in Elysium, for their desires, outstripping possibility, leave them as poor as a moneyless debtor. We are told by the wisest philosophers of the dangers of the world, the deceits of men, and the treason of our own hearts: but not the less fearlessly does each put off his frail bark from the port, spread the sail, and strain his oar, to attain the multitudinous streams of the sea of life. How few in youth's prime, moor their vessels on the "golden sands," and collect the painted shells that strew them. But all at close of day, with riven planks and rent canvas make for shore, and are either wrecked ere they reach it, or find some wave-beaten haven, some desart strand, whereon to cast themselves and die unmourned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A truce to philosophy!—Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread. What has been, though sweet, is gone; the present is good only because it is about to change, and the to come is all my own. Do I fear, that my heart palpitates? high aspirations cause the flow of my blood; my eyes seem to penetrate the cloudy midnight of time, and to discern within the depths of its darkness, the fruition of all my soul desires.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now pause!—During my journey I might dream, and with buoyant wings reach the summit of life's high edifice. Now that I am arrived at its base, my pinions are furled, the mighty stairs are before me, and step by step I must ascend the wondrous fane—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Speak!—What door is opened?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Behold me in a new capacity. A diplomatist: one among the pleasure-seeking society of a gay city; a youth of promise; favourite of the Ambassador. All was strange and admirable to the shepherd of Cumberland. With breathless amaze I entered on the gay scene, whose actors were</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >—the lilies glorious as Solomon, Who toil not, neither do they spin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soon, too soon, I entered the giddy whirl; forgetting my studious hours, and the companionship of Adrian. Passionate desire of sympathy, and ardent pursuit for a wished-for object still characterized me. The sight of beauty entranced me, and attractive manners in man or woman won my entire confidence. I called it rapture, when a smile made my heart beat; and I felt the life's blood tingle in my frame, when I approached the idol which for awhile I worshipped. The mere flow of animal spirits was Paradise, and at night's close I only desired a renewal of the intoxicating delusion. The dazzling light of ornamented rooms; lovely forms arrayed in splendid dresses; the motions of a dance, the voluptuous tones of exquisite music, cradled my senses in one delightful dream.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And is not this in its kind happiness? I appeal to moralists and sages. I ask if in the calm of their measured reveries, if in the deep meditations which fill their hours, they feel the extasy of a youthful tyro in the school of pleasure? Can the calm beams of their heaven-seeking eyes equal the flashes of mingling passion which blind his, or does the influence of cold philosophy steep their soul in a joy equal to his, engaged</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In this dear work of youthful revelry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But in truth, neither the lonely meditations of the hermit, nor the tumultuous raptures of the reveller, are capable of satisfying man's heart. From the one we gather unquiet speculation, from the other satiety. The mind flags beneath the weight of thought, and droops in the heartless intercourse of those whose sole aim is amusement. There is no fruition in their vacant kindness, and sharp rocks lurk beneath the smiling ripples of these shallow waters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus I felt, when disappointment, weariness, and solitude drove me back upon my heart, to gather thence the joy of which it had become barren. My flagging spirits asked for something to speak to the affections; and not finding it, I drooped. Thus, notwithstanding the thoughtless delight that waited on its commencement, the impression I have of my life at Vienna is melancholy. Goethe has said, that in youth we cannot be happy unless we love. I did not love; but I was devoured by a restless wish to be something to others. I became the victim of ingratitude and cold coquetry—then I desponded, and imagined that my discontent gave me a right to hate the world. I receded to solitude; I had recourse to my books, and my desire again to enjoy the society of Adrian became a burning thirst.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Emulation, that in its excess almost assumed the venomous properties of envy, gave a sting to these feelings. At this period the name and exploits of one of my countrymen filled the world with admiration. Relations of what he had done, conjectures concerning his future actions, were the never-failing topics of the hour. I was not angry on my own account, but I felt as if the praises which this idol received were leaves torn from laurels destined for Adrian. But I must enter into some account of this darling of fame—this favourite of the wonder-loving world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lord Raymond was the sole remnant of a noble but impoverished family. From early youth he had considered his pedigree with complacency, and bitterly lamented his want of wealth. His first wish was aggrandisement; and the means that led towards this end were secondary considerations. Haughty, yet trembling to every demonstration of respect; ambitious, but too proud to shew his ambition; willing to achieve honour, yet a votary of pleasure,— he entered upon life. He was met on the threshold by some insult, real or imaginary; some repulse, where he least expected it; some disappointment, hard for his pride to bear. He writhed beneath an injury he was unable to revenge; and he quitted England with a vow not to return, till the good time should arrive, when she might feel the power of him she now despised.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He became an adventurer in the Greek wars. His reckless courage and comprehensive genius brought him into notice. He became the darling hero of this rising people. His foreign birth, and he refused to throw off his allegiance to his native country, alone prevented him from filling the first offices in the state. But, though others might rank higher in title and ceremony, Lord Raymond held a station above and beyond all this. He led the Greek armies to victory; their triumphs were all his own. When he appeared, whole towns poured forth their population to meet him; new songs were adapted to their national airs, whose themes were his glory, valour, and munificence. A truce was concluded between the Greeks and Turks. At the same time, Lord Raymond, by some unlooked-for chance, became the possessor of an immense fortune in England, whither he returned, crowned with glory, to receive the meed of honour and distinction before denied to his pretensions. His proud heart rebelled against this change. In what was the despised Raymond not the same? If the acquisition of power in the shape of wealth caused this alteration, that power should they feel as an iron yoke. Power therefore was the aim of all his endeavours; aggrandizement the mark at which he for ever shot. In open ambition or close intrigue, his end was the same—to attain the first station in his own country.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This account filled me with curiosity. The events that in succession followed his return to England, gave me keener feelings. Among his other advantages, Lord Raymond was supremely handsome; every one admired him; of women he was the idol. He was courteous, honey-tongued—an adept in fascinating arts. What could not this man achieve in the busy English world? Change succeeded to change; the entire history did not reach me; for Adrian had ceased to write, and Perdita was a laconic correspondent. The rumour went that Adrian had become—how write the fatal word—mad: that Lord Raymond was the favourite of the ex-queen, her daughter's destined husband. Nay, more, that this aspiring noble revived the claim of the house of Windsor to the crown, and that, on the event of Adrian's incurable disorder and his marriage with the sister, the brow of the ambitious Raymond might be encircled with the magic ring of regality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such a tale filled the trumpet of many voiced fame; such a tale rendered my longer stay at Vienna, away from the friend of my youth, intolerable. Now I must fulfil my vow; now range myself at his side, and be his ally and support till death. Farewell to courtly pleasure; to politic intrigue; to the maze of passion and folly! All hail, England! Native England, receive thy child! thou art the scene of all my hopes, the mighty theatre on which is acted the only drama that can, heart and soul, bear me along with it in its development. A voice most irresistible, a power omnipotent, drew me thither. After an absence of two years I landed on its shores, not daring to make any inquiries, fearful of every remark. My first visit would be to my sister, who inhabited a little cottage, a part of Adrian's gift, on the borders of Windsor Forest. From her I should learn the truth concerning our protector; I should hear why she had withdrawn from the protection of the Princess Evadne, and be instructed as to the influence which this overtopping and towering Raymond exercised over the fortunes of my friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had never before been in the neighbourhood of Windsor; the fertility and beauty of the country around now struck me with admiration, which encreased as I approached the antique wood. The ruins of majestic oaks which had grown, flourished, and decayed during the progress of centuries, marked where the limits of the forest once reached, while the shattered palings and neglected underwood shewed that this part was deserted for the younger plantations, which owed their birth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and now stood in the pride of maturity. Perdita's humble dwelling was situated on the skirts of the most ancient portion; before it was stretched Bishopgate Heath, which towards the east appeared interminable, and was bounded to the west by Chapel Wood and the grove of Virginia Water. Behind, the cottage was shadowed by the venerable fathers of the forest, under which the deer came to graze, and which for the most part hollow and decayed, formed fantastic groups that contrasted with the regular beauty of the younger trees. These, the offspring of a later period, stood erect and seemed ready to advance fearlessly into coming time; while those out worn stragglers, blasted and broke, clung to each other, their weak boughs sighing as the wind buffetted them—a weather-beaten crew.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A light railing surrounded the garden of the cottage, which, low-roofed, seemed to submit to the majesty of nature, and cower amidst the venerable remains of forgotten time. Flowers, the children of the spring, adorned her garden and casements; in the midst of lowliness there was an air of elegance which spoke the graceful taste of the inmate. With a beating heart I entered the enclosure; as I stood at the entrance, I heard her voice, melodious as it had ever been, which before I saw her assured me of her welfare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A moment more and Perdita appeared; she stood before me in the fresh bloom of youthful womanhood, different from and yet the same as the mountain girl I had left. Her eyes could not be deeper than they were in childhood, nor her countenance more expressive; but the expression was changed and improved; intelligence sat on her brow; when she smiled her face was embellished by the softest sensibility, and her low, modulated voice seemed tuned by love. Her person was formed in the most feminine proportions; she was not tall, but her mountain life had given freedom to her motions, so that her light step scarce made her foot-fall heard as she tript across the hall to meet me. When we had parted, I had clasped her to my bosom with unrestrained warmth; we met again, and new feelings were awakened; when each beheld the other, childhood passed, as full grown actors on this changeful scene. The pause was but for a moment; the flood of association and natural feeling which had been checked, again rushed in full tide upon our hearts, and with tenderest emotion we were swiftly locked in each other's embrace.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This burst of passionate feeling over, with calmed thoughts we sat together, talking of the past and present. I alluded to the coldness of her letters; but the few minutes we had spent together sufficiently explained the origin of this. New feelings had arisen within her, which she was unable to express in writing to one whom she had only known in childhood; but we saw each other again, and our intimacy was renewed as if nothing had intervened to check it. I detailed the incidents of my sojourn abroad, and then questioned her as to the changes that had taken place at home, the causes of Adrian's absence, and her secluded life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The tears that suffused my sister's eyes when I mentioned our friend, and her heightened colour seemed to vouch for the truth of the reports that had reached me. But their import was too terrible for me to give instant credit to my suspicion. Was there indeed anarchy in the sublime universe of Adrian's thoughts, did madness scatter the well-appointed legions, and was he no longer the lord of his own soul? Beloved friend, this ill world was no clime for your gentle spirit; you delivered up its governance to false humanity, which stript it of its leaves ere winter-time, and laid bare its quivering life to the evil ministration of roughest winds. Have those gentle eyes, those "channels of the soul" lost their meaning, or do they only in their glare disclose the horrible tale of its aberrations? Does that voice no longer "discourse excellent music?" Horrible, most horrible! I veil my eyes in terror of the change, and gushing tears bear witness to my sympathy for this unimaginable ruin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In obedience to my request Perdita detailed the melancholy circumstances that led to this event.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The frank and unsuspicious mind of Adrian, gifted as it was by every natural grace, endowed with transcendant powers of intellect, unblemished by the shadow of defect (unless his dreadless independence of thought was to be construed into one), was devoted, even as a victim to sacrifice, to his love for Evadne. He entrusted to her keeping the treasures of his soul, his aspirations after excellence, and his plans for the improvement of mankind. As manhood dawned upon him, his schemes and theories, far from being changed by personal and prudential motives, acquired new strength from the powers he felt arise within him; and his love for Evadne became deep-rooted, as he each day became more certain that the path he pursued was full of difficulty, and that he must seek his reward, not in the applause or gratitude of his fellow creatures, hardly in the success of his plans, but in the approbation of his own heart, and in her love and sympathy, which was to lighten every toil and recompence every sacrifice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In solitude, and through many wanderings afar from the haunts of men, he matured his views for the reform of the English government, and the improvement of the people. It would have been well if he had concealed his sentiments, until he had come into possession of the power which would secure their practical development. But he was impatient of the years that must intervene, he was frank of heart and fearless. He gave not only a brief denial to his mother's schemes, but published his intention of using his influence to diminish the power of the aristocracy, to effect a greater equalization of wealth and privilege, and to introduce a perfect system of republican government into England. At first his mother treated his theories as the wild ravings of inexperience. But they were so systematically arranged, and his arguments so well supported, that though still in appearance incredulous, she began to fear him. She tried to reason with him, and finding him inflexible, learned to hate him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Strange to say, this feeling was infectious. His enthusiasm for good which did not exist; his contempt for the sacredness of authority; his ardour and imprudence were all at the antipodes of the usual routine of life; the worldly feared him; the young and inexperienced did not understand the lofty severity of his moral views, and disliked him as a being different from themselves. Evadne entered but coldly into his systems. She thought he did well to assert his own will, but she wished that will to have been more intelligible to the multitude. She had none of the spirit of a martyr, and did not incline to share the shame and defeat of a fallen patriot. She was aware of the purity of his motives, the generosity of his disposition, his true and ardent attachment to her; and she entertained a great affection for him. He repaid this spirit of kindness with the fondest gratitude, and made her the treasure-house of all his hopes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At this time Lord Raymond returned from Greece. No two persons could be more opposite than Adrian and he. With all the incongruities of his character, Raymond was emphatically a man of the world. His passions were violent; as these often obtained the mastery over him, he could not always square his conduct to the obvious line of self-interest, but self-gratification at least was the paramount object with him. He looked on the structure of society as but a part of the machinery which supported the web on which his life was traced. The earth was spread out as an highway for him; the heavens built up as a canopy for him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian felt that he made a part of a great whole. He owned affinity not only with mankind, but all nature was akin to him; the mountains and sky were his friends; the winds of heaven and the offspring of earth his playmates; while he the focus only of this mighty mirror, felt his life mingle with the universe of existence. His soul was sympathy, and dedicated to the worship of beauty and excellence. Adrian and Raymond now came into contact, and a spirit of aversion rose between them. Adrian despised the narrow views of the politician, and Raymond held in supreme contempt the benevolent visions of the philanthropist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With the coming of Raymond was formed the storm that laid waste at one fell blow the gardens of delight and sheltered paths which Adrian fancied that he had secured to himself, as a refuge from defeat and contumely. Raymond, the deliverer of Greece, the graceful soldier, who bore in his mien a tinge of all that, peculiar to her native clime, Evadne cherished as most dear— Raymond was loved by Evadne. Overpowered by her new sensations, she did not pause to examine them, or to regulate her conduct by any sentiments except the tyrannical one which suddenly usurped the empire of her heart. She yielded to its influence, and the too natural consequence in a mind unattuned to soft emotions was, that the attentions of Adrian became distasteful to her. She grew capricious; her gentle conduct towards him was exchanged for asperity and repulsive coldness. When she perceived the wild or pathetic appeal of his expressive countenance, she would relent, and for a while resume her ancient kindness. But these fluctuations shook to its depths the soul of the sensitive youth; he no longer deemed the world subject to him, because he possessed Evadne's love; he felt in every nerve that the dire storms of the mental universe were about to attack his fragile being, which quivered at the expectation of its advent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita, who then resided with Evadne, saw the torture that Adrian endured. She loved him as a kind elder brother; a relation to guide, protect, and instruct her, without the too frequent tyranny of parental authority. She adored his virtues, and with mixed contempt and indignation she saw Evadne pile drear sorrow on his head, for the sake of one who hardly marked her. In his solitary despair Adrian would often seek my sister, and in covered terms express his misery, while fortitude and agony divided the throne of his mind. Soon, alas! was one to conquer. Anger made no part of his emotion. With whom should he be angry? Not with Raymond, who was unconscious of the misery he occasioned; not with Evadne, for her his soul wept tears of blood—poor, mistaken girl, slave not tyrant was she, and amidst his own anguish he grieved for her future destiny. Once a writing of his fell into Perdita's hands; it was blotted with tears—well might any blot it with the like—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Life"—it began thus—"is not the thing romance writers describe it; going through the measures of a dance, and after various evolutions arriving at a conclusion, when the dancers may sit down and repose. While there is life there is action and change. We go on, each thought linked to the one which was its parent, each act to a previous act. No joy or sorrow dies barren of progeny, which for ever generated and generating, weaves the chain that make our life:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Un dia llama a otro dia y ass i llama, y encadena llanto a llanto, y pena a pena.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Truly disappointment is the guardian deity of human life; she sits at the threshold of unborn time, and marshals the events as they come forth. Once my heart sat lightly in my bosom; all the beauty of the world was doubly beautiful, irradiated by the sun-light shed from my own soul. O wherefore are love and ruin for ever joined in this our mortal dream? So that when we make our hearts a lair for that gently seeming beast, its companion enters with it, and pitilessly lays waste what might have been an home and a shelter."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By degrees his health was shaken by his misery, and then his intellect yielded to the same tyranny. His manners grew wild; he was sometimes ferocious, sometimes absorbed in speechless melancholy. Suddenly Evadne quitted London for Paris; he followed, and overtook her when the vessel was about to sail; none knew what passed between them, but Perdita had never seen him since; he lived in seclusion, no one knew where, attended by such persons as his mother selected for that purpose.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IV.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >THE next day Lord Raymond called at Perdita's cottage, on his way to Windsor Castle. My sister's heightened colour and sparkling eyes half revealed her secret to me. He was perfectly self-possessed; he accosted us both with courtesy, seemed immediately to enter into our feelings, and to make one with us. I scanned his physiognomy, which varied as he spoke, yet was beautiful in every change. The usual expression of his eyes was soft, though at times he could make them even glare with ferocity; his complexion was colourless; and every trait spoke predominate self-will; his smile was pleasing, though disdain too often curled his lips—lips which to female eyes were the very throne of beauty and love. His voice, usually gentle, often startled you by a sharp discordant note, which shewed that his usual low tone was rather the work of study than nature. Thus full of contradictions, unbending yet haughty, gentle yet fierce, tender and again neglectful, he by some strange art found easy entrance to the admiration and affection of women; now caressing and now tyrannizing over them according to his mood, but in every change a despot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the present time Raymond evidently wished to appear amiable. Wit, hilarity, and deep observation were mingled in his talk, rendering every sentence that he uttered as a flash of light. He soon conquered my latent distaste; I endeavoured to watch him and Perdita, and to keep in mind every thing I had heard to his disadvantage. But all appeared so ingenuous, and all was so fascinating, that I forgot everything except the pleasure his society afforded me. Under the idea of initiating me in the scene of English politics and society, of which I was soon to become a part, he narrated a number of anecdotes, and sketched many characters; his discourse, rich and varied, flowed on, pervading all my senses with pleasure. But for one thing he would have been completely triumphant. He alluded to Adrian, and spoke of him with that disparagement that the worldly wise always attach to enthusiasm. He perceived the cloud gathering, and tried to dissipate it; but the strength of my feelings would not permit me to pass thus lightly over this sacred subject; so I said emphatically, "Permit me to remark, that I am devotedly attached to the Earl of Windsor; he is my best friend and benefactor. I reverence his goodness, I accord with his opinions, and bitterly lament his present, and I trust temporary, illness. That illness, from its peculiarity, makes it painful to me beyond words to hear him mentioned, unless in terms of respect and affection."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond replied; but there was nothing conciliatory in his reply. I saw that in his heart he despised those dedicated to any but worldly idols. "Every man," he said, "dreams about something, love, honour, and pleasure; you dream of friendship, and devote yourself to a maniac; well, if that be your vocation, doubtless you are in the right to follow it."—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Some reflection seemed to sting him, and the spasm of pain that for a moment convulsed his countenance, checked my indignation. "Happy are dreamers," he continued, "so that they be not awakened! Would I could dream! but 'broad and garish day' is the element in which I live; the dazzling glare of reality inverts the scene for me. Even the ghost of friendship has departed, and love"——He broke off; nor could I guess whether the disdain that curled his lip was directed against the passion, or against himself for being its slave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This account may be taken as a sample of my intercourse with Lord Raymond. I became intimate with him, and each day afforded me occasion to admire more and more his powerful and versatile talents, that together with his eloquence, which was graceful and witty, and his wealth now immense, caused him to be feared, loved, and hated beyond any other man in England.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My descent, which claimed interest, if not respect, my former connection with Adrian, the favour of the ambassador, whose secretary I had been, and now my intimacy with Lord Raymond, gave me easy access to the fashionable and political circles of England. To my inexperience we at first appeared on the eve of a civil war; each party was violent, acrimonious, and unyielding. Parliament was divided by three factions, aristocrats, democrats, and royalists. After Adrian's declared predeliction to the republican form of government, the latter party had nearly died away, chiefless, guideless; but, when Lord Raymond came forward as its leader, it revived with redoubled force. Some were royalists from prejudice and ancient affection, and there were many moderately inclined who feared alike the capricious tyranny of the popular party, and the unbending despotism of the aristocrats. More than a third of the members ranged themselves under Raymond, and their number was perpetually encreasing. The aristocrats built their hopes on their preponderant wealth and influence; the reformers on the force of the nation itself; the debates were violent, more violent the discourses held by each knot of politicians as they assembled to arrange their measures. Opprobrious epithets were bandied about, resistance even to the death threatened; meetings of the populace disturbed the quiet order of the country; except in war, how could all this end? Even as the destructive flames were ready to break forth, I saw them shrink back; allayed by the absence of the military, by the aversion entertained by every one to any violence, save that of speech, and by the cordial politeness and even friendship of the hostile leaders when they met in private society. I was from a thousand motives induced to attend minutely to the course of events, and watch each turn with intense anxiety.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I could not but perceive that Perdita loved Raymond; methought also that he regarded the fair daughter of Verney with admiration and tenderness. Yet I knew that he was urging forward his marriage with the presumptive heiress of the Earldom of Windsor, with keen expectation of the advantages that would thence accrue to him. All the ex-queen's friends were his friends; no week passed that he did not hold consultations with her at Windsor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had never seen the sister of Adrian. I had heard that she was lovely, amiable, and fascinating. Wherefore should I see her? There are times when we have an indefinable sentiment of impending change for better or for worse, to arise from an event; and, be it for better or for worse, we fear the change, and shun the event. For this reason I avoided this high-born damsel. To me she was everything and nothing; her very name mentioned by another made me start and tremble; the endless discussion concerning her union with Lord Raymond was real agony to me. Methought that, Adrian withdrawn from active life, and this beauteous Idris, a victim probably to her mother's ambitious schemes, I ought to come forward to protect her from undue influence, guard her from unhappiness, and secure to her freedom of choice, the right of every human being. Yet how was I to do this? She herself would disdain my interference. Since then I must be an object of indifference or contempt to her, better, far better avoid her, nor expose myself before her and the scornful world to the chance of playing the mad game of a fond, foolish Icarus. One day, several months after my return to England, I quitted London to visit my sister. Her society was my chief solace and delight; and my spirits always rose at the expectation of seeing her. Her conversation was full of pointed remark and discernment; in her pleasant alcove, redolent with sweetest flowers, adorned by magnificent casts, antique vases, and copies of the finest pictures of Raphael, Correggio, and Claude, painted by herself, I fancied myself in a fairy retreat untainted by and inaccessible to the noisy contentions of politicians and the frivolous pursuits of fashion. On this occasion, my sister was not alone; nor could I fail to recognise her companion: it was Idris, the till now unseen object of my mad idolatry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In what fitting terms of wonder and delight, in what choice expression and soft flow of language, can I usher in the loveliest, wisest, best? How in poor assemblage of words convey the halo of glory that surrounded her, the thousand graces that waited unwearied on her. The first thing that struck you on beholding that charming countenance was its perfect goodness and frankness; candour sat upon her brow, simplicity in her eyes, heavenly benignity in her smile. Her tall slim figure bent gracefully as a poplar to the breezy west, and her gait, goddess-like, was as that of a winged angel new alit from heaven's high floor; the pearly fairness of her complexion was stained by a pure suffusion; her voice resembled the low, subdued tenor of a flute. It is easiest perhaps to describe by contrast. I have detailed the perfections of my sister; and yet she was utterly unlike Idris. Perdita, even where she loved, was reserved and timid; Idris was frank and confiding. The one recoiled to solitude, that she might there entrench herself from disappointment and injury; the other walked forth in open day, believing that none would harm her. Wordsworth has compared a beloved female to two fair objects in nature; but his lines always appeared to me rather a contrast than a similitude:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A violet by a mossy stone</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Half hidden from the eye,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Fair as a star when only one</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is shining in the sky.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such a violet was sweet Perdita, trembling to entrust herself to the very air, cowering from observation, yet betrayed by her excellences; and repaying with a thousand graces the labour of those who sought her in her lonely bye-path. Idris was as the star, set in single splendour in the dim anadem of balmy evening; ready to enlighten and delight the subject world, shielded herself from every taint by her unimagined distance from all that was not like herself akin to heaven.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I found this vision of beauty in Perdita's alcove, in earnest conversation with its inmate. When my sister saw me, she rose, and taking my hand, said, "He is here, even at our wish; this is Lionel, my brother." Idris arose also, and bent on me her eyes of celestial blue, and with grace peculiar said—"You hardly need an introduction; we have a picture, highly valued by my father, which declares at once your name. Verney, you will acknowledge this tie, and as my brother's friend, I feel that I may trust you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, with lids humid with a tear and trembling voice, she continued— "Dear friends, do not think it strange that now, visiting you for the first time, I ask your assistance, and confide my wishes and fears to you. To you alone do I dare speak; I have heard you commended by impartial spectators; you are my brother's friends, therefore you must be mine. What can I say? if you refuse to aid me, I am lost indeed!" She cast up her eyes, while wonder held her auditors mute; then, as if carried away by her feelings, she cried—"My brother! beloved, ill-fated Adrian! how speak of your misfortunes? Doubtless you have both heard the current tale; perhaps believe the slander; but he is not mad! Were an angel from the foot of God's throne to assert it, never, never would I believe it. He is wronged, betrayed, imprisoned—save him! Verney, you must do this; seek him out in whatever part of the island he is immured; find him, rescue him from his persecutors, restore him to himself, to me—on the wide earth I have none to love but only him!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her earnest appeal, so sweetly and passionately expressed, filled me with wonder and sympathy; and, when she added, with thrilling voice and look, "Do you consent to undertake this enterprize?" I vowed, with energy and truth, to devote myself in life and death to the restoration and welfare of Adrian. We then conversed on the plan I should pursue, and discussed the probable means of discovering his residence. While we were in earnest discourse, Lord Raymond entered unannounced: I saw Perdita tremble and grow deadly pale, and the cheeks of Idris glow with purest blushes. He must have been astonished at our conclave, disturbed by it I should have thought; but nothing of this appeared; he saluted my companions, and addressed me with a cordial greeting. Idris appeared suspended for a moment, and then with extreme sweetness, she said, "Lord Raymond, I confide in your goodness and honour."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Smiling haughtily, he bent his head, and replied, with emphasis, "Do you indeed confide, Lady Idris?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She endeavoured to read his thought, and then answered with dignity, "As you please. It is certainly best not to compromise oneself by any concealment."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pardon me," he replied, "if I have offended. Whether you trust me or not, rely on my doing my utmost to further your wishes, whatever they may be."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idris smiled her thanks, and rose to take leave. Lord Raymond requested permission to accompany her to Windsor Castle, to which she consented, and they quitted the cottage together. My sister and I were left—truly like two fools, who fancied that they had obtained a golden treasure, till daylight shewed it to be lead—two silly, luckless flies, who had played in sunbeams and were caught in a spider's web. I leaned against the casement, and watched those two glorious creatures, till they disappeared in the forest-glades; and then I turned. Perdita had not moved; her eyes fixed on the ground, her cheeks pale, her very lips white, motionless and rigid, every feature stamped by woe, she sat. Half frightened, I would have taken her hand; but she shudderingly withdrew it, and strove to collect herself. I entreated her to speak to me: "Not now," she replied, "nor do you speak to me, my dear Lionel; you can say nothing, for you know nothing. I will see you to-morrow; in the meantime, adieu!" She rose, and walked from the room; but pausing at the door, and leaning against it, as if her over-busy thoughts had taken from her the power of supporting herself, she said, "Lord Raymond will probably return. Will you tell him that he must excuse me to-day, for I am not well. I will see him to-morrow if he wishes it, and you also. You had better return to London with him; you can there make the enquiries agreed upon, concerning the Earl of Windsor and visit me again to-morrow, before you proceed on your journey—till then, farewell!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke falteringly, and concluded with a heavy sigh. I gave my assent to her request; and she left me. I felt as if, from the order of the systematic world, I had plunged into chaos, obscure, contrary, unintelligible. That Raymond should marry Idris was more than ever intolerable; yet my passion, though a giant from its birth, was too strange, wild, and impracticable, for me to feel at once the misery I perceived in Perdita. How should I act? She had not confided in me; I could not demand an explanation from Raymond without the hazard of betraying what was perhaps her most treasured secret. I would obtain the truth from her the following day—in the mean time—But, while I was occupied by multiplying reflections, Lord Raymond returned. He asked for my sister; and I delivered her message. After musing on it for a moment, he asked me if I were about to return to London, and if I would accompany him: I consented. He was full of thought, and remained silent during a considerable part of our ride; at length he said, "I must apologize to you for my abstraction; the truth is, Ryland's motion comes on to-night, and I am considering my reply."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ryland was the leader of the popular party, a hard-headed man, and in his way eloquent; he had obtained leave to bring in a bill making it treason to endeavour to change the present state of the English government and the standing laws of the republic. This attack was directed against Raymond and his machinations for the restoration of the monarchy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond asked me if I would accompany him to the House that evening. I remembered my pursuit for intelligence concerning Adrian; and, knowing that my time would be fully occupied, I excused myself. "Nay," said my companion, "I can free you from your present impediment. You are going to make enquiries concerning the Earl of Windsor. I can answer them at once, he is at the Duke of Athol's seat at Dunkeld. On the first approach of his disorder, he travelled about from one place to another; until, arriving at that romantic seclusion he refused to quit it, and we made arrangements with the Duke for his continuing there."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was hurt by the careless tone with which he conveyed this information, and replied coldly: "I am obliged to you for your intelligence, and will avail myself of it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You shall, Verney," said he, "and if you continue of the same mind, I will facilitate your views. But first witness, I beseech you, the result of this night's contest, and the triumph I am about to achieve, if I may so call it, while I fear that victory is to me defeat. What can I do? My dearest hopes appear to be near their fulfilment. The ex-queen gives me Idris; Adrian is totally unfitted to succeed to the earldom, and that earldom in my hands becomes a kingdom. By the reigning God it is true; the paltry earldom of Windsor shall no longer content him, who will inherit the rights which must for ever appertain to the person who possesses it. The Countess can never forget that she has been a queen, and she disdains to leave a diminished inheritance to her children; her power and my wit will rebuild the throne, and this brow will be clasped by a kingly diadem.—I can do this—I can marry Idris."—-</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stopped abruptly, his countenance darkened, and its expression changed again and again under the influence of internal passion. I asked, "Does Lady Idris love you?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What a question," replied he laughing. "She will of course, as I shall her, when we are married."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You begin late," said I, ironically, "marriage is usually considered the grave, and not the cradle of love. So you are about to love her, but do not already?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do not catechise me, Lionel; I will do my duty by her, be assured. Love! I must steel my heart against that; expel it from its tower of strength, barricade it out: the fountain of love must cease to play, its waters be dried up, and all passionate thoughts attendant on it die—that is to say, the love which would rule me, not that which I rule. Idris is a gentle, pretty, sweet little girl; it is impossible not to have an affection for her, and I have a very sincere one; only do not speak of love —love, the tyrant and the tyrant-queller; love, until now my conqueror, now my slave; the hungry fire, the untameable beast, the fanged snake—no—no—I will have nothing to do with that love. Tell me, Lionel, do you consent that I should marry this young lady?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He bent his keen eyes upon me, and my uncontrollable heart swelled in my bosom. I replied in a calm voice—but how far from calm was the thought imaged by my still words—"Never! I can never consent that Lady Idris should be united to one who does not love her."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Because you love her yourself."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your Lordship might have spared that taunt; I do not, dare not love her."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"At least," he continued haughtily, "she does not love you. I would not marry a reigning sovereign, were I not sure that her heart was free. But, O, Lionel! a kingdom is a word of might, and gently sounding are the terms that compose the style of royalty. Were not the mightiest men of the olden times kings? Alexander was a king; Solomon, the wisest of men, was a king; Napoleon was a king; Caesar died in his attempt to become one, and Cromwell, the puritan and king-killer, aspired to regality. The father of Adrian yielded up the already broken sceptre of England; but I will rear the fallen plant, join its dismembered frame, and exalt it above all the flowers of the field.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You need not wonder that I freely discover Adrian's abode. Do not suppose that I am wicked or foolish enough to found my purposed sovereignty on a fraud, and one so easily discovered as the truth or falsehood of the Earl's insanity. I am just come from him. Before I decided on my marriage with Idris, I resolved to see him myself again, and to judge of the probability of his recovery.—He is irrecoverably mad."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I gasped for breath—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will not detail to you," continued Raymond, "the melancholy particulars. You shall see him, and judge for yourself; although I fear this visit, useless to him, will be insufferably painful to you. It has weighed on my spirits ever since. Excellent and gentle as he is even in the downfall of his reason, I do not worship him as you do, but I would give all my hopes of a crown and my right hand to boot, to see him restored to himself."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His voice expressed the deepest compassion: "Thou most unaccountable being," I cried, "whither will thy actions tend, in all this maze of purpose in which thou seemest lost?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Whither indeed? To a crown, a golden be-gemmed crown, I hope; and yet I dare not trust and though I dream of a crown and wake for one, ever and anon a busy devil whispers to me, that it is but a fool's cap that I seek, and that were I wise, I should trample on it, and take in its stead, that which is worth all the crowns of the east and presidentships of the west."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And what is that?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If I do make it my choice, then you shall know; at present I dare not speak, even think of it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Again he was silent, and after a pause turned to me laughingly. When scorn did not inspire his mirth, when it was genuine gaiety that painted his features with a joyous expression, his beauty became super-eminent, divine. "Verney," said he, "my first act when I become King of England, will be to unite with the Greeks, take Constantinople, and subdue all Asia. I intend to be a warrior, a conqueror; Napoleon's name shall vail to mine; and enthusiasts, instead of visiting his rocky grave, and exalting the merits of the fallen, shall adore my majesty, and magnify my illustrious achievements."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I listened to Raymond with intense interest. Could I be other than all ear, to one who seemed to govern the whole earth in his grasping imagination, and who only quailed when he attempted to rule himself. Then on his word and will depended my own happiness—the fate of all dear to me. I endeavoured to divine the concealed meaning of his words. Perdita's name was not mentioned; yet I could not doubt that love for her caused the vacillation of purpose that he exhibited. And who was so worthy of love as my noble-minded sister? Who deserved the hand of this self-exalted king more than she whose glance belonged to a queen of nations? who loved him, as he did her; notwithstanding that disappointment quelled her passion, and ambition held strong combat with his.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We went together to the House in the evening. Raymond, while he knew that his plans and prospects were to be discussed and decided during the expected debate, was gay and careless. An hum, like that of ten thousand hives of swarming bees, stunned us as we entered the coffee-room. Knots of politicians were assembled with anxious brows and loud or deep voices. The aristocratical party, the richest and most influential men in England, appeared less agitated than the others, for the question was to be discussed without their interference. Near the fire was Ryland and his supporters. Ryland was a man of obscure birth and of immense wealth, inherited from his father, who had been a manufacturer. He had witnessed, when a young man, the abdication of the king, and the amalgamation of the two houses of Lords and Commons; he had sympathized with these popular encroachments, and it had been the business of his life to consolidate and encrease them. Since then, the influence of the landed proprietors had augmented; and at first Ryland was not sorry to observe the machinations of Lord Raymond, which drew off many of his opponent's partizans. But the thing was now going too far. The poorer nobility hailed the return of sovereignty, as an event which would restore them to their power and rights, now lost. The half extinct spirit of royalty roused itself in the minds of men; and they, willing slaves, self-constituted subjects, were ready to bend their necks to the yoke. Some erect and manly spirits still remained, pillars of state; but the word republic had grown stale to the vulgar ear; and many—the event would prove whether it was a majority— pined for the tinsel and show of royalty. Ryland was roused to resistance; he asserted that his sufferance alone had permitted the encrease of this party; but the time for indulgence was passed, and with one motion of his arm he would sweep away the cobwebs that blinded his countrymen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When Raymond entered the coffee-room, his presence was hailed by his friends almost with a shout. They gathered round him, counted their numbers, and detailed the reasons why they were now to receive an addition of such and such members, who had not yet declared themselves. Some trifling business of the House having been gone through, the leaders took their seats in the chamber; the clamour of voices continued, till Ryland arose to speak, and then the slightest whispered observation was audible. All eyes were fixed upon him as he stood—ponderous of frame, sonorous of voice, and with a manner which, though not graceful, was impressive. I turned from his marked, iron countenance to Raymond, whose face, veiled by a smile, would not betray his care; yet his lips quivered somewhat, and his hand clasped the bench on which he sat, with a convulsive strength that made the muscles start again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ryland began by praising the present state of the British empire. He recalled past years to their memory; the miserable contentions which in the time of our fathers arose almost to civil war, the abdication of the late king, and the foundation of the republic. He described this republic; shewed how it gave privilege to each individual in the state, to rise to consequence, and even to temporary sovereignty. He compared the royal and republican spirit; shewed how the one tended to enslave the minds of men; while all the institutions of the other served to raise even the meanest among us to something great and good. He shewed how England had become powerful, and its inhabitants valiant and wise, by means of the freedom they enjoyed. As he spoke, every heart swelled with pride, and every cheek glowed with delight to remember, that each one there was English, and that each supported and contributed to the happy state of things now commemorated. Ryland's fervour increased—his eyes lighted up—his voice assumed the tone of passion. There was one man, he continued, who wished to alter all this, and bring us back to our days of impotence and contention:—one man, who would dare arrogate the honour which was due to all who claimed England as their birthplace, and set his name and style above the name and style of his country. I saw at this juncture that Raymond changed colour; his eyes were withdrawn from the orator, and cast on the ground; the listeners turned from one to the other; but in the meantime the speaker's voice filled their ears—the thunder of his denunciations influenced their senses. The very boldness of his language gave him weight; each knew that he spoke truth—a truth known, but not acknowledged. He tore from reality the mask with which she had been clothed; and the purposes of Raymond, which before had crept around, ensnaring by stealth, now stood a hunted stag—even at bay—as all perceived who watched the irrepressible changes of his countenance. Ryland ended by moving, that any attempt to re-erect the kingly power should be declared treason, and he a traitor who should endeavour to change the present form of government. Cheers and loud acclamations followed the close of his speech.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After his motion had been seconded, Lord Raymond rose,—his countenance bland, his voice softly melodious, his manner soothing, his grace and sweetness came like the mild breathing of a flute, after the loud, organ-like voice of his adversary. He rose, he said, to speak in favour of the honourable member's motion, with one slight amendment subjoined. He was ready to go back to old times, and commemorate the contests of our fathers, and the monarch's abdication. Nobly and greatly, he said, had the illustrious and last sovereign of England sacrificed himself to the apparent good of his country, and divested himself of a power which could only be maintained by the blood of his subjects—these subjects named so no more, these, his friends and equals, had in gratitude conferred certain favours and distinctions on him and his family for ever. An ample estate was allotted to them, and they took the first rank among the peers of Great Britain. Yet it might be conjectured that they had not forgotten their ancient heritage; and it was hard that his heir should suffer alike with any other pretender, if he attempted to regain what by ancient right and inheritance belonged to him. He did not say that he should favour such an attempt; but he did say that such an attempt would be venial; and, if the aspirant did not go so far as to declare war, and erect a standard in the kingdom, his fault ought to be regarded with an indulgent eye. In his amendment he proposed, that an exception should be made in the bill in favour of any person who claimed the sovereign power in right of the earls of Windsor. Nor did Raymond make an end without drawing in vivid and glowing colours, the splendour of a kingdom, in opposition to the commercial spirit of republicanism. He asserted, that each individual under the English monarchy, was then as now, capable of attaining high rank and power—with one only exception, that of the function of chief magistrate; higher and nobler rank, than a bartering, timorous commonwealth could afford. And for this one exception, to what did it amount? The nature of riches and influence forcibly confined the list of candidates to a few of the wealthiest; and it was much to be feared, that the ill-humour and contention generated by this triennial struggle, would counterbalance its advantages in impartial eyes. I can ill record the flow of language and graceful turns of expression, the wit and easy raillery that gave vigour and influence to his speech. His manner, timid at first, became firm—his changeful face was lit up to superhuman brilliancy; his voice, various as music, was like that enchanting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It were useless to record the debate that followed this harangue. Party speeches were delivered, which clothed the question in cant, and veiled its simple meaning in a woven wind of words. The motion was lost; Ryland withdrew in rage and despair; and Raymond, gay and exulting, retired to dream of his future kingdom.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IV.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >IS there such a feeling as love at first sight? And if there be, in what does its nature differ from love founded in long observation and slow growth? Perhaps its effects are not so permanent; but they are, while they last, as violent and intense. We walk the pathless mazes of society, vacant of joy, till we hold this clue, leading us through that labyrinth to paradise. Our nature dim, like to an unlighted torch, sleeps in formless blank till the fire attain it; this life of life, this light to moon, and glory to the sun. What does it matter, whether the fire be struck from flint and steel, nourished with care into a flame, slowly communicated to the dark wick, or whether swiftly the radiant power of light and warmth passes from a kindred power, and shines at once the beacon and the hope. In the deepest fountain of my heart the pulses were stirred; around, above, beneath, the clinging Memory as a cloak enwrapt me. In no one moment of coming time did I feel as I had done in time gone by. The spirit of Idris hovered in the air I breathed; her eyes were ever and for ever bent on mine; her remembered smile blinded my faint gaze, and caused me to walk as one, not in eclipse, not in darkness and vacancy—but in a new and brilliant light, too novel, too dazzling for my human senses. On every leaf, on every small division of the universe, (as on the hyacinth ai is engraved) was imprinted the talisman of my existence—SHE LIVES! SHE IS! —I had not time yet to analyze my feeling, to take myself to task, and leash in the tameless passion; all was one idea, one feeling, one knowledge —it was my life!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But the die was cast—Raymond would marry Idris. The merry marriage bells rung in my ears; I heard the nation's gratulation which followed the union; the ambitious noble uprose with swift eagle-flight, from the lowly ground to regal supremacy—and to the love of Idris. Yet, not so! She did not love him; she had called me her friend; she had smiled on me; to me she had entrusted her heart's dearest hope, the welfare of Adrian. This reflection thawed my congealing blood, and again the tide of life and love flowed impetuously onward, again to ebb as my busy thoughts changed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The debate had ended at three in the morning. My soul was in tumults; I traversed the streets with eager rapidity. Truly, I was mad that night— love—which I have named a giant from its birth, wrestled with despair! My heart, the field of combat, was wounded by the iron heel of the one, watered by the gushing tears of the other. Day, hateful to me, dawned; I retreated to my lodgings—I threw myself on a couch—I slept—was it sleep?—for thought was still alive—love and despair struggled still, and I writhed with unendurable pain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I awoke half stupefied; I felt a heavy oppression on me, but knew not wherefore; I entered, as it were, the council-chamber of my brain, and questioned the various ministers of thought therein assembled; too soon I remembered all; too soon my limbs quivered beneath the tormenting power; soon, too soon, I knew myself a slave!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly, unannounced, Lord Raymond entered my apartment. He came in gaily, singing the Tyrolese song of liberty; noticed me with a gracious nod, and threw himself on a sopha opposite the copy of a bust of the Apollo Belvidere. After one or two trivial remarks, to which I sullenly replied, he suddenly cried, looking at the bust, "I am called like that victor! Not a bad idea; the head will serve for my new coinage, and be an omen to all dutiful subjects of my future success."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He said this in his most gay, yet benevolent manner, and smiled, not disdainfully, but in playful mockery of himself. Then his countenance suddenly darkened, and in that shrill tone peculiar to himself, he cried, "I fought a good battle last night; higher conquest the plains of Greece never saw me achieve. Now I am the first man in the state, burthen of every ballad, and object of old women's mumbled devotions. What are your meditations? You, who fancy that you can read the human soul, as your native lake reads each crevice and folding of its surrounding hills—say what you think of me; king-expectant, angel or devil, which?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This ironical tone was discord to my bursting, over-boiling-heart; I was nettled by his insolence, and replied with bitterness; "There is a spirit, neither angel or devil, damned to limbo merely." I saw his cheeks become pale, and his lips whiten and quiver; his anger served but to enkindle mine, and I answered with a determined look his eyes which glared on me; suddenly they were withdrawn, cast down, a tear, I thought, wetted the dark lashes; I was softened, and with involuntary emotion added, "Not that you are such, my dear lord."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I paused, even awed by the agitation he evinced; "Yes," he said at length, rising and biting his lip, as he strove to curb his passion; "Such am I! You do not know me, Verney; neither you, nor our audience of last night, nor does universal England know aught of me. I stand here, it would seem, an elected king; this hand is about to grasp a sceptre; these brows feel in each nerve the coming diadem. I appear to have strength, power, victory; standing as a dome-supporting column stands; and I am—a reed! I have ambition, and that attains its aim; my nightly dreams are realized, my waking hopes fulfilled; a kingdom awaits my acceptance, my enemies are overthrown. But here," and he struck his heart with violence, "here is the rebel, here the stumbling-block; this over-ruling heart, which I may drain of its living blood; but, while one fluttering pulsation remains, I am its slave."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He spoke with a broken voice, then bowed his head, and, hiding his face in his hands, wept. I was still smarting from my own disappointment; yet this scene oppressed me even to terror, nor could I interrupt his access of passion. It subsided at length; and, throwing himself on the couch, he remained silent and motionless, except that his changeful features shewed a strong internal conflict. At last he rose, and said in his usual tone of voice, "The time grows on us, Verney, I must away. Let me not forget my chiefest errand here. Will you accompany me to Windsor to-morrow? You will not be dishonoured by my society, and as this is probably the last service, or disservice you can do me, will you grant my request?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He held out his hand with almost a bashful air. Swiftly I thought—Yes, I will witness the last scene of the drama. Beside which, his mien conquered me, and an affectionate sentiment towards him, again filled my heart—I bade him command me. "Aye, that I will," said he gaily, "that's my cue now; be with me to-morrow morning by seven; be secret and faithful; and you shall be groom of the stole ere long."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So saying, he hastened away, vaulted on his horse, and with a gesture as if he gave me his hand to kiss, bade me another laughing adieu. Left to myself, I strove with painful intensity to divine the motive of his request and foresee the events of the coming day. The hours passed on unperceived; my head ached with thought, the nerves seemed teeming with the over full fraught—I clasped my burning brow, as if my fevered hand could medicine its pain. I was punctual to the appointed hour on the following day, and found Lord Raymond waiting for me. We got into his carriage, and proceeded towards Windsor. I had tutored myself, and was resolved by no outward sign to disclose my internal agitation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What a mistake Ryland made," said Raymond, "when he thought to overpower me the other night. He spoke well, very well; such an harangue would have succeeded better addressed to me singly, than to the fools and knaves assembled yonder. Had I been alone, I should have listened to him with a wish to hear reason, but when he endeavoured to vanquish me in my own territory, with my own weapons, he put me on my mettle, and the event was such as all might have expected."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I smiled incredulously, and replied: "I am of Ryland's way of thinking, and will, if you please, repeat all his arguments; we shall see how far you will be induced by them, to change the royal for the patriotic style."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The repetition would be useless," said Raymond, "since I well remember them, and have many others, self-suggested, which speak with unanswerable persuasion."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He did not explain himself, nor did I make any remark on his reply. Our silence endured for some miles, till the country with open fields, or shady woods and parks, presented pleasant objects to our view. After some observations on the scenery and seats, Raymond said: "Philosophers have called man a microcosm of nature, and find a reflection in the internal mind for all this machinery visibly at work around us. This theory has often been a source of amusement to me; and many an idle hour have I spent, exercising my ingenuity in finding resemblances. Does not Lord Bacon say that, 'the falling from a discord to a concord, which maketh great sweetness in music, hath an agreement with the affections, which are re-integrated to the better after some dislikes?' What a sea is the tide of passion, whose fountains are in our own nature! Our virtues are the quick-sands, which shew themselves at calm and low water; but let the waves arise and the winds buffet them, and the poor devil whose hope was in their durability, finds them sink from under him. The fashions of the world, its exigencies, educations and pursuits, are winds to drive our wills, like clouds all one way; but let a thunderstorm arise in the shape of love, hate, or ambition, and the rack goes backward, stemming the opposing air in triumph."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yet," replied I, "nature always presents to our eyes the appearance of a patient: while there is an active principle in man which is capable of ruling fortune, and at least of tacking against the gale, till it in some mode conquers it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There is more of what is specious than true in your distinction," said my companion. "Did we form ourselves, choosing our dispositions, and our powers? I find myself, for one, as a stringed instrument with chords and stops—but I have no power to turn the pegs, or pitch my thoughts to a higher or lower key."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Other men," I observed, "may be better musicians."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I talk not of others, but myself," replied Raymond, "and I am as fair an example to go by as another. I cannot set my heart to a particular tune, or run voluntary changes on my will. We are born; we choose neither our parents, nor our station; we are educated by others, or by the world's circumstance, and this cultivation, mingling with our innate disposition, is the soil in which our desires, passions, and motives grow."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There is much truth in what you say," said I, "and yet no man ever acts upon this theory. Who, when he makes a choice, says, Thus I choose, because I am necessitated? Does he not on the contrary feel a freedom of will within him, which, though you may call it fallacious, still actuates him as he decides?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Exactly so," replied Raymond, "another link of the breakless chain. Were I now to commit an act which would annihilate my hopes, and pluck the regal garment from my mortal limbs, to clothe them in ordinary weeds, would this, think you, be an act of free-will on my part?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As we talked thus, I perceived that we were not going the ordinary road to Windsor, but through Englefield Green, towards Bishopgate Heath. I began to divine that Idris was not the object of our journey, but that I was brought to witness the scene that was to decide the fate of Raymond—and of Perdita. Raymond had evidently vacillated during his journey, and irresolution was marked in every gesture as we entered Perdita's cottage. I watched him curiously, determined that, if this hesitation should continue, I would assist Perdita to overcome herself, and teach her to disdain the wavering love of him, who balanced between the possession of a crown, and of her, whose excellence and affection transcended the worth of a kingdom.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We found her in her flower-adorned alcove; she was reading the newspaper report of the debate in parliament, that apparently doomed her to hopelessness. That heart-sinking feeling was painted in her sunk eyes and spiritless attitude; a cloud was on her beauty, and frequent sighs were tokens of her distress. This sight had an instantaneous effect on Raymond; his eyes beamed with tenderness, and remorse clothed his manners with earnestness and truth. He sat beside her; and, taking the paper from her hand, said, "Not a word more shall my sweet Perdita read of this contention of madmen and fools. I must not permit you to be acquainted with the extent of my delusion, lest you despise me; although, believe me, a wish to appear before you, not vanquished, but as a conqueror, inspired me during my wordy war."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita looked at him like one amazed; her expressive countenance shone for a moment with tenderness; to see him only was happiness. But a bitter thought swiftly shadowed her joy; she bent her eyes on the ground, endeavouring to master the passion of tears that threatened to overwhelm her. Raymond continued, "I will not act a part with you, dear girl, or appear other than what I am, weak and unworthy, more fit to excite your disdain than your love. Yet you do love me; I feel and know that you do, and thence I draw my most cherished hopes. If pride guided you, or even reason, you might well reject me. Do so; if your high heart, incapable of my infirmity of purpose, refuses to bend to the lowness of mine. Turn from me, if you will,—if you can. If your whole soul does not urge you to forgive me—if your entire heart does not open wide its door to admit me to its very centre, forsake me, never speak to me again. I, though sinning against you almost beyond remission, I also am proud; there must be no reserve in your pardon—no drawback to the gift of your affection."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita looked down, confused, yet pleased. My presence embarrassed her; so that she dared not turn to meet her lover's eye, or trust her voice to assure him of her affection; while a blush mantled her cheek, and her disconsolate air was exchanged for one expressive of deep-felt joy. Raymond encircled her waist with his arm, and continued, "I do not deny that I have balanced between you and the highest hope that mortal men can entertain; but I do so no longer. Take me—mould me to your will, possess my heart and soul to all eternity. If you refuse to contribute to my happiness, I quit England to-night, and will never set foot in it again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Lionel, you hear: witness for me: persuade your sister to forgive the injury I have done her; persuade her to be mine."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There needs no persuasion," said the blushing Perdita, "except your own dear promises, and my ready heart, which whispers to me that they are true."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That same evening we all three walked together in the forest, and, with the garrulity which happiness inspires, they detailed to me the history of their loves. It was pleasant to see the haughty Raymond and reserved Perdita changed through happy love into prattling, playful children, both losing their characteristic dignity in the fulness of mutual contentment. A night or two ago Lord Raymond, with a brow of care, and a heart oppressed with thought, bent all his energies to silence or persuade the legislators of England that a sceptre was not too weighty for his hand, while visions of dominion, war, and triumph floated before him; now, frolicsome as a lively boy sporting under his mother's approving eye, the hopes of his ambition were complete, when he pressed the small fair hand of Perdita to his lips; while she, radiant with delight, looked on the still pool, not truly admiring herself, but drinking in with rapture the reflection there made of the form of herself and her lover, shewn for the first time in dear conjunction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I rambled away from them. If the rapture of assured sympathy was theirs, I enjoyed that of restored hope. I looked on the regal towers of Windsor. High is the wall and strong the barrier that separate me from my Star of Beauty. But not impassible. She will not be his. A few more years dwell in thy native garden, sweet flower, till I by toil and time acquire a right to gather thee. Despair not, nor bid me despair! What must I do now? First I must seek Adrian, and restore him to her. Patience, gentleness, and untired affection, shall recall him, if it be true, as Raymond says, that he is mad; energy and courage shall rescue him, if he be unjustly imprisoned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the lovers again joined me, we supped together in the alcove. Truly it was a fairy's supper; for though the air was perfumed by the scent of fruits and wine, we none of us either ate or drank—even the beauty of the night was unobserved; their extasy could not be increased by outward objects, and I was wrapt in reverie. At about midnight Raymond and I took leave of my sister, to return to town. He was all gaiety; scraps of songs fell from his lips; every thought of his mind—every object about us, gleamed under the sunshine of his mirth. He accused me of melancholy, of ill-humour and envy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not so," said I, "though I confess that my thoughts are not occupied as pleasantly as yours are. You promised to facilitate my visit to Adrian; I conjure you to perform your promise. I cannot linger here; I long to soothe —perhaps to cure the malady of my first and best friend. I shall immediately depart for Dunkeld."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Thou bird of night," replied Raymond, "what an eclipse do you throw across my bright thoughts, forcing me to call to mind that melancholy ruin, which stands in mental desolation, more irreparable than a fragment of a carved column in a weed-grown field. You dream that you can restore him? Daedalus never wound so inextricable an error round Minotaur, as madness has woven about his imprisoned reason. Nor you, nor any other Theseus, can thread the labyrinth, to which perhaps some unkind Ariadne has the clue."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You allude to Evadne Zaimi: but she is not in England."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And were she," said Raymond, "I would not advise her seeing him. Better to decay in absolute delirium, than to be the victim of the methodical unreason of ill-bestowed love. The long duration of his malady has probably erased from his mind all vestige of her; and it were well that it should never again be imprinted. You will find him at Dunkeld; gentle and tractable he wanders up the hills, and through the wood, or sits listening beside the waterfall. You may see him—his hair stuck with wild flowers —his eyes full of untraceable meaning—his voice broken—his person wasted to a shadow. He plucks flowers and weeds, and weaves chaplets of them, or sails yellow leaves and bits of bark on the stream, rejoicing in their safety, or weeping at their wreck. The very memory half unmans me. By Heaven! the first tears I have shed since boyhood rushed scalding into my eyes when I saw him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It needed not this last account to spur me on to visit him. I only doubted whether or not I should endeavour to see Idris again, before I departed. This doubt was decided on the following day. Early in the morning Raymond came to me; intelligence had arrived that Adrian was dangerously ill, and it appeared impossible that his failing strength should surmount the disorder. "To-morrow," said Raymond, "his mother and sister set out for Scotland to see him once again."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And I go to-day," I cried; "this very hour I will engage a sailing balloon; I shall be there in forty-eight hours at furthest, perhaps in less, if the wind is fair. Farewell, Raymond; be happy in having chosen the better part in life. This turn of fortune revives me. I feared madness, not sickness—I have a presentiment that Adrian will not die; perhaps this illness is a crisis, and he may recover."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Everything favoured my journey. The balloon rose about half a mile from the earth, and with a favourable wind it hurried through the air, its feathered vans cleaving the unopposing atmosphere. Notwithstanding the melancholy object of my journey, my spirits were exhilarated by reviving hope, by the swift motion of the airy pinnace, and the balmy visitation of the sunny air. The pilot hardly moved the plumed steerage, and the slender mechanism of the wings, wide unfurled, gave forth a murmuring noise, soothing to the sense. Plain and hill, stream and corn-field, were discernible below, while we unimpeded sped on swift and secure, as a wild swan in his spring-tide flight. The machine obeyed the slightest motion of the helm; and, the wind blowing steadily, there was no let or obstacle to our course. Such was the power of man over the elements; a power long sought, and lately won; yet foretold in by-gone time by the prince of poets, whose verses I quoted much to the astonishment of my pilot, when I told him how many hundred years ago they had been written:—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Oh! human wit, thou can'st invent much ill,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Thou searchest strange arts: who would think by skill,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > An heavy man like a light bird should stray,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And through the empty heavens find a way?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I alighted at Perth; and, though much fatigued by a constant exposure to the air for many hours, I would not rest, but merely altering my mode of conveyance, I went by land instead of air, to Dunkeld. The sun was rising as I entered the opening of the hills. After the revolution of ages Birnam hill was again covered with a young forest, while more aged pines, planted at the very commencement of the nineteenth century by the then Duke of Athol, gave solemnity and beauty to the scene. The rising sun first tinged the pine tops; and my mind, rendered through my mountain education deeply susceptible of the graces of nature, and now on the eve of again beholding my beloved and perhaps dying friend, was strangely influenced by the sight of those distant beams: surely they were ominous, and as such I regarded them, good omens for Adrian, on whose life my happiness depended.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poor fellow! he lay stretched on a bed of sickness, his cheeks glowing with the hues of fever, his eyes half closed, his breath irregular and difficult. Yet it was less painful to see him thus, than to find him fulfilling the animal functions uninterruptedly, his mind sick the while. I established myself at his bedside; I never quitted it day or night. Bitter task was it, to behold his spirit waver between death and life: to see his warm cheek, and know that the very fire which burned too fiercely there, was consuming the vital fuel; to hear his moaning voice, which might never again articulate words of love and wisdom; to witness the ineffectual motions of his limbs, soon to be wrapt in their mortal shroud. Such for three days and nights appeared the consummation which fate had decreed for my labours, and I became haggard and spectre-like, through anxiety and watching. At length his eyes unclosed faintly, yet with a look of returning life; he became pale and weak; but the rigidity of his features was softened by approaching convalescence. He knew me. What a brimful cup of joyful agony it was, when his face first gleamed with the glance of recognition—when he pressed my hand, now more fevered than his own, and when he pronounced my name! No trace of his past insanity remained, to dash my joy with sorrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This same evening his mother and sister arrived. The Countess of Windsor was by nature full of energetic feeling; but she had very seldom in her life permitted the concentrated emotions of her heart to shew themselves on her features. The studied immovability of her countenance; her slow, equable manner, and soft but unmelodious voice, were a mask, hiding her fiery passions, and the impatience of her disposition. She did not in the least resemble either of her children; her black and sparkling eye, lit up by pride, was totally unlike the blue lustre, and frank, benignant expression of either Adrian or Idris. There was something grand and majestic in her motions, but nothing persuasive, nothing amiable. Tall, thin, and strait, her face still handsome, her raven hair hardly tinged with grey, her forehead arched and beautiful, had not the eye-brows been somewhat scattered—it was impossible not to be struck by her, almost to fear her. Idris appeared to be the only being who could resist her mother, notwithstanding the extreme mildness of her character. But there was a fearlessness and frankness about her, which said that she would not encroach on another's liberty, but held her own sacred and unassailable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Countess cast no look of kindness on my worn-out frame, though afterwards she thanked me coldly for my attentions. Not so Idris; her first glance was for her brother; she took his hand, she kissed his eye-lids, and hung over him with looks of compassion and love. Her eyes glistened with tears when she thanked me, and the grace of her expressions was enhanced, not diminished, by the fervour, which caused her almost to falter as she spoke. Her mother, all eyes and ears, soon interrupted us; and I saw, that she wished to dismiss me quietly, as one whose services, now that his relatives had arrived, were of no use to her son. I was harassed and ill, resolved not to give up my post, yet doubting in what way I should assert it; when Adrian called me, and clasping my hand, bade me not leave him. His mother, apparently inattentive, at once understood what was meant, and seeing the hold we had upon her, yielded the point to us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The days that followed were full of pain to me; so that I sometimes regretted that I had not yielded at once to the haughty lady, who watched all my motions, and turned my beloved task of nursing my friend to a work of pain and irritation. Never did any woman appear so entirely made of mind, as the Countess of Windsor. Her passions had subdued her appetites, even her natural wants; she slept little, and hardly ate at all; her body was evidently considered by her as a mere machine, whose health was necessary for the accomplishment of her schemes, but whose senses formed no part of her enjoyment. There is something fearful in one who can thus conquer the animal part of our nature, if the victory be not the effect of consummate virtue; nor was it without a mixture of this feeling, that I beheld the figure of the Countess awake when others slept, fasting when I, abstemious naturally, and rendered so by the fever that preyed on me, was forced to recruit myself with food. She resolved to prevent or diminish my opportunities of acquiring influence over her children, and circumvented my plans by a hard, quiet, stubborn resolution, that seemed not to belong to flesh and blood. War was at last tacitly acknowledged between us. We had many pitched battles, during which no word was spoken, hardly a look was interchanged, but in which each resolved not to submit to the other. The Countess had the advantage of position; so I was vanquished, though I would not yield.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I became sick at heart. My countenance was painted with the hues of ill health and vexation. Adrian and Idris saw this; they attributed it to my long watching and anxiety; they urged me to rest, and take care of myself, while I most truly assured them, that my best medicine was their good wishes; those, and the assured convalescence of my friend, now daily more apparent. The faint rose again blushed on his cheek; his brow and lips lost the ashy paleness of threatened dissolution; such was the dear reward of my unremitting attention—and bounteous heaven added overflowing recompence, when it gave me also the thanks and smiles of Idris.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the lapse of a few weeks, we left Dunkeld. Idris and her mother returned immediately to Windsor, while Adrian and I followed by slow journies and frequent stoppages, occasioned by his continued weakness. As we traversed the various counties of fertile England, all wore an exhilarating appearance to my companion, who had been so long secluded by disease from the enjoyments of weather and scenery. We passed through busy towns and cultivated plains. The husbandmen were getting in their plenteous harvests, and the women and children, occupied by light rustic toils, formed groupes of happy, healthful persons, the very sight of whom carried cheerfulness to the heart. One evening, quitting our inn, we strolled down a shady lane, then up a grassy slope, till we came to an eminence, that commanded an extensive view of hill and dale, meandering rivers, dark woods, and shining villages. The sun was setting; and the clouds, straying, like new-shorn sheep, through the vast fields of sky, received the golden colour of his parting beams; the distant uplands shone out, and the busy hum of evening came, harmonized by distance, on our ear. Adrian, who felt all the fresh spirit infused by returning health, clasped his hands in delight, and exclaimed with transport:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"O happy earth, and happy inhabitants of earth! A stately palace has God built for you, O man! and worthy are you of your dwelling! Behold the verdant carpet spread at our feet, and the azure canopy above; the fields of earth which generate and nurture all things, and the track of heaven, which contains and clasps all things. Now, at this evening hour, at the period of repose and refection, methinks all hearts breathe one hymn of love and thanksgiving, and we, like priests of old on the mountain-tops, give a voice to their sentiment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Assuredly a most benignant power built up the majestic fabric we inhabit, and framed the laws by which it endures. If mere existence, and not happiness, had been the final end of our being, what need of the profuse luxuries which we enjoy? Why should our dwelling place be so lovely, and why should the instincts of nature minister pleasurable sensations? The very sustaining of our animal machine is made delightful; and our sustenance, the fruits of the field, is painted with transcendant hues, endued with grateful odours, and palatable to our taste. Why should this be, if HE were not good? We need houses to protect us from the seasons, and behold the materials with which we are provided; the growth of trees with their adornment of leaves; while rocks of stone piled above the plains variegate the prospect with their pleasant irregularity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nor are outward objects alone the receptacles of the Spirit of Good. Look into the mind of man, where wisdom reigns enthroned; where imagination, the painter, sits, with his pencil dipt in hues lovelier than those of sunset, adorning familiar life with glowing tints. What a noble boon, worthy the giver, is the imagination! it takes from reality its leaden hue: it envelopes all thought and sensation in a radiant veil, and with an hand of beauty beckons us from the sterile seas of life, to her gardens, and bowers, and glades of bliss. And is not love a gift of the divinity? Love, and her child, Hope, which can bestow wealth on poverty, strength on the weak, and happiness on the sorrowing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My lot has not been fortunate. I have consorted long with grief, entered the gloomy labyrinth of madness, and emerged, but half alive. Yet I thank God that I have lived! I thank God, that I have beheld his throne, the heavens, and earth, his footstool. I am glad that I have seen the changes of his day; to behold the sun, fountain of light, and the gentle pilgrim moon; to have seen the fire bearing flowers of the sky, and the flowery stars of earth; to have witnessed the sowing and the harvest. I am glad that I have loved, and have experienced sympathetic joy and sorrow with my fellow-creatures. I am glad now to feel the current of thought flow through my mind, as the blood through the articulations of my frame; mere existence is pleasure; and I thank God that I live!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And all ye happy nurslings of mother-earth, do ye not echo my words? Ye who are linked by the affectionate ties of nature, companions, friends, lovers! fathers, who toil with joy for their offspring; women, who while gazing on the living forms of their children, forget the pains of maternity; children, who neither toil nor spin, but love and are loved!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, that death and sickness were banished from our earthly home! that hatred, tyranny, and fear could no longer make their lair in the human heart! that each man might find a brother in his fellow, and a nest of repose amid the wide plains of his inheritance! that the source of tears were dry, and that lips might no longer form expressions of sorrow. Sleeping thus under the beneficent eye of heaven, can evil visit thee, O Earth, or grief cradle to their graves thy luckless children? Whisper it not, let the demons hear and rejoice! The choice is with us; let us will it, and our habitation becomes a paradise. For the will of man is omnipotent, blunting the arrows of death, soothing the bed of disease, and wiping away the tears of agony. And what is each human being worth, if he do not put forth his strength to aid his fellow-creatures? My soul is a fading spark, my nature frail as a spent wave; but I dedicate all of intellect and strength that remains to me, to that one work, and take upon me the task, as far as I am able, of bestowing blessings on my fellow-men!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His voice trembled, his eyes were cast up, his hands clasped, and his fragile person was bent, as it were, with excess of emotion. The spirit of life seemed to linger in his form, as a dying flame on an altar flickers on the embers of an accepted sacrifice.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER V.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >WHEN we arrived at Windsor, I found that Raymond and Perdita had departed for the continent. I took possession of my sister's cottage, and blessed myself that I lived within view of Windsor Castle. It was a curious fact, that at this period, when by the marriage of Perdita I was allied to one of the richest individuals in England, and was bound by the most intimate friendship to its chiefest noble, I experienced the greatest excess of poverty that I had ever known. My knowledge of the worldly principles of Lord Raymond, would have ever prevented me from applying to him, however deep my distress might have been. It was in vain that I repeated to myself with regard to Adrian, that his purse was open to me; that one in soul, as we were, our fortunes ought also to be common. I could never, while with him, think of his bounty as a remedy to my poverty; and I even put aside hastily his offers of supplies, assuring him of a falsehood, that I needed them not. How could I say to this generous being, "Maintain me in idleness. You who have dedicated your powers of mind and fortune to the benefit of your species, shall you so misdirect your exertions, as to support in uselessness the strong, healthy, and capable?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And yet I dared not request him to use his influence that I might obtain an honourable provision for myself—for then I should have been obliged to leave Windsor. I hovered for ever around the walls of its Castle, beneath its enshadowing thickets; my sole companions were my books and my loving thoughts. I studied the wisdom of the ancients, and gazed on the happy walls that sheltered the beloved of my soul. My mind was nevertheless idle. I pored over the poetry of old times; I studied the metaphysics of Plato and Berkeley. I read the histories of Greece and Rome, and of England's former periods, and I watched the movements of the lady of my heart. At night I could see her shadow on the walls of her apartment; by day I viewed her in her flower-garden, or riding in the park with her usual companions. Methought the charm would be broken if I were seen, but I heard the music of her voice and was happy. I gave to each heroine of whom I read, her beauty and matchless excellences—such was Antigone, when she guided the blind Oedipus to the grove of the Eumenides, and discharged the funeral rites of Polynices; such was Miranda in the unvisited cave of Prospero; such Haidee, on the sands of the Ionian island. I was mad with excess of passionate devotion; but pride, tameless as fire, invested my nature, and prevented me from betraying myself by word or look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the mean time, while I thus pampered myself with rich mental repasts, a peasant would have disdained my scanty fare, which I sometimes robbed from the squirrels of the forest. I was, I own, often tempted to recur to the lawless feats of my boy-hood, and knock down the almost tame pheasants that perched upon the trees, and bent their bright eyes on me. But they were the property of Adrian, the nurslings of Idris; and so, although my imagination rendered sensual by privation, made me think that they would better become the spit in my kitchen, than the green leaves of the forest,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Nathelesse,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > I checked my haughty will, and did not eat;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >but supped upon sentiment, and dreamt vainly of "such morsels sweet," as I might not waking attain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But, at this period, the whole scheme of my existence was about to change. The orphan and neglected son of Verney, was on the eve of being linked to the mechanism of society by a golden chain, and to enter into all the duties and affections of life. Miracles were to be wrought in my favour, the machine of social life pushed with vast effort backward. Attend, O reader! while I narrate this tale of wonders!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One day as Adrian and Idris were riding through the forest, with their mother and accustomed companions, Idris, drawing her brother aside from the rest of the cavalcade, suddenly asked him, "What had become of his friend, Lionel Verney?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Even from this spot," replied Adrian, pointing to my sister's cottage, "you can see his dwelling."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Indeed!" said Idris, "and why, if he be so near, does he not come to see us, and make one of our society?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I often visit him," replied Adrian; "but you may easily guess the motives, which prevent him from coming where his presence may annoy any one among us."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I do guess them," said Idris, "and such as they are, I would not venture to combat them. Tell me, however, in what way he passes his time; what he is doing and thinking in his cottage retreat?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nay, my sweet sister," replied Adrian, "you ask me more than I can well answer; but if you feel interest in him, why not visit him? He will feel highly honoured, and thus you may repay a part of the obligation I owe him, and compensate for the injuries fortune has done him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will most readily accompany you to his abode," said the lady, "not that I wish that either of us should unburthen ourselves of our debt, which, being no less than your life, must remain unpayable ever. But let us go; to-morrow we will arrange to ride out together, and proceeding towards that part of the forest, call upon him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The next evening therefore, though the autumnal change had brought on cold and rain, Adrian and Idris entered my cottage. They found me Curius-like, feasting on sorry fruits for supper; but they brought gifts richer than the golden bribes of the Sabines, nor could I refuse the invaluable store of friendship and delight which they bestowed. Surely the glorious twins of Latona were not more welcome, when, in the infancy of the world, they were brought forth to beautify and enlighten this "sterile promontory," than were this angelic pair to my lowly dwelling and grateful heart. We sat like one family round my hearth. Our talk was on subjects, unconnected with the emotions that evidently occupied each; but we each divined the other's thought, and as our voices spoke of indifferent matters, our eyes, in mute language, told a thousand things no tongue could have uttered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They left me in an hour's time. They left me happy—how unspeakably happy. It did not require the measured sounds of human language to syllable the story of my extasy. Idris had visited me; Idris I should again and again see—my imagination did not wander beyond the completeness of this knowledge. I trod air; no doubt, no fear, no hope even, disturbed me; I clasped with my soul the fulness of contentment, satisfied, undesiring, beatified.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For many days Adrian and Idris continued to visit me thus. In this dear intercourse, love, in the guise of enthusiastic friendship, infused more and more of his omnipotent spirit. Idris felt it. Yes, divinity of the world, I read your characters in her looks and gesture; I heard your melodious voice echoed by her—you prepared for us a soft and flowery path, all gentle thoughts adorned it—your name, O Love, was not spoken, but you stood the Genius of the Hour, veiled, and time, but no mortal hand, might raise the curtain. Organs of articulate sound did not proclaim the union of our hearts; for untoward circumstance allowed no opportunity for the expression that hovered on our lips. Oh my pen! haste thou to write what was, before the thought of what is, arrests the hand that guides thee. If I lift up my eyes and see the desart earth, and feel that those dear eyes have spent their mortal lustre, and that those beauteous lips are silent, their "crimson leaves" faded, for ever I am mute!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But you live, my Idris, even now you move before me! There was a glade, O reader! a grassy opening in the wood; the retiring trees left its velvet expanse as a temple for love; the silver Thames bounded it on one side, and a willow bending down dipt in the water its Naiad hair, dishevelled by the wind's viewless hand. The oaks around were the home of a tribe of nightingales—there am I now; Idris, in youth's dear prime, is by my side —remember, I am just twenty-two, and seventeen summers have scarcely passed over the beloved of my heart. The river swollen by autumnal rains, deluged the low lands, and Adrian in his favourite boat is employed in the dangerous pastime of plucking the topmost bough from a submerged oak. Are you weary of life, O Adrian, that you thus play with danger?—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He has obtained his prize, and he pilots his boat through the flood; our eyes were fixed on him fearfully, but the stream carried him away from us; he was forced to land far lower down, and to make a considerable circuit before he could join us. "He is safe!" said Idris, as he leapt on shore, and waved the bough over his head in token of success; "we will wait for him here."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were alone together; the sun had set; the song of the nightingales began; the evening star shone distinct in the flood of light, which was yet unfaded in the west. The blue eyes of my angelic girl were fixed on this sweet emblem of herself: "How the light palpitates," she said, "which is that star's life. Its vacillating effulgence seems to say that its state, even like ours upon earth, is wavering and inconstant; it fears, methinks, and it loves."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Gaze not on the star, dear, generous friend," I cried, "read not love in its trembling rays; look not upon distant worlds; speak not of the mere imagination of a sentiment. I have long been silent; long even to sickness have I desired to speak to you, and submit my soul, my life, my entire being to you. Look not on the star, dear love, or do, and let that eternal spark plead for me; let it be my witness and my advocate, silent as it shines—love is to me as light to the star; even so long as that is uneclipsed by annihilation, so long shall I love you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Veiled for ever to the world's callous eye must be the transport of that moment. Still do I feel her graceful form press against my full-fraught heart—still does sight, and pulse, and breath sicken and fail, at the remembrance of that first kiss. Slowly and silently we went to meet Adrian, whom we heard approaching.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I entreated Adrian to return to me after he had conducted his sister home. And that same evening, walking among the moon-lit forest paths, I poured forth my whole heart, its transport and its hope, to my friend. For a moment he looked disturbed—"I might have foreseen this," he said, "what strife will now ensue! Pardon me, Lionel, nor wonder that the expectation of contest with my mother should jar me, when else I should delightedly confess that my best hopes are fulfilled, in confiding my sister to your protection. If you do not already know it, you will soon learn the deep hate my mother bears to the name Verney. I will converse with Idris; then all that a friend can do, I will do; to her it must belong to play the lover's part, if she be capable of it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >While the brother and sister were still hesitating in what manner they could best attempt to bring their mother over to their party, she, suspecting our meetings, taxed her children with them; taxed her fair daughter with deceit, and an unbecoming attachment for one whose only merit was being the son of the profligate favourite of her imprudent father; and who was doubtless as worthless as he from whom he boasted his descent. The eyes of Idris flashed at this accusation; she replied, "I do not deny that I love Verney; prove to me that he is worthless; and I will never see him more."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dear Madam," said Adrian, "let me entreat you to see him, to cultivate his friendship. You will wonder then, as I do, at the extent of his accomplishments, and the brilliancy of his talents." (Pardon me, gentle reader, this is not futile vanity;—not futile, since to know that Adrian felt thus, brings joy even now to my lone heart).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Mad and foolish boy!" exclaimed the angry lady, "you have chosen with dreams and theories to overthrow my schemes for your own aggrandizement; but you shall not do the same by those I have formed for your sister. I but too well understand the fascination you both labour under; since I had the same struggle with your father, to make him cast off the parent of this youth, who hid his evil propensities with the smoothness and subtlety of a viper. In those days how often did I hear of his attractions, his wide spread conquests, his wit, his refined manners. It is well when flies only are caught by such spiders' webs; but is it for the high-born and powerful to bow their necks to the flimsy yoke of these unmeaning pretensions? Were your sister indeed the insignificant person she deserves to be, I would willingly leave her to the fate, the wretched fate, of the wife of a man, whose very person, resembling as it does his wretched father, ought to remind you of the folly and vice it typifies—but remember, Lady Idris, it is not alone the once royal blood of England that colours your veins, you are a Princess of Austria, and every life-drop is akin to emperors and kings. Are you then a fit mate for an uneducated shepherd-boy, whose only inheritance is his father's tarnished name?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I can make but one defence," replied Idris, "the same offered by my brother; see Lionel, converse with my shepherd-boy"—-The Countess interrupted her indignantly—"Yours!"—she cried: and then, smoothing her impassioned features to a disdainful smile, she continued—"We will talk of this another time. All I now ask, all your mother, Idris, requests is, that you will not see this upstart during the interval of one month."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I dare not comply," said Idris, "it would pain him too much. I have no right to play with his feelings, to accept his proffered love, and then sting him with neglect."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is going too far," her mother answered, with quivering lips, and eyes again instinct by anger.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nay, Madam," said Adrian, "unless my sister consent never to see him again, it is surely an useless torment to separate them for a month."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Certainly," replied the ex-queen, with bitter scorn, "his love, and her love, and both their childish flutterings, are to be put in fit comparison with my years of hope and anxiety, with the duties of the offspring of kings, with the high and dignified conduct which one of her descent ought to pursue. But it is unworthy of me to argue and complain. Perhaps you will have the goodness to promise me not to marry during that interval?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This was asked only half ironically; and Idris wondered why her mother should extort from her a solemn vow not to do, what she had never dreamed of doing—but the promise was required and given.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All went on cheerfully now; we met as usual, and talked without dread of our future plans. The Countess was so gentle, and even beyond her wont, amiable with her children, that they began to entertain hopes of her ultimate consent. She was too unlike them, too utterly alien to their tastes, for them to find delight in her society, or in the prospect of its continuance, but it gave them pleasure to see her conciliating and kind. Once even, Adrian ventured to propose her receiving me. She refused with a smile, reminding him that for the present his sister had promised to be patient.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One day, after the lapse of nearly a month, Adrian received a letter from a friend in London, requesting his immediate presence for the furtherance of some important object. Guileless himself, Adrian feared no deceit. I rode with him as far as Staines: he was in high spirits; and, since I could not see Idris during his absence, he promised a speedy return. His gaiety, which was extreme, had the strange effect of awakening in me contrary feelings; a presentiment of evil hung over me; I loitered on my return; I counted the hours that must elapse before I saw Idris again. Wherefore should this be? What evil might not happen in the mean time? Might not her mother take advantage of Adrian's absence to urge her beyond her sufferance, perhaps to entrap her? I resolved, let what would befall, to see and converse with her the following day. This determination soothed me. To-morrow, loveliest and best, hope and joy of my life, to-morrow I will see thee—Fool, to dream of a moment's delay!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I went to rest. At past midnight I was awaked by a violent knocking. It was now deep winter; it had snowed, and was still snowing; the wind whistled in the leafless trees, despoiling them of the white flakes as they fell; its drear moaning, and the continued knocking, mingled wildly with my dreams— at length I was wide awake; hastily dressing myself, I hurried to discover the cause of this disturbance, and to open my door to the unexpected visitor. Pale as the snow that showered about her, with clasped hands, Idris stood before me. "Save me!" she exclaimed, and would have sunk to the ground had I not supported her. In a moment however she revived, and, with energy, almost with violence, entreated me to saddle horses, to take her away, away to London—to her brother—at least to save her. I had no horses—she wrung her hands. "What can I do?" she cried, "I am lost—we are both for ever lost! But come—come with me, Lionel; here I must not stay,—we can get a chaise at the nearest post-house; yet perhaps we have time! come, O come with me to save and protect me!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When I heard her piteous demands, while with disordered dress, dishevelled hair, and aghast looks, she wrung her hands—the idea shot across me is she also mad?—"Sweet one," and I folded her to my heart, "better repose than wander further;—rest—my beloved, I will make a fire—you are chill."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Rest!" she cried, "repose! you rave, Lionel! If you delay we are lost; come, I pray you, unless you would cast me off for ever."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That Idris, the princely born, nursling of wealth and luxury, should have come through the tempestuous winter-night from her regal abode, and standing at my lowly door, conjure me to fly with her through darkness and storm—was surely a dream—again her plaintive tones, the sight of her loveliness assured me that it was no vision. Looking timidly around, as if she feared to be overheard, she whispered: "I have discovered—to-morrow —that is, to-day—already the to-morrow is come—before dawn, foreigners, Austrians, my mother's hirelings, are to carry me off to Germany, to prison, to marriage—to anything, except you and my brother —take me away, or soon they will be here!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was frightened by her vehemence, and imagined some mistake in her incoherent tale; but I no longer hesitated to obey her. She had come by herself from the Castle, three long miles, at midnight, through the heavy snow; we must reach Englefield Green, a mile and a half further, before we could obtain a chaise. She told me, that she had kept up her strength and courage till her arrival at my cottage, and then both failed. Now she could hardly walk. Supporting her as I did, still she lagged: and at the distance of half a mile, after many stoppages, shivering fits, and half faintings, she slipt from my supporting arm on the snow, and with a torrent of tears averred that she must be taken, for that she could not proceed. I lifted her up in my arms; her light form rested on my breast.—I felt no burthen, except the internal one of contrary and contending emotions. Brimming delight now invested me. Again her chill limbs touched me as a torpedo; and I shuddered in sympathy with her pain and fright. Her head lay on my shoulder, her breath waved my hair, her heart beat near mine, transport made me tremble, blinded me, annihilated me—till a suppressed groan, bursting from her lips, the chattering of her teeth, which she strove vainly to subdue, and all the signs of suffering she evinced, recalled me to the necessity of speed and succour. At last I said to her, "There is Englefield Green; there the inn. But, if you are seen thus strangely circumstanced, dear Idris, even now your enemies may learn your flight too soon: were it not better that I hired the chaise alone? I will put you in safety meanwhile, and return to you immediately."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She answered that I was right, and might do with her as I pleased. I observed the door of a small out-house a-jar. I pushed it open; and, with some hay strewed about, I formed a couch for her, placing her exhausted frame on it, and covering her with my cloak. I feared to leave her, she looked so wan and faint—but in a moment she re-acquired animation, and, with that, fear; and again she implored me not to delay. To call up the people of the inn, and obtain a conveyance and horses, even though I harnessed them myself, was the work of many minutes; minutes, each freighted with the weight of ages. I caused the chaise to advance a little, waited till the people of the inn had retired, and then made the post-boy draw up the carriage to the spot where Idris, impatient, and now somewhat recovered, stood waiting for me. I lifted her into the chaise; I assured her that with our four horses we should arrive in London before five o'clock, the hour when she would be sought and missed. I besought her to calm herself; a kindly shower of tears relieved her, and by degrees she related her tale of fear and peril.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That same night after Adrian's departure, her mother had warmly expostulated with her on the subject of her attachment to me. Every motive, every threat, every angry taunt was urged in vain. She seemed to consider that through me she had lost Raymond; I was the evil influence of her life; I was even accused of encreasing and confirming the mad and base apostacy of Adrian from all views of advancement and grandeur; and now this miserable mountaineer was to steal her daughter. Never, Idris related, did the angry lady deign to recur to gentleness and persuasion; if she had, the task of resistance would have been exquisitely painful. As it was, the sweet girl's generous nature was roused to defend, and ally herself with, my despised cause. Her mother ended with a look of contempt and covert triumph, which for a moment awakened the suspicions of Idris. When they parted for the night, the Countess said, "To-morrow I trust your tone will be changed: be composed; I have agitated you; go to rest; and I will send you a medicine I always take when unduly restless—it will give you a quiet night."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By the time that she had with uneasy thoughts laid her fair cheek upon her pillow, her mother's servant brought a draught; a suspicion again crossed her at this novel proceeding, sufficiently alarming to determine her not to take the potion; but dislike of contention, and a wish to discover whether there was any just foundation for her conjectures, made her, she said, almost instinctively, and in contradiction to her usual frankness, pretend to swallow the medicine. Then, agitated as she had been by her mother's violence, and now by unaccustomed fears, she lay unable to sleep, starting at every sound. Soon her door opened softly, and on her springing up, she heard a whisper, "Not asleep yet," and the door again closed. With a beating heart she expected another visit, and when after an interval her chamber was again invaded, having first assured herself that the intruders were her mother and an attendant, she composed herself to feigned sleep. A step approached her bed, she dared not move, she strove to calm her palpitations, which became more violent, when she heard her mother say mutteringly, "Pretty simpleton, little do you think that your game is already at an end for ever."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For a moment the poor girl fancied that her mother believed that she had drank poison: she was on the point of springing up; when the Countess, already at a distance from the bed, spoke in a low voice to her companion, and again Idris listened: "Hasten," said she, "there is no time to lose— it is long past eleven; they will be here at five; take merely the clothes necessary for her journey, and her jewel-casket." The servant obeyed; few words were spoken on either side; but those were caught at with avidity by the intended victim. She heard the name of her own maid mentioned;—"No, no," replied her mother, "she does not go with us; Lady Idris must forget England, and all belonging to it." And again she heard, "She will not wake till late to-morrow, and we shall then be at sea."——"All is ready," at length the woman announced. The Countess again came to her daughter's bedside: "In Austria at least," she said, "you will obey. In Austria, where obedience can be enforced, and no choice left but between an honourable prison and a fitting marriage."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Both then withdrew; though, as she went, the Countess said, "Softly; all sleep; though all have not been prepared for sleep, like her. I would not have any one suspect, or she might be roused to resistance, and perhaps escape. Come with me to my room; we will remain there till the hour agreed upon." They went. Idris, panic-struck, but animated and strengthened even by her excessive fear, dressed herself hurriedly, and going down a flight of back-stairs, avoiding the vicinity of her mother's apartment, she contrived to escape from the castle by a low window, and came through snow, wind, and obscurity to my cottage; nor lost her courage, until she arrived, and, depositing her fate in my hands, gave herself up to the desperation and weariness that overwhelmed her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I comforted her as well as I might. Joy and exultation, were mine, to possess, and to save her. Yet not to excite fresh agitation in her, "per non turbar quel bel viso sereno," I curbed my delight. I strove to quiet the eager dancing of my heart; I turned from her my eyes, beaming with too much tenderness, and proudly, to dark night, and the inclement atmosphere, murmured the expressions of my transport. We reached London, methought, all too soon; and yet I could not regret our speedy arrival, when I witnessed the extasy with which my beloved girl found herself in her brother's arms, safe from every evil, under his unblamed protection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian wrote a brief note to his mother, informing her that Idris was under his care and guardianship. Several days elapsed, and at last an answer came, dated from Cologne. "It was useless," the haughty and disappointed lady wrote, "for the Earl of Windsor and his sister to address again the injured parent, whose only expectation of tranquillity must be derived from oblivion of their existence. Her desires had been blasted, her schemes overthrown. She did not complain; in her brother's court she would find, not compensation for their disobedience (filial unkindness admitted of none), but such a state of things and mode of life, as might best reconcile her to her fate. Under such circumstances, she positively declined any communication with them."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such were the strange and incredible events, that finally brought about my union with the sister of my best friend, with my adored Idris. With simplicity and courage she set aside the prejudices and opposition which were obstacles to my happiness, nor scrupled to give her hand, where she had given her heart. To be worthy of her, to raise myself to her height through the exertion of talents and virtue, to repay her love with devoted, unwearied tenderness, were the only thanks I could offer for the matchless gift.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VI.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >AND now let the reader, passing over some short period of time, be introduced to our happy circle. Adrian, Idris and I, were established in Windsor Castle; Lord Raymond and my sister, inhabited a house which the former had built on the borders of the Great Park, near Perdita's cottage, as was still named the low-roofed abode, where we two, poor even in hope, had each received the assurance of our felicity. We had our separate occupations and our common amusements. Sometimes we passed whole days under the leafy covert of the forest with our books and music. This occurred during those rare days in this country, when the sun mounts his etherial throne in unclouded majesty, and the windless atmosphere is as a bath of pellucid and grateful water, wrapping the senses in tranquillity. When the clouds veiled the sky, and the wind scattered them there and here, rending their woof, and strewing its fragments through the aerial plains—then we rode out, and sought new spots of beauty and repose. When the frequent rains shut us within doors, evening recreation followed morning study, ushered in by music and song. Idris had a natural musical talent; and her voice, which had been carefully cultivated, was full and sweet. Raymond and I made a part of the concert, and Adrian and Perdita were devout listeners. Then we were as gay as summer insects, playful as children; we ever met one another with smiles, and read content and joy in each other's countenances. Our prime festivals were held in Perdita's cottage; nor were we ever weary of talking of the past or dreaming of the future. Jealousy and disquiet were unknown among us; nor did a fear or hope of change ever disturb our tranquillity. Others said, We might be happy—we said—We are.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When any separation took place between us, it generally so happened, that Idris and Perdita would ramble away together, and we remained to discuss the affairs of nations, and the philosophy of life. The very difference of our dispositions gave zest to these conversations. Adrian had the superiority in learning and eloquence; but Raymond possessed a quick penetration, and a practical knowledge of life, which usually displayed itself in opposition to Adrian, and thus kept up the ball of discussion. At other times we made excursions of many days' duration, and crossed the country to visit any spot noted for beauty or historical association. Sometimes we went up to London, and entered into the amusements of the busy throng; sometimes our retreat was invaded by visitors from among them. This change made us only the more sensible to the delights of the intimate intercourse of our own circle, the tranquillity of our divine forest, and our happy evenings in the halls of our beloved Castle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The disposition of Idris was peculiarly frank, soft, and affectionate. Her temper was unalterably sweet; and although firm and resolute on any point that touched her heart, she was yielding to those she loved. The nature of Perdita was less perfect; but tenderness and happiness improved her temper, and softened her natural reserve. Her understanding was clear and comprehensive, her imagination vivid; she was sincere, generous, and reasonable. Adrian, the matchless brother of my soul, the sensitive and excellent Adrian, loving all, and beloved by all, yet seemed destined not to find the half of himself, which was to complete his happiness. He often left us, and wandered by himself in the woods, or sailed in his little skiff, his books his only companions. He was often the gayest of our party, at the same time that he was the only one visited by fits of despondency; his slender frame seemed overcharged with the weight of life, and his soul appeared rather to inhabit his body than unite with it. I was hardly more devoted to my Idris than to her brother, and she loved him as her teacher, her friend, the benefactor who had secured to her the fulfilment of her dearest wishes. Raymond, the ambitious, restless Raymond, reposed midway on the great high-road of life, and was content to give up all his schemes of sovereignty and fame, to make one of us, the flowers of the field. His kingdom was the heart of Perdita, his subjects her thoughts; by her he was loved, respected as a superior being, obeyed, waited on. No office, no devotion, no watching was irksome to her, as it regarded him. She would sit apart from us and watch him; she would weep for joy to think that he was hers. She erected a temple for him in the depth of her being, and each faculty was a priestess vowed to his service. Sometimes she might be wayward and capricious; but her repentance was bitter, her return entire, and even this inequality of temper suited him who was not formed by nature to float idly down the stream of life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During the first year of their marriage, Perdita presented Raymond with a lovely girl. It was curious to trace in this miniature model the very traits of its father. The same half-disdainful lips and smile of triumph, the same intelligent eyes, the same brow and chestnut hair; her very hands and taper fingers resembled his. How very dear she was to Perdita! In progress of time, I also became a father, and our little darlings, our playthings and delights, called forth a thousand new and delicious feelings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Years passed thus,—even years. Each month brought forth its successor, each year one like to that gone by; truly, our lives were a living comment on that beautiful sentiment of Plutarch, that "our souls have a natural inclination to love, being born as much to love, as to feel, to reason, to understand and remember." We talked of change and active pursuits, but still remained at Windsor, incapable of violating the charm that attached us to our secluded life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Pareamo aver qui tutto il ben raccolto</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Che fra mortali in piu parte si rimembra.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now also that our children gave us occupation, we found excuses for our idleness, in the idea of bringing them up to a more splendid career. At length our tranquillity was disturbed, and the course of events, which for five years had flowed on in hushing tranquillity, was broken by breakers and obstacles, that woke us from our pleasant dream.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A new Lord Protector of England was to be chosen; and, at Raymond's request, we removed to London, to witness, and even take a part in the election. If Raymond had been united to Idris, this post had been his stepping-stone to higher dignity; and his desire for power and fame had been crowned with fullest measure. He had exchanged a sceptre for a lute, a kingdom for Perdita.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Did he think of this as we journeyed up to town? I watched him, but could make but little of him. He was particularly gay, playing with his child, and turning to sport every word that was uttered. Perhaps he did this because he saw a cloud upon Perdita's brow. She tried to rouse herself, but her eyes every now and then filled with tears, and she looked wistfully on Raymond and her girl, as if fearful that some evil would betide them. And so she felt. A presentiment of ill hung over her. She leaned from the window looking on the forest, and the turrets of the Castle, and as these became hid by intervening objects, she passionately exclaimed—"Scenes of happiness! scenes sacred to devoted love, when shall I see you again! and when I see ye, shall I be still the beloved and joyous Perdita, or shall I, heart-broken and lost, wander among your groves, the ghost of what I am!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why, silly one," cried Raymond, "what is your little head pondering upon, that of a sudden you have become so sublimely dismal? Cheer up, or I shall make you over to Idris, and call Adrian into the carriage, who, I see by his gesture, sympathizes with my good spirits."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian was on horseback; he rode up to the carriage, and his gaiety, in addition to that of Raymond, dispelled my sister's melancholy. We entered London in the evening, and went to our several abodes near Hyde Park.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The following morning Lord Raymond visited me early. "I come to you," he said, "only half assured that you will assist me in my project, but resolved to go through with it, whether you concur with me or not. Promise me secrecy however; for if you will not contribute to my success, at least you must not baffle me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I promise. And now—-"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And now, my dear fellow, for what are we come to London? To be present at the election of a Protector, and to give our yea or nay for his shuffling Grace of——? or for that noisy Ryland? Do you believe, Verney, that I brought you to town for that? No, we will have a Protector of our own. We will set up a candidate, and ensure his success. We will nominate Adrian, and do our best to bestow on him the power to which he is entitled by his birth, and which he merits through his virtues.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do not answer; I know all your objections, and will reply to them in order. First, Whether he will or will not consent to become a great man? Leave the task of persuasion on that point to me; I do not ask you to assist me there. Secondly, Whether he ought to exchange his employment of plucking blackberries, and nursing wounded partridges in the forest, for the command of a nation? My dear Lionel, we are married men, and find employment sufficient in amusing our wives, and dancing our children. But Adrian is alone, wifeless, childless, unoccupied. I have long observed him. He pines for want of some interest in life. His heart, exhausted by his early sufferings, reposes like a new-healed limb, and shrinks from all excitement. But his understanding, his charity, his virtues, want a field for exercise and display; and we will procure it for him. Besides, is it not a shame, that the genius of Adrian should fade from the earth like a flower in an untrod mountain-path, fruitless? Do you think Nature composed his surpassing machine for no purpose? Believe me, he was destined to be the author of infinite good to his native England. Has she not bestowed on him every gift in prodigality?—birth, wealth, talent, goodness? Does not every one love and admire him? and does he not delight singly in such efforts as manifest his love to all? Come, I see that you are already persuaded, and will second me when I propose him to-night in parliament."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You have got up all your arguments in excellent order," I replied; "and, if Adrian consent, they are unanswerable. One only condition I would make, —that you do nothing without his concurrence."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I believe you are in the right," said Raymond; "although I had thought at first to arrange the affair differently. Be it so. I will go instantly to Adrian; and, if he inclines to consent, you will not destroy my labour by persuading him to return, and turn squirrel again in Windsor Forest. Idris, you will not act the traitor towards me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Trust me," replied she, "I will preserve a strict neutrality."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"For my part," said I, "I am too well convinced of the worth of our friend, and the rich harvest of benefits that all England would reap from his Protectorship, to deprive my countrymen of such a blessing, if he consent to bestow it on them."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the evening Adrian visited us.—"Do you cabal also against me," said he, laughing; "and will you make common cause with Raymond, in dragging a poor visionary from the clouds to surround him with the fire-works and blasts of earthly grandeur, instead of heavenly rays and airs? I thought you knew me better."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I do know you better," I replied "than to think that you would be happy in such a situation; but the good you would do to others may be an inducement, since the time is probably arrived when you can put your theories into practice, and you may bring about such reformation and change, as will conduce to that perfect system of government which you delight to portray."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You speak of an almost-forgotten dream," said Adrian, his countenance slightly clouding as he spoke; "the visions of my boyhood have long since faded in the light of reality; I know now that I am not a man fitted to govern nations; sufficient for me, if I keep in wholesome rule the little kingdom of my own mortality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But do not you see, Lionel, the drift of our noble friend; a drift, perhaps, unknown to himself, but apparent to me. Lord Raymond was never born to be a drone in the hive, and to find content in our pastoral life. He thinks, that he ought to be satisfied; he imagines, that his present situation precludes the possibility of aggrandisement; he does not therefore, even in his own heart, plan change for himself. But do you not see, that, under the idea of exalting me, he is chalking out a new path for himself; a path of action from which he has long wandered?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let us assist him. He, the noble, the warlike, the great in every quality that can adorn the mind and person of man; he is fitted to be the Protector of England. If I—that is, if we propose him, he will assuredly be elected, and will find, in the functions of that high office, scope for the towering powers of his mind. Even Perdita will rejoice. Perdita, in whom ambition was a covered fire until she married Raymond, which event was for a time the fulfilment of her hopes; Perdita will rejoice in the glory and advancement of her lord—and, coyly and prettily, not be discontented with her share. In the mean time, we, the wise of the land, will return to our Castle, and, Cincinnatus-like, take to our usual labours, until our friend shall require our presence and assistance here."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The more Adrian reasoned upon this scheme, the more feasible it appeared. His own determination never to enter into public life was insurmountable, and the delicacy of his health was a sufficient argument against it. The next step was to induce Raymond to confess his secret wishes for dignity and fame. He entered while we were speaking. The way in which Adrian had received his project for setting him up as a candidate for the Protectorship, and his replies, had already awakened in his mind, the view of the subject which we were now discussing. His countenance and manner betrayed irresolution and anxiety; but the anxiety arose from a fear that we should not prosecute, or not succeed in our idea; and his irresolution, from a doubt whether we should risk a defeat. A few words from us decided him, and hope and joy sparkled in his eyes; the idea of embarking in a career, so congenial to his early habits and cherished wishes, made him as before energetic and bold. We discussed his chances, the merits of the other candidates, and the dispositions of the voters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After all we miscalculated. Raymond had lost much of his popularity, and was deserted by his peculiar partizans. Absence from the busy stage had caused him to be forgotten by the people; his former parliamentary supporters were principally composed of royalists, who had been willing to make an idol of him when he appeared as the heir of the Earldom of Windsor; but who were indifferent to him, when he came forward with no other attributes and distinctions than they conceived to be common to many among themselves. Still he had many friends, admirers of his transcendent talents; his presence in the house, his eloquence, address and imposing beauty, were calculated to produce an electric effect. Adrian also, notwithstanding his recluse habits and theories, so adverse to the spirit of party, had many friends, and they were easily induced to vote for a candidate of his selection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Duke of——, and Mr. Ryland, Lord Raymond's old antagonist, were the other candidates. The Duke was supported by all the aristocrats of the republic, who considered him their proper representative. Ryland was the popular candidate; when Lord Raymond was first added to the list, his chance of success appeared small. We retired from the debate which had followed on his nomination: we, his nominators, mortified; he dispirited to excess. Perdita reproached us bitterly. Her expectations had been strongly excited; she had urged nothing against our project, on the contrary, she was evidently pleased by it; but its evident ill success changed the current of her ideas. She felt, that, once awakened, Raymond would never return unrepining to Windsor. His habits were unhinged; his restless mind roused from its sleep, ambition must now be his companion through life; and if he did not succeed in his present attempt, she foresaw that unhappiness and cureless discontent would follow. Perhaps her own disappointment added a sting to her thoughts and words; she did not spare us, and our own reflections added to our disquietude.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was necessary to follow up our nomination, and to persuade Raymond to present himself to the electors on the following evening. For a long time he was obstinate. He would embark in a balloon; he would sail for a distant quarter of the world, where his name and humiliation were unknown. But this was useless; his attempt was registered; his purpose published to the world; his shame could never be erased from the memories of men. It was as well to fail at last after a struggle, as to fly now at the beginning of his enterprise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From the moment that he adopted this idea, he was changed. His depression and anxiety fled; he became all life and activity. The smile of triumph shone on his countenance; determined to pursue his object to the uttermost, his manner and expression seem ominous of the accomplishment of his wishes. Not so Perdita. She was frightened by his gaiety, for she dreaded a greater revulsion at the end. If his appearance even inspired us with hope, it only rendered the state of her mind more painful. She feared to lose sight of him; yet she dreaded to remark any change in the temper of his mind. She listened eagerly to him, yet tantalized herself by giving to his words a meaning foreign to their true interpretation, and adverse to her hopes. She dared not be present at the contest; yet she remained at home a prey to double solicitude. She wept over her little girl; she looked, she spoke, as if she dreaded the occurrence of some frightful calamity. She was half mad from the effects of uncontrollable agitation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lord Raymond presented himself to the house with fearless confidence and insinuating address. After the Duke of——and Mr. Ryland had finished their speeches, he commenced. Assuredly he had not conned his lesson; and at first he hesitated, pausing in his ideas, and in the choice of his expressions. By degrees he warmed; his words flowed with ease, his language was full of vigour, and his voice of persuasion. He reverted to his past life, his successes in Greece, his favour at home. Why should he lose this, now that added years, prudence, and the pledge which his marriage gave to his country, ought to encrease, rather than diminish his claims to confidence? He spoke of the state of England; the necessary measures to be taken to ensure its security, and confirm its prosperity. He drew a glowing picture of its present situation. As he spoke, every sound was hushed, every thought suspended by intense attention. His graceful elocution enchained the senses of his hearers. In some degree also he was fitted to reconcile all parties. His birth pleased the aristocracy; his being the candidate recommended by Adrian, a man intimately allied to the popular party, caused a number, who had no great reliance either on the Duke or Mr. Ryland, to range on his side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The contest was keen and doubtful. Neither Adrian nor myself would have been so anxious, if our own success had depended on our exertions; but we had egged our friend on to the enterprise, and it became us to ensure his triumph. Idris, who entertained the highest opinion of his abilities, was warmly interested in the event: and my poor sister, who dared not hope, and to whom fear was misery, was plunged into a fever of disquietude.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Day after day passed while we discussed our projects for the evening, and each night was occupied by debates which offered no conclusion. At last the crisis came: the night when parliament, which had so long delayed its choice, must decide: as the hour of twelve passed, and the new day began, it was by virtue of the constitution dissolved, its power extinct.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We assembled at Raymond's house, we and our partizans. At half past five o'clock we proceeded to the House. Idris endeavoured to calm Perdita; but the poor girl's agitation deprived her of all power of self-command. She walked up and down the room,—gazed wildly when any one entered, fancying that they might be the announcers of her doom. I must do justice to my sweet sister: it was not for herself that she was thus agonized. She alone knew the weight which Raymond attached to his success. Even to us he assumed gaiety and hope, and assumed them so well, that we did not divine the secret workings of his mind. Sometimes a nervous trembling, a sharp dissonance of voice, and momentary fits of absence revealed to Perdita the violence he did himself; but we, intent on our plans, observed only his ready laugh, his joke intruded on all occasions, the flow of his spirits which seemed incapable of ebb. Besides, Perdita was with him in his retirement; she saw the moodiness that succeeded to this forced hilarity; she marked his disturbed sleep, his painful irritability—once she had seen his tears—hers had scarce ceased to flow, since she had beheld the big drops which disappointed pride had caused to gather in his eye, but which pride was unable to dispel. What wonder then, that her feelings were wrought to this pitch! I thus accounted to myself for her agitation; but this was not all, and the sequel revealed another excuse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One moment we seized before our departure, to take leave of our beloved girls. I had small hope of success, and entreated Idris to watch over my sister. As I approached the latter, she seized my hand, and drew me into another apartment; she threw herself into my arms, and wept and sobbed bitterly and long. I tried to soothe her; I bade her hope; I asked what tremendous consequences would ensue even on our failure. "My brother," she cried, "protector of my childhood, dear, most dear Lionel, my fate hangs by a thread. I have you all about me now—you, the companion of my infancy; Adrian, as dear to me as if bound by the ties of blood; Idris, the sister of my heart, and her lovely offspring. This, O this may be the last time that you will surround me thus!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Abruptly she stopped, and then cried: "What have I said?—foolish false girl that I am!" She looked wildly on me, and then suddenly calming herself, apologized for what she called her unmeaning words, saying that she must indeed be insane, for, while Raymond lived, she must be happy; and then, though she still wept, she suffered me tranquilly to depart. Raymond only took her hand when he went, and looked on her expressively; she answered by a look of intelligence and assent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poor girl! what she then suffered! I could never entirely forgive Raymond for the trials he imposed on her, occasioned as they were by a selfish feeling on his part. He had schemed, if he failed in his present attempt, without taking leave of any of us, to embark for Greece, and never again to revisit England. Perdita acceded to his wishes; for his contentment was the chief object of her life, the crown of her enjoyment; but to leave us all, her companions, the beloved partners of her happiest years, and in the interim to conceal this frightful determination, was a task that almost conquered her strength of mind. She had been employed in arranging for their departure; she had promised Raymond during this decisive evening, to take advantage of our absence, to go one stage of the journey, and he, after his defeat was ascertained, would slip away from us, and join her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Although, when I was informed of this scheme, I was bitterly offended by the small attention which Raymond paid to my sister's feelings, I was led by reflection to consider, that he acted under the force of such strong excitement, as to take from him the consciousness, and, consequently, the guilt of a fault. If he had permitted us to witness his agitation, he would have been more under the guidance of reason; but his struggles for the shew of composure, acted with such violence on his nerves, as to destroy his power of self-command. I am convinced that, at the worst, he would have returned from the seashore to take leave of us, and to make us the partners of his council. But the task imposed on Perdita was not the less painful. He had extorted from her a vow of secrecy; and her part of the drama, since it was to be performed alone, was the most agonizing that could be devised. But to return to my narrative.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The debates had hitherto been long and loud; they had often been protracted merely for the sake of delay. But now each seemed fearful lest the fatal moment should pass, while the choice was yet undecided. Unwonted silence reigned in the house, the members spoke in whispers, and the ordinary business was transacted with celerity and quietness. During the first stage of the election, the Duke of——had been thrown out; the question therefore lay between Lord Raymond and Mr. Ryland. The latter had felt secure of victory, until the appearance of Raymond; and, since his name had been inserted as a candidate, he had canvassed with eagerness. He had appeared each evening, impatience and anger marked in his looks, scowling on us from the opposite side of St. Stephen's, as if his mere frown would cast eclipse on our hopes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Every thing in the English constitution had been regulated for the better preservation of peace. On the last day, two candidates only were allowed to remain; and to obviate, if possible, the last struggle between these, a bribe was offered to him who should voluntarily resign his pretensions; a place of great emolument and honour was given him, and his success facilitated at a future election. Strange to say however, no instance had yet occurred, where either candidate had had recourse to this expedient; in consequence the law had become obsolete, nor had been referred to by any of us in our discussions. To our extreme surprise, when it was moved that we should resolve ourselves into a committee for the election of the Lord Protector, the member who had nominated Ryland, rose and informed us that this candidate had resigned his pretensions. His information was at first received with silence; a confused murmur succeeded; and, when the chairman declared Lord Raymond duly chosen, it amounted to a shout of applause and victory. It seemed as if, far from any dread of defeat even if Mr. Ryland had not resigned, every voice would have been united in favour of our candidate. In fact, now that the idea of contest was dismissed, all hearts returned to their former respect and admiration of our accomplished friend. Each felt, that England had never seen a Protector so capable of fulfilling the arduous duties of that high office. One voice made of many voices, resounded through the chamber; it syllabled the name of Raymond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He entered. I was on one of the highest seats, and saw him walk up the passage to the table of the speaker. The native modesty of his disposition conquered the joy of his triumph. He looked round timidly; a mist seemed before his eyes. Adrian, who was beside me, hastened to him, and jumping down the benches, was at his side in a moment. His appearance re-animated our friend; and, when he came to speak and act, his hesitation vanished, and he shone out supreme in majesty and victory. The former Protector tendered him the oaths, and presented him with the insignia of office, performing the ceremonies of installation. The house then dissolved. The chief members of the state crowded round the new magistrate, and conducted him to the palace of government. Adrian suddenly vanished; and, by the time that Raymond's supporters were reduced to our intimate friends merely, returned leading Idris to congratulate her friend on his success.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But where was Perdita? In securing solicitously an unobserved retreat in case of failure, Raymond had forgotten to arrange the mode by which she was to hear of his success; and she had been too much agitated to revert to this circumstance. When Idris entered, so far had Raymond forgotten himself, that he asked for my sister; one word, which told of her mysterious disappearance, recalled him. Adrian it is true had already gone to seek the fugitive, imagining that her tameless anxiety had led her to the purlieus of the House, and that some sinister event detained her. But Raymond, without explaining himself, suddenly quitted us, and in another moment we heard him gallop down the street, in spite of the wind and rain that scattered tempest over the earth. We did not know how far he had to go, and soon separated, supposing that in a short time he would return to the palace with Perdita, and that they would not be sorry to find themselves alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita had arrived with her child at Dartford, weeping and inconsolable. She directed everything to be prepared for the continuance of their journey, and placing her lovely sleeping charge on a bed, passed several hours in acute suffering. Sometimes she observed the war of elements, thinking that they also declared against her, and listened to the pattering of the rain in gloomy despair. Sometimes she hung over her child, tracing her resemblance to the father, and fearful lest in after life she should display the same passions and uncontrollable impulses, that rendered him unhappy. Again, with a gush of pride and delight, she marked in the features of her little girl, the same smile of beauty that often irradiated Raymond's countenance. The sight of it soothed her. She thought of the treasure she possessed in the affections of her lord; of his accomplishments, surpassing those of his contemporaries, his genius, his devotion to her.—Soon she thought, that all she possessed in the world, except him, might well be spared, nay, given with delight, a propitiatory offering, to secure the supreme good she retained in him. Soon she imagined, that fate demanded this sacrifice from her, as a mark she was devoted to Raymond, and that it must be made with cheerfulness. She figured to herself their life in the Greek isle he had selected for their retreat; her task of soothing him; her cares for the beauteous Clara, her rides in his company, her dedication of herself to his consolation. The picture then presented itself to her in such glowing colours, that she feared the reverse, and a life of magnificence and power in London; where Raymond would no longer be hers only, nor she the sole source of happiness to him. So far as she merely was concerned, she began to hope for defeat; and it was only on his account that her feelings vacillated, as she heard him gallop into the court-yard of the inn. That he should come to her alone, wetted by the storm, careless of every thing except speed, what else could it mean, than that, vanquished and solitary, they were to take their way from native England, the scene of shame, and hide themselves in the myrtle groves of the Grecian isles?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In a moment she was in his arms. The knowledge of his success had become so much a part of himself, that he forgot that it was necessary to impart it to his companion. She only felt in his embrace a dear assurance that while he possessed her, he would not despair. "This is kind," she cried; "this is noble, my own beloved! O fear not disgrace or lowly fortune, while you have your Perdita; fear not sorrow, while our child lives and smiles. Let us go even where you will; the love that accompanies us will prevent our regrets."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Locked in his embrace, she spoke thus, and cast back her head, seeking an assent to her words in his eyes—they were sparkling with ineffable delight. "Why, my little Lady Protectress," said he, playfully, "what is this you say? And what pretty scheme have you woven of exile and obscurity, while a brighter web, a gold-enwoven tissue, is that which, in truth, you ought to contemplate?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He kissed her brow—but the wayward girl, half sorry at his triumph, agitated by swift change of thought, hid her face in his bosom and wept. He comforted her; he instilled into her his own hopes and desires; and soon her countenance beamed with sympathy. How very happy were they that night! How full even to bursting was their sense of joy!</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VII.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >HAVING seen our friend properly installed in his new office, we turned our eyes towards Windsor. The nearness of this place to London was such, as to take away the idea of painful separation, when we quitted Raymond and Perdita. We took leave of them in the Protectoral Palace. It was pretty enough to see my sister enter as it were into the spirit of the drama, and endeavour to fill her station with becoming dignity. Her internal pride and humility of manner were now more than ever at war. Her timidity was not artificial, but arose from that fear of not being properly appreciated, that slight estimation of the neglect of the world, which also characterized Raymond. But then Perdita thought more constantly of others than he; and part of her bashfulness arose from a wish to take from those around her a sense of inferiority; a feeling which never crossed her mind. From the circumstances of her birth and education, Idris would have been better fitted for the formulae of ceremony; but the very ease which accompanied such actions with her, arising from habit, rendered them tedious; while, with every drawback, Perdita evidently enjoyed her situation. She was too full of new ideas to feel much pain when we departed; she took an affectionate leave of us, and promised to visit us soon; but she did not regret the circumstances that caused our separation. The spirits of Raymond were unbounded; he did not know what to do with his new got power; his head was full of plans; he had as yet decided on none— but he promised himself, his friends, and the world, that the aera of his Protectorship should be signalized by some act of surpassing glory. Thus, we talked of them, and moralized, as with diminished numbers we returned to Windsor Castle. We felt extreme delight at our escape from political turmoil, and sought our solitude with redoubled zest. We did not want for occupation; but my eager disposition was now turned to the field of intellectual exertion only; and hard study I found to be an excellent medicine to allay a fever of spirit with which in indolence, I should doubtless have been assailed. Perdita had permitted us to take Clara back with us to Windsor; and she and my two lovely infants were perpetual sources of interest and amusement.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The only circumstance that disturbed our peace, was the health of Adrian. It evidently declined, without any symptom which could lead us to suspect his disease, unless indeed his brightened eyes, animated look, and flustering cheeks, made us dread consumption; but he was without pain or fear. He betook himself to books with ardour, and reposed from study in the society he best loved, that of his sister and myself. Sometimes he went up to London to visit Raymond, and watch the progress of events. Clara often accompanied him in these excursions; partly that she might see her parents, partly because Adrian delighted in the prattle, and intelligent looks of this lovely child.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Meanwhile all went on well in London. The new elections were finished; parliament met, and Raymond was occupied in a thousand beneficial schemes. Canals, aqueducts, bridges, stately buildings, and various edifices for public utility, were entered upon; he was continually surrounded by projectors and projects, which were to render England one scene of fertility and magnificence; the state of poverty was to be abolished; men were to be transported from place to place almost with the same facility as the Princes Houssain, Ali, and Ahmed, in the Arabian Nights. The physical state of man would soon not yield to the beatitude of angels; disease was to be banished; labour lightened of its heaviest burden. Nor did this seem extravagant. The arts of life, and the discoveries of science had augmented in a ratio which left all calculation behind; food sprung up, so to say, spontaneously—machines existed to supply with facility every want of the population. An evil direction still survived; and men were not happy, not because they could not, but because they would not rouse themselves to vanquish self-raised obstacles. Raymond was to inspire them with his beneficial will, and the mechanism of society, once systematised according to faultless rules, would never again swerve into disorder. For these hopes he abandoned his long-cherished ambition of being enregistered in the annals of nations as a successful warrior; laying aside his sword, peace and its enduring glories became his aim—the title he coveted was that of the benefactor of his country.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Among other works of art in which he was engaged, he had projected the erection of a national gallery for statues and pictures. He possessed many himself, which he designed to present to the Republic; and, as the edifice was to be the great ornament of his Protectorship, he was very fastidious in his choice of the plan on which it would be built. Hundreds were brought to him and rejected. He sent even to Italy and Greece for drawings; but, as the design was to be characterized by originality as well as by perfect beauty, his endeavours were for a time without avail. At length a drawing came, with an address where communications might be sent, and no artist's name affixed. The design was new and elegant, but faulty; so faulty, that although drawn with the hand and eye of taste, it was evidently the work of one who was not an architect. Raymond contemplated it with delight; the more he gazed, the more pleased he was; and yet the errors multiplied under inspection. He wrote to the address given, desiring to see the draughtsman, that such alterations might be made, as should be suggested in a consultation between him and the original conceiver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A Greek came. A middle-aged man, with some intelligence of manner, but with so common-place a physiognomy, that Raymond could scarcely believe that he was the designer. He acknowledged that he was not an architect; but the idea of the building had struck him, though he had sent it without the smallest hope of its being accepted. He was a man of few words. Raymond questioned him; but his reserved answers soon made him turn from the man to the drawing. He pointed out the errors, and the alterations that he wished to be made; he offered the Greek a pencil that he might correct the sketch on the spot; this was refused by his visitor, who said that he perfectly understood, and would work at it at home. At length Raymond suffered him to depart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The next day he returned. The design had been re-drawn; but many defects still remained, and several of the instructions given had been misunderstood. "Come," said Raymond, "I yielded to you yesterday, now comply with my request—take the pencil."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Greek took it, but he handled it in no artist-like way; at length he said: "I must confess to you, my Lord, that I did not make this drawing. It is impossible for you to see the real designer; your instructions must pass through me. Condescend therefore to have patience with my ignorance, and to explain your wishes to me; in time I am certain that you will be satisfied."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond questioned vainly; the mysterious Greek would say no more. Would an architect be permitted to see the artist? This also was refused. Raymond repeated his instructions, and the visitor retired. Our friend resolved however not to be foiled in his wish. He suspected, that unaccustomed poverty was the cause of the mystery, and that the artist was unwilling to be seen in the garb and abode of want. Raymond was only the more excited by this consideration to discover him; impelled by the interest he took in obscure talent, he therefore ordered a person skilled in such matters, to follow the Greek the next time he came, and observe the house in which he should enter. His emissary obeyed, and brought the desired intelligence. He had traced the man to one of the most penurious streets in the metropolis. Raymond did not wonder, that, thus situated, the artist had shrunk from notice, but he did not for this alter his resolve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the same evening, he went alone to the house named to him. Poverty, dirt, and squalid misery characterized its appearance. Alas! thought Raymond, I have much to do before England becomes a Paradise. He knocked; the door was opened by a string from above—the broken, wretched staircase was immediately before him, but no person appeared; he knocked again, vainly—and then, impatient of further delay, he ascended the dark, creaking stairs. His main wish, more particularly now that he witnessed the abject dwelling of the artist, was to relieve one, possessed of talent, but depressed by want. He pictured to himself a youth, whose eyes sparkled with genius, whose person was attenuated by famine. He half feared to displease him; but he trusted that his generous kindness would be administered so delicately, as not to excite repulse. What human heart is shut to kindness? and though poverty, in its excess, might render the sufferer unapt to submit to the supposed degradation of a benefit, the zeal of the benefactor must at last relax him into thankfulness. These thoughts encouraged Raymond, as he stood at the door of the highest room of the house. After trying vainly to enter the other apartments, he perceived just within the threshold of this one, a pair of small Turkish slippers; the door was ajar, but all was silent within. It was probable that the inmate was absent, but secure that he had found the right person, our adventurous Protector was tempted to enter, to leave a purse on the table, and silently depart. In pursuance of this idea, he pushed open the door gently—but the room was inhabited.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond had never visited the dwellings of want, and the scene that now presented itself struck him to the heart. The floor was sunk in many places; the walls ragged and bare—the ceiling weather-stained—a tattered bed stood in the corner; there were but two chairs in the room, and a rough broken table, on which was a light in a tin candlestick;—yet in the midst of such drear and heart sickening poverty, there was an air of order and cleanliness that surprised him. The thought was fleeting; for his attention was instantly drawn towards the inhabitant of this wretched abode. It was a female. She sat at the table; one small hand shaded her eyes from the candle; the other held a pencil; her looks were fixed on a drawing before her, which Raymond recognized as the design presented to him. Her whole appearance awakened his deepest interest. Her dark hair was braided and twined in thick knots like the head-dress of a Grecian statue; her garb was mean, but her attitude might have been selected as a model of grace. Raymond had a confused remembrance that he had seen such a form before; he walked across the room; she did not raise her eyes, merely asking in Romaic, who is there? "A friend," replied Raymond in the same dialect. She looked up wondering, and he saw that it was Evadne Zaimi. Evadne, once the idol of Adrian's affections; and who, for the sake of her present visitor, had disdained the noble youth, and then, neglected by him she loved, with crushed hopes and a stinging sense of misery, had returned to her native Greece. What revolution of fortune could have brought her to England, and housed her thus?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond recognized her; and his manner changed from polite beneficence to the warmest protestations of kindness and sympathy. The sight of her, in her present situation, passed like an arrow into his soul. He sat by her, he took her hand, and said a thousand things which breathed the deepest spirit of compassion and affection. Evadne did not answer; her large dark eyes were cast down, at length a tear glimmered on the lashes. "Thus," she cried, "kindness can do, what no want, no misery ever effected; I weep." She shed indeed many tears; her head sunk unconsciously on the shoulder of Raymond; he held her hand: he kissed her sunken tear-stained cheek. He told her, that her sufferings were now over: no one possessed the art of consoling like Raymond; he did not reason or declaim, but his look shone with sympathy; he brought pleasant images before the sufferer; his caresses excited no distrust, for they arose purely from the feeling which leads a mother to kiss her wounded child; a desire to demonstrate in every possible way the truth of his feelings, and the keenness of his wish to pour balm into the lacerated mind of the unfortunate. As Evadne regained her composure, his manner became even gay; he sported with the idea of her poverty. Something told him that it was not its real evils that lay heavily at her heart, but the debasement and disgrace attendant on it; as he talked, he divested it of these; sometimes speaking of her fortitude with energetic praise; then, alluding to her past state, he called her his Princess in disguise. He made her warm offers of service; she was too much occupied by more engrossing thoughts, either to accept or reject them; at length he left her, making a promise to repeat his visit the next day. He returned home, full of mingled feelings, of pain excited by Evadne's wretchedness, and pleasure at the prospect of relieving it. Some motive for which he did not account, even to himself, prevented him from relating his adventure to Perdita.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The next day he threw such disguise over his person as a cloak afforded, and revisited Evadne. As he went, he bought a basket of costly fruits, such as were natives of her own country, and throwing over these various beautiful flowers, bore it himself to the miserable garret of his friend. "Behold," cried he, as he entered, "what bird's food I have brought for my sparrow on the house-top."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Evadne now related the tale of her misfortunes. Her father, though of high rank, had in the end dissipated his fortune, and even destroyed his reputation and influence through a course of dissolute indulgence. His health was impaired beyond hope of cure; and it became his earnest wish, before he died, to preserve his daughter from the poverty which would be the portion of her orphan state. He therefore accepted for her, and persuaded her to accede to, a proposal of marriage, from a wealthy Greek merchant settled at Constantinople. She quitted her native Greece; her father died; by degrees she was cut off from all the companions and ties of her youth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The war, which about a year before the present time had broken out between Greece and Turkey, brought about many reverses of fortune. Her husband became bankrupt, and then in a tumult and threatened massacre on the part of the Turks, they were obliged to fly at midnight, and reached in an open boat an English vessel under sail, which brought them immediately to this island. The few jewels they had saved, supported them awhile. The whole strength of Evadne's mind was exerted to support the failing spirits of her husband. Loss of property, hopelessness as to his future prospects, the inoccupation to which poverty condemned him, combined to reduce him to a state bordering on insanity. Five months after their arrival in England, he committed suicide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You will ask me," continued Evadne, "what I have done since; why I have not applied for succour to the rich Greeks resident here; why I have not returned to my native country? My answer to these questions must needs appear to you unsatisfactory, yet they have sufficed to lead me on, day after day, enduring every wretchedness, rather than by such means to seek relief. Shall the daughter of the noble, though prodigal Zaimi, appear a beggar before her compeers or inferiors—superiors she had none. Shall I bow my head before them, and with servile gesture sell my nobility for life? Had I a child, or any tie to bind me to existence, I might descend to this—but, as it is—the world has been to me a harsh step-mother; fain would I leave the abode she seems to grudge, and in the grave forget my pride, my struggles, my despair. The time will soon come; grief and famine have already sapped the foundations of my being; a very short time, and I shall have passed away; unstained by the crime of self-destruction, unstung by the memory of degradation, my spirit will throw aside the miserable coil, and find such recompense as fortitude and resignation may deserve. This may seem madness to you, yet you also have pride and resolution; do not then wonder that my pride is tameless, my resolution unalterable."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Having thus finished her tale, and given such an account as she deemed fit, of the motives of her abstaining from all endeavour to obtain aid from her countrymen, Evadne paused; yet she seemed to have more to say, to which she was unable to give words. In the mean time Raymond was eloquent. His desire of restoring his lovely friend to her rank in society, and to her lost prosperity, animated him, and he poured forth with energy, all his wishes and intentions on that subject. But he was checked; Evadne exacted a promise, that he should conceal from all her friends her existence in England. "The relatives of the Earl of Windsor," said she haughtily, "doubtless think that I injured him; perhaps the Earl himself would be the first to acquit me, but probably I do not deserve acquittal. I acted then, as I ever must, from impulse. This abode of penury may at least prove the disinterestedness of my conduct. No matter: I do not wish to plead my cause before any of them, not even before your Lordship, had you not first discovered me. The tenor of my actions will prove that I had rather die, than be a mark for scorn—behold the proud Evadne in her tatters! look on the beggar-princess! There is aspic venom in the thought—promise me that my secret shall not be violated by you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond promised; but then a new discussion ensued. Evadne required another engagement on his part, that he would not without her concurrence enter into any project for her benefit, nor himself offer relief. "Do not degrade me in my own eyes," she said; "poverty has long been my nurse; hard-visaged she is, but honest. If dishonour, or what I conceive to be dishonour, come near me, I am lost." Raymond adduced many arguments and fervent persuasions to overcome her feeling, but she remained unconvinced; and, agitated by the discussion, she wildly and passionately made a solemn vow, to fly and hide herself where he never could discover her, where famine would soon bring death to conclude her woes, if he persisted in his to her disgracing offers. She could support herself, she said. And then she shewed him how, by executing various designs and paintings, she earned a pittance for her support. Raymond yielded for the present. He felt assured, after he had for awhile humoured her self-will, that in the end friendship and reason would gain the day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But the feelings that actuated Evadne were rooted in the depths of her being, and were such in their growth as he had no means of understanding. Evadne loved Raymond. He was the hero of her imagination, the image carved by love in the unchanged texture of her heart. Seven years ago, in her youthful prime, she had become attached to him; he had served her country against the Turks; he had in her own land acquired that military glory peculiarly dear to the Greeks, since they were still obliged inch by inch to fight for their security. Yet when he returned thence, and first appeared in public life in England, her love did not purchase his, which then vacillated between Perdita and a crown. While he was yet undecided, she had quitted England; the news of his marriage reached her, and her hopes, poorly nurtured blossoms, withered and fell. The glory of life was gone for her; the roseate halo of love, which had imbued every object with its own colour, faded;—she was content to take life as it was, and to make the best of leaden-coloured reality. She married; and, carrying her restless energy of character with her into new scenes, she turned her thoughts to ambition, and aimed at the title and power of Princess of Wallachia; while her patriotic feelings were soothed by the idea of the good she might do her country, when her husband should be chief of this principality. She lived to find ambition, as unreal a delusion as love. Her intrigues with Russia for the furtherance of her object, excited the jealousy of the Porte, and the animosity of the Greek government. She was considered a traitor by both, the ruin of her husband followed; they avoided death by a timely flight, and she fell from the height of her desires to penury in England. Much of this tale she concealed from Raymond; nor did she confess, that repulse and denial, as to a criminal convicted of the worst of crimes, that of bringing the scythe of foreign despotism to cut away the new springing liberties of her country, would have followed her application to any among the Greeks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She knew that she was the cause of her husband's utter ruin; and she strung herself to bear the consequences. The reproaches which agony extorted; or worse, cureless, uncomplaining depression, when his mind was sunk in a torpor, not the less painful because it was silent and moveless. She reproached herself with the crime of his death; guilt and its punishments appeared to surround her; in vain she endeavoured to allay remorse by the memory of her real integrity; the rest of the world, and she among them, judged of her actions, by their consequences. She prayed for her husband's soul; she conjured the Supreme to place on her head the crime of his self-destruction—she vowed to live to expiate his fault.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the midst of such wretchedness as must soon have destroyed her, one thought only was matter of consolation. She lived in the same country, breathed the same air as Raymond. His name as Protector was the burthen of every tongue; his achievements, projects, and magnificence, the argument of every story. Nothing is so precious to a woman's heart as the glory and excellence of him she loves; thus in every horror Evadne revelled in his fame and prosperity. While her husband lived, this feeling was regarded by her as a crime, repressed, repented of. When he died, the tide of love resumed its ancient flow, it deluged her soul with its tumultuous waves, and she gave herself up a prey to its uncontrollable power.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But never, O, never, should he see her in her degraded state. Never should he behold her fallen, as she deemed, from her pride of beauty, the poverty-stricken inhabitant of a garret, with a name which had become a reproach, and a weight of guilt on her soul. But though impenetrably veiled from him, his public office permitted her to become acquainted with all his actions, his daily course of life, even his conversation. She allowed herself one luxury, she saw the newspapers every day, and feasted on the praise and actions of the Protector. Not that this indulgence was devoid of accompanying grief. Perdita's name was for ever joined with his; their conjugal felicity was celebrated even by the authentic testimony of facts. They were continually together, nor could the unfortunate Evadne read the monosyllable that designated his name, without, at the same time, being presented with the image of her who was the faithful companion of all his labours and pleasures. They, their Excellencies, met her eyes in each line, mingling an evil potion that poisoned her very blood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was in the newspaper that she saw the advertisement for the design for a national gallery. Combining with taste her remembrance of the edifices which she had seen in the east, and by an effort of genius enduing them with unity of design, she executed the plan which had been sent to the Protector. She triumphed in the idea of bestowing, unknown and forgotten as she was, a benefit upon him she loved; and with enthusiastic pride looked forward to the accomplishment of a work of hers, which, immortalized in stone, would go down to posterity stamped with the name of Raymond. She awaited with eagerness the return of her messenger from the palace; she listened insatiate to his account of each word, each look of the Protector; she felt bliss in this communication with her beloved, although he knew not to whom he addressed his instructions. The drawing itself became ineffably dear to her. He had seen it, and praised it; it was again retouched by her, each stroke of her pencil was as a chord of thrilling music, and bore to her the idea of a temple raised to celebrate the deepest and most unutterable emotions of her soul. These contemplations engaged her, when the voice of Raymond first struck her ear, a voice, once heard, never to be forgotten; she mastered her gush of feelings, and welcomed him with quiet gentleness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pride and tenderness now struggled, and at length made a compromise together. She would see Raymond, since destiny had led him to her, and her constancy and devotion must merit his friendship. But her rights with regard to him, and her cherished independence, should not be injured by the idea of interest, or the intervention of the complicated feelings attendant on pecuniary obligation, and the relative situations of the benefactor, and benefited. Her mind was of uncommon strength; she could subdue her sensible wants to her mental wishes, and suffer cold, hunger and misery, rather than concede to fortune a contested point. Alas! that in human nature such a pitch of mental discipline, and disdainful negligence of nature itself, should not have been allied to the extreme of moral excellence! But the resolution that permitted her to resist the pains of privation, sprung from the too great energy of her passions; and the concentrated self-will of which this was a sign, was destined to destroy even the very idol, to preserve whose respect she submitted to this detail of wretchedness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Their intercourse continued. By degrees Evadne related to her friend the whole of her story, the stain her name had received in Greece, the weight of sin which had accrued to her from the death of her husband. When Raymond offered to clear her reputation, and demonstrate to the world her real patriotism, she declared that it was only through her present sufferings that she hoped for any relief to the stings of conscience; that, in her state of mind, diseased as he might think it, the necessity of occupation was salutary medicine; she ended by extorting a promise that for the space of one month he would refrain from the discussion of her interests, engaging after that time to yield in part to his wishes. She could not disguise to herself that any change would separate her from him; now she saw him each day. His connection with Adrian and Perdita was never mentioned; he was to her a meteor, a companionless star, which at its appointed hour rose in her hemisphere, whose appearance brought felicity, and which, although it set, was never eclipsed. He came each day to her abode of penury, and his presence transformed it to a temple redolent with sweets, radiant with heaven's own light; he partook of her delirium. "They built a wall between them and the world"—Without, a thousand harpies raved, remorse and misery, expecting the destined moment for their invasion. Within, was the peace as of innocence, reckless blindless, deluding joy, hope, whose still anchor rested on placid but unconstant water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus, while Raymond had been wrapt in visions of power and fame, while he looked forward to entire dominion over the elements and the mind of man, the territory of his own heart escaped his notice; and from that unthought of source arose the mighty torrent that overwhelmed his will, and carried to the oblivious sea, fame, hope, and happiness.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VIII.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >IN the mean time what did Perdita?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During the first months of his Protectorate, Raymond and she had been inseparable; each project was discussed with her, each plan approved by her. I never beheld any one so perfectly happy as my sweet sister. Her expressive eyes were two stars whose beams were love; hope and light-heartedness sat on her cloudless brow. She fed even to tears of joy on the praise and glory of her Lord; her whole existence was one sacrifice to him, and if in the humility of her heart she felt self-complacency, it arose from the reflection that she had won the distinguished hero of the age, and had for years preserved him, even after time had taken from love its usual nourishment. Her own feeling was as entire as at its birth. Five years had failed to destroy the dazzling unreality of passion. Most men ruthlessly destroy the sacred veil, with which the female heart is wont to adorn the idol of its affections. Not so Raymond; he was an enchanter, whose reign was for ever undiminished; a king whose power never was suspended: follow him through the details of common life, still the same charm of grace and majesty adorned him; nor could he be despoiled of the innate deification with which nature had invested him. Perdita grew in beauty and excellence under his eye; I no longer recognised my reserved abstracted sister in the fascinating and open-hearted wife of Raymond. The genius that enlightened her countenance, was now united to an expression of benevolence, which gave divine perfection to her beauty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Happiness is in its highest degree the sister of goodness. Suffering and amiability may exist together, and writers have loved to depict their conjunction; there is a human and touching harmony in the picture. But perfect happiness is an attribute of angels; and those who possess it, appear angelic. Fear has been said to be the parent of religion: even of that religion is it the generator, which leads its votaries to sacrifice human victims at its altars; but the religion which springs from happiness is a lovelier growth; the religion which makes the heart breathe forth fervent thanksgiving, and causes us to pour out the overflowings of the soul before the author of our being; that which is the parent of the imagination and the nurse of poetry; that which bestows benevolent intelligence on the visible mechanism of the world, and makes earth a temple with heaven for its cope. Such happiness, goodness, and religion inhabited the mind of Perdita.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During the five years we had spent together, a knot of happy human beings at Windsor Castle, her blissful lot had been the frequent theme of my sister's conversation. From early habit, and natural affection, she selected me in preference to Adrian or Idris, to be the partner in her overflowings of delight; perhaps, though apparently much unlike, some secret point of resemblance, the offspring of consanguinity, induced this preference. Often at sunset, I have walked with her, in the sober, enshadowed forest paths, and listened with joyful sympathy. Security gave dignity to her passion; the certainty of a full return, left her with no wish unfulfilled. The birth of her daughter, embryo copy of her Raymond, filled up the measure of her content, and produced a sacred and indissoluble tie between them. Sometimes she felt proud that he had preferred her to the hopes of a crown. Sometimes she remembered that she had suffered keen anguish, when he hesitated in his choice. But this memory of past discontent only served to enhance her present joy. What had been hardly won, was now, entirely possessed, doubly dear. She would look at him at a distance with the same rapture, (O, far more exuberant rapture!) that one might feel, who after the perils of a tempest, should find himself in the desired port; she would hasten towards him, to feel more certain in his arms, the reality of her bliss. This warmth of affection, added to the depth of her understanding, and the brilliancy of her imagination, made her beyond words dear to Raymond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If a feeling of dissatisfaction ever crossed her, it arose from the idea that he was not perfectly happy. Desire of renown, and presumptuous ambition, had characterized his youth. The one he had acquired in Greece; the other he had sacrificed to love. His intellect found sufficient field for exercise in his domestic circle, whose members, all adorned by refinement and literature, were many of them, like himself, distinguished by genius. Yet active life was the genuine soil for his virtues; and he sometimes suffered tedium from the monotonous succession of events in our retirement. Pride made him recoil from complaint; and gratitude and affection to Perdita, generally acted as an opiate to all desire, save that of meriting her love. We all observed the visitation of these feelings, and none regretted them so much as Perdita. Her life consecrated to him, was a slight sacrifice to reward his choice, but was not that sufficient—Did he need any gratification that she was unable to bestow? This was the only cloud in the azure of her happiness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His passage to power had been full of pain to both. He however attained his wish; he filled the situation for which nature seemed to have moulded him. His activity was fed in wholesome measure, without either exhaustion or satiety; his taste and genius found worthy expression in each of the modes human beings have invented to encage and manifest the spirit of beauty; the goodness of his heart made him never weary of conducing to the well-being of his fellow-creatures; his magnificent spirit, and aspirations for the respect and love of mankind, now received fruition; true, his exaltation was temporary; perhaps it were better that it should be so. Habit would not dull his sense of the enjoyment of power; nor struggles, disappointment and defeat await the end of that which would expire at its maturity. He determined to extract and condense all of glory, power, and achievement, which might have resulted from a long reign, into the three years of his Protectorate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond was eminently social. All that he now enjoyed would have been devoid of pleasure to him, had it been unparticipated. But in Perdita he possessed all that his heart could desire. Her love gave birth to sympathy; her intelligence made her understand him at a word; her powers of intellect enabled her to assist and guide him. He felt her worth. During the early years of their union, the inequality of her temper, and yet unsubdued self-will which tarnished her character, had been a slight drawback to the fulness of his sentiment. Now that unchanged serenity, and gentle compliance were added to her other qualifications, his respect equalled his love. Years added to the strictness of their union. They did not now guess at, and totter on the pathway, divining the mode to please, hoping, yet fearing the continuance of bliss. Five years gave a sober certainty to their emotions, though it did not rob them of their etherial nature. It had given them a child; but it had not detracted from the personal attractions of my sister. Timidity, which in her had almost amounted to awkwardness, was exchanged for a graceful decision of manner; frankness, instead of reserve, characterized her physiognomy; and her voice was attuned to thrilling softness. She was now three and twenty, in the pride of womanhood, fulfilling the precious duties of wife and mother, possessed of all her heart had ever coveted. Raymond was ten years older; to his previous beauty, noble mien, and commanding aspect, he now added gentlest benevolence, winning tenderness, graceful and unwearied attention to the wishes of another.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The first secret that had existed between them was the visits of Raymond to Evadne. He had been struck by the fortitude and beauty of the ill-fated Greek; and, when her constant tenderness towards him unfolded itself, he asked with astonishment, by what act of his he had merited this passionate and unrequited love. She was for a while the sole object of his reveries; and Perdita became aware that his thoughts and time were bestowed on a subject unparticipated by her. My sister was by nature destitute of the common feelings of anxious, petulant jealousy. The treasure which she possessed in the affections of Raymond, was more necessary to her being, than the life-blood that animated her veins—more truly than Othello she might say,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > To be once in doubt,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is—once to be resolved.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the present occasion she did not suspect any alienation of affection; but she conjectured that some circumstance connected with his high place, had occasioned this mystery. She was startled and pained. She began to count the long days, and months, and years which must elapse, before he would be restored to a private station, and unreservedly to her. She was not content that, even for a time, he should practice concealment with her. She often repined; but her trust in the singleness of his affection was undisturbed; and, when they were together, unchecked by fear, she opened her heart to the fullest delight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Time went on. Raymond, stopping mid-way in his wild career, paused suddenly to think of consequences. Two results presented themselves in the view he took of the future. That his intercourse with Evadne should continue a secret to, or that finally it should be discovered by Perdita. The destitute condition, and highly wrought feelings of his friend prevented him from adverting to the possibility of exiling himself from her. In the first event he had bidden an eternal farewell to open-hearted converse, and entire sympathy with the companion of his life. The veil must be thicker than that invented by Turkish jealousy; the wall higher than the unscaleable tower of Vathek, which should conceal from her the workings of his heart, and hide from her view the secret of his actions. This idea was intolerably painful to him. Frankness and social feelings were the essence of Raymond's nature; without them his qualities became common-place; without these to spread glory over his intercourse with Perdita, his vaunted exchange of a throne for her love, was as weak and empty as the rainbow hues which vanish when the sun is down. But there was no remedy. Genius, devotion, and courage; the adornments of his mind, and the energies of his soul, all exerted to their uttermost stretch, could not roll back one hair's breadth the wheel of time's chariot; that which had been was written with the adamantine pen of reality, on the everlasting volume of the past; nor could agony and tears suffice to wash out one iota from the act fulfilled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But this was the best side of the question. What, if circumstance should lead Perdita to suspect, and suspecting to be resolved? The fibres of his frame became relaxed, and cold dew stood on his forehead, at this idea. Many men may scoff at his dread; but he read the future; and the peace of Perdita was too dear to him, her speechless agony too certain, and too fearful, not to unman him. His course was speedily decided upon. If the worst befell; if she learnt the truth, he would neither stand her reproaches, or the anguish of her altered looks. He would forsake her, England, his friends, the scenes of his youth, the hopes of coming time, he would seek another country, and in other scenes begin life again. Having resolved on this, he became calmer. He endeavoured to guide with prudence the steeds of destiny through the devious road which he had chosen, and bent all his efforts the better to conceal what he could not alter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The perfect confidence that subsisted between Perdita and him, rendered every communication common between them. They opened each other's letters, even as, until now, the inmost fold of the heart of each was disclosed to the other. A letter came unawares, Perdita read it. Had it contained confirmation, she must have been annihilated. As it was, trembling, cold, and pale, she sought Raymond. He was alone, examining some petitions lately presented. She entered silently, sat on a sofa opposite to him, and gazed on him with a look of such despair, that wildest shrieks and dire moans would have been tame exhibitions of misery, compared to the living incarnation of the thing itself exhibited by her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At first he did not take his eyes from the papers; when he raised them, he was struck by the wretchedness manifest on her altered cheek; for a moment he forgot his own acts and fears, and asked with consternation—"Dearest girl, what is the matter; what has happened?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nothing," she replied at first; "and yet not so," she continued, hurrying on in her speech; "you have secrets, Raymond; where have you been lately, whom have you seen, what do you conceal from me?—why am I banished from your confidence? Yet this is not it—I do not intend to entrap you with questions—one will suffice—am I completely a wretch?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With trembling hand she gave him the paper, and sat white and motionless looking at him while he read it. He recognised the hand-writing of Evadne, and the colour mounted in his cheeks. With lightning-speed he conceived the contents of the letter; all was now cast on one die; falsehood and artifice were trifles in comparison with the impending ruin. He would either entirely dispel Perdita's suspicions, or quit her for ever. "My dear girl," he said, "I have been to blame; but you must pardon me. I was in the wrong to commence a system of concealment; but I did it for the sake of sparing you pain; and each day has rendered it more difficult for me to alter my plan. Besides, I was instigated by delicacy towards the unhappy writer of these few lines."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita gasped: "Well," she cried, "well, go on!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That is all—this paper tells all. I am placed in the most difficult circumstances. I have done my best, though perhaps I have done wrong. My love for you is inviolate."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita shook her head doubtingly: "It cannot be," she cried, "I know that it is not. You would deceive me, but I will not be deceived. I have lost you, myself, my life!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you not believe me?" said Raymond haughtily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To believe you," she exclaimed, "I would give up all, and expire with joy, so that in death I could feel that you were true—but that cannot be!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Perdita," continued Raymond, "you do not see the precipice on which you stand. You may believe that I did not enter on my present line of conduct without reluctance and pain. I knew that it was possible that your suspicions might be excited; but I trusted that my simple word would cause them to disappear. I built my hope on your confidence. Do you think that I will be questioned, and my replies disdainfully set aside? Do you think that I will be suspected, perhaps watched, cross-questioned, and disbelieved? I am not yet fallen so low; my honour is not yet so tarnished. You have loved me; I adored you. But all human sentiments come to an end. Let our affection expire—but let it not be exchanged for distrust and recrimination. Heretofore we have been friends—lovers—let us not become enemies, mutual spies. I cannot live the object of suspicion—you cannot believe me—let us part!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Exactly so," cried Perdita, "I knew that it would come to this! Are we not already parted? Does not a stream, boundless as ocean, deep as vacuum, yawn between us?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond rose, his voice was broken, his features convulsed, his manner calm as the earthquake-cradling atmosphere, he replied: "I am rejoiced that you take my decision so philosophically. Doubtless you will play the part of the injured wife to admiration. Sometimes you may be stung with the feeling that you have wronged me, but the condolence of your relatives, the pity of the world, the complacency which the consciousness of your own immaculate innocence will bestow, will be excellent balm;—me you will never see more!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond moved towards the door. He forgot that each word he spoke was false. He personated his assumption of innocence even to self-deception. Have not actors wept, as they pourtrayed imagined passion? A more intense feeling of the reality of fiction possessed Raymond. He spoke with pride; he felt injured. Perdita looked up; she saw his angry glance; his hand was on the lock of the door. She started up, she threw herself on his neck, she gasped and sobbed; he took her hand, and leading her to the sofa, sat down near her. Her head fell on his shoulder, she trembled, alternate changes of fire and ice ran through her limbs: observing her emotion he spoke with softened accents:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The blow is given. I will not part from you in anger;—I owe you too much. I owe you six years of unalloyed happiness. But they are passed. I will not live the mark of suspicion, the object of jealousy. I love you too well. In an eternal separation only can either of us hope for dignity and propriety of action. We shall not then be degraded from our true characters. Faith and devotion have hitherto been the essence of our intercourse;—these lost, let us not cling to the seedless husk of life, the unkernelled shell. You have your child, your brother, Idris, Adrian"—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And you," cried Perdita, "the writer of that letter."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Uncontrollable indignation flashed from the eyes of Raymond. He knew that this accusation at least was false. "Entertain this belief," he cried, "hug it to your heart—make it a pillow to your head, an opiate for your eyes —I am content. But, by the God that made me, hell is not more false than the word you have spoken!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita was struck by the impassioned seriousness of his asseverations. She replied with earnestness, "I do not refuse to believe you, Raymond; on the contrary I promise to put implicit faith in your simple word. Only assure me that your love and faith towards me have never been violated; and suspicion, and doubt, and jealousy will at once be dispersed. We shall continue as we have ever done, one heart, one hope, one life."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have already assured you of my fidelity," said Raymond with disdainful coldness, "triple assertions will avail nothing where one is despised. I will say no more; for I can add nothing to what I have already said, to what you before contemptuously set aside. This contention is unworthy of both of us; and I confess that I am weary of replying to charges at once unfounded and unkind."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita tried to read his countenance, which he angrily averted. There was so much of truth and nature in his resentment, that her doubts were dispelled. Her countenance, which for years had not expressed a feeling unallied to affection, became again radiant and satisfied. She found it however no easy task to soften and reconcile Raymond. At first he refused to stay to hear her. But she would not be put off; secure of his unaltered love, she was willing to undertake any labour, use any entreaty, to dispel his anger. She obtained an hearing, he sat in haughty silence, but he listened. She first assured him of her boundless confidence; of this he must be conscious, since but for that she would not seek to detain him. She enumerated their years of happiness; she brought before him past scenes of intimacy and happiness; she pictured their future life, she mentioned their child—tears unbidden now filled her eyes. She tried to disperse them, but they refused to be checked—her utterance was choaked. She had not wept before. Raymond could not resist these signs of distress: he felt perhaps somewhat ashamed of the part he acted of the injured man, he who was in truth the injurer. And then he devoutly loved Perdita; the bend of her head, her glossy ringlets, the turn of her form were to him subjects of deep tenderness and admiration; as she spoke, her melodious tones entered his soul; he soon softened towards her, comforting and caressing her, and endeavouring to cheat himself into the belief that he had never wronged her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond staggered forth from this scene, as a man might do, who had been just put to the torture, and looked forward to when it would be again inflicted. He had sinned against his own honour, by affirming, swearing to, a direct falsehood; true this he had palmed on a woman, and it might therefore be deemed less base—by others—not by him;—for whom had he deceived?—his own trusting, devoted, affectionate Perdita, whose generous belief galled him doubly, when he remembered the parade of innocence with which it had been exacted. The mind of Raymond was not so rough cast, nor had been so rudely handled, in the circumstance of life, as to make him proof to these considerations—on the contrary, he was all nerve; his spirit was as a pure fire, which fades and shrinks from every contagion of foul atmosphere: but now the contagion had become incorporated with its essence, and the change was the more painful. Truth and falsehood, love and hate lost their eternal boundaries, heaven rushed in to mingle with hell; while his sensitive mind, turned to a field for such battle, was stung to madness. He heartily despised himself, he was angry with Perdita, and the idea of Evadne was attended by all that was hideous and cruel. His passions, always his masters, acquired fresh strength, from the long sleep in which love had cradled them, the clinging weight of destiny bent him down; he was goaded, tortured, fiercely impatient of that worst of miseries, the sense of remorse. This troubled state yielded by degrees, to sullen animosity, and depression of spirits. His dependants, even his equals, if in his present post he had any, were startled to find anger, derision, and bitterness in one, before distinguished for suavity and benevolence of manner. He transacted public business with distaste, and hastened from it to the solitude which was at once his bane and relief. He mounted a fiery horse, that which had borne him forward to victory in Greece; he fatigued himself with deadening exercise, losing the pangs of a troubled mind in animal sensation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He slowly recovered himself; yet, at last, as one might from the effects of poison, he lifted his head from above the vapours of fever and passion into the still atmosphere of calm reflection. He meditated on what was best to be done. He was first struck by the space of time that had elapsed, since madness, rather than any reasonable impulse, had regulated his actions. A month had gone by, and during that time he had not seen Evadne. Her power, which was linked to few of the enduring emotions of his heart, had greatly decayed. He was no longer her slave—no longer her lover: he would never see her more, and by the completeness of his return, deserve the confidence of Perdita.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet, as he thus determined, fancy conjured up the miserable abode of the Greek girl. An abode, which from noble and lofty principle, she had refused to exchange for one of greater luxury. He thought of the splendour of her situation and appearance when he first knew her; he thought of her life at Constantinople, attended by every circumstance of oriental magnificence; of her present penury, her daily task of industry, her lorn state, her faded, famine-struck cheek. Compassion swelled his breast; he would see her once again; he would devise some plan for restoring her to society, and the enjoyment of her rank; their separation would then follow, as a matter of course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Again he thought, how during this long month, he had avoided Perdita, flying from her as from the stings of his own conscience. But he was awake now; all this should be remedied; and future devotion erase the memory of this only blot on the serenity of their life. He became cheerful, as he thought of this, and soberly and resolutely marked out the line of conduct he would adopt. He remembered that he had promised Perdita to be present this very evening (the 19th of October, anniversary of his election as Protector) at a festival given in his honour. Good augury should this festival be of the happiness of future years. First, he would look in on Evadne; he would not stay; but he owed her some account, some compensation for his long and unannounced absence; and then to Perdita, to the forgotten world, to the duties of society, the splendour of rank, the enjoyment of power.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the scene sketched in the preceding pages, Perdita had contemplated an entire change in the manners and conduct of Raymond. She expected freedom of communication, and a return to those habits of affectionate intercourse which had formed the delight of her life. But Raymond did not join her in any of her avocations. He transacted the business of the day apart from her; he went out, she knew not whither. The pain inflicted by this disappointment was tormenting and keen. She looked on it as a deceitful dream, and tried to throw off the consciousness of it; but like the shirt of Nessus, it clung to her very flesh, and ate with sharp agony into her vital principle. She possessed that (though such an assertion may appear a paradox) which belongs to few, a capacity of happiness. Her delicate organization and creative imagination rendered her peculiarly susceptible of pleasurable emotion. The overflowing warmth of her heart, by making love a plant of deep root and stately growth, had attuned her whole soul to the reception of happiness, when she found in Raymond all that could adorn love and satisfy her imagination. But if the sentiment on which the fabric of her existence was founded, became common place through participation, the endless succession of attentions and graceful action snapt by transfer, his universe of love wrested from her, happiness must depart, and then be exchanged for its opposite. The same peculiarities of character rendered her sorrows agonies; her fancy magnified them, her sensibility made her for ever open to their renewed impression; love envenomed the heart-piercing sting. There was neither submission, patience, nor self-abandonment in her grief; she fought with it, struggled beneath it, and rendered every pang more sharp by resistance. Again and again the idea recurred, that he loved another. She did him justice; she believed that he felt a tender affection for her; but give a paltry prize to him who in some life-pending lottery has calculated on the possession of tens of thousands, and it will disappoint him more than a blank. The affection and amity of a Raymond might be inestimable; but, beyond that affection, embosomed deeper than friendship, was the indivisible treasure of love. Take the sum in its completeness, and no arithmetic can calculate its price; take from it the smallest portion, give it but the name of parts, separate it into degrees and sections, and like the magician's coin, the valueless gold of the mine, is turned to vilest substance. There is a meaning in the eye of love; a cadence in its voice, an irradiation in its smile, the talisman of whose enchantments one only can possess; its spirit is elemental, its essence single, its divinity an unit. The very heart and soul of Raymond and Perdita had mingled, even as two mountain brooks that join in their descent, and murmuring and sparkling flow over shining pebbles, beside starry flowers; but let one desert its primal course, or be dammed up by choaking obstruction, and the other shrinks in its altered banks. Perdita was sensible of the failing of the tide that fed her life. Unable to support the slow withering of her hopes, she suddenly formed a plan, resolving to terminate at once the period of misery, and to bring to an happy conclusion the late disastrous events.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The anniversary was at hand of the exaltation of Raymond to the office of Protector; and it was customary to celebrate this day by a splendid festival. A variety of feelings urged Perdita to shed double magnificence over the scene; yet, as she arrayed herself for the evening gala, she wondered herself at the pains she took, to render sumptuous the celebration of an event which appeared to her the beginning of her sufferings. Woe befall the day, she thought, woe, tears, and mourning betide the hour, that gave Raymond another hope than love, another wish than my devotion; and thrice joyful the moment when he shall be restored to me! God knows, I put my trust in his vows, and believe his asserted faith—but for that, I would not seek what I am now resolved to attain. Shall two years more be thus passed, each day adding to our alienation, each act being another stone piled on the barrier which separates us? No, my Raymond, my only beloved, sole possession of Perdita! This night, this splendid assembly, these sumptuous apartments, and this adornment of your tearful girl, are all united to celebrate your abdication. Once for me, you relinquished the prospect of a crown. That was in days of early love, when I could only hold out the hope, not the assurance of happiness. Now you have the experience of all that I can give, the heart's devotion, taintless love, and unhesitating subjection to you. You must choose between these and your protectorate. This, proud noble, is your last night! Perdita has bestowed on it all of magnificent and dazzling that your heart best loves—but, from these gorgeous rooms, from this princely attendance, from power and elevation, you must return with to-morrow's sun to our rural abode; for I would not buy an immortality of joy, by the endurance of one more week sister to the last.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Brooding over this plan, resolved when the hour should come, to propose, and insist upon its accomplishment, secure of his consent, the heart of Perdita was lightened, or rather exalted. Her cheek was flushed by the expectation of struggle; her eyes sparkled with the hope of triumph. Having cast her fate upon a die, and feeling secure of winning, she, whom I have named as bearing the stamp of queen of nations on her noble brow, now rose superior to humanity, and seemed in calm power, to arrest with her finger, the wheel of destiny. She had never before looked so supremely lovely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We, the Arcadian shepherds of the tale, had intended to be present at this festivity, but Perdita wrote to entreat us not to come, or to absent ourselves from Windsor; for she (though she did not reveal her scheme to us) resolved the next morning to return with Raymond to our dear circle, there to renew a course of life in which she had found entire felicity. Late in the evening she entered the apartments appropriated to the festival. Raymond had quitted the palace the night before; he had promised to grace the assembly, but he had not yet returned. Still she felt sure that he would come at last; and the wider the breach might appear at this crisis, the more secure she was of closing it for ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was as I said, the nineteenth of October; the autumn was far advanced and dreary. The wind howled; the half bare trees were despoiled of the remainder of their summer ornament; the state of the air which induced the decay of vegetation, was hostile to cheerfulness or hope. Raymond had been exalted by the determination he had made; but with the declining day his spirits declined. First he was to visit Evadne, and then to hasten to the palace of the Protectorate. As he walked through the wretched streets in the neighbourhood of the luckless Greek's abode, his heart smote him for the whole course of his conduct towards her. First, his having entered into any engagement that should permit her to remain in such a state of degradation; and then, after a short wild dream, having left her to drear solitude, anxious conjecture, and bitter, still—disappointed expectation. What had she done the while, how supported his absence and neglect? Light grew dim in these close streets, and when the well known door was opened, the staircase was shrouded in perfect night. He groped his way up, he entered the garret, he found Evadne stretched speechless, almost lifeless on her wretched bed. He called for the people of the house, but could learn nothing from them, except that they knew nothing. Her story was plain to him, plain and distinct as the remorse and horror that darted their fangs into him. When she found herself forsaken by him, she lost the heart to pursue her usual avocations; pride forbade every application to him; famine was welcomed as the kind porter to the gates of death, within whose opening folds she should now, without sin, quickly repose. No creature came near her, as her strength failed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If she died, where could there be found on record a murderer, whose cruel act might compare with his? What fiend more wanton in his mischief, what damned soul more worthy of perdition! But he was not reserved for this agony of self-reproach. He sent for medical assistance; the hours passed, spun by suspense into ages; the darkness of the long autumnal night yielded to day, before her life was secure. He had her then removed to a more commodious dwelling, and hovered about her, again and again to assure himself that she was safe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the midst of his greatest suspense and fear as to the event, he remembered the festival given in his honour, by Perdita; in his honour then, when misery and death were affixing indelible disgrace to his name, honour to him whose crimes deserved a scaffold; this was the worst mockery. Still Perdita would expect him; he wrote a few incoherent words on a scrap of paper, testifying that he was well, and bade the woman of the house take it to the palace, and deliver it into the hands of the wife of the Lord Protector. The woman, who did not know him, contemptuously asked, how he thought she should gain admittance, particularly on a festal night, to that lady's presence? Raymond gave her his ring to ensure the respect of the menials. Thus, while Perdita was entertaining her guests, and anxiously awaiting the arrival of her lord, his ring was brought her; and she was told that a poor woman had a note to deliver to her from its wearer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The vanity of the old gossip was raised by her commission, which, after all, she did not understand, since she had no suspicion, even now that Evadne's visitor was Lord Raymond. Perdita dreaded a fall from his horse, or some similar accident—till the woman's answers woke other fears. From a feeling of cunning blindly exercised, the officious, if not malignant messenger, did not speak of Evadne's illness; but she garrulously gave an account of Raymond's frequent visits, adding to her narration such circumstances, as, while they convinced Perdita of its truth, exaggerated the unkindness and perfidy of Raymond. Worst of all, his absence now from the festival, his message wholly unaccounted for, except by the disgraceful hints of the woman, appeared the deadliest insult. Again she looked at the ring, it was a small ruby, almost heart-shaped, which she had herself given him. She looked at the hand-writing, which she could not mistake, and repeated to herself the words—"Do not, I charge you, I entreat you, permit your guests to wonder at my absence:" the while the old crone going on with her talk, filled her ear with a strange medley of truth and falsehood. At length Perdita dismissed her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The poor girl returned to the assembly, where her presence had not been missed. She glided into a recess somewhat obscured, and leaning against an ornamental column there placed, tried to recover herself. Her faculties were palsied. She gazed on some flowers that stood near in a carved vase: that morning she had arranged them, they were rare and lovely plants; even now all aghast as she was, she observed their brilliant colours and starry shapes.—"Divine infoliations of the spirit of beauty," she exclaimed, "Ye droop not, neither do ye mourn; the despair that clasps my heart, has not spread contagion over you!—Why am I not a partner of your insensibility, a sharer in your calm!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She paused. "To my task," she continued mentally, "my guests must not perceive the reality, either as it regards him or me. I obey; they shall not, though I die the moment they are gone. They shall behold the antipodes of what is real—for I will appear to live—while I am—dead." It required all her self-command, to suppress the gush of tears self-pity caused at this idea. After many struggles, she succeeded, and turned to join the company.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All her efforts were now directed to the dissembling her internal conflict. She had to play the part of a courteous hostess; to attend to all; to shine the focus of enjoyment and grace. She had to do this, while in deep woe she sighed for loneliness, and would gladly have exchanged her crowded rooms for dark forest depths, or a drear, night-enshadowed heath. But she became gay. She could not keep in the medium, nor be, as was usual with her, placidly content. Every one remarked her exhilaration of spirits; as all actions appear graceful in the eye of rank, her guests surrounded her applaudingly, although there was a sharpness in her laugh, and an abruptness in her sallies, which might have betrayed her secret to an attentive observer. She went on, feeling that, if she had paused for a moment, the checked waters of misery would have deluged her soul, that her wrecked hopes would raise their wailing voices, and that those who now echoed her mirth, and provoked her repartees, would have shrunk in fear from her convulsive despair. Her only consolation during the violence which she did herself, was to watch the motions of an illuminated clock, and internally count the moments which must elapse before she could be alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At length the rooms began to thin. Mocking her own desires, she rallied her guests on their early departure. One by one they left her—at length she pressed the hand of her last visitor. "How cold and damp your hand is," said her friend; "you are over fatigued, pray hasten to rest." Perdita smiled faintly—her guest left her; the carriage rolling down the street assured the final departure. Then, as if pursued by an enemy, as if wings had been at her feet, she flew to her own apartment, she dismissed her attendants, she locked the doors, she threw herself wildly on the floor, she bit her lips even to blood to suppress her shrieks, and lay long a prey to the vulture of despair, striving not to think, while multitudinous ideas made a home of her heart; and ideas, horrid as furies, cruel as vipers, and poured in with such swift succession, that they seemed to jostle and wound each other, while they worked her up to madness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At length she rose, more composed, not less miserable. She stood before a large mirror—she gazed on her reflected image; her light and graceful dress, the jewels that studded her hair, and encircled her beauteous arms and neck, her small feet shod in satin, her profuse and glossy tresses, all were to her clouded brow and woe-begone countenance like a gorgeous frame to a dark tempest-pourtraying picture. "Vase am I," she thought, "vase brimful of despair's direst essence. Farewell, Perdita! farewell, poor girl! never again will you see yourself thus; luxury and wealth are no longer yours; in the excess of your poverty you may envy the homeless beggar; most truly am I without a home! I live on a barren desart, which, wide and interminable, brings forth neither fruit or flower; in the midst is a solitary rock, to which thou, Perdita, art chained, and thou seest the dreary level stretch far away."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She threw open her window, which looked on the palace-garden. Light and darkness were struggling together, and the orient was streaked by roseate and golden rays. One star only trembled in the depth of the kindling atmosphere. The morning air blowing freshly over the dewy plants, rushed into the heated room. "All things go on," thought Perdita, "all things proceed, decay, and perish! When noontide has passed, and the weary day has driven her team to their western stalls, the fires of heaven rise from the East, moving in their accustomed path, they ascend and descend the skiey hill. When their course is fulfilled, the dial begins to cast westward an uncertain shadow; the eye-lids of day are opened, and birds and flowers, the startled vegetation, and fresh breeze awaken; the sun at length appears, and in majestic procession climbs the capitol of heaven. All proceeds, changes and dies, except the sense of misery in my bursting heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ay, all proceeds and changes: what wonder then, that love has journied on to its setting, and that the lord of my life has changed? We call the supernal lights fixed, yet they wander about yonder plain, and if I look again where I looked an hour ago, the face of the eternal heavens is altered. The silly moon and inconstant planets vary nightly their erratic dance; the sun itself, sovereign of the sky, ever and anon deserts his throne, and leaves his dominion to night and winter. Nature grows old, and shakes in her decaying limbs,—creation has become bankrupt! What wonder then, that eclipse and death have led to destruction the light of thy life, O Perdita!"</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IX.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >THUS sad and disarranged were the thoughts of my poor sister, when she became assured of the infidelity of Raymond. All her virtues and all her defects tended to make the blow incurable. Her affection for me, her brother, for Adrian and Idris, was subject as it were to the reigning passion of her heart; even her maternal tenderness borrowed half its force from the delight she had in tracing Raymond's features and expression in the infant's countenance. She had been reserved and even stern in childhood; but love had softened the asperities of her character, and her union with Raymond had caused her talents and affections to unfold themselves; the one betrayed, and the other lost, she in some degree returned to her ancient disposition. The concentrated pride of her nature, forgotten during her blissful dream, awoke, and with its adder's sting pierced her heart; her humility of spirit augmented the power of the venom; she had been exalted in her own estimation, while distinguished by his love: of what worth was she, now that he thrust her from this preferment? She had been proud of having won and preserved him—but another had won him from her, and her exultation was as cold as a water quenched ember.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We, in our retirement, remained long in ignorance of her misfortune. Soon after the festival she had sent for her child, and then she seemed to have forgotten us. Adrian observed a change during a visit that he afterward paid them; but he could not tell its extent, or divine the cause. They still appeared in public together, and lived under the same roof. Raymond was as usual courteous, though there was, on occasions, an unbidden haughtiness, or painful abruptness in his manners, which startled his gentle friend; his brow was not clouded but disdain sat on his lips, and his voice was harsh. Perdita was all kindness and attention to her lord; but she was silent, and beyond words sad. She had grown thin and pale; and her eyes often filled with tears. Sometimes she looked at Raymond, as if to say—That it should be so! At others her countenance expressed—I will still do all I can to make you happy. But Adrian read with uncertain aim the charactery of her face, and might mistake.—Clara was always with her, and she seemed most at ease, when, in an obscure corner, she could sit holding her child's hand, silent and lonely. Still Adrian was unable to guess the truth; he entreated them to visit us at Windsor, and they promised to come during the following month.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was May before they arrived: the season had decked the forest trees with leaves, and its paths with a thousand flowers. We had notice of their intention the day before; and, early in the morning, Perdita arrived with her daughter. Raymond would follow soon, she said; he had been detained by business. According to Adrian's account, I had expected to find her sad; but, on the contrary, she appeared in the highest spirits: true, she had grown thin, her eyes were somewhat hollow, and her cheeks sunk, though tinged by a bright glow. She was delighted to see us; caressed our children, praised their growth and improvement; Clara also was pleased to meet again her young friend Alfred; all kinds of childish games were entered into, in which Perdita joined. She communicated her gaiety to us, and as we amused ourselves on the Castle Terrace, it appeared that a happier, less care-worn party could not have been assembled. "This is better, Mamma," said Clara, "than being in that dismal London, where you often cry, and never laugh as you do now."—"Silence, little foolish thing," replied her mother, "and remember any one that mentions London is sent to Coventry for an hour."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Soon after, Raymond arrived. He did not join as usual in the playful spirit of the rest; but, entering into conversation with Adrian and myself, by degrees we seceded from our companions, and Idris and Perdita only remained with the children. Raymond talked of his new buildings; of his plan for an establishment for the better education of the poor; as usual Adrian and he entered into argument, and the time slipped away unperceived.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We assembled again towards evening, and Perdita insisted on our having recourse to music. She wanted, she said, to give us a specimen of her new accomplishment; for since she had been in London, she had applied herself to music, and sang, without much power, but with a great deal of sweetness. We were not permitted by her to select any but light-hearted melodies; and all the Operas of Mozart were called into service, that we might choose the most exhilarating of his airs. Among the other transcendant attributes of Mozart's music, it possesses more than any other that of appearing to come from the heart; you enter into the passions expressed by him, and are transported with grief, joy, anger, or confusion, as he, our soul's master, chooses to inspire. For some time, the spirit of hilarity was kept up; but, at length, Perdita receded from the piano, for Raymond had joined in the trio of "Taci ingiusto core," in Don Giovanni, whose arch entreaty was softened by him into tenderness, and thrilled her heart with memories of the changed past; it was the same voice, the same tone, the self-same sounds and words, which often before she had received, as the homage of love to her—no longer was it that; and this concord of sound with its dissonance of expression penetrated her with regret and despair. Soon after Idris, who was at the harp, turned to that passionate and sorrowful air in Figaro, "Porgi, amor, qualche risforo," in which the deserted Countess laments the change of the faithless Almaviva. The soul of tender sorrow is breathed forth in this strain; and the sweet voice of Idris, sustained by the mournful chords of her instrument, added to the expression of the words. During the pathetic appeal with which it concludes, a stifled sob attracted our attention to Perdita, the cessation of the music recalled her to herself, she hastened out of the hall—I followed her. At first, she seemed to wish to shun me; and then, yielding to my earnest questioning, she threw herself on my neck, and wept aloud:—"Once more," she cried, "once more on your friendly breast, my beloved brother, can the lost Perdita pour forth her sorrows. I had imposed a law of silence on myself; and for months I have kept it. I do wrong in weeping now, and greater wrong in giving words to my grief. I will not speak! Be it enough for you to know that I am miserable—be it enough for you to know, that the painted veil of life is rent, that I sit for ever shrouded in darkness and gloom, that grief is my sister, everlasting lamentation my mate!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I endeavoured to console her; I did not question her! but I caressed her, assured her of my deepest affection and my intense interest in the changes of her fortune:—"Dear words," she cried, "expressions of love come upon my ear, like the remembered sounds of forgotten music, that had been dear to me. They are vain, I know; how very vain in their attempt to soothe or comfort me. Dearest Lionel, you cannot guess what I have suffered during these long months. I have read of mourners in ancient days, who clothed themselves in sackcloth, scattered dust upon their heads, ate their bread mingled with ashes, and took up their abode on the bleak mountain tops, reproaching heaven and earth aloud with their misfortunes. Why this is the very luxury of sorrow! thus one might go on from day to day contriving new extravagances, revelling in the paraphernalia of woe, wedded to all the appurtenances of despair. Alas! I must for ever conceal the wretchedness that consumes me. I must weave a veil of dazzling falsehood to hide my grief from vulgar eyes, smoothe my brow, and paint my lips in deceitful smiles—even in solitude I dare not think how lost I am, lest I become insane and rave."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The tears and agitation of my poor sister had rendered her unfit to return to the circle we had left—so I persuaded her to let me drive her through the park; and, during the ride, I induced her to confide the tale of her unhappiness to me, fancying that talking of it would lighten the burthen, and certain that, if there were a remedy, it should be found and secured to her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Several weeks had elapsed since the festival of the anniversary, and she had been unable to calm her mind, or to subdue her thoughts to any regular train. Sometimes she reproached herself for taking too bitterly to heart, that which many would esteem an imaginary evil; but this was no subject for reason; and, ignorant as she was of the motives and true conduct of Raymond, things assumed for her even a worse appearance, than the reality warranted. He was seldom at the palace; never, but when he was assured that his public duties would prevent his remaining alone with Perdita. They seldom addressed each other, shunning explanation, each fearing any communication the other might make. Suddenly, however, the manners of Raymond changed; he appeared to desire to find opportunities of bringing about a return to kindness and intimacy with my sister. The tide of love towards her appeared to flow again; he could never forget, how once he had been devoted to her, making her the shrine and storehouse wherein to place every thought and every sentiment. Shame seemed to hold him back; yet he evidently wished to establish a renewal of confidence and affection. From the moment Perdita had sufficiently recovered herself to form any plan of action, she had laid one down, which now she prepared to follow. She received these tokens of returning love with gentleness; she did not shun his company; but she endeavoured to place a barrier in the way of familiar intercourse or painful discussion, which mingled pride and shame prevented Raymond from surmounting. He began at last to shew signs of angry impatience, and Perdita became aware that the system she had adopted could not continue; she must explain herself to him; she could not summon courage to speak—she wrote thus:—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Read this letter with patience, I entreat you. It will contain no reproaches. Reproach is indeed an idle word: for what should I reproach you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Allow me in some degree to explain my feeling; without that, we shall both grope in the dark, mistaking one another; erring from the path which may conduct, one of us at least, to a more eligible mode of life than that led by either during the last few weeks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I loved you—I love you—neither anger nor pride dictates these lines; but a feeling beyond, deeper, and more unalterable than either. My affections are wounded; it is impossible to heal them:—cease then the vain endeavour, if indeed that way your endeavours tend. Forgiveness! Return! Idle words are these! I forgive the pain I endure; but the trodden path cannot be retraced.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Common affection might have been satisfied with common usages. I believed that you read my heart, and knew its devotion, its unalienable fidelity towards you. I never loved any but you. You came the embodied image of my fondest dreams. The praise of men, power and high aspirations attended your career. Love for you invested the world for me in enchanted light; it was no longer the earth I trod—the earth, common mother, yielding only trite and stale repetition of objects and circumstances old and worn out. I lived in a temple glorified by intensest sense of devotion and rapture; I walked, a consecrated being, contemplating only your power, your excellence;</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > For O, you stood beside me, like my youth,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Transformed for me the real to a dream,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Cloathing the palpable and familiar</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With golden exhalations of the dawn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >'The bloom has vanished from my life'—there is no morning to this all investing night; no rising to the set-sun of love. In those days the rest of the world was nothing to me: all other men—I never considered nor felt what they were; nor did I look on you as one of them. Separated from them; exalted in my heart; sole possessor of my affections; single object of my hopes, the best half of myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ah, Raymond, were we not happy? Did the sun shine on any, who could enjoy its light with purer and more intense bliss? It was not—it is not a common infidelity at which I repine. It is the disunion of an whole which may not have parts; it is the carelessness with which you have shaken off the mantle of election with which to me you were invested, and have become one among the many. Dream not to alter this. Is not love a divinity, because it is immortal? Did not I appear sanctified, even to myself, because this love had for its temple my heart? I have gazed on you as you slept, melted even to tears, as the idea filled my mind, that all I possessed lay cradled in those idolized, but mortal lineaments before me. Yet, even then, I have checked thick-coming fears with one thought; I would not fear death, for the emotions that linked us must be immortal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And now I do not fear death. I should be well pleased to close my eyes, never more to open them again. And yet I fear it; even as I fear all things; for in any state of being linked by the chain of memory with this, happiness would not return—even in Paradise, I must feel that your love was less enduring than the mortal beatings of my fragile heart, every pulse of which knells audibly,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The funeral note</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of love, deep buried, without resurrection.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > No—no—me miserable; for love extinct there is no resurrection!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yet I love you. Yet, and for ever, would I contribute all I possess to your welfare. On account of a tattling world; for the sake of my—of our child, I would remain by you, Raymond, share your fortunes, partake your counsel. Shall it be thus? We are no longer lovers; nor can I call myself a friend to any; since, lost as I am, I have no thought to spare from my own wretched, engrossing self. But it will please me to see you each day! to listen to the public voice praising you; to keep up your paternal love for our girl; to hear your voice; to know that I am near you, though you are no longer mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If you wish to break the chains that bind us, say the word, and it shall be done—I will take all the blame on myself, of harshness or unkindness, in the world's eye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yet, as I have said, I should be best pleased, at least for the present, to live under the same roof with you. When the fever of my young life is spent; when placid age shall tame the vulture that devours me, friendship may come, love and hope being dead. May this be true? Can my soul, inextricably linked to this perishable frame, become lethargic and cold, even as this sensitive mechanism shall lose its youthful elasticity? Then, with lack-lustre eyes, grey hairs, and wrinkled brow, though now the words sound hollow and meaningless, then, tottering on the grave's extreme edge, I may be—your affectionate and true friend,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"PERDITA."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond's answer was brief. What indeed could he reply to her complaints, to her griefs which she jealously paled round, keeping out all thought of remedy. "Notwithstanding your bitter letter," he wrote, "for bitter I must call it, you are the chief person in my estimation, and it is your happiness that I would principally consult. Do that which seems best to you: and if you can receive gratification from one mode of life in preference to another, do not let me be any obstacle. I foresee that the plan which you mark out in your letter will not endure long; but you are mistress of yourself, and it is my sincere wish to contribute as far as you will permit me to your happiness."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Raymond has prophesied well," said Perdita, "alas, that it should be so! our present mode of life cannot continue long, yet I will not be the first to propose alteration. He beholds in me one whom he has injured even unto death; and I derive no hope from his kindness; no change can possibly be brought about even by his best intentions. As well might Cleopatra have worn as an ornament the vinegar which contained her dissolved pearl, as I be content with the love that Raymond can now offer me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I own that I did not see her misfortune with the same eyes as Perdita. At all events methought that the wound could be healed; and, if they remained together, it would be so. I endeavoured therefore to sooth and soften her mind; and it was not until after many endeavours that I gave up the task as impracticable. Perdita listened to me impatiently, and answered with some asperity:—"Do you think that any of your arguments are new to me? or that my own burning wishes and intense anguish have not suggested them all a thousand times, with far more eagerness and subtlety than you can put into them? Lionel, you cannot understand what woman's love is. In days of happiness I have often repeated to myself, with a grateful heart and exulting spirit, all that Raymond sacrificed for me. I was a poor, uneducated, unbefriended, mountain girl, raised from nothingness by him. All that I possessed of the luxuries of life came from him. He gave me an illustrious name and noble station; the world's respect reflected from his own glory: all this joined to his own undying love, inspired me with sensations towards him, akin to those with which we regard the Giver of life. I gave him love only. I devoted myself to him: imperfect creature that I was, I took myself to task, that I might become worthy of him. I watched over my hasty temper, subdued my burning impatience of character, schooled my self-engrossing thoughts, educating myself to the best perfection I might attain, that the fruit of my exertions might be his happiness. I took no merit to myself for this. He deserved it all—all labour, all devotion, all sacrifice; I would have toiled up a scaleless Alp, to pluck a flower that would please him. I was ready to quit you all, my beloved and gifted companions, and to live only with him, for him. I could not do otherwise, even if I had wished; for if we are said to have two souls, he was my better soul, to which the other was a perpetual slave. One only return did he owe me, even fidelity. I earned that; I deserved it. Because I was mountain bred, unallied to the noble and wealthy, shall he think to repay me by an empty name and station? Let him take them back; without his love they are nothing to me. Their only merit in my eyes was that they were his."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus passionately Perdita ran on. When I adverted to the question of their entire separation, she replied: "Be it so! One day the period will arrive; I know it, and feel it. But in this I am a coward. This imperfect companionship, and our masquerade of union, are strangely dear to me. It is painful, I allow, destructive, impracticable. It keeps up a perpetual fever in my veins; it frets my immedicable wound; it is instinct with poison. Yet I must cling to it; perhaps it will kill me soon, and thus perform a thankful office."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the mean time, Raymond had remained with Adrian and Idris. He was naturally frank; the continued absence of Perdita and myself became remarkable; and Raymond soon found relief from the constraint of months, by an unreserved confidence with his two friends. He related to them the situation in which he had found Evadne. At first, from delicacy to Adrian he concealed her name; but it was divulged in the course of his narrative, and her former lover heard with the most acute agitation the history of her sufferings. Idris had shared Perdita's ill opinion of the Greek; but Raymond's account softened and interested her. Evadne's constancy, fortitude, even her ill-fated and ill-regulated love, were matter of admiration and pity; especially when, from the detail of the events of the nineteenth of October, it was apparent that she preferred suffering and death to any in her eyes degrading application for the pity and assistance of her lover. Her subsequent conduct did not diminish this interest. At first, relieved from famine and the grave, watched over by Raymond with the tenderest assiduity, with that feeling of repose peculiar to convalescence, Evadne gave herself up to rapturous gratitude and love. But reflection returned with health. She questioned him with regard to the motives which had occasioned his critical absence. She framed her enquiries with Greek subtlety; she formed her conclusions with the decision and firmness peculiar to her disposition. She could not divine, that the breach which she had occasioned between Raymond and Perdita was already irreparable: but she knew, that under the present system it would be widened each day, and that its result must be to destroy her lover's happiness, and to implant the fangs of remorse in his heart. From the moment that she perceived the right line of conduct, she resolved to adopt it, and to part from Raymond for ever. Conflicting passions, long-cherished love, and self-inflicted disappointment, made her regard death alone as sufficient refuge for her woe. But the same feelings and opinions which had before restrained her, acted with redoubled force; for she knew that the reflection that he had occasioned her death, would pursue Raymond through life, poisoning every enjoyment, clouding every prospect. Besides, though the violence of her anguish made life hateful, it had not yet produced that monotonous, lethargic sense of changeless misery which for the most part produces suicide. Her energy of character induced her still to combat with the ills of life; even those attendant on hopeless love presented themselves, rather in the shape of an adversary to be overcome, than of a victor to whom she must submit. Besides, she had memories of past tenderness to cherish, smiles, words, and even tears, to con over, which, though remembered in desertion and sorrow, were to be preferred to the forgetfulness of the grave. It was impossible to guess at the whole of her plan. Her letter to Raymond gave no clue for discovery; it assured him, that she was in no danger of wanting the means of life; she promised in it to preserve herself, and some future day perhaps to present herself to him in a station not unworthy of her. She then bade him, with the eloquence of despair and of unalterable love, a last farewell.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All these circumstances were now related to Adrian and Idris. Raymond then lamented the cureless evil of his situation with Perdita. He declared, notwithstanding her harshness, he even called it coldness, that he loved her. He had been ready once with the humility of a penitent, and the duty of a vassal, to surrender himself to her; giving up his very soul to her tutelage, to become her pupil, her slave, her bondsman. She had rejected these advances; and the time for such exuberant submission, which must be founded on love and nourished by it, was now passed. Still all his wishes and endeavours were directed towards her peace, and his chief discomfort arose from the perception that he exerted himself in vain. If she were to continue inflexible in the line of conduct she now pursued, they must part. The combinations and occurrences of this senseless mode of intercourse were maddening to him. Yet he would not propose the separation. He was haunted by the fear of causing the death of one or other of the beings implicated in these events; and he could not persuade himself to undertake to direct the course of events, lest, ignorant of the land he traversed, he should lead those attached to the car into irremediable ruin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a discussion on this subject, which lasted for several hours, he took leave of his friends, and returned to town, unwilling to meet Perdita before us, conscious, as we all must be, of the thoughts uppermost in the minds of both. Perdita prepared to follow him with her child. Idris endeavoured to persuade her to remain. My poor sister looked at the counsellor with affright. She knew that Raymond had conversed with her; had he instigated this request?—was this to be the prelude to their eternal separation?—I have said, that the defects of her character awoke and acquired vigour from her unnatural position. She regarded with suspicion the invitation of Idris; she embraced me, as if she were about to be deprived of my affection also: calling me her more than brother, her only friend, her last hope, she pathetically conjured me not to cease to love her; and with encreased anxiety she departed for London, the scene and cause of all her misery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The scenes that followed, convinced her that she had not yet fathomed the obscure gulph into which she had plunged. Her unhappiness assumed every day a new shape; every day some unexpected event seemed to close, while in fact it led onward, the train of calamities which now befell her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The selected passion of the soul of Raymond was ambition. Readiness of talent, a capacity of entering into, and leading the dispositions of men; earnest desire of distinction were the awakeners and nurses of his ambition. But other ingredients mingled with these, and prevented him from becoming the calculating, determined character, which alone forms a successful hero. He was obstinate, but not firm; benevolent in his first movements; harsh and reckless when provoked. Above all, he was remorseless and unyielding in the pursuit of any object of desire, however lawless. Love of pleasure, and the softer sensibilities of our nature, made a prominent part of his character, conquering the conqueror; holding him in at the moment of acquisition; sweeping away ambition's web; making him forget the toil of weeks, for the sake of one moment's indulgence of the new and actual object of his wishes. Obeying these impulses, he had become the husband of Perdita: egged on by them, he found himself the lover of Evadne. He had now lost both. He had neither the ennobling self-gratulation, which constancy inspires, to console him, nor the voluptuous sense of abandonment to a forbidden, but intoxicating passion. His heart was exhausted by the recent events; his enjoyment of life was destroyed by the resentment of Perdita, and the flight of Evadne; and the inflexibility of the former, set the last seal upon the annihilation of his hopes. As long as their disunion remained a secret, he cherished an expectation of re-awakening past tenderness in her bosom; now that we were all made acquainted with these occurrences, and that Perdita, by declaring her resolves to others, in a manner pledged herself to their accomplishment, he gave up the idea of re-union as futile, and sought only, since he was unable to influence her to change, to reconcile himself to the present state of things. He made a vow against love and its train of struggles, disappointment and remorse, and sought in mere sensual enjoyment, a remedy for the injurious inroads of passion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Debasement of character is the certain follower of such pursuits. Yet this consequence would not have been immediately remarkable, if Raymond had continued to apply himself to the execution of his plans for the public benefit, and the fulfilling his duties as Protector. But, extreme in all things, given up to immediate impressions, he entered with ardour into this new pursuit of pleasure, and followed up the incongruous intimacies occasioned by it without reflection or foresight. The council-chamber was deserted; the crowds which attended on him as agents to his various projects were neglected. Festivity, and even libertinism, became the order of the day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita beheld with affright the encreasing disorder. For a moment she thought that she could stem the torrent, and that Raymond could be induced to hear reason from her.—Vain hope! The moment of her influence was passed. He listened with haughtiness, replied disdainfully; and, if in truth, she succeeded in awakening his conscience, the sole effect was that he sought an opiate for the pang in oblivious riot. With the energy natural to her, Perdita then endeavoured to supply his place. Their still apparent union permitted her to do much; but no woman could, in the end, present a remedy to the encreasing negligence of the Protector; who, as if seized with a paroxysm of insanity, trampled on all ceremony, all order, all duty, and gave himself up to license.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Reports of these strange proceedings reached us, and we were undecided what method to adopt to restore our friend to himself and his country, when Perdita suddenly appeared among us. She detailed the progress of the mournful change, and entreated Adrian and myself to go up to London, and endeavour to remedy the encreasing evil:—"Tell him," she cried, "tell Lord Raymond, that my presence shall no longer annoy him. That he need not plunge into this destructive dissipation for the sake of disgusting me, and causing me to fly. This purpose is now accomplished; he will never see me more. But let me, it is my last entreaty, let me in the praises of his countrymen and the prosperity of England, find the choice of my youth justified."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During our ride up to town, Adrian and I discussed and argued upon Raymond's conduct, and his falling off from the hopes of permanent excellence on his part, which he had before given us cause to entertain. My friend and I had both been educated in one school, or rather I was his pupil in the opinion, that steady adherence to principle was the only road to honour; a ceaseless observance of the laws of general utility, the only conscientious aim of human ambition. But though we both entertained these ideas, we differed in their application. Resentment added also a sting to my censure; and I reprobated Raymond's conduct in severe terms. Adrian was more benign, more considerate. He admitted that the principles that I laid down were the best; but he denied that they were the only ones. Quoting the text, there are many mansions in my father's house, he insisted that the modes of becoming good or great, varied as much as the dispositions of men, of whom it might be said, as of the leaves of the forest, there were no two alike.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We arrived in London at about eleven at night. We conjectured, notwithstanding what we had heard, that we should find Raymond in St. Stephen's: thither we sped. The chamber was full—but there was no Protector; and there was an austere discontent manifest on the countenances of the leaders, and a whispering and busy tattle among the underlings, not less ominous. We hastened to the palace of the Protectorate. We found Raymond in his dining room with six others: the bottle was being pushed about merrily, and had made considerable inroads on the understanding of one or two. He who sat near Raymond was telling a story, which convulsed the rest with laughter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond sat among them, though while he entered into the spirit of the hour, his natural dignity never forsook him. He was gay, playful, fascinating—but never did he overstep the modesty of nature, or the respect due to himself, in his wildest sallies. Yet I own, that considering the task which Raymond had taken on himself as Protector of England, and the cares to which it became him to attend, I was exceedingly provoked to observe the worthless fellows on whom his time was wasted, and the jovial if not drunken spirit which seemed on the point of robbing him of his better self. I stood watching the scene, while Adrian flitted like a shadow in among them, and, by a word and look of sobriety, endeavoured to restore order in the assembly. Raymond expressed himself delighted to see him, declaring that he should make one in the festivity of the night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This action of Adrian provoked me. I was indignant that he should sit at the same table with the companions of Raymond—men of abandoned characters, or rather without any, the refuse of high-bred luxury, the disgrace of their country. "Let me entreat Adrian," I cried, "not to comply: rather join with me in endeavouring to withdraw Lord Raymond from this scene, and restore him to other society."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My good fellow," said Raymond, "this is neither the time nor place for the delivery of a moral lecture: take my word for it that my amusements and society are not so bad as you imagine. We are neither hypocrites or fools —for the rest, 'Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?'"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I turned angrily away: "Verney," said Adrian, "you are very cynical: sit down; or if you will not, perhaps, as you are not a frequent visitor, Lord Raymond will humour you, and accompany us, as we had previously agreed upon, to parliament."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond looked keenly at him; he could read benignity only in his gentle lineaments; he turned to me, observing with scorn my moody and stern demeanour. "Come," said Adrian, "I have promised for you, enable me to keep my engagement. Come with us."—Raymond made an uneasy movement, and laconically replied—"I won't!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The party in the mean time had broken up. They looked at the pictures, strolled into the other apartments, talked of billiards, and one by one vanished. Raymond strode angrily up and down the room. I stood ready to receive and reply to his reproaches. Adrian leaned against the wall. "This is infinitely ridiculous," he cried, "if you were school-boys, you could not conduct yourselves more unreasonably."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You do not understand," said Raymond. "This is only part of a system:—a scheme of tyranny to which I will never submit. Because I am Protector of England, am I to be the only slave in its empire? My privacy invaded, my actions censured, my friends insulted? But I will get rid of the whole together.—Be you witnesses," and he took the star, insignia of office, from his breast, and threw it on the table. "I renounce my office, I abdicate my power—assume it who will!"—-</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let him assume it," exclaimed Adrian, "who can pronounce himself, or whom the world will pronounce to be your superior. There does not exist the man in England with adequate presumption. Know yourself, Raymond, and your indignation will cease; your complacency return. A few months ago, whenever we prayed for the prosperity of our country, or our own, we at the same time prayed for the life and welfare of the Protector, as indissolubly linked to it. Your hours were devoted to our benefit, your ambition was to obtain our commendation. You decorated our towns with edifices, you bestowed on us useful establishments, you gifted the soil with abundant fertility. The powerful and unjust cowered at the steps of your judgment-seat, and the poor and oppressed arose like morn-awakened flowers under the sunshine of your protection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Can you wonder that we are all aghast and mourn, when this appears changed? But, come, this splenetic fit is already passed; resume your functions; your partizans will hail you; your enemies be silenced; our love, honour, and duty will again be manifested towards you. Master yourself, Raymond, and the world is subject to you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"All this would be very good sense, if addressed to another," replied Raymond, moodily, "con the lesson yourself, and you, the first peer of the land, may become its sovereign. You the good, the wise, the just, may rule all hearts. But I perceive, too soon for my own happiness, too late for England's good, that I undertook a task to which I am unequal. I cannot rule myself. My passions are my masters; my smallest impulse my tyrant. Do you think that I renounced the Protectorate (and I have renounced it) in a fit of spleen? By the God that lives, I swear never to take up that bauble again; never again to burthen myself with the weight of care and misery, of which that is the visible sign.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Once I desired to be a king. It was in the hey-day of youth, in the pride of boyish folly. I knew myself when I renounced it. I renounced it to gain —no matter what—for that also I have lost. For many months I have submitted to this mock majesty—this solemn jest. I am its dupe no longer. I will be free.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I have lost that which adorned and dignified my life; that which linked me to other men. Again I am a solitary man; and I will become again, as in my early years, a wanderer, a soldier of fortune. My friends, for Verney, I feel that you are my friend, do not endeavour to shake my resolve. Perdita, wedded to an imagination, careless of what is behind the veil, whose charactery is in truth faulty and vile, Perdita has renounced me. With her it was pretty enough to play a sovereign's part; and, as in the recesses of your beloved forest we acted masques, and imagined ourselves Arcadian shepherds, to please the fancy of the moment—so was I content, more for Perdita's sake than my own, to take on me the character of one of the great ones of the earth; to lead her behind the scenes of grandeur, to vary her life with a short act of magnificence and power. This was to be the colour; love and confidence the substance of our existence. But we must live, and not act our lives; pursuing the shadow, I lost the reality—now I renounce both.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Adrian, I am about to return to Greece, to become again a soldier, perhaps a conqueror. Will you accompany me? You will behold new scenes; see a new people; witness the mighty struggle there going forward between civilization and barbarism; behold, and perhaps direct the efforts of a young and vigorous population, for liberty and order. Come with me. I have expected you. I waited for this moment; all is prepared;—will you accompany me?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will," replied Adrian. "Immediately?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To-morrow if you will."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Reflect!" I cried.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Wherefore?" asked Raymond—"My dear fellow, I have done nothing else than reflect on this step the live-long summer; and be assured that Adrian has condensed an age of reflection into this little moment. Do not talk of reflection; from this moment I abjure it; this is my only happy moment during a long interval of time. I must go, Lionel—the Gods will it; and I must. Do not endeavour to deprive me of my companion, the out-cast's friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"One word more concerning unkind, unjust Perdita. For a time, I thought that, by watching a complying moment, fostering the still warm ashes, I might relume in her the flame of love. It is more cold within her, than a fire left by gypsies in winter-time, the spent embers crowned by a pyramid of snow. Then, in endeavouring to do violence to my own disposition, I made all worse than before. Still I think, that time, and even absence, may restore her to me. Remember, that I love her still, that my dearest hope is that she will again be mine. I know, though she does not, how false the veil is which she has spread over the reality—do not endeavour to rend this deceptive covering, but by degrees withdraw it. Present her with a mirror, in which she may know herself; and, when she is an adept in that necessary but difficult science, she will wonder at her present mistake, and hasten to restore to me, what is by right mine, her forgiveness, her kind thoughts, her love."</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER X.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >AFTER these events, it was long before we were able to attain any degree of composure. A moral tempest had wrecked our richly freighted vessel, and we, remnants of the diminished crew, were aghast at the losses and changes which we had undergone. Idris passionately loved her brother, and could ill brook an absence whose duration was uncertain; his society was dear and necessary to me—I had followed up my chosen literary occupations with delight under his tutorship and assistance; his mild philosophy, unerring reason, and enthusiastic friendship were the best ingredient, the exalted spirit of our circle; even the children bitterly regretted the loss of their kind playfellow. Deeper grief oppressed Perdita. In spite of resentment, by day and night she figured to herself the toils and dangers of the wanderers. Raymond absent, struggling with difficulties, lost to the power and rank of the Protectorate, exposed to the perils of war, became an object of anxious interest; not that she felt any inclination to recall him, if recall must imply a return to their former union. Such return she felt to be impossible; and while she believed it to be thus, and with anguish regretted that so it should be, she continued angry and impatient with him, who occasioned her misery. These perplexities and regrets caused her to bathe her pillow with nightly tears, and to reduce her in person and in mind to the shadow of what she had been. She sought solitude, and avoided us when in gaiety and unrestrained affection we met in a family circle. Lonely musings, interminable wanderings, and solemn music were her only pastimes. She neglected even her child; shutting her heart against all tenderness, she grew reserved towards me, her first and fast friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I could not see her thus lost, without exerting myself to remedy the evil —remediless I knew, if I could not in the end bring her to reconcile herself to Raymond. Before he went I used every argument, every persuasion to induce her to stop his journey. She answered the one with a gush of tears—telling me that to be persuaded—life and the goods of life were a cheap exchange. It was not will that she wanted, but the capacity; again and again she declared, it were as easy to enchain the sea, to put reins on the wind's viewless courses, as for her to take truth for falsehood, deceit for honesty, heartless communion for sincere, confiding love. She answered my reasonings more briefly, declaring with disdain, that the reason was hers; and, until I could persuade her that the past could be unacted, that maturity could go back to the cradle, and that all that was could become as though it had never been, it was useless to assure her that no real change had taken place in her fate. And thus with stern pride she suffered him to go, though her very heart-strings cracked at the fulfilling of the act, which rent from her all that made life valuable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To change the scene for her, and even for ourselves, all unhinged by the cloud that had come over us, I persuaded my two remaining companions that it were better that we should absent ourselves for a time from Windsor. We visited the north of England, my native Ulswater, and lingered in scenes dear from a thousand associations. We lengthened our tour into Scotland, that we might see Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond; thence we crossed to Ireland, and passed several weeks in the neighbourhood of Killarney. The change of scene operated to a great degree as I expected; after a year's absence, Perdita returned in gentler and more docile mood to Windsor. The first sight of this place for a time unhinged her. Here every spot was distinct with associations now grown bitter. The forest glades, the ferny dells, and lawny uplands, the cultivated and cheerful country spread around the silver pathway of ancient Thames, all earth, air, and wave, took up one choral voice, inspired by memory, instinct with plaintive regret.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But my essay towards bringing her to a saner view of her own situation, did not end here. Perdita was still to a great degree uneducated. When first she left her peasant life, and resided with the elegant and cultivated Evadne, the only accomplishment she brought to any perfection was that of painting, for which she had a taste almost amounting to genius. This had occupied her in her lonely cottage, when she quitted her Greek friend's protection. Her pallet and easel were now thrown aside; did she try to paint, thronging recollections made her hand tremble, her eyes fill with tears. With this occupation she gave up almost every other; and her mind preyed upon itself almost to madness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For my own part, since Adrian had first withdrawn me from my selvatic wilderness to his own paradise of order and beauty, I had been wedded to literature. I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books. To me they stood in the place of an active career, of ambition, and those palpable excitements necessary to the multitude. The collation of philosophical opinions, the study of historical facts, the acquirement of languages, were at once my recreation, and the serious aim of my life. I turned author myself. My productions however were sufficiently unpretending; they were confined to the biography of favourite historical characters, especially those whom I believed to have been traduced, or about whom clung obscurity and doubt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As my authorship increased, I acquired new sympathies and pleasures. I found another and a valuable link to enchain me to my fellow-creatures; my point of sight was extended, and the inclinations and capacities of all human beings became deeply interesting to me. Kings have been called the fathers of their people. Suddenly I became as it were the father of all mankind. Posterity became my heirs. My thoughts were gems to enrich the treasure house of man's intellectual possessions; each sentiment was a precious gift I bestowed on them. Let not these aspirations be attributed to vanity. They were not expressed in words, nor even reduced to form in my own mind; but they filled my soul, exalting my thoughts, raising a glow of enthusiasm, and led me out of the obscure path in which I before walked, into the bright noon-enlightened highway of mankind, making me, citizen of the world, a candidate for immortal honors, an eager aspirant to the praise and sympathy of my fellow men.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No one certainly ever enjoyed the pleasures of composition more intensely than I. If I left the woods, the solemn music of the waving branches, and the majestic temple of nature, I sought the vast halls of the Castle, and looked over wide, fertile England, spread beneath our regal mount, and listened the while to inspiring strains of music. At such times solemn harmonies or spirit-stirring airs gave wings to my lagging thoughts, permitting them, methought, to penetrate the last veil of nature and her God, and to display the highest beauty in visible expression to the understandings of men. As the music went on, my ideas seemed to quit their mortal dwelling house; they shook their pinions and began a flight, sailing on the placid current of thought, filling the creation with new glory, and rousing sublime imagery that else had slept voiceless. Then I would hasten to my desk, weave the new-found web of mind in firm texture and brilliant colours, leaving the fashioning of the material to a calmer moment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But this account, which might as properly belong to a former period of my life as to the present moment, leads me far afield. It was the pleasure I took in literature, the discipline of mind I found arise from it, that made me eager to lead Perdita to the same pursuits. I began with light hand and gentle allurement; first exciting her curiosity, and then satisfying it in such a way as might occasion her, at the same time that she half forgot her sorrows in occupation, to find in the hours that succeeded a reaction of benevolence and toleration.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Intellectual activity, though not directed towards books, had always been my sister's characteristic. It had been displayed early in life, leading her out to solitary musing among her native mountains, causing her to form innumerous combinations from common objects, giving strength to her perceptions, and swiftness to their arrangement. Love had come, as the rod of the master-prophet, to swallow up every minor propensity. Love had doubled all her excellencies, and placed a diadem on her genius. Was she to cease to love? Take the colours and odour from the rose, change the sweet nutriment of mother's milk to gall and poison; as easily might you wean Perdita from love. She grieved for the loss of Raymond with an anguish, that exiled all smile from her lips, and trenched sad lines on her brow of beauty. But each day seemed to change the nature of her suffering, and every succeeding hour forced her to alter (if so I may style it) the fashion of her soul's mourning garb. For a time music was able to satisfy the cravings of her mental hunger, and her melancholy thoughts renewed themselves in each change of key, and varied with every alteration in the strain. My schooling first impelled her towards books; and, if music had been the food of sorrow, the productions of the wise became its medicine. The acquisition of unknown languages was too tedious an occupation, for one who referred every expression to the universe within, and read not, as many do, for the mere sake of filling up time; but who was still questioning herself and her author, moulding every idea in a thousand ways, ardently desirous for the discovery of truth in every sentence. She sought to improve her understanding; mechanically her heart and dispositions became soft and gentle under this benign discipline. After awhile she discovered, that amidst all her newly acquired knowledge, her own character, which formerly she fancied that she thoroughly understood, became the first in rank among the terrae incognitae, the pathless wilds of a country that had no chart. Erringly and strangely she began the task of self-examination with self-condemnation. And then again she became aware of her own excellencies, and began to balance with juster scales the shades of good and evil. I, who longed beyond words, to restore her to the happiness it was still in her power to enjoy, watched with anxiety the result of these internal proceedings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But man is a strange animal. We cannot calculate on his forces like that of an engine; and, though an impulse draw with a forty-horse power at what appears willing to yield to one, yet in contempt of calculation the movement is not effected. Neither grief, philosophy, nor love could make Perdita think with mildness of the dereliction of Raymond. She now took pleasure in my society; towards Idris she felt and displayed a full and affectionate sense of her worth—she restored to her child in abundant measure her tenderness and care. But I could discover, amidst all her repinings, deep resentment towards Raymond, and an unfading sense of injury, that plucked from me my hope, when I appeared nearest to its fulfilment. Among other painful restrictions, she has occasioned it to become a law among us, never to mention Raymond's name before her. She refused to read any communications from Greece, desiring me only to mention when any arrived, and whether the wanderers were well. It was curious that even little Clara observed this law towards her mother. This lovely child was nearly eight years of age. Formerly she had been a light-hearted infant, fanciful, but gay and childish. After the departure of her father, thought became impressed on her young brow. Children, unadepts in language, seldom find words to express their thoughts, nor could we tell in what manner the late events had impressed themselves on her mind. But certainly she had made deep observations while she noted in silence the changes that passed around her. She never mentioned her father to Perdita, she appeared half afraid when she spoke of him to me, and though I tried to draw her out on the subject, and to dispel the gloom that hung about her ideas concerning him, I could not succeed. Yet each foreign post-day she watched for the arrival of letters—knew the post mark, and watched me as I read. I found her often poring over the article of Greek intelligence in the newspaper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is no more painful sight than that of untimely care in children, and it was particularly observable in one whose disposition had heretofore been mirthful. Yet there was so much sweetness and docility about Clara, that your admiration was excited; and if the moods of mind are calculated to paint the cheek with beauty, and endow motions with grace, surely her contemplations must have been celestial; since every lineament was moulded into loveliness, and her motions were more harmonious than the elegant boundings of the fawns of her native forest. I sometimes expostulated with Perdita on the subject of her reserve; but she rejected my counsels, while her daughter's sensibility excited in her a tenderness still more passionate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the lapse of more than a year, Adrian returned from Greece.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When our exiles had first arrived, a truce was in existence between the Turks and Greeks; a truce that was as sleep to the mortal frame, signal of renewed activity on waking. With the numerous soldiers of Asia, with all of warlike stores, ships, and military engines, that wealth and power could command, the Turks at once resolved to crush an enemy, which creeping on by degrees, had from their stronghold in the Morea, acquired Thrace and Macedonia, and had led their armies even to the gates of Constantinople, while their extensive commercial relations gave every European nation an interest in their success. Greece prepared for a vigorous resistance; it rose to a man; and the women, sacrificing their costly ornaments, accoutred their sons for the war, and bade them conquer or die with the spirit of the Spartan mother. The talents and courage of Raymond were highly esteemed among the Greeks. Born at Athens, that city claimed him for her own, and by giving him the command of her peculiar division in the army, the commander-in-chief only possessed superior power. He was numbered among her citizens, his name was added to the list of Grecian heroes. His judgment, activity, and consummate bravery, justified their choice. The Earl of Windsor became a volunteer under his friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It is well," said Adrian, "to prate of war in these pleasant shades, and with much ill-spent oil make a show of joy, because many thousand of our fellow-creatures leave with pain this sweet air and natal earth. I shall not be suspected of being averse to the Greek cause; I know and feel its necessity; it is beyond every other a good cause. I have defended it with my sword, and was willing that my spirit should be breathed out in its defence; freedom is of more worth than life, and the Greeks do well to defend their privilege unto death. But let us not deceive ourselves. The Turks are men; each fibre, each limb is as feeling as our own, and every spasm, be it mental or bodily, is as truly felt in a Turk's heart or brain, as in a Greek's. The last action at which I was present was the taking of ——. The Turks resisted to the last, the garrison perished on the ramparts, and we entered by assault. Every breathing creature within the walls was massacred. Think you, amidst the shrieks of violated innocence and helpless infancy, I did not feel in every nerve the cry of a fellow being? They were men and women, the sufferers, before they were Mahometans, and when they rise turbanless from the grave, in what except their good or evil actions will they be the better or worse than we? Two soldiers contended for a girl, whose rich dress and extreme beauty excited the brutal appetites of these wretches, who, perhaps good men among their families, were changed by the fury of the moment into incarnated evils. An old man, with a silver beard, decrepid and bald, he might be her grandfather, interposed to save her; the battle axe of one of them clove his skull. I rushed to her defence, but rage made them blind and deaf; they did not distinguish my Christian garb or heed my words—words were blunt weapons then, for while war cried "havoc," and murder gave fit echo, how could I—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Turn back the tide of ills, relieving wrong</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With mild accost of soothing eloquence?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of the fellows, enraged at my interference, struck me with his bayonet in the side, and I fell senseless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This wound will probably shorten my life, having shattered a frame, weak of itself. But I am content to die. I have learnt in Greece that one man, more or less, is of small import, while human bodies remain to fill up the thinned ranks of the soldiery; and that the identity of an individual may be overlooked, so that the muster roll contain its full numbers. All this has a different effect upon Raymond. He is able to contemplate the ideal of war, while I am sensible only to its realities. He is a soldier, a general. He can influence the blood-thirsty war-dogs, while I resist their propensities vainly. The cause is simple. Burke has said that, 'in all bodies those who would lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow.' —I cannot follow; for I do not sympathize in their dreams of massacre and glory—to follow and to lead in such a career, is the natural bent of Raymond's mind. He is always successful, and bids fair, at the same time that he acquires high name and station for himself, to secure liberty, probably extended empire, to the Greeks."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita's mind was not softened by this account. He, she thought, can be great and happy without me. Would that I also had a career! Would that I could freight some untried bark with all my hopes, energies, and desires, and launch it forth into the ocean of life—bound for some attainable point, with ambition or pleasure at the helm! But adverse winds detain me on shore; like Ulysses, I sit at the water's edge and weep. But my nerveless hands can neither fell the trees, nor smooth the planks. Under the influence of these melancholy thoughts, she became more than ever in love with sorrow. Yet Adrian's presence did some good; he at once broke through the law of silence observed concerning Raymond. At first she started from the unaccustomed sound; soon she got used to it and to love it, and she listened with avidity to the account of his achievements. Clara got rid also of her restraint; Adrian and she had been old playfellows; and now, as they walked or rode together, he yielded to her earnest entreaty, and repeated, for the hundredth time, some tale of her father's bravery, munificence, or justice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Each vessel in the mean time brought exhilarating tidings from Greece. The presence of a friend in its armies and councils made us enter into the details with enthusiasm; and a short letter now and then from Raymond told us how he was engrossed by the interests of his adopted country. The Greeks were strongly attached to their commercial pursuits, and would have been satisfied with their present acquisitions, had not the Turks roused them by invasion. The patriots were victorious; a spirit of conquest was instilled; and already they looked on Constantinople as their own. Raymond rose perpetually in their estimation; but one man held a superior command to him in their armies. He was conspicuous for his conduct and choice of position in a battle fought in the plains of Thrace, on the banks of the Hebrus, which was to decide the fate of Islam. The Mahometans were defeated, and driven entirely from the country west of this river. The battle was sanguinary, the loss of the Turks apparently irreparable; the Greeks, in losing one man, forgot the nameless crowd strewed upon the bloody field, and they ceased to value themselves on a victory, which cost them— Raymond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the battle of Makri he had led the charge of cavalry, and pursued the fugitives even to the banks of the Hebrus. His favourite horse was found grazing by the margin of the tranquil river. It became a question whether he had fallen among the unrecognized; but no broken ornament or stained trapping betrayed his fate. It was suspected that the Turks, finding themselves possessed of so illustrious a captive, resolved to satisfy their cruelty rather than their avarice, and fearful of the interference of England, had come to the determination of concealing for ever the cold-blooded murder of the soldier they most hated and feared in the squadrons of their enemy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond was not forgotten in England. His abdication of the Protectorate had caused an unexampled sensation; and, when his magnificent and manly system was contrasted with the narrow views of succeeding politicians, the period of his elevation was referred to with sorrow. The perpetual recurrence of his name, joined to most honourable testimonials, in the Greek gazettes, kept up the interest he had excited. He seemed the favourite child of fortune, and his untimely loss eclipsed the world, and shewed forth the remnant of mankind with diminished lustre. They clung with eagerness to the hope held out that he might yet be alive. Their minister at Constantinople was urged to make the necessary perquisitions, and should his existence be ascertained, to demand his release. It was to be hoped that their efforts would succeed, and that though now a prisoner, the sport of cruelty and the mark of hate, he would be rescued from danger and restored to the happiness, power, and honour which he deserved.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The effect of this intelligence upon my sister was striking. She never for a moment credited the story of his death; she resolved instantly to go to Greece. Reasoning and persuasion were thrown away upon her; she would endure no hindrance, no delay. It may be advanced for a truth, that, if argument or entreaty can turn any one from a desperate purpose, whose motive and end depends on the strength of the affections only, then it is right so to turn them, since their docility shews, that neither the motive nor the end were of sufficient force to bear them through the obstacles attendant on their undertaking. If, on the contrary, they are proof against expostulation, this very steadiness is an omen of success; and it becomes the duty of those who love them, to assist in smoothing the obstructions in their path. Such sentiments actuated our little circle. Finding Perdita immoveable, we consulted as to the best means of furthering her purpose. She could not go alone to a country where she had no friends, where she might arrive only to hear the dreadful news, which must overwhelm her with grief and remorse. Adrian, whose health had always been weak, now suffered considerable aggravation of suffering from the effects of his wound. Idris could not endure to leave him in this state; nor was it right either to quit or take with us a young family for a journey of this description. I resolved at length to accompany Perdita. The separation from my Idris was painful—but necessity reconciled us to it in some degree: necessity and the hope of saving Raymond, and restoring him again to happiness and Perdita. No delay was to ensue. Two days after we came to our determination, we set out for Portsmouth, and embarked. The season was May, the weather stormless; we were promised a prosperous voyage. Cherishing the most fervent hopes, embarked on the waste ocean, we saw with delight the receding shore of Britain, and on the wings of desire outspeeded our well filled sails towards the South. The light curling waves bore us onward, and old ocean smiled at the freight of love and hope committed to his charge; it stroked gently its tempestuous plains, and the path was smoothed for us. Day and night the wind right aft, gave steady impulse to our keel—nor did rough gale, or treacherous sand, or destructive rock interpose an obstacle between my sister and the land which was to restore her to her first beloved,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her dear heart's confessor—a heart within that heart.<br /><br /><br /></span><a href="http://pospapendix.blogspot.com/2010/03/mary-shelleys-last-man-volume-two_05.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" Volume Two</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2010/03/mary-wollstonecraft-shelleys-last-man_05.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's "The Last Man"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-73886842794936142052010-03-05T11:07:00.001-08:002010-03-05T11:30:37.761-08:00Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" Volume Two<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Last Man</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary Shelley</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1826</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Volume Two</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER I.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DURING this voyage, when on calm evenings we conversed on deck, watching the glancing of the waves and the changeful appearances of the sky, I discovered the total revolution that the disasters of Raymond had wrought in the mind of my sister. Were they the same waters of love, which, lately cold and cutting as ice, repelling as that, now loosened from their frozen chains, flowed through the regions of her soul in gushing and grateful exuberance? She did not believe that he was dead, but she knew that he was in danger, and the hope of assisting in his liberation, and the idea of soothing by tenderness the ills that he might have undergone, elevated and harmonized the late jarring element of her being. I was not so sanguine as she as to the result of our voyage. She was not sanguine, but secure; and the expectation of seeing the lover she had banished, the husband, friend, heart's companion from whom she had long been alienated, wrapt her senses in delight, her mind in placidity. It was beginning life again; it was leaving barren sands for an abode of fertile beauty; it was a harbour after a tempest, an opiate after sleepless nights, a happy waking from a terrible dream.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Little Clara accompanied us; the poor child did not well understand what was going forward. She heard that we were bound for Greece, that she would see her father, and now, for the first time, she prattled of him to her mother.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On landing at Athens we found difficulties encrease upon us: nor could the storied earth or balmy atmosphere inspire us with enthusiasm or pleasure, while the fate of Raymond was in jeopardy. No man had ever excited so strong an interest in the public mind; this was apparent even among the phlegmatic English, from whom he had long been absent. The Athenians had expected their hero to return in triumph; the women had taught their children to lisp his name joined to thanksgiving; his manly beauty, his courage, his devotion to their cause, made him appear in their eyes almost as one of the ancient deities of the soil descended from their native Olympus to defend them. When they spoke of his probable death and certain captivity, tears streamed from their eyes; even as the women of Syria sorrowed for Adonis, did the wives and mothers of Greece lament our English Raymond—Athens was a city of mourning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All these shews of despair struck Perdita with affright. With that sanguine but confused expectation, which desire engendered while she was at a distance from reality, she had formed an image in her mind of instantaneous change, when she should set her foot on Grecian shores. She fancied that Raymond would already be free, and that her tender attentions would come to entirely obliterate even the memory of his mischance. But his fate was still uncertain; she began to fear the worst, and to feel that her soul's hope was cast on a chance that might prove a blank. The wife and lovely child of Lord Raymond became objects of intense interest in Athens. The gates of their abode were besieged, audible prayers were breathed for his restoration; all these circumstances added to the dismay and fears of Perdita.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My exertions were unremitted: after a time I left Athens, and joined the army stationed at Kishan in Thrace. Bribery, threats, and intrigue, soon discovered the secret that Raymond was alive, a prisoner, suffering the most rigorous confinement and wanton cruelties. We put in movement every impulse of policy and money to redeem him from their hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The impatience of my sister's disposition now returned on her, awakened by repentance, sharpened by remorse. The very beauty of the Grecian climate, during the season of spring, added torture to her sensations. The unexampled loveliness of the flower-clad earth—the genial sunshine and grateful shade—the melody of the birds—the majesty of the woods— the splendour of the marble ruins—the clear effulgence of the stars by night—the combination of all that was exciting and voluptuous in this transcending land, by inspiring a quicker spirit of life and an added sensitiveness to every articulation of her frame, only gave edge to the poignancy of her grief. Each long hour was counted, and "He suffers" was the burthen of all her thoughts. She abstained from food; she lay on the bare earth, and, by such mimickry of his enforced torments, endeavoured to hold communion with his distant pain. I remembered in one of her harshest moments a quotation of mine had roused her to anger and disdain. "Perdita," I had said, "some day you will discover that you have done wrong in again casting Raymond on the thorns of life. When disappointment has sullied his beauty, when a soldier's hardships have bent his manly form, and loneliness made even triumph bitter to him, then you will repent; and regret for the irreparable change</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"will move In hearts all rocky now, the late remorse of love."[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The stinging "remorse of love" now pierced her heart. She accused herself of his journey to Greece—his dangers—his imprisonment. She pictured to herself the anguish of his solitude; she remembered with what eager delight he had in former days made her the partner of his joyful hopes— with what grateful affection he received her sympathy in his cares. She called to mind how often he had declared that solitude was to him the greatest of all evils, and how death itself was to him more full of fear and pain when he pictured to himself a lonely grave. "My best girl," he had said, "relieves me from these phantasies. United to her, cherished in her dear heart, never again shall I know the misery of finding myself alone. Even if I die before you, my Perdita, treasure up my ashes till yours may mingle with mine. It is a foolish sentiment for one who is not a materialist, yet, methinks, even in that dark cell, I may feel that my inanimate dust mingles with yours, and thus have a companion in decay." In her resentful mood, these expressions had been remembered with acrimony and disdain; they visited her in her softened hour, taking sleep from her eyes, all hope of rest from her uneasy mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Two months passed thus, when at last we obtained a promise of Raymond's release. Confinement and hardship had undermined his health; the Turks feared an accomplishment of the threats of the English government, if he died under their hands; they looked upon his recovery as impossible; they delivered him up as a dying man, willingly making over to us the rites of burial.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He came by sea from Constantinople to Athens. The wind, favourable to him, blew so strongly in shore, that we were unable, as we had at first intended, to meet him on his watery road. The watchtower of Athens was besieged by inquirers, each sail eagerly looked out for; till on the first of May the gallant frigate bore in sight, freighted with treasure more invaluable than the wealth which, piloted from Mexico, the vexed Pacific swallowed, or that was conveyed over its tranquil bosom to enrich the crown of Spain. At early dawn the vessel was discovered bearing in shore; it was conjectured that it would cast anchor about five miles from land. The news spread through Athens, and the whole city poured out at the gate of the Piraeus, down the roads, through the vineyards, the olive woods and plantations of fig-trees, towards the harbour. The noisy joy of the populace, the gaudy colours of their dress, the tumult of carriages and horses, the march of soldiers intermixed, the waving of banners and sound of martial music added to the high excitement of the scene; while round us reposed in solemn majesty the relics of antient time. To our right the Acropolis rose high, spectatress of a thousand changes, of ancient glory, Turkish slavery, and the restoration of dear-bought liberty; tombs and cenotaphs were strewed thick around, adorned by ever renewing vegetation; the mighty dead hovered over their monuments, and beheld in our enthusiasm and congregated numbers a renewal of the scenes in which they had been the actors. Perdita and Clara rode in a close carriage; I attended them on horseback. At length we arrived at the harbour; it was agitated by the outward swell of the sea; the beach, as far could be discerned, was covered by a moving multitude, which, urged by those behind toward the sea, again rushed back as the heavy waves with sullen roar burst close to them. I applied my glass, and could discern that the frigate had already cast anchor, fearful of the danger of approaching nearer to a lee shore: a boat was lowered; with a pang I saw that Raymond was unable to descend the vessel's side; he was let down in a chair, and lay wrapt in cloaks at the bottom of the boat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I dismounted, and called to some sailors who were rowing about the harbour to pull up, and take me into their skiff; Perdita at the same moment alighted from her carriage—she seized my arm—"Take me with you," she cried; she was trembling and pale; Clara clung to her—"You must not," I said, "the sea is rough—he will soon be here—do you not see his boat?" The little bark to which I had beckoned had now pulled up; before I could stop her, Perdita, assisted by the sailors was in it—Clara followed her mother—a loud shout echoed from the crowd as we pulled out of the inner harbour; while my sister at the prow, had caught hold of one of the men who was using a glass, asking a thousand questions, careless of the spray that broke over her, deaf, sightless to all, except the little speck that, just visible on the top of the waves, evidently neared. We approached with all the speed six rowers could give; the orderly and picturesque dress of the soldiers on the beach, the sounds of exulting music, the stirring breeze and waving flags, the unchecked exclamations of the eager crowd, whose dark looks and foreign garb were purely eastern; the sight of temple-crowned rock, the white marble of the buildings glittering in the sun, and standing in bright relief against the dark ridge of lofty mountains beyond; the near roar of the sea, the splash of oars, and dash of spray, all steeped my soul in a delirium, unfelt, unimagined in the common course of common life. Trembling, I was unable to continue to look through the glass with which I had watched the motion of the crew, when the frigate's boat had first been launched. We rapidly drew near, so that at length the number and forms of those within could be discerned; its dark sides grew big, and the splash of its oars became audible: I could distinguish the languid form of my friend, as he half raised himself at our approach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita's questions had ceased; she leaned on my arm, panting with emotions too acute for tears—our men pulled alongside the other boat. As a last effort, my sister mustered her strength, her firmness; she stepped from one boat to the other, and then with a shriek she sprang towards Raymond, knelt at his side, and glueing her lips to the hand she seized, her face shrouded by her long hair, gave herself up to tears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond had somewhat raised himself at our approach, but it was with difficulty that he exerted himself even thus much. With sunken cheek and hollow eyes, pale and gaunt, how could I recognize the beloved of Perdita? I continued awe-struck and mute—he looked smilingly on the poor girl; the smile was his. A day of sun-shine falling on a dark valley, displays its before hidden characteristics; and now this smile, the same with which he first spoke love to Perdita, with which he had welcomed the protectorate, playing on his altered countenance, made me in my heart's core feel that this was Raymond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stretched out to me his other hand; I discerned the trace of manacles on his bared wrist. I heard my sister's sobs, and thought, happy are women who can weep, and in a passionate caress disburthen the oppression of their feelings; shame and habitual restraint hold back a man. I would have given worlds to have acted as in days of boyhood, have strained him to my breast, pressed his hand to my lips, and wept over him; my swelling heart choked me; the natural current would not be checked; the big rebellious tears gathered in my eyes; I turned aside, and they dropped in the sea—they came fast and faster;—yet I could hardly be ashamed, for I saw that the rough sailors were not unmoved, and Raymond's eyes alone were dry from among our crew. He lay in that blessed calm which convalescence always induces, enjoying in secure tranquillity his liberty and re-union with her whom he adored. Perdita at length subdued her burst of passion, and rose, —she looked round for Clara; the child frightened, not recognizing her father, and neglected by us, had crept to the other end of the boat; she came at her mother's call. Perdita presented her to Raymond; her first words were: "Beloved, embrace our child!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come hither, sweet one," said her father, "do you not know me?" she knew his voice, and cast herself in his arms with half bashful but uncontrollable emotion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perceiving the weakness of Raymond, I was afraid of ill consequences from the pressure of the crowd on his landing. But they were awed as I had been, at the change of his appearance. The music died away, the shouts abruptly ended; the soldiers had cleared a space in which a carriage was drawn up. He was placed in it; Perdita and Clara entered with him, and his escort closed round it; a hollow murmur, akin to the roaring of the near waves, went through the multitude; they fell back as the carriage advanced, and fearful of injuring him they had come to welcome, by loud testimonies of joy, they satisfied themselves with bending in a low salaam as the carriage passed; it went slowly along the road of the Piraeus; passed by antique temple and heroic tomb, beneath the craggy rock of the citadel. The sound of the waves was left behind; that of the multitude continued at intervals, supressed and hoarse; and though, in the city, the houses, churches, and public buildings were decorated with tapestry and banners—though the soldiery lined the streets, and the inhabitants in thousands were assembled to give him hail, the same solemn silence prevailed, the soldiery presented arms, the banners vailed, many a white hand waved a streamer, and vainly sought to discern the hero in the vehicle, which, closed and encompassed by the city guards, drew him to the palace allotted for his abode.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond was weak and exhausted, yet the interest he perceived to be excited on his account, filled him with proud pleasure. He was nearly killed with kindness. It is true, the populace retained themselves; but there arose a perpetual hum and bustle from the throng round the palace, which added to the noise of fireworks, the frequent explosion of arms, the tramp to and fro of horsemen and carriages, to which effervescence he was the focus, retarded his recovery. So we retired awhile to Eleusis, and here rest and tender care added each day to the strength of our invalid. The zealous attention of Perdita claimed the first rank in the causes which induced his rapid recovery; but the second was surely the delight he felt in the affection and good will of the Greeks. We are said to love much those whom we greatly benefit. Raymond had fought and conquered for the Athenians; he had suffered, on their account, peril, imprisonment, and hardship; their gratitude affected him deeply, and he inly vowed to unite his fate for ever to that of a people so enthusiastically devoted to him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Social feeling and sympathy constituted a marked feature in my disposition. In early youth, the living drama acted around me, drew me heart and soul into its vortex. I was now conscious of a change. I loved, I hoped, I enjoyed; but there was something besides this. I was inquisitive as to the internal principles of action of those around me: anxious to read their thoughts justly, and for ever occupied in divining their inmost mind. All events, at the same time that they deeply interested me, arranged themselves in pictures before me. I gave the right place to every personage in the groupe, the just balance to every sentiment. This undercurrent of thought, often soothed me amidst distress, and even agony. It gave ideality to that, from which, taken in naked truth, the soul would have revolted: it bestowed pictorial colours on misery and disease, and not unfrequently relieved me from despair in deplorable changes. This faculty, or instinct, was now rouzed. I watched the re-awakened devotion of my sister; Clara's timid, but concentrated admiration of her father, and Raymond's appetite for renown, and sensitiveness to the demonstrations of affection of the Athenians. Attentively perusing this animated volume, I was the less surprised at the tale I read on the new-turned page.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Turkish army were at this time besieging Rodosto; and the Greeks, hastening their preparations, and sending each day reinforcements, were on the eve of forcing the enemy to battle. Each people looked on the coming struggle as that which would be to a great degree decisive; as, in case of victory, the next step would be the siege of Constantinople by the Greeks. Raymond, being somewhat recovered, prepared to re-assume his command in the army.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita did not oppose herself to his determination. She only stipulated to be permitted to accompany him. She had set down no rule of conduct for herself; but for her life she could not have opposed his slightest wish, or do other than acquiesce cheerfully in all his projects. One word, in truth, had alarmed her more than battles or sieges, during which she trusted Raymond's high command would exempt him from danger. That word, as yet it was not more to her, was PLAGUE. This enemy to the human race had begun early in June to raise its serpent-head on the shores of the Nile; parts of Asia, not usually subject to this evil, were infected. It was in Constantinople; but as each year that city experienced a like visitation, small attention was paid to those accounts which declared more people to have died there already, than usually made up the accustomed prey of the whole of the hotter months. However it might be, neither plague nor war could prevent Perdita from following her lord, or induce her to utter one objection to the plans which he proposed. To be near him, to be loved by him, to feel him again her own, was the limit of her desires. The object of her life was to do him pleasure: it had been so before, but with a difference. In past times, without thought or foresight she had made him happy, being so herself, and in any question of choice, consulted her own wishes, as being one with his. Now she sedulously put herself out of the question, sacrificing even her anxiety for his health and welfare to her resolve not to oppose any of his desires. Love of the Greek people, appetite for glory, and hatred of the barbarian government under which he had suffered even to the approach of death, stimulated him. He wished to repay the kindness of the Athenians, to keep alive the splendid associations connected with his name, and to eradicate from Europe a power which, while every other nation advanced in civilization, stood still, a monument of antique barbarism. Having effected the reunion of Raymond and Perdita, I was eager to return to England; but his earnest request, added to awakening curiosity, and an indefinable anxiety to behold the catastrophe, now apparently at hand, in the long drawn history of Grecian and Turkish warfare, induced me to consent to prolong until the autumn, the period of my residence in Greece.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As soon as the health of Raymond was sufficiently re-established, he prepared to join the Grecian camp, hear Kishan, a town of some importance, situated to the east of the Hebrus; in which Perdita and Clara were to remain until the event of the expected battle. We quitted Athens on the 2nd of June. Raymond had recovered from the gaunt and pallid looks of fever. If I no longer saw the fresh glow of youth on his matured countenance, if care had besieged his brow, "And dug deep trenches in his beauty's field," 2 if his hair, slightly mingled with grey, and his look, considerate even in its eagerness, gave signs of added years and past sufferings, yet there was something irresistibly affecting in the sight of one, lately snatched from the grave, renewing his career, untamed by sickness or disaster. The Athenians saw in him, not as heretofore, the heroic boy or desperate man, who was ready to die for them; but the prudent commander, who for their sakes was careful of his life, and could make his own warrior-propensities second to the scheme of conduct policy might point out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All Athens accompanied us for several miles. When he had landed a month ago, the noisy populace had been hushed by sorrow and fear; but this was a festival day to all. The air resounded with their shouts; their picturesque costume, and the gay colours of which it was composed, flaunted in the sunshine; their eager gestures and rapid utterance accorded with their wild appearance. Raymond was the theme of every tongue, the hope of each wife, mother or betrothed bride, whose husband, child, or lover, making a part of the Greek army, were to be conducted to victory by him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Notwithstanding the hazardous object of our journey, it was full of romantic interest, as we passed through the vallies, and over the hills, of this divine country. Raymond was inspirited by the intense sensations of recovered health; he felt that in being general of the Athenians, he filled a post worthy of his ambition; and, in his hope of the conquest of Constantinople, he counted on an event which would be as a landmark in the waste of ages, an exploit unequalled in the annals of man; when a city of grand historic association, the beauty of whose site was the wonder of the world, which for many hundred years had been the strong hold of the Moslems, should be rescued from slavery and barbarism, and restored to a people illustrious for genius, civilization, and a spirit of liberty. Perdita rested on his restored society, on his love, his hopes and fame, even as a Sybarite on a luxurious couch; every thought was transport, each emotion bathed as it were in a congenial and balmy element.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We arrived at Kishan on the 7th of July. The weather during our journey had been serene. Each day, before dawn, we left our night's encampment, and watched the shadows as they retreated from hill and valley, and the golden splendour of the sun's approach. The accompanying soldiers received, with national vivacity, enthusiastic pleasure from the sight of beautiful nature. The uprising of the star of day was hailed by triumphant strains, while the birds, heard by snatches, filled up the intervals of the music. At noon, we pitched our tents in some shady valley, or embowering wood among the mountains, while a stream prattling over pebbles induced grateful sleep. Our evening march, more calm, was yet more delightful than the morning restlessness of spirit. If the band played, involuntarily they chose airs of moderated passion; the farewell of love, or lament at absence, was followed and closed by some solemn hymn, which harmonized with the tranquil loveliness of evening, and elevated the soul to grand and religious thought. Often all sounds were suspended, that we might listen to the nightingale, while the fire-flies danced in bright measure, and the soft cooing of the aziolo spoke of fair weather to the travellers. Did we pass a valley? Soft shades encompassed us, and rocks tinged with beauteous hues. If we traversed a mountain, Greece, a living map, was spread beneath, her renowned pinnacles cleaving the ether; her rivers threading in silver line the fertile land. Afraid almost to breathe, we English travellers surveyed with extasy this splendid landscape, so different from the sober hues and melancholy graces of our native scenery. When we quitted Macedonia, the fertile but low plains of Thrace afforded fewer beauties; yet our journey continued to be interesting. An advanced guard gave information of our approach, and the country people were quickly in motion to do honour to Lord Raymond. The villages were decorated by triumphal arches of greenery by day, and lamps by night; tapestry waved from the windows, the ground was strewed with flowers, and the name of Raymond, joined to that of Greece, was echoed in the Evive of the peasant crowd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When we arrived at Kishan, we learnt, that on hearing of the advance of Lord Raymond and his detachment, the Turkish army had retreated from Rodosto; but meeting with a reinforcement, they had re-trod their steps. In the meantime, Argyropylo, the Greek commander-in-chief, had advanced, so as to be between the Turks and Rodosto; a battle, it was said, was inevitable. Perdita and her child were to remain at Kishan. Raymond asked me, if I would not continue with them. "Now by the fells of Cumberland," I cried, "by all of the vagabond and poacher that appertains to me, I will stand at your side, draw my sword in the Greek cause, and be hailed as a victor along with you!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All the plain, from Kishan to Rodosto, a distance of sixteen leagues, was alive with troops, or with the camp-followers, all in motion at the approach of a battle. The small garrisons were drawn from the various towns and fortresses, and went to swell the main army. We met baggage waggons, and many females of high and low rank returning to Fairy or Kishan, there to wait the issue of the expected day. When we arrived at Rodosto, we found that the field had been taken, and the scheme of the battle arranged. The sound of firing, early on the following morning, informed us that advanced posts of the armies were engaged. Regiment after regiment advanced, their colours flying and bands playing. They planted the cannon on the tumuli, sole elevations in this level country, and formed themselves into column and hollow square; while the pioneers threw up small mounds for their protection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These then were the preparations for a battle, nay, the battle itself; far different from any thing the imagination had pictured. We read of centre and wing in Greek and Roman history; we fancy a spot, plain as a table, and soldiers small as chessmen; and drawn forth, so that the most ignorant of the game can discover science and order in the disposition of the forces. When I came to the reality, and saw regiments file off to the left far out of sight, fields intervening between the battalions, but a few troops sufficiently near me to observe their motions, I gave up all idea of understanding, even of seeing a battle, but attaching myself to Raymond attended with intense interest to his actions. He shewed himself collected, gallant and imperial; his commands were prompt, his intuition of the events of the day to me miraculous. In the mean time the cannon roared; the music lifted up its enlivening voice at intervals; and we on the highest of the mounds I mentioned, too far off to observe the fallen sheaves which death gathered into his storehouse, beheld the regiments, now lost in smoke, now banners and staves peering above the cloud, while shout and clamour drowned every sound.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Early in the day, Argyropylo was wounded dangerously, and Raymond assumed the command of the whole army. He made few remarks, till, on observing through his glass the sequel of an order he had given, his face, clouded for awhile with doubt, became radiant. "The day is ours," he cried, "the Turks fly from the bayonet." And then swiftly he dispatched his aides-de-camp to command the horse to fall on the routed enemy. The defeat became total; the cannon ceased to roar; the infantry rallied, and horse pursued the flying Turks along the dreary plain; the staff of Raymond was dispersed in various directions, to make observations, and bear commands. Even I was dispatched to a distant part of the field.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ground on which the battle was fought, was a level plain—so level, that from the tumuli you saw the waving line of mountains on the wide-stretched horizon; yet the intervening space was unvaried by the least irregularity, save such undulations as resembled the waves of the sea. The whole of this part of Thrace had been so long a scene of contest, that it had remained uncultivated, and presented a dreary, barren appearance. The order I had received, was to make an observation of the direction which a detachment of the enemy might have taken, from a northern tumulus; the whole Turkish army, followed by the Greek, had poured eastward; none but the dead remained in the direction of my side. From the top of the mound, I looked far round—all was silent and deserted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The last beams of the nearly sunken sun shot up from behind the far summit of Mount Athos; the sea of Marmora still glittered beneath its rays, while the Asiatic coast beyond was half hid in a haze of low cloud. Many a casque, and bayonet, and sword, fallen from unnerved arms, reflected the departing ray; they lay scattered far and near. From the east, a band of ravens, old inhabitants of the Turkish cemeteries, came sailing along towards their harvest; the sun disappeared. This hour, melancholy yet sweet, has always seemed to me the time when we are most naturally led to commune with higher powers; our mortal sternness departs, and gentle complacency invests the soul. But now, in the midst of the dying and the dead, how could a thought of heaven or a sensation of tranquillity possess one of the murderers? During the busy day, my mind had yielded itself a willing slave to the state of things presented to it by its fellow-beings; historical association, hatred of the foe, and military enthusiasm had held dominion over me. Now, I looked on the evening star, as softly and calmly it hung pendulous in the orange hues of sunset. I turned to the corse-strewn earth; and felt ashamed of my species. So perhaps were the placid skies; for they quickly veiled themselves in mist, and in this change assisted the swift disappearance of twilight usual in the south; heavy masses of cloud floated up from the south east, and red and turbid lightning shot from their dark edges; the rushing wind disturbed the garments of the dead, and was chilled as it passed over their icy forms. Darkness gathered round; the objects about me became indistinct, I descended from my station, and with difficulty guided my horse, so as to avoid the slain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly I heard a piercing shriek; a form seemed to rise from the earth; it flew swiftly towards me, sinking to the ground again as it drew near. All this passed so suddenly, that I with difficulty reined in my horse, so that it should not trample on the prostrate being. The dress of this person was that of a soldier, but the bared neck and arms, and the continued shrieks discovered a female thus disguised. I dismounted to her aid, while she, with heavy groans, and her hand placed on her side, resisted my attempt to lead her on. In the hurry of the moment I forgot that I was in Greece, and in my native accents endeavoured to soothe the sufferer. With wild and terrific exclamations did the lost, dying Evadne (for it was she) recognize the language of her lover; pain and fever from her wound had deranged her intellects, while her piteous cries and feeble efforts to escape, penetrated me with compassion. In wild delirium she called upon the name of Raymond; she exclaimed that I was keeping him from her, while the Turks with fearful instruments of torture were about to take his life. Then again she sadly lamented her hard fate; that a woman, with a woman's heart and sensibility, should be driven by hopeless love and vacant hopes to take up the trade of arms, and suffer beyond the endurance of man privation, labour, and pain—the while her dry, hot hand pressed mine, and her brow and lips burned with consuming fire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As her strength grew less, I lifted her from the ground; her emaciated form hung over my arm, her sunken cheek rested on my breast; in a sepulchral voice she murmured:—"This is the end of love!—Yet not the end!"— and frenzy lent her strength as she cast her arm up to heaven: "there is the end! there we meet again. Many living deaths have I borne for thee, O Raymond, and now I expire, thy victim!—By my death I purchase thee— lo! the instruments of war, fire, the plague are my servitors. I dared, I conquered them all, till now! I have sold myself to death, with the sole condition that thou shouldst follow me—Fire, and war, and plague, unite for thy destruction—O my Raymond, there is no safety for thee!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With an heavy heart I listened to the changes of her delirium; I made her a bed of cloaks; her violence decreased and a clammy dew stood on her brow as the paleness of death succeeded to the crimson of fever, I placed her on the cloaks. She continued to rave of her speedy meeting with her beloved in the grave, of his death nigh at hand; sometimes she solemnly declared that he was summoned; sometimes she bewailed his hard destiny. Her voice grew feebler, her speech interrupted; a few convulsive movements, and her muscles relaxed, the limbs fell, no more to be sustained, one deep sigh, and life was gone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I bore her from the near neighbourhood of the dead; wrapt in cloaks, I placed her beneath a tree. Once more I looked on her altered face; the last time I saw her she was eighteen; beautiful as poet's vision, splendid as a Sultana of the East—Twelve years had past; twelve years of change, sorrow and hardship; her brilliant complexion had become worn and dark, her limbs had lost the roundness of youth and womanhood; her eyes had sunk deep,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Crushed and o'erworn,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The hours had drained her blood, and filled her brow</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With lines and wrinkles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With shuddering horror I veiled this monument of human passion and human misery; I heaped over her all of flags and heavy accoutrements I could find, to guard her from birds and beasts of prey, until I could bestow on her a fitting grave. Sadly and slowly I stemmed my course from among the heaps of slain, and, guided by the twinkling lights of the town, at length reached Rodosto.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Lord Byron's Fourth Canto of Childe Harolde. [2] Shakspeare's Sonnets.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER II.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ON my arrival, I found that an order had already gone forth for the army to proceed immediately towards Constantinople; and the troops which had suffered least in the battle were already on their way. The town was full of tumult. The wound, and consequent inability of Argyropylo, caused Raymond to be the first in command. He rode through the town, visiting the wounded, and giving such orders as were necessary for the siege he meditated. Early in the morning the whole army was in motion. In the hurry I could hardly find an opportunity to bestow the last offices on Evadne. Attended only by my servant, I dug a deep grave for her at the foot of the tree, and without disturbing her warrior shroud, I placed her in it, heaping stones upon the grave. The dazzling sun and glare of daylight, deprived the scene of solemnity; from Evadne's low tomb, I joined Raymond and his staff, now on their way to the Golden City.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Constantinople was invested, trenches dug, and advances made. The whole Greek fleet blockaded it by sea; on land from the river Kyat Kbanah, near the Sweet Waters, to the Tower of Marmora, on the shores of the Propontis, along the whole line of the ancient walls, the trenches of the siege were drawn. We already possessed Pera; the Golden Horn itself, the city, bastioned by the sea, and the ivy-mantled walls of the Greek emperors was all of Europe that the Mahometans could call theirs. Our army looked on her as certain prey. They counted the garrison; it was impossible that it should be relieved; each sally was a victory; for, even when the Turks were triumphant, the loss of men they sustained was an irreparable injury. I rode one morning with Raymond to the lofty mound, not far from the Top Kapou, (Cannon-gate), on which Mahmoud planted his standard, and first saw the city. Still the same lofty domes and minarets towered above the verdurous walls, where Constantine had died, and the Turk had entered the city. The plain around was interspersed with cemeteries, Turk, Greek, and Armenian, with their growth of cypress trees; and other woods of more cheerful aspect, diversified the scene. Among them the Greek army was encamped, and their squadrons moved to and fro—now in regular march, now in swift career.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond's eyes were fixed on the city. "I have counted the hours of her life," said he; "one month, and she falls. Remain with me till then; wait till you see the cross on St. Sophia; and then return to your peaceful glades."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You then," I asked, "still remain in Greece?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Assuredly," replied Raymond. "Yet Lionel, when I say this, believe me I look back with regret to our tranquil life at Windsor. I am but half a soldier; I love the renown, but not the trade of war. Before the battle of Rodosto I was full of hope and spirit; to conquer there, and afterwards to take Constantinople, was the hope, the bourne, the fulfilment of my ambition. This enthusiasm is now spent, I know not why; I seem to myself to be entering a darksome gulph; the ardent spirit of the army is irksome to me, the rapture of triumph null."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He paused, and was lost in thought. His serious mien recalled, by some association, the half-forgotten Evadne to my mind, and I seized this opportunity to make enquiries from him concerning her strange lot. I asked him, if he had ever seen among the troops any one resembling her; if since he had returned to Greece he had heard of her?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He started at her name,—he looked uneasily on me. "Even so," he cried, "I knew you would speak of her. Long, long I had forgotten her. Since our encampment here, she daily, hourly visits my thoughts. When I am addressed, her name is the sound I expect: in every communication, I imagine that she will form a part. At length you have broken the spell; tell me what you know of her."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I related my meeting with her; the story of her death was told and re-told. With painful earnestness he questioned me concerning her prophecies with regard to him. I treated them as the ravings of a maniac. "No, no," he said, "do not deceive yourself,—me you cannot. She has said nothing but what I knew before—though this is confirmation. Fire, the sword, and plague! They may all be found in yonder city; on my head alone may they fall!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From this day Raymond's melancholy increased. He secluded himself as much as the duties of his station permitted. When in company, sadness would in spite of every effort steal over his features, and he sat absent and mute among the busy crowd that thronged about him. Perdita rejoined him, and before her he forced himself to appear cheerful, for she, even as a mirror, changed as he changed, and if he were silent and anxious, she solicitously inquired concerning, and endeavoured to remove the cause of his seriousness. She resided at the palace of Sweet Waters, a summer seraglio of the Sultan; the beauty of the surrounding scenery, undefiled by war, and the freshness of the river, made this spot doubly delightful. Raymond felt no relief, received no pleasure from any show of heaven or earth. He often left Perdita, to wander in the grounds alone; or in a light shallop he floated idly on the pure waters, musing deeply. Sometimes I joined him; at such times his countenance was invariably solemn, his air dejected. He seemed relieved on seeing me, and would talk with some degree of interest on the affairs of the day. There was evidently something behind all this; yet, when he appeared about to speak of that which was nearest his heart, he would abruptly turn away, and with a sigh endeavour to deliver the painful idea to the winds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It had often occurred, that, when, as I said, Raymond quitted Perdita's drawing-room, Clara came up to me, and gently drawing me aside, said, "Papa is gone; shall we go to him? I dare say he will be glad to see you." And, as accident permitted, I complied with or refused her request. One evening a numerous assembly of Greek chieftains were gathered together in the palace. The intriguing Palli, the accomplished Karazza, the warlike Ypsilanti, were among the principal. They talked of the events of the day; the skirmish at noon; the diminished numbers of the Infidels; their defeat and flight: they contemplated, after a short interval of time, the capture of the Golden City. They endeavoured to picture forth what would then happen, and spoke in lofty terms of the prosperity of Greece, when Constantinople should become its capital. The conversation then reverted to Asiatic intelligence, and the ravages the plague made in its chief cities; conjectures were hazarded as to the progress that disease might have made in the besieged city.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond had joined in the former part of the discussion. In lively terms he demonstrated the extremities to which Constantinople was reduced; the wasted and haggard, though ferocious appearance of the troops; famine and pestilence was at work for them, he observed, and the infidels would soon be obliged to take refuge in their only hope—submission. Suddenly in the midst of his harangue he broke off, as if stung by some painful thought; he rose uneasily, and I perceived him at length quit the hall, and through the long corridor seek the open air. He did not return; and soon Clara crept round to me, making the accustomed invitation. I consented to her request, and taking her little hand, followed Raymond. We found him just about to embark in his boat, and he readily agreed to receive us as companions. After the heats of the day, the cooling land-breeze ruffled the river, and filled our little sail. The city looked dark to the south, while numerous lights along the near shores, and the beautiful aspect of the banks reposing in placid night, the waters keenly reflecting the heavenly lights, gave to this beauteous river a dower of loveliness that might have characterized a retreat in Paradise. Our single boatman attended to the sail; Raymond steered; Clara sat at his feet, clasping his knees with her arms, and laying her head on them. Raymond began the conversation somewhat abruptly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This, my friend, is probably the last time we shall have an opportunity of conversing freely; my plans are now in full operation, and my time will become more and more occupied. Besides, I wish at once to tell you my wishes and expectations, and then never again to revert to so painful a subject. First, I must thank you, Lionel, for having remained here at my request. Vanity first prompted me to ask you: vanity, I call it; yet even in this I see the hand of fate—your presence will soon be necessary; you will become the last resource of Perdita, her protector and consoler. You will take her back to Windsor."—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not without you," I said. "You do not mean to separate again?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do not deceive yourself," replied Raymond, "the separation at hand is one over which I have no control; most near at hand is it; the days are already counted. May I trust you? For many days I have longed to disclose the mysterious presentiments that weigh on me, although I fear that you will ridicule them. Yet do not, my gentle friend; for, all childish and unwise as they are, they have become a part of me, and I dare not expect to shake them off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yet how can I expect you to sympathize with me? You are of this world; I am not. You hold forth your hand; it is even as a part of yourself; and you do not yet divide the feeling of identity from the mortal form that shapes forth Lionel. How then can you understand me? Earth is to me a tomb, the firmament a vault, shrouding mere corruption. Time is no more, for I have stepped within the threshold of eternity; each man I meet appears a corse, which will soon be deserted of its animating spark, on the eve of decay and corruption.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Cada piedra un piramide levanta, y cada flor costruye un monumento, cada edificio es un sepulcro altivo, cada soldado un esqueleto vivo."[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His accent was mournful,—he sighed deeply. "A few months ago," he continued, "I was thought to be dying; but life was strong within me. My affections were human; hope and love were the day-stars of my life. Now— they dream that the brows of the conqueror of the infidel faith are about to be encircled by triumphant laurel; they talk of honourable reward, of title, power, and wealth—all I ask of Greece is a grave. Let them raise a mound above my lifeless body, which may stand even when the dome of St. Sophia has fallen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Wherefore do I feel thus? At Rodosto I was full of hope; but when first I saw Constantinople, that feeling, with every other joyful one, departed. The last words of Evadne were the seal upon the warrant of my death. Yet I do not pretend to account for my mood by any particular event. All I can say is, that it is so. The plague I am told is in Constantinople, perhaps I have imbibed its effluvia—perhaps disease is the real cause of my prognostications. It matters little why or wherefore I am affected, no power can avert the stroke, and the shadow of Fate's uplifted hand already darkens me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To you, Lionel, I entrust your sister and her child. Never mention to her the fatal name of Evadne. She would doubly sorrow over the strange link that enchains me to her, making my spirit obey her dying voice, following her, as it is about to do, to the unknown country."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I listened to him with wonder; but that his sad demeanour and solemn utterance assured me of the truth and intensity of his feelings, I should with light derision have attempted to dissipate his fears. Whatever I was about to reply, was interrupted by the powerful emotions of Clara. Raymond had spoken, thoughtless of her presence, and she, poor child, heard with terror and faith the prophecy of his death. Her father was moved by her violent grief; he took her in his arms and soothed her, but his very soothings were solemn and fearful. "Weep not, sweet child," said he, "the coming death of one you have hardly known. I may die, but in death I can never forget or desert my own Clara. In after sorrow or joy, believe that you father's spirit is near, to save or sympathize with you. Be proud of me, and cherish your infant remembrance of me. Thus, sweetest, I shall not appear to die. One thing you must promise,—not to speak to any one but your uncle, of the conversation you have just overheard. When I am gone, you will console your mother, and tell her that death was only bitter because it divided me from her; that my last thoughts will be spent on her. But while I live, promise not to betray me; promise, my child."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With faltering accents Clara promised, while she still clung to her father in a transport of sorrow. Soon we returned to shore, and I endeavoured to obviate the impression made on the child's mind, by treating Raymond's fears lightly. We heard no more of them; for, as he had said, the siege, now drawing to a conclusion, became paramount in interest, engaging all his time and attention.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The empire of the Mahometans in Europe was at its close. The Greek fleet blockading every port of Stamboul, prevented the arrival of succour from Asia; all egress on the side towards land had become impracticable, except to such desperate sallies, as reduced the numbers of the enemy without making any impression on our lines. The garrison was now so much diminished, that it was evident that the city could easily have been carried by storm; but both humanity and policy dictated a slower mode of proceeding. We could hardly doubt that, if pursued to the utmost, its palaces, its temples and store of wealth would be destroyed in the fury of contending triumph and defeat. Already the defenceless citizens had suffered through the barbarity of the Janisaries; and, in time of storm, tumult and massacre, beauty, infancy and decrepitude, would have alike been sacrificed to the brutal ferocity of the soldiers. Famine and blockade were certain means of conquest; and on these we founded our hopes of victory.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Each day the soldiers of the garrison assaulted our advanced posts, and impeded the accomplishment of our works. Fire-boats were launched from the various ports, while our troops sometimes recoiled from the devoted courage of men who did not seek to live, but to sell their lives dearly. These contests were aggravated by the season: they took place during summer, when the southern Asiatic wind came laden with intolerable heat, when the streams were dried up in their shallow beds, and the vast basin of the sea appeared to glow under the unmitigated rays of the solsticial sun. Nor did night refresh the earth. Dew was denied; herbage and flowers there were none; the very trees drooped; and summer assumed the blighted appearance of winter, as it went forth in silence and flame to abridge the means of sustenance to man. In vain did the eye strive to find the wreck of some northern cloud in the stainless empyrean, which might bring hope of change and moisture to the oppressive and windless atmosphere. All was serene, burning, annihilating. We the besiegers were in the comparison little affected by these evils. The woods around afforded us shade,—the river secured to us a constant supply of water; nay, detachments were employed in furnishing the army with ice, which had been laid up on Haemus, and Athos, and the mountains of Macedonia, while cooling fruits and wholesome food renovated the strength of the labourers, and made us bear with less impatience the weight of the unrefreshing air. But in the city things wore a different face. The sun's rays were refracted from the pavement and buildings—the stoppage of the public fountains—the bad quality of the food, and scarcity even of that, produced a state of suffering, which was aggravated by the scourge of disease; while the garrison arrogated every superfluity to themselves, adding by waste and riot to the necessary evils of the time. Still they would not capitulate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly the system of warfare was changed. We experienced no more assaults; and by night and day we continued our labours unimpeded. Stranger still, when the troops advanced near the city, the walls were vacant, and no cannon was pointed against the intruders. When these circumstances were reported to Raymond, he caused minute observations to be made as to what was doing within the walls, and when his scouts returned, reporting only the continued silence and desolation of the city, he commanded the army to be drawn out before the gates. No one appeared on the walls; the very portals, though locked and barred, seemed unguarded; above, the many domes and glittering crescents pierced heaven; while the old walls, survivors of ages, with ivy-crowned tower and weed-tangled buttress, stood as rocks in an uninhabited waste. From within the city neither shout nor cry, nor aught except the casual howling of a dog, broke the noon-day stillness. Even our soldiers were awed to silence; the music paused; the clang of arms was hushed. Each man asked his fellow in whispers, the meaning of this sudden peace; while Raymond from an height endeavoured, by means of glasses, to discover and observe the stratagem of the enemy. No form could be discerned on the terraces of the houses; in the higher parts of the town no moving shadow bespoke the presence of any living being: the very trees waved not, and mocked the stability of architecture with like immovability.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The tramp of horses, distinctly heard in the silence, was at length discerned. It was a troop sent by Karazza, the Admiral; they bore dispatches to the Lord General. The contents of these papers were important. The night before, the watch, on board one of the smaller vessels anchored near the seraglio wall, was roused by a slight splashing as of muffled oars; the alarm was given: twelve small boats, each containing three Janizaries, were descried endeavouring to make their way through the fleet to the opposite shore of Scutari. When they found themselves discovered they discharged their muskets, and some came to the front to cover the others, whose crews, exerting all their strength, endeavoured to escape with their light barks from among the dark hulls that environed them. They were in the end all sunk, and, with the exception of two or three prisoners, the crews drowned. Little could be got from the survivors; but their cautious answers caused it to be surmised that several expeditions had preceded this last, and that several Turks of rank and importance had been conveyed to Asia. The men disdainfully repelled the idea of having deserted the defence of their city; and one, the youngest among them, in answer to the taunt of a sailor, exclaimed, "Take it, Christian dogs! take the palaces, the gardens, the mosques, the abode of our fathers—take plague with them; pestilence is the enemy we fly; if she be your friend, hug her to your bosoms. The curse of Allah is on Stamboul, share ye her fate."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such was the account sent by Karazza to Raymond: but a tale full of monstrous exaggerations, though founded on this, was spread by the accompanying troop among our soldiers. A murmur arose, the city was the prey of pestilence; already had a mighty power subjugated the inhabitants; Death had become lord of Constantinople.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I have heard a picture described, wherein all the inhabitants of earth were drawn out in fear to stand the encounter of Death. The feeble and decrepid fled; the warriors retreated, though they threatened even in flight. Wolves and lions, and various monsters of the desert roared against him; while the grim Unreality hovered shaking his spectral dart, a solitary but invincible assailant. Even so was it with the army of Greece. I am convinced, that had the myriad troops of Asia come from over the Propontis, and stood defenders of the Golden City, each and every Greek would have marched against the overwhelming numbers, and have devoted himself with patriotic fury for his country. But here no hedge of bayonets opposed itself, no death-dealing artillery, no formidable array of brave soldiers—the unguarded walls afforded easy entrance—the vacant palaces luxurious dwellings; but above the dome of St. Sophia the superstitious Greek saw Pestilence, and shrunk in trepidation from her influence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Raymond was actuated by far other feelings. He descended the hill with a face beaming with triumph, and pointing with his sword to the gates, commanded his troops to—down with those barricades—the only obstacles now to completest victory. The soldiers answered his cheerful words with aghast and awe-struck looks; instinctively they drew back, and Raymond rode in the front of the lines:—"By my sword I swear," he cried, "that no ambush or stratagem endangers you. The enemy is already vanquished; the pleasant places, the noble dwellings and spoil of the city are already yours; force the gate; enter and possess the seats of your ancestors, your own inheritance!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An universal shudder and fearful whispering passed through the lines; not a soldier moved. "Cowards!" exclaimed their general, exasperated, "give me an hatchet! I alone will enter! I will plant your standard; and when you see it wave from yon highest minaret, you may gain courage, and rally round it!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of the officers now came forward: "General," he said, "we neither fear the courage, nor arms, the open attack, nor secret ambush of the Moslems. We are ready to expose our breasts, exposed ten thousand times before, to the balls and scymetars of the infidels, and to fall gloriously for Greece. But we will not die in heaps, like dogs poisoned in summer-time, by the pestilential air of that city—we dare not go against the Plague!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A multitude of men are feeble and inert, without a voice, a leader; give them that, and they regain the strength belonging to their numbers. Shouts from a thousand voices now rent the air—the cry of applause became universal. Raymond saw the danger; he was willing to save his troops from the crime of disobedience; for he knew, that contention once begun between the commander and his army, each act and word added to the weakness of the former, and bestowed power on the latter. He gave orders for the retreat to be sounded, and the regiments repaired in good order to the camp.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I hastened to carry the intelligence of these strange proceedings to Perdita; and we were soon joined by Raymond. He looked gloomy and perturbed. My sister was struck by my narrative: "How beyond the imagination of man," she exclaimed, "are the decrees of heaven, wondrous and inexplicable!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Foolish girl," cried Raymond angrily, "are you like my valiant soldiers, panic-struck? What is there inexplicable, pray, tell me, in so very natural an occurrence? Does not the plague rage each year in Stamboul? What wonder, that this year, when as we are told, its virulence is unexampled in Asia, that it should have occasioned double havoc in that city? What wonder then, in time of siege, want, extreme heat, and drought, that it should make unaccustomed ravages? Less wonder far is it, that the garrison, despairing of being able to hold out longer, should take advantage of the negligence of our fleet to escape at once from siege and capture. It is not pestilence —by the God that lives! it is not either plague or impending danger that makes us, like birds in harvest-time, terrified by a scarecrow, abstain from the ready prey—it is base superstition—And thus the aim of the valiant is made the shuttlecock of fools; the worthy ambition of the high-souled, the plaything of these tamed hares! But yet Stamboul shall be ours! By my past labours, by torture and imprisonment suffered for them, by my victories, by my sword, I swear—by my hopes of fame, by my former deserts now awaiting their reward, I deeply vow, with these hands to plant the cross on yonder mosque!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dearest Raymond!" interrupted Perdita, in a supplicating accent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had been walking to and fro in the marble hall of the seraglio; his very lips were pale with rage, while, quivering, they shaped his angry words— his eyes shot fire—his gestures seemed restrained by their very vehemence. "Perdita," he continued, impatiently, "I know what you would say; I know that you love me, that you are good and gentle; but this is no woman's work—nor can a female heart guess at the hurricane which tears me!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He seemed half afraid of his own violence, and suddenly quitted the hall: a look from Perdita shewed me her distress, and I followed him. He was pacing the garden: his passions were in a state of inconceivable turbulence. "Am I for ever," he cried, "to be the sport of fortune! Must man, the heaven-climber, be for ever the victim of the crawling reptiles of his species! Were I as you, Lionel, looking forward to many years of life, to a succession of love-enlightened days, to refined enjoyments and fresh-springing hopes, I might yield, and breaking my General's staff, seek repose in the glades of Windsor. But I am about to die!—nay, interrupt me not—soon I shall die. From the many-peopled earth, from the sympathies of man, from the loved resorts of my youth, from the kindness of my friends, from the affection of my only beloved Perdita, I am about to be removed. Such is the will of fate! Such the decree of the High Ruler from whom there is no appeal: to whom I submit. But to lose all—to lose with life and love, glory also! It shall not be!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I, and in a few brief years, all you,—this panic-struck army, and all the population of fair Greece, will no longer be. But other generations will arise, and ever and for ever will continue, to be made happier by our present acts, to be glorified by our valour. The prayer of my youth was to be one among those who render the pages of earth's history splendid; who exalt the race of man, and make this little globe a dwelling of the mighty. Alas, for Raymond! the prayer of his youth is wasted—the hopes of his manhood are null!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"From my dungeon in yonder city I cried, soon I will be thy lord! When Evadne pronounced my death, I thought that the title of Victor of Constantinople would be written on my tomb, and I subdued all mortal fear. I stand before its vanquished walls, and dare not call myself a conqueror. So shall it not be! Did not Alexander leap from the walls of the city of the Oxydracae, to shew his coward troops the way to victory, encountering alone the swords of its defenders? Even so will I brave the plague—and though no man follow, I will plant the Grecian standard on the height of St. Sophia."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Reason came unavailing to such high-wrought feelings. In vain I shewed him, that when winter came, the cold would dissipate the pestilential air, and restore courage to the Greeks. "Talk not of other season than this!" he cried. "I have lived my last winter, and the date of this year, 2092, will be carved upon my tomb. Already do I see," he continued, looking up mournfully, "the bourne and precipitate edge of my existence, over which I plunge into the gloomy mystery of the life to come. I am prepared, so that I leave behind a trail of light so radiant, that my worst enemies cannot cloud it. I owe this to Greece, to you, to my surviving Perdita, and to myself, the victim of ambition."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were interrupted by an attendant, who announced, that the staff of Raymond was assembled in the council-chamber. He requested me in the meantime to ride through the camp, and to observe and report to him the dispositions of the soldiers; he then left me. I had been excited to the utmost by the proceedings of the day, and now more than ever by the passionate language of Raymond. Alas! for human reason! He accused the Greeks of superstition: what name did he give to the faith he lent to the predictions of Evadne? I passed from the palace of Sweet Waters to the plain on which the encampment lay, and found its inhabitants in commotion. The arrival of several with fresh stories of marvels, from the fleet; the exaggerations bestowed on what was already known; tales of old prophecies, of fearful histories of whole regions which had been laid waste during the present year by pestilence, alarmed and occupied the troops. Discipline was lost; the army disbanded itself. Each individual, before a part of a great whole moving only in unison with others, now became resolved into the unit nature had made him, and thought of himself only. They stole off at first by ones and twos, then in larger companies, until, unimpeded by the officers, whole battalions sought the road that led to Macedonia.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >About midnight I returned to the palace and sought Raymond; he was alone, and apparently composed; such composure, at least, was his as is inspired by a resolve to adhere to a certain line of conduct. He heard my account of the self-dissolution of the army with calmness, and then said, "You know, Verney, my fixed determination not to quit this place, until in the light of day Stamboul is confessedly ours. If the men I have about me shrink from following me, others, more courageous, are to be found. Go you before break of day, bear these dispatches to Karazza, add to them your own entreaties that he send me his marines and naval force; if I can get but one regiment to second me, the rest would follow of course. Let him send me this regiment. I shall expect your return by to-morrow noon."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Methought this was but a poor expedient; but I assured him of my obedience and zeal. I quitted him to take a few hours rest. With the breaking of morning I was accoutred for my ride. I lingered awhile, desirous of taking leave of Perdita, and from my window observed the approach of the sun. The golden splendour arose, and weary nature awoke to suffer yet another day of heat and thirsty decay. No flowers lifted up their dew-laden cups to meet the dawn; the dry grass had withered on the plains; the burning fields of air were vacant of birds; the cicale alone, children of the sun, began their shrill and deafening song among the cypresses and olives. I saw Raymond's coal-black charger brought to the palace gate; a small company of officers arrived soon after; care and fear was painted on each cheek, and in each eye, unrefreshed by sleep. I found Raymond and Perdita together. He was watching the rising sun, while with one arm he encircled his beloved's waist; she looked on him, the sun of her life, with earnest gaze of mingled anxiety and tenderness. Raymond started angrily when he saw me. "Here still?" he cried. "Is this your promised zeal?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pardon me," I said, "but even as you speak, I am gone."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nay, pardon me," he replied; "I have no right to command or reproach; but my life hangs on your departure and speedy return. Farewell!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His voice had recovered its bland tone, but a dark cloud still hung on his features. I would have delayed; I wished to recommend watchfulness to Perdita, but his presence restrained me. I had no pretence for my hesitation; and on his repeating his farewell, I clasped his outstretched hand; it was cold and clammy. "Take care of yourself, my dear Lord," I said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nay," said Perdita, "that task shall be mine. Return speedily, Lionel." With an air of absence he was playing with her auburn locks, while she leaned on him; twice I turned back, only to look again on this matchless pair. At last, with slow and heavy steps, I had paced out of the hall, and sprung upon my horse. At that moment Clara flew towards me; clasping my knee she cried, "Make haste back, uncle! Dear uncle, I have such fearful dreams; I dare not tell my mother. Do not be long away!" I assured her of my impatience to return, and then, with a small escort rode along the plain towards the tower of Marmora.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I fulfilled my commission; I saw Karazza. He was somewhat surprised; he would see, he said, what could be done; but it required time; and Raymond had ordered me to return by noon. It was impossible to effect any thing in so short a time. I must stay till the next day; or come back, after having reported the present state of things to the general. My choice was easily made. A restlessness, a fear of what was about to betide, a doubt as to Raymond's purposes, urged me to return without delay to his quarters. Quitting the Seven Towers, I rode eastward towards the Sweet Waters. I took a circuitous path, principally for the sake of going to the top of the mount before mentioned, which commanded a view of the city. I had my glass with me. The city basked under the noon-day sun, and the venerable walls formed its picturesque boundary. Immediately before me was the Top Kapou, the gate near which Mahomet had made the breach by which he entered the city. Trees gigantic and aged grew near; before the gate I discerned a crowd of moving human figures—with intense curiosity I lifted my glass to my eye. I saw Lord Raymond on his charger; a small company of officers had gathered about him; and behind was a promiscuous concourse of soldiers and subalterns, their discipline lost, their arms thrown aside; no music sounded, no banners streamed. The only flag among them was one which Raymond carried; he pointed with it to the gate of the city. The circle round him fell back. With angry gestures he leapt from his horse, and seizing a hatchet that hung from his saddle-bow, went with the apparent intention of battering down the opposing gate. A few men came to aid him; their numbers increased; under their united blows the obstacle was vanquished, gate, portcullis, and fence were demolished; and the wide sun-lit way, leading to the heart of the city, now lay open before them. The men shrank back; they seemed afraid of what they had already done, and stood as if they expected some Mighty Phantom to stalk in offended majesty from the opening. Raymond sprung lightly on his horse, grasped the standard, and with words which I could not hear (but his gestures, being their fit accompaniment, were marked by passionate energy,) he seemed to adjure their assistance and companionship; even as he spoke, the crowd receded from him. Indignation now transported him; his words I guessed were fraught with disdain—then turning from his coward followers, he addressed himself to enter the city alone. His very horse seemed to back from the fatal entrance; his dog, his faithful dog, lay moaning and supplicating in his path—in a moment more, he had plunged the rowels into the sides of the stung animal, who bounded forward, and he, the gateway passed, was galloping up the broad and desart street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Until this moment my soul had been in my eyes only. I had gazed with wonder, mixed with fear and enthusiasm. The latter feeling now predominated. I forgot the distance between us: "I will go with thee, Raymond!" I cried; but, my eye removed from the glass, I could scarce discern the pigmy forms of the crowd, which about a mile from me surrounded the gate; the form of Raymond was lost. Stung with impatience, I urged my horse with force of spur and loosened reins down the acclivity, that, before danger could arrive, I might be at the side of my noble, godlike friend. A number of buildings and trees intervened, when I had reached the plain, hiding the city from my view. But at that moment a crash was heard. Thunderlike it reverberated through the sky, while the air was darkened. A moment more and the old walls again met my sight, while over them hovered a murky cloud; fragments of buildings whirled above, half seen in smoke, while flames burst out beneath, and continued explosions filled the air with terrific thunders. Flying from the mass of falling ruin which leapt over the high walls, and shook the ivy towers, a crowd of soldiers made for the road by which I came; I was surrounded, hemmed in by them, unable to get forward. My impatience rose to its utmost; I stretched out my hands to the men; I conjured them to turn back and save their General, the conqueror of Stamboul, the liberator of Greece; tears, aye tears, in warm flow gushed from my eyes—I would not believe in his destruction; yet every mass that darkened the air seemed to bear with it a portion of the martyred Raymond. Horrible sights were shaped to me in the turbid cloud that hovered over the city; and my only relief was derived from the struggles I made to approach the gate. Yet when I effected my purpose, all I could discern within the precincts of the massive walls was a city of fire: the open way through which Raymond had ridden was enveloped in smoke and flame. After an interval the explosions ceased, but the flames still shot up from various quarters; the dome of St. Sophia had disappeared. Strange to say (the result perhaps of the concussion of air occasioned by the blowing up of the city) huge, white thunder clouds lifted themselves up from the southern horizon, and gathered over-head; they were the first blots on the blue expanse that I had seen for months, and amidst this havoc and despair they inspired pleasure. The vault above became obscured, lightning flashed from the heavy masses, followed instantaneously by crashing thunder; then the big rain fell. The flames of the city bent beneath it; and the smoke and dust arising from the ruins was dissipated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I no sooner perceived an abatement of the flames than, hurried on by an irresistible impulse, I endeavoured to penetrate the town. I could only do this on foot, as the mass of ruin was impracticable for a horse. I had never entered the city before, and its ways were unknown to me. The streets were blocked up, the ruins smoking; I climbed up one heap, only to view others in succession; and nothing told me where the centre of the town might be, or towards what point Raymond might have directed his course. The rain ceased; the clouds sunk behind the horizon; it was now evening, and the sun descended swiftly the western sky. I scrambled on, until I came to a street, whose wooden houses, half-burnt, had been cooled by the rain, and were fortunately uninjured by the gunpowder. Up this I hurried—until now I had not seen a vestige of man. Yet none of the defaced human forms which I distinguished, could be Raymond; so I turned my eyes away, while my heart sickened within me. I came to an open space—a mountain of ruin in the midst, announced that some large mosque had occupied the space—and here, scattered about, I saw various articles of luxury and wealth, singed, destroyed—but shewing what they had been in their ruin—jewels, strings of pearls, embroidered robes, rich furs, glittering tapestries, and oriental ornaments, seemed to have been collected here in a pile destined for destruction; but the rain had stopped the havoc midway.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hours passed, while in this scene of ruin I sought for Raymond. Insurmountable heaps sometimes opposed themselves; the still burning fires scorched me. The sun set; the atmosphere grew dim—and the evening star no longer shone companionless. The glare of flames attested the progress of destruction, while, during mingled light and obscurity, the piles around me took gigantic proportions and weird shapes. For a moment I could yield to the creative power of the imagination, and for a moment was soothed by the sublime fictions it presented to me. The beatings of my human heart drew me back to blank reality. Where, in this wilderness of death, art thou, O Raymond—ornament of England, deliverer of Greece, "hero of unwritten story," where in this burning chaos are thy dear relics strewed? I called aloud for him—through the darkness of night, over the scorching ruins of fallen Constantinople, his name was heard; no voice replied—echo even was mute.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was overcome by weariness; the solitude depressed my spirits. The sultry air impregnated with dust, the heat and smoke of burning palaces, palsied my limbs. Hunger suddenly came acutely upon me. The excitement which had hitherto sustained me was lost; as a building, whose props are loosened, and whose foundations rock, totters and falls, so when enthusiasm and hope deserted me, did my strength fail. I sat on the sole remaining step of an edifice, which even in its downfall, was huge and magnificent; a few broken walls, not dislodged by gunpowder, stood in fantastic groupes, and a flame glimmered at intervals on the summit of the pile. For a time hunger and sleep contended, till the constellations reeled before my eyes and then were lost. I strove to rise, but my heavy lids closed, my limbs over-wearied, claimed repose—I rested my head on the stone, I yielded to the grateful sensation of utter forgetfulness; and in that scene of desolation, on that night of despair—I slept.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Calderon de la Barca.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER III.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >THE stars still shone brightly when I awoke, and Taurus high in the southern heaven shewed that it was midnight. I awoke from disturbed dreams. Methought I had been invited to Timon's last feast; I came with keen appetite, the covers were removed, the hot water sent up its unsatisfying steams, while I fled before the anger of the host, who assumed the form of Raymond; while to my diseased fancy, the vessels hurled by him after me, were surcharged with fetid vapour, and my friend's shape, altered by a thousand distortions, expanded into a gigantic phantom, bearing on its brow the sign of pestilence. The growing shadow rose and rose, filling, and then seeming to endeavour to burst beyond, the adamantine vault that bent over, sustaining and enclosing the world. The night-mare became torture; with a strong effort I threw off sleep, and recalled reason to her wonted functions. My first thought was Perdita; to her I must return; her I must support, drawing such food from despair as might best sustain her wounded heart; recalling her from the wild excesses of grief, by the austere laws of duty, and the soft tenderness of regret.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The position of the stars was my only guide. I turned from the awful ruin of the Golden City, and, after great exertion, succeeded in extricating myself from its enclosure. I met a company of soldiers outside the walls; I borrowed a horse from one of them, and hastened to my sister. The appearance of the plain was changed during this short interval; the encampment was broken up; the relics of the disbanded army met in small companies here and there; each face was clouded; every gesture spoke astonishment and dismay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With an heavy heart I entered the palace, and stood fearful to advance, to speak, to look. In the midst of the hall was Perdita; she sat on the marble pavement, her head fallen on her bosom, her hair dishevelled, her fingers twined busily one within the other; she was pale as marble, and every feature was contracted by agony. She perceived me, and looked up enquiringly; her half glance of hope was misery; the words died before I could articulate them; I felt a ghastly smile wrinkle my lips. She understood my gesture; again her head fell; again her fingers worked restlessly. At last I recovered speech, but my voice terrified her; the hapless girl had understood my look, and for worlds she would not that the tale of her heavy misery should have been shaped out and confirmed by hard, irrevocable words. Nay, she seemed to wish to distract my thoughts from the subject: she rose from the floor: "Hush!" she said, whisperingly; "after much weeping, Clara sleeps; we must not disturb her." She seated herself then on the same ottoman where I had left her in the morning resting on the beating heart of her Raymond; I dared not approach her, but sat at a distant corner, watching her starting and nervous gestures. At length, in an abrupt manner she asked, "Where is he?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"O, fear not," she continued, "fear not that I should entertain hope! Yet tell me, have you found him? To have him once more in my arms, to see him, however changed, is all I desire. Though Constantinople be heaped above him as a tomb, yet I must find him—then cover us with the city's weight, with a mountain piled above—I care not, so that one grave hold Raymond and his Perdita." Then weeping, she clung to me: "Take me to him," she cried, "unkind Lionel, why do you keep me here? Of myself I cannot find him —but you know where he lies—lead me thither."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At first these agonizing plaints filled me with intolerable compassion. But soon I endeavoured to extract patience for her from the ideas she suggested. I related my adventures of the night, my endeavours to find our lost one, and my disappointment. Turning her thoughts this way, I gave them an object which rescued them from insanity. With apparent calmness she discussed with me the probable spot where he might be found, and planned the means we should use for that purpose. Then hearing of my fatigue and abstinence, she herself brought me food. I seized the favourable moment, and endeavoured to awaken in her something beyond the killing torpor of grief. As I spoke, my subject carried me away; deep admiration; grief, the offspring of truest affection, the overflowing of a heart bursting with sympathy for all that had been great and sublime in the career of my friend, inspired me as I poured forth the praises of Raymond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Alas, for us," I cried, "who have lost this latest honour of the world! Beloved Raymond! He is gone to the nations of the dead; he has become one of those, who render the dark abode of the obscure grave illustrious by dwelling there. He has journied on the road that leads to it, and joined the mighty of soul who went before him. When the world was in its infancy death must have been terrible, and man left his friends and kindred to dwell, a solitary stranger, in an unknown country. But now, he who dies finds many companions gone before to prepare for his reception. The great of past ages people it, the exalted hero of our own days is counted among its inhabitants, while life becomes doubly 'the desart and the solitude.'</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What a noble creature was Raymond, the first among the men of our time. By the grandeur of his conceptions, the graceful daring of his actions, by his wit and beauty, he won and ruled the minds of all. Of one only fault he might have been accused; but his death has cancelled that. I have heard him called inconstant of purpose—when he deserted, for the sake of love, the hope of sovereignty, and when he abdicated the protectorship of England, men blamed his infirmity of purpose. Now his death has crowned his life, and to the end of time it will be remembered, that he devoted himself, a willing victim, to the glory of Greece. Such was his choice: he expected to die. He foresaw that he should leave this cheerful earth, the lightsome sky, and thy love, Perdita; yet he neither hesitated or turned back, going right onward to his mark of fame. While the earth lasts, his actions will be recorded with praise. Grecian maidens will in devotion strew flowers on his tomb, and make the air around it resonant with patriotic hymns, in which his name will find high record."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I saw the features of Perdita soften; the sternness of grief yielded to tenderness—I continued:—"Thus to honour him, is the sacred duty of his survivors. To make his name even as an holy spot of ground, enclosing it from all hostile attacks by our praise, shedding on it the blossoms of love and regret, guarding it from decay, and bequeathing it untainted to posterity. Such is the duty of his friends. A dearer one belongs to you, Perdita, mother of his child. Do you remember in her infancy, with what transport you beheld Clara, recognizing in her the united being of yourself and Raymond; joying to view in this living temple a manifestation of your eternal loves. Even such is she still. You say that you have lost Raymond. O, no!—yet he lives with you and in you there. From him she sprung, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone—and not, as heretofore, are you content to trace in her downy cheek and delicate limbs, an affinity to Raymond, but in her enthusiastic affections, in the sweet qualities of her mind, you may still find him living, the good, the great, the beloved. Be it your care to foster this similarity—be it your care to render her worthy of him, so that, when she glory in her origin, she take not shame for what she is."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I could perceive that, when I recalled my sister's thoughts to her duties in life, she did not listen with the same patience as before. She appeared to suspect a plan of consolation on my part, from which she, cherishing her new-born grief, revolted. "You talk of the future," she said, "while the present is all to me. Let me find the earthly dwelling of my beloved; let us rescue that from common dust, so that in times to come men may point to the sacred tomb, and name it his—then to other thoughts, and a new course of life, or what else fate, in her cruel tyranny, may have marked out for me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a short repose I prepared to leave her, that I might endeavour to accomplish her wish. In the mean time we were joined by Clara, whose pallid cheek and scared look shewed the deep impression grief had made on her young mind. She seemed to be full of something to which she could not give words; but, seizing an opportunity afforded by Perdita's absence, she preferred to me an earnest prayer, that I would take her within view of the gate at which her father had entered Constantinople. She promised to commit no extravagance, to be docile, and immediately to return. I could not refuse; for Clara was not an ordinary child; her sensibility and intelligence seemed already to have endowed her with the rights of womanhood. With her therefore, before me on my horse, attended only by the servant who was to re-conduct her, we rode to the Top Kapou. We found a party of soldiers gathered round it. They were listening. "They are human cries," said one: "More like the howling of a dog," replied another; and again they bent to catch the sound of regular distant moans, which issued from the precincts of the ruined city. "That, Clara," I said, "is the gate, that the street which yestermorn your father rode up." Whatever Clara's intention had been in asking to be brought hither, it was balked by the presence of the soldiers. With earnest gaze she looked on the labyrinth of smoking piles which had been a city, and then expressed her readiness to return home. At this moment a melancholy howl struck on our ears; it was repeated; "Hark!" cried Clara, "he is there; that is Florio, my father's dog." It seemed to me impossible that she could recognise the sound, but she persisted in her assertion till she gained credit with the crowd about. At least it would be a benevolent action to rescue the sufferer, whether human or brute, from the desolation of the town; so, sending Clara back to her home, I again entered Constantinople. Encouraged by the impunity attendant on my former visit, several soldiers who had made a part of Raymond's body guard, who had loved him, and sincerely mourned his loss, accompanied me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is impossible to conjecture the strange enchainment of events which restored the lifeless form of my friend to our hands. In that part of the town where the fire had most raged the night before, and which now lay quenched, black and cold, the dying dog of Raymond crouched beside the mutilated form of its lord. At such a time sorrow has no voice; affliction, tamed by it is very vehemence, is mute. The poor animal recognised me, licked my hand, crept close to its lord, and died. He had been evidently thrown from his horse by some falling ruin, which had crushed his head, and defaced his whole person. I bent over the body, and took in my hand the edge of his cloak, less altered in appearance than the human frame it clothed. I pressed it to my lips, while the rough soldiers gathered around, mourning over this worthiest prey of death, as if regret and endless lamentation could re-illumine the extinguished spark, or call to its shattered prison-house of flesh the liberated spirit. Yesterday those limbs were worth an universe; they then enshrined a transcendant power, whose intents, words, and actions were worthy to be recorded in letters of gold; now the superstition of affection alone could give value to the shattered mechanism, which, incapable and clod-like, no more resembled Raymond, than the fallen rain is like the former mansion of cloud in which it climbed the highest skies, and gilded by the sun, attracted all eyes, and satiated the sense by its excess of beauty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such as he had now become, such as was his terrene vesture, defaced and spoiled, we wrapt it in our cloaks, and lifting the burthen in our arms, bore it from this city of the dead. The question arose as to where we should deposit him. In our road to the palace, we passed through the Greek cemetery; here on a tablet of black marble I caused him to be laid; the cypresses waved high above, their death-like gloom accorded with his state of nothingness. We cut branches of the funereal trees and placed them over him, and on these again his sword. I left a guard to protect this treasure of dust; and ordered perpetual torches to be burned around.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When I returned to Perdita, I found that she had already been informed of the success of my undertaking. He, her beloved, the sole and eternal object of her passionate tenderness, was restored her. Such was the maniac language of her enthusiasm. What though those limbs moved not, and those lips could no more frame modulated accents of wisdom and love! What though like a weed flung from the fruitless sea, he lay the prey of corruption— still that was the form she had caressed, those the lips that meeting hers, had drank the spirit of love from the commingling breath; that was the earthly mechanism of dissoluble clay she had called her own. True, she looked forward to another life; true, the burning spirit of love seemed to her unextinguishable throughout eternity. Yet at this time, with human fondness, she clung to all that her human senses permitted her to see and feel to be a part of Raymond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pale as marble, clear and beaming as that, she heard my tale, and enquired concerning the spot where he had been deposited. Her features had lost the distortion of grief; her eyes were brightened, her very person seemed dilated; while the excessive whiteness and even transparency of her skin, and something hollow in her voice, bore witness that not tranquillity, but excess of excitement, occasioned the treacherous calm that settled on her countenance. I asked her where he should be buried. She replied, "At Athens; even at the Athens which he loved. Without the town, on the acclivity of Hymettus, there is a rocky recess which he pointed out to me as the spot where he would wish to repose."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My own desire certainly was that he should not be removed from the spot where he now lay. But her wish was of course to be complied with; and I entreated her to prepare without delay for our departure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Behold now the melancholy train cross the flats of Thrace, and wind through the defiles, and over the mountains of Macedonia, coast the clear waves of the Peneus, cross the Larissean plain, pass the straits of Thermopylae, and ascending in succession Oeta and Parnassus, descend to the fertile plain of Athens. Women bear with resignation these long drawn ills, but to a man's impatient spirit, the slow motion of our cavalcade, the melancholy repose we took at noon, the perpetual presence of the pall, gorgeous though it was, that wrapt the rifled casket which had contained Raymond, the monotonous recurrence of day and night, unvaried by hope or change, all the circumstances of our march were intolerable. Perdita, shut up in herself, spoke little. Her carriage was closed; and, when we rested, she sat leaning her pale cheek on her white cold hand, with eyes fixed on the ground, indulging thoughts which refused communication or sympathy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We descended from Parnassus, emerging from its many folds, and passed through Livadia on our road to Attica. Perdita would not enter Athens; but reposing at Marathon on the night of our arrival, conducted me on the following day, to the spot selected by her as the treasure house of Raymond's dear remains. It was in a recess near the head of the ravine to the south of Hymettus. The chasm, deep, black, and hoary, swept from the summit to the base; in the fissures of the rock myrtle underwood grew and wild thyme, the food of many nations of bees; enormous crags protruded into the cleft, some beetling over, others rising perpendicularly from it. At the foot of this sublime chasm, a fertile laughing valley reached from sea to sea, and beyond was spread the blue Aegean, sprinkled with islands, the light waves glancing beneath the sun. Close to the spot on which we stood, was a solitary rock, high and conical, which, divided on every side from the mountain, seemed a nature-hewn pyramid; with little labour this block was reduced to a perfect shape; the narrow cell was scooped out beneath in which Raymond was placed, and a short inscription, carved in the living stone, recorded the name of its tenant, the cause and aera of his death.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Every thing was accomplished with speed under my directions. I agreed to leave the finishing and guardianship of the tomb to the head of the religious establishment at Athens, and by the end of October prepared for my return to England. I mentioned this to Perdita. It was painful to appear to drag her from the last scene that spoke of her lost one; but to linger here was vain, and my very soul was sick with its yearning to rejoin my Idris and her babes. In reply, my sister requested me to accompany her the following evening to the tomb of Raymond. Some days had passed since I had visited the spot. The path to it had been enlarged, and steps hewn in the rock led us less circuitously than before, to the spot itself; the platform on which the pyramid stood was enlarged, and looking towards the south, in a recess overshadowed by the straggling branches of a wild fig-tree, I saw foundations dug, and props and rafters fixed, evidently the commencement of a cottage; standing on its unfinished threshold, the tomb was at our right-hand, the whole ravine, and plain, and azure sea immediately before us; the dark rocks received a glow from the descending sun, which glanced along the cultivated valley, and dyed in purple and orange the placid waves; we sat on a rocky elevation, and I gazed with rapture on the beauteous panorama of living and changeful colours, which varied and enhanced the graces of earth and ocean.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Did I not do right," said Perdita, "in having my loved one conveyed hither? Hereafter this will be the cynosure of Greece. In such a spot death loses half its terrors, and even the inanimate dust appears to partake of the spirit of beauty which hallows this region. Lionel, he sleeps there; that is the grave of Raymond, he whom in my youth I first loved; whom my heart accompanied in days of separation and anger; to whom I am now joined for ever. Never—mark me—never will I leave this spot. Methinks his spirit remains here as well as that dust, which, uncommunicable though it be, is more precious in its nothingness than aught else widowed earth clasps to her sorrowing bosom. The myrtle bushes, the thyme, the little cyclamen, which peep from the fissures of the rock, all the produce of the place, bear affinity to him; the light that invests the hills participates in his essence, and sky and mountains, sea and valley, are imbued by the presence of his spirit. I will live and die here!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Go you to England, Lionel; return to sweet Idris and dearest Adrian; return, and let my orphan girl be as a child of your own in your house. Look on me as dead; and truly if death be a mere change of state, I am dead. This is another world, from that which late I inhabited, from that which is now your home. Here I hold communion only with the has been, and to come. Go you to England, and leave me where alone I can consent to drag out the miserable days which I must still live."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A shower of tears terminated her sad harangue. I had expected some extravagant proposition, and remained silent awhile, collecting my thoughts that I might the better combat her fanciful scheme. "You cherish dreary thoughts, my dear Perdita," I said, "nor do I wonder that for a time your better reason should be influenced by passionate grief and a disturbed imagination. Even I am in love with this last home of Raymond's; nevertheless we must quit it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I expected this," cried Perdita; "I supposed that you would treat me as a mad, foolish girl. But do not deceive yourself; this cottage is built by my order; and here I shall remain, until the hour arrives when I may share his happier dwelling."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My dearest girl!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And what is there so strange in my design? I might have deceived you; I might have talked of remaining here only a few months; in your anxiety to reach Windsor you would have left me, and without reproach or contention, I might have pursued my plan. But I disdained the artifice; or rather in my wretchedness it was my only consolation to pour out my heart to you, my brother, my only friend. You will not dispute with me? You know how wilful your poor, misery-stricken sister is. Take my girl with you; wean her from sights and thoughts of sorrow; let infantine hilarity revisit her heart, and animate her eyes; so could it never be, were she near me; it is far better for all of you that you should never see me again. For myself, I will not voluntarily seek death, that is, I will not, while I can command myself; and I can here. But drag me from this country; and my power of self control vanishes, nor can I answer for the violence my agony of grief may lead me to commit."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You clothe your meaning, Perdita," I replied, "in powerful words, yet that meaning is selfish and unworthy of you. You have often agreed with me that there is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others: and now, in the very prime of life, you desert your principles, and shut yourself up in useless solitude. Will you think of Raymond less at Windsor, the scene of your early happiness? Will you commune less with his departed spirit, while you watch over and cultivate the rare excellence of his child? You have been sadly visited; nor do I wonder that a feeling akin to insanity should drive you to bitter and unreasonable imaginings. But a home of love awaits you in your native England. My tenderness and affection must soothe you; the society of Raymond's friends will be of more solace than these dreary speculations. We will all make it our first care, our dearest task, to contribute to your happiness."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Perdita shook her head; "If it could be so," she replied, "I were much in the wrong to disdain your offers. But it is not a matter of choice; I can live here only. I am a part of this scene; each and all its properties are a part of me. This is no sudden fancy; I live by it. The knowledge that I am here, rises with me in the morning, and enables me to endure the light; it is mingled with my food, which else were poison; it walks, it sleeps with me, for ever it accompanies me. Here I may even cease to repine, and may add my tardy consent to the decree which has taken him from me. He would rather have died such a death, which will be recorded in history to endless time, than have lived to old age unknown, unhonoured. Nor can I desire better, than, having been the chosen and beloved of his heart, here, in youth's prime, before added years can tarnish the best feelings of my nature, to watch his tomb, and speedily rejoin him in his blessed repose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So much, my dearest Lionel, I have said, wishing to persuade you that I do right. If you are unconvinced, I can add nothing further by way of argument, and I can only declare my fixed resolve. I stay here; force only can remove me. Be it so; drag me away—I return; confine me, imprison me, still I escape, and come here. Or would my brother rather devote the heart-broken Perdita to the straw and chains of a maniac, than suffer her to rest in peace beneath the shadow of His society, in this my own selected and beloved recess?"—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All this appeared to me, I own, methodized madness. I imagined, that it was my imperative duty to take her from scenes that thus forcibly reminded her of her loss. Nor did I doubt, that in the tranquillity of our family circle at Windsor, she would recover some degree of composure, and in the end, of happiness. My affection for Clara also led me to oppose these fond dreams of cherished grief; her sensibility had already been too much excited; her infant heedlessness too soon exchanged for deep and anxious thought. The strange and romantic scheme of her mother, might confirm and perpetuate the painful view of life, which had intruded itself thus early on her contemplation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On returning home, the captain of the steam packet with whom I had agreed to sail, came to tell me, that accidental circumstances hastened his departure, and that, if I went with him, I must come on board at five on the following morning. I hastily gave my consent to this arrangement, and as hastily formed a plan through which Perdita should be forced to become my companion. I believe that most people in my situation would have acted in the same manner. Yet this consideration does not, or rather did not in after time, diminish the reproaches of my conscience. At the moment, I felt convinced that I was acting for the best, and that all I did was right and even necessary.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I sat with Perdita and soothed her, by my seeming assent to her wild scheme. She received my concurrence with pleasure, and a thousand times over thanked her deceiving, deceitful brother. As night came on, her spirits, enlivened by my unexpected concession, regained an almost forgotten vivacity. I pretended to be alarmed by the feverish glow in her cheek; I entreated her to take a composing draught; I poured out the medicine, which she took docilely from me. I watched her as she drank it. Falsehood and artifice are in themselves so hateful, that, though I still thought I did right, a feeling of shame and guilt came painfully upon me. I left her, and soon heard that she slept soundly under the influence of the opiate I had administered. She was carried thus unconscious on board; the anchor weighed, and the wind being favourable, we stood far out to sea; with all the canvas spread, and the power of the engine to assist, we scudded swiftly and steadily through the chafed element.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was late in the day before Perdita awoke, and a longer time elapsed before recovering from the torpor occasioned by the laudanum, she perceived her change of situation. She started wildly from her couch, and flew to the cabin window. The blue and troubled sea sped past the vessel, and was spread shoreless around: the sky was covered by a rack, which in its swift motion shewed how speedily she was borne away. The creaking of the masts, the clang of the wheels, the tramp above, all persuaded her that she was already far from the shores of Greece.—"Where are we?" she cried, "where are we going?"—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The attendant whom I had stationed to watch her, replied, "to England."—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And my brother?"—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Is on deck, Madam."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Unkind! unkind!" exclaimed the poor victim, as with a deep sigh she looked on the waste of waters. Then without further remark, she threw herself on her couch, and closing her eyes remained motionless; so that but for the deep sighs that burst from her, it would have seemed that she slept.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As soon as I heard that she had spoken, I sent Clara to her, that the sight of the lovely innocent might inspire gentle and affectionate thoughts. But neither the presence of her child, nor a subsequent visit from me, could rouse my sister. She looked on Clara with a countenance of woful meaning, but she did not speak. When I appeared, she turned away, and in reply to my enquiries, only said, "You know not what you have done!"—I trusted that this sullenness betokened merely the struggle between disappointment and natural affection, and that in a few days she would be reconciled to her fate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When night came on, she begged that Clara might sleep in a separate cabin. Her servant, however, remained with her. About midnight she spoke to the latter, saying that she had had a bad dream, and bade her go to her daughter, and bring word whether she rested quietly. The woman obeyed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The breeze, that had flagged since sunset, now rose again. I was on deck, enjoying our swift progress. The quiet was disturbed only by the rush of waters as they divided before the steady keel, the murmur of the moveless and full sails, the wind whistling in the shrouds, and the regular motion of the engine. The sea was gently agitated, now shewing a white crest, and now resuming an uniform hue; the clouds had disappeared; and dark ether clipt the broad ocean, in which the constellations vainly sought their accustomed mirror. Our rate could not have been less than eight knots.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly I heard a splash in the sea. The sailors on watch rushed to the side of the vessel, with the cry—some one gone overboard. "It is not from deck," said the man at the helm, "something has been thrown from the aft cabin." A call for the boat to be lowered was echoed from the deck. I rushed into my sister's cabin; it was empty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With sails abaft, the engine stopt, the vessel remained unwillingly stationary, until, after an hour's search, my poor Perdita was brought on board. But no care could re-animate her, no medicine cause her dear eyes to open, and the blood to flow again from her pulseless heart. One clenched hand contained a slip of paper, on which was written, "To Athens." To ensure her removal thither, and prevent the irrecoverable loss of her body in the wide sea, she had had the precaution to fasten a long shawl round her waist, and again to the staunchions of the cabin window. She had drifted somewhat under the keel of the vessel, and her being out of sight occasioned the delay in finding her. And thus the ill-starred girl died a victim to my senseless rashness. Thus, in early day, she left us for the company of the dead, and preferred to share the rocky grave of Raymond, before the animated scene this cheerful earth afforded, and the society of loving friends. Thus in her twenty-ninth year she died; having enjoyed some few years of the happiness of paradise, and sustaining a reverse to which her impatient spirit and affectionate disposition were unable to submit. As I marked the placid expression that had settled on her countenance in death, I felt, in spite of the pangs of remorse, in spite of heart-rending regret, that it was better to die so, than to drag on long, miserable years of repining and inconsolable grief. Stress of weather drove us up the Adriatic Gulph; and, our vessel being hardly fitted to weather a storm, we took refuge in the port of Ancona. Here I met Georgio Palli, the vice-admiral of the Greek fleet, a former friend and warm partizan of Raymond. I committed the remains of my lost Perdita to his care, for the purpose of having them transported to Hymettus, and placed in the cell her Raymond already occupied beneath the pyramid. This was all accomplished even as I wished. She reposed beside her beloved, and the tomb above was inscribed with the united names of Raymond and Perdita.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I then came to a resolution of pursuing our journey to England overland. My own heart was racked by regrets and remorse. The apprehension, that Raymond had departed for ever, that his name, blended eternally with the past, must be erased from every anticipation of the future, had come slowly upon me. I had always admired his talents; his noble aspirations; his grand conceptions of the glory and majesty of his ambition: his utter want of mean passions; his fortitude and daring. In Greece I had learnt to love him; his very waywardness, and self-abandonment to the impulses of superstition, attached me to him doubly; it might be weakness, but it was the antipodes of all that was grovelling and selfish. To these pangs were added the loss of Perdita, lost through my own accursed self-will and conceit. This dear one, my sole relation; whose progress I had marked from tender childhood through the varied path of life, and seen her throughout conspicuous for integrity, devotion, and true affection; for all that constitutes the peculiar graces of the female character, and beheld her at last the victim of too much loving, too constant an attachment to the perishable and lost, she, in her pride of beauty and life, had thrown aside the pleasant perception of the apparent world for the unreality of the grave, and had left poor Clara quite an orphan. I concealed from this beloved child that her mother's death was voluntary, and tried every means to awaken cheerfulness in her sorrow-stricken spirit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of my first acts for the recovery even of my own composure, was to bid farewell to the sea. Its hateful splash renewed again and again to my sense the death of my sister; its roar was a dirge; in every dark hull that was tossed on its inconstant bosom, I imaged a bier, that would convey to death all who trusted to its treacherous smiles. Farewell to the sea! Come, my Clara, sit beside me in this aerial bark; quickly and gently it cleaves the azure serene, and with soft undulation glides upon the current of the air; or, if storm shake its fragile mechanism, the green earth is below; we can descend, and take shelter on the stable continent. Here aloft, the companions of the swift-winged birds, we skim through the unresisting element, fleetly and fearlessly. The light boat heaves not, nor is opposed by death-bearing waves; the ether opens before the prow, and the shadow of the globe that upholds it, shelters us from the noon-day sun. Beneath are the plains of Italy, or the vast undulations of the wave-like Apennines: fertility reposes in their many folds, and woods crown the summits. The free and happy peasant, unshackled by the Austrian, bears the double harvest to the garner; and the refined citizens rear without dread the long blighted tree of knowledge in this garden of the world. We were lifted above the Alpine peaks, and from their deep and brawling ravines entered the plain of fair France, and after an airy journey of six days, we landed at Dieppe, furled the feathered wings, and closed the silken globe of our little pinnace. A heavy rain made this mode of travelling now incommodious; so we embarked in a steam-packet, and after a short passage landed at Portsmouth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A strange story was rife here. A few days before, a tempest-struck vessel had appeared off the town: the hull was parched-looking and cracked, the sails rent, and bent in a careless, unseamanlike manner, the shrouds tangled and broken. She drifted towards the harbour, and was stranded on the sands at the entrance. In the morning the custom-house officers, together with a crowd of idlers, visited her. One only of the crew appeared to have arrived with her. He had got to shore, and had walked a few paces towards the town, and then, vanquished by malady and approaching death, had fallen on the inhospitable beach. He was found stiff, his hands clenched, and pressed against his breast. His skin, nearly black, his matted hair and bristly beard, were signs of a long protracted misery. It was whispered that he had died of the plague. No one ventured on board the vessel, and strange sights were averred to be seen at night, walking the deck, and hanging on the masts and shrouds. She soon went to pieces; I was shewn where she had been, and saw her disjoined timbers tossed on the waves. The body of the man who had landed, had been buried deep in the sands; and none could tell more, than that the vessel was American built, and that several months before the Fortunatas had sailed from Philadelphia, of which no tidings were afterwards received.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IV.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I RETURNED to my family estate in the autumn of the year 2092. My heart had long been with them; and I felt sick with the hope and delight of seeing them again. The district which contained them appeared the abode of every kindly spirit. Happiness, love and peace, walked the forest paths, and tempered the atmosphere. After all the agitation and sorrow I had endured in Greece, I sought Windsor, as the storm-driven bird does the nest in which it may fold its wings in tranquillity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave "life," that we may live.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idris was well content with this resolve of mine. Her native sprightliness needed no undue excitement, and her placid heart reposed contented on my love, the well-being of her children, and the beauty of surrounding nature. Her pride and blameless ambition was to create smiles in all around her, and to shed repose on the fragile existence of her brother. In spite of her tender nursing, the health of Adrian perceptibly declined. Walking, riding, the common occupations of life, overcame him: he felt no pain, but seemed to tremble for ever on the verge of annihilation. Yet, as he had lived on for months nearly in the same state, he did not inspire us with any immediate fear; and, though he talked of death as an event most familiar to his thoughts, he did not cease to exert himself to render others happy, or to cultivate his own astonishing powers of mind. Winter passed away; and spring, led by the months, awakened life in all nature. The forest was dressed in green; the young calves frisked on the new-sprung grass; the wind-winged shadows of light clouds sped over the green cornfields; the hermit cuckoo repeated his monotonous all-hail to the season; the nightingale, bird of love and minion of the evening star, filled the woods with song; while Venus lingered in the warm sunset, and the young green of the trees lay in gentle relief along the clear horizon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Delight awoke in every heart, delight and exultation; for there was peace through all the world; the temple of Universal Janus was shut, and man died not that year by the hand of man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let this last but twelve months," said Adrian; "and earth will become a Paradise. The energies of man were before directed to the destruction of his species: they now aim at its liberation and preservation. Man cannot repose, and his restless aspirations will now bring forth good instead of evil. The favoured countries of the south will throw off the iron yoke of servitude; poverty will quit us, and with that, sickness. What may not the forces, never before united, of liberty and peace achieve in this dwelling of man?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dreaming, for ever dreaming, Windsor!" said Ryland, the old adversary of Raymond, and candidate for the Protectorate at the ensuing election. "Be assured that earth is not, nor ever can be heaven, while the seeds of hell are natives of her soil. When the seasons have become equal, when the air breeds no disorders, when its surface is no longer liable to blights and droughts, then sickness will cease; when men's passions are dead, poverty will depart. When love is no longer akin to hate, then brotherhood will exist: we are very far from that state at present."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not so far as you may suppose," observed a little old astronomer, by name Merrival, "the poles precede slowly, but securely; in an hundred thousand years—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We shall all be underground," said Ryland.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The pole of the earth will coincide with the pole of the ecliptic," continued the astronomer, "an universal spring will be produced, and earth become a paradise."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And we shall of course enjoy the benefit of the change," said Ryland, contemptuously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We have strange news here," I observed. I had the newspaper in my hand, and, as usual, had turned to the intelligence from Greece. "It seems that the total destruction of Constantinople, and the supposition that winter had purified the air of the fallen city, gave the Greeks courage to visit its site, and begin to rebuild it. But they tell us that the curse of God is on the place, for every one who has ventured within the walls has been tainted by the plague; that this disease has spread in Thrace and Macedonia; and now, fearing the virulence of infection during the coming heats, a cordon has been drawn on the frontiers of Thessaly, and a strict quarantine exacted." This intelligence brought us back from the prospect of paradise, held out after the lapse of an hundred thousand years, to the pain and misery at present existent upon earth. We talked of the ravages made last year by pestilence in every quarter of the world; and of the dreadful consequences of a second visitation. We discussed the best means of preventing infection, and of preserving health and activity in a large city thus afflicted—London, for instance. Merrival did not join in this conversation; drawing near Idris, he proceeded to assure her that the joyful prospect of an earthly paradise after an hundred thousand years, was clouded to him by the knowledge that in a certain period of time after, an earthly hell or purgatory, would occur, when the ecliptic and equator would be at right angles.[1] Our party at length broke up; "We are all dreaming this morning," said Ryland, "it is as wise to discuss the probability of a visitation of the plague in our well-governed metropolis, as to calculate the centuries which must escape before we can grow pine-apples here in the open air."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But, though it seemed absurd to calculate upon the arrival of the plague in London, I could not reflect without extreme pain on the desolation this evil would cause in Greece. The English for the most part talked of Thrace and Macedonia, as they would of a lunar territory, which, unknown to them, presented no distinct idea or interest to the minds. I had trod the soil. The faces of many of the inhabitants were familiar to me; in the towns, plains, hills, and defiles of these countries, I had enjoyed unspeakable delight, as I journied through them the year before. Some romantic village, some cottage, or elegant abode there situated, inhabited by the lovely and the good, rose before my mental sight, and the question haunted me, is the plague there also?—That same invincible monster, which hovered over and devoured Constantinople—that fiend more cruel than tempest, less tame than fire, is, alas, unchained in that beautiful country—these reflections would not allow me to rest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The political state of England became agitated as the time drew near when the new Protector was to be elected. This event excited the more interest, since it was the current report, that if the popular candidate (Ryland) should be chosen, the question of the abolition of hereditary rank, and other feudal relics, would come under the consideration of parliament. Not a word had been spoken during the present session on any of these topics. Every thing would depend upon the choice of a Protector, and the elections of the ensuing year. Yet this very silence was awful, shewing the deep weight attributed to the question; the fear of either party to hazard an ill-timed attack, and the expectation of a furious contention when it should begin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But although St. Stephen's did not echo with the voice which filled each heart, the newspapers teemed with nothing else; and in private companies the conversation however remotely begun, soon verged towards this central point, while voices were lowered and chairs drawn closer. The nobles did not hesitate to express their fear; the other party endeavoured to treat the matter lightly. "Shame on the country," said Ryland, "to lay so much stress upon words and frippery; it is a question of nothing; of the new painting of carriage-pannels and the embroidery of footmen's coats."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet could England indeed doff her lordly trappings, and be content with the democratic style of America? Were the pride of ancestry, the patrician spirit, the gentle courtesies and refined pursuits, splendid attributes of rank, to be erased among us? We were told that this would not be the case; that we were by nature a poetical people, a nation easily duped by words, ready to array clouds in splendour, and bestow honour on the dust. This spirit we could never lose; and it was to diffuse this concentrated spirit of birth, that the new law was to be brought forward. We were assured that, when the name and title of Englishman was the sole patent of nobility, we should all be noble; that when no man born under English sway, felt another his superior in rank, courtesy and refinement would become the birth-right of all our countrymen. Let not England be so far disgraced, as to have it imagined that it can be without nobles, nature's true nobility, who bear their patent in their mien, who are from their cradle elevated above the rest of their species, because they are better than the rest. Among a race of independent, and generous, and well educated men, in a country where the imagination is empress of men's minds, there needs be no fear that we should want a perpetual succession of the high-born and lordly. That party, however, could hardly yet be considered a minority in the kingdom, who extolled the ornament of the column, "the Corinthian capital of polished society;" they appealed to prejudices without number, to old attachments and young hopes; to the expectation of thousands who might one day become peers; they set up as a scarecrow, the spectre of all that was sordid, mechanic and base in the commercial republics.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The plague had come to Athens. Hundreds of English residents returned to their own country. Raymond's beloved Athenians, the free, the noble people of the divinest town in Greece, fell like ripe corn before the merciless sickle of the adversary. Its pleasant places were deserted; its temples and palaces were converted into tombs; its energies, bent before towards the highest objects of human ambition, were now forced to converge to one point, the guarding against the innumerous arrows of the plague.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At any other time this disaster would have excited extreme compassion among us; but it was now passed over, while each mind was engaged by the coming controversy. It was not so with me; and the question of rank and right dwindled to insignificance in my eyes, when I pictured the scene of suffering Athens. I heard of the death of only sons; of wives and husbands most devoted; of the rending of ties twisted with the heart's fibres, of friend losing friend, and young mothers mourning for their first born; and these moving incidents were grouped and painted in my mind by the knowledge of the persons, by my esteem and affection for the sufferers. It was the admirers, friends, fellow soldiers of Raymond, families that had welcomed Perdita to Greece, and lamented with her the loss of her lord, that were swept away, and went to dwell with them in the undistinguishing tomb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The plague at Athens had been preceded and caused by the contagion from the East; and the scene of havoc and death continued to be acted there, on a scale of fearful magnitude. A hope that the visitation of the present year would prove the last, kept up the spirits of the merchants connected with these countries; but the inhabitants were driven to despair, or to a resignation which, arising from fanaticism, assumed the same dark hue. America had also received the taint; and, were it yellow fever or plague, the epidemic was gifted with a virulence before unfelt. The devastation was not confined to the towns, but spread throughout the country; the hunter died in the woods, the peasant in the corn-fields, and the fisher on his native waters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A strange story was brought to us from the East, to which little credit would have been given, had not the fact been attested by a multitude of witnesses, in various parts of the world. On the twenty-first of June, it was said that an hour before noon, a black sun arose: an orb, the size of that luminary, but dark, defined, whose beams were shadows, ascended from the west; in about an hour it had reached the meridian, and eclipsed the bright parent of day. Night fell upon every country, night, sudden, rayless, entire. The stars came out, shedding their ineffectual glimmerings on the light-widowed earth. But soon the dim orb passed from over the sun, and lingered down the eastern heaven. As it descended, its dusky rays crossed the brilliant ones of the sun, and deadened or distorted them. The shadows of things assumed strange and ghastly shapes. The wild animals in the woods took fright at the unknown shapes figured on the ground. They fled they knew not whither; and the citizens were filled with greater dread, at the convulsion which "shook lions into civil streets;"—birds, strong-winged eagles, suddenly blinded, fell in the market-places, while owls and bats shewed themselves welcoming the early night. Gradually the object of fear sank beneath the horizon, and to the last shot up shadowy beams into the otherwise radiant air. Such was the tale sent us from Asia, from the eastern extremity of Europe, and from Africa as far west as the Golden Coast. Whether this story were true or not, the effects were certain. Through Asia, from the banks of the Nile to the shores of the Caspian, from the Hellespont even to the sea of Oman, a sudden panic was driven. The men filled the mosques; the women, veiled, hastened to the tombs, and carried offerings to the dead, thus to preserve the living. The plague was forgotten, in this new fear which the black sun had spread; and, though the dead multiplied, and the streets of Ispahan, of Pekin, and of Delhi were strewed with pestilence-struck corpses, men passed on, gazing on the ominous sky, regardless of the death beneath their feet. The christians sought their churches,—christian maidens, even at the feast of roses, clad in white, with shining veils, sought, in long procession, the places consecrated to their religion, filling the air with their hymns; while, ever and anon, from the lips of some poor mourner in the crowd, a voice of wailing burst, and the rest looked up, fancying they could discern the sweeping wings of angels, who passed over the earth, lamenting the disasters about to fall on man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the sunny clime of Persia, in the crowded cities of China, amidst the aromatic groves of Cashmere, and along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, such scenes had place. Even in Greece the tale of the sun of darkness encreased the fears and despair of the dying multitude. We, in our cloudy isle, were far removed from danger, and the only circumstance that brought these disasters at all home to us, was the daily arrival of vessels from the east, crowded with emigrants, mostly English; for the Moslems, though the fear of death was spread keenly among them, still clung together; that, if they were to die (and if they were, death would as readily meet them on the homeless sea, or in far England, as in Persia,)— if they were to die, their bones might rest in earth made sacred by the relics of true believers. Mecca had never before been so crowded with pilgrims; yet the Arabs neglected to pillage the caravans, but, humble and weaponless, they joined the procession, praying Mahomet to avert plague from their tents and deserts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I cannot describe the rapturous delight with which I turned from political brawls at home, and the physical evils of distant countries, to my own dear home, to the selected abode of goodness and love; to peace, and the interchange of every sacred sympathy. Had I never quitted Windsor, these emotions would not have been so intense; but I had in Greece been the prey of fear and deplorable change; in Greece, after a period of anxiety and sorrow, I had seen depart two, whose very names were the symbol of greatness and virtue. But such miseries could never intrude upon the domestic circle left to me, while, secluded in our beloved forest, we passed our lives in tranquillity. Some small change indeed the progress of years brought here; and time, as it is wont, stamped the traces of mortality on our pleasures and expectations. Idris, the most affectionate wife, sister and friend, was a tender and loving mother. The feeling was not with her as with many, a pastime; it was a passion. We had had three children; one, the second in age, died while I was in Greece. This had dashed the triumphant and rapturous emotions of maternity with grief and fear. Before this event, the little beings, sprung from herself, the young heirs of her transient life, seemed to have a sure lease of existence; now she dreaded that the pitiless destroyer might snatch her remaining darlings, as it had snatched their brother. The least illness caused throes of terror; she was miserable if she were at all absent from them; her treasure of happiness she had garnered in their fragile being, and kept forever on the watch, lest the insidious thief should as before steal these valued gems. She had fortunately small cause for fear. Alfred, now nine years old, was an upright, manly little fellow, with radiant brow, soft eyes, and gentle, though independent disposition. Our youngest was yet in infancy; but his downy cheek was sprinkled with the roses of health, and his unwearied vivacity filled our halls with innocent laughter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Clara had passed the age which, from its mute ignorance, was the source of the fears of Idris. Clara was dear to her, to all. There was so much intelligence combined with innocence, sensibility with forbearance, and seriousness with perfect good-humour, a beauty so transcendant, united to such endearing simplicity, that she hung like a pearl in the shrine of our possessions, a treasure of wonder and excellence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the beginning of winter our Alfred, now nine years of age, first went to school at Eton. This appeared to him the primary step towards manhood, and he was proportionably pleased. Community of study and amusement developed the best parts of his character, his steady perseverance, generosity, and well-governed firmness. What deep and sacred emotions are excited in a father's bosom, when he first becomes convinced that his love for his child is not a mere instinct, but worthily bestowed, and that others, less akin, participate his approbation! It was supreme happiness to Idris and myself, to find that the frankness which Alfred's open brow indicated, the intelligence of his eyes, the tempered sensibility of his tones, were not delusions, but indications of talents and virtues, which would "grow with his growth, and strengthen with his strength." At this period, the termination of an animal's love for its offspring,—the true affection of the human parent commences. We no longer look on this dearest part of ourselves, as a tender plant which we must cherish, or a plaything for an idle hour. We build now on his intellectual faculties, we establish our hopes on his moral propensities. His weakness still imparts anxiety to this feeling, his ignorance prevents entire intimacy; but we begin to respect the future man, and to endeavour to secure his esteem, even as if he were our equal. What can a parent have more at heart than the good opinion of his child? In all our transactions with him our honour must be inviolate, the integrity of our relations untainted: fate and circumstance may, when he arrives at maturity, separate us for ever—but, as his aegis in danger, his consolation in hardship, let the ardent youth for ever bear with him through the rough path of life, love and honour for his parents.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We had lived so long in the vicinity of Eton, that its population of young folks was well known to us. Many of them had been Alfred's playmates, before they became his school-fellows. We now watched this youthful congregation with redoubled interest. We marked the difference of character among the boys, and endeavoured to read the future man in the stripling. There is nothing more lovely, to which the heart more yearns than a free-spirited boy, gentle, brave, and generous. Several of the Etonians had these characteristics; all were distinguished by a sense of honour, and spirit of enterprize; in some, as they verged towards manhood, this degenerated into presumption; but the younger ones, lads a little older than our own, were conspicuous for their gallant and sweet dispositions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here were the future governors of England; the men, who, when our ardour was cold, and our projects completed or destroyed for ever, when, our drama acted, we doffed the garb of the hour, and assumed the uniform of age, or of more equalizing death; here were the beings who were to carry on the vast machine of society; here were the lovers, husbands, fathers; here the landlord, the politician, the soldier; some fancied that they were even now ready to appear on the stage, eager to make one among the dramatis personae of active life. It was not long since I was like one of these beardless aspirants; when my boy shall have obtained the place I now hold, I shall have tottered into a grey-headed, wrinkled old man. Strange system! riddle of the Sphynx, most awe-striking! that thus man remains, while we the individuals pass away. Such is, to borrow the words of an eloquent and philosophic writer, "the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression."[2]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Willingly do I give place to thee, dear Alfred! advance, offspring of tender love, child of our hopes; advance a soldier on the road to which I have been the pioneer! I will make way for thee. I have already put off the carelessness of childhood, the unlined brow, and springy gait of early years, that they may adorn thee. Advance; and I will despoil myself still further for thy advantage. Time shall rob me of the graces of maturity, shall take the fire from my eyes, and agility from my limbs, shall steal the better part of life, eager expectation and passionate love, and shower them in double portion on thy dear head. Advance! avail thyself of the gift, thou and thy comrades; and in the drama you are about to act, do not disgrace those who taught you to enter on the stage, and to pronounce becomingly the parts assigned to you! May your progress be uninterrupted and secure; born during the spring-tide of the hopes of man, may you lead up the summer to which no winter may succeed!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] See an ingenious Essay, entitled, "The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated," by Mackey, a shoemaker, of Norwich printed in 1822. [2] Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER V.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SOME disorder had surely crept into the course of the elements, destroying their benignant influence. The wind, prince of air, raged through his kingdom, lashing the sea into fury, and subduing the rebel earth into some sort of obedience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The God sends down his angry plagues from high,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Famine and pestilence in heaps they die.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Again in vengeance of his wrath he falls</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > On their great hosts, and breaks their tottering walls;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Arrests their navies on the ocean's plain,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And whelms their strength with mountains of the main.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Their deadly power shook the flourishing countries of the south, and during winter, even, we, in our northern retreat, began to quake under their ill effects.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That fable is unjust, which gives the superiority to the sun over the wind. Who has not seen the lightsome earth, the balmy atmosphere, and basking nature become dark, cold and ungenial, when the sleeping wind has awoke in the east? Or, when the dun clouds thickly veil the sky, while exhaustless stores of rain are poured down, until, the dank earth refusing to imbibe the superabundant moisture, it lies in pools on the surface; when the torch of day seems like a meteor, to be quenched; who has not seen the cloud-stirring north arise, the streaked blue appear, and soon an opening made in the vapours in the eye of the wind, through which the bright azure shines? The clouds become thin; an arch is formed for ever rising upwards, till, the universal cope being unveiled, the sun pours forth its rays, re-animated and fed by the breeze.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then mighty art thou, O wind, to be throned above all other vicegerents of nature's power; whether thou comest destroying from the east, or pregnant with elementary life from the west; thee the clouds obey; the sun is subservient to thee; the shoreless ocean is thy slave! Thou sweepest over the earth, and oaks, the growth of centuries, submit to thy viewless axe; the snow-drift is scattered on the pinnacles of the Alps, the avalanche thunders down their vallies. Thou holdest the keys of the frost, and canst first chain and then set free the streams; under thy gentle governance the buds and leaves are born, they flourish nursed by thee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Why dost thou howl thus, O wind? By day and by night for four long months thy roarings have not ceased—the shores of the sea are strewn with wrecks, its keel-welcoming surface has become impassable, the earth has shed her beauty in obedience to thy command; the frail balloon dares no longer sail on the agitated air; thy ministers, the clouds, deluge the land with rain; rivers forsake their banks; the wild torrent tears up the mountain path; plain and wood, and verdant dell are despoiled of their loveliness; our very cities are wasted by thee. Alas, what will become of us? It seems as if the giant waves of ocean, and vast arms of the sea, were about to wrench the deep-rooted island from its centre; and cast it, a ruin and a wreck, upon the fields of the Atlantic.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident. Day by day we are forced to believe this. He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I—I also am subject to the same laws. In the face of all this we call ourselves lords of the creation, wielders of the elements, masters of life and death, and we allege in excuse of this arrogance, that though the individual is destroyed, man continues for ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus, losing our identity, that of which we are chiefly conscious, we glory in the continuity of our species, and learn to regard death without terror. But when any whole nation becomes the victim of the destructive powers of exterior agents, then indeed man shrinks into insignificance, he feels his tenure of life insecure, his inheritance on earth cut off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I remember, after having witnessed the destructive effects of a fire, I could not even behold a small one in a stove, without a sensation of fear. The mounting flames had curled round the building, as it fell, and was destroyed. They insinuated themselves into the substances about them, and the impediments to their progress yielded at their touch. Could we take integral parts of this power, and not be subject to its operation? Could we domesticate a cub of this wild beast, and not fear its growth and maturity?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus we began to feel, with regard to many-visaged death let loose on the chosen districts of our fair habitation, and above all, with regard to the plague. We feared the coming summer. Nations, bordering on the already infected countries, began to enter upon serious plans for the better keeping out of the enemy. We, a commercial people, were obliged to bring such schemes under consideration; and the question of contagion became matter of earnest disquisition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That the plague was not what is commonly called contagious, like the scarlet fever, or extinct small-pox, was proved. It was called an epidemic. But the grand question was still unsettled of how this epidemic was generated and increased. If infection depended upon the air, the air was subject to infection. As for instance, a typhus fever has been brought by ships to one sea-port town; yet the very people who brought it there, were incapable of communicating it in a town more fortunately situated. But how are we to judge of airs, and pronounce—in such a city plague will die unproductive; in such another, nature has provided for it a plentiful harvest? In the same way, individuals may escape ninety-nine times, and receive the death-blow at the hundredth; because bodies are sometimes in a state to reject the infection of malady, and at others, thirsty to imbibe it. These reflections made our legislators pause, before they could decide on the laws to be put in force. The evil was so wide-spreading, so violent and immedicable, that no care, no prevention could be judged superfluous, which even added a chance to our escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These were questions of prudence; there was no immediate necessity for an earnest caution. England was still secure. France, Germany, Italy and Spain, were interposed, walls yet without a breach, between us and the plague. Our vessels truly were the sport of winds and waves, even as Gulliver was the toy of the Brobdignagians; but we on our stable abode could not be hurt in life or limb by these eruptions of nature. We could not fear—we did not. Yet a feeling of awe, a breathless sentiment of wonder, a painful sense of the degradation of humanity, was introduced into every heart. Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace. She shewed us plainly, that, though she permitted us to assign her laws and subdue her apparent powers, yet, if she put forth but a finger, we must quake. She could take our globe, fringed with mountains, girded by the atmosphere, containing the condition of our being, and all that man's mind could invent or his force achieve; she could take the ball in her hand, and cast it into space, where life would be drunk up, and man and all his efforts for ever annihilated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These speculations were rife among us; yet not the less we proceeded in our daily occupations, and our plans, whose accomplishment demanded the lapse of many years. No voice was heard telling us to hold! When foreign distresses came to be felt by us through the channels of commerce, we set ourselves to apply remedies. Subscriptions were made for the emigrants, and merchants bankrupt by the failure of trade. The English spirit awoke to its full activity, and, as it had ever done, set itself to resist the evil, and to stand in the breach which diseased nature had suffered chaos and death to make in the bounds and banks which had hitherto kept them out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the commencement of summer, we began to feel, that the mischief which had taken place in distant countries was greater than we had at first suspected. Quito was destroyed by an earthquake. Mexico laid waste by the united effects of storm, pestilence and famine. Crowds of emigrants inundated the west of Europe; and our island had become the refuge of thousands. In the mean time Ryland had been chosen Protector. He had sought this office with eagerness, under the idea of turning his whole forces to the suppression of the privileged orders of our community. His measures were thwarted, and his schemes interrupted by this new state of things. Many of the foreigners were utterly destitute; and their increasing numbers at length forbade a recourse to the usual modes of relief. Trade was stopped by the failure of the interchange of cargoes usual between us, and America, India, Egypt and Greece. A sudden break was made in the routine of our lives. In vain our Protector and his partizans sought to conceal this truth; in vain, day after day, he appointed a period for the discussion of the new laws concerning hereditary rank and privilege; in vain he endeavoured to represent the evil as partial and temporary. These disasters came home to so many bosoms, and, through the various channels of commerce, were carried so entirely into every class and division of the community, that of necessity they became the first question in the state, the chief subjects to which we must turn our attention.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Can it be true, each asked the other with wonder and dismay, that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature? The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan, the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin. Where late the busy multitudes assembled for pleasure or profit, now only the sound of wailing and misery is heard. The air is empoisoned, and each human being inhales death, even while in youth and health, their hopes are in the flower. We called to mind the plague of 1348, when it was calculated that a third of mankind had been destroyed. As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >O, yes, it would—Countrymen, fear not! In the still uncultivated wilds of America, what wonder that among its other giant destroyers, Plague should be numbered! It is of old a native of the East, sister of the tornado, the earthquake, and the simoon. Child of the sun, and nursling of the tropics, it would expire in these climes. It drinks the dark blood of the inhabitant of the south, but it never feasts on the pale-faced Celt. If perchance some stricken Asiatic come among us, plague dies with him, uncommunicated and innoxious. Let us weep for our brethren, though we can never experience their reverse. Let us lament over and assist the children of the garden of the earth. Late we envied their abodes, their spicy groves, fertile plains, and abundant loveliness. But in this mortal life extremes are always matched; the thorn grows with the rose, the poison tree and the cinnamon mingle their boughs. Persia, with its cloth of gold, marble halls, and infinite wealth, is now a tomb. The tent of the Arab is fallen in the sands, and his horse spurns the ground unbridled and unsaddled. The voice of lamentation fills the valley of Cashmere; its dells and woods, its cool fountains, and gardens of roses, are polluted by the dead; in Circassia and Georgia the spirit of beauty weeps over the ruin of its favourite temple—the form of woman.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Our own distresses, though they were occasioned by the fictitious reciprocity of commerce, encreased in due proportion. Bankers, merchants, and manufacturers, whose trade depended on exports and interchange of wealth, became bankrupt. Such things, when they happen singly, affect only the immediate parties; but the prosperity of the nation was now shaken by frequent and extensive losses. Families, bred in opulence and luxury, were reduced to beggary. The very state of peace in which we gloried was injurious; there were no means of employing the idle, or of sending any overplus of population out of the country. Even the source of colonies was dried up, for in New Holland, Van Diemen's Land, and the Cape of Good Hope, plague raged. O, for some medicinal vial to purge unwholesome nature, and bring back the earth to its accustomed health!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ryland was a man of strong intellects and quick and sound decision in the usual course of things, but he stood aghast at the multitude of evils that gathered round us. Must he tax the landed interest to assist our commercial population? To do this, he must gain the favour of the chief land-holders, the nobility of the country; and these were his vowed enemies—he must conciliate them by abandoning his favourite scheme of equalization; he must confirm them in their manorial rights; he must sell his cherished plans for the permanent good of his country, for temporary relief. He must aim no more at the dear object of his ambition; throwing his arms aside, he must for present ends give up the ultimate object of his endeavours. He came to Windsor to consult with us. Every day added to his difficulties; the arrival of fresh vessels with emigrants, the total cessation of commerce, the starving multitude that thronged around the palace of the Protectorate, were circumstances not to be tampered with. The blow was struck; the aristocracy obtained all they wished, and they subscribed to a twelvemonths' bill, which levied twenty per cent on all the rent-rolls of the country. Calm was now restored to the metropolis, and to the populous cities, before driven to desperation; and we returned to the consideration of distant calamities, wondering if the future would bring any alleviation to their excess. It was August; so there could be small hope of relief during the heats. On the contrary, the disease gained virulence, while starvation did its accustomed work. Thousands died unlamented; for beside the yet warm corpse the mourner was stretched, made mute by death.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the eighteenth of this month news arrived in London that the plague was in France and Italy. These tidings were at first whispered about town; but no one dared express aloud the soul-quailing intelligence. When any one met a friend in the street, he only cried as he hurried on, "You know!"— while the other, with an ejaculation of fear and horror, would answer,— "What will become of us?" At length it was mentioned in the newspapers. The paragraph was inserted in an obscure part: "We regret to state that there can be no longer a doubt of the plague having been introduced at Leghorn, Genoa, and Marseilles." No word of comment followed; each reader made his own fearful one. We were as a man who hears that his house is burning, and yet hurries through the streets, borne along by a lurking hope of a mistake, till he turns the corner, and sees his sheltering roof enveloped in a flame. Before it had been a rumour; but now in words uneraseable, in definite and undeniable print, the knowledge went forth. Its obscurity of situation rendered it the more conspicuous: the diminutive letters grew gigantic to the bewildered eye of fear: they seemed graven with a pen of iron, impressed by fire, woven in the clouds, stamped on the very front of the universe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The English, whether travellers or residents, came pouring in one great revulsive stream, back on their own country; and with them crowds of Italians and Spaniards. Our little island was filled even to bursting. At first an unusual quantity of specie made its appearance with the emigrants; but these people had no means of receiving back into their hands what they spent among us. With the advance of summer, and the increase of the distemper, rents were unpaid, and their remittances failed them. It was impossible to see these crowds of wretched, perishing creatures, late nurslings of luxury, and not stretch out a hand to save them. As at the conclusion of the eighteenth century, the English unlocked their hospitable store, for the relief of those driven from their homes by political revolution; so now they were not backward in affording aid to the victims of a more wide-spreading calamity. We had many foreign friends whom we eagerly sought out, and relieved from dreadful penury. Our Castle became an asylum for the unhappy. A little population occupied its halls. The revenue of its possessor, which had always found a mode of expenditure congenial to his generous nature, was now attended to more parsimoniously, that it might embrace a wider portion of utility. It was not however money, except partially, but the necessaries of life, that became scarce. It was difficult to find an immediate remedy. The usual one of imports was entirely cut off. In this emergency, to feed the very people to whom we had given refuge, we were obliged to yield to the plough and the mattock our pleasure-grounds and parks. Live stock diminished sensibly in the country, from the effects of the great demand in the market. Even the poor deer, our antlered proteges, were obliged to fall for the sake of worthier pensioners. The labour necessary to bring the lands to this sort of culture, employed and fed the offcasts of the diminished manufactories.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian did not rest only with the exertions he could make with regard to his own possessions. He addressed himself to the wealthy of the land; he made proposals in parliament little adapted to please the rich; but his earnest pleadings and benevolent eloquence were irresistible. To give up their pleasure-grounds to the agriculturist, to diminish sensibly the number of horses kept for the purposes of luxury throughout the country, were means obvious, but unpleasing. Yet, to the honour of the English be it recorded, that, although natural disinclination made them delay awhile, yet when the misery of their fellow-creatures became glaring, an enthusiastic generosity inspired their decrees. The most luxurious were often the first to part with their indulgencies. As is common in communities, a fashion was set. The high-born ladies of the country would have deemed themselves disgraced if they had now enjoyed, what they before called a necessary, the ease of a carriage. Chairs, as in olden time, and Indian palanquins were introduced for the infirm; but else it was nothing singular to see females of rank going on foot to places of fashionable resort. It was more common, for all who possessed landed property to secede to their estates, attended by whole troops of the indigent, to cut down their woods to erect temporary dwellings, and to portion out their parks, parterres and flower-gardens, to necessitous families. Many of these, of high rank in their own countries, now, with hoe in hand, turned up the soil. It was found necessary at last to check the spirit of sacrifice, and to remind those whose generosity proceeded to lavish waste, that, until the present state of things became permanent, of which there was no likelihood, it was wrong to carry change so far as to make a reaction difficult. Experience demonstrated that in a year or two pestilence would cease; it were well that in the mean time we should not have destroyed our fine breeds of horses, or have utterly changed the face of the ornamented portion of the country.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It may be imagined that things were in a bad state indeed, before this spirit of benevolence could have struck such deep roots. The infection had now spread in the southern provinces of France. But that country had so many resources in the way of agriculture, that the rush of population from one part of it to another, and its increase through foreign emigration, was less felt than with us. The panic struck appeared of more injury, than disease and its natural concomitants.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Winter was hailed, a general and never-failing physician. The embrowning woods, and swollen rivers, the evening mists, and morning frosts, were welcomed with gratitude. The effects of purifying cold were immediately felt; and the lists of mortality abroad were curtailed each week. Many of our visitors left us: those whose homes were far in the south, fled delightedly from our northern winter, and sought their native land, secure of plenty even after their fearful visitation. We breathed again. What the coming summer would bring, we knew not; but the present months were our own, and our hopes of a cessation of pestilence were high.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Elton's translation of Hesiod's Works.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VI.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I HAVE lingered thus long on the extreme bank, the wasting shoal that stretched into the stream of life, dallying with the shadow of death. Thus long, I have cradled my heart in retrospection of past happiness, when hope was. Why not for ever thus? I am not immortal; and the thread of my history might be spun out to the limits of my existence. But the same sentiment that first led me to pourtray scenes replete with tender recollections, now bids me hurry on. The same yearning of this warm, panting heart, that has made me in written words record my vagabond youth, my serene manhood, and the passions of my soul, makes me now recoil from further delay. I must complete my work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here then I stand, as I said, beside the fleet waters of the flowing years, and now away! Spread the sail, and strain with oar, hurrying by dark impending crags, adown steep rapids, even to the sea of desolation I have reached. Yet one moment, one brief interval before I put from shore— once, once again let me fancy myself as I was in 2094 in my abode at Windsor, let me close my eyes, and imagine that the immeasurable boughs of its oaks still shadow me, its castle walls anear. Let fancy pourtray the joyous scene of the twentieth of June, such as even now my aching heart recalls it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Circumstances had called me to London; here I heard talk that symptoms of the plague had occurred in hospitals of that city. I returned to Windsor; my brow was clouded, my heart heavy; I entered the Little Park, as was my custom, at the Frogmore gate, on my way to the Castle. A great part of these grounds had been given to cultivation, and strips of potatoe-land and corn were scattered here and there. The rooks cawed loudly in the trees above; mixed with their hoarse cries I heard a lively strain of music. It was Alfred's birthday. The young people, the Etonians, and children of the neighbouring gentry, held a mock fair, to which all the country people were invited. The park was speckled by tents, whose flaunting colours and gaudy flags, waving in the sunshine, added to the gaiety of the scene. On a platform erected beneath the terrace, a number of the younger part of the assembly were dancing. I leaned against a tree to observe them. The band played the wild eastern air of Weber introduced in Abon Hassan; its volatile notes gave wings to the feet of the dancers, while the lookers-on unconsciously beat time. At first the tripping measure lifted my spirit with it, and for a moment my eyes gladly followed the mazes of the dance. The revulsion of thought passed like keen steel to my heart. Ye are all going to die, I thought; already your tomb is built up around you. Awhile, because you are gifted with agility and strength, you fancy that you live: but frail is the "bower of flesh" that encaskets life; dissoluble the silver cord than binds you to it. The joyous soul, charioted from pleasure to pleasure by the graceful mechanism of well-formed limbs, will suddenly feel the axle-tree give way, and spring and wheel dissolve in dust. Not one of you, O! fated crowd, can escape—not one! not my own ones! not my Idris and her babes! Horror and misery! Already the gay dance vanished, the green sward was strewn with corpses, the blue air above became fetid with deathly exhalations. Shriek, ye clarions! ye loud trumpets, howl! Pile dirge on dirge; rouse the funereal chords; let the air ring with dire wailing; let wild discord rush on the wings of the wind! Already I hear it, while guardian angels, attendant on humanity, their task achieved, hasten away, and their departure is announced by melancholy strains; faces all unseemly with weeping, forced open my lids; faster and faster many groups of these woe-begone countenances thronged around, exhibiting every variety of wretchedness—well known faces mingled with the distorted creations of fancy. Ashy pale, Raymond and Perdita sat apart, looking on with sad smiles. Adrian's countenance flitted across, tainted by death—Idris, with eyes languidly closed and livid lips, was about to slide into the wide grave. The confusion grew—their looks of sorrow changed to mockery; they nodded their heads in time to the music, whose clang became maddening.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I felt that this was insanity—I sprang forward to throw it off; I rushed into the midst of the crowd. Idris saw me: with light step she advanced; as I folded her in my arms, feeling, as I did, that I thus enclosed what was to me a world, yet frail as the waterdrop which the noon-day sun will drink from the water lily's cup; tears filled my eyes, unwont to be thus moistened. The joyful welcome of my boys, the soft gratulation of Clara, the pressure of Adrian's hand, contributed to unman me. I felt that they were near, that they were safe, yet methought this was all deceit;—the earth reeled, the firm-enrooted trees moved—dizziness came over me—I sank to the ground.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My beloved friends were alarmed—nay, they expressed their alarm so anxiously, that I dared not pronounce the word plague, that hovered on my lips, lest they should construe my perturbed looks into a symptom, and see infection in my languor. I had scarcely recovered, and with feigned hilarity had brought back smiles into my little circle, when we saw Ryland approach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ryland had something the appearance of a farmer; of a man whose muscles and full grown stature had been developed under the influence of vigorous exercise and exposure to the elements. This was to a great degree the case: for, though a large landed proprietor, yet, being a projector, and of an ardent and industrious disposition, he had on his own estate given himself up to agricultural labours. When he went as ambassador to the Northern States of America, he, for some time, planned his entire migration; and went so far as to make several journies far westward on that immense continent, for the purpose of choosing the site of his new abode. Ambition turned his thoughts from these designs—ambition, which labouring through various lets and hindrances, had now led him to the summit of his hopes, in making him Lord Protector of England.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His countenance was rough but intelligent—his ample brow and quick grey eyes seemed to look out, over his own plans, and the opposition of his enemies. His voice was stentorian: his hand stretched out in debate, seemed by its gigantic and muscular form, to warn his hearers that words were not his only weapons. Few people had discovered some cowardice and much infirmity of purpose under this imposing exterior. No man could crush a "butterfly on the wheel" with better effect; no man better cover a speedy retreat from a powerful adversary. This had been the secret of his secession at the time of Lord Raymond's election. In the unsteady glance of his eye, in his extreme desire to learn the opinions of all, in the feebleness of his hand-writing, these qualities might be obscurely traced, but they were not generally known. He was now our Lord Protector. He had canvassed eagerly for this post. His protectorate was to be distinguished by every kind of innovation on the aristocracy. This his selected task was exchanged for the far different one of encountering the ruin caused by the convulsions of physical nature. He was incapable of meeting these evils by any comprehensive system; he had resorted to expedient after expedient, and could never be induced to put a remedy in force, till it came too late to be of use.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Certainly the Ryland that advanced towards us now, bore small resemblance to the powerful, ironical, seemingly fearless canvasser for the first rank among Englishmen. Our native oak, as his partisans called him, was visited truly by a nipping winter. He scarcely appeared half his usual height; his joints were unknit, his limbs would not support him; his face was contracted, his eye wandering; debility of purpose and dastard fear were expressed in every gesture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In answer to our eager questions, one word alone fell, as it were involuntarily, from his convulsed lips: The Plague.—"Where?"—"Every where—we must fly—all fly—but whither? No man can tell—there is no refuge on earth, it comes on us like a thousand packs of wolves—we must all fly—where shall you go? Where can any of us go?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These words were syllabled trembling by the iron man. Adrian replied, "Whither indeed would you fly? We must all remain; and do our best to help our suffering fellow-creatures."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Help!" said Ryland, "there is no help!—great God, who talks of help!</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All the world has the plague!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Then to avoid it, we must quit the world," observed Adrian, with a gentle smile.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ryland groaned; cold drops stood on his brow. It was useless to oppose his paroxysm of terror: but we soothed and encouraged him, so that after an interval he was better able to explain to us the ground of his alarm. It had come sufficiently home to him. One of his servants, while waiting on him, had suddenly fallen down dead. The physician declared that he died of the plague. We endeavoured to calm him—but our own hearts were not calm. I saw the eye of Idris wander from me to her children, with an anxious appeal to my judgment. Adrian was absorbed in meditation. For myself, I own that Ryland's words rang in my ears; all the world was infected;—in what uncontaminated seclusion could I save my beloved treasures, until the shadow of death had passed from over the earth? We sunk into silence: a silence that drank in the doleful accounts and prognostications of our guest. We had receded from the crowd; and ascending the steps of the terrace, sought the Castle. Our change of cheer struck those nearest to us; and, by means of Ryland's servants, the report soon spread that he had fled from the plague in London. The sprightly parties broke up—they assembled in whispering groups. The spirit of gaiety was eclipsed; the music ceased; the young people left their occupations and gathered together. The lightness of heart which had dressed them in masquerade habits, had decorated their tents, and assembled them in fantastic groups, appeared a sin against, and a provocative to, the awful destiny that had laid its palsying hand upon hope and life. The merriment of the hour was an unholy mockery of the sorrows of man. The foreigners whom we had among us, who had fled from the plague in their own country, now saw their last asylum invaded; and, fear making them garrulous, they described to eager listeners the miseries they had beheld in cities visited by the calamity, and gave fearful accounts of the insidious and irremediable nature of the disease.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We had entered the Castle. Idris stood at a window that over-looked the park; her maternal eyes sought her own children among the young crowd. An Italian lad had got an audience about him, and with animated gestures was describing some scene of horror. Alfred stood immoveable before him, his whole attention absorbed. Little Evelyn had endeavoured to draw Clara away to play with him; but the Italian's tale arrested her, she crept near, her lustrous eyes fixed on the speaker. Either watching the crowd in the park, or occupied by painful reflection, we were all silent; Ryland stood by himself in an embrasure of the window; Adrian paced the hall, revolving some new and overpowering idea—suddenly he stopped and said: "I have long expected this; could we in reason expect that this island should be exempt from the universal visitation? The evil is come home to us, and we must not shrink from our fate. What are your plans, my Lord Protector, for the benefit of our country?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"For heaven's love! Windsor," cried Ryland, "do not mock me with that title. Death and disease level all men. I neither pretend to protect nor govern an hospital—such will England quickly become."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you then intend, now in time of peril, to recede from your duties?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Duties! speak rationally, my Lord!—when I am a plague-spotted corpse, where will my duties be? Every man for himself! the devil take the protectorship, say I, if it expose me to danger!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Faint-hearted man!" cried Adrian indignantly—"Your countrymen put their trust in you, and you betray them!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I betray them!" said Ryland, "the plague betrays me. Faint-hearted! It is well, shut up in your castle, out of danger, to boast yourself out of fear. Take the Protectorship who will; before God I renounce it!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And before God," replied his opponent, fervently, "do I receive it! No one will canvass for this honour now—none envy my danger or labours. Deposit your powers in my hands. Long have I fought with death, and much" (he stretched out his thin hand) "much have I suffered in the struggle. It is not by flying, but by facing the enemy, that we can conquer. If my last combat is now about to be fought, and I am to be worsted—so let it be!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But come, Ryland, recollect yourself! Men have hitherto thought you magnanimous and wise, will you cast aside these titles? Consider the panic your departure will occasion. Return to London. I will go with you. Encourage the people by your presence. I will incur all the danger. Shame! shame! if the first magistrate of England be foremost to renounce his duties."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Meanwhile among our guests in the park, all thoughts of festivity had faded. As summer-flies are scattered by rain, so did this congregation, late noisy and happy, in sadness and melancholy murmurs break up, dwindling away apace. With the set sun and the deepening twilight the park became nearly empty. Adrian and Ryland were still in earnest discussion. We had prepared a banquet for our guests in the lower hall of the castle; and thither Idris and I repaired to receive and entertain the few that remained. There is nothing more melancholy than a merry-meeting thus turned to sorrow: the gala dresses—the decorations, gay as they might otherwise be, receive a solemn and funereal appearance. If such change be painful from lighter causes, it weighed with intolerable heaviness from the knowledge that the earth's desolator had at last, even as an arch-fiend, lightly over-leaped the boundaries our precautions raised, and at once enthroned himself in the full and beating heart of our country. Idris sat at the top of the half-empty hall. Pale and tearful, she almost forgot her duties as hostess; her eyes were fixed on her children. Alfred's serious air shewed that he still revolved the tragic story related by the Italian boy. Evelyn was the only mirthful creature present: he sat on Clara's lap; and, making matter of glee from his own fancies, laughed aloud. The vaulted roof echoed again his infant tone. The poor mother who had brooded long over, and suppressed the expression of her anguish, now burst into tears, and folding her babe in her arms, hurried from the hall. Clara and Alfred followed. While the rest of the company, in confused murmur, which grew louder and louder, gave voice to their many fears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The younger part gathered round me to ask my advice; and those who had friends in London were anxious beyond the rest, to ascertain the present extent of disease in the metropolis. I encouraged them with such thoughts of cheer as presented themselves. I told them exceedingly few deaths had yet been occasioned by pestilence, and gave them hopes, as we were the last visited, so the calamity might have lost its most venomous power before it had reached us. The cleanliness, habits of order, and the manner in which our cities were built, were all in our favour. As it was an epidemic, its chief force was derived from pernicious qualities in the air, and it would probably do little harm where this was naturally salubrious. At first, I had spoken only to those nearest me; but the whole assembly gathered about me, and I found that I was listened to by all. "My friends," I said, "our risk is common; our precautions and exertions shall be common also. If manly courage and resistance can save us, we will be saved. We will fight the enemy to the last. Plague shall not find us a ready prey; we will dispute every inch of ground; and, by methodical and inflexible laws, pile invincible barriers to the progress of our foe. Perhaps in no part of the world has she met with so systematic and determined an opposition. Perhaps no country is naturally so well protected against our invader; nor has nature anywhere been so well assisted by the hand of man. We will not despair. We are neither cowards nor fatalists; but, believing that God has placed the means for our preservation in our own hands, we will use those means to our utmost. Remember that cleanliness, sobriety, and even good-humour and benevolence, are our best medicines."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There was little I could add to this general exhortation; for the plague, though in London, was not among us. I dismissed the guests therefore; and they went thoughtful, more than sad, to await the events in store for them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I now sought Adrian, anxious to hear the result of his discussion with Ryland. He had in part prevailed; the Lord Protector consented to return to London for a few weeks; during which time things should be so arranged, as to occasion less consternation at his departure. Adrian and Idris were together. The sadness with which the former had first heard that the plague was in London had vanished; the energy of his purpose informed his body with strength, the solemn joy of enthusiasm and self-devotion illuminated his countenance; and the weakness of his physical nature seemed to pass from him, as the cloud of humanity did, in the ancient fable, from the divine lover of Semele. He was endeavouring to encourage his sister, and to bring her to look on his intent in a less tragic light than she was prepared to do; and with passionate eloquence he unfolded his designs to her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Let me, at the first word," he said, "relieve your mind from all fear on my account. I will not task myself beyond my powers, nor will I needlessly seek danger. I feel that I know what ought to be done, and as my presence is necessary for the accomplishment of my plans, I will take especial care to preserve my life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am now going to undertake an office fitted for me. I cannot intrigue, or work a tortuous path through the labyrinth of men's vices and passions; but I can bring patience, and sympathy, and such aid as art affords, to the bed of disease; I can raise from earth the miserable orphan, and awaken to new hopes the shut heart of the mourner. I can enchain the plague in limits, and set a term to the misery it would occasion; courage, forbearance, and watchfulness, are the forces I bring towards this great work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"O, I shall be something now! From my birth I have aspired like the eagle —but, unlike the eagle, my wings have failed, and my vision has been blinded. Disappointment and sickness have hitherto held dominion over me; twin born with me, my would, was for ever enchained by the shall not, of these my tyrants. A shepherd-boy that tends a silly flock on the mountains, was more in the scale of society than I. Congratulate me then that I have found fitting scope for my powers. I have often thought of offering my services to the pestilence-stricken towns of France and Italy; but fear of paining you, and expectation of this catastrophe, withheld me. To England and to Englishmen I dedicate myself. If I can save one of her mighty spirits from the deadly shaft; if I can ward disease from one of her smiling cottages, I shall not have lived in vain."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Strange ambition this! Yet such was Adrian. He appeared given up to contemplation, averse to excitement, a lowly student, a man of visions— but afford him worthy theme, and—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like to the lark at break of day arising,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >so did he spring up from listlessness and unproductive thought, to the highest pitch of virtuous action.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With him went enthusiasm, the high-wrought resolve, the eye that without blenching could look at death. With us remained sorrow, anxiety, and unendurable expectation of evil. The man, says Lord Bacon, who hath wife and children, has given hostages to fortune. Vain was all philosophical reasoning—vain all fortitude—vain, vain, a reliance on probable good. I might heap high the scale with logic, courage, and resignation—but let one fear for Idris and our children enter the opposite one, and, over-weighed, it kicked the beam.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The plague was in London! Fools that we were not long ago to have foreseen this. We wept over the ruin of the boundless continents of the east, and the desolation of the western world; while we fancied that the little channel between our island and the rest of the earth was to preserve us alive among the dead. It were no mighty leap methinks from Calais to Dover. The eye easily discerns the sister land; they were united once; and the little path that runs between looks in a map but as a trodden footway through high grass. Yet this small interval was to save us: the sea was to rise a wall of adamant—without, disease and misery—within, a shelter from evil, a nook of the garden of paradise—a particle of celestial soil, which no evil could invade—truly we were wise in our generation, to imagine all these things!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But we are awake now. The plague is in London; the air of England is tainted, and her sons and daughters strew the unwholesome earth. And now, the sea, late our defence, seems our prison bound; hemmed in by its gulphs, we shall die like the famished inhabitants of a besieged town. Other nations have a fellowship in death; but we, shut out from all neighbourhood, must bury our own dead, and little England become a wide, wide tomb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This feeling of universal misery assumed concentration and shape, when I looked on my wife and children; and the thought of danger to them possessed my whole being with fear. How could I save them? I revolved a thousand and a thousand plans. They should not die—first I would be gathered to nothingness, ere infection should come anear these idols of my soul. I would walk barefoot through the world, to find an uninfected spot; I would build my home on some wave-tossed plank, drifted about on the barren, shoreless ocean. I would betake me with them to some wild beast's den, where a tyger's cubs, which I would slay, had been reared in health. I would seek the mountain eagle's eirie, and live years suspended in some inaccessible recess of a sea-bounding cliff—no labour too great, no scheme too wild, if it promised life to them. O! ye heart-strings of mine, could ye be torn asunder, and my soul not spend itself in tears of blood for sorrow!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idris, after the first shock, regained a portion of fortitude. She studiously shut out all prospect of the future, and cradled her heart in present blessings. She never for a moment lost sight of her children. But while they in health sported about her, she could cherish contentment and hope. A strange and wild restlessness came over me—the more intolerable, because I was forced to conceal it. My fears for Adrian were ceaseless; August had come; and the symptoms of plague encreased rapidly in London. It was deserted by all who possessed the power of removing; and he, the brother of my soul, was exposed to the perils from which all but slaves enchained by circumstance fled. He remained to combat the fiend—his side unguarded, his toils unshared—infection might even reach him, and he die unattended and alone. By day and night these thoughts pursued me. I resolved to visit London, to see him; to quiet these agonizing throes by the sweet medicine of hope, or the opiate of despair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was not until I arrived at Brentford, that I perceived much change in the face of the country. The better sort of houses were shut up; the busy trade of the town palsied; there was an air of anxiety among the few passengers I met, and they looked wonderingly at my carriage—the first they had seen pass towards London, since pestilence sat on its high places, and possessed its busy streets. I met several funerals; they were slenderly attended by mourners, and were regarded by the spectators as omens of direst import. Some gazed on these processions with wild eagerness— others fled timidly—some wept aloud.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian's chief endeavour, after the immediate succour of the sick, had been to disguise the symptoms and progress of the plague from the inhabitants of London. He knew that fear and melancholy forebodings were powerful assistants to disease; that desponding and brooding care rendered the physical nature of man peculiarly susceptible of infection. No unseemly sights were therefore discernible: the shops were in general open, the concourse of passengers in some degree kept up. But although the appearance of an infected town was avoided, to me, who had not beheld it since the commencement of the visitation, London appeared sufficiently changed. There were no carriages, and grass had sprung high in the streets; the houses had a desolate look; most of the shutters were closed; and there was a ghast and frightened stare in the persons I met, very different from the usual business-like demeanour of the Londoners. My solitary carriage attracted notice, as it rattled along towards the Protectoral Palace—and the fashionable streets leading to it wore a still more dreary and deserted appearance. I found Adrian's anti-chamber crowded—it was his hour for giving audience. I was unwilling to disturb his labours, and waited, watching the ingress and egress of the petitioners. They consisted of people of the middling and lower classes of society, whose means of subsistence failed with the cessation of trade, and of the busy spirit of money-making in all its branches, peculiar to our country. There was an air of anxiety, sometimes of terror in the new-comers, strongly contrasted with the resigned and even satisfied mien of those who had had audience. I could read the influence of my friend in their quickened motions and cheerful faces. Two o'clock struck, after which none were admitted; those who had been disappointed went sullenly or sorrowfully away, while I entered the audience-chamber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was struck by the improvement that appeared in the health of Adrian. He was no longer bent to the ground, like an over-nursed flower of spring, that, shooting up beyond its strength, is weighed down even by its own coronal of blossoms. His eyes were bright, his countenance composed, an air of concentrated energy was diffused over his whole person, much unlike its former languor. He sat at a table with several secretaries, who were arranging petitions, or registering the notes made during that day's audience. Two or three petitioners were still in attendance. I admired his justice and patience. Those who possessed a power of living out of London, he advised immediately to quit it, affording them the means of so doing. Others, whose trade was beneficial to the city, or who possessed no other refuge, he provided with advice for better avoiding the epidemic; relieving overloaded families, supplying the gaps made in others by death. Order, comfort, and even health, rose under his influence, as from the touch of a magician's wand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am glad you are come," he said to me, when we were at last alone; "I can only spare a few minutes, and must tell you much in that time. The plague is now in progress—it is useless closing one's eyes to the fact—the deaths encrease each week. What will come I cannot guess. As yet, thank God, I am equal to the government of the town; and I look only to the present. Ryland, whom I have so long detained, has stipulated that I shall suffer him to depart before the end of this month. The deputy appointed by parliament is dead; another therefore must be named; I have advanced my claim, and I believe that I shall have no competitor. To-night the question is to be decided, as there is a call of the house for the purpose. You must nominate me, Lionel; Ryland, for shame, cannot shew himself; but you, my friend, will do me this service?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How lovely is devotion! Here was a youth, royally sprung, bred in luxury, by nature averse to the usual struggles of a public life, and now, in time of danger, at a period when to live was the utmost scope of the ambitious, he, the beloved and heroic Adrian, made, in sweet simplicity, an offer to sacrifice himself for the public good. The very idea was generous and noble,—but, beyond this, his unpretending manner, his entire want of the assumption of a virtue, rendered his act ten times more touching. I would have withstood his request; but I had seen the good he diffused; I felt that his resolves were not to be shaken, so, with an heavy heart, I consented to do as he asked. He grasped my hand affectionately:—"Thank you," he said, "you have relieved me from a painful dilemma, and are, as you ever were, the best of my friends. Farewell—I must now leave you for a few hours. Go you and converse with Ryland. Although he deserts his post in London, he may be of the greatest service in the north of England, by receiving and assisting travellers, and contributing to supply the metropolis with food. Awaken him, I entreat you, to some sense of duty."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian left me, as I afterwards learnt, upon his daily task of visiting the hospitals, and inspecting the crowded parts of London. I found Ryland much altered, even from what he had been when he visited Windsor. Perpetual fear had jaundiced his complexion, and shrivelled his whole person. I told him of the business of the evening, and a smile relaxed the contracted muscles. He desired to go; each day he expected to be infected by pestilence, each day he was unable to resist the gentle violence of Adrian's detention. The moment Adrian should be legally elected his deputy, he would escape to safety. Under this impression he listened to all I said; and, elevated almost to joy by the near prospect of his departure, he entered into a discussion concerning the plans he should adopt in his own county, forgetting, for the moment, his cherished resolution of shutting himself up from all communication in the mansion and grounds of his estate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the evening, Adrian and I proceeded to Westminster. As we went he reminded me of what I was to say and do, yet, strange to say, I entered the chamber without having once reflected on my purpose. Adrian remained in the coffee-room, while I, in compliance with his desire, took my seat in St. Stephen's. There reigned unusual silence in the chamber. I had not visited it since Raymond's protectorate; a period conspicuous for a numerous attendance of members, for the eloquence of the speakers, and the warmth of the debate. The benches were very empty, those by custom occupied by the hereditary members were vacant; the city members were there—the members for the commercial towns, few landed proprietors, and not many of those who entered parliament for the sake of a career. The first subject that occupied the attention of the house was an address from the Lord Protector, praying them to appoint a deputy during a necessary absence on his part.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A silence prevailed, till one of the members coming to me, whispered that the Earl of Windsor had sent him word that I was to move his election, in the absence of the person who had been first chosen for this office. Now for the first time I saw the full extent of my task, and I was overwhelmed by what I had brought on myself. Ryland had deserted his post through fear of the plague: from the same fear Adrian had no competitor. And I, the nearest kinsman of the Earl of Windsor, was to propose his election. I was to thrust this selected and matchless friend into the post of danger— impossible! the die was cast—I would offer myself as candidate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The few members who were present, had come more for the sake of terminating the business by securing a legal attendance, than under the idea of a debate. I had risen mechanically—my knees trembled; irresolution hung on my voice, as I uttered a few words on the necessity of choosing a person adequate to the dangerous task in hand. But, when the idea of presenting myself in the room of my friend intruded, the load of doubt and pain was taken from off me. My words flowed spontaneously—my utterance was firm and quick. I adverted to what Adrian had already done—I promised the same vigilance in furthering all his views. I drew a touching picture of his vacillating health; I boasted of my own strength. I prayed them to save even from himself this scion of the noblest family in England. My alliance with him was the pledge of my sincerity, my union with his sister, my children, his presumptive heirs, were the hostages of my truth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This unexpected turn in the debate was quickly communicated to Adrian. He hurried in, and witnessed the termination of my impassioned harangue. I did not see him: my soul was in my words,—my eyes could not perceive that which was; while a vision of Adrian's form, tainted by pestilence, and sinking in death, floated before them. He seized my hand, as I concluded— "Unkind!" he cried, "you have betrayed me!" then, springing forwards, with the air of one who had a right to command, he claimed the place of deputy as his own. He had bought it, he said, with danger, and paid for it with toil. His ambition rested there; and, after an interval devoted to the interests of his country, was I to step in, and reap the profit? Let them remember what London had been when he arrived: the panic that prevailed brought famine, while every moral and legal tie was loosened. He had restored order—this had been a work which required perseverance, patience, and energy; and he had neither slept nor waked but for the good of his country.—Would they dare wrong him thus? Would they wrest his hard-earned reward from him, to bestow it on one, who, never having mingled in public life, would come a tyro to the craft, in which he was an adept. He demanded the place of deputy as his right. Ryland had shewn that he preferred him. Never before had he, who was born even to the inheritance of the throne of England, never had he asked favour or honour from those now his equals, but who might have been his subjects. Would they refuse him? Could they thrust back from the path of distinction and laudable ambition, the heir of their ancient kings, and heap another disappointment on a fallen house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No one had ever before heard Adrian allude to the rights of his ancestors. None had ever before suspected, that power, or the suffrage of the many, could in any manner become dear to him. He had begun his speech with vehemence; he ended with unassuming gentleness, making his appeal with the same humility, as if he had asked to be the first in wealth, honour, and power among Englishmen, and not, as was the truth, to be the foremost in the ranks of loathsome toils and inevitable death. A murmur of approbation rose after his speech. "Oh, do not listen to him," I cried, "he speaks false—false to himself,"—I was interrupted: and, silence being restored, we were ordered, as was the custom, to retire during the decision of the house. I fancied that they hesitated, and that there was some hope for me—I was mistaken—hardly had we quitted the chamber, before Adrian was recalled, and installed in his office of Lord Deputy to the Protector.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We returned together to the palace. "Why, Lionel," said Adrian, "what did you intend? you could not hope to conquer, and yet you gave me the pain of a triumph over my dearest friend."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is mockery," I replied, "you devote yourself,—you, the adored brother of Idris, the being, of all the world contains, dearest to our hearts—you devote yourself to an early death. I would have prevented this; my death would be a small evil—or rather I should not die; while you cannot hope to escape."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"As to the likelihood of escaping," said Adrian, "ten years hence the cold stars may shine on the graves of all of us; but as to my peculiar liability to infection, I could easily prove, both logically and physically, that in the midst of contagion I have a better chance of life than you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This is my post: I was born for this—to rule England in anarchy, to save her in danger—to devote myself for her. The blood of my forefathers cries aloud in my veins, and bids me be first among my countrymen. Or, if this mode of speech offend you, let me say, that my mother, the proud queen, instilled early into me a love of distinction, and all that, if the weakness of my physical nature and my peculiar opinions had not prevented such a design, might have made me long since struggle for the lost inheritance of my race. But now my mother, or, if you will, my mother's lessons, awaken within me. I cannot lead on to battle; I cannot, through intrigue and faithlessness rear again the throne upon the wreck of English public spirit. But I can be the first to support and guard my country, now that terrific disasters and ruin have laid strong hands upon her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That country and my beloved sister are all I have. I will protect the first—the latter I commit to your charge. If I survive, and she be lost, I were far better dead. Preserve her—for her own sake I know that you will—if you require any other spur, think that, in preserving her, you preserve me. Her faultless nature, one sum of perfections, is wrapt up in her affections—if they were hurt, she would droop like an unwatered floweret, and the slightest injury they receive is a nipping frost to her. Already she fears for us. She fears for the children she adores, and for you, the father of these, her lover, husband, protector; and you must be near her to support and encourage her. Return to Windsor then, my brother; for such you are by every tie—fill the double place my absence imposes on you, and let me, in all my sufferings here, turn my eyes towards that dear seclusion, and say—There is peace."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Shakespeare's Sonnets.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VII.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I DID proceed to Windsor, but not with the intention of remaining there. I went but to obtain the consent of Idris, and then to return and take my station beside my unequalled friend; to share his labours, and save him, if so it must be, at the expence of my life. Yet I dreaded to witness the anguish which my resolve might excite in Idris. I had vowed to my own heart never to shadow her countenance even with transient grief, and should I prove recreant at the hour of greatest need? I had begun my journey with anxious haste; now I desired to draw it out through the course of days and months. I longed to avoid the necessity of action; I strove to escape from thought—vainly—futurity, like a dark image in a phantasmagoria, came nearer and more near, till it clasped the whole earth in its shadow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A slight circumstance induced me to alter my usual route, and to return home by Egham and Bishopgate. I alighted at Perdita's ancient abode, her cottage; and, sending forward the carriage, determined to walk across the park to the castle. This spot, dedicated to sweetest recollections, the deserted house and neglected garden were well adapted to nurse my melancholy. In our happiest days, Perdita had adorned her cottage with every aid art might bring, to that which nature had selected to favour. In the same spirit of exaggeration she had, on the event of her separation from Raymond, caused it to be entirely neglected. It was now in ruin: the deer had climbed the broken palings, and reposed among the flowers; grass grew on the threshold, and the swinging lattice creaking to the wind, gave signal of utter desertion. The sky was blue above, and the air impregnated with fragrance by the rare flowers that grew among the weeds. The trees moved overhead, awakening nature's favourite melody—but the melancholy appearance of the choaked paths, and weed-grown flower-beds, dimmed even this gay summer scene. The time when in proud and happy security we assembled at this cottage, was gone—soon the present hours would join those past, and shadows of future ones rose dark and menacing from the womb of time, their cradle and their bier. For the first time in my life I envied the sleep of the dead, and thought with pleasure of one's bed under the sod, where grief and fear have no power. I passed through the gap of the broken paling—I felt, while I disdained, the choaking tears—I rushed into the depths of the forest. O death and change, rulers of our life, where are ye, that I may grapple with you! What was there in our tranquillity, that excited your envy—in our happiness, that ye should destroy it? We were happy, loving, and beloved; the horn of Amalthea contained no blessing unshowered upon us, but, alas!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >la fortuna deidad barbara importuna, oy cadaver y ayer flor, no permanece jamas![1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As I wandered on thus ruminating, a number of country people passed me. They seemed full of careful thought, and a few words of their conversation that reached me, induced me to approach and make further enquiries. A party of people flying from London, as was frequent in those days, had come up the Thames in a boat. No one at Windsor would afford them shelter; so, going a little further up, they remained all night in a deserted hut near Bolter's lock. They pursued their way the following morning, leaving one of their company behind them, sick of the plague. This circumstance once spread abroad, none dared approach within half a mile of the infected neighbourhood, and the deserted wretch was left to fight with disease and death in solitude, as he best might. I was urged by compassion to hasten to the hut, for the purpose of ascertaining his situation, and administering to his wants.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As I advanced I met knots of country-people talking earnestly of this event: distant as they were from the apprehended contagion, fear was impressed on every countenance. I passed by a group of these terrorists, in a lane in the direct road to the hut. One of them stopped me, and, conjecturing that I was ignorant of the circumstance, told me not to go on, for that an infected person lay but at a short distance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I know it," I replied, "and I am going to see in what condition the poor fellow is."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A murmur of surprise and horror ran through the assembly. I continued:—</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"This poor wretch is deserted, dying, succourless; in these unhappy times,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >God knows how soon any or all of us may be in like want. I am going to do,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >as I would be done by."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But you will never be able to return to the Castle—Lady Idris—his children—" in confused speech were the words that struck my ear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you not know, my friends," I said, "that the Earl himself, now Lord Protector, visits daily, not only those probably infected by this disease, but the hospitals and pest houses, going near, and even touching the sick? yet he was never in better health. You labour under an entire mistake as to the nature of the plague; but do not fear, I do not ask any of you to accompany me, nor to believe me, until I return safe and sound from my patient."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So I left them, and hurried on. I soon arrived at the hut: the door was ajar. I entered, and one glance assured me that its former inhabitant was no more—he lay on a heap of straw, cold and stiff; while a pernicious effluvia filled the room, and various stains and marks served to shew the virulence of the disorder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had never before beheld one killed by pestilence. While every mind was full of dismay at its effects, a craving for excitement had led us to peruse De Foe's account, and the masterly delineations of the author of Arthur Mervyn. The pictures drawn in these books were so vivid, that we seemed to have experienced the results depicted by them. But cold were the sensations excited by words, burning though they were, and describing the death and misery of thousands, compared to what I felt in looking on the corpse of this unhappy stranger. This indeed was the plague. I raised his rigid limbs, I marked the distortion of his face, and the stony eyes lost to perception. As I was thus occupied, chill horror congealed my blood, making my flesh quiver and my hair to stand on end. Half insanely I spoke to the dead. So the plague killed you, I muttered. How came this? Was the coming painful? You look as if the enemy had tortured, before he murdered you. And now I leapt up precipitately, and escaped from the hut, before nature could revoke her laws, and inorganic words be breathed in answer from the lips of the departed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On returning through the lane, I saw at a distance the same assemblage of persons which I had left. They hurried away, as soon as they saw me; my agitated mien added to their fear of coming near one who had entered within the verge of contagion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At a distance from facts one draws conclusions which appear infallible, which yet when put to the test of reality, vanish like unreal dreams. I had ridiculed the fears of my countrymen, when they related to others; now that they came home to myself, I paused. The Rubicon, I felt, was passed; and it behoved me well to reflect what I should do on this hither side of disease and danger. According to the vulgar superstition, my dress, my person, the air I breathed, bore in it mortal danger to myself and others. Should I return to the Castle, to my wife and children, with this taint upon me? Not surely if I were infected; but I felt certain that I was not—a few hours would determine the question—I would spend these in the forest, in reflection on what was to come, and what my future actions were to be. In the feeling communicated to me by the sight of one struck by the plague, I forgot the events that had excited me so strongly in London; new and more painful prospects, by degrees were cleared of the mist which had hitherto veiled them. The question was no longer whether I should share Adrian's toils and danger; but in what manner I could, in Windsor and the neighbourhood, imitate the prudence and zeal which, under his government, produced order and plenty in London, and how, now pestilence had spread more widely, I could secure the health of my own family.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety. In the south, the disease, virulent and immedicable, had nearly annihilated the race of man; storm and inundation, poisonous winds and blights, filled up the measure of suffering. In the north it was worse—the lesser population gradually declined, and famine and plague kept watch on the survivors, who, helpless and feeble, were ready to fall an easy prey into their hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I contracted my view to England. The overgrown metropolis, the great heart of mighty Britain, was pulseless. Commerce had ceased. All resort for ambition or pleasure was cut off—the streets were grass-grown—the houses empty—the few, that from necessity remained, seemed already branded with the taint of inevitable pestilence. In the larger manufacturing towns the same tragedy was acted on a smaller, yet more disastrous scale. There was no Adrian to superintend and direct, while whole flocks of the poor were struck and killed. Yet we were not all to die. No truly, though thinned, the race of man would continue, and the great plague would, in after years, become matter of history and wonder. Doubtless this visitation was for extent unexampled—more need that we should work hard to dispute its progress; ere this men have gone out in sport, and slain their thousands and tens of thousands; but now man had become a creature of price; the life of one of them was of more worth than the so called treasures of kings. Look at his thought-endued countenance, his graceful limbs, his majestic brow, his wondrous mechanism—the type and model of this best work of God is not to be cast aside as a broken vessel—he shall be preserved, and his children and his children's children carry down the name and form of man to latest time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Above all I must guard those entrusted by nature and fate to my especial care. And surely, if among all my fellow-creatures I were to select those who might stand forth examples of the greatness and goodness of man, I could choose no other than those allied to me by the most sacred ties. Some from among the family of man must survive, and these should be among the survivors; that should be my task—to accomplish it my own life were a small sacrifice. There then in that castle—in Windsor Castle, birth-place of Idris and my babes, should be the haven and retreat for the wrecked bark of human society. Its forest should be our world—its garden afford us food; within its walls I would establish the shaken throne of health. I was an outcast and a vagabond, when Adrian gently threw over me the silver net of love and civilization, and linked me inextricably to human charities and human excellence. I was one, who, though an aspirant after good, and an ardent lover of wisdom, was yet unenrolled in any list of worth, when Idris, the princely born, who was herself the personification of all that was divine in woman, she who walked the earth like a poet's dream, as a carved goddess endued with sense, or pictured saint stepping from the canvas—she, the most worthy, chose me, and gave me herself—a priceless gift.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During several hours I continued thus to meditate, till hunger and fatigue brought me back to the passing hour, then marked by long shadows cast from the descending sun. I had wandered towards Bracknel, far to the west of Windsor. The feeling of perfect health which I enjoyed, assured me that I was free from contagion. I remembered that Idris had been kept in ignorance of my proceedings. She might have heard of my return from London, and my visit to Bolter's Lock, which, connected with my continued absence, might tend greatly to alarm her. I returned to Windsor by the Long Walk, and passing through the town towards the Castle, I found it in a state of agitation and disturbance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It is too late to be ambitious," says Sir Thomas Browne. "We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons; one face of Janus holds no proportion to the other." Upon this text many fanatics arose, who prophesied that the end of time was come. The spirit of superstition had birth, from the wreck of our hopes, and antics wild and dangerous were played on the great theatre, while the remaining particle of futurity dwindled into a point in the eyes of the prognosticators. Weak-spirited women died of fear as they listened to their denunciations; men of robust form and seeming strength fell into idiotcy and madness, racked by the dread of coming eternity. A man of this kind was now pouring forth his eloquent despair among the inhabitants of Windsor. The scene of the morning, and my visit to the dead, which had been spread abroad, had alarmed the country-people, so they had become fit instruments to be played upon by a maniac.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The poor wretch had lost his young wife and lovely infant by the plague. He was a mechanic; and, rendered unable to attend to the occupation which supplied his necessities, famine was added to his other miseries. He left the chamber which contained his wife and child—wife and child no more, but "dead earth upon the earth"—wild with hunger, watching and grief, his diseased fancy made him believe himself sent by heaven to preach the end of time to the world. He entered the churches, and foretold to the congregations their speedy removal to the vaults below. He appeared like the forgotten spirit of the time in the theatres, and bade the spectators go home and die. He had been seized and confined; he had escaped and wandered from London among the neighbouring towns, and, with frantic gestures and thrilling words, he unveiled to each their hidden fears, and gave voice to the soundless thought they dared not syllable. He stood under the arcade of the town-hall of Windsor, and from this elevation harangued a trembling crowd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hear, O ye inhabitants of the earth," he cried, "hear thou, all seeing, but most pitiless Heaven! hear thou too, O tempest-tossed heart, which breathes out these words, yet faints beneath their meaning! Death is among us! The earth is beautiful and flower-bedecked, but she is our grave! The clouds of heaven weep for us—the pageantry of the stars is but our funeral torchlight. Grey headed men, ye hoped for yet a few years in your long-known abode—but the lease is up, you must remove—children, ye will never reach maturity, even now the small grave is dug for ye— mothers, clasp them in your arms, one death embraces you!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Shuddering, he stretched out his hands, his eyes cast up, seemed bursting from their sockets, while he appeared to follow shapes, to us invisible, in the yielding air—"There they are," he cried, "the dead! They rise in their shrouds, and pass in silent procession towards the far land of their doom—their bloodless lips move not—their shadowy limbs are void of motion, while still they glide onwards. We come," he exclaimed, springing forwards, "for what should we wait? Haste, my friends, apparel yourselves in the court-dress of death. Pestilence will usher you to his presence. Why thus long? they, the good, the wise, and the beloved, are gone before. Mothers, kiss you last—husbands, protectors no more, lead on the partners of your death! Come, O come! while the dear ones are yet in sight, for soon they will pass away, and we never never shall join them more."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From such ravings as these, he would suddenly become collected, and with unexaggerated but terrific words, paint the horrors of the time; describe with minute detail, the effects of the plague on the human frame, and tell heart-breaking tales of the snapping of dear affinities—the gasping horror of despair over the death-bed of the last beloved—so that groans and even shrieks burst from the crowd. One man in particular stood in front, his eyes fixt on the prophet, his mouth open, his limbs rigid, while his face changed to various colours, yellow, blue, and green, through intense fear. The maniac caught his glance, and turned his eye on him— one has heard of the gaze of the rattle-snake, which allures the trembling victim till he falls within his jaws. The maniac became composed; his person rose higher; authority beamed from his countenance. He looked on the peasant, who began to tremble, while he still gazed; his knees knocked together; his teeth chattered. He at last fell down in convulsions. "That man has the plague," said the maniac calmly. A shriek burst from the lips of the poor wretch; and then sudden motionlessness came over him; it was manifest to all that he was dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Cries of horror filled the place—every one endeavoured to effect his escape—in a few minutes the market place was cleared—the corpse lay on the ground; and the maniac, subdued and exhausted, sat beside it, leaning his gaunt cheek upon his thin hand. Soon some people, deputed by the magistrates, came to remove the body; the unfortunate being saw a jailor in each—he fled precipitately, while I passed onwards to the Castle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Death, cruel and relentless, had entered these beloved walls. An old servant, who had nursed Idris in infancy, and who lived with us more on the footing of a revered relative than a domestic, had gone a few days before to visit a daughter, married, and settled in the neighbourhood of London. On the night of her return she sickened of the plague. From the haughty and unbending nature of the Countess of Windsor, Idris had few tender filial associations with her. This good woman had stood in the place of a mother, and her very deficiencies of education and knowledge, by rendering her humble and defenceless, endeared her to us—she was the especial favourite of the children. I found my poor girl, there is no exaggeration in the expression, wild with grief and dread. She hung over the patient in agony, which was not mitigated when her thoughts wandered towards her babes, for whom she feared infection. My arrival was like the newly discovered lamp of a lighthouse to sailors, who are weathering some dangerous point. She deposited her appalling doubts in my hands; she relied on my judgment, and was comforted by my participation in her sorrow. Soon our poor nurse expired; and the anguish of suspense was changed to deep regret, which though at first more painful, yet yielded with greater readiness to my consolations. Sleep, the sovereign balm, at length steeped her tearful eyes in forgetfulness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She slept; and quiet prevailed in the Castle, whose inhabitants were hushed to repose. I was awake, and during the long hours of dead night, my busy thoughts worked in my brain, like ten thousand mill-wheels, rapid, acute, untameable. All slept—all England slept; and from my window, commanding a wide prospect of the star-illumined country, I saw the land stretched out in placid rest. I was awake, alive, while the brother of death possessed my race. What, if the more potent of these fraternal deities should obtain dominion over it? The silence of midnight, to speak truly, though apparently a paradox, rung in my ears. The solitude became intolerable—I placed my hand on the beating heart of Idris, I bent my head to catch the sound of her breath, to assure myself that she still existed—for a moment I doubted whether I should not awake her; so effeminate an horror ran through my frame.—Great God! would it one day be thus? One day all extinct, save myself, should I walk the earth alone? Were these warning voices, whose inarticulate and oracular sense forced belief upon me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Yet I would not call them</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Voices of warning, that announce to us</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Only the inevitable. As the sun,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the atmosphere—so often do the spirits</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of great events stride on before the events,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And in to-day already walks to-morrow.[2]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Calderon de la Barca. [2] Coleridge's Translation of Schiller's Wallenstein.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VIII.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >AFTER a long interval, I am again impelled by the restless spirit within me to continue my narration; but I must alter the mode which I have hitherto adopted. The details contained in the foregoing pages, apparently trivial, yet each slightest one weighing like lead in the depressed scale of human afflictions; this tedious dwelling on the sorrows of others, while my own were only in apprehension; this slowly laying bare of my soul's wounds: this journal of death; this long drawn and tortuous path, leading to the ocean of countless tears, awakens me again to keen grief. I had used this history as an opiate; while it described my beloved friends, fresh with life and glowing with hope, active assistants on the scene, I was soothed; there will be a more melancholy pleasure in painting the end of all. But the intermediate steps, the climbing the wall, raised up between what was and is, while I still looked back nor saw the concealed desert beyond, is a labour past my strength. Time and experience have placed me on an height from which I can comprehend the past as a whole; and in this way I must describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing light and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there will be harmony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It would be needless to narrate those disastrous occurrences, for which a parallel might be found in any slighter visitation of our gigantic calamity. Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death is the comforter—of the mournful passage of the death-cart—of the insensibility of the worthless, and the anguish of the loving heart—of harrowing shrieks and silence dire—of the variety of disease, desertion, famine, despair, and death? There are many books which can feed the appetite craving for these things; let them turn to the accounts of Boccaccio, De Foe, and Browne. The vast annihilation that has swallowed all things—the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth—the lonely state of singleness which hems me in, has deprived even such details of their stinging reality, and mellowing the lurid tints of past anguish with poetic hues, I am able to escape from the mosaic of circumstance, by perceiving and reflecting back the grouping and combined colouring of the past.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had returned from London possessed by the idea, with the intimate feeling that it was my first duty to secure, as well as I was able, the well-being of my family, and then to return and take my post beside Adrian. The events that immediately followed on my arrival at Windsor changed this view of things. The plague was not in London alone, it was every where—it came on us, as Ryland had said, like a thousand packs of wolves, howling through the winter night, gaunt and fierce. When once disease was introduced into the rural districts, its effects appeared more horrible, more exigent, and more difficult to cure, than in towns. There was a companionship in suffering there, and, the neighbours keeping constant watch on each other, and inspired by the active benevolence of Adrian, succour was afforded, and the path of destruction smoothed. But in the country, among the scattered farm-houses, in lone cottages, in fields, and barns, tragedies were acted harrowing to the soul, unseen, unheard, unnoticed. Medical aid was less easily procured, food was more difficult to obtain, and human beings, unwithheld by shame, for they were unbeheld of their fellows, ventured on deeds of greater wickedness, or gave way more readily to their abject fears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Deeds of heroism also occurred, whose very mention swells the heart and brings tears into the eyes. Such is human nature, that beauty and deformity are often closely linked. In reading history we are chiefly struck by the generosity and self-devotion that follow close on the heels of crime, veiling with supernal flowers the stain of blood. Such acts were not wanting to adorn the grim train that waited on the progress of the plague.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The inhabitants of Berkshire and Bucks had been long aware that the plague was in London, in Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, York, in short, in all the more populous towns of England. They were not however the less astonished and dismayed when it appeared among themselves. They were impatient and angry in the midst of terror. They would do something to throw off the clinging evil, and, while in action, they fancied that a remedy was applied. The inhabitants of the smaller towns left their houses, pitched tents in the fields, wandering separate from each other careless of hunger or the sky's inclemency, while they imagined that they avoided the death-dealing disease. The farmers and cottagers, on the contrary, struck with the fear of solitude, and madly desirous of medical assistance, flocked into the towns.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But winter was coming, and with winter, hope. In August, the plague had appeared in the country of England, and during September it made its ravages. Towards the end of October it dwindled away, and was in some degree replaced by a typhus, of hardly less virulence. The autumn was warm and rainy: the infirm and sickly died off—happier they: many young people flushed with health and prosperity, made pale by wasting malady, became the inhabitants of the grave. The crop had failed, the bad corn, and want of foreign wines, added vigour to disease. Before Christmas half England was under water. The storms of the last winter were renewed; but the diminished shipping of this year caused us to feel less the tempests of the sea. The flood and storms did more harm to continental Europe than to us—giving, as it were, the last blow to the calamities which destroyed it. In Italy the rivers were unwatched by the diminished peasantry; and, like wild beasts from their lair when the hunters and dogs are afar, did Tiber, Arno, and Po, rush upon and destroy the fertility of the plains. Whole villages were carried away. Rome, and Florence, and Pisa were overflowed, and their marble palaces, late mirrored in tranquil streams, had their foundations shaken by their winter-gifted power. In Germany and Russia the injury was still more momentous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth. Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow, released from her menace of destruction. It was not until February that the desired signs of winter appeared. For three days the snow fell, ice stopped the current of the rivers, and the birds flew out from crackling branches of the frost-whitened trees. On the fourth morning all vanished. A south-west wind brought up rain—the sun came out, and mocking the usual laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial force. It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat. We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pisando la tierra dura de continuo el hombre esta y cada passo que da es sobre su sepultura.[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet notwithstanding these disadvantages winter was breathing time; and we exerted ourselves to make the best of it. Plague might not revive with the summer; but if it did, it should find us prepared. It is a part of man's nature to adapt itself through habit even to pain and sorrow. Pestilence had become a part of our future, our existence; it was to be guarded against, like the flooding of rivers, the encroachments of ocean, or the inclemency of the sky. After long suffering and bitter experience, some panacea might be discovered; as it was, all that received infection died— all however were not infected; and it became our part to fix deep the foundations, and raise high the barrier between contagion and the sane; to introduce such order as would conduce to the well-being of the survivors, and as would preserve hope and some portion of happiness to those who were spectators of the still renewed tragedy. Adrian had introduced systematic modes of proceeding in the metropolis, which, while they were unable to stop the progress of death, yet prevented other evils, vice and folly, from rendering the awful fate of the hour still more tremendous. I wished to imitate his example, but men are used to</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >—move all together, if they move at all,[2]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >and I could find no means of leading the inhabitants of scattered towns and villages, who forgot my words as soon as they heard them not, and veered with every baffling wind, that might arise from an apparent change of circumstance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I adopted another plan. Those writers who have imagined a reign of peace and happiness on earth, have generally described a rural country, where each small township was directed by the elders and wise men. This was the key of my design. Each village, however small, usually contains a leader, one among themselves whom they venerate, whose advice they seek in difficulty, and whose good opinion they chiefly value. I was immediately drawn to make this observation by occurrences that presented themselves to my personal experience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the village of Little Marlow an old woman ruled the community. She had lived for some years in an alms-house, and on fine Sundays her threshold was constantly beset by a crowd, seeking her advice and listening to her admonitions. She had been a soldier's wife, and had seen the world; infirmity, induced by fevers caught in unwholesome quarters, had come on her before its time, and she seldom moved from her little cot. The plague entered the village; and, while fright and grief deprived the inhabitants of the little wisdom they possessed, old Martha stepped forward and said— "Before now I have been in a town where there was the plague."—"And you escaped?"—"No, but I recovered."—After this Martha was seated more firmly than ever on the regal seat, elevated by reverence and love. She entered the cottages of the sick; she relieved their wants with her own hand; she betrayed no fear, and inspired all who saw her with some portion of her own native courage. She attended the markets—she insisted upon being supplied with food for those who were too poor to purchase it. She shewed them how the well-being of each included the prosperity of all. She would not permit the gardens to be neglected, nor the very flowers in the cottage lattices to droop from want of care. Hope, she said, was better than a doctor's prescription, and every thing that could sustain and enliven the spirits, of more worth than drugs and mixtures.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was the sight of Little Marlow, and my conversations with Martha, that led me to the plan I formed. I had before visited the manor houses and gentlemen's seats, and often found the inhabitants actuated by the purest benevolence, ready to lend their utmost aid for the welfare of their tenants. But this was not enough. The intimate sympathy generated by similar hopes and fears, similar experience and pursuits, was wanting here. The poor perceived that the rich possessed other means of preservation than those which could be partaken of by themselves, seclusion, and, as far as circumstances permitted, freedom from care. They could not place reliance on them, but turned with tenfold dependence to the succour and advice of their equals. I resolved therefore to go from village to village, seeking out the rustic archon of the place, and by systematizing their exertions, and enlightening their views, encrease both their power and their use among their fellow-cottagers. Many changes also now occurred in these spontaneous regal elections: depositions and abdications were frequent, while, in the place of the old and prudent, the ardent youth would step forward, eager for action, regardless of danger. Often too, the voice to which all listened was suddenly silenced, the helping hand cold, the sympathetic eye closed, and the villagers feared still more the death that had selected a choice victim, shivering in dust the heart that had beat for them, reducing to incommunicable annihilation the mind for ever occupied with projects for their welfare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Whoever labours for man must often find ingratitude, watered by vice and folly, spring from the grain which he has sown. Death, which had in our younger days walked the earth like "a thief that comes in the night," now, rising from his subterranean vault, girt with power, with dark banner floating, came a conqueror. Many saw, seated above his vice-regal throne, a supreme Providence, who directed his shafts, and guided his progress, and they bowed their heads in resignation, or at least in obedience. Others perceived only a passing casualty; they endeavoured to exchange terror for heedlessness, and plunged into licentiousness, to avoid the agonizing throes of worst apprehension. Thus, while the wise, the good, and the prudent were occupied by the labours of benevolence, the truce of winter produced other effects among the young, the thoughtless, and the vicious. During the colder months there was a general rush to London in search of amusement—the ties of public opinion were loosened; many were rich, heretofore poor—many had lost father and mother, the guardians of their morals, their mentors and restraints. It would have been useless to have opposed these impulses by barriers, which would only have driven those actuated by them to more pernicious indulgencies. The theatres were open and thronged; dance and midnight festival were frequented—in many of these decorum was violated, and the evils, which hitherto adhered to an advanced state of civilization, were doubled. The student left his books, the artist his study: the occupations of life were gone, but the amusements remained; enjoyment might be protracted to the verge of the grave. All factitious colouring disappeared—death rose like night, and, protected by its murky shadows the blush of modesty, the reserve of pride, the decorum of prudery were frequently thrown aside as useless veils. This was not universal. Among better natures, anguish and dread, the fear of eternal separation, and the awful wonder produced by unprecedented calamity, drew closer the ties of kindred and friendship. Philosophers opposed their principles, as barriers to the inundation of profligacy or despair, and the only ramparts to protect the invaded territory of human life; the religious, hoping now for their reward, clung fast to their creeds, as the rafts and planks which over the tempest-vexed sea of suffering, would bear them in safety to the harbour of the Unknown Continent. The loving heart, obliged to contract its view, bestowed its overflow of affection in triple portion on the few that remained. Yet, even among these, the present, as an unalienable possession, became all of time to which they dared commit the precious freight of their hopes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The experience of immemorial time had taught us formerly to count our enjoyments by years, and extend our prospect of life through a lengthened period of progression and decay; the long road threaded a vast labyrinth, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, in which it terminated, was hid by intervening objects. But an earthquake had changed the scene—under our very feet the earth yawned—deep and precipitous the gulph below opened to receive us, while the hours charioted us towards the chasm. But it was winter now, and months must elapse before we are hurled from our security. We became ephemera, to whom the interval between the rising and setting sun was as a long drawn year of common time. We should never see our children ripen into maturity, nor behold their downy cheeks roughen, their blithe hearts subdued by passion or care; but we had them now—they lived, and we lived—what more could we desire? With such schooling did my poor Idris try to hush thronging fears, and in some measure succeeded. It was not as in summer-time, when each hour might bring the dreaded fate—until summer, we felt sure; and this certainty, short lived as it must be, yet for awhile satisfied her maternal tenderness. I know not how to express or communicate the sense of concentrated, intense, though evanescent transport, that imparadized us in the present hour. Our joys were dearer because we saw their end; they were keener because we felt, to its fullest extent, their value; they were purer because their essence was sympathy— as a meteor is brighter than a star, did the felicity of this winter contain in itself the extracted delights of a long, long life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How lovely is spring! As we looked from Windsor Terrace on the sixteen fertile counties spread beneath, speckled by happy cottages and wealthier towns, all looked as in former years, heart-cheering and fair. The land was ploughed, the slender blades of wheat broke through the dark soil, the fruit trees were covered with buds, the husbandman was abroad in the fields, the milk-maid tripped home with well-filled pails, the swallows and martins struck the sunny pools with their long, pointed wings, the new dropped lambs reposed on the young grass, the tender growth of leaves—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Lifts its sweet head into the air, and feeds</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A silent space with ever sprouting green.[3]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man himself seemed to regenerate, and feel the frost of winter yield to an elastic and warm renewal of life—reason told us that care and sorrow would grow with the opening year—but how to believe the ominous voice breathed up with pestiferous vapours from fear's dim cavern, while nature, laughing and scattering from her green lap flowers, and fruits, and sparkling waters, invited us to join the gay masque of young life she led upon the scene?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Where was the plague? "Here—every where!" one voice of horror and dismay exclaimed, when in the pleasant days of a sunny May the Destroyer of man brooded again over the earth, forcing the spirit to leave its organic chrysalis, and to enter upon an untried life. With one mighty sweep of its potent weapon, all caution, all care, all prudence were levelled low: death sat at the tables of the great, stretched itself on the cottager's pallet, seized the dastard who fled, quelled the brave man who resisted: despondency entered every heart, sorrow dimmed every eye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sights of woe now became familiar to me, and were I to tell all of anguish and pain that I witnessed, of the despairing moans of age, and the more terrible smiles of infancy in the bosom of horror, my reader, his limbs quivering and his hair on end, would wonder how I did not, seized with sudden frenzy, dash myself from some precipice, and so close my eyes for ever on the sad end of the world. But the powers of love, poetry, and creative fancy will dwell even beside the sick of the plague, with the squalid, and with the dying. A feeling of devotion, of duty, of a high and steady purpose, elevated me; a strange joy filled my heart. In the midst of saddest grief I seemed to tread air, while the spirit of good shed round me an ambrosial atmosphere, which blunted the sting of sympathy, and purified the air of sighs. If my wearied soul flagged in its career, I thought of my loved home, of the casket that contained my treasures, of the kiss of love and the filial caress, while my eyes were moistened by purest dew, and my heart was at once softened and refreshed by thrilling tenderness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maternal affection had not rendered Idris selfish; at the beginning of our calamity she had, with thoughtless enthusiasm, devoted herself to the care of the sick and helpless. I checked her; and she submitted to my rule. I told her how the fear of her danger palsied my exertions, how the knowledge of her safety strung my nerves to endurance. I shewed her the dangers which her children incurred during her absence; and she at length agreed not to go beyond the inclosure of the forest. Indeed, within the walls of the Castle we had a colony of the unhappy, deserted by their relatives, and in themselves helpless, sufficient to occupy her time and attention, while ceaseless anxiety for my welfare and the health of her children, however she strove to curb or conceal it, absorbed all her thoughts, and undermined the vital principle. After watching over and providing for their safety, her second care was to hide from me her anguish and tears. Each night I returned to the Castle, and found there repose and love awaiting me. Often I waited beside the bed of death till midnight, and through the obscurity of rainy, cloudy nights rode many miles, sustained by one circumstance only, the safety and sheltered repose of those I loved. If some scene of tremendous agony shook my frame and fevered my brow, I would lay my head on the lap of Idris, and the tumultuous pulses subsided into a temperate flow —her smile could raise me from hopelessness, her embrace bathe my sorrowing heart in calm peace. Summer advanced, and, crowned with the sun's potent rays, plague shot her unerring shafts over the earth. The nations beneath their influence bowed their heads, and died. The corn that sprung up in plenty, lay in autumn rotting on the ground, while the melancholy wretch who had gone out to gather bread for his children, lay stiff and plague-struck in the furrow. The green woods waved their boughs majestically, while the dying were spread beneath their shade, answering the solemn melody with inharmonious cries. The painted birds flitted through the shades; the careless deer reposed unhurt upon the fern—the oxen and the horses strayed from their unguarded stables, and grazed among the wheat, for death fell on man alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With summer and mortality grew our fears. My poor love and I looked at each other, and our babes.—"We will save them, Idris," I said, "I will save them. Years hence we shall recount to them our fears, then passed away with their occasion. Though they only should remain on the earth, still they shall live, nor shall their cheeks become pale nor their sweet voices languish." Our eldest in some degree understood the scenes passing around, and at times, he with serious looks questioned me concerning the reason of so vast a desolation. But he was only ten years old; and the hilarity of youth soon chased unreasonable care from his brow. Evelyn, a laughing cherub, a gamesome infant, without idea of pain or sorrow, would, shaking back his light curls from his eyes, make the halls re-echo with his merriment, and in a thousand artless ways attract our attention to his play. Clara, our lovely gentle Clara, was our stay, our solace, our delight. She made it her task to attend the sick, comfort the sorrowing, assist the aged, and partake the sports and awaken the gaiety of the young. She flitted through the rooms, like a good spirit, dispatched from the celestial kingdom, to illumine our dark hour with alien splendour. Gratitude and praise marked where her footsteps had been. Yet, when she stood in unassuming simplicity before us, playing with our children, or with girlish assiduity performing little kind offices for Idris, one wondered in what fair lineament of her pure loveliness, in what soft tone of her thrilling voice, so much of heroism, sagacity and active goodness resided.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The summer passed tediously, for we trusted that winter would at least check the disease. That it would vanish altogether was an hope too dear— too heartfelt, to be expressed. When such a thought was heedlessly uttered, the hearers, with a gush of tears and passionate sobs, bore witness how deep their fears were, how small their hopes. For my own part, my exertions for the public good permitted me to observe more closely than most others, the virulence and extensive ravages of our sightless enemy. A short month has destroyed a village, and where in May the first person sickened, in June the paths were deformed by unburied corpses—the houses tenantless, no smoke arising from the chimneys; and the housewife's clock marked only the hour when death had been triumphant. From such scenes I have sometimes saved a deserted infant—sometimes led a young and grieving mother from the lifeless image of her first born, or drawn the sturdy labourer from childish weeping over his extinct family.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >July is gone. August must pass, and by the middle of September we may hope. Each day was eagerly counted; and the inhabitants of towns, desirous to leap this dangerous interval, plunged into dissipation, and strove, by riot, and what they wished to imagine to be pleasure, to banish thought and opiate despair. None but Adrian could have tamed the motley population of London, which, like a troop of unbitted steeds rushing to their pastures, had thrown aside all minor fears, through the operation of the fear paramount. Even Adrian was obliged in part to yield, that he might be able, if not to guide, at least to set bounds to the license of the times. The theatres were kept open; every place of public resort was frequented; though he endeavoured so to modify them, as might best quiet the agitation of the spectators, and at the same time prevent a reaction of misery when the excitement was over. Tragedies deep and dire were the chief favourites. Comedy brought with it too great a contrast to the inner despair: when such were attempted, it was not unfrequent for a comedian, in the midst of the laughter occasioned by his disporportioned buffoonery, to find a word or thought in his part that jarred with his own sense of wretchedness, and burst from mimic merriment into sobs and tears, while the spectators, seized with irresistible sympathy, wept, and the pantomimic revelry was changed to a real exhibition of tragic passion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was not in my nature to derive consolation from such scenes; from theatres, whose buffoon laughter and discordant mirth awakened distempered sympathy, or where fictitious tears and wailings mocked the heart-felt grief within; from festival or crowded meeting, where hilarity sprung from the worst feelings of our nature, or such enthralment of the better ones, as impressed it with garish and false varnish; from assemblies of mourners in the guise of revellers. Once however I witnessed a scene of singular interest at one of the theatres, where nature overpowered art, as an overflowing cataract will tear away the puny manufacture of a mock cascade, which had before been fed by a small portion of its waters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had come to London to see Adrian. He was not at the palace; and, though the attendants did not know whither he had gone, they did not expect him till late at night. It was between six and seven o'clock, a fine summer afternoon, and I spent my leisure hours in a ramble through the empty streets of London; now turning to avoid an approaching funeral, now urged by curiosity to observe the state of a particular spot; my wanderings were instinct with pain, for silence and desertion characterized every place I visited, and the few beings I met were so pale and woe-begone, so marked with care and depressed by fear, that weary of encountering only signs of misery, I began to retread my steps towards home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was now in Holborn, and passed by a public house filled with uproarious companions, whose songs, laughter, and shouts were more sorrowful than the pale looks and silence of the mourner. Such an one was near, hovering round this house. The sorry plight of her dress displayed her poverty, she was ghastly pale, and continued approaching, first the window and then the door of the house, as if fearful, yet longing to enter. A sudden burst of song and merriment seemed to sting her to the heart; she murmured, "Can he have the heart?" and then mustering her courage, she stepped within the threshold. The landlady met her in the passage; the poor creature asked, "Is my husband here? Can I see George?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"See him," cried the woman, "yes, if you go to him; last night he was taken with the plague, and we sent him to the hospital."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The unfortunate inquirer staggered against a wall, a faint cry escaped her</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >—"O! were you cruel enough," she exclaimed, "to send him there?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The landlady meanwhile hurried away; but a more compassionate bar-maid gave her a detailed account, the sum of which was, that her husband had been taken ill, after a night of riot, and sent by his boon companions with all expedition to St. Bartholomew's Hospital. I had watched this scene, for there was a gentleness about the poor woman that interested me; she now tottered away from the door, walking as well as she could down Holborn Hill; but her strength soon failed her; she leaned against a wall, and her head sunk on her bosom, while her pallid cheek became still more white. I went up to her and offered my services. She hardly looked up—"You can do me no good," she replied; "I must go to the hospital; if I do not die before I get there."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were still a few hackney-coaches accustomed to stand about the streets, more truly from habit than for use. I put her in one of these, and entered with her that I might secure her entrance into the hospital. Our way was short, and she said little; except interrupted ejaculations of reproach that he had left her, exclamations on the unkindness of some of his friends, and hope that she would find him alive. There was a simple, natural earnestness about her that interested me in her fate, especially when she assured me that her husband was the best of men,—had been so, till want of business during these unhappy times had thrown him into bad company. "He could not bear to come home," she said, "only to see our children die. A man cannot have the patience a mother has, with her own flesh and blood."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were set down at St. Bartholomew's, and entered the wretched precincts of the house of disease. The poor creature clung closer to me, as she saw with what heartless haste they bore the dead from the wards, and took them into a room, whose half-opened door displayed a number of corpses, horrible to behold by one unaccustomed to such scenes. We were directed to the ward where her husband had been first taken, and still was, the nurse said, if alive. My companion looked eagerly from one bed to the other, till at the end of the ward she espied, on a wretched bed, a squalid, haggard creature, writhing under the torture of disease. She rushed towards him, she embraced him, blessing God for his preservation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The enthusiasm that inspired her with this strange joy, blinded her to the horrors about her; but they were intolerably agonizing to me. The ward was filled with an effluvia that caused my heart to heave with painful qualms. The dead were carried out, and the sick brought in, with like indifference; some were screaming with pain, others laughing from the influence of more terrible delirium; some were attended by weeping, despairing relations, others called aloud with thrilling tenderness or reproach on the friends who had deserted them, while the nurses went from bed to bed, incarnate images of despair, neglect, and death. I gave gold to my luckless companion; I recommended her to the care of the attendants; I then hastened away; while the tormentor, the imagination, busied itself in picturing my own loved ones, stretched on such beds, attended thus. The country afforded no such mass of horrors; solitary wretches died in the open fields; and I have found a survivor in a vacant village, contending at once with famine and disease; but the assembly of pestilence, the banqueting hall of death, was spread only in London.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I rambled on, oppressed, distracted by painful emotions—suddenly I found myself before Drury Lane Theatre. The play was Macbeth—the first actor of the age was there to exert his powers to drug with irreflection the auditors; such a medicine I yearned for, so I entered. The theatre was tolerably well filled. Shakspeare, whose popularity was established by the approval of four centuries, had not lost his influence even at this dread period; but was still "Ut magus," the wizard to rule our hearts and govern our imaginations. I came in during the interval between the third and fourth act. I looked round on the audience; the females were mostly of the lower classes, but the men were of all ranks, come hither to forget awhile the protracted scenes of wretchedness, which awaited them at their miserable homes. The curtain drew up, and the stage presented the scene of the witches' cave. The wildness and supernatural machinery of Macbeth, was a pledge that it could contain little directly connected with our present circumstances. Great pains had been taken in the scenery to give the semblance of reality to the impossible. The extreme darkness of the stage, whose only light was received from the fire under the cauldron, joined to a kind of mist that floated about it, rendered the unearthly shapes of the witches obscure and shadowy. It was not three decrepid old hags that bent over their pot throwing in the grim ingredients of the magic charm, but forms frightful, unreal, and fanciful. The entrance of Hecate, and the wild music that followed, took us out of this world. The cavern shape the stage assumed, the beetling rocks, the glare of the fire, the misty shades that crossed the scene at times, the music in harmony with all witch-like fancies, permitted the imagination to revel, without fear of contradiction, or reproof from reason or the heart. The entrance of Macbeth did not destroy the illusion, for he was actuated by the same feelings that inspired us, and while the work of magic proceeded we sympathized in his wonder and his daring, and gave ourselves up with our whole souls to the influence of scenic delusion. I felt the beneficial result of such excitement, in a renewal of those pleasing flights of fancy to which I had long been a stranger. The effect of this scene of incantation communicated a portion of its power to that which followed. We forgot that Malcolm and Macduff were mere human beings, acted upon by such simple passions as warmed our own breasts. By slow degrees however we were drawn to the real interest of the scene. A shudder like the swift passing of an electric shock ran through the house, when Rosse exclaimed, in answer to "Stands Scotland where it did?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Alas, poor country;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Be called our mother, but our grave: where nothing,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rent the air,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > A modern extasy: the dead man's knell</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is there scarce asked, for who; and good men's lives</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Expire before the flowers in their caps,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Dying, or ere they sicken.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Each word struck the sense, as our life's passing bell; we feared to look at each other, but bent our gaze on the stage, as if our eyes could fall innocuous on that alone. The person who played the part of Rosse, suddenly became aware of the dangerous ground he trod. He was an inferior actor, but truth now made him excellent; as he went on to announce to Macduff the slaughter of his family, he was afraid to speak, trembling from apprehension of a burst of grief from the audience, not from his fellow-mime. Each word was drawn out with difficulty; real anguish painted his features; his eyes were now lifted in sudden horror, now fixed in dread upon the ground. This shew of terror encreased ours, we gasped with him, each neck was stretched out, each face changed with the actor's changes— at length while Macduff, who, attending to his part, was unobservant of the high wrought sympathy of the house, cried with well acted passion:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > All my pretty ones?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Did you say all?—O hell kite! All?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > What! all my pretty chickens, and their dam,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > At one fell swoop!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A pang of tameless grief wrenched every heart, a burst of despair was echoed from every lip.—I had entered into the universal feeling—I had been absorbed by the terrors of Rosse—I re-echoed the cry of Macduff, and then rushed out as from an hell of torture, to find calm in the free air and silent street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Free the air was not, or the street silent. Oh, how I longed then for the dear soothings of maternal Nature, as my wounded heart was still further stung by the roar of heartless merriment from the public-house, by the sight of the drunkard reeling home, having lost the memory of what he would find there in oblivious debauch, and by the more appalling salutations of those melancholy beings to whom the name of home was a mockery. I ran on at my utmost speed until I found myself I knew not how, close to Westminster Abbey, and was attracted by the deep and swelling tone of the organ. I entered with soothing awe the lighted chancel, and listened to the solemn religious chaunt, which spoke peace and hope to the unhappy. The notes, freighted with man's dearest prayers, re-echoed through the dim aisles, and the bleeding of the soul's wounds was staunched by heavenly balm. In spite of the misery I deprecated, and could not understand; in spite of the cold hearths of wide London, and the corpse-strewn fields of my native land; in spite of all the variety of agonizing emotions I had that evening experienced, I thought that in reply to our melodious adjurations, the Creator looked down in compassion and promise of relief; the awful peal of the heaven-winged music seemed fitting voice wherewith to commune with the Supreme; calm was produced by its sound, and by the sight of many other human creatures offering up prayers and submission with me. A sentiment approaching happiness followed the total resignation of one's being to the guardianship of the world's ruler. Alas! with the failing of this solemn strain, the elevated spirit sank again to earth. Suddenly one of the choristers died—he was lifted from his desk, the vaults below were hastily opened—he was consigned with a few muttered prayers to the darksome cavern, abode of thousands who had gone before—now wide yawning to receive even all who fulfilled the funeral rites. In vain I would then have turned from this scene, to darkened aisle or lofty dome, echoing with melodious praise. In the open air alone I found relief; among nature's beauteous works, her God reassumed his attribute of benevolence, and again I could trust that he who built up the mountains, planted the forests, and poured out the rivers, would erect another state for lost humanity, where we might awaken again to our affections, our happiness, and our faith.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fortunately for me those circumstances were of rare occurrence that obliged me to visit London, and my duties were confined to the rural district which our lofty castle overlooked; and here labour stood in the place of pastime, to occupy such of the country people as were sufficiently exempt from sorrow or disease. My endeavours were directed towards urging them to their usual attention to their crops, and to the acting as if pestilence did not exist. The mower's scythe was at times heard; yet the joyless haymakers after they had listlessly turned the grass, forgot to cart it; the shepherd, when he had sheared his sheep, would let the wool lie to be scattered by the winds, deeming it useless to provide clothing for another winter. At times however the spirit of life was awakened by these employments; the sun, the refreshing breeze, the sweet smell of the hay, the rustling leaves and prattling rivulets brought repose to the agitated bosom, and bestowed a feeling akin to happiness on the apprehensive. Nor, strange to say, was the time without its pleasures. Young couples, who had loved long and hopelessly, suddenly found every impediment removed, and wealth pour in from the death of relatives. The very danger drew them closer. The immediate peril urged them to seize the immediate opportunity; wildly and passionately they sought to know what delights existence afforded, before they yielded to death, and</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Snatching their pleasures with rough strife</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Thorough the iron gates of life,[4]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >they defied the conquering pestilence to destroy what had been, or to erase even from their death-bed thoughts the sentiment of happiness which had been theirs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One instance of this kind came immediately under our notice, where a high-born girl had in early youth given her heart to one of meaner extraction. He was a schoolfellow and friend of her brother's, and usually spent a part of the holidays at the mansion of the duke her father. They had played together as children, been the confidants of each other's little secrets, mutual aids and consolers in difficulty and sorrow. Love had crept in, noiseless, terrorless at first, till each felt their life bound up in the other, and at the same time knew that they must part. Their extreme youth, and the purity of their attachment, made them yield with less resistance to the tyranny of circumstances. The father of the fair Juliet separated them; but not until the young lover had promised to remain absent only till he had rendered himself worthy of her, and she had vowed to preserve her virgin heart, his treasure, till he returned to claim and possess it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Plague came, threatening to destroy at once the aim of the ambitious and the hopes of love. Long the Duke of L——derided the idea that there could be danger while he pursued his plans of cautious seclusion; and he so far succeeded, that it was not till this second summer, that the destroyer, at one fell stroke, overthrew his precautions, his security, and his life. Poor Juliet saw one by one, father, mother, brothers, and sisters, sicken and die. Most of the servants fled on the first appearance of disease, those who remained were infected mortally; no neighbour or rustic ventured within the verge of contagion. By a strange fatality Juliet alone escaped, and she to the last waited on her relatives, and smoothed the pillow of death. The moment at length came, when the last blow was given to the last of the house: the youthful survivor of her race sat alone among the dead. There was no living being near to soothe her, or withdraw her from this hideous company. With the declining heat of a September night, a whirlwind of storm, thunder, and hail, rattled round the house, and with ghastly harmony sung the dirge of her family. She sat upon the ground absorbed in wordless despair, when through the gusty wind and bickering rain she thought she heard her name called. Whose could that familiar voice be? Not one of her relations, for they lay glaring on her with stony eyes. Again her name was syllabled, and she shuddered as she asked herself, am I becoming mad, or am I dying, that I hear the voices of the departed? A second thought passed, swift as an arrow, into her brain; she rushed to the window; and a flash of lightning shewed to her the expected vision, her lover in the shrubbery beneath; joy lent her strength to descend the stairs, to open the door, and then she fainted in his supporting arms.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A thousand times she reproached herself, as with a crime, that she should revive to happiness with him. The natural clinging of the human mind to life and joy was in its full energy in her young heart; she gave herself impetuously up to the enchantment: they were married; and in their radiant features I saw incarnate, for the last time, the spirit of love, of rapturous sympathy, which once had been the life of the world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I envied them, but felt how impossible it was to imbibe the same feeling, now that years had multiplied my ties in the world. Above all, the anxious mother, my own beloved and drooping Idris, claimed my earnest care; I could not reproach the anxiety that never for a moment slept in her heart, but I exerted myself to distract her attention from too keen an observation of the truth of things, of the near and nearer approaches of disease, misery, and death, of the wild look of our attendants as intelligence of another and yet another death reached us; for to the last something new occurred that seemed to transcend in horror all that had gone before. Wretched beings crawled to die under our succouring roof; the inhabitants of the Castle decreased daily, while the survivors huddled together in fear, and, as in a famine-struck boat, the sport of the wild, interminable waves, each looked in the other's face, to guess on whom the death-lot would next fall. All this I endeavoured to veil, so that it might least impress my Idris; yet, as I have said, my courage survived even despair: I might be vanquished, but I would not yield.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One day, it was the ninth of September, seemed devoted to every disaster, to every harrowing incident. Early in the day, I heard of the arrival of the aged grandmother of one of our servants at the Castle. This old woman had reached her hundredth year; her skin was shrivelled, her form was bent and lost in extreme decrepitude; but as still from year to year she continued in existence, out-living many younger and stronger, she began to feel as if she were to live for ever. The plague came, and the inhabitants of her village died. Clinging, with the dastard feeling of the aged, to the remnant of her spent life, she had, on hearing that the pestilence had come into her neighbourhood, barred her door, and closed her casement, refusing to communicate with any. She would wander out at night to get food, and returned home, pleased that she had met no one, that she was in no danger from the plague. As the earth became more desolate, her difficulty in acquiring sustenance increased; at first, her son, who lived near, had humoured her by placing articles of food in her way: at last he died. But, even though threatened by famine, her fear of the plague was paramount; and her greatest care was to avoid her fellow creatures. She grew weaker each day, and each day she had further to go. The night before, she had reached Datchet; and, prowling about, had found a baker's shop open and deserted. Laden with spoil, she hastened to return, and lost her way. The night was windless, hot, and cloudy; her load became too heavy for her; and one by one she threw away her loaves, still endeavouring to get along, though her hobbling fell into lameness, and her weakness at last into inability to move.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She lay down among the tall corn, and fell asleep. Deep in midnight, she was awaked by a rustling near her; she would have started up, but her stiff joints refused to obey her will. A low moan close to her ear followed, and the rustling increased; she heard a smothered voice breathe out, Water, Water! several times; and then again a sigh heaved from the heart of the sufferer. The old woman shuddered, she contrived at length to sit upright; but her teeth chattered, and her knees knocked together—close, very close, lay a half-naked figure, just discernible in the gloom, and the cry for water and the stifled moan were again uttered. Her motions at length attracted the attention of her unknown companion; her hand was seized with a convulsive violence that made the grasp feel like iron, the fingers like the keen teeth of a trap.—"At last you are come!" were the words given forth—but this exertion was the last effort of the dying—the joints relaxed, the figure fell prostrate, one low moan, the last, marked the moment of death. Morning broke; and the old woman saw the corpse, marked with the fatal disease, close to her; her wrist was livid with the hold loosened by death. She felt struck by the plague; her aged frame was unable to bear her away with sufficient speed; and now, believing herself infected, she no longer dreaded the association of others; but, as swiftly as she might, came to her grand-daughter, at Windsor Castle, there to lament and die. The sight was horrible; still she clung to life, and lamented her mischance with cries and hideous groans; while the swift advance of the disease shewed, what proved to be the fact, that she could not survive many hours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >While I was directing that the necessary care should be taken of her, Clara came in; she was trembling and pale; and, when I anxiously asked her the cause of her agitation, she threw herself into my arms weeping and exclaiming—"Uncle, dearest uncle, do not hate me for ever! I must tell you, for you must know, that Evelyn, poor little Evelyn"—her voice was choked by sobs. The fear of so mighty a calamity as the loss of our adored infant made the current of my blood pause with chilly horror; but the remembrance of the mother restored my presence of mind. I sought the little bed of my darling; he was oppressed by fever; but I trusted, I fondly and fearfully trusted, that there were no symptoms of the plague. He was not three years old, and his illness appeared only one of those attacks incident to infancy. I watched him long—his heavy half-closed lids, his burning cheeks and restless twining of his small fingers—the fever was violent, the torpor complete—enough, without the greater fear of pestilence, to awaken alarm. Idris must not see him in this state. Clara, though only twelve years old, was rendered, through extreme sensibility, so prudent and careful, that I felt secure in entrusting the charge of him to her, and it was my task to prevent Idris from observing their absence. I administered the fitting remedies, and left my sweet niece to watch beside him, and bring me notice of any change she should observe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I then went to Idris, contriving in my way, plausible excuses for remaining all day in the Castle, and endeavouring to disperse the traces of care from my brow. Fortunately she was not alone. I found Merrival, the astronomer, with her. He was far too long sighted in his view of humanity to heed the casualties of the day, and lived in the midst of contagion unconscious of its existence. This poor man, learned as La Place, guileless and unforeseeing as a child, had often been on the point of starvation, he, his pale wife and numerous offspring, while he neither felt hunger, nor observed distress. His astronomical theories absorbed him; calculations were scrawled with coal on the bare walls of his garret: a hard-earned guinea, or an article of dress, was exchanged for a book without remorse; he neither heard his children cry, nor observed his companion's emaciated form, and the excess of calamity was merely to him as the occurrence of a cloudy night, when he would have given his right hand to observe a celestial phenomenon. His wife was one of those wondrous beings, to be found only among women, with affections not to be diminished by misfortune. Her mind was divided between boundless admiration for her husband, and tender anxiety for her children—she waited on him, worked for them, and never complained, though care rendered her life one long-drawn, melancholy dream.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had introduced himself to Adrian, by a request he made to observe some planetary motions from his glass. His poverty was easily detected and relieved. He often thanked us for the books we lent him, and for the use of our instruments, but never spoke of his altered abode or change of circumstances. His wife assured us, that he had not observed any difference, except in the absence of the children from his study, and to her infinite surprise he complained of this unaccustomed quiet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He came now to announce to us the completion of his Essay on the Pericyclical Motions of the Earth's Axis, and the precession of the equinoctial points. If an old Roman of the period of the Republic had returned to life, and talked of the impending election of some laurel-crowned consul, or of the last battle with Mithridates, his ideas would not have been more alien to the times, than the conversation of Merrival. Man, no longer with an appetite for sympathy, clothed his thoughts in visible signs; nor were there any readers left: while each one, having thrown away his sword with opposing shield alone, awaited the plague, Merrival talked of the state of mankind six thousand years hence. He might with equal interest to us, have added a commentary, to describe the unknown and unimaginable lineaments of the creatures, who would then occupy the vacated dwelling of mankind. We had not the heart to undeceive the poor old man; and at the moment I came in, he was reading parts of his book to Idris, asking what answer could be given to this or that position.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idris could not refrain from a smile, as she listened; she had already gathered from him that his family was alive and in health; though not apt to forget the precipice of time on which she stood, yet I could perceive that she was amused for a moment, by the contrast between the contracted view we had so long taken of human life, and the seven league strides with which Merrival paced a coming eternity. I was glad to see her smile, because it assured me of her total ignorance of her infant's danger: but I shuddered to think of the revulsion that would be occasioned by a discovery of the truth. While Merrival was talking, Clara softly opened a door behind Idris, and beckoned me to come with a gesture and look of grief. A mirror betrayed the sign to Idris—she started up. To suspect evil, to perceive that, Alfred being with us, the danger must regard her youngest darling, to fly across the long chambers into his apartment, was the work but of a moment. There she beheld her Evelyn lying fever-stricken and motionless. I followed her, and strove to inspire more hope than I could myself entertain; but she shook her head mournfully. Anguish deprived her of presence of mind; she gave up to me and Clara the physician's and nurse's parts; she sat by the bed, holding one little burning hand, and, with glazed eyes fixed on her babe, passed the long day in one unvaried agony. It was not the plague that visited our little boy so roughly; but she could not listen to my assurances; apprehension deprived her of judgment and reflection; every slight convulsion of her child's features shook her frame —if he moved, she dreaded the instant crisis; if he remained still, she saw death in his torpor, and the cloud on her brow darkened.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The poor little thing's fever encreased towards night. The sensation is most dreary, to use no stronger term, with which one looks forward to passing the long hours of night beside a sick bed, especially if the patient be an infant, who cannot explain its pain, and whose flickering life resembles the wasting flame of the watch-light,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Whose narrow fire</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is shaken by the wind, and on whose edge</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Devouring darkness hovers.[5]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With eagerness one turns toward the east, with angry impatience one marks the unchequered darkness; the crowing of a cock, that sound of glee during day-time, comes wailing and untuneable—the creaking of rafters, and slight stir of invisible insect is heard and felt as the signal and type of desolation. Clara, overcome by weariness, had seated herself at the foot of her cousin's bed, and in spite of her efforts slumber weighed down her lids; twice or thrice she shook it off; but at length she was conquered and slept. Idris sat at the bedside, holding Evelyn's hand; we were afraid to speak to each other; I watched the stars —I hung over my child—I felt his little pulse—I drew near the mother—again I receded. At the turn of morning a gentle sigh from the patient attracted me, the burning spot on his cheek faded—his pulse beat softly and regularly—torpor yielded to sleep. For a long time I dared not hope; but when his unobstructed breathing and the moisture that suffused his forehead, were tokens no longer to be mistaken of the departure of mortal malady, I ventured to whisper the news of the change to Idris, and at length succeeded in persuading her that I spoke truth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But neither this assurance, nor the speedy convalescence of our child could restore her, even to the portion of peace she before enjoyed. Her fear had been too deep, too absorbing, too entire, to be changed to security. She felt as if during her past calm she had dreamed, but was now awake; she was</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As one</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In some lone watch-tower on the deep, awakened</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > From soothing visions of the home he loves,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Trembling to hear the wrathful billows roar;[6]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >as one who has been cradled by a storm, and awakes to find the vessel sinking. Before, she had been visited by pangs of fear—now, she never enjoyed an interval of hope. No smile of the heart ever irradiated her fair countenance; sometimes she forced one, and then gushing tears would flow, and the sea of grief close above these wrecks of past happiness. Still while I was near her, she could not be in utter despair— she fully confided herself to me—she did not seem to fear my death, or revert to its possibility; to my guardianship she consigned the full freight of her anxieties, reposing on my love, as a wind-nipped fawn by the side of a doe, as a wounded nestling under its mother's wing, as a tiny, shattered boat, quivering still, beneath some protecting willow-tree. While I, not proudly as in days of joy, yet tenderly, and with glad consciousness of the comfort I afforded, drew my trembling girl close to my heart, and tried to ward every painful thought or rough circumstance from her sensitive nature.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One other incident occurred at the end of this summer. The Countess of Windsor, Ex-Queen of England, returned from Germany. She had at the beginning of the season quitted the vacant city of Vienna; and, unable to tame her haughty mind to anything like submission, she had delayed at Hamburgh, and, when at last she came to London, many weeks elapsed before she gave Adrian notice of her arrival. In spite of her coldness and long absence, he welcomed her with sensibility, displaying such affection as sought to heal the wounds of pride and sorrow, and was repulsed only by her total apparent want of sympathy. Idris heard of her mother's return with pleasure. Her own maternal feelings were so ardent, that she imagined her parent must now, in this waste world, have lost pride and harshness, and would receive with delight her filial attentions. The first check to her duteous demonstrations was a formal intimation from the fallen majesty of England, that I was in no manner to be intruded upon her. She consented, she said, to forgive her daughter, and acknowledge her grandchildren; larger concessions must not be expected.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To me this proceeding appeared (if so light a term may be permitted) extremely whimsical. Now that the race of man had lost in fact all distinction of rank, this pride was doubly fatuitous; now that we felt a kindred, fraternal nature with all who bore the stamp of humanity, this angry reminiscence of times for ever gone, was worse than foolish. Idris was too much taken up by her own dreadful fears, to be angry, hardly grieved; for she judged that insensibility must be the source of this continued rancour. This was not altogether the fact: but predominant self-will assumed the arms and masque of callous feeling; and the haughty lady disdained to exhibit any token of the struggle she endured; while the slave of pride, she fancied that she sacrificed her happiness to immutable principle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >False was all this—false all but the affections of our nature, and the links of sympathy with pleasure or pain. There was but one good and one evil in the world—life and death. The pomp of rank, the assumption of power, the possessions of wealth vanished like morning mist. One living beggar had become of more worth than a national peerage of dead lords— alas the day!—than of dead heroes, patriots, or men of genius. There was much of degradation in this: for even vice and virtue had lost their attributes—life—life—the continuation of our animal mechanism— was the Alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of human race.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Calderon de la Barca. [2] Wordsworth. [3] Keats. [4] Andrew Marvell. [5] The Cenci [6] The Brides' Tragedy, by T. L. Beddoes, Esq.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IX.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >HALF England was desolate, when October came, and the equinoctial winds swept over the earth, chilling the ardours of the unhealthy season. The summer, which was uncommonly hot, had been protracted into the beginning of this month, when on the eighteenth a sudden change was brought about from summer temperature to winter frost. Pestilence then made a pause in her death-dealing career. Gasping, not daring to name our hopes, yet full even to the brim with intense expectation, we stood, as a ship-wrecked sailor stands on a barren rock islanded by the ocean, watching a distant vessel, fancying that now it nears, and then again that it is bearing from sight. This promise of a renewed lease of life turned rugged natures to melting tenderness, and by contrast filled the soft with harsh and unnatural sentiments. When it seemed destined that all were to die, we were reckless of the how and when—now that the virulence of the disease was mitigated, and it appeared willing to spare some, each was eager to be among the elect, and clung to life with dastard tenacity. Instances of desertion became more frequent; and even murders, which made the hearer sick with horror, where the fear of contagion had armed those nearest in blood against each other. But these smaller and separate tragedies were about to yield to a mightier interest—and, while we were promised calm from infectious influences, a tempest arose wilder than the winds, a tempest bred by the passions of man, nourished by his most violent impulses, unexampled and dire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A number of people from North America, the relics of that populous continent, had set sail for the East with mad desire of change, leaving their native plains for lands not less afflicted than their own. Several hundreds landed in Ireland, about the first of November, and took possession of such vacant habitations as they could find; seizing upon the superabundant food, and the stray cattle. As they exhausted the produce of one spot, they went on to another. At length they began to interfere with the inhabitants, and strong in their concentrated numbers, ejected the natives from their dwellings, and robbed them of their winter store. A few events of this kind roused the fiery nature of the Irish; and they attacked the invaders. Some were destroyed; the major part escaped by quick and well ordered movements; and danger made them careful. Their numbers ably arranged; the very deaths among them concealed; moving on in good order, and apparently given up to enjoyment, they excited the envy of the Irish. The Americans permitted a few to join their band, and presently the recruits outnumbered the strangers—nor did they join with them, nor imitate the admirable order which, preserved by the Trans-Atlantic chiefs, rendered them at once secure and formidable. The Irish followed their track in disorganized multitudes; each day encreasing; each day becoming more lawless. The Americans were eager to escape from the spirit they had roused, and, reaching the eastern shores of the island, embarked for England. Their incursion would hardly have been felt had they come alone; but the Irish, collected in unnatural numbers, began to feel the inroads of famine, and they followed in the wake of the Americans for England also. The crossing of the sea could not arrest their progress. The harbours of the desolate sea-ports of the west of Ireland were filled with vessels of all sizes, from the man of war to the small fishers' boat, which lay sailorless, and rotting on the lazy deep. The emigrants embarked by hundreds, and unfurling their sails with rude hands, made strange havoc of buoy and cordage. Those who modestly betook themselves to the smaller craft, for the most part achieved their watery journey in safety. Some, in the true spirit of reckless enterprise, went on board a ship of an hundred and twenty guns; the vast hull drifted with the tide out of the bay, and after many hours its crew of landsmen contrived to spread a great part of her enormous canvass—the wind took it, and while a thousand mistakes of the helmsman made her present her head now to one point, and now to another, the vast fields of canvass that formed her sails flapped with a sound like that of a huge cataract; or such as a sea-like forest may give forth when buffeted by an equinoctial north-wind. The port-holes were open, and with every sea, which as she lurched, washed her decks, they received whole tons of water. The difficulties were increased by a fresh breeze which began to blow, whistling among the shrowds, dashing the sails this way and that, and rending them with horrid split, and such whir as may have visited the dreams of Milton, when he imagined the winnowing of the arch-fiend's van-like wings, which encreased the uproar of wild chaos. These sounds were mingled with the roaring of the sea, the splash of the chafed billows round the vessel's sides, and the gurgling up of the water in the hold. The crew, many of whom had never seen the sea before, felt indeed as if heaven and earth came ruining together, as the vessel dipped her bows in the waves, or rose high upon them. Their yells were drowned in the clamour of elements, and the thunder rivings of their unwieldy habitation—they discovered at last that the water gained on them, and they betook themselves to their pumps; they might as well have laboured to empty the ocean by bucketfuls. As the sun went down, the gale encreased; the ship seemed to feel her danger, she was now completely water-logged, and presented other indications of settling before she went down. The bay was crowded with vessels, whose crews, for the most part, were observing the uncouth sportings of this huge unwieldy machine—they saw her gradually sink; the waters now rising above her lower decks—they could hardly wink before she had utterly disappeared, nor could the place where the sea had closed over her be at all discerned. Some few of her crew were saved, but the greater part clinging to her cordage and masts went down with her, to rise only when death loosened their hold.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This event caused many of those who were about to sail, to put foot again on firm land, ready to encounter any evil rather than to rush into the yawning jaws of the pitiless ocean. But these were few, in comparison to the numbers who actually crossed. Many went up as high as Belfast to ensure a shorter passage, and then journeying south through Scotland, they were joined by the poorer natives of that country, and all poured with one consent into England.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such incursions struck the English with affright, in all those towns where there was still sufficient population to feel the change. There was room enough indeed in our hapless country for twice the number of invaders; but their lawless spirit instigated them to violence; they took a delight in thrusting the possessors from their houses; in seizing on some mansion of luxury, where the noble dwellers secluded themselves in fear of the plague; in forcing these of either sex to become their servants and purveyors; till, the ruin complete in one place, they removed their locust visitation to another. When unopposed they spread their ravages wide; in cases of danger they clustered, and by dint of numbers overthrew their weak and despairing foes. They came from the east and the north, and directed their course without apparent motive, but unanimously towards our unhappy metropolis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Communication had been to a great degree cut off through the paralyzing effects of pestilence, so that the van of our invaders had proceeded as far as Manchester and Derby, before we received notice of their arrival. They swept the country like a conquering army, burning—laying waste— murdering. The lower and vagabond English joined with them. Some few of the Lords Lieutenant who remained, endeavoured to collect the militia—but the ranks were vacant, panic seized on all, and the opposition that was made only served to increase the audacity and cruelty of the enemy. They talked of taking London, conquering England—calling to mind the long detail of injuries which had for many years been forgotten. Such vaunts displayed their weakness, rather than their strength—yet still they might do extreme mischief, which, ending in their destruction, would render them at last objects of compassion and remorse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were now taught how, in the beginning of the world, mankind clothed their enemies in impossible attributes—and how details proceeding from mouth to mouth, might, like Virgil's ever-growing Rumour, reach the heavens with her brow, and clasp Hesperus and Lucifer with her outstretched hands. Gorgon and Centaur, dragon and iron-hoofed lion, vast sea-monster and gigantic hydra, were but types of the strange and appalling accounts brought to London concerning our invaders. Their landing was long unknown, but having now advanced within an hundred miles of London, the country people flying before them arrived in successive troops, each exaggerating the numbers, fury, and cruelty of the assailants. Tumult filled the before quiet streets—women and children deserted their homes, escaping they knew not whither—fathers, husbands, and sons, stood trembling, not for themselves, but for their loved and defenceless relations. As the country people poured into London, the citizens fled southwards—they climbed the higher edifices of the town, fancying that they could discern the smoke and flames the enemy spread around them. As Windsor lay, to a great degree, in the line of march from the west, I removed my family to London, assigning the Tower for their sojourn, and joining Adrian, acted as his Lieutenant in the coming struggle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We employed only two days in our preparations, and made good use of them. Artillery and arms were collected; the remnants of such regiments, as could be brought through many losses into any show of muster, were put under arms, with that appearance of military discipline which might encourage our own party, and seem most formidable to the disorganized multitude of our enemies. Even music was not wanting: banners floated in the air, and the shrill fife and loud trumpet breathed forth sounds of encouragement and victory. A practised ear might trace an undue faltering in the step of the soldiers; but this was not occasioned so much by fear of the adversary, as by disease, by sorrow, and by fatal prognostications, which often weighed most potently on the brave, and quelled the manly heart to abject subjection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian led the troops. He was full of care. It was small relief to him that our discipline should gain us success in such a conflict; while plague still hovered to equalize the conqueror and the conquered, it was not victory that he desired, but bloodless peace. As we advanced, we were met by bands of peasantry, whose almost naked condition, whose despair and horror, told at once the fierce nature of the coming enemy. The senseless spirit of conquest and thirst of spoil blinded them, while with insane fury they deluged the country in ruin. The sight of the military restored hope to those who fled, and revenge took place of fear. They inspired the soldiers with the same sentiment. Languor was changed to ardour, the slow step converted to a speedy pace, while the hollow murmur of the multitude, inspired by one feeling, and that deadly, filled the air, drowning the clang of arms and sound of music. Adrian perceived the change, and feared that it would be difficult to prevent them from wreaking their utmost fury on the Irish. He rode through the lines, charging the officers to restrain the troops, exhorting the soldiers, restoring order, and quieting in some degree the violent agitation that swelled every bosom.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We first came upon a few stragglers of the Irish at St. Albans. They retreated, and, joining others of their companions, still fell back, till they reached the main body. Tidings of an armed and regular opposition recalled them to a sort of order. They made Buckingham their head-quarters, and scouts were sent out to ascertain our situation. We remained for the night at Luton. In the morning a simultaneous movement caused us each to advance. It was early dawn, and the air, impregnated with freshest odour, seemed in idle mockery to play with our banners, and bore onwards towards the enemy the music of the bands, the neighings of the horses, and regular step of the infantry. The first sound of martial instruments that came upon our undisciplined foe, inspired surprise, not unmingled with dread. It spoke of other days, of days of concord and order; it was associated with times when plague was not, and man lived beyond the shadow of imminent fate. The pause was momentary. Soon we heard their disorderly clamour, the barbarian shouts, the untimed step of thousands coming on in disarray. Their troops now came pouring on us from the open country or narrow lanes; a large extent of unenclosed fields lay between us; we advanced to the middle of this, and then made a halt: being somewhat on superior ground, we could discern the space they covered. When their leaders perceived us drawn out in opposition, they also gave the word to halt, and endeavoured to form their men into some imitation of military discipline. The first ranks had muskets; some were mounted, but their arms were such as they had seized during their advance, their horses those they had taken from the peasantry; there was no uniformity, and little obedience, but their shouts and wild gestures showed the untamed spirit that inspired them. Our soldiers received the word, and advanced to quickest time, but in perfect order: their uniform dresses, the gleam of their polished arms, their silence, and looks of sullen hate, were more appalling than the savage clamour of our innumerous foe. Thus coming nearer and nearer each other, the howls and shouts of the Irish increased; the English proceeded in obedience to their officers, until they came near enough to distinguish the faces of their enemies; the sight inspired them with fury: with one cry, that rent heaven and was re-echoed by the furthest lines, they rushed on; they disdained the use of the bullet, but with fixed bayonet dashed among the opposing foe, while the ranks opening at intervals, the matchmen lighted the cannon, whose deafening roar and blinding smoke filled up the horror of the scene. I was beside Adrian; a moment before he had again given the word to halt, and had remained a few yards distant from us in deep meditation: he was forming swiftly his plan of action, to prevent the effusion of blood; the noise of cannon, the sudden rush of the troops, and yell of the foe, startled him: with flashing eyes he exclaimed, "Not one of these must perish!" and plunging the rowels into his horse's sides, he dashed between the conflicting bands. We, his staff, followed him to surround and protect him; obeying his signal, however, we fell back somewhat. The soldiery perceiving him, paused in their onset; he did not swerve from the bullets that passed near him, but rode immediately between the opposing lines. Silence succeeded to clamour; about fifty men lay on the ground dying or dead. Adrian raised his sword in act to speak: "By whose command," he cried, addressing his own troops, "do you advance? Who ordered your attack? Fall back; these misguided men shall not be slaughtered, while I am your general. Sheath your weapons; these are your brothers, commit not fratricide; soon the plague will not leave one for you to glut your revenge upon: will you be more pitiless than pestilence? As you honour me—as you worship God, in whose image those also are created—as your children and friends are dear to you,—shed not a drop of precious human blood."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He spoke with outstretched hand and winning voice, and then turning to our invaders, with a severe brow, he commanded them to lay down their arms: "Do you think," he said, "that because we are wasted by plague, you can overcome us; the plague is also among you, and when ye are vanquished by famine and disease, the ghosts of those you have murdered will arise to bid you not hope in death. Lay down your arms, barbarous and cruel men—men whose hands are stained with the blood of the innocent, whose souls are weighed down by the orphan's cry! We shall conquer, for the right is on our side; already your cheeks are pale—the weapons fall from your nerveless grasp. Lay down your arms, fellow men! brethren! Pardon, succour, and brotherly love await your repentance. You are dear to us, because you wear the frail shape of humanity; each one among you will find a friend and host among these forces. Shall man be the enemy of man, while plague, the foe to all, even now is above us, triumphing in our butchery, more cruel than her own?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Each army paused. On our side the soldiers grasped their arms firmly, and looked with stern glances on the foe. These had not thrown down their weapons, more from fear than the spirit of contest; they looked at each other, each wishing to follow some example given him,—but they had no leader. Adrian threw himself from his horse, and approaching one of those just slain: "He was a man," he cried, "and he is dead. O quickly bind up the wounds of the fallen—let not one die; let not one more soul escape through your merciless gashes, to relate before the throne of God the tale of fratricide; bind up their wounds—restore them to their friends. Cast away the hearts of tigers that burn in your breasts; throw down those tools of cruelty and hate; in this pause of exterminating destiny, let each man be brother, guardian, and stay to the other. Away with those blood-stained arms, and hasten some of you to bind up these wounds."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As he spoke, he knelt on the ground, and raised in his arms a man from whose side the warm tide of life gushed—the poor wretch gasped—so still had either host become, that his moans were distinctly heard, and every heart, late fiercely bent on universal massacre, now beat anxiously in hope and fear for the fate of this one man. Adrian tore off his military scarf and bound it round the sufferer—it was too late—the man heaved a deep sigh, his head fell back, his limbs lost their sustaining power.— "He is dead!" said Adrian, as the corpse fell from his arms on the ground, and he bowed his head in sorrow and awe. The fate of the world seemed bound up in the death of this single man. On either side the bands threw down their arms, even the veterans wept, and our party held out their hands to their foes, while a gush of love and deepest amity filled every heart. The two forces mingling, unarmed and hand in hand, talking only how each might assist the other, the adversaries conjoined; each repenting, the one side their former cruelties, the other their late violence, they obeyed the orders of the General to proceed towards London.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian was obliged to exert his utmost prudence, first to allay the discord, and then to provide for the multitude of the invaders. They were marched to various parts of the southern counties, quartered in deserted villages,—a part were sent back to their own island, while the season of winter so far revived our energy, that the passes of the country were defended, and any increase of numbers prohibited.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On this occasion Adrian and Idris met after a separation of nearly a year. Adrian had been occupied in fulfilling a laborious and painful task. He had been familiar with every species of human misery, and had for ever found his powers inadequate, his aid of small avail. Yet the purpose of his soul, his energy and ardent resolution, prevented any re-action of sorrow. He seemed born anew, and virtue, more potent than Medean alchemy, endued him with health and strength. Idris hardly recognized the fragile being, whose form had seemed to bend even to the summer breeze, in the energetic man, whose very excess of sensibility rendered him more capable of fulfilling his station of pilot in storm-tossed England.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was not thus with Idris. She was uncomplaining; but the very soul of fear had taken its seat in her heart. She had grown thin and pale, her eyes filled with involuntary tears, her voice was broken and low. She tried to throw a veil over the change which she knew her brother must observe in her, but the effort was ineffectual; and when alone with him, with a burst of irrepressible grief she gave vent to her apprehensions and sorrow. She described in vivid terms the ceaseless care that with still renewing hunger ate into her soul; she compared this gnawing of sleepless expectation of evil, to the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus; under the influence of this eternal excitement, and of the interminable struggles she endured to combat and conceal it, she felt, she said, as if all the wheels and springs of the animal machine worked at double rate, and were fast consuming themselves. Sleep was not sleep, for her waking thoughts, bridled by some remains of reason, and by the sight of her children happy and in health, were then transformed to wild dreams, all her terrors were realized, all her fears received their dread fulfilment. To this state there was no hope, no alleviation, unless the grave should quickly receive its destined prey, and she be permitted to die, before she experienced a thousand living deaths in the loss of those she loved. Fearing to give me pain, she hid as best she could the excess of her wretchedness, but meeting thus her brother after a long absence, she could not restrain the expression of her woe, but with all the vividness of imagination with which misery is always replete, she poured out the emotions of her heart to her beloved and sympathizing Adrian.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her present visit to London tended to augment her state of inquietude, by shewing in its utmost extent the ravages occasioned by pestilence. It hardly preserved the appearance of an inhabited city; grass sprung up thick in the streets; the squares were weed-grown, the houses were shut up, while silence and loneliness characterized the busiest parts of the town. Yet in the midst of desolation Adrian had preserved order; and each one continued to live according to law and custom—human institutions thus surviving as it were divine ones, and while the decree of population was abrogated, property continued sacred. It was a melancholy reflection; and in spite of the diminution of evil produced, it struck on the heart as a wretched mockery. All idea of resort for pleasure, of theatres and festivals had passed away. "Next summer," said Adrian as we parted on our return to Windsor, "will decide the fate of the human race. I shall not pause in my exertions until that time; but, if plague revives with the coming year, all contest with her must cease, and our only occupation be the choice of a grave."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I must not forget one incident that occurred during this visit to London. The visits of Merrival to Windsor, before frequent, had suddenly ceased. At this time where but a hair's line separated the living from the dead, I feared that our friend had become a victim to the all-embracing evil. On this occasion I went, dreading the worst, to his dwelling, to see if I could be of any service to those of his family who might have survived. The house was deserted, and had been one of those assigned to the invading strangers quartered in London. I saw his astronomical instruments put to strange uses, his globes defaced, his papers covered with abstruse calculations destroyed. The neighbours could tell me little, till I lighted on a poor woman who acted as nurse in these perilous times. She told me that all the family were dead, except Merrival himself, who had gone mad— mad, she called it, yet on questioning her further, it appeared that he was possessed only by the delirium of excessive grief. This old man, tottering on the edge of the grave, and prolonging his prospect through millions of calculated years,—this visionary who had not seen starvation in the wasted forms of his wife and children, or plague in the horrible sights and sounds that surrounded him—this astronomer, apparently dead on earth, and living only in the motion of the spheres—loved his family with unapparent but intense affection. Through long habit they had become a part of himself; his want of worldly knowledge, his absence of mind and infant guilelessness, made him utterly dependent on them. It was not till one of them died that he perceived their danger; one by one they were carried off by pestilence; and his wife, his helpmate and supporter, more necessary to him than his own limbs and frame, which had hardly been taught the lesson of self-preservation, the kind companion whose voice always spoke peace to him, closed her eyes in death. The old man felt the system of universal nature which he had so long studied and adored, slide from under him, and he stood among the dead, and lifted his voice in curses.—No wonder that the attendant should interpret as phrensy the harrowing maledictions of the grief-struck old man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had commenced my search late in the day, a November day, that closed in early with pattering rain and melancholy wind. As I turned from the door, I saw Merrival, or rather the shadow of Merrival, attenuated and wild, pass me, and sit on the steps of his home. The breeze scattered the grey locks on his temples, the rain drenched his uncovered head, he sat hiding his face in his withered hands. I pressed his shoulder to awaken his attention, but he did not alter his position. "Merrival," I said, "it is long since we have seen you—you must return to Windsor with me—Lady Idris desires to see you, you will not refuse her request—come home with me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He replied in a hollow voice, "Why deceive a helpless old man, why talk hypocritically to one half crazed? Windsor is not my home; my true home I have found; the home that the Creator has prepared for me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His accent of bitter scorn thrilled me—"Do not tempt me to speak," he continued, "my words would scare you—in an universe of cowards I dare think—among the church-yard tombs—among the victims of His merciless tyranny I dare reproach the Supreme Evil. How can he punish me? Let him bare his arm and transfix me with lightning—this is also one of his attributes"—and the old man laughed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He rose, and I followed him through the rain to a neighbouring church-yard —he threw himself on the wet earth. "Here they are," he cried, "beautiful creatures—breathing, speaking, loving creatures. She who by day and night cherished the age-worn lover of her youth—they, parts of my flesh, my children—here they are: call them, scream their names through the night; they will not answer!" He clung to the little heaps that marked the graves. "I ask but one thing; I do not fear His hell, for I have it here; I do not desire His heaven, let me but die and be laid beside them; let me but, when I lie dead, feel my flesh as it moulders, mingle with theirs. Promise," and he raised himself painfully, and seized my arm, "promise to bury me with them."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So God help me and mine as I promise," I replied, "on one condition: return with me to Windsor."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"To Windsor!" he cried with a shriek, "Never!—from this place I never go —my bones, my flesh, I myself, are already buried here, and what you see of me is corrupted clay like them. I will lie here, and cling here, till rain, and hail, and lightning and storm, ruining on me, make me one in substance with them below."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In a few words I must conclude this tragedy. I was obliged to leave London, and Adrian undertook to watch over him; the task was soon fulfilled; age, grief, and inclement weather, all united to hush his sorrows, and bring repose to his heart, whose beats were agony. He died embracing the sod, which was piled above his breast, when he was placed beside the beings whom he regretted with such wild despair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I returned to Windsor at the wish of Idris, who seemed to think that there was greater safety for her children at that spot; and because, once having taken on me the guardianship of the district, I would not desert it while an inhabitant survived. I went also to act in conformity with Adrian's plans, which was to congregate in masses what remained of the population; for he possessed the conviction that it was only through the benevolent and social virtues that any safety was to be hoped for the remnant of mankind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a melancholy thing to return to this spot so dear to us, as the scene of a happiness rarely before enjoyed, here to mark the extinction of our species, and trace the deep uneraseable footsteps of disease over the fertile and cherished soil. The aspect of the country had so far changed, that it had been impossible to enter on the task of sowing seed, and other autumnal labours. That season was now gone; and winter had set in with sudden and unusual severity. Alternate frosts and thaws succeeding to floods, rendered the country impassable. Heavy falls of snow gave an arctic appearance to the scenery; the roofs of the houses peeped from the white mass; the lowly cot and stately mansion, alike deserted, were blocked up, their thresholds uncleared; the windows were broken by the hail, while the prevalence of a north-east wind rendered out-door exertions extremely painful. The altered state of society made these accidents of nature, sources of real misery. The luxury of command and the attentions of servitude were lost. It is true that the necessaries of life were assembled in such quantities, as to supply to superfluity the wants of the diminished population; but still much labour was required to arrange these, as it were, raw materials; and depressed by sickness, and fearful of the future, we had not energy to enter boldly and decidedly on any system.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I can speak for myself—want of energy was not my failing. The intense life that quickened my pulses, and animated my frame, had the effect, not of drawing me into the mazes of active life, but of exalting my lowliness, and of bestowing majestic proportions on insignificant objects—I could have lived the life of a peasant in the same way—my trifling occupations were swelled into important pursuits; my affections were impetuous and engrossing passions, and nature with all her changes was invested in divine attributes. The very spirit of the Greek mythology inhabited my heart; I deified the uplands, glades, and streams, I</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Had sight of Proteus coming from the sea;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And heard old Triton blow his wreathed horn.[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Strange, that while the earth preserved her monotonous course, I dwelt with ever-renewing wonder on her antique laws, and now that with excentric wheel she rushed into an untried path, I should feel this spirit fade; I struggled with despondency and weariness, but like a fog, they choked me. Perhaps, after the labours and stupendous excitement of the past summer, the calm of winter and the almost menial toils it brought with it, were by natural re-action doubly irksome. It was not the grasping passion of the preceding year, which gave life and individuality to each moment—it was not the aching pangs induced by the distresses of the times. The utter inutility that had attended all my exertions took from them their usual effects of exhilaration, and despair rendered abortive the balm of self applause—I longed to return to my old occupations, but of what use were they? To read were futile—to write, vanity indeed. The earth, late wide circus for the display of dignified exploits, vast theatre for a magnificent drama, now presented a vacant space, an empty stage—for actor or spectator there was no longer aught to say or hear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Our little town of Windsor, in which the survivors from the neighbouring counties were chiefly assembled, wore a melancholy aspect. Its streets were blocked up with snow—the few passengers seemed palsied, and frozen by the ungenial visitation of winter. To escape these evils was the aim and scope of all our exertions. Families late devoted to exalting and refined pursuits, rich, blooming, and young, with diminished numbers and care-fraught hearts, huddled over a fire, grown selfish and grovelling through suffering. Without the aid of servants, it was necessary to discharge all household duties; hands unused to such labour must knead the bread, or in the absence of flour, the statesmen or perfumed courtier must undertake the butcher's office. Poor and rich were now equal, or rather the poor were the superior, since they entered on such tasks with alacrity and experience; while ignorance, inaptitude, and habits of repose, rendered them fatiguing to the luxurious, galling to the proud, disgustful to all whose minds, bent on intellectual improvement, held it their dearest privilege to be exempt from attending to mere animal wants.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But in every change goodness and affection can find field for exertion and display. Among some these changes produced a devotion and sacrifice of self at once graceful and heroic. It was a sight for the lovers of the human race to enjoy; to behold, as in ancient times, the patriarchal modes in which the variety of kindred and friendship fulfilled their duteous and kindly offices. Youths, nobles of the land, performed for the sake of mother or sister, the services of menials with amiable cheerfulness. They went to the river to break the ice, and draw water: they assembled on foraging expeditions, or axe in hand felled the trees for fuel. The females received them on their return with the simple and affectionate welcome known before only to the lowly cottage—a clean hearth and bright fire; the supper ready cooked by beloved hands; gratitude for the provision for to-morrow's meal: strange enjoyments for the high-born English, yet they were now their sole, hard earned, and dearly prized luxuries.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >None was more conspicuous for this graceful submission to circumstances, noble humility, and ingenious fancy to adorn such acts with romantic colouring, than our own Clara. She saw my despondency, and the aching cares of Idris. Her perpetual study was to relieve us from labour and to spread ease and even elegance over our altered mode of life. We still had some attendants spared by disease, and warmly attached to us. But Clara was jealous of their services; she would be sole handmaid of Idris, sole minister to the wants of her little cousins; nothing gave her so much pleasure as our employing her in this way; she went beyond our desires, earnest, diligent, and unwearied,—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Abra was ready ere we called her name,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And though we called another, Abra came.[2]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was my task each day to visit the various families assembled in our town, and when the weather permitted, I was glad to prolong my ride, and to muse in solitude over every changeful appearance of our destiny, endeavouring to gather lessons for the future from the experience of the past. The impatience with which, while in society, the ills that afflicted my species inspired me, were softened by loneliness, when individual suffering was merged in the general calamity, strange to say, less afflicting to contemplate. Thus often, pushing my way with difficulty through the narrow snow-blocked town, I crossed the bridge and passed through Eton. No youthful congregation of gallant-hearted boys thronged the portal of the college; sad silence pervaded the busy school-room and noisy playground. I extended my ride towards Salt Hill, on every side impeded by the snow. Were those the fertile fields I loved—was that the interchange of gentle upland and cultivated dale, once covered with waving corn, diversified by stately trees, watered by the meandering Thames? One sheet of white covered it, while bitter recollection told me that cold as the winter-clothed earth, were the hearts of the inhabitants. I met troops of horses, herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, wandering at will; here throwing down a hay-rick, and nestling from cold in its heart, which afforded them shelter and food—there having taken possession of a vacant cottage. Once on a frosty day, pushed on by restless unsatisfying reflections, I sought a favourite haunt, a little wood not far distant from Salt Hill. A bubbling spring prattles over stones on one side, and a plantation of a few elms and beeches, hardly deserve, and yet continue the name of wood. This spot had for me peculiar charms. It had been a favourite resort of Adrian; it was secluded; and he often said that in boyhood, his happiest hours were spent here; having escaped the stately bondage of his mother, he sat on the rough hewn steps that led to the spring, now reading a favourite book, now musing, with speculation beyond his years, on the still unravelled skein of morals or metaphysics. A melancholy foreboding assured me that I should never see this place more; so with careful thought, I noted each tree, every winding of the streamlet and irregularity of the soil, that I might better call up its idea in absence. A robin red-breast dropt from the frosty branches of the trees, upon the congealed rivulet; its panting breast and half-closed eyes shewed that it was dying: a hawk appeared in the air; sudden fear seized the little creature; it exerted its last strength, throwing itself on its back, raising its talons in impotent defence against its powerful enemy. I took it up and placed it in my breast. I fed it with a few crumbs from a biscuit; by degrees it revived; its warm fluttering heart beat against me; I cannot tell why I detail this trifling incident—but the scene is still before me; the snow-clad fields seen through the silvered trunks of the beeches,—the brook, in days of happiness alive with sparkling waters, now choked by ice—the leafless trees fantastically dressed in hoar frost—the shapes of summer leaves imaged by winter's frozen hand on the hard ground—the dusky sky, drear cold, and unbroken silence—while close in my bosom, my feathered nursling lay warm, and safe, speaking its content with a light chirp— painful reflections thronged, stirring my brain with wild commotion—cold and death-like as the snowy fields was all earth—misery-stricken the life-tide of the inhabitants—why should I oppose the cataract of destruction that swept us away?—why string my nerves and renew my wearied efforts—ah, why? But that my firm courage and cheerful exertions might shelter the dear mate, whom I chose in the spring of my life; though the throbbings of my heart be replete with pain, though my hopes for the future are chill, still while your dear head, my gentlest love, can repose in peace on that heart, and while you derive from its fostering care, comfort, and hope, my struggles shall not cease,—I will not call myself altogether vanquished.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One fine February day, when the sun had reassumed some of its genial power, I walked in the forest with my family. It was one of those lovely winter-days which assert the capacity of nature to bestow beauty on barrenness. The leafless trees spread their fibrous branches against the pure sky; their intricate and pervious tracery resembled delicate sea-weed; the deer were turning up the snow in search of the hidden grass; the white was made intensely dazzling by the sun, and trunks of the trees, rendered more conspicuous by the loss of preponderating foliage, gathered around like the labyrinthine columns of a vast temple; it was impossible not to receive pleasure from the sight of these things. Our children, freed from the bondage of winter, bounded before us; pursuing the deer, or rousing the pheasants and partridges from their coverts. Idris leant on my arm; her sadness yielded to the present sense of pleasure. We met other families on the Long Walk, enjoying like ourselves the return of the genial season. At once, I seemed to awake; I cast off the clinging sloth of the past months; earth assumed a new appearance, and my view of the future was suddenly made clear. I exclaimed, "I have now found out the secret!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What secret?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In answer to this question, I described our gloomy winter-life, our sordid cares, our menial labours:—"This northern country," I said, "is no place for our diminished race. When mankind were few, it was not here that they battled with the powerful agents of nature, and were enabled to cover the globe with offspring. We must seek some natural Paradise, some garden of the earth, where our simple wants may be easily supplied, and the enjoyment of a delicious climate compensate for the social pleasures we have lost. If we survive this coming summer, I will not spend the ensuing winter in England; neither I nor any of us."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I spoke without much heed, and the very conclusion of what I said brought with it other thoughts. Should we, any of us, survive the coming summer? I saw the brow of Idris clouded; I again felt, that we were enchained to the car of fate, over whose coursers we had no control. We could no longer say, This we will do, and this we will leave undone. A mightier power than the human was at hand to destroy our plans or to achieve the work we avoided. It were madness to calculate upon another winter. This was our last. The coming summer was the extreme end of our vista; and, when we arrived there, instead of a continuation of the long road, a gulph yawned, into which we must of force be precipitated. The last blessing of humanity was wrested from us; we might no longer hope. Can the madman, as he clanks his chains, hope? Can the wretch, led to the scaffold, who when he lays his head on the block, marks the double shadow of himself and the executioner, whose uplifted arm bears the axe, hope? Can the ship-wrecked mariner, who spent with swimming, hears close behind the splashing waters divided by a shark which pursues him through the Atlantic, hope? Such hope as theirs, we also may entertain!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Old fable tells us, that this gentle spirit sprung from the box of Pandora, else crammed with evils; but these were unseen and null, while all admired the inspiriting loveliness of young Hope; each man's heart became her home; she was enthroned sovereign of our lives, here and here-after; she was deified and worshipped, declared incorruptible and everlasting. But like all other gifts of the Creator to Man, she is mortal; her life has attained its last hour. We have watched over her; nursed her flickering existence; now she has fallen at once from youth to decrepitude, from health to immedicinable disease; even as we spend ourselves in struggles for her recovery, she dies; to all nations the voice goes forth, Hope is dead! We are but mourners in the funeral train, and what immortal essence or perishable creation will refuse to make one in the sad procession that attends to its grave the dead comforter of humanity?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Does not the sun call in his light? and day</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Like a thin exhalation melt away—</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Both wrapping up their beams in clouds to be</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Themselves close mourners at this obsequie.[3]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Wordsworth. [2] Prior's "Solomon." [3] Cleveland's Poems.<br /><br /><br /></span><a href="http://pospapendix.blogspot.com/2010/03/mary-shelleys-last-man-volume-three.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" Volume Three</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2010/03/mary-wollstonecraft-shelleys-last-man_05.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's "The Last Man"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2010/03/mary-wollstonecraft-shelleys-last-man_05.html"></a></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-7311113729598431682010-03-05T11:04:00.000-08:002010-03-05T11:33:32.525-08:00Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" Volume Three<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" >The Last Man</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mary Shelley</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >1826</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Volume Three</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER I.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >HEAR YOU not the rushing sound of the coming tempest? Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonizing groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks and wailings,— all announcing the last days of man? No! none of these things accompanied our fall! The balmy air of spring, breathed from nature's ambrosial home, invested the lovely earth, which wakened as a young mother about to lead forth in pride her beauteous offspring to meet their sire who had been long absent. The buds decked the trees, the flowers adorned the land: the dark branches, swollen with seasonable juices, expanded into leaves, and the variegated foliage of spring, bending and singing in the breeze, rejoiced in the genial warmth of the unclouded empyrean: the brooks flowed murmuring, the sea was waveless, and the promontories that over-hung it were reflected in the placid waters; birds awoke in the woods, while abundant food for man and beast sprung up from the dark ground. Where was pain and evil? Not in the calm air or weltering ocean; not in the woods or fertile fields, nor among the birds that made the woods resonant with song, nor the animals that in the midst of plenty basked in the sunshine. Our enemy, like the Calamity of Homer, trod our hearts, and no sound was echoed from her steps—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > With ills the land is rife, with ills the sea,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Diseases haunt our frail humanity,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Through noon, through night, on casual wing they glide,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Silent,—a voice the power all-wise denied.[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Once man was a favourite of the Creator, as the royal psalmist sang, "God had made him a little lower than the angels, and had crowned him with glory and honour. God made him to have dominion over the works of his hands, and put all things under his feet." Once it was so; now is man lord of the creation? Look at him—ha! I see plague! She has invested his form, is incarnate in his flesh, has entwined herself with his being, and blinds his heaven-seeking eyes. Lie down, O man, on the flower-strown earth; give up all claim to your inheritance, all you can ever possess of it is the small cell which the dead require. Plague is the companion of spring, of sunshine, and plenty. We no longer struggle with her. We have forgotten what we did when she was not. Of old navies used to stem the giant ocean-waves betwixt Indus and the Pole for slight articles of luxury. Men made perilous journies to possess themselves of earth's splendid trifles, gems and gold. Human labour was wasted—human life set at nought. Now life is all that we covet; that this automaton of flesh should, with joints and springs in order, perform its functions, that this dwelling of the soul should be capable of containing its dweller. Our minds, late spread abroad through countless spheres and endless combinations of thought, now retrenched themselves behind this wall of flesh, eager to preserve its well-being only. We were surely sufficiently degraded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At first the increase of sickness in spring brought increase of toil to such of us, who, as yet spared to life, bestowed our time and thoughts on our fellow creatures. We nerved ourselves to the task: "in the midst of despair we performed the tasks of hope." We went out with the resolution of disputing with our foe. We aided the sick, and comforted the sorrowing; turning from the multitudinous dead to the rare survivors, with an energy of desire that bore the resemblance of power, we bade them—live. Plague sat paramount the while, and laughed us to scorn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Have any of you, my readers, observed the ruins of an anthill immediately after its destruction? At first it appears entirely deserted of its former inhabitants; in a little time you see an ant struggling through the upturned mould; they reappear by twos and threes, running hither and thither in search of their lost companions. Such were we upon earth, wondering aghast at the effects of pestilence. Our empty habitations remained, but the dwellers were gathered to the shades of the tomb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As the rules of order and pressure of laws were lost, some began with hesitation and wonder to transgress the accustomed uses of society. Palaces were deserted, and the poor man dared at length, unreproved, intrude into the splendid apartments, whose very furniture and decorations were an unknown world to him. It was found, that, though at first the stop put to to all circulation of property, had reduced those before supported by the factitious wants of society to sudden and hideous poverty, yet when the boundaries of private possession were thrown down, the products of human labour at present existing were more, far more, than the thinned generation could possibly consume. To some among the poor this was matter of exultation. We were all equal now; magnificent dwellings, luxurious carpets, and beds of down, were afforded to all. Carriages and horses, gardens, pictures, statues, and princely libraries, there were enough of these even to superfluity; and there was nothing to prevent each from assuming possession of his share. We were all equal now; but near at hand was an equality still more levelling, a state where beauty and strength, and wisdom, would be as vain as riches and birth. The grave yawned beneath us all, and its prospect prevented any of us from enjoying the ease and plenty which in so awful a manner was presented to us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Still the bloom did not fade on the cheeks of my babes; and Clara sprung up in years and growth, unsullied by disease. We had no reason to think the site of Windsor Castle peculiarly healthy, for many other families had expired beneath its roof; we lived therefore without any particular precaution; but we lived, it seemed, in safety. If Idris became thin and pale, it was anxiety that occasioned the change; an anxiety I could in no way alleviate. She never complained, but sleep and appetite fled from her, a slow fever preyed on her veins, her colour was hectic, and she often wept in secret; gloomy prognostications, care, and agonizing dread, ate up the principle of life within her. I could not fail to perceive this change. I often wished that I had permitted her to take her own course, and engage herself in such labours for the welfare of others as might have distracted her thoughts. But it was too late now. Besides that, with the nearly extinct race of man, all our toils grew near a conclusion, she was too weak; consumption, if so it might be called, or rather the over active life within her, which, as with Adrian, spent the vital oil in the early morning hours, deprived her limbs of strength. At night, when she could leave me unperceived, she wandered through the house, or hung over the couches of her children; and in the day time would sink into a perturbed sleep, while her murmurs and starts betrayed the unquiet dreams that vexed her. As this state of wretchedness became more confirmed, and, in spite of her endeavours at concealment more apparent, I strove, though vainly, to awaken in her courage and hope. I could not wonder at the vehemence of her care; her very soul was tenderness; she trusted indeed that she should not outlive me if I became the prey of the vast calamity, and this thought sometimes relieved her. We had for many years trod the highway of life hand in hand, and still thus linked, we might step within the shades of death; but her children, her lovely, playful, animated children—beings sprung from her own dear side—portions of her own being—depositories of our loves—even if we died, it would be comfort to know that they ran man's accustomed course. But it would not be so; young and blooming as they were, they would die, and from the hopes of maturity, from the proud name of attained manhood, they were cut off for ever. Often with maternal affection she had figured their merits and talents exerted on life's wide stage. Alas for these latter days! The world had grown old, and all its inmates partook of the decrepitude. Why talk of infancy, manhood, and old age? We all stood equal sharers of the last throes of time-worn nature. Arrived at the same point of the world's age—there was no difference in us; the name of parent and child had lost their meaning; young boys and girls were level now with men. This was all true; but it was not less agonizing to take the admonition home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Where could we turn, and not find a desolation pregnant with the dire lesson of example? The fields had been left uncultivated, weeds and gaudy flowers sprung up,—or where a few wheat-fields shewed signs of the living hopes of the husbandman, the work had been left halfway, the ploughman had died beside the plough; the horses had deserted the furrow, and no seedsman had approached the dead; the cattle unattended wandered over the fields and through the lanes; the tame inhabitants of the poultry yard, baulked of their daily food, had become wild—young lambs were dropt in flower-gardens, and the cow stalled in the hall of pleasure. Sickly and few, the country people neither went out to sow nor reap; but sauntered about the meadows, or lay under the hedges, when the inclement sky did not drive them to take shelter under the nearest roof. Many of those who remained, secluded themselves; some had laid up stores which should prevent the necessity of leaving their homes;—some deserted wife and child, and imagined that they secured their safety in utter solitude. Such had been Ryland's plan, and he was discovered dead and half-devoured by insects, in a house many miles from any other, with piles of food laid up in useless superfluity. Others made long journies to unite themselves to those they loved, and arrived to find them dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >London did not contain above a thousand inhabitants; and this number was continually diminishing. Most of them were country people, come up for the sake of change; the Londoners had sought the country. The busy eastern part of the town was silent, or at most you saw only where, half from cupidity, half from curiosity, the warehouses had been more ransacked than pillaged: bales of rich India goods, shawls of price, jewels, and spices, unpacked, strewed the floors. In some places the possessor had to the last kept watch on his store, and died before the barred gates. The massy portals of the churches swung creaking on their hinges; and some few lay dead on the pavement. The wretched female, loveless victim of vulgar brutality, had wandered to the toilet of high-born beauty, and, arraying herself in the garb of splendour, had died before the mirror which reflected to herself alone her altered appearance. Women whose delicate feet had seldom touched the earth in their luxury, had fled in fright and horror from their homes, till, losing themselves in the squalid streets of the metropolis, they had died on the threshold of poverty. The heart sickened at the variety of misery presented; and, when I saw a specimen of this gloomy change, my soul ached with the fear of what might befall my beloved Idris and my babes. Were they, surviving Adrian and myself, to find themselves protectorless in the world? As yet the mind alone had suffered—could I for ever put off the time, when the delicate frame and shrinking nerves of my child of prosperity, the nursling of rank and wealth, who was my companion, should be invaded by famine, hardship, and disease? Better die at once—better plunge a poinard in her bosom, still untouched by drear adversity, and then again sheathe it in my own! But, no; in times of misery we must fight against our destinies, and strive not to be overcome by them. I would not yield, but to the last gasp resolutely defended my dear ones against sorrow and pain; and if I were vanquished at last, it should not be ingloriously. I stood in the gap, resisting the enemy—the impalpable, invisible foe, who had so long besieged us—as yet he had made no breach: it must be my care that he should not, secretly undermining, burst up within the very threshold of the temple of love, at whose altar I daily sacrificed. The hunger of Death was now stung more sharply by the diminution of his food: or was it that before, the survivors being many, the dead were less eagerly counted? Now each life was a gem, each human breathing form of far, O! far more worth than subtlest imagery of sculptured stone; and the daily, nay, hourly decrease visible in our numbers, visited the heart with sickening misery. This summer extinguished our hopes, the vessel of society was wrecked, and the shattered raft, which carried the few survivors over the sea of misery, was riven and tempest tost. Man existed by twos and threes; man, the individual who might sleep, and wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself weak, yet more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ocean; man, the queller of the elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of demi-gods, existed no longer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Farewell to the patriotic scene, to the love of liberty and well earned meed of virtuous aspiration!—farewell to crowded senate, vocal with the councils of the wise, whose laws were keener than the sword blade tempered at Damascus!—farewell to kingly pomp and warlike pageantry; the crowns are in the dust, and the wearers are in their graves!—farewell to the desire of rule, and the hope of victory; to high vaulting ambition, to the appetite for praise, and the craving for the suffrage of their fellows! The nations are no longer! No senate sits in council for the dead; no scion of a time honoured dynasty pants to rule over the inhabitants of a charnel house; the general's hand is cold, and the soldier has his untimely grave dug in his native fields, unhonoured, though in youth. The market-place is empty, the candidate for popular favour finds none whom he can represent. To chambers of painted state farewell!—To midnight revelry, and the panting emulation of beauty, to costly dress and birth-day shew, to title and the gilded coronet, farewell!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Farewell to the giant powers of man,—to knowledge that could pilot the deep-drawing bark through the opposing waters of shoreless ocean,—to science that directed the silken balloon through the pathless air,—to the power that could put a barrier to mighty waters, and set in motion wheels, and beams, and vast machinery, that could divide rocks of granite or marble, and make the mountains plain!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence, which is to the human mind as the winds to the sea, stirring, and then allaying it;—farewell to poetry and deep philosophy, for man's imagination is cold, and his enquiring mind can no longer expatiate on the wonders of life, for "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave, whither thou goest!"—to the graceful building, which in its perfect proportion transcended the rude forms of nature, the fretted gothic and massy saracenic pile, to the stupendous arch and glorious dome, the fluted column with its capital, Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric, the peristyle and fair entablature, whose harmony of form is to the eye as musical concord to the ear!—farewell to sculpture, where the pure marble mocks human flesh, and in the plastic expression of the culled excellencies of the human shape, shines forth the god!—farewell to painting, the high wrought sentiment and deep knowledge of the artists's mind in pictured canvas—to paradisaical scenes, where trees are ever vernal, and the ambrosial air rests in perpetual glow:—to the stamped form of tempest, and wildest uproar of universal nature encaged in the narrow frame, O farewell! Farewell to music, and the sound of song; to the marriage of instruments, where the concord of soft and harsh unites in sweet harmony, and gives wings to the panting listeners, whereby to climb heaven, and learn the hidden pleasures of the eternals!—Farewell to the well-trod stage; a truer tragedy is enacted on the world's ample scene, that puts to shame mimic grief: to high-bred comedy, and the low buffoon, farewell!—Man may laugh no more. Alas! to enumerate the adornments of humanity, shews, by what we have lost, how supremely great man was. It is all over now. He is solitary; like our first parents expelled from Paradise, he looks back towards the scene he has quitted. The high walls of the tomb, and the flaming sword of plague, lie between it and him. Like to our first parents, the whole earth is before him, a wide desart. Unsupported and weak, let him wander through fields where the unreaped corn stands in barren plenty, through copses planted by his fathers, through towns built for his use. Posterity is no more; fame, and ambition, and love, are words void of meaning; even as the cattle that grazes in the field, do thou, O deserted one, lie down at evening-tide, unknowing of the past, careless of the future, for from such fond ignorance alone canst thou hope for ease!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Joy paints with its own colours every act and thought. The happy do not feel poverty—for delight is as a gold-tissued robe, and crowns them with priceless gems. Enjoyment plays the cook to their homely fare, and mingles intoxication with their simple drink. Joy strews the hard couch with roses, and makes labour ease.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sorrow doubles the burthen to the bent-down back; plants thorns in the unyielding pillow; mingles gall with water; adds saltness to their bitter bread; cloathing them in rags, and strewing ashes on their bare heads. To our irremediable distress every small and pelting inconvenience came with added force; we had strung our frames to endure the Atlean weight thrown on us; we sank beneath the added feather chance threw on us, "the grasshopper was a burthen." Many of the survivors had been bred in luxury—their servants were gone, their powers of command vanished like unreal shadows: the poor even suffered various privations; and the idea of another winter like the last, brought affright to our minds. Was it not enough that we must die, but toil must be added?—must we prepare our funeral repast with labour, and with unseemly drudgery heap fuel on our deserted hearths —must we with servile hands fabricate the garments, soon to be our shroud?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Not so! We are presently to die, let us then enjoy to its full relish the remnant of our lives. Sordid care, avaunt! menial labours, and pains, slight in themselves, but too gigantic for our exhausted strength, shall make no part of our ephemeral existences. In the beginning of time, when, as now, man lived by families, and not by tribes or nations, they were placed in a genial clime, where earth fed them untilled, and the balmy air enwrapt their reposing limbs with warmth more pleasant than beds of down. The south is the native place of the human race; the land of fruits, more grateful to man than the hard-earned Ceres of the north,—of trees, whose boughs are as a palace-roof, of couches of roses, and of the thirst-appeasing grape. We need not there fear cold and hunger.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Look at England! the grass shoots up high in the meadows; but they are dank and cold, unfit bed for us. Corn we have none, and the crude fruits cannot support us. We must seek firing in the bowels of the earth, or the unkind atmosphere will fill us with rheums and aches. The labour of hundreds of thousands alone could make this inclement nook fit habitation for one man. To the south then, to the sun!—where nature is kind, where Jove has showered forth the contents of Amalthea's horn, and earth is garden.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >England, late birth-place of excellence and school of the wise, thy children are gone, thy glory faded! Thou, England, wert the triumph of man! Small favour was shewn thee by thy Creator, thou Isle of the North; a ragged canvas naturally, painted by man with alien colours; but the hues he gave are faded, never more to be renewed. So we must leave thee, thou marvel of the world; we must bid farewell to thy clouds, and cold, and scarcity for ever! Thy manly hearts are still; thy tale of power and liberty at its close! Bereft of man, O little isle! the ocean waves will buffet thee, and the raven flap his wings over thee; thy soil will be birth-place of weeds, thy sky will canopy barrenness. It was not for the rose of Persia thou wert famous, nor the banana of the east; not for the spicy gales of India, nor the sugar groves of America; not for thy vines nor thy double harvests, nor for thy vernal airs, nor solstitial sun—but for thy children, their unwearied industry and lofty aspiration. They are gone, and thou goest with them the oft trodden path that leads to oblivion, —</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Farewell, sad Isle, farewell, thy fatal glory</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is summed, cast up, and cancelled in this story.[2]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Elton's translation of Hesiod. [2] Cleveland's Poems.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER II.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >IN the autumn of this year 2096, the spirit of emigration crept in among the few survivors, who, congregating from various parts of England, met in London. This spirit existed as a breath, a wish, a far off thought, until communicated to Adrian, who imbibed it with ardour, and instantly engaged himself in plans for its execution. The fear of immediate death vanished with the heats of September. Another winter was before us, and we might elect our mode of passing it to the best advantage. Perhaps in rational philosophy none could be better chosen than this scheme of migration, which would draw us from the immediate scene of our woe, and, leading us through pleasant and picturesque countries, amuse for a time our despair. The idea once broached, all were impatient to put it in execution.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were still at Windsor; our renewed hopes medicined the anguish we had suffered from the late tragedies. The death of many of our inmates had weaned us from the fond idea, that Windsor Castle was a spot sacred from the plague; but our lease of life was renewed for some months, and even Idris lifted her head, as a lily after a storm, when a last sunbeam tinges its silver cup. Just at this time Adrian came down to us; his eager looks shewed us that he was full of some scheme. He hastened to take me aside, and disclosed to me with rapidity his plan of emigration from England.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To leave England for ever! to turn from its polluted fields and groves, and, placing the sea between us, to quit it, as a sailor quits the rock on which he has been wrecked, when the saving ship rides by. Such was his plan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To leave the country of our fathers, made holy by their graves!—We could not feel even as a voluntary exile of old, who might for pleasure or convenience forsake his native soil; though thousands of miles might divide him, England was still a part of him, as he of her. He heard of the passing events of the day; he knew that, if he returned, and resumed his place in society, the entrance was still open, and it required but the will, to surround himself at once with the associations and habits of boyhood. Not so with us, the remnant. We left none to represent us, none to repeople the desart land, and the name of England died, when we left her,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In vagabond pursuit of dreadful safety.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet let us go! England is in her shroud,—we may not enchain ourselves to a corpse. Let us go—the world is our country now, and we will choose for our residence its most fertile spot. Shall we, in these desart halls, under this wintry sky, sit with closed eyes and folded hands, expecting death? Let us rather go out to meet it gallantly: or perhaps—for all this pendulous orb, this fair gem in the sky's diadem, is not surely plague-striken—perhaps, in some secluded nook, amidst eternal spring, and waving trees, and purling streams, we may find Life. The world is vast, and England, though her many fields and wide spread woods seem interminable, is but a small part of her. At the close of a day's march over high mountains and through snowy vallies, we may come upon health, and committing our loved ones to its charge, replant the uprooted tree of humanity, and send to late posterity the tale of the ante-pestilential race, the heroes and sages of the lost state of things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hope beckons and sorrow urges us, the heart beats high with expectation, and this eager desire of change must be an omen of success. O come! Farewell to the dead! farewell to the tombs of those we loved!—farewell to giant London and the placid Thames, to river and mountain or fair district, birth-place of the wise and good, to Windsor Forest and its antique castle, farewell! themes for story alone are they,—we must live elsewhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such were in part the arguments of Adrian, uttered with enthusiasm and unanswerable rapidity. Something more was in his heart, to which he dared not give words. He felt that the end of time was come; he knew that one by one we should dwindle into nothingness. It was not adviseable to wait this sad consummation in our native country; but travelling would give us our object for each day, that would distract our thoughts from the swift-approaching end of things. If we went to Italy, to sacred and eternal Rome, we might with greater patience submit to the decree, which had laid her mighty towers low. We might lose our selfish grief in the sublime aspect of its desolation. All this was in the mind of Adrian; but he thought of my children, and, instead of communicating to me these resources of despair, he called up the image of health and life to be found, where we knew not—when we knew not; but if never to be found, for ever and for ever to be sought. He won me over to his party, heart and soul.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It devolved on me to disclose our plan to Idris. The images of health and hope which I presented to her, made her with a smile consent. With a smile she agreed to leave her country, from which she had never before been absent, and the spot she had inhabited from infancy; the forest and its mighty trees, the woodland paths and green recesses, where she had played in childhood, and had lived so happily through youth; she would leave them without regret, for she hoped to purchase thus the lives of her children. They were her life; dearer than a spot consecrated to love, dearer than all else the earth contained. The boys heard with childish glee of our removal: Clara asked if we were to go to Athens. "It is possible," I replied; and her countenance became radiant with pleasure. There she would behold the tomb of her parents, and the territory filled with recollections of her father's glory. In silence, but without respite, she had brooded over these scenes. It was the recollection of them that had turned her infant gaiety to seriousness, and had impressed her with high and restless thoughts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were many dear friends whom we must not leave behind, humble though they were. There was the spirited and obedient steed which Lord Raymond had given his daughter; there was Alfred's dog and a pet eagle, whose sight was dimmed through age. But this catalogue of favourites to be taken with us, could not be made without grief to think of our heavy losses, and a deep sigh for the many things we must leave behind. The tears rushed into the eyes of Idris, while Alfred and Evelyn brought now a favourite rose tree, now a marble vase beautifully carved, insisting that these must go, and exclaiming on the pity that we could not take the castle and the forest, the deer and the birds, and all accustomed and cherished objects along with us. "Fond and foolish ones," I said, "we have lost for ever treasures far more precious than these; and we desert them, to preserve treasures to which in comparison they are nothing. Let us not for a moment forget our object and our hope; and they will form a resistless mound to stop the overflowing of our regret for trifles."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The children were easily distracted, and again returned to their prospect of future amusement. Idris had disappeared. She had gone to hide her weakness; escaping from the castle, she had descended to the little park, and sought solitude, that she might there indulge her tears; I found her clinging round an old oak, pressing its rough trunk with her roseate lips, as her tears fell plenteously, and her sobs and broken exclamations could not be suppressed; with surpassing grief I beheld this loved one of my heart thus lost in sorrow! I drew her towards me; and, as she felt my kisses on her eyelids, as she felt my arms press her, she revived to the knowledge of what remained to her. "You are very kind not to reproach me," she said: "I weep, and a bitter pang of intolerable sorrow tears my heart. And yet I am happy; mothers lament their children, wives lose their husbands, while you and my children are left to me. Yes, I am happy, most happy, that I can weep thus for imaginary sorrows, and that the slight loss of my adored country is not dwindled and annihilated in mightier misery. Take me where you will; where you and my children are, there shall be Windsor, and every country will be England to me. Let these tears flow not for myself, happy and ungrateful as I am, but for the dead world—for our lost country—for all of love, and life, and joy, now choked in the dusty chambers of death."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke quickly, as if to convince herself; she turned her eyes from the trees and forest-paths she loved; she hid her face in my bosom, and we— yes, my masculine firmness dissolved—we wept together consolatory tears, and then calm—nay, almost cheerful, we returned to the castle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The first cold weather of an English October, made us hasten our preparations. I persuaded Idris to go up to London, where she might better attend to necessary arrangements. I did not tell her, that to spare her the pang of parting from inanimate objects, now the only things left, I had resolved that we should none of us return to Windsor. For the last time we looked on the wide extent of country visible from the terrace, and saw the last rays of the sun tinge the dark masses of wood variegated by autumnal tints; the uncultivated fields and smokeless cottages lay in shadow below; the Thames wound through the wide plain, and the venerable pile of Eton college, stood in dark relief, a prominent object; the cawing of the myriad rooks which inhabited the trees of the little park, as in column or thick wedge they speeded to their nests, disturbed the silence of evening. Nature was the same, as when she was the kind mother of the human race; now, childless and forlorn, her fertility was a mockery; her loveliness a mask for deformity. Why should the breeze gently stir the trees, man felt not its refreshment? Why did dark night adorn herself with stars—man saw them not? Why are there fruits, or flowers, or streams, man is not here to enjoy them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idris stood beside me, her dear hand locked in mine. Her face was radiant with a smile.—"The sun is alone," she said, "but we are not. A strange star, my Lionel, ruled our birth; sadly and with dismay we may look upon the annihilation of man; but we remain for each other. Did I ever in the wide world seek other than thee? And since in the wide world thou remainest, why should I complain? Thou and nature are still true to me. Beneath the shades of night, and through the day, whose garish light displays our solitude, thou wilt still be at my side, and even Windsor will not be regretted."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had chosen night time for our journey to London, that the change and desolation of the country might be the less observable. Our only surviving servant drove us. We past down the steep hill, and entered the dusky avenue of the Long Walk. At times like these, minute circumstances assume giant and majestic proportions; the very swinging open of the white gate that admitted us into the forest, arrested my thoughts as matter of interest; it was an every day act, never to occur again! The setting crescent of the moon glittered through the massy trees to our right, and when we entered the park, we scared a troop of deer, that fled bounding away in the forest shades. Our two boys quietly slept; once, before our road turned from the view, I looked back on the castle. Its windows glistened in the moonshine, and its heavy outline lay in a dark mass against the sky—the trees near us waved a solemn dirge to the midnight breeze. Idris leaned back in the carriage; her two hands pressed mine, her countenance was placid, she seemed to lose the sense of what she now left, in the memory of what she still possessed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My thoughts were sad and solemn, yet not of unmingled pain. The very excess of our misery carried a relief with it, giving sublimity and elevation to sorrow. I felt that I carried with me those I best loved; I was pleased, after a long separation to rejoin Adrian; never again to part. I felt that I quitted what I loved, not what loved me. The castle walls, and long familiar trees, did not hear the parting sound of our carriage-wheels with regret. And, while I felt Idris to be near, and heard the regular breathing of my children, I could not be unhappy. Clara was greatly moved; with streaming eyes, suppressing her sobs, she leaned from the window, watching the last glimpse of her native Windsor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian welcomed us on our arrival. He was all animation; you could no longer trace in his look of health, the suffering valetudinarian; from his smile and sprightly tones you could not guess that he was about to lead forth from their native country, the numbered remnant of the English nation, into the tenantless realms of the south, there to die, one by one, till the LAST MAN should remain in a voiceless, empty world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian was impatient for our departure, and had advanced far in his preparations. His wisdom guided all. His care was the soul, to move the luckless crowd, who relied wholly on him. It was useless to provide many things, for we should find abundant provision in every town. It was Adrian's wish to prevent all labour; to bestow a festive appearance on this funeral train. Our numbers amounted to not quite two thousand persons. These were not all assembled in London, but each day witnessed the arrival of fresh numbers, and those who resided in the neighbouring towns, had received orders to assemble at one place, on the twentieth of November. Carriages and horses were provided for all; captains and under officers chosen, and the whole assemblage wisely organized. All obeyed the Lord Protector of dying England; all looked up to him. His council was chosen, it consisted of about fifty persons. Distinction and station were not the qualifications of their election. We had no station among us, but that which benevolence and prudence gave; no distinction save between the living and the dead. Although we were anxious to leave England before the depth of winter, yet we were detained. Small parties had been dispatched to various parts of England, in search of stragglers; we would not go, until we had assured ourselves that in all human probability we did not leave behind a single human being.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On our arrival in London, we found that the aged Countess of Windsor was residing with her son in the palace of the Protectorate; we repaired to our accustomed abode near Hyde Park. Idris now for the first time for many years saw her mother, anxious to assure herself that the childishness of old age did not mingle with unforgotten pride, to make this high-born dame still so inveterate against me. Age and care had furrowed her cheeks, and bent her form; but her eye was still bright, her manners authoritative and unchanged; she received her daughter coldly, but displayed more feeling as she folded her grand-children in her arms. It is our nature to wish to continue our systems and thoughts to posterity through our own offspring. The Countess had failed in this design with regard to her children; perhaps she hoped to find the next remove in birth more tractable. Once Idris named me casually—a frown, a convulsive gesture of anger, shook her mother, and, with voice trembling with hate, she said—"I am of little worth in this world; the young are impatient to push the old off the scene; but, Idris, if you do not wish to see your mother expire at your feet, never again name that person to me; all else I can bear; and now I am resigned to the destruction of my cherished hopes: but it is too much to require that I should love the instrument that providence gifted with murderous properties for my destruction."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This was a strange speech, now that, on the empty stage, each might play his part without impediment from the other. But the haughty Ex-Queen thought as Octavius Caesar and Mark Antony,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > We could not stall together</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > In the whole world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The period of our departure was fixed for the twenty-fifth of November. The weather was temperate; soft rains fell at night, and by day the wintry sun shone out. Our numbers were to move forward in separate parties, and to go by different routes, all to unite at last at Paris. Adrian and his division, consisting in all of five hundred persons, were to take the direction of Dover and Calais. On the twentieth of November, Adrian and I rode for the last time through the streets of London. They were grass-grown and desert. The open doors of the empty mansions creaked upon their hinges; rank herbage, and deforming dirt, had swiftly accumulated on the steps of the houses; the voiceless steeples of the churches pierced the smokeless air; the churches were open, but no prayer was offered at the altars; mildew and damp had already defaced their ornaments; birds, and tame animals, now homeless, had built nests, and made their lairs in consecrated spots. We passed St. Paul's. London, which had extended so far in suburbs in all direction, had been somewhat deserted in the midst, and much of what had in former days obscured this vast building was removed. Its ponderous mass, blackened stone, and high dome, made it look, not like a temple, but a tomb. Methought above the portico was engraved the Hic jacet of England. We passed on eastwards, engaged in such solemn talk as the times inspired. No human step was heard, nor human form discerned. Troops of dogs, deserted of their masters, passed us; and now and then a horse, unbridled and unsaddled, trotted towards us, and tried to attract the attention of those which we rode, as if to allure them to seek like liberty. An unwieldy ox, who had fed in an abandoned granary, suddenly lowed, and shewed his shapeless form in a narrow door-way; every thing was desert; but nothing was in ruin. And this medley of undamaged buildings, and luxurious accommodation, in trim and fresh youth, was contrasted with the lonely silence of the unpeopled streets.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Night closed in, and it began to rain. We were about to return homewards, when a voice, a human voice, strange now to hear, attracted our attention. It was a child singing a merry, lightsome air; there was no other sound. We had traversed London from Hyde Park even to where we now were in the Minories, and had met no person, heard no voice nor footstep. The singing was interrupted by laughing and talking; never was merry ditty so sadly timed, never laughter more akin to tears. The door of the house from which these sounds proceeded was open, the upper rooms were illuminated as for a feast. It was a large magnificent house, in which doubtless some rich merchant had lived. The singing again commenced, and rang through the high-roofed rooms, while we silently ascended the stair-case. Lights now appeared to guide us; and a long suite of splendid rooms illuminated, made us still more wonder. Their only inhabitant, a little girl, was dancing, waltzing, and singing about them, followed by a large Newfoundland dog, who boisterously jumping on her, and interrupting her, made her now scold, now laugh, now throw herself on the carpet to play with him. She was dressed grotesquely, in glittering robes and shawls fit for a woman; she appeared about ten years of age. We stood at the door looking on this strange scene, till the dog perceiving us barked loudly; the child turned and saw us: her face, losing its gaiety, assumed a sullen expression: she slunk back, apparently meditating an escape. I came up to her, and held her hand; she did not resist, but with a stern brow, so strange in childhood, so different from her former hilarity, she stood still, her eyes fixed on the ground. "What do you do here?" I said gently; "Who are you?"—she was silent, but trembled violently.—"My poor child," asked Adrian, "are you alone?" There was a winning softness in his voice, that went to the heart of the little girl; she looked at him, then snatching her hand from me, threw herself into his arms, clinging round his neck, ejaculating—"Save me! save me!" while her unnatural sullenness dissolved in tears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I will save you," he replied, "of what are you afraid? you need not fear my friend, he will do you no harm. Are you alone?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No, Lion is with me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And your father and mother?—"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I never had any; I am a charity girl. Every body is gone, gone for a great, great many days; but if they come back and find me out, they will beat me so!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Her unhappy story was told in these few words: an orphan, taken on pretended charity, ill-treated and reviled, her oppressors had died: unknowing of what had passed around her, she found herself alone; she had not dared venture out, but by the continuance of her solitude her courage revived, her childish vivacity caused her to play a thousand freaks, and with her brute companion she passed a long holiday, fearing nothing but the return of the harsh voices and cruel usage of her protectors. She readily consented to go with Adrian.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the mean time, while we descanted on alien sorrows, and on a solitude which struck our eyes and not our hearts, while we imagined all of change and suffering that had intervened in these once thronged streets, before, tenantless and abandoned, they became mere kennels for dogs, and stables for cattle:—while we read the death of the world upon the dark fane, and hugged ourselves in the remembrance that we possessed that which was all the world to us—in the meanwhile—-</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We had arrived from Windsor early in October, and had now been in London about six weeks. Day by day, during that time, the health of my Idris declined: her heart was broken; neither sleep nor appetite, the chosen servants of health, waited on her wasted form. To watch her children hour by hour, to sit by me, drinking deep the dear persuasion that I remained to her, was all her pastime. Her vivacity, so long assumed, her affectionate display of cheerfulness, her light-hearted tone and springy gait were gone. I could not disguise to myself, nor could she conceal, her life-consuming sorrow. Still change of scene, and reviving hopes might restore her; I feared the plague only, and she was untouched by that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had left her this evening, reposing after the fatigues of her preparations. Clara sat beside her, relating a story to the two boys. The eyes of Idris were closed: but Clara perceived a sudden change in the appearance of our eldest darling; his heavy lids veiled his eyes, an unnatural colour burnt in his cheeks, his breath became short. Clara looked at the mother; she slept, yet started at the pause the narrator made— Fear of awakening and alarming her, caused Clara to go on at the eager call of Evelyn, who was unaware of what was passing. Her eyes turned alternately from Alfred to Idris; with trembling accents she continued her tale, till she saw the child about to fall: starting forward she caught him, and her cry roused Idris. She looked on her son. She saw death stealing across his features; she laid him on a bed, she held drink to his parched lips.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet he might be saved. If I were there, he might be saved; perhaps it was not the plague. Without a counsellor, what could she do? stay and behold him die! Why at that moment was I away? "Look to him, Clara," she exclaimed, "I will return immediately."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She inquired among those who, selected as the companions of our journey, had taken up their residence in our house; she heard from them merely that I had gone out with Adrian. She entreated them to seek me: she returned to her child, he was plunged in a frightful state of torpor; again she rushed down stairs; all was dark, desert, and silent; she lost all self-possession; she ran into the street; she called on my name. The pattering rain and howling wind alone replied to her. Wild fear gave wings to her feet; she darted forward to seek me, she knew not where; but, putting all her thoughts, all her energy, all her being in speed only, most misdirected speed, she neither felt, nor feared, nor paused, but ran right on, till her strength suddenly deserted her so suddenly, that she had not thought to save herself. Her knees failed her, and she fell heavily on the pavement. She was stunned for a time; but at length rose, and though sorely hurt, still walked on, shedding a fountain of tears, stumbling at times, going she knew not whither, only now and then with feeble voice she called my name, adding with heart-piercing exclamations, that I was cruel and unkind. Human being there was none to reply; and the inclemency of the night had driven the wandering animals to the habitations they had usurped. Her thin dress was drenched with rain; her wet hair clung round her neck; she tottered through the dark streets; till, striking her foot against an unseen impediment, she again fell; she could not rise; she hardly strove; but, gathering up her limbs, she resigned herself to the fury of the elements, and the bitter grief of her own heart. She breathed an earnest prayer to die speedily, for there was no relief but death. While hopeless of safety for herself, she ceased to lament for her dying child, but shed kindly, bitter tears for the grief I should experience in losing her. While she lay, life almost suspended, she felt a warm, soft hand on her brow, and a gentle female voice asked her, with expressions of tender compassion, if she could not rise? That another human being, sympathetic and kind, should exist near, roused her; half rising, with clasped hands, and fresh springing tears, she entreated her companion to seek for me, to bid me hasten to my dying child, to save him, for the love of heaven, to save him!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The woman raised her; she led her under shelter, she entreated her to return to her home, whither perhaps I had already returned. Idris easily yielded to her persuasions, she leaned on the arm of her friend, she endeavoured to walk on, but irresistible faintness made her pause again and again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Quickened by the encreasing storm, we had hastened our return, our little charge was placed before Adrian on his horse. There was an assemblage of persons under the portico of our house, in whose gestures I instinctively read some heavy change, some new misfortune. With swift alarm, afraid to ask a single question, I leapt from my horse; the spectators saw me, knew me, and in awful silence divided to make way for me. I snatched a light, and rushing up stairs, and hearing a groan, without reflection I threw open the door of the first room that presented itself. It was quite dark; but, as I stept within, a pernicious scent assailed my senses, producing sickening qualms, which made their way to my very heart, while I felt my leg clasped, and a groan repeated by the person that held me. I lowered my lamp, and saw a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of disease, while he held me with a convulsive grasp. With mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals. For a moment I was overcome, my head was bowed by aching nausea; till, reflection returning, I sprung up, threw the wretch from me, and darting up the staircase, entered the chamber usually inhabited by my family. A dim light shewed me Alfred on a couch; Clara trembling, and paler than whitest snow, had raised him on her arm, holding a cup of water to his lips. I saw full well that no spark of life existed in that ruined form, his features were rigid, his eyes glazed, his head had fallen back. I took him from her, I laid him softly down, kissed his cold little mouth, and turned to speak in a vain whisper, when loudest sound of thunderlike cannon could not have reached him in his immaterial abode.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And where was Idris? That she had gone out to seek me, and had not returned, were fearful tidings, while the rain and driving wind clattered against the window, and roared round the house. Added to this, the sickening sensation of disease gained upon me; no time was to be lost, if ever I would see her again. I mounted my horse and rode out to seek her, fancying that I heard her voice in every gust, oppressed by fever and aching pain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I rode in the dark and rain through the labyrinthine streets of unpeopled London. My child lay dead at home; the seeds of mortal disease had taken root in my bosom; I went to seek Idris, my adored, now wandering alone, while the waters were rushing from heaven like a cataract to bathe her dear head in chill damp, her fair limbs in numbing cold. A female stood on the step of a door, and called to me as I gallopped past. It was not Idris; so I rode swiftly on, until a kind of second sight, a reflection back again on my senses of what I had seen but not marked, made me feel sure that another figure, thin, graceful and tall, stood clinging to the foremost person who supported her. In a minute I was beside the suppliant, in a minute I received the sinking Idris in my arms. Lifting her up, I placed her on the horse; she had not strength to support herself; so I mounted behind her, and held her close to my bosom, wrapping my riding-cloak round her, while her companion, whose well known, but changed countenance, (it was Juliet, daughter of the Duke of L—-) could at this moment of horror obtain from me no more than a passing glance of compassion. She took the abandoned rein, and conducted our obedient steed homewards. Dare I avouch it? That was the last moment of my happiness; but I was happy. Idris must die, for her heart was broken: I must die, for I had caught the plague; earth was a scene of desolation; hope was madness; life had married death; they were one; but, thus supporting my fainting love, thus feeling that I must soon die, I revelled in the delight of possessing her once more; again and again I kissed her, and pressed her to my heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We arrived at our home. I assisted her to dismount, I carried her up stairs, and gave her into Clara's care, that her wet garments might be changed. Briefly I assured Adrian of her safety, and requested that we might be left to repose. As the miser, who with trembling caution visits his treasure to count it again and again, so I numbered each moment, and grudged every one that was not spent with Idris. I returned swiftly to the chamber where the life of my life reposed; before I entered the room I paused for a few seconds; for a few seconds I tried to examine my state; sickness and shuddering ever and anon came over me; my head was heavy, my chest oppressed, my legs bent under me; but I threw off resolutely the swift growing symptoms of my disorder, and met Idris with placid and even joyous looks. She was lying on a couch; carefully fastening the door to prevent all intrusion; I sat by her, we embraced, and our lips met in a kiss long drawn and breathless—would that moment had been my last!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maternal feeling now awoke in my poor girl's bosom, and she asked: "And</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alfred?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Idris," I replied, "we are spared to each other, we are together; do not let any other idea intrude. I am happy; even on this fatal night, I declare myself happy, beyond all name, all thought—what would you more, sweet one?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idris understood me: she bowed her head on my shoulder and wept. "Why," she again asked, "do you tremble, Lionel, what shakes you thus?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well may I be shaken," I replied, "happy as I am. Our child is dead, and the present hour is dark and ominous. Well may I tremble! but, I am happy, mine own Idris, most happy."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I understand thee, my kind love," said Idris, "thus—pale as thou art with sorrow at our loss; trembling and aghast, though wouldest assuage my grief by thy dear assurances. I am not happy," (and the tears flashed and fell from under her down-cast lids), "for we are inmates of a miserable prison, and there is no joy for us; but the true love I bear you will render this and every other loss endurable."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We have been happy together, at least," I said; "no future misery can deprive us of the past. We have been true to each other for years, ever since my sweet princess-love came through the snow to the lowly cottage of the poverty-striken heir of the ruined Verney. Even now, that eternity is before us, we take hope only from the presence of each other. Idris, do you think, that when we die, we shall be divided?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Die! when we die! what mean you? What secret lies hid from me in those dreadful words?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Must we not all die, dearest?" I asked with a sad smile.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Gracious God! are you ill, Lionel, that you speak of death? My only friend, heart of my heart, speak!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I do not think," replied I, "that we have any of us long to live; and when the curtain drops on this mortal scene, where, think you, we shall find ourselves?" Idris was calmed by my unembarrassed tone and look; she answered:—"You may easily believe that during this long progress of the plague, I have thought much on death, and asked myself, now that all mankind is dead to this life, to what other life they may have been borne. Hour after hour, I have dwelt on these thoughts, and strove to form a rational conclusion concerning the mystery of a future state. What a scare-crow, indeed, would death be, if we were merely to cast aside the shadow in which we now walk, and, stepping forth into the unclouded sunshine of knowledge and love, revived with the same companions, the same affections, and reached the fulfilment of our hopes, leaving our fears with our earthly vesture in the grave. Alas! the same strong feeling which makes me sure that I shall not wholly die, makes me refuse to believe that I shall live wholly as I do now. Yet, Lionel, never, never, can I love any but you; through eternity I must desire your society; and, as I am innocent of harm to others, and as relying and confident as my mortal nature permits, I trust that the Ruler of the world will never tear us asunder."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your remarks are like yourself, dear love," replied I, "gentle and good; let us cherish such a belief, and dismiss anxiety from our minds. But, sweet, we are so formed, (and there is no sin, if God made our nature, to yield to what he ordains), we are so formed, that we must love life, and cling to it; we must love the living smile, the sympathetic touch, and thrilling voice, peculiar to our mortal mechanism. Let us not, through security in hereafter, neglect the present. This present moment, short as it is, is a part of eternity, and the dearest part, since it is our own unalienably. Thou, the hope of my futurity, art my present joy. Let me then look on thy dear eyes, and, reading love in them, drink intoxicating pleasure."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Timidly, for my vehemence somewhat terrified her, Idris looked on me. My eyes were bloodshot, starting from my head; every artery beat, methought, audibly, every muscle throbbed, each single nerve felt. Her look of wild affright told me, that I could no longer keep my secret:—"So it is, mine own beloved," I said, "the last hour of many happy ones is arrived, nor can we shun any longer the inevitable destiny. I cannot live long—but, again and again, I say, this moment is ours!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Paler than marble, with white lips and convulsed features, Idris became aware of my situation. My arm, as I sat, encircled her waist. She felt the palm burn with fever, even on the heart it pressed:—"One moment," she murmured, scarce audibly, "only one moment."—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She kneeled, and hiding her face in her hands, uttered a brief, but earnest prayer, that she might fulfil her duty, and watch over me to the last. While there was hope, the agony had been unendurable;—all was now concluded; her feelings became solemn and calm. Even as Epicharis, unperturbed and firm, submitted to the instruments of torture, did Idris, suppressing every sigh and sign of grief, enter upon the endurance of torments, of which the rack and the wheel are but faint and metaphysical symbols.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was changed; the tight-drawn cord that sounded so harshly was loosened, the moment that Idris participated in my knowledge of our real situation. The perturbed and passion-tossed waves of thought subsided, leaving only the heavy swell that kept right on without any outward manifestation of its disturbance, till it should break on the remote shore towards which I rapidly advanced:—"It is true that I am sick," I said, "and your society, my Idris is my only medicine; come, and sit beside me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She made me lie down on the couch, and, drawing a low ottoman near, sat close to my pillow, pressing my burning hands in her cold palms. She yielded to my feverish restlessness, and let me talk, and talked to me, on subjects strange indeed to beings, who thus looked the last, and heard the last, of what they loved alone in the world. We talked of times gone by; of the happy period of our early love; of Raymond, Perdita, and Evadne. We talked of what might arise on this desert earth, if, two or three being saved, it were slowly re-peopled.—We talked of what was beyond the tomb; and, man in his human shape being nearly extinct, we felt with certainty of faith, that other spirits, other minds, other perceptive beings, sightless to us, must people with thought and love this beauteous and imperishable universe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We talked—I know not how long—but, in the morning I awoke from a painful heavy slumber; the pale cheek of Idris rested on my pillow; the large orbs of her eyes half raised the lids, and shewed the deep blue lights beneath; her lips were unclosed, and the slight murmurs they formed told that, even while asleep, she suffered. "If she were dead," I thought, "what difference? now that form is the temple of a residing deity; those eyes are the windows of her soul; all grace, love, and intelligence are throned on that lovely bosom—were she dead, where would this mind, the dearer half of mine, be? For quickly the fair proportion of this edifice would be more defaced, than are the sand-choked ruins of the desert temples of Palmyra."</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER III.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >IDRIS stirred and awoke; alas! she awoke to misery. She saw the signs of disease on my countenance, and wondered how she could permit the long night to pass without her having sought, not cure, that was impossible, but alleviation to my sufferings. She called Adrian; my couch was quickly surrounded by friends and assistants, and such medicines as were judged fitting were administered. It was the peculiar and dreadful distinction of our visitation, that none who had been attacked by the pestilence had recovered. The first symptom of the disease was the death-warrant, which in no single instance had been followed by pardon or reprieve. No gleam of hope therefore cheered my friends.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >While fever producing torpor, heavy pains, sitting like lead on my limbs, and making my breast heave, were upon me; I continued insensible to every thing but pain, and at last even to that. I awoke on the fourth morning as from a dreamless sleep. An irritating sense of thirst, and, when I strove to speak or move, an entire dereliction of power, was all I felt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For three days and nights Idris had not moved from my side. She administered to all my wants, and never slept nor rested. She did not hope; and therefore she neither endeavoured to read the physician's countenance, nor to watch for symptoms of recovery. All her thought was to attend on me to the last, and then to lie down and die beside me. On the third night animation was suspended; to the eye and touch of all I was dead. With earnest prayer, almost with force, Adrian tried to draw Idris from me. He exhausted every adjuration, her child's welfare and his own. She shook her head, and wiped a stealing tear from her sunk cheek, but would not yield; she entreated to be allowed to watch me that one night only, with such affliction and meek earnestness, that she gained her point, and sat silent and motionless, except when, stung by intolerable remembrance, she kissed my closed eyes and pallid lips, and pressed my stiffening hands to her beating heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At dead of night, when, though it was mid winter, the cock crowed at three o'clock, as herald of the morning change, while hanging over me, and mourning in silent, bitter thought for the loss of all of love towards her that had been enshrined in my heart; her dishevelled hair hung over her face, and the long tresses fell on the bed; she saw one ringlet in motion, and the scattered hair slightly stirred, as by a breath. It is not so, she thought, for he will never breathe more. Several times the same thing occurred, and she only marked it by the same reflection; till the whole ringlet waved back, and she thought she saw my breast heave. Her first emotion was deadly fear, cold dew stood on her brow; my eyes half opened; and, re-assured, she would have exclaimed, "He lives!" but the words were choked by a spasm, and she fell with a groan on the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian was in the chamber. After long watching, he had unwillingly fallen into a sleep. He started up, and beheld his sister senseless on the earth, weltering in a stream of blood that gushed from her mouth. Encreasing signs of life in me in some degree explained her state; the surprise, the burst of joy, the revulsion of every sentiment, had been too much for her frame, worn by long months of care, late shattered by every species of woe and toil. She was now in far greater danger than I, the wheels and springs of my life, once again set in motion, acquired elasticity from their short suspension. For a long time, no one believed that I should indeed continue to live; during the reign of the plague upon earth, not one person, attacked by the grim disease, had recovered. My restoration was looked on as a deception; every moment it was expected that the evil symptoms would recur with redoubled violence, until confirmed convalescence, absence of all fever or pain, and encreasing strength, brought slow conviction that I had recovered from the plague.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The restoration of Idris was more problematical. When I had been attacked by illness, her cheeks were sunk, her form emaciated; but now, the vessel, which had broken from the effects of extreme agitation, did not entirely heal, but was as a channel that drop by drop drew from her the ruddy stream that vivified her heart. Her hollow eyes and worn countenance had a ghastly appearance; her cheek-bones, her open fair brow, the projection of the mouth, stood fearfully prominent; you might tell each bone in the thin anatomy of her frame. Her hand hung powerless; each joint lay bare, so that the light penetrated through and through. It was strange that life could exist in what was wasted and worn into a very type of death.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To take her from these heart-breaking scenes, to lead her to forget the world's desolation in the variety of objects presented by travelling, and to nurse her failing strength in the mild climate towards which we had resolved to journey, was my last hope for her preservation. The preparations for our departure, which had been suspended during my illness, were renewed. I did not revive to doubtful convalescence; health spent her treasures upon me; as the tree in spring may feel from its wrinkled limbs the fresh green break forth, and the living sap rise and circulate, so did the renewed vigour of my frame, the cheerful current of my blood, the new-born elasticity of my limbs, influence my mind to cheerful endurance and pleasurable thoughts. My body, late the heavy weight that bound me to the tomb, was exuberant with health; mere common exercises were insufficient for my reviving strength; methought I could emulate the speed of the race-horse, discern through the air objects at a blinding distance, hear the operations of nature in her mute abodes; my senses had become so refined and susceptible after my recovery from mortal disease.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hope, among my other blessings, was not denied to me; and I did fondly trust that my unwearied attentions would restore my adored girl. I was therefore eager to forward our preparations. According to the plan first laid down, we were to have quitted London on the twenty-fifth of November; and, in pursuance of this scheme, two-thirds of our people—thepeople— all that remained of England, had gone forward, and had already been some weeks in Paris. First my illness, and subsequently that of Idris, had detained Adrian with his division, which consisted of three hundred persons, so that we now departed on the first of January, 2098. It was my wish to keep Idris as distant as possible from the hurry and clamour of the crowd, and to hide from her those appearances that would remind her most forcibly of our real situation. We separated ourselves to a great degree from Adrian, who was obliged to give his whole time to public business. The Countess of Windsor travelled with her son. Clara, Evelyn, and a female who acted as our attendant, were the only persons with whom we had contact. We occupied a commodious carriage, our servant officiated as coachman. A party of about twenty persons preceded us at a small distance. They had it in charge to prepare our halting places and our nightly abode. They had been selected for this service out of a great number that offered, on account of the superior sagacity of the man who had been appointed their leader.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Immediately on our departure, I was delighted to find a change in Idris, which I fondly hoped prognosticated the happiest results. All the cheerfulness and gentle gaiety natural to her revived. She was weak, and this alteration was rather displayed in looks and voice than in acts; but it was permanent and real. My recovery from the plague and confirmed health instilled into her a firm belief that I was now secure from this dread enemy. She told me that she was sure she should recover. That she had a presentiment, that the tide of calamity which deluged our unhappy race had now turned. That the remnant would be preserved, and among them the dear objects of her tender affection; and that in some selected spot we should wear out our lives together in pleasant society. "Do not let my state of feebleness deceive you," she said; "I feel that I am better; there is a quick life within me, and a spirit of anticipation that assures me, that I shall continue long to make a part of this world. I shall throw off this degrading weakness of body, which infects even my mind with debility, and I shall enter again on the performance of my duties. I was sorry to leave Windsor: but now I am weaned from this local attachment; I am content to remove to a mild climate, which will complete my recovery. Trust me, dearest, I shall neither leave you, nor my brother, nor these dear children; my firm determination to remain with you to the last, and to continue to contribute to your happiness and welfare, would keep me alive, even if grim death were nearer at hand than he really is."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was only half re-assured by these expressions; I could not believe that the over-quick flow of her blood was a sign of health, or that her burning cheeks denoted convalescence. But I had no fears of an immediate catastrophe; nay, I persuaded myself that she would ultimately recover. And thus cheerfulness reigned in our little society. Idris conversed with animation on a thousand topics. Her chief desire was to lead our thoughts from melancholy reflections; so she drew charming pictures of a tranquil solitude, of a beauteous retreat, of the simple manners of our little tribe, and of the patriarchal brotherhood of love, which would survive the ruins of the populous nations which had lately existed. We shut out from our thoughts the present, and withdrew our eyes from the dreary landscape we traversed. Winter reigned in all its gloom. The leafless trees lay without motion against the dun sky; the forms of frost, mimicking the foliage of summer, strewed the ground; the paths were overgrown; the unploughed cornfields were patched with grass and weeds; the sheep congregated at the threshold of the cottage, the horned ox thrust his head from the window. The wind was bleak, and frequent sleet or snow-storms, added to the melancholy appearance wintry nature assumed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We arrived at Rochester, and an accident caused us to be detained there a day. During that time, a circumstance occurred that changed our plans, and which, alas! in its result changed the eternal course of events, turning me from the pleasant new sprung hope I enjoyed, to an obscure and gloomy desert. But I must give some little explanation before I proceed with the final cause of our temporary alteration of plan, and refer again to those times when man walked the earth fearless, before Plague had become Queen of the World.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There resided a family in the neighbourhood of Windsor, of very humble pretensions, but which had been an object of interest to us on account of one of the persons of whom it was composed. The family of the Claytons had known better days; but, after a series of reverses, the father died a bankrupt, and the mother heartbroken, and a confirmed invalid, retired with her five children to a little cottage between Eton and Salt Hill. The eldest of these children, who was thirteen years old, seemed at once from the influence of adversity, to acquire the sagacity and principle belonging to a more mature age. Her mother grew worse and worse in health, but Lucy attended on her, and was as a tender parent to her younger brothers and sisters, and in the meantime shewed herself so good-humoured, social, and benevolent, that she was beloved as well as honoured, in her little neighbourhood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lucy was besides extremely pretty; so when she grew to be sixteen, it was to be supposed, notwithstanding her poverty, that she should have admirers. One of these was the son of a country-curate; he was a generous, frank-hearted youth, with an ardent love of knowledge, and no mean acquirements. Though Lucy was untaught, her mother's conversation and manners gave her a taste for refinements superior to her present situation. She loved the youth even without knowing it, except that in any difficulty she naturally turned to him for aid, and awoke with a lighter heart every Sunday, because she knew that she would be met and accompanied by him in her evening walk with her sisters. She had another admirer, one of the head-waiters at the inn at Salt Hill. He also was not without pretensions to urbane superiority, such as he learnt from gentlemen's servants and waiting-maids, who initiating him in all the slang of high life below stairs, rendered his arrogant temper ten times more intrusive. Lucy did not disclaim him—she was incapable of that feeling; but she was sorry when she saw him approach, and quietly resisted all his endeavours to establish an intimacy. The fellow soon discovered that his rival was preferred to him; and this changed what was at first a chance admiration into a passion, whose main springs were envy, and a base desire to deprive his competitor of the advantage he enjoyed over himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poor Lucy's sad story was but a common one. Her lover's father died; and he was left destitute. He accepted the offer of a gentleman to go to India with him, feeling secure that he should soon acquire an independence, and return to claim the hand of his beloved. He became involved in the war carried on there, was taken prisoner, and years elapsed before tidings of his existence were received in his native land. In the meantime disastrous poverty came on Lucy. Her little cottage, which stood looking from its trellice, covered with woodbine and jessamine, was burnt down; and the whole of their little property was included in the destruction. Whither betake them? By what exertion of industry could Lucy procure them another abode? Her mother nearly bed-rid, could not survive any extreme of famine-struck poverty. At this time her other admirer stept forward, and renewed his offer of marriage. He had saved money, and was going to set up a little inn at Datchet. There was nothing alluring to Lucy in this offer, except the home it secured to her mother; and she felt more sure of this, since she was struck by the apparent generosity which occasioned the present offer. She accepted it; thus sacrificing herself for the comfort and welfare of her parent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was some years after her marriage that we became acquainted with her. The accident of a storm caused us to take refuge in the inn, where we witnessed the brutal and quarrelsome behaviour of her husband, and her patient endurance. Her lot was not a fortunate one. Her first lover had returned with the hope of making her his own, and met her by accident, for the first time, as the mistress of his country inn, and the wife of another. He withdrew despairingly to foreign parts; nothing went well with him; at last he enlisted, and came back again wounded and sick, and yet Lucy was debarred from nursing him. Her husband's brutal disposition was aggravated by his yielding to the many temptations held out by his situation, and the consequent disarrangement of his affairs. Fortunately she had no children; but her heart was bound up in her brothers and sisters, and these his avarice and ill temper soon drove from the house; they were dispersed about the country, earning their livelihood with toil and care. He even shewed an inclination to get rid of her mother—but Lucy was firm here—she had sacrificed herself for her; she lived for her —she would not part with her—if the mother went, she would also go beg bread for her, die with her, but never desert her. The presence of Lucy was too necessary in keeping up the order of the house, and in preventing the whole establishment from going to wreck, for him to permit her to leave him. He yielded the point; but in all accesses of anger, or in his drunken fits, he recurred to the old topic, and stung poor Lucy's heart by opprobrious epithets bestowed on her parent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A passion however, if it be wholly pure, entire, and reciprocal, brings with it its own solace. Lucy was truly, and from the depth of heart, devoted to her mother; the sole end she proposed to herself in life, was the comfort and preservation of this parent. Though she grieved for the result, yet she did not repent of her marriage, even when her lover returned to bestow competence on her. Three years had intervened, and how, in their pennyless state, could her mother have existed during this time? This excellent woman was worthy of her child's devotion. A perfect confidence and friendship existed between them; besides, she was by no means illiterate; and Lucy, whose mind had been in some degree cultivated by her former lover, now found in her the only person who could understand and appreciate her. Thus, though suffering, she was by no means desolate, and when, during fine summer days, she led her mother into the flowery and shady lanes near their abode, a gleam of unmixed joy enlightened her countenance; she saw that her parent was happy, and she knew that this happiness was of her sole creating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Meanwhile her husband's affairs grew more and more involved; ruin was near at hand, and she was about to lose the fruit of all her labours, when pestilence came to change the aspect of the world. Her husband reaped benefit from the universal misery; but, as the disaster encreased, the spirit of lawlessness seized him; he deserted his home to revel in the luxuries promised him in London, and found there a grave. Her former lover had been one of the first victims of the disease. But Lucy continued to live for and in her mother. Her courage only failed when she dreaded peril for her parent, or feared that death might prevent her from performing those duties to which she was unalterably devoted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When we had quitted Windsor for London, as the previous step to our final emigration, we visited Lucy, and arranged with her the plan of her own and her mother's removal. Lucy was sorry at the necessity which forced her to quit her native lanes and village, and to drag an infirm parent from her comforts at home, to the homeless waste of depopulate earth; but she was too well disciplined by adversity, and of too sweet a temper, to indulge in repinings at what was inevitable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Subsequent circumstances, my illness and that of Idris, drove her from our remembrance; and we called her to mind at last, only to conclude that she made one of the few who came from Windsor to join the emigrants, and that she was already in Paris. When we arrived at Rochester therefore, we were surprised to receive, by a man just come from Slough, a letter from this exemplary sufferer. His account was, that, journeying from his home, and passing through Datchet, he was surprised to see smoke issue from the chimney of the inn, and supposing that he should find comrades for his journey assembled there, he knocked and was admitted. There was no one in the house but Lucy, and her mother; the latter had been deprived of the use of her limbs by an attack of rheumatism, and so, one by one, all the remaining inhabitants of the country set forward, leaving them alone. Lucy intreated the man to stay with her; in a week or two her mother would be better, and they would then set out; but they must perish, if they were left thus helpless and forlorn. The man said, that his wife and children were already among the emigrants, and it was therefore, according to his notion, impossible for him to remain. Lucy, as a last resource, gave him a letter for Idris, to be delivered to her wherever he should meet us. This commission at least he fulfilled, and Idris received with emotion the following letter:—</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"HONOURED LADY,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am sure that you will remember and pity me, and I dare hope that you will assist me; what other hope have I? Pardon my manner of writing, I am so bewildered. A month ago my dear mother was deprived of the use of her limbs. She is already better, and in another month would I am sure be able to travel, in the way you were so kind as to say you would arrange for us. But now everybody is gone—everybody—as they went away, each said, that perhaps my mother would be better, before we were quite deserted. But three days ago I went to Samuel Woods, who, on account of his new-born child, remained to the last; and there being a large family of them, I thought I could persuade them to wait a little longer for us; but I found the house deserted. I have not seen a soul since, till this good man came. —What will become of us? My mother does not know our state; she is so ill, that I have hidden it from her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Will you not send some one to us? I am sure we must perish miserably as we are. If I were to try to move my mother now, she would die on the road; and if, when she gets better, I were able, I cannot guess how, to find out the roads, and get on so many many miles to the sea, you would all be in France, and the great ocean would be between us, which is so terrible even to sailors. What would it be to me, a woman, who never saw it? We should be imprisoned by it in this country, all, all alone, with no help; better die where we are. I can hardly write—I cannot stop my tears—it is not for myself; I could put my trust in God; and let the worst come, I think I could bear it, if I were alone. But my mother, my sick, my dear, dear mother, who never, since I was born, spoke a harsh word to me, who has been patient in many sufferings; pity her, dear Lady, she must die a miserable death if you do not pity her. People speak carelessly of her, because she is old and infirm, as if we must not all, if we are spared, become so; and then, when the young are old themselves, they will think that they ought to be taken care of. It is very silly of me to write in this way to you; but, when I hear her trying not to groan, and see her look smiling on me to comfort me, when I know she is in pain; and when I think that she does not know the worst, but she soon must; and then she will not complain; but I shall sit guessing at all that she is dwelling upon, of famine and misery—I feel as if my heart must break, and I do not know what I say or do; my mother—mother for whom I have borne much, God preserve you from this fate! Preserve her, Lady, and He will bless you; and I, poor miserable creature as I am, will thank you and pray for you while I live.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your unhappy and dutiful servant,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dec. 30th, 2097. LUCY MARTIN."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This letter deeply affected Idris, and she instantly proposed, that we should return to Datchet, to assist Lucy and her mother. I said that I would without delay set out for that place, but entreated her to join her brother, and there await my return with the children. But Idris was in high spirits, and full of hope. She declared that she could not consent even to a temporary separation from me, but that there was no need of this, the motion of the carriage did her good, and the distance was too trifling to be considered. We could dispatch messengers to Adrian, to inform him of our deviation from the original plan. She spoke with vivacity, and drew a picture after her own dear heart, of the pleasure we should bestow upon Lucy, and declared, if I went, she must accompany me, and that she should very much dislike to entrust the charge of rescuing them to others, who might fulfil it with coldness or inhumanity. Lucy's life had been one act of devotion and virtue; let her now reap the small reward of finding her excellence appreciated, and her necessity assisted, by those whom she respected and honoured.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These, and many other arguments, were urged with gentle pertinacity, and the ardour of a wish to do all the good in her power, by her whose simple expression of a desire and slightest request had ever been a law with me. I, of course, consented, the moment that I saw that she had set her heart upon this step. We sent half our attendant troop on to Adrian; and with the other half our carriage took a retrograde course back to Windsor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I wonder now how I could be so blind and senseless, as thus to risk the safety of Idris; for, if I had eyes, surely I could see the sure, though deceitful, advance of death in her burning cheek and encreasing weakness. But she said she was better; and I believed her. Extinction could not be near a being, whose vivacity and intelligence hourly encreased, and whose frame was endowed with an intense, and I fondly thought, a strong and permanent spirit of life. Who, after a great disaster, has not looked back with wonder at his inconceivable obtuseness of understanding, that could not perceive the many minute threads with which fate weaves the inextricable net of our destinies, until he is inmeshed completely in it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The cross roads which we now entered upon, were even in a worse state than the long neglected high-ways; and the inconvenience seemed to menace the perishing frame of Idris with destruction. Passing through Dartford, we arrived at Hampton on the second day. Even in this short interval my beloved companion grew sensibly worse in health, though her spirits were still light, and she cheered my growing anxiety with gay sallies; sometimes the thought pierced my brain—Is she dying?—as I saw her fair fleshless hand rest on mine, or observed the feebleness with which she performed the accustomed acts of life. I drove away the idea, as if it had been suggested by insanity; but it occurred again and again, only to be dispelled by the continued liveliness of her manner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >About mid-day, after quitting Hampton, our carriage broke down: the shock caused Idris to faint, but on her reviving no other ill consequence ensued; our party of attendants had as usual gone on before us, and our coachman went in search of another vehicle, our former one being rendered by this accident unfit for service. The only place near us was a poor village, in which he found a kind of caravan, able to hold four people, but it was clumsy and ill hung; besides this he found a very excellent cabriolet: our plan was soon arranged; I would drive Idris in the latter; while the children were conveyed by the servant in the former. But these arrangements cost time; we had agreed to proceed that night to Windsor, and thither our purveyors had gone: we should find considerable difficulty in getting accommodation, before we reached this place; after all, the distance was only ten miles; my horse was a good one; I would go forward at a good pace with Idris, leaving the children to follow at a rate more consonant to the uses of their cumberous machine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Evening closed in quickly, far more quickly than I was prepared to expect. At the going down of the sun it began to snow heavily. I attempted in vain to defend my beloved companion from the storm; the wind drove the snow in our faces; and it lay so high on the ground, that we made but small way; while the night was so dark, that but for the white covering on the ground we should not have been able to see a yard before us. We had left our accompanying caravan far behind us; and now I perceived that the storm had made me unconsciously deviate from my intended route. I had gone some miles out of my way. My knowledge of the country enabled me to regain the right road; but, instead of going, as at first agreed upon, by a cross road through Stanwell to Datchet, I was obliged to take the way of Egham and Bishopgate. It was certain therefore that I should not be rejoined by the other vehicle, that I should not meet a single fellow-creature till we arrived at Windsor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The back of our carriage was drawn up, and I hung a pelisse before it, thus to curtain the beloved sufferer from the pelting sleet. She leaned on my shoulder, growing every moment more languid and feeble; at first she replied to my words of cheer with affectionate thanks; but by degrees she sunk into silence; her head lay heavily upon me; I only knew that she lived by her irregular breathing and frequent sighs. For a moment I resolved to stop, and, opposing the back of the cabriolet to the force of the tempest, to expect morning as well as I might. But the wind was bleak and piercing, while the occasional shudderings of my poor Idris, and the intense cold I felt myself, demonstrated that this would be a dangerous experiment. At length methought she slept—fatal sleep, induced by frost: at this moment I saw the heavy outline of a cottage traced on the dark horizon close to us: "Dearest love," I said, "support yourself but one moment, and we shall have shelter; let us stop here, that I may open the door of this blessed dwelling."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As I spoke, my heart was transported, and my senses swam with excessive delight and thankfulness; I placed the head of Idris against the carriage, and, leaping out, scrambled through the snow to the cottage, whose door was open. I had apparatus about me for procuring light, and that shewed me a comfortable room, with a pile of wood in one corner, and no appearance of disorder, except that, the door having been left partly open, the snow, drifting in, had blocked up the threshold. I returned to the carriage, and the sudden change from light to darkness at first blinded me. When I recovered my sight—eternal God of this lawless world! O supreme Death! I will not disturb thy silent reign, or mar my tale with fruitless exclamations of horror—I saw Idris, who had fallen from the seat to the bottom of the carriage; her head, its long hair pendent, with one arm, hung over the side.—Struck by a spasm of horror, I lifted her up; her heart was pulseless, her faded lips unfanned by the slightest breath.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I carried her into the cottage; I placed her on the bed. Lighting a fire, I chafed her stiffening limbs; for two long hours I sought to restore departed life; and, when hope was as dead as my beloved, I closed with trembling hands her glazed eyes. I did not doubt what I should now do. In the confusion attendant on my illness, the task of interring our darling Alfred had devolved on his grandmother, the Ex-Queen, and she, true to her ruling passion, had caused him to be carried to Windsor, and buried in the family vault, in St. George's Chapel. I must proceed to Windsor, to calm the anxiety of Clara, who would wait anxiously for us—yet I would fain spare her the heart-breaking spectacle of Idris, brought in by me lifeless from the journey. So first I would place my beloved beside her child in the vault, and then seek the poor children who would be expecting me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I lighted the lamps of my carriage; I wrapt her in furs, and placed her along the seat; then taking the reins, made the horses go forward. We proceeded through the snow, which lay in masses impeding the way, while the descending flakes, driving against me with redoubled fury, blinded me. The pain occasioned by the angry elements, and the cold iron of the shafts of frost which buffetted me, and entered my aching flesh, were a relief to me; blunting my mental suffering. The horses staggered on, and the reins hung loosely in my hands. I often thought I would lay my head close to the sweet, cold face of my lost angel, and thus resign myself to conquering torpor. Yet I must not leave her a prey to the fowls of the air; but, in pursuance of my determination place her in the tomb of her forefathers, where a merciful God might permit me to rest also.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The road we passed through Egham was familiar to me; but the wind and snow caused the horses to drag their load slowly and heavily. Suddenly the wind veered from south-west to west, and then again to north-west. As Sampson with tug and strain stirred from their bases the columns that supported the Philistine temple, so did the gale shake the dense vapours propped on the horizon, while the massy dome of clouds fell to the south, disclosing through the scattered web the clear empyrean, and the little stars, which were set at an immeasurable distance in the crystalline fields, showered their small rays on the glittering snow. Even the horses were cheered, and moved on with renovated strength. We entered the forest at Bishopgate, and at the end of the Long Walk I saw the Castle, "the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers." I looked with reverence on a structure, ancient almost as the rock on which it stood, abode of kings, theme of admiration for the wise. With greater reverence and, tearful affection I beheld it as the asylum of the long lease of love I had enjoyed there with the perishable, unmatchable treasure of dust, which now lay cold beside me. Now indeed, I could have yielded to all the softness of my nature, and wept; and, womanlike, have uttered bitter plaints; while the familiar trees, the herds of living deer, the sward oft prest by her fairy-feet, one by one with sad association presented themselves. The white gate at the end of the Long Walk was wide open, and I rode up the empty town through the first gate of the feudal tower; and now St. George's Chapel, with its blackened fretted sides, was right before me. I halted at its door, which was open; I entered, and placed my lighted lamp on the altar; then I returned, and with tender caution I bore Idris up the aisle into the chancel, and laid her softly down on the carpet which covered the step leading to the communion table. The banners of the knights of the garter, and their half drawn swords, were hung in vain emblazonry above the stalls. The banner of her family hung there, still surmounted by its regal crown. Farewell to the glory and heraldry of England!—I turned from such vanity with a slight feeling of wonder, at how mankind could have ever been interested in such things. I bent over the lifeless corpse of my beloved; and, while looking on her uncovered face, the features already contracted by the rigidity of death, I felt as if all the visible universe had grown as soulless, inane, and comfortless as the clay-cold image beneath me. I felt for a moment the intolerable sense of struggle with, and detestation for, the laws which govern the world; till the calm still visible on the face of my dead love recalled me to a more soothing tone of mind, and I proceeded to fulfil the last office that could now be paid her. For her I could not lament, so much I envied her enjoyment of "the sad immunities of the grave."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The vault had been lately opened to place our Alfred therein. The ceremony customary in these latter days had been cursorily performed, and the pavement of the chapel, which was its entrance, having been removed, had not been replaced. I descended the steps, and walked through the long passage to the large vault which contained the kindred dust of my Idris. I distinguished the small coffin of my babe. With hasty, trembling hands I constructed a bier beside it, spreading it with the furs and Indian shawls, which had wrapt Idris in her journey thither. I lighted the glimmering lamp, which flickered in this damp abode of the dead; then I bore my lost one to her last bed, decently composing her limbs, and covering them with a mantle, veiling all except her face, which remained lovely and placid. She appeared to rest like one over-wearied, her beauteous eyes steeped in sweet slumber. Yet, so it was not—she was dead! How intensely I then longed to lie down beside her, to gaze till death should gather me to the same repose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But death does not come at the bidding of the miserable. I had lately recovered from mortal illness, and my blood had never flowed with such an even current, nor had my limbs ever been so instinct with quick life, as now. I felt that my death must be voluntary. Yet what more natural than famine, as I watched in this chamber of mortality, placed in a world of the dead, beside the lost hope of my life? Meanwhile as I looked on her, the features, which bore a sisterly resemblance to Adrian, brought my thoughts back again to the living, to this dear friend, to Clara, and to Evelyn, who were probably now in Windsor, waiting anxiously for our arrival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Methought I heard a noise, a step in the far chapel, which was re-echoed by its vaulted roof, and borne to me through the hollow passages. Had Clara seen my carriage pass up the town, and did she seek me here? I must save her at least from the horrible scene the vault presented. I sprung up the steps, and then saw a female figure, bent with age, and clad in long mourning robes, advance through the dusky chapel, supported by a slender cane, yet tottering even with this support. She heard me, and looked up; the lamp I held illuminated my figure, and the moon-beams, struggling through the painted glass, fell upon her face, wrinkled and gaunt, yet with a piercing eye and commanding brow—I recognized the Countess of Windsor. With a hollow voice she asked, "Where is the princess?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I pointed to the torn up pavement: she walked to the spot, and looked down into the palpable darkness; for the vault was too distant for the rays of the small lamp I had left there to be discernible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Your light," she said. I gave it her; and she regarded the now visible, but precipitous steps, as if calculating her capacity to descend. Instinctively I made a silent offer of my assistance. She motioned me away with a look of scorn, saying in an harsh voice, as she pointed downwards, "There at least I may have her undisturbed."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She walked deliberately down, while I, overcome, miserable beyond words, or tears, or groans, threw myself on the pavement near—the stiffening form of Idris was before me, the death-struck countenance hushed in eternal repose beneath. That was to me the end of all! The day before, I had figured to my self various adventures, and communion with my friends in after time—now I had leapt the interval, and reached the utmost edge and bourne of life. Thus wrapt in gloom, enclosed, walled up, vaulted over by the omnipotent present, I was startled by the sound of feet on the steps of the tomb, and I remembered her whom I had utterly forgotten, my angry visitant; her tall form slowly rose upwards from the vault, a living statue, instinct with hate, and human, passionate strife: she seemed to me as having reached the pavement of the aisle; she stood motionless, seeking with her eyes alone, some desired object—till, perceiving me close to her, she placed her wrinkled hand on my arm, exclaiming with tremulous accents, "Lionel Verney, my son!" This name, applied at such a moment by my angel's mother, instilled into me more respect than I had ever before felt for this disdainful lady. I bowed my head, and kissed her shrivelled hand, and, remarking that she trembled violently, supported her to the end of the chancel, where she sat on the steps that led to the regal stall. She suffered herself to be led, and still holding my hand, she leaned her head back against the stall, while the moon beams, tinged with various colours by the painted glass, fell on her glistening eyes; aware of her weakness, again calling to mind her long cherished dignity, she dashed the tears away; yet they fell fast, as she said, for excuse, "She is so beautiful and placid, even in death. No harsh feeling ever clouded her serene brow; how did I treat her? wounding her gentle heart with savage coldness; I had no compassion on her in past years, does she forgive me now? Little, little does it boot to talk of repentance and forgiveness to the dead, had I during her life once consulted her gentle wishes, and curbed my rugged nature to do her pleasure, I should not feel thus."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Idris and her mother were unlike in person. The dark hair, deep-set black eyes, and prominent features of the Ex-Queen were in entire contrast to the golden tresses, the full blue orbs, and the soft lines and contour of her daughter's countenance. Yet, in latter days, illness had taken from my poor girl the full outline of her face, and reduced it to the inflexible shape of the bone beneath. In the form of her brow, in her oval chin, there was to be found a resemblance to her mother; nay in some moods, their gestures were not unlike; nor, having lived so long together, was this wonderful.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is a magic power in resemblance. When one we love dies, we hope to see them in another state, and half expect that the agency of mind will inform its new garb in imitation of its decayed earthly vesture. But these are ideas of the mind only. We know that the instrument is shivered, the sensible image lies in miserable fragments, dissolved to dusty nothingness; a look, a gesture, or a fashioning of the limbs similar to the dead in a living person, touches a thrilling chord, whose sacred harmony is felt in the heart's dearest recess. Strangely moved, prostrate before this spectral image, and enslaved by the force of blood manifested in likeness of look and movement, I remained trembling in the presence of the harsh, proud, and till now unloved mother of Idris.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poor, mistaken woman! in her tenderest mood before, she had cherished the idea, that a word, a look of reconciliation from her, would be received with joy, and repay long years of severity. Now that the time was gone for the exercise of such power, she fell at once upon the thorny truth of things, and felt that neither smile nor caress could penetrate to the unconscious state, or influence the happiness of her who lay in the vault beneath. This conviction, together with the remembrance of soft replies to bitter speeches, of gentle looks repaying angry glances; the perception of the falsehood, paltryness and futility of her cherished dreams of birth and power; the overpowering knowledge, that love and life were the true emperors of our mortal state; all, as a tide, rose, and filled her soul with stormy and bewildering confusion. It fell to my lot, to come as the influential power, to allay the fierce tossing of these tumultuous waves. I spoke to her; I led her to reflect how happy Idris had really been, and how her virtues and numerous excellencies had found scope and estimation in her past career. I praised her, the idol of my heart's dear worship, the admired type of feminine perfection. With ardent and overflowing eloquence, I relieved my heart from its burthen, and awoke to the sense of a new pleasure in life, as I poured forth the funeral eulogy. Then I referred to Adrian, her loved brother, and to her surviving child. I declared, which I had before almost forgotten, what my duties were with regard to these valued portions of herself, and bade the melancholy repentant mother reflect, how she could best expiate unkindness towards the dead, by redoubled love of the survivors. Consoling her, my own sorrows were assuaged; my sincerity won her entire conviction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She turned to me. The hard, inflexible, persecuting woman, turned with a mild expression of face, and said, "If our beloved angel sees us now, it will delight her to find that I do you even tardy justice. You were worthy of her; and from my heart I am glad that you won her away from me. Pardon, my son, the many wrongs I have done you; forget my bitter words and unkind treatment—take me, and govern me as you will."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I seized this docile moment to propose our departure from the church.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"First," she said, "let us replace the pavement above the vault."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We drew near to it; "Shall we look on her again?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I cannot," she replied, "and, I pray you, neither do you. We need not torture ourselves by gazing on the soulless body, while her living spirit is buried quick in our hearts, and her surpassing loveliness is so deeply carved there, that sleeping or waking she must ever be present to us."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For a few moments, we bent in solemn silence over the open vault. I consecrated my future life, to the embalming of her dear memory; I vowed to serve her brother and her child till death. The convulsive sob of my companion made me break off my internal orisons. I next dragged the stones over the entrance of the tomb, and closed the gulph that contained the life of my life. Then, supporting my decrepid fellow-mourner, we slowly left the chapel. I felt, as I stepped into the open air, as if I had quitted an happy nest of repose, for a dreary wilderness, a tortuous path, a bitter, joyless, hopeless pilgrimage.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IV.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >OUR escort had been directed to prepare our abode for the night at the inn, opposite the ascent to the Castle. We could not again visit the halls and familiar chambers of our home, on a mere visit. We had already left for ever the glades of Windsor, and all of coppice, flowery hedgerow, and murmuring stream, which gave shape and intensity to the love of our country, and the almost superstitious attachment with which we regarded native England. It had been our intention to have called at Lucy's dwelling in Datchet, and to have re-assured her with promises of aid and protection before we repaired to our quarters for the night. Now, as the Countess of Windsor and I turned down the steep hill that led from the Castle, we saw the children, who had just stopped in their caravan, at the inn-door. They had passed through Datchet without halting. I dreaded to meet them, and to be the bearer of my tragic story, so while they were still occupied in the hurry of arrival, I suddenly left them, and through the snow and clear moon-light air, hastened along the well known road to Datchet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Well known indeed it was. Each cottage stood on its accustomed site, each tree wore its familiar appearance. Habit had graven uneraseably on my memory, every turn and change of object on the road. At a short distance beyond the Little Park, was an elm half blown down by a storm, some ten years ago; and still, with leafless snow-laden branches, it stretched across the pathway, which wound through a meadow, beside a shallow brook, whose brawling was silenced by frost—that stile, that white gate, that hollow oak tree, which doubtless once belonged to the forest, and which now shewed in the moonlight its gaping rent; to whose fanciful appearance, tricked out by the dusk into a resemblance of the human form, the children had given the name of Falstaff;—all these objects were as well known to me as the cold hearth of my deserted home, and every moss-grown wall and plot of orchard ground, alike as twin lambs are to each other in a stranger's eye, yet to my accustomed gaze bore differences, distinction, and a name. England remained, though England was dead—it was the ghost of merry England that I beheld, under those greenwood shade passing generations had sported in security and ease. To this painful recognition of familiar places, was added a feeling experienced by all, understood by none—a feeling as if in some state, less visionary than a dream, in some past real existence, I had seen all I saw, with precisely the same feelings as I now beheld them—as if all my sensations were a duplex mirror of a former revelation. To get rid of this oppressive sense I strove to imagine change in this tranquil spot—this augmented my mood, by causing me to bestow more attention on the objects which occasioned me pain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I reached Datchet and Lucy's humble abode—once noisy with Saturday night revellers, or trim and neat on Sunday morning it had borne testimony to the labours and orderly habits of the housewife. The snow lay high about the door, as if it had remained unclosed for many days.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?" I muttered to myself as I looked at the dark casements. At first I thought I saw a light in one of them, but it proved to be merely the refraction of the moon-beams, while the only sound was the crackling branches as the breeze whirred the snow flakes from them—the moon sailed high and unclouded in the interminable ether, while the shadow of the cottage lay black on the garden behind. I entered this by the open wicket, and anxiously examined each window. At length I detected a ray of light struggling through a closed shutter in one of the upper rooms—it was a novel feeling, alas! to look at any house and say there dwells its usual inmate—the door of the house was merely on the latch: so I entered and ascended the moon-lit staircase. The door of the inhabited room was ajar: looking in, I saw Lucy sitting as at work at the table on which the light stood; the implements of needlework were about her, but her hand had fallen on her lap, and her eyes, fixed on the ground, shewed by their vacancy that her thoughts wandered. Traces of care and watching had diminished her former attractions—but her simple dress and cap, her desponding attitude, and the single candle that cast its light upon her, gave for a moment a picturesque grouping to the whole. A fearful reality recalled me from the thought—a figure lay stretched on the bed covered by a sheet—her mother was dead, and Lucy, apart from all the world, deserted and alone, watched beside the corpse during the weary night. I entered the room, and my unexpected appearance at first drew a scream from the lone survivor of a dead nation; but she recognised me, and recovered herself, with the quick exercise of self-control habitual to her. "Did you not expect me?" I asked, in that low voice which the presence of the dead makes us as it were instinctively assume.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You are very good," replied she, "to have come yourself; I can never thank you sufficiently; but it is too late."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Too late," cried I, "what do you mean? It is not too late to take you from this deserted place, and conduct you to—-"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My own loss, which I had forgotten as I spoke, now made me turn away, while choking grief impeded my speech. I threw open the window, and looked on the cold, waning, ghastly, misshaped circle on high, and the chill white earth beneath—did the spirit of sweet Idris sail along the moon-frozen crystal air?—No, no, a more genial atmosphere, a lovelier habitation was surely hers!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I indulged in this meditation for a moment, and then again addressed the mourner, who stood leaning against the bed with that expression of resigned despair, of complete misery, and a patient sufferance of it, which is far more touching than any of the insane ravings or wild gesticulation of untamed sorrow. I desired to draw her from this spot; but she opposed my wish. That class of persons whose imagination and sensibility have never been taken out of the narrow circle immediately in view, if they possess these qualities to any extent, are apt to pour their influence into the very realities which appear to destroy them, and to cling to these with double tenacity from not being able to comprehend any thing beyond. Thus Lucy, in desert England, in a dead world, wished to fulfil the usual ceremonies of the dead, such as were customary to the English country people, when death was a rare visitant, and gave us time to receive his dreaded usurpation with pomp and circumstance—going forth in procession to deliver the keys of the tomb into his conquering hand. She had already, alone as she was, accomplished some of these, and the work on which I found her employed, was her mother's shroud. My heart sickened at such detail of woe, which a female can endure, but which is more painful to the masculine spirit than deadliest struggle, or throes of unutterable but transient agony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This must not be, I told her; and then, as further inducement, I communicated to her my recent loss, and gave her the idea that she must come with me to take charge of the orphan children, whom the death of Idris had deprived of a mother's care. Lucy never resisted the call of a duty, so she yielded, and closing the casements and doors with care, she accompanied me back to Windsor. As we went she communicated to me the occasion of her mother's death. Either by some mischance she had got sight of Lucy's letter to Idris, or she had overheard her conversation with the countryman who bore it; however it might be, she obtained a knowledge of the appalling situation of herself and her daughter, her aged frame could not sustain the anxiety and horror this discovery instilled—she concealed her knowledge from Lucy, but brooded over it through sleepless nights, till fever and delirium, swift forerunners of death, disclosed the secret. Her life, which had long been hovering on its extinction, now yielded at once to the united effects of misery and sickness, and that same morning she had died.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the tumultuous emotions of the day, I was glad to find on my arrival at the inn that my companions had retired to rest. I gave Lucy in charge to the Countess's attendant, and then sought repose from my various struggles and impatient regrets. For a few moments the events of the day floated in disastrous pageant through my brain, till sleep bathed it in forgetfulness; when morning dawned and I awoke, it seemed as if my slumber had endured for years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My companions had not shared my oblivion. Clara's swollen eyes shewed that she has passed the night in weeping. The Countess looked haggard and wan. Her firm spirit had not found relief in tears, and she suffered the more from all the painful retrospect and agonizing regret that now occupied her. We departed from Windsor, as soon as the burial rites had been performed for Lucy's mother, and, urged on by an impatient desire to change the scene, went forward towards Dover with speed, our escort having gone before to provide horses; finding them either in the warm stables they instinctively sought during the cold weather, or standing shivering in the bleak fields ready to surrender their liberty in exchange for offered corn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During our ride the Countess recounted to me the extraordinary circumstances which had brought her so strangely to my side in the chancel of St. George's chapel. When last she had taken leave of Idris, as she looked anxiously on her faded person and pallid countenance, she had suddenly been visited by a conviction that she saw her for the last time. It was hard to part with her while under the dominion of this sentiment, and for the last time she endeavoured to persuade her daughter to commit herself to her nursing, permitting me to join Adrian. Idris mildly refused, and thus they separated. The idea that they should never again meet grew on the Countess's mind, and haunted her perpetually; a thousand times she had resolved to turn back and join us, and was again and again restrained by the pride and anger of which she was the slave. Proud of heart as she was, she bathed her pillow with nightly tears, and through the day was subdued by nervous agitation and expectation of the dreaded event, which she was wholly incapable of curbing. She confessed that at this period her hatred of me knew no bounds, since she considered me as the sole obstacle to the fulfilment of her dearest wish, that of attending upon her daughter in her last moments. She desired to express her fears to her son, and to seek consolation from his sympathy with, or courage from his rejection of, her auguries.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the first day of her arrival at Dover she walked with him on the sea beach, and with the timidity characteristic of passionate and exaggerated feeling was by degrees bringing the conversation to the desired point, when she could communicate her fears to him, when the messenger who bore my letter announcing our temporary return to Windsor, came riding down to them. He gave some oral account of how he had left us, and added, that notwithstanding the cheerfulness and good courage of Lady Idris, he was afraid that she would hardly reach Windsor alive. "True," said the Countess, "your fears are just, she is about to expire!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As she spoke, her eyes were fixed on a tomblike hollow of the cliff, and she saw, she averred the same to me with solemnity, Idris pacing slowly towards this cave. She was turned from her, her head was bent down, her white dress was such as she was accustomed to wear, except that a thin crape-like veil covered her golden tresses, and concealed her as a dim transparent mist. She looked dejected, as docilely yielding to a commanding power; she submissively entered, and was lost in the dark recess.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Were I subject to visionary moods," said the venerable lady, as she continued her narrative, "I might doubt my eyes, and condemn my credulity; but reality is the world I live in, and what I saw I doubt not had existence beyond myself. From that moment I could not rest; it was worth my existence to see her once again before she died; I knew that I should not accomplish this, yet I must endeavour. I immediately departed for Windsor; and, though I was assured that we travelled speedily, it seemed to me that our progress was snail-like, and that delays were created solely for my annoyance. Still I accused you, and heaped on your head the fiery ashes of my burning impatience. It was no disappointment, though an agonizing pang, when you pointed to her last abode; and words would ill express the abhorrence I that moment felt towards you, the triumphant impediment to my dearest wishes. I saw her, and anger, and hate, and injustice died at her bier, giving place at their departure to a remorse (Great God, that I should feel it!) which must last while memory and feeling endure."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To medicine such remorse, to prevent awakening love and new-born mildness from producing the same bitter fruit that hate and harshness had done, I devoted all my endeavours to soothe the venerable penitent. Our party was a melancholy one; each was possessed by regret for what was remediless; for the absence of his mother shadowed even the infant gaiety of Evelyn. Added to this was the prospect of the uncertain future. Before the final accomplishment of any great voluntary change the mind vacillates, now soothing itself by fervent expectation, now recoiling from obstacles which seem never to have presented themselves before with so frightful an aspect. An involuntary tremor ran through me when I thought that in another day we might have crossed the watery barrier, and have set forward on that hopeless, interminable, sad wandering, which but a short time before I regarded as the only relief to sorrow that our situation afforded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Our approach to Dover was announced by the loud roarings of the wintry sea. They were borne miles inland by the sound-laden blast, and by their unaccustomed uproar, imparted a feeling of insecurity and peril to our stable abode. At first we hardly permitted ourselves to think that any unusual eruption of nature caused this tremendous war of air and water, but rather fancied that we merely listened to what we had heard a thousand times before, when we had watched the flocks of fleece-crowned waves, driven by the winds, come to lament and die on the barren sands and pointed rocks. But we found upon advancing farther, that Dover was overflowed— many of the houses were overthrown by the surges which filled the streets, and with hideous brawlings sometimes retreated leaving the pavement of the town bare, till again hurried forward by the influx of ocean, they returned with thunder-sound to their usurped station.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hardly less disturbed than the tempestuous world of waters was the assembly of human beings, that from the cliff fearfully watched its ravings. On the morning of the arrival of the emigrants under the conduct of Adrian, the sea had been serene and glassy, the slight ripples refracted the sunbeams, which shed their radiance through the clear blue frosty air. This placid appearance of nature was hailed as a good augury for the voyage, and the chief immediately repaired to the harbour to examine two steamboats which were moored there. On the following midnight, when all were at rest, a frightful storm of wind and clattering rain and hail first disturbed them, and the voice of one shrieking in the streets, that the sleepers must awake or they would be drowned; and when they rushed out, half clothed, to discover the meaning of this alarm, they found that the tide, rising above every mark, was rushing into the town. They ascended the cliff, but the darkness permitted only the white crest of waves to be seen, while the roaring wind mingled its howlings in dire accord with the wild surges. The awful hour of night, the utter inexperience of many who had never seen the sea before, the wailing of women and cries of children added to the horror of the tumult. All the following day the same scene continued. When the tide ebbed, the town was left dry; but on its flow, it rose even higher than on the preceding night. The vast ships that lay rotting in the roads were whirled from their anchorage, and driven and jammed against the cliff, the vessels in the harbour were flung on land like sea-weed, and there battered to pieces by the breakers. The waves dashed against the cliff, which if in any place it had been before loosened, now gave way, and the affrighted crowd saw vast fragments of the near earth fall with crash and roar into the deep. This sight operated differently on different persons. The greater part thought it a judgment of God, to prevent or punish our emigration from our native land. Many were doubly eager to quit a nook of ground now become their prison, which appeared unable to resist the inroads of ocean's giant waves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When we arrived at Dover, after a fatiguing day's journey, we all required rest and sleep; but the scene acting around us soon drove away such ideas. We were drawn, along with the greater part of our companions, to the edge of the cliff, there to listen to and make a thousand conjectures. A fog narrowed our horizon to about a quarter of a mile, and the misty veil, cold and dense, enveloped sky and sea in equal obscurity. What added to our inquietude was the circumstance that two-thirds of our original number were now waiting for us in Paris, and clinging, as we now did most painfully, to any addition to our melancholy remnant, this division, with the tameless impassable ocean between, struck us with affright. At length, after loitering for several hours on the cliff, we retired to Dover Castle, whose roof sheltered all who breathed the English air, and sought the sleep necessary to restore strength and courage to our worn frames and languid spirits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Early in the morning Adrian brought me the welcome intelligence that the wind had changed: it had been south-west; it was now north-east. The sky was stripped bare of clouds by the increasing gale, while the tide at its ebb seceded entirely from the town. The change of wind rather increased the fury of the sea, but it altered its late dusky hue to a bright green; and in spite of its unmitigated clamour, its more cheerful appearance instilled hope and pleasure. All day we watched the ranging of the mountainous waves, and towards sunset a desire to decypher the promise for the morrow at its setting, made us all gather with one accord on the edge of the cliff. When the mighty luminary approached within a few degrees of the tempest-tossed horizon, suddenly, a wonder! three other suns, alike burning and brilliant, rushed from various quarters of the heavens towards the great orb; they whirled round it. The glare of light was intense to our dazzled eyes; the sun itself seemed to join in the dance, while the sea burned like a furnace, like all Vesuvius a-light, with flowing lava beneath. The horses broke loose from their stalls in terror—a herd of cattle, panic struck, raced down to the brink of the cliff, and blinded by light, plunged down with frightful yells in the waves below. The time occupied by the apparition of these meteors was comparatively short; suddenly the three mock suns united in one, and plunged into the sea. A few seconds afterwards, a deafening watery sound came up with awful peal from the spot where they had disappeared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Meanwhile the sun, disencumbered from his strange satellites, paced with its accustomed majesty towards its western home. When—we dared not trust our eyes late dazzled, but it seemed that—the sea rose to meet it—it mounted higher and higher, till the fiery globe was obscured, and the wall of water still ascended the horizon; it appeared as if suddenly the motion of earth was revealed to us—as if no longer we were ruled by ancient laws, but were turned adrift in an unknown region of space. Many cried aloud, that these were no meteors, but globes of burning matter, which had set fire to the earth, and caused the vast cauldron at our feet to bubble up with its measureless waves; the day of judgment was come they averred, and a few moments would transport us before the awful countenance of the omnipotent judge; while those less given to visionary terrors, declared that two conflicting gales had occasioned the last phaenomenon. In support of this opinion they pointed out the fact that the east wind died away, while the rushing of the coming west mingled its wild howl with the roar of the advancing waters. Would the cliff resist this new battery? Was not the giant wave far higher than the precipice? Would not our little island be deluged by its approach? The crowd of spectators fled. They were dispersed over the fields, stopping now and then, and looking back in terror. A sublime sense of awe calmed the swift pulsations of my heart—I awaited the approach of the destruction menaced, with that solemn resignation which an unavoidable necessity instils. The ocean every moment assumed a more terrific aspect, while the twilight was dimmed by the rack which the west wind spread over the sky. By slow degrees however, as the wave advanced, it took a more mild appearance; some under current of air, or obstruction in the bed of the waters, checked its progress, and it sank gradually; while the surface of the sea became uniformly higher as it dissolved into it. This change took from us the fear of an immediate catastrophe, although we were still anxious as to the final result. We continued during the whole night to watch the fury of the sea and the pace of the driving clouds, through whose openings the rare stars rushed impetuously; the thunder of conflicting elements deprived us of all power to sleep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This endured ceaselessly for three days and nights. The stoutest hearts quailed before the savage enmity of nature; provisions began to fail us, though every day foraging parties were dispersed to the nearer towns. In vain we schooled ourselves into the belief, that there was nothing out of the common order of nature in the strife we witnessed; our disasterous and overwhelming destiny turned the best of us to cowards. Death had hunted us through the course of many months, even to the narrow strip of time on which we now stood; narrow indeed, and buffeted by storms, was our footway overhanging the great sea of calamity—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > As an unsheltered northern shore</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Is shaken by the wintry wave—</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > And frequent storms for evermore,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > (While from the west the loud winds rave,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Or from the east, or mountains hoar)</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The struck and tott'ring sand-bank lave.[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It required more than human energy to bear up against the menaces of destruction that every where surrounded us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After the lapse of three days, the gale died away, the sea-gull sailed upon the calm bosom of the windless atmosphere, and the last yellow leaf on the topmost branch of the oak hung without motion. The sea no longer broke with fury; but a swell setting in steadily for shore, with long sweep and sullen burst replaced the roar of the breakers. Yet we derived hope from the change, and we did not doubt that after the interval of a few days the sea would resume its tranquillity. The sunset of the fourth day favoured this idea; it was clear and golden. As we gazed on the purple sea, radiant beneath, we were attracted by a novel spectacle; a dark speck—as it neared, visibly a boat—rode on the top of the waves, every now and then lost in the steep vallies between. We marked its course with eager questionings; and, when we saw that it evidently made for shore, we descended to the only practicable landing place, and hoisted a signal to direct them. By the help of glasses we distinguished her crew; it consisted of nine men, Englishmen, belonging in truth to the two divisions of our people, who had preceded us, and had been for several weeks at Paris. As countryman was wont to meet countryman in distant lands, did we greet our visitors on their landing, with outstretched hands and gladsome welcome. They were slow to reciprocate our gratulations. They looked angry and resentful; not less than the chafed sea which they had traversed with imminent peril, though apparently more displeased with each other than with us. It was strange to see these human beings, who appeared to be given forth by the earth like rare and inestimable plants, full of towering passion, and the spirit of angry contest. Their first demand was to be conducted to the Lord Protector of England, so they called Adrian, though he had long discarded the empty title, as a bitter mockery of the shadow to which the Protectorship was now reduced. They were speedily led to Dover Castle, from whose keep Adrian had watched the movements of the boat. He received them with the interest and wonder so strange a visitation created. In the confusion occasioned by their angry demands for precedence, it was long before we could discover the secret meaning of this strange scene. By degrees, from the furious declamations of one, the fierce interruptions of another, and the bitter scoffs of a third, we found that they were deputies from our colony at Paris, from three parties there formed, who, each with angry rivalry, tried to attain a superiority over the other two. These deputies had been dispatched by them to Adrian, who had been selected arbiter; and they had journied from Paris to Calais, through the vacant towns and desolate country, indulging the while violent hatred against each other; and now they pleaded their several causes with unmitigated party-spirit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By examining the deputies apart, and after much investigation, we learnt the true state of things at Paris. Since parliament had elected him Ryland's deputy, all the surviving English had submitted to Adrian. He was our captain to lead us from our native soil to unknown lands, our lawgiver and our preserver. On the first arrangement of our scheme of emigration, no continued separation of our members was contemplated, and the command of the whole body in gradual ascent of power had its apex in the Earl of Windsor. But unforeseen circumstances changed our plans for us, and occasioned the greater part of our numbers to be divided for the space of nearly two months, from the supreme chief. They had gone over in two distinct bodies; and on their arrival at Paris dissension arose between them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They had found Paris a desert. When first the plague had appeared, the return of travellers and merchants, and communications by letter, informed us regularly of the ravages made by disease on the continent. But with the encreased mortality this intercourse declined and ceased. Even in England itself communication from one part of the island to the other became slow and rare. No vessel stemmed the flood that divided Calais from Dover; or if some melancholy voyager, wishing to assure himself of the life or death of his relatives, put from the French shore to return among us, often the greedy ocean swallowed his little craft, or after a day or two he was infected by the disorder, and died before he could tell the tale of the desolation of France. We were therefore to a great degree ignorant of the state of things on the continent, and were not without some vague hope of finding numerous companions in its wide track. But the same causes that had so fearfully diminished the English nation had had even greater scope for mischief in the sister land. France was a blank; during the long line of road from Calais to Paris not one human being was found. In Paris there were a few, perhaps a hundred, who, resigned to their coming fate, flitted about the streets of the capital and assembled to converse of past times, with that vivacity and even gaiety that seldom deserts the individuals of this nation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The English took uncontested possession of Paris. Its high houses and narrow streets were lifeless. A few pale figures were to be distinguished at the accustomed resort at the Tuileries; they wondered wherefore the islanders should approach their ill-fated city—for in the excess of wretchedness, the sufferers always imagine, that their part of the calamity is the bitterest, as, when enduring intense pain, we would exchange the particular torture we writhe under, for any other which should visit a different part of the frame. They listened to the account the emigrants gave of their motives for leaving their native land, with a shrug almost of disdain—"Return," they said, "return to your island, whose sea breezes, and division from the continent gives some promise of health; if Pestilence among you has slain its hundreds, with us it has slain its thousands. Are you not even now more numerous than we are?—A year ago you would have found only the sick burying the dead; now we are happier; for the pang of struggle has passed away, and the few you find here are patiently waiting the final blow. But you, who are not content to die, breathe no longer the air of France, or soon you will only be a part of her soil."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus, by menaces of the sword, they would have driven back those who had escaped from fire. But the peril left behind was deemed imminent by my countrymen; that before them doubtful and distant; and soon other feelings arose to obliterate fear, or to replace it by passions, that ought to have had no place among a brotherhood of unhappy survivors of the expiring world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The more numerous division of emigrants, which arrived first at Paris, assumed a superiority of rank and power; the second party asserted their independence. A third was formed by a sectarian, a self-erected prophet, who, while he attributed all power and rule to God, strove to get the real command of his comrades into his own hands. This third division consisted of fewest individuals, but their purpose was more one, their obedience to their leader more entire, their fortitude and courage more unyielding and active.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During the whole progress of the plague, the teachers of religion were in possession of great power; a power of good, if rightly directed, or of incalculable mischief, if fanaticism or intolerance guided their efforts. In the present instance, a worse feeling than either of these actuated the leader. He was an impostor in the most determined sense of the term. A man who had in early life lost, through the indulgence of vicious propensities, all sense of rectitude or self-esteem; and who, when ambition was awakened in him, gave himself up to its influence unbridled by any scruple. His father had been a methodist preacher, an enthusiastic man with simple intentions; but whose pernicious doctrines of election and special grace had contributed to destroy all conscientious feeling in his son. During the progress of the pestilence he had entered upon various schemes, by which to acquire adherents and power. Adrian had discovered and defeated these attempts; but Adrian was absent; the wolf assumed the shepherd's garb, and the flock admitted the deception: he had formed a party during the few weeks he had been in Paris, who zealously propagated the creed of his divine mission, and believed that safety and salvation were to be afforded only to those who put their trust in him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When once the spirit of dissension had arisen, the most frivolous causes gave it activity. The first party, on arriving at Paris, had taken possession of the Tuileries; chance and friendly feeling had induced the second to lodge near to them. A contest arose concerning the distribution of the pillage; the chiefs of the first division demanded that the whole should be placed at their disposal; with this assumption the opposite party refused to comply. When next the latter went to forage, the gates of Paris were shut on them. After overcoming this difficulty, they marched in a body to the Tuileries. They found that their enemies had been already expelled thence by the Elect, as the fanatical party designated themselves, who refused to admit any into the palace who did not first abjure obedience to all except God, and his delegate on earth, their chief. Such was the beginning of the strife, which at length proceeded so far, that the three divisions, armed, met in the Place Vendome, each resolved to subdue by force the resistance of its adversaries. They assembled, their muskets were loaded, and even pointed at the breasts of their so called enemies. One word had been sufficient; and there the last of mankind would have burthened their souls with the crime of murder, and dipt their hands in each other's blood. A sense of shame, a recollection that not only their cause, but the existence of the whole human race was at stake, entered the breast of the leader of the more numerous party. He was aware, that if the ranks were thinned, no other recruits could fill them up; that each man was as a priceless gem in a kingly crown, which if destroyed, the earth's deep entrails could yield no paragon. He was a young man, and had been hurried on by presumption, and the notion of his high rank and superiority to all other pretenders; now he repented his work, he felt that all the blood about to be shed would be on his head; with sudden impulse therefore he spurred his horse between the bands, and, having fixed a white handkerchief on the point of his uplifted sword, thus demanded parley; the opposite leaders obeyed the signal. He spoke with warmth; he reminded them of the oath all the chiefs had taken to submit to the Lord Protector; he declared their present meeting to be an act of treason and mutiny; he allowed that he had been hurried away by passion, but that a cooler moment had arrived; and he proposed that each party should send deputies to the Earl of Windsor, inviting his interference and offering submission to his decision. His offer was accepted so far, that each leader consented to command a retreat, and moreover agreed, that after the approbation of their several parties had been consulted, they should meet that night on some neutral spot to ratify the truce. At the meeting of the chiefs, this plan was finally concluded upon. The leader of the fanatics indeed refused to admit the arbitration of Adrian; he sent ambassadors, rather than deputies, to assert his claim, not plead his cause.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The truce was to continue until the first of February, when the bands were again to assemble on the Place Vendome; it was of the utmost consequence therefore that Adrian should arrive in Paris by that day, since an hair might turn the scale, and peace, scared away by intestine broils, might only return to watch by the silent dead. It was now the twenty-eighth of January; every vessel stationed near Dover had been beaten to pieces and destroyed by the furious storms I have commemorated. Our journey however would admit of no delay. That very night, Adrian, and I, and twelve others, either friends or attendants, put off from the English shore, in the boat that had brought over the deputies. We all took our turn at the oar; and the immediate occasion of our departure affording us abundant matter for conjecture and discourse, prevented the feeling that we left our native country, depopulate England, for the last time, to enter deeply into the minds of the greater part of our number. It was a serene starlight night, and the dark line of the English coast continued for some time visible at intervals, as we rose on the broad back of the waves. I exerted myself with my long oar to give swift impulse to our skiff; and, while the waters splashed with melancholy sound against its sides, I looked with sad affection on this last glimpse of sea-girt England, and strained my eyes not too soon to lose sight of the castellated cliff, which rose to protect the land of heroism and beauty from the inroads of ocean, that, turbulent as I had lately seen it, required such cyclopean walls for its repulsion. A solitary sea-gull winged its flight over our heads, to seek its nest in a cleft of the precipice. Yes, thou shalt revisit the land of thy birth, I thought, as I looked invidiously on the airy voyager; but we shall, never more! Tomb of Idris, farewell! Grave, in which my heart lies sepultured, farewell for ever!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We were twelve hours at sea, and the heavy swell obliged us to exert all our strength. At length, by mere dint of rowing, we reached the French coast. The stars faded, and the grey morning cast a dim veil over the silver horns of the waning moon—the sun rose broad and red from the sea, as we walked over the sands to Calais. Our first care was to procure horses, and although wearied by our night of watching and toil, some of our party immediately went in quest of these in the wide fields of the unenclosed and now barren plain round Calais. We divided ourselves, like seamen, into watches, and some reposed, while others prepared the morning's repast. Our foragers returned at noon with only six horses—on these, Adrian and I, and four others, proceeded on our journey towards the great city, which its inhabitants had fondly named the capital of the civilized world. Our horses had become, through their long holiday, almost wild, and we crossed the plain round Calais with impetuous speed. From the height near Boulogne, I turned again to look on England; nature had cast a misty pall over her, her cliff was hidden—there was spread the watery barrier that divided us, never again to be crossed; she lay on the ocean plain,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the great pool a swan's nest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ruined the nest, alas! the swans of Albion had passed away for ever—an uninhabited rock in the wide Pacific, which had remained since the creation uninhabited, unnamed, unmarked, would be of as much account in the world's future history, as desert England.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Our journey was impeded by a thousand obstacles. As our horses grew tired, we had to seek for others; and hours were wasted, while we exhausted our artifices to allure some of these enfranchised slaves of man to resume the yoke; or as we went from stable to stable through the towns, hoping to find some who had not forgotten the shelter of their native stalls. Our ill success in procuring them, obliged us continually to leave some one of our companions behind; and on the first of February, Adrian and I entered Paris, wholly unaccompanied. The serene morning had dawned when we arrived at Saint Denis, and the sun was high, when the clamour of voices, and the clash, as we feared, of weapons, guided us to where our countrymen had assembled on the Place Vendome. We passed a knot of Frenchmen, who were talking earnestly of the madness of the insular invaders, and then coming by a sudden turn upon the Place, we saw the sun glitter on drawn swords and fixed bayonets, while yells and clamours rent the air. It was a scene of unaccustomed confusion in these days of depopulation. Roused by fancied wrongs, and insulting scoffs, the opposite parties had rushed to attack each other; while the elect, drawn up apart, seemed to wait an opportunity to fall with better advantage on their foes, when they should have mutually weakened each other. A merciful power interposed, and no blood was shed; for, while the insane mob were in the very act of attack, the females, wives, mothers and daughters, rushed between; they seized the bridles; they embraced the knees of the horsemen, and hung on the necks, or enweaponed arms of their enraged relatives; the shrill female scream was mingled with the manly shout, and formed the wild clamour that welcomed us on our arrival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Our voices could not be heard in the tumult; Adrian however was eminent for the white charger he rode; spurring him, he dashed into the midst of the throng: he was recognized, and a loud cry raised for England and the Protector. The late adversaries, warmed to affection at the sight of him, joined in heedless confusion, and surrounded him; the women kissed his hands, and the edges of his garments; nay, his horse received tribute of their embraces; some wept their welcome; he appeared an angel of peace descended among them; and the only danger was, that his mortal nature would be demonstrated, by his suffocation from the kindness of his friends. His voice was at length heard, and obeyed; the crowd fell back; the chiefs alone rallied round him. I had seen Lord Raymond ride through his lines; his look of victory, and majestic mien obtained the respect and obedience of all: such was not the appearance or influence of Adrian. His slight figure, his fervent look, his gesture, more of deprecation than rule, were proofs that love, unmingled with fear, gave him dominion over the hearts of a multitude, who knew that he never flinched from danger, nor was actuated by other motives than care for the general welfare. No distinction was now visible between the two parties, late ready to shed each other's blood, for, though neither would submit to the other, they both yielded ready obedience to the Earl of Windsor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One party however remained, cut off from the rest, which did not sympathize in the joy exhibited on Adrian's arrival, or imbibe the spirit of peace, which fell like dew upon the softened hearts of their countrymen. At the head of this assembly was a ponderous, dark-looking man, whose malign eye surveyed with gloating delight the stern looks of his followers. They had hitherto been inactive, but now, perceiving themselves to be forgotten in the universal jubilee, they advanced with threatening gestures: our friends had, as it were in wanton contention, attacked each other; they wanted but to be told that their cause was one, for it to become so: their mutual anger had been a fire of straw, compared to the slow-burning hatred they both entertained for these seceders, who seized a portion of the world to come, there to entrench and incastellate themselves, and to issue with fearful sally, and appalling denunciations, on the mere common children of the earth. The first advance of the little army of the elect reawakened their rage; they grasped their arms, and waited but their leader's signal to commence the attack, when the clear tones of Adrian's voice were heard, commanding them to fall back; with confused murmur and hurried retreat, as the wave ebbs clamorously from the sands it lately covered, our friends obeyed. Adrian rode singly into the space between the opposing bands; he approached the hostile leader, as requesting him to imitate his example, but his look was not obeyed, and the chief advanced, followed by his whole troop. There were many women among them, who seemed more eager and resolute than their male companions. They pressed round their leader, as if to shield him, while they loudly bestowed on him every sacred denomination and epithet of worship. Adrian met them half way; they halted: "What," he said, "do you seek? Do you require any thing of us that we refuse to give, and that you are forced to acquire by arms and warfare?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His questions were answered by a general cry, in which the words election, sin, and red right arm of God, could alone be heard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian looked expressly at their leader, saying, "Can you not silence your followers? Mine, you perceive, obey me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The fellow answered by a scowl; and then, perhaps fearful that his people should become auditors of the debate he expected to ensue, he commanded them to fall back, and advanced by himself. "What, I again ask," said Adrian, "do you require of us?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Repentance," replied the man, whose sinister brow gathered clouds as he spoke. "Obedience to the will of the Most High, made manifest to these his Elected People. Do we not all die through your sins, O generation of unbelief, and have we not a right to demand of you repentance and obedience?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And if we refuse them, what then?" his opponent inquired mildly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Beware," cried the man, "God hears you, and will smite your stony heart in his wrath; his poisoned arrows fly, his dogs of death are unleashed! We will not perish unrevenged—and mighty will our avenger be, when he descends in visible majesty, and scatters destruction among you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My good fellow," said Adrian, with quiet scorn, "I wish that you were ignorant only, and I think it would be no difficult task to prove to you, that you speak of what you do not understand. On the present occasion however, it is enough for me to know that you seek nothing of us; and, heaven is our witness, we seek nothing of you. I should be sorry to embitter by strife the few days that we any of us may have here to live; when there," he pointed downwards, "we shall not be able to contend, while here we need not. Go home, or stay; pray to your God in your own mode; your friends may do the like. My orisons consist in peace and good will, in resignation and hope. Farewell!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He bowed slightly to the angry disputant who was about to reply; and, turning his horse down Rue Saint Honore, called on his friends to follow him. He rode slowly, to give time to all to join him at the Barrier, and then issued his orders that those who yielded obedience to him, should rendezvous at Versailles. In the meantime he remained within the walls of Paris, until he had secured the safe retreat of all. In about a fortnight the remainder of the emigrants arrived from England, and they all repaired to Versailles; apartments were prepared for the family of the Protector in the Grand Trianon, and there, after the excitement of these events, we reposed amidst the luxuries of the departed Bourbons.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Chorus in Oedipus Coloneus.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER V.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >AFTER the repose of a few days, we held a council, to decide on our future movements. Our first plan had been to quit our wintry native latitude, and seek for our diminished numbers the luxuries and delights of a southern climate. We had not fixed on any precise spot as the termination of our wanderings; but a vague picture of perpetual spring, fragrant groves, and sparkling streams, floated in our imagination to entice us on. A variety of causes had detained us in England, and we had now arrived at the middle of February; if we pursued our original project, we should find ourselves in a worse situation than before, having exchanged our temperate climate for the intolerable heats of a summer in Egypt or Persia. We were therefore obliged to modify our plan, as the season continued to be inclement; and it was determined that we should await the arrival of spring in our present abode, and so order our future movements as to pass the hot months in the icy vallies of Switzerland, deferring our southern progress until the ensuing autumn, if such a season was ever again to be beheld by us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The castle and town of Versailles afforded our numbers ample accommodation, and foraging parties took it by turns to supply our wants. There was a strange and appalling motley in the situation of these the last of the race. At first I likened it to a colony, which borne over the far seas, struck root for the first time in a new country. But where was the bustle and industry characteristic of such an assemblage; the rudely constructed dwelling, which was to suffice till a more commodious mansion could be built; the marking out of fields; the attempt at cultivation; the eager curiosity to discover unknown animals and herbs; the excursions for the sake of exploring the country? Our habitations were palaces our food was ready stored in granaries—there was no need of labour, no inquisitiveness, no restless desire to get on. If we had been assured that we should secure the lives of our present numbers, there would have been more vivacity and hope in our councils. We should have discussed as to the period when the existing produce for man's sustenance would no longer suffice for us, and what mode of life we should then adopt. We should have considered more carefully our future plans, and debated concerning the spot where we should in future dwell. But summer and the plague were near, and we dared not look forward. Every heart sickened at the thought of amusement; if the younger part of our community were ever impelled, by youthful and untamed hilarity, to enter on any dance or song, to cheer the melancholy time, they would suddenly break off, checked by a mournful look or agonizing sigh from any one among them, who was prevented by sorrows and losses from mingling in the festivity. If laughter echoed under our roof, yet the heart was vacant of joy; and, when ever it chanced that I witnessed such attempts at pastime, they encreased instead of diminishing my sense of woe. In the midst of the pleasure-hunting throng, I would close my eyes, and see before me the obscure cavern, where was garnered the mortality of Idris, and the dead lay around, mouldering in hushed repose. When I again became aware of the present hour, softest melody of Lydian flute, or harmonious maze of graceful dance, was but as the demoniac chorus in the Wolf's Glen, and the caperings of the reptiles that surrounded the magic circle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My dearest interval of peace occurred, when, released from the obligation of associating with the crowd, I could repose in the dear home where my children lived. Children I say, for the tenderest emotions of paternity bound me to Clara. She was now fourteen; sorrow, and deep insight into the scenes around her, calmed the restless spirit of girlhood; while the remembrance of her father whom she idolized, and respect for me and Adrian, implanted an high sense of duty in her young heart. Though serious she was not sad; the eager desire that makes us all, when young, plume our wings, and stretch our necks, that we may more swiftly alight tiptoe on the height of maturity, was subdued in her by early experience. All that she could spare of overflowing love from her parents' memory, and attention to her living relatives, was spent upon religion. This was the hidden law of her heart, which she concealed with childish reserve, and cherished the more because it was secret. What faith so entire, what charity so pure, what hope so fervent, as that of early youth? and she, all love, all tenderness and trust, who from infancy had been tossed on the wide sea of passion and misfortune, saw the finger of apparent divinity in all, and her best hope was to make herself acceptable to the power she worshipped. Evelyn was only five years old; his joyous heart was incapable of sorrow, and he enlivened our house with the innocent mirth incident to his years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The aged Countess of Windsor had fallen from her dream of power, rank and grandeur; she had been suddenly seized with the conviction, that love was the only good of life, virtue the only ennobling distinction and enriching wealth. Such a lesson had been taught her by the dead lips of her neglected daughter; and she devoted herself, with all the fiery violence of her character, to the obtaining the affection of the remnants of her family. In early years the heart of Adrian had been chilled towards her; and, though he observed a due respect, her coldness, mixed with the recollection of disappointment and madness, caused him to feel even pain in her society. She saw this, and yet determined to win his love; the obstacle served the rather to excite her ambition. As Henry, Emperor of Germany, lay in the snow before Pope Leo's gate for three winter days and nights, so did she in humility wait before the icy barriers of his closed heart, till he, the servant of love, and prince of tender courtesy, opened it wide for her admittance, bestowing, with fervency and gratitude, the tribute of filial affection she merited. Her understanding, courage, and presence of mind, became powerful auxiliaries to him in the difficult task of ruling the tumultuous crowd, which were subjected to his control, in truth by a single hair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The principal circumstances that disturbed our tranquillity during this interval, originated in the vicinity of the impostor-prophet and his followers. They continued to reside at Paris; but missionaries from among them often visited Versailles—and such was the power of assertions, however false, yet vehemently iterated, over the ready credulity of the ignorant and fearful, that they seldom failed in drawing over to their party some from among our numbers. An instance of this nature coming immediately under our notice, we were led to consider the miserable state in which we should leave our countrymen, when we should, at the approach of summer, move on towards Switzerland, and leave a deluded crew behind us in the hands of their miscreant leader. The sense of the smallness of our numbers, and expectation of decrease, pressed upon us; and, while it would be a subject of congratulation to ourselves to add one to our party, it would be doubly gratifying to rescue from the pernicious influence of superstition and unrelenting tyranny, the victims that now, though voluntarily enchained, groaned beneath it. If we had considered the preacher as sincere in a belief of his own denunciations, or only moderately actuated by kind feeling in the exercise of his assumed powers, we should have immediately addressed ourselves to him, and endeavoured with our best arguments to soften and humanize his views. But he was instigated by ambition, he desired to rule over these last stragglers from the fold of death; his projects went so far, as to cause him to calculate that, if, from these crushed remains, a few survived, so that a new race should spring up, he, by holding tight the reins of belief, might be remembered by the post-pestilential race as a patriarch, a prophet, nay a deity; such as of old among the post-diluvians were Jupiter the conqueror, Serapis the lawgiver, and Vishnou the preserver. These ideas made him inflexible in his rule, and violent in his hate of any who presumed to share with him his usurped empire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is a strange fact, but incontestible, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who patient, reasonable and gentle, yet disdains to use other argument than truth, has less influence over men's minds, than he who, grasping and selfish, refuses not to adopt any means, nor awaken any passion, nor diffuse any falsehood, for the advancement of his cause. If this from time immemorial has been the case, the contrast was infinitely greater, now that the one could bring harrowing fears and transcendent hopes into play; while the other had few hopes to hold forth, nor could influence the imagination to diminish the fears which he himself was the first to entertain. The preacher had persuaded his followers, that their escape from the plague, the salvation of their children, and the rise of a new race of men from their seed, depended on their faith in, and their submission to him. They greedily imbibed this belief; and their over-weening credulity even rendered them eager to make converts to the same faith.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How to seduce any individuals from such an alliance of fraud, was a frequent subject of Adrian's meditations and discourse. He formed many plans for the purpose; but his own troop kept him in full occupation to ensure their fidelity and safety; beside which the preacher was as cautious and prudent, as he was cruel. His victims lived under the strictest rules and laws, which either entirely imprisoned them within the Tuileries, or let them out in such numbers, and under such leaders, as precluded the possibility of controversy. There was one among them however whom I resolved to save; she had been known to us in happier days; Idris had loved her; and her excellent nature made it peculiarly lamentable that she should be sacrificed by this merciless cannibal of souls.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This man had between two and three hundred persons enlisted under his banners. More than half of them were women; there were about fifty children of all ages; and not more than eighty men. They were mostly drawn from that which, when such distinctions existed, was denominated the lower rank of society. The exceptions consisted of a few high-born females, who, panic-struck, and tamed by sorrow, had joined him. Among these was one, young, lovely, and enthusiastic, whose very goodness made her a more easy victim. I have mentioned her before: Juliet, the youngest daughter, and now sole relic of the ducal house of L—-. There are some beings, whom fate seems to select on whom to pour, in unmeasured portion, the vials of her wrath, and whom she bathes even to the lips in misery. Such a one was the ill-starred Juliet. She had lost her indulgent parents, her brothers and sisters, companions of her youth; in one fell swoop they had been carried off from her. Yet she had again dared to call herself happy; united to her admirer, to him who possessed and filled her whole heart, she yielded to the lethean powers of love, and knew and felt only his life and presence. At the very time when with keen delight she welcomed the tokens of maternity, this sole prop of her life failed, her husband died of the plague. For a time she had been lulled in insanity; the birth of her child restored her to the cruel reality of things, but gave her at the same time an object for whom to preserve at once life and reason. Every friend and relative had died off, and she was reduced to solitude and penury; deep melancholy and angry impatience distorted her judgment, so that she could not persuade herself to disclose her distress to us. When she heard of the plan of universal emigration, she resolved to remain behind with her child, and alone in wide England to live or die, as fate might decree, beside the grave of her beloved. She had hidden herself in one of the many empty habitations of London; it was she who rescued my Idris on the fatal twentieth of November, though my immediate danger, and the subsequent illness of Idris, caused us to forget our hapless friend. This circumstance had however brought her again in contact with her fellow-creatures; a slight illness of her infant, proved to her that she was still bound to humanity by an indestructible tie; to preserve this little creature's life became the object of her being, and she joined the first division of migrants who went over to Paris.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She became an easy prey to the methodist; her sensibility and acute fears rendered her accessible to every impulse; her love for her child made her eager to cling to the merest straw held out to save him. Her mind, once unstrung, and now tuned by roughest inharmonious hands, made her credulous: beautiful as fabled goddess, with voice of unrivalled sweetness, burning with new lighted enthusiasm, she became a stedfast proselyte, and powerful auxiliary to the leader of the elect. I had remarked her in the crowd, on the day we met on the Place Vendome; and, recollecting suddenly her providential rescue of my lost one, on the night of the twentieth of November, I reproached myself for my neglect and ingratitude, and felt impelled to leave no means that I could adopt untried, to recall her to her better self, and rescue her from the fangs of the hypocrite destroyer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I will not, at this period of my story, record the artifices I used to penetrate the asylum of the Tuileries, or give what would be a tedious account of my stratagems, disappointments, and perseverance. I at last succeeded in entering these walls, and roamed its halls and corridors in eager hope to find my selected convert. In the evening I contrived to mingle unobserved with the congregation, which assembled in the chapel to listen to the crafty and eloquent harangue of their prophet. I saw Juliet near him. Her dark eyes, fearfully impressed with the restless glare of madness, were fixed on him; she held her infant, not yet a year old, in her arms; and care of it alone could distract her attention from the words to which she eagerly listened. After the sermon was over, the congregation dispersed; all quitted the chapel except she whom I sought; her babe had fallen asleep; so she placed it on a cushion, and sat on the floor beside, watching its tranquil slumber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I presented myself to her; for a moment natural feeling produced a sentiment of gladness, which disappeared again, when with ardent and affectionate exhortation I besought her to accompany me in flight from this den of superstition and misery. In a moment she relapsed into the delirium of fanaticism, and, but that her gentle nature forbade, would have loaded me with execrations. She conjured me, she commanded me to leave her— "Beware, O beware," she cried, "fly while yet your escape is practicable. Now you are safe; but strange sounds and inspirations come on me at times, and if the Eternal should in awful whisper reveal to me his will, that to save my child you must be sacrificed, I would call in the satellites of him you call the tyrant; they would tear you limb from limb; nor would I hallow the death of him whom Idris loved, by a single tear."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke hurriedly, with tuneless voice, and wild look; her child awoke, and, frightened, began to cry; each sob went to the ill-fated mother's heart, and she mingled the epithets of endearment she addressed to her infant, with angry commands that I should leave her. Had I had the means, I would have risked all, have torn her by force from the murderer's den, and trusted to the healing balm of reason and affection. But I had no choice, no power even of longer struggle; steps were heard along the gallery, and the voice of the preacher drew near. Juliet, straining her child in a close embrace, fled by another passage. Even then I would have followed her; but my foe and his satellites entered; I was surrounded, and taken prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I remembered the menace of the unhappy Juliet, and expected the full tempest of the man's vengeance, and the awakened wrath of his followers, to fall instantly upon me. I was questioned. My answers were simple and sincere. "His own mouth condemns him," exclaimed the impostor; "he confesses that his intention was to seduce from the way of salvation our well-beloved sister in God; away with him to the dungeon; to-morrow he dies the death; we are manifestly called upon to make an example, tremendous and appalling, to scare the children of sin from our asylum of the saved."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My heart revolted from his hypocritical jargon: but it was unworthy of me to combat in words with the ruffian; and my answer was cool; while, far from being possessed with fear, methought, even at the worst, a man true to himself, courageous and determined, could fight his way, even from the boards of the scaffold, through the herd of these misguided maniacs. "Remember," I said, "who I am; and be well assured that I shall not die unavenged. Your legal magistrate, the Lord Protector, knew of my design, and is aware that I am here; the cry of blood will reach him, and you and your miserable victims will long lament the tragedy you are about to act."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My antagonist did not deign to reply, even by a look;—"You know your duty," he said to his comrades,—"obey."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In a moment I was thrown on the earth, bound, blindfolded, and hurried away —liberty of limb and sight was only restored to me, when, surrounded by dungeon-walls, dark and impervious, I found myself a prisoner and alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Such was the result of my attempt to gain over the proselyte of this man of crime; I could not conceive that he would dare put me to death.—Yet I was in his hands; the path of his ambition had ever been dark and cruel; his power was founded upon fear; the one word which might cause me to die, unheard, unseen, in the obscurity of my dungeon, might be easier to speak than the deed of mercy to act. He would not risk probably a public execution; but a private assassination would at once terrify any of my companions from attempting a like feat, at the same time that a cautious line of conduct might enable him to avoid the enquiries and the vengeance of Adrian.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Two months ago, in a vault more obscure than the one I now inhabited, I had revolved the design of quietly laying me down to die; now I shuddered at the approach of fate. My imagination was busied in shaping forth the kind of death he would inflict. Would he allow me to wear out life with famine; or was the food administered to me to be medicined with death? Would he steal on me in my sleep; or should I contend to the last with my murderers, knowing, even while I struggled, that I must be overcome? I lived upon an earth whose diminished population a child's arithmetic might number; I had lived through long months with death stalking close at my side, while at intervals the shadow of his skeleton-shape darkened my path. I had believed that I despised the grim phantom, and laughed his power to scorn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Any other fate I should have met with courage, nay, have gone out gallantly to encounter. But to be murdered thus at the midnight hour by cold-blooded assassins, no friendly hand to close my eyes, or receive my parting blessing—to die in combat, hate and execration—ah, why, my angel love, didst thou restore me to life, when already I had stepped within the portals of the tomb, now that so soon again I was to be flung back a mangled corpse!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hours passed—centuries. Could I give words to the many thoughts which occupied me in endless succession during this interval, I should fill volumes. The air was dank, the dungeon-floor mildewed and icy cold; hunger came upon me too, and no sound reached me from without. To-morrow the ruffian had declared that I should die. When would to-morrow come? Was it not already here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My door was about to be opened. I heard the key turn, and the bars and bolts slowly removed. The opening of intervening passages permitted sounds from the interior of the palace to reach me; and I heard the clock strike one. They come to murder me, I thought; this hour does not befit a public execution. I drew myself up against the wall opposite the entrance; I collected my forces, I rallied my courage, I would not fall a tame prey. Slowly the door receded on its hinges—I was ready to spring forward to seize and grapple with the intruder, till the sight of who it was changed at once the temper of my mind. It was Juliet herself; pale and trembling she stood, a lamp in her hand, on the threshold of the dungeon, looking at me with wistful countenance. But in a moment she re-assumed her self-possession; and her languid eyes recovered their brilliancy. She said, "I am come to save you, Verney."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And yourself also," I cried: "dearest friend, can we indeed be saved?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Not a word," she replied, "follow me!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I obeyed instantly. We threaded with light steps many corridors, ascended several flights of stairs, and passed through long galleries; at the end of one she unlocked a low portal; a rush of wind extinguished our lamp; but, in lieu of it, we had the blessed moon-beams and the open face of heaven. Then first Juliet spoke:—"You are safe," she said, "God bless you!— farewell!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I seized her reluctant hand—"Dear friend," I cried, "misguided victim, do you not intend to escape with me? Have you not risked all in facilitating my flight? and do you think, that I will permit you to return, and suffer alone the effects of that miscreant's rage? Never!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do not fear for me," replied the lovely girl mournfully, "and do not imagine that without the consent of our chief you could be without these walls. It is he that has saved you; he assigned to me the part of leading you hither, because I am best acquainted with your motives for coming here, and can best appreciate his mercy in permitting you to depart."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And are you," I cried, "the dupe of this man? He dreads me alive as an enemy, and dead he fears my avengers. By favouring this clandestine escape he preserves a shew of consistency to his followers; but mercy is far from his heart. Do you forget his artifices, his cruelty, and fraud? As I am free, so are you. Come, Juliet, the mother of our lost Idris will welcome you, the noble Adrian will rejoice to receive you; you will find peace and love, and better hopes than fanaticism can afford. Come, and fear not; long before day we shall be at Versailles; close the door on this abode of crime —come, sweet Juliet, from hypocrisy and guilt to the society of the affectionate and good."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I spoke hurriedly, but with fervour: and while with gentle violence I drew her from the portal, some thought, some recollection of past scenes of youth and happiness, made her listen and yield to me; suddenly she broke away with a piercing shriek:—"My child, my child! he has my child; my darling girl is my hostage."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She darted from me into the passage; the gate closed between us—she was left in the fangs of this man of crime, a prisoner, still to inhale the pestilential atmosphere which adhered to his demoniac nature; the unimpeded breeze played on my cheek, the moon shone graciously upon me, my path was free. Glad to have escaped, yet melancholy in my very joy, I retrod my steps to Versailles.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VI.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >EVENTFUL winter passed; winter, the respite of our ills. By degrees the sun, which with slant beams had before yielded the more extended reign to night, lengthened his diurnal journey, and mounted his highest throne, at once the fosterer of earth's new beauty, and her lover. We who, like flies that congregate upon a dry rock at the ebbing of the tide, had played wantonly with time, allowing our passions, our hopes, and our mad desires to rule us, now heard the approaching roar of the ocean of destruction, and would have fled to some sheltered crevice, before the first wave broke over us. We resolved without delay, to commence our journey to Switzerland; we became eager to leave France. Under the icy vaults of the glaciers, beneath the shadow of the pines, the swinging of whose mighty branches was arrested by a load of snow; beside the streams whose intense cold proclaimed their origin to be from the slow-melting piles of congelated waters, amidst frequent storms which might purify the air, we should find health, if in truth health were not herself diseased.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We began our preparations at first with alacrity. We did not now bid adieu to our native country, to the graves of those we loved, to the flowers, and streams, and trees, which had lived beside us from infancy. Small sorrow would be ours on leaving Paris. A scene of shame, when we remembered our late contentions, and thought that we left behind a flock of miserable, deluded victims, bending under the tyranny of a selfish impostor. Small pangs should we feel in leaving the gardens, woods, and halls of the palaces of the Bourbons at Versailles, which we feared would soon be tainted by the dead, when we looked forward to vallies lovelier than any garden, to mighty forests and halls, built not for mortal majesty, but palaces of nature's own, with the Alp of marmoreal whiteness for their walls, the sky for their roof.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet our spirits flagged, as the day drew near which we had fixed for our departure. Dire visions and evil auguries, if such things were, thickened around us, so that in vain might men say—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These are their reasons, they are natural,[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >we felt them to be ominous, and dreaded the future event enchained to them. That the night owl should screech before the noon-day sun, that the hard-winged bat should wheel around the bed of beauty, that muttering thunder should in early spring startle the cloudless air, that sudden and exterminating blight should fall on the tree and shrub, were unaccustomed, but physical events, less horrible than the mental creations of almighty fear. Some had sight of funeral processions, and faces all begrimed with tears, which flitted through the long avenues of the gardens, and drew aside the curtains of the sleepers at dead of night. Some heard wailing and cries in the air; a mournful chaunt would stream through the dark atmosphere, as if spirits above sang the requiem of the human race. What was there in all this, but that fear created other senses within our frames, making us see, hear, and feel what was not? What was this, but the action of diseased imaginations and childish credulity? So might it be; but what was most real, was the existence of these very fears; the staring looks of horror, the faces pale even to ghastliness, the voices struck dumb with harrowing dread, of those among us who saw and heard these things. Of this number was Adrian, who knew the delusion, yet could not cast off the clinging terror. Even ignorant infancy appeared with timorous shrieks and convulsions to acknowledge the presence of unseen powers. We must go: in change of scene, in occupation, and such security as we still hoped to find, we should discover a cure for these gathering horrors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On mustering our company, we found them to consist of fourteen hundred souls, men, women, and children. Until now therefore, we were undiminished in numbers, except by the desertion of those who had attached themselves to the impostor-prophet, and remained behind in Paris. About fifty French joined us. Our order of march was easily arranged; the ill success which had attended our division, determined Adrian to keep all in one body. I, with an hundred men, went forward first as purveyor, taking the road of the Cote d'Or, through Auxerre, Dijon, Dole, over the Jura to Geneva. I was to make arrangements, at every ten miles, for the accommodation of such numbers as I found the town or village would receive, leaving behind a messenger with a written order, signifying how many were to be quartered there. The remainder of our tribe was then divided into bands of fifty each, every division containing eighteen men, and the remainder, consisting of women and children. Each of these was headed by an officer, who carried the roll of names, by which they were each day to be mustered. If the numbers were divided at night, in the morning those in the van waited for those in the rear. At each of the large towns before mentioned, we were all to assemble; and a conclave of the principal officers would hold council for the general weal. I went first, as I said; Adrian last. His mother, with Clara and Evelyn under her protection, remained also with him. Thus our order being determined, I departed. My plan was to go at first no further than Fontainebleau, where in a few days I should be joined by Adrian, before I took flight again further eastward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My friend accompanied me a few miles from Versailles. He was sad; and, in a tone of unaccustomed despondency, uttered a prayer for our speedy arrival among the Alps, accompanied with an expression of vain regret that we were not already there. "In that case," I observed, "we can quicken our march; why adhere to a plan whose dilatory proceeding you already disapprove?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Nay," replied he, "it is too late now. A month ago, and we were masters of ourselves; now,—" he turned his face from me; though gathering twilight had already veiled its expression, he turned it yet more away, as he added —"a man died of the plague last night!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He spoke in a smothered voice, then suddenly clasping his hands, he exclaimed, "Swiftly, most swiftly advances the last hour for us all; as the stars vanish before the sun, so will his near approach destroy us. I have done my best; with grasping hands and impotent strength, I have hung on the wheel of the chariot of plague; but she drags me along with it, while, like Juggernaut, she proceeds crushing out the being of all who strew the high road of life. Would that it were over—would that her procession achieved, we had all entered the tomb together!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tears streamed from his eyes. "Again and again," he continued, "will the tragedy be acted; again I must hear the groans of the dying, the wailing of the survivors; again witness the pangs, which, consummating all, envelope an eternity in their evanescent existence. Why am I reserved for this? Why the tainted wether of the flock, am I not struck to earth among the first? It is hard, very hard, for one of woman born to endure all that I endure!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hitherto, with an undaunted spirit, and an high feeling of duty and worth, Adrian had fulfilled his self-imposed task. I had contemplated him with reverence, and a fruitless desire of imitation. I now offered a few words of encouragement and sympathy. He hid his face in his hands, and while he strove to calm himself, he ejaculated, "For a few months, yet for a few months more, let not, O God, my heart fail, or my courage be bowed down; let not sights of intolerable misery madden this half-crazed brain, or cause this frail heart to beat against its prison-bound, so that it burst. I have believed it to be my destiny to guide and rule the last of the race of man, till death extinguish my government; and to this destiny I submit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pardon me, Verney, I pain you, but I will no longer complain. Now I am myself again, or rather I am better than myself. You have known how from my childhood aspiring thoughts and high desires have warred with inherent disease and overstrained sensitiveness, till the latter became victors. You know how I placed this wasted feeble hand on the abandoned helm of human government. I have been visited at times by intervals of fluctuation; yet, until now, I have felt as if a superior and indefatigable spirit had taken up its abode within me or rather incorporated itself with my weaker being. The holy visitant has for a time slept, perhaps to show me how powerless I am without its inspiration. Yet, stay for a while, O Power of goodness and strength; disdain not yet this rent shrine of fleshly mortality, O immortal Capability! While one fellow creature remains to whom aid can be afforded, stay by and prop your shattered, falling engine!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His vehemence, and voice broken by irrepressible sighs, sunk to my heart; his eyes gleamed in the gloom of night like two earthly stars; and, his form dilating, his countenance beaming, truly it almost seemed as if at his eloquent appeal a more than mortal spirit entered his frame, exalting him above humanity. He turned quickly towards me, and held out his hand. "Farewell, Verney," he cried, "brother of my love, farewell; no other weak expression must cross these lips, I am alive again: to our tasks, to our combats with our unvanquishable foe, for to the last I will struggle against her."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He grasped my hand, and bent a look on me, more fervent and animated than any smile; then turning his horse's head, he touched the animal with the spur, and was out of sight in a moment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A man last night had died of the plague. The quiver was not emptied, nor the bow unstrung. We stood as marks, while Parthian Pestilence aimed and shot, insatiated by conquest, unobstructed by the heaps of slain. A sickness of the soul, contagious even to my physical mechanism, came over me. My knees knocked together, my teeth chattered, the current of my blood, clotted by sudden cold, painfully forced its way from my heavy heart. I did not fear for myself, but it was misery to think that we could not even save this remnant. That those I loved might in a few days be as clay-cold as Idris in her antique tomb; nor could strength of body or energy of mind ward off the blow. A sense of degradation came over me. Did God create man, merely in the end to become dead earth in the midst of healthful vegetating nature? Was he of no more account to his Maker, than a field of corn blighted in the ear? Were our proud dreams thus to fade? Our name was written "a little lower than the angels;" and, behold, we were no better than ephemera. We had called ourselves the "paragon of animals," and, lo! we were a "quint-essence of dust." We repined that the pyramids had outlasted the embalmed body of their builder. Alas! the mere shepherd's hut of straw we passed on the road, contained in its structure the principle of greater longevity than the whole race of man. How reconcile this sad change to our past aspirations, to our apparent powers!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sudden an internal voice, articulate and clear, seemed to say:—Thus from eternity, it was decreed: the steeds that bear Time onwards had this hour and this fulfilment enchained to them, since the void brought forth its burthen. Would you read backwards the unchangeable laws of Necessity?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mother of the world! Servant of the Omnipotent! eternal, changeless Necessity! who with busy fingers sittest ever weaving the indissoluble chain of events!—I will not murmur at thy acts. If my human mind cannot acknowledge that all that is, is right; yet since what is, must be, I will sit amidst the ruins and smile. Truly we were not born to enjoy, but to submit, and to hope.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Will not the reader tire, if I should minutely describe our long-drawn journey from Paris to Geneva? If, day by day, I should record, in the form of a journal, the thronging miseries of our lot, could my hand write, or language afford words to express, the variety of our woe; the hustling and crowding of one deplorable event upon another? Patience, oh reader! whoever thou art, wherever thou dwellest, whether of race spiritual, or, sprung from some surviving pair, thy nature will be human, thy habitation the earth; thou wilt here read of the acts of the extinct race, and wilt ask wonderingly, if they, who suffered what thou findest recorded, were of frail flesh and soft organization like thyself. Most true, they were— weep therefore; for surely, solitary being, thou wilt be of gentle disposition; shed compassionate tears; but the while lend thy attention to the tale, and learn the deeds and sufferings of thy predecessors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet the last events that marked our progress through France were so full of strange horror and gloomy misery, that I dare not pause too long in the narration. If I were to dissect each incident, every small fragment of a second would contain an harrowing tale, whose minutest word would curdle the blood in thy young veins. It is right that I should erect for thy instruction this monument of the foregone race; but not that I should drag thee through the wards of an hospital, nor the secret chambers of the charnel-house. This tale, therefore, shall be rapidly unfolded. Images of destruction, pictures of despair, the procession of the last triumph of death, shall be drawn before thee, swift as the rack driven by the north wind along the blotted splendour of the sky.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Weed-grown fields, desolate towns, the wild approach of riderless horses had now become habitual to my eyes; nay, sights far worse, of the unburied dead, and human forms which were strewed on the road side, and on the steps of once frequented habitations, where,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Through the flesh that wastes away</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Beneath the parching sun, the whitening bones</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Start forth, and moulder in the sable dust.[2]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sights like these had become—ah, woe the while! so familiar, that we had ceased to shudder, or spur our stung horses to sudden speed, as we passed them. France in its best days, at least that part of France through which we travelled, had been a cultivated desert, and the absence of enclosures, of cottages, and even of peasantry, was saddening to a traveller from sunny Italy, or busy England. Yet the towns were frequent and lively, and the cordial politeness and ready smile of the wooden-shoed peasant restored good humour to the splenetic. Now, the old woman sat no more at the door with her distaff—the lank beggar no longer asked charity in courtier-like phrase; nor on holidays did the peasantry thread with slow grace the mazes of the dance. Silence, melancholy bride of death, went in procession with him from town to town through the spacious region.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We arrived at Fontainebleau, and speedily prepared for the reception of our friends. On mustering our numbers for the night, three were found missing. When I enquired for them, the man to whom I spoke, uttered the word "plague," and fell at my feet in convulsions; he also was infected. There were hard faces around me; for among my troop were sailors who had crossed the line times unnumbered, soldiers who, in Russia and far America, had suffered famine, cold and danger, and men still sterner-featured, once nightly depredators in our over-grown metropolis; men bred from their cradle to see the whole machine of society at work for their destruction. I looked round, and saw upon the faces of all horror and despair written in glaring characters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We passed four days at Fontainebleau. Several sickened and died, and in the mean time neither Adrian nor any of our friends appeared. My own troop was in commotion; to reach Switzerland, to plunge into rivers of snow, and to dwell in caves of ice, became the mad desire of all. Yet we had promised to wait for the Earl; and he came not. My people demanded to be led forward— rebellion, if so we might call what was the mere casting away of straw-formed shackles, appeared manifestly among them. They would away on the word without a leader. The only chance of safety, the only hope of preservation from every form of indescribable suffering, was our keeping together. I told them this; while the most determined among them answered with sullenness, that they could take care of themselves, and replied to my entreaties with scoffs and menaces.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At length, on the fifth day, a messenger arrived from Adrian, bearing letters, which directed us to proceed to Auxerre, and there await his arrival, which would only be deferred for a few days. Such was the tenor of his public letters. Those privately delivered to me, detailed at length the difficulties of his situation, and left the arrangement of my future plans to my own discretion. His account of the state of affairs at Versailles was brief, but the oral communications of his messenger filled up his omissions, and shewed me that perils of the most frightful nature were gathering around him. At first the re-awakening of the plague had been concealed; but the number of deaths encreasing, the secret was divulged, and the destruction already achieved, was exaggerated by the fears of the survivors. Some emissaries of the enemy of mankind, the accursed Impostors. were among them instilling their doctrine, that safety and life could only be ensured by submission to their chief; and they succeeded so well, that soon, instead of desiring to proceed to Switzerland, the major part of the multitude, weak-minded women, and dastardly men, desired to return to Paris, and, by ranging themselves under the banners of the so called prophet, and by a cowardly worship of the principle of evil, to purchase respite, as they hoped, from impending death. The discord and tumult induced by these conflicting fears and passions, detained Adrian. It required all his ardour in pursuit of an object, and his patience under difficulties, to calm and animate such a number of his followers, as might counterbalance the panic of the rest, and lead them back to the means from which alone safety could be derived. He had hoped immediately to follow me; but, being defeated in this intention, he sent his messenger urging me to secure my own troop at such a distance from Versailles, as to prevent the contagion of rebellion from reaching them; promising, at the same time, to join me the moment a favourable occasion should occur, by means of which he could withdraw the main body of the emigrants from the evil influence at present exercised over them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was thrown into a most painful state of uncertainty by these communications. My first impulse was that we should all return to Versailles, there to assist in extricating our chief from his perils. I accordingly assembled my troop, and proposed to them this retrograde movement, instead of the continuation of our journey to Auxerre. With one voice they refused to comply. The notion circulated among them was, that the ravages of the plague alone detained the Protector; they opposed his order to my request; they came to a resolve to proceed without me, should I refuse to accompany them. Argument and adjuration were lost on these dastards. The continual diminution of their own numbers, effected by pestilence, added a sting to their dislike of delay; and my opposition only served to bring their resolution to a crisis. That same evening they departed towards Auxerre. Oaths, as from soldiers to their general, had been taken by them: these they broke. I also had engaged myself not to desert them; it appeared to me inhuman to ground any infraction of my word on theirs. The same spirit that caused them to rebel against me, would impel them to desert each other; and the most dreadful sufferings would be the consequence of their journey in their present unordered and chiefless array. These feelings for a time were paramount; and, in obedience to them, I accompanied the rest towards Auxerre. We arrived the same night at Villeneuve-la-Guiard, a town at the distance of four posts from Fontainebleau. When my companions had retired to rest, and I was left alone to revolve and ruminate upon the intelligence I received of Adrian's situation, another view of the subject presented itself to me. What was I doing, and what was the object of my present movements? Apparently I was to lead this troop of selfish and lawless men towards Switzerland, leaving behind my family and my selected friend, which, subject as they were hourly to the death that threatened to all, I might never see again. Was it not my first duty to assist the Protector, setting an example of attachment and duty? At a crisis, such as the one I had reached, it is very difficult to balance nicely opposing interests, and that towards which our inclinations lead us, obstinately assumes the appearance of selfishness, even when we meditate a sacrifice. We are easily led at such times to make a compromise of the question; and this was my present resource. I resolved that very night to ride to Versailles; if I found affairs less desperate than I now deemed them, I would return without delay to my troop; I had a vague idea that my arrival at that town, would occasion some sensation more or less strong, of which we might profit, for the purpose of leading forward the vacillating multitude—at least no time was to be lost—I visited the stables, I saddled my favourite horse, and vaulting on his back, without giving myself time for further reflection or hesitation, quitted Villeneuve-la-Guiard on my return to Versailles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was glad to escape from my rebellious troop, and to lose sight for a time, of the strife of evil with good, where the former for ever remained triumphant. I was stung almost to madness by my uncertainty concerning the fate of Adrian, and grew reckless of any event, except what might lose or preserve my unequalled friend. With an heavy heart, that sought relief in the rapidity of my course, I rode through the night to Versailles. I spurred my horse, who addressed his free limbs to speed, and tossed his gallant head in pride. The constellations reeled swiftly by, swiftly each tree and stone and landmark fled past my onward career. I bared my head to the rushing wind, which bathed my brow in delightful coolness. As I lost sight of Villeneuve-la-Guiard, I forgot the sad drama of human misery; methought it was happiness enough to live, sensitive the while of the beauty of the verdure-clad earth, the star-bespangled sky, and the tameless wind that lent animation to the whole. My horse grew tired—and I, forgetful of his fatigue, still as he lagged, cheered him with my voice, and urged him with the spur. He was a gallant animal, and I did not wish to exchange him for any chance beast I might light on, leaving him never to be refound. All night we went forward; in the morning he became sensible that we approached Versailles, to reach which as his home, he mustered his flagging strength. The distance we had come was not less than fifty miles, yet he shot down the long Boulevards swift as an arrow; poor fellow, as I dismounted at the gate of the castle, he sunk on his knees, his eyes were covered with a film, he fell on his side, a few gasps inflated his noble chest, and he died. I saw him expire with an anguish, unaccountable even to myself, the spasm was as the wrenching of some limb in agonizing torture, but it was brief as it was intolerable. I forgot him, as I swiftly darted through the open portal, and up the majestic stairs of this castle of victories—heard Adrian's voice—O fool! O woman nurtured, effeminate and contemptible being—I heard his voice, and answered it with convulsive shrieks; I rushed into the Hall of Hercules, where he stood surrounded by a crowd, whose eyes, turned in wonder on me, reminded me that on the stage of the world, a man must repress such girlish extacies. I would have given worlds to have embraced him; I dared not—Half in exhaustion, half voluntarily, I threw myself at my length on the ground— dare I disclose the truth to the gentle offspring of solitude? I did so, that I might kiss the dear and sacred earth he trod.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I found everything in a state of tumult. An emissary of the leader of the elect, had been so worked up by his chief, and by his own fanatical creed, as to make an attempt on the life of the Protector and preserver of lost mankind. His hand was arrested while in the act of poignarding the Earl; this circumstance had caused the clamour I heard on my arrival at the castle, and the confused assembly of persons that I found assembled in the Salle d'Hercule. Although superstition and demoniac fury had crept among the emigrants, yet several adhered with fidelity to their noble chieftain; and many, whose faith and love had been unhinged by fear, felt all their latent affection rekindled by this detestable attempt. A phalanx of faithful breasts closed round him; the wretch, who, although a prisoner and in bonds, vaunted his design, and madly claimed the crown of martyrdom, would have been torn to pieces, had not his intended victim interposed. Adrian, springing forward, shielded him with his own person, and commanded with energy the submission of his infuriate friends—at this moment I had entered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Discipline and peace were at length restored in the castle; and then Adrian went from house to house, from troop to troop, to soothe the disturbed minds of his followers, and recall them to their ancient obedience. But the fear of immediate death was still rife amongst these survivors of a world's destruction; the horror occasioned by the attempted assassination, past away; each eye turned towards Paris. Men love a prop so well, that they will lean on a pointed poisoned spear; and such was he, the impostor, who, with fear of hell for his scourge, most ravenous wolf, played the driver to a credulous flock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was a moment of suspense, that shook even the resolution of the unyielding friend of man. Adrian for one moment was about to give in, to cease the struggle, and quit, with a few adherents, the deluded crowd, leaving them a miserable prey to their passions, and to the worse tyrant who excited them. But again, after a brief fluctuation of purpose, he resumed his courage and resolves, sustained by the singleness of his purpose, and the untried spirit of benevolence which animated him. At this moment, as an omen of excellent import, his wretched enemy pulled destruction on his head, destroying with his own hands the dominion he had erected.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >His grand hold upon the minds of men, took its rise from the doctrine inculcated by him, that those who believed in, and followed him, were the remnant to be saved, while all the rest of mankind were marked out for death. Now, at the time of the Flood, the omnipotent repented him that he had created man, and as then with water, now with the arrows of pestilence, was about to annihilate all, except those who obeyed his decrees, promulgated by the ipse dixit prophet. It is impossible to say on what foundations this man built his hopes of being able to carry on such an imposture. It is likely that he was fully aware of the lie which murderous nature might give to his assertions, and believed it to be the cast of a die, whether he should in future ages be reverenced as an inspired delegate from heaven, or be recognized as an impostor by the present dying generation. At any rate he resolved to keep up the drama to the last act. When, on the first approach of summer, the fatal disease again made its ravages among the followers of Adrian, the impostor exultingly proclaimed the exemption of his own congregation from the universal calamity. He was believed; his followers, hitherto shut up in Paris, now came to Versailles. Mingling with the coward band there assembled, they reviled their admirable leader, and asserted their own superiority and exemption. At length the plague, slow-footed, but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion, invading the congregation of the elect, and showering promiscuous death among them. Their leader endeavoured to conceal this event; he had a few followers, who, admitted into the arcana of his wickedness, could help him in the execution of his nefarious designs. Those who sickened were immediately and quietly withdrawn, the cord and a midnight-grave disposed of them for ever; while some plausible excuse was given for their absence. At last a female, whose maternal vigilance subdued even the effects of the narcotics administered to her, became a witness of their murderous designs on her only child. Mad with horror, she would have burst among her deluded fellow-victims, and, wildly shrieking, have awaked the dull ear of night with the history of the fiend-like crime; when the Impostor, in his last act of rage and desperation, plunged a poignard in her bosom. Thus wounded to death, her garments dripping with her own life-blood, bearing her strangled infant in her arms, beautiful and young as she was, Juliet, (for it was she) denounced to the host of deceived believers, the wickedness of their leader. He saw the aghast looks of her auditors, changing from horror to fury—the names of those already sacrificed were echoed by their relatives, now assured of their loss. The wretch with that energy of purpose, which had borne him thus far in his guilty career, saw his danger, and resolved to evade the worst forms of it—he rushed on one of the foremost, seized a pistol from his girdle, and his loud laugh of derision mingled with the report of the weapon with which he destroyed himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They left his miserable remains even where they lay; they placed the corpse of poor Juliet and her babe upon a bier, and all, with hearts subdued to saddest regret, in long procession walked towards Versailles. They met troops of those who had quitted the kindly protection of Adrian, and were journeying to join the fanatics. The tale of horror was recounted—all turned back; and thus at last, accompanied by the undiminished numbers of surviving humanity, and preceded by the mournful emblem of their recovered reason, they appeared before Adrian, and again and for ever vowed obedience to his commands, and fidelity to his cause.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Shakespeare—Julius Caesar. [2] Elton's Translation of Hesiod's "Shield of Hercules."</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VII.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >THESE events occupied so much time, that June had numbered more than half its days, before we again commenced our long-protracted journey. The day after my return to Versailles, six men, from among those I had left at Villeneuve-la-Guiard, arrived, with intelligence, that the rest of the troop had already proceeded towards Switzerland. We went forward in the same track.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is strange, after an interval of time, to look back on a period, which, though short in itself, appeared, when in actual progress, to be drawn out interminably. By the end of July we entered Dijon; by the end of July those hours, days, and weeks had mingled with the ocean of forgotten time, which in their passage teemed with fatal events and agonizing sorrow. By the end of July, little more than a month had gone by, if man's life were measured by the rising and setting of the sun: but, alas! in that interval ardent youth had become grey-haired; furrows deep and uneraseable were trenched in the blooming cheek of the young mother; the elastic limbs of early manhood, paralyzed as by the burthen of years, assumed the decrepitude of age. Nights passed, during whose fatal darkness the sun grew old before it rose; and burning days, to cool whose baleful heat the balmy eve, lingering far in eastern climes, came lagging and ineffectual; days, in which the dial, radiant in its noon-day station, moved not its shadow the space of a little hour, until a whole life of sorrow had brought the sufferer to an untimely grave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We departed from Versailles fifteen hundred souls. We set out on the eighteenth of June. We made a long procession, in which was contained every dear relationship, or tie of love, that existed in human society. Fathers and husbands, with guardian care, gathered their dear relatives around them; wives and mothers looked for support to the manly form beside them, and then with tender anxiety bent their eyes on the infant troop around. They were sad, but not hopeless. Each thought that someone would be saved; each, with that pertinacious optimism, which to the last characterized our human nature, trusted that their beloved family would be the one preserved.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We passed through France, and found it empty of inhabitants. Some one or two natives survived in the larger towns, which they roamed through like ghosts; we received therefore small encrease to our numbers, and such decrease through death, that at last it became easier to count the scanty list of survivors. As we never deserted any of the sick, until their death permitted us to commit their remains to the shelter of a grave, our journey was long, while every day a frightful gap was made in our troop—they died by tens, by fifties, by hundreds. No mercy was shewn by death; we ceased to expect it, and every day welcomed the sun with the feeling that we might never see it rise again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The nervous terrors and fearful visions which had scared us during the spring, continued to visit our coward troop during this sad journey. Every evening brought its fresh creation of spectres; a ghost was depicted by every blighted tree; and appalling shapes were manufactured from each shaggy bush. By degrees these common marvels palled on us, and then other wonders were called into being. Once it was confidently asserted, that the sun rose an hour later than its seasonable time; again it was discovered that he grew paler and paler; that shadows took an uncommon appearance. It was impossible to have imagined, during the usual calm routine of life men had before experienced, the terrible effects produced by these extravagant delusions: in truth, of such little worth are our senses, when unsupported by concurring testimony, that it was with the utmost difficulty I kept myself free from the belief in supernatural events, to which the major part of our people readily gave credit. Being one sane amidst a crowd of the mad, I hardly dared assert to my own mind, that the vast luminary had undergone no change—that the shadows of night were unthickened by innumerable shapes of awe and terror; or that the wind, as it sung in the trees, or whistled round an empty building, was not pregnant with sounds of wailing and despair. Sometimes realities took ghostly shapes; and it was impossible for one's blood not to curdle at the perception of an evident mixture of what we knew to be true, with the visionary semblance of all that we feared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Once, at the dusk of the evening, we saw a figure all in white, apparently of more than human stature, flourishing about the road, now throwing up its arms, now leaping to an astonishing height in the air, then turning round several times successively, then raising itself to its full height and gesticulating violently. Our troop, on the alert to discover and believe in the supernatural, made a halt at some distance from this shape; and, as it became darker, there was something appalling even to the incredulous, in the lonely spectre, whose gambols, if they hardly accorded with spiritual dignity, were beyond human powers. Now it leapt right up in the air, now sheer over a high hedge, and was again the moment after in the road before us. By the time I came up, the fright experienced by the spectators of this ghostly exhibition, began to manifest itself in the flight of some, and the close huddling together of the rest. Our goblin now perceived us; he approached, and, as we drew reverentially back, made a low bow. The sight was irresistibly ludicrous even to our hapless band, and his politeness was hailed by a shout of laughter;—then, again springing up, as a last effort, it sunk to the ground, and became almost invisible through the dusky night. This circumstance again spread silence and fear through the troop; the more courageous at length advanced, and, raising the dying wretch, discovered the tragic explanation of this wild scene. It was an opera-dancer, and had been one of the troop which deserted from Villeneuve-la-Guiard: falling sick, he had been deserted by his companions; in an access of delirium he had fancied himself on the stage, and, poor fellow, his dying sense eagerly accepted the last human applause that could ever be bestowed on his grace and agility.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At another time we were haunted for several days by an apparition, to which our people gave the appellation of the Black Spectre. We never saw it except at evening, when his coal black steed, his mourning dress, and plume of black feathers, had a majestic and awe-striking appearance; his face, one said, who had seen it for a moment, was ashy pale; he had lingered far behind the rest of his troop, and suddenly at a turn in the road, saw the Black Spectre coming towards him; he hid himself in fear, and the horse and his rider slowly past, while the moonbeams fell on the face of the latter, displaying its unearthly hue. Sometimes at dead of night, as we watched the sick, we heard one galloping through the town; it was the Black Spectre come in token of inevitable death. He grew giant tall to vulgar eyes; an icy atmosphere, they said, surrounded him; when he was heard, all animals shuddered, and the dying knew that their last hour was come. It was Death himself, they declared, come visibly to seize on subject earth, and quell at once our decreasing numbers, sole rebels to his law. One day at noon, we saw a dark mass on the road before us, and, coming up, beheld the Black Spectre fallen from his horse, lying in the agonies of disease upon the ground. He did not survive many hours; and his last words disclosed the secret of his mysterious conduct. He was a French noble of distinction, who, from the effects of plague, had been left alone in his district; during many months, he had wandered from town to town, from province to province, seeking some survivor for a companion, and abhorring the loneliness to which he was condemned. When he discovered our troop, fear of contagion conquered his love of society. He dared not join us, yet he could not resolve to lose sight of us, sole human beings who besides himself existed in wide and fertile France; so he accompanied us in the spectral guise I have described, till pestilence gathered him to a larger congregation, even that of Dead Mankind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It had been well, if such vain terrors could have distracted our thoughts from more tangible evils. But these were too dreadful and too many not to force themselves into every thought, every moment, of our lives. We were obliged to halt at different periods for days together, till another and yet another was consigned as a clod to the vast clod which had been once our living mother. Thus we continued travelling during the hottest season; and it was not till the first of August, that we, the emigrants,—reader, there were just eighty of us in number,—entered the gates of Dijon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We had expected this moment with eagerness, for now we had accomplished the worst part of our drear journey, and Switzerland was near at hand. Yet how could we congratulate ourselves on any event thus imperfectly fulfilled? Were these miserable beings, who, worn and wretched, passed in sorrowful procession, the sole remnants of the race of man, which, like a flood, had once spread over and possessed the whole earth? It had come down clear and unimpeded from its primal mountain source in Ararat, and grew from a puny streamlet to a vast perennial river, generation after generation flowing on ceaselessly. The same, but diversified, it grew, and swept onwards towards the absorbing ocean, whose dim shores we now reached. It had been the mere plaything of nature, when first it crept out of uncreative void into light; but thought brought forth power and knowledge; and, clad with these, the race of man assumed dignity and authority. It was then no longer the mere gardener of earth, or the shepherd of her flocks; "it carried with it an imposing and majestic aspect; it had a pedigree and illustrious ancestors; it had its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records and titles."[1]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This was all over, now that the ocean of death had sucked in the slackening tide, and its source was dried up. We first had bidden adieu to the state of things which having existed many thousand years, seemed eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the name of country, we had bidden farewell. We saw depart all hope of retrieving our ancient state—all expectation, except the feeble one of saving our individual lives from the wreck of the past. To preserve these we had quitted England—England, no more; for without her children, what name could that barren island claim? With tenacious grasp we clung to such rule and order as could best save us; trusting that, if a little colony could be preserved, that would suffice at some remoter period to restore the lost community of mankind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But the game is up! We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the wide inheritance of earth. We must all die! The species of man must perish; his frame of exquisite workmanship; the wondrous mechanism of his senses; the noble proportion of his godlike limbs; his mind, the throned king of these; must perish. Will the earth still keep her place among the planets; will she still journey with unmarked regularity round the sun; will the seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in solitude? Will the mountains remain unmoved, and streams still keep a downward course towards the vast abyss; will the tides rise and fall, and the winds fan universal nature; will beasts pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim, when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things, has passed away, as though he had never been? O, what mockery is this! Surely death is not death, and humanity is not extinct; but merely passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions. Death is a vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to pass; let us exist no more in this living death, but die that we may live!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We had longed with inexpressible earnestness to reach Dijon, since we had fixed on it, as a kind of station in our progress. But now we entered it with a torpor more painful than acute suffering. We had come slowly but irrevocably to the opinion, that our utmost efforts would not preserve one human being alive. We took our hands therefore away from the long grasped rudder; and the frail vessel on which we floated, seemed, the government over her suspended, to rush, prow foremost, into the dark abyss of the billows. A gush of grief, a wanton profusion of tears, and vain laments, and overflowing tenderness, and passionate but fruitless clinging to the priceless few that remained, was followed by languor and recklessness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During this disastrous journey we lost all those, not of our own family, to whom we had particularly attached ourselves among the survivors. It were not well to fill these pages with a mere catalogue of losses; yet I cannot refrain from this last mention of those principally dear to us. The little girl whom Adrian had rescued from utter desertion, during our ride through London on the twentieth of November, died at Auxerre. The poor child had attached herself greatly to us; and the suddenness of her death added to our sorrow. In the morning we had seen her apparently in health—in the evening, Lucy, before we retired to rest, visited our quarters to say that she was dead. Poor Lucy herself only survived, till we arrived at Dijon. She had devoted herself throughout to the nursing the sick, and attending the friendless. Her excessive exertions brought on a slow fever, which ended in the dread disease whose approach soon released her from her sufferings. She had throughout been endeared to us by her good qualities, by her ready and cheerful execution of every duty, and mild acquiescence in every turn of adversity. When we consigned her to the tomb, we seemed at the same time to bid a final adieu to those peculiarly feminine virtues conspicuous in her; uneducated and unpretending as she was, she was distinguished for patience, forbearance, and sweetness. These, with all their train of qualities peculiarly English, would never again be revived for us. This type of all that was most worthy of admiration in her class among my countrywomen, was placed under the sod of desert France; and it was as a second separation from our country to have lost sight of her for ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Countess of Windsor died during our abode at Dijon. One morning I was informed that she wished to see me. Her message made me remember, that several days had elapsed since I had last seen her. Such a circumstance had often occurred during our journey, when I remained behind to watch to their close the last moments of some one of our hapless comrades, and the rest of the troop past on before me. But there was something in the manner of her messenger, that made me suspect that all was not right. A caprice of the imagination caused me to conjecture that some ill had occurred to Clara or Evelyn, rather than to this aged lady. Our fears, for ever on the stretch, demanded a nourishment of horror; and it seemed too natural an occurrence, too like past times, for the old to die before the young. I found the venerable mother of my Idris lying on a couch, her tall emaciated figure stretched out; her face fallen away, from which the nose stood out in sharp profile, and her large dark eyes, hollow and deep, gleamed with such light as may edge a thunder cloud at sun-set. All was shrivelled and dried up, except these lights; her voice too was fearfully changed, as she spoke to me at intervals. "I am afraid," said she, "that it is selfish in me to have asked you to visit the old woman again, before she dies: yet perhaps it would have been a greater shock to hear suddenly that I was dead, than to see me first thus."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I clasped her shrivelled hand: "Are you indeed so ill?" I asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Do you not perceive death in my face," replied she, "it is strange; I ought to have expected this, and yet I confess it has taken me unaware. I never clung to life, or enjoyed it, till these last months, while among those I senselessly deserted: and it is hard to be snatched immediately away. I am glad, however, that I am not a victim of the plague; probably I should have died at this hour, though the world had continued as it was in my youth."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She spoke with difficulty, and I perceived that she regretted the necessity of death, even more than she cared to confess. Yet she had not to complain of an undue shortening of existence; her faded person shewed that life had naturally spent itself. We had been alone at first; now Clara entered; the Countess turned to her with a smile, and took the hand of this lovely child; her roseate palm and snowy fingers, contrasted with relaxed fibres and yellow hue of those of her aged friend; she bent to kiss her, touching her withered mouth with the warm, full lips of youth. "Verney," said the Countess, "I need not recommend this dear girl to you, for your own sake you will preserve her. Were the world as it was, I should have a thousand sage precautions to impress, that one so sensitive, good, and beauteous, might escape the dangers that used to lurk for the destruction of the fair and excellent. This is all nothing now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I commit you, my kind nurse, to your uncle's care; to yours I entrust the dearest relic of my better self. Be to Adrian, sweet one, what you have been to me—enliven his sadness with your sprightly sallies; sooth his anguish by your sober and inspired converse, when he is dying; nurse him as you have done me."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Clara burst into tears; "Kind girl," said the Countess, "do not weep for me. Many dear friends are left to you."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"And yet," cried Clara, "you talk of their dying also. This is indeed cruel —how could I live, if they were gone? If it were possible for my beloved protector to die before me, I could not nurse him; I could only die too."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The venerable lady survived this scene only twenty-four hours. She was the last tie binding us to the ancient state of things. It was impossible to look on her, and not call to mind in their wonted guise, events and persons, as alien to our present situation as the disputes of Themistocles and Aristides, or the wars of the two roses in our native land. The crown of England had pressed her brow; the memory of my father and his misfortunes, the vain struggles of the late king, the images of Raymond, Evadne, and Perdita, who had lived in the world's prime, were brought vividly before us. We consigned her to the oblivious tomb with reluctance; and when I turned from her grave, Janus veiled his retrospective face; that which gazed on future generations had long lost its faculty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After remaining a week at Dijon, until thirty of our number deserted the vacant ranks of life, we continued our way towards Geneva. At noon on the second day we arrived at the foot of Jura. We halted here during the heat of the day. Here fifty human beings—fifty, the only human beings that survived of the food-teeming earth, assembled to read in the looks of each other ghastly plague, or wasting sorrow, desperation, or worse, carelessness of future or present evil. Here we assembled at the foot of this mighty wall of mountain, under a spreading walnut tree; a brawling stream refreshed the green sward by its sprinkling; and the busy grasshopper chirped among the thyme. We clustered together a group of wretched sufferers. A mother cradled in her enfeebled arms the child, last of many, whose glazed eye was about to close for ever. Here beauty, late glowing in youthful lustre and consciousness, now wan and neglected, knelt fanning with uncertain motion the beloved, who lay striving to paint his features, distorted by illness, with a thankful smile. There an hard-featured, weather-worn veteran, having prepared his meal, sat, his head dropped on his breast, the useless knife falling from his grasp, his limbs utterly relaxed, as thought of wife and child, and dearest relative, all lost, passed across his recollection. There sat a man who for forty years had basked in fortune's tranquil sunshine; he held the hand of his last hope, his beloved daughter, who had just attained womanhood; and he gazed on her with anxious eyes, while she tried to rally her fainting spirit to comfort him. Here a servant, faithful to the last, though dying, waited on one, who, though still erect with health, gazed with gasping fear on the variety of woe around.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian stood leaning against a tree; he held a book in his hand, but his eye wandered from the pages, and sought mine; they mingled a sympathetic glance; his looks confessed that his thoughts had quitted the inanimate print, for pages more pregnant with meaning, more absorbing, spread out before him. By the margin of the stream, apart from all, in a tranquil nook, where the purling brook kissed the green sward gently, Clara and Evelyn were at play, sometimes beating the water with large boughs, sometimes watching the summer-flies that sported upon it. Evelyn now chased a butterfly—now gathered a flower for his cousin; and his laughing cherub-face and clear brow told of the light heart that beat in his bosom. Clara, though she endeavoured to give herself up to his amusement, often forgot him, as she turned to observe Adrian and me. She was now fourteen, and retained her childish appearance, though in height a woman; she acted the part of the tenderest mother to my little orphan boy; to see her playing with him, or attending silently and submissively on our wants, you thought only of her admirable docility and patience; but, in her soft eyes, and the veined curtains that veiled them, in the clearness of her marmoreal brow, and the tender expression of her lips, there was an intelligence and beauty that at once excited admiration and love.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the sun had sunk towards the precipitate west, and the evening shadows grew long, we prepared to ascend the mountain. The attention that we were obliged to pay to the sick, made our progress slow. The winding road, though steep, presented a confined view of rocky fields and hills, each hiding the other, till our farther ascent disclosed them in succession. We were seldom shaded from the declining sun, whose slant beams were instinct with exhausting heat. There are times when minor difficulties grow gigantic —times, when as the Hebrew poet expressively terms it, "the grasshopper is a burthen;" so was it with our ill fated party this evening. Adrian, usually the first to rally his spirits, and dash foremost into fatigue and hardship, with relaxed limbs and declined head, the reins hanging loosely in his grasp, left the choice of the path to the instinct of his horse, now and then painfully rousing himself, when the steepness of the ascent required that he should keep his seat with better care. Fear and horror encompassed me. Did his languid air attest that he also was struck with contagion? How long, when I look on this matchless specimen of mortality, may I perceive that his thought answers mine? how long will those limbs obey the kindly spirit within? how long will light and life dwell in the eyes of this my sole remaining friend? Thus pacing slowly, each hill surmounted, only presented another to be ascended; each jutting corner only discovered another, sister to the last, endlessly. Sometimes the pressure of sickness in one among us, caused the whole cavalcade to halt; the call for water, the eagerly expressed wish to repose; the cry of pain, and suppressed sob of the mourner—such were the sorrowful attendants of our passage of the Jura.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian had gone first. I saw him, while I was detained by the loosening of a girth, struggling with the upward path, seemingly more difficult than any we had yet passed. He reached the top, and the dark outline of his figure stood in relief against the sky. He seemed to behold something unexpected and wonderful; for, pausing, his head stretched out, his arms for a moment extended, he seemed to give an All Hail! to some new vision. Urged by curiosity, I hurried to join him. After battling for many tedious minutes with the precipice, the same scene presented itself to me, which had wrapt him in extatic wonder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nature, or nature's favourite, this lovely earth, presented her most unrivalled beauties in resplendent and sudden exhibition. Below, far, far below, even as it were in the yawning abyss of the ponderous globe, lay the placid and azure expanse of lake Leman; vine-covered hills hedged it in, and behind dark mountains in cone-like shape, or irregular cyclopean wall, served for further defence. But beyond, and high above all, as if the spirits of the air had suddenly unveiled their bright abodes, placed in scaleless altitude in the stainless sky, heaven-kissing, companions of the unattainable ether, were the glorious Alps, clothed in dazzling robes of light by the setting sun. And, as if the world's wonders were never to be exhausted, their vast immensities, their jagged crags, and roseate painting, appeared again in the lake below, dipping their proud heights beneath the unruffled waves—palaces for the Naiads of the placid waters. Towns and villages lay scattered at the foot of Jura, which, with dark ravine, and black promontories, stretched its roots into the watery expanse beneath. Carried away by wonder, I forgot the death of man, and the living and beloved friend near me. When I turned, I saw tears streaming from his eyes; his thin hands pressed one against the other, his animated countenance beaming with admiration; "Why," cried he, at last, "Why, oh heart, whisperest thou of grief to me? Drink in the beauty of that scene, and possess delight beyond what a fabled paradise could afford."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By degrees, our whole party surmounting the steep, joined us, not one among them, but gave visible tokens of admiration, surpassing any before experienced. One cried, "God reveals his heaven to us; we may die blessed." Another and another, with broken exclamations, and extravagant phrases, endeavoured to express the intoxicating effect of this wonder of nature. So we remained awhile, lightened of the pressing burthen of fate, forgetful of death, into whose night we were about to plunge; no longer reflecting that our eyes now and for ever were and would be the only ones which might perceive the divine magnificence of this terrestrial exhibition. An enthusiastic transport, akin to happiness, burst, like a sudden ray from the sun, on our darkened life. Precious attribute of woe-worn humanity! that can snatch extatic emotion, even from under the very share and harrow, that ruthlessly ploughs up and lays waste every hope.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This evening was marked by another event. Passing through Ferney in our way to Geneva, unaccustomed sounds of music arose from the rural church which stood embosomed in trees, surrounded by smokeless, vacant cottages. The peal of an organ with rich swell awoke the mute air, lingering along, and mingling with the intense beauty that clothed the rocks and woods, and waves around. Music—the language of the immortals, disclosed to us as testimony of their existence—music, "silver key of the fountain of tears," child of love, soother of grief, inspirer of heroism and radiant thoughts, O music, in this our desolation, we had forgotten thee! Nor pipe at eve cheered us, nor harmony of voice, nor linked thrill of string; thou camest upon us now, like the revealing of other forms of being; and transported as we had been by the loveliness of nature, fancying that we beheld the abode of spirits, now we might well imagine that we heard their melodious communings. We paused in such awe as would seize on a pale votarist, visiting some holy shrine at midnight; if she beheld animated and smiling, the image which she worshipped. We all stood mute; many knelt. In a few minutes however, we were recalled to human wonder and sympathy by a familiar strain. The air was Haydn's "New-Created World," and, old and drooping as humanity had become, the world yet fresh as at creation's day, might still be worthily celebrated by such an hymn of praise. Adrian and I entered the church; the nave was empty, though the smoke of incense rose from the altar, bringing with it the recollection of vast congregations, in once thronged cathedrals; we went into the loft. A blind old man sat at the bellows; his whole soul was ear; and as he sat in the attitude of attentive listening, a bright glow of pleasure was diffused over his countenance; for, though his lack-lustre eye could not reflect the beam, yet his parted lips, and every line of his face and venerable brow spoke delight. A young woman sat at the keys, perhaps twenty years of age. Her auburn hair hung on her neck, and her fair brow shone in its own beauty; but her drooping eyes let fall fast-flowing tears, while the constraint she exercised to suppress her sobs, and still her trembling, flushed her else pale cheek; she was thin; languor, and alas! sickness, bent her form. We stood looking at the pair, forgetting what we heard in the absorbing sight; till, the last chord struck, the peal died away in lessening reverberations. The mighty voice, inorganic we might call it, for we could in no way associate it with mechanism of pipe or key, stilled its sonorous tone, and the girl, turning to lend her assistance to her aged companion, at length perceived us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was her father; and she, since childhood, had been the guide of his darkened steps. They were Germans from Saxony, and, emigrating thither but a few years before, had formed new ties with the surrounding villagers. About the time that the pestilence had broken out, a young German student had joined them. Their simple history was easily divined. He, a noble, loved the fair daughter of the poor musician, and followed them in their flight from the persecutions of his friends; but soon the mighty leveller came with unblunted scythe to mow, together with the grass, the tall flowers of the field. The youth was an early victim. She preserved herself for her father's sake. His blindness permitted her to continue a delusion, at first the child of accident—and now solitary beings, sole survivors in the land, he remained unacquainted with the change, nor was aware that when he listened to his child's music, the mute mountains, senseless lake, and unconscious trees, were, himself excepted, her sole auditors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The very day that we arrived she had been attacked by symptomatic illness. She was paralyzed with horror at the idea of leaving her aged, sightless father alone on the empty earth; but she had not courage to disclose the truth, and the very excess of her desperation animated her to surpassing exertions. At the accustomed vesper hour, she led him to the chapel; and, though trembling and weeping on his account, she played, without fault in time, or error in note, the hymn written to celebrate the creation of the adorned earth, soon to be her tomb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We came to her like visitors from heaven itself; her high-wrought courage; her hardly sustained firmness, fled with the appearance of relief. With a shriek she rushed towards us, embraced the knees of Adrian, and uttering but the words, "O save my father!" with sobs and hysterical cries, opened the long-shut floodgates of her woe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poor girl!—she and her father now lie side by side, beneath the high walnut-tree where her lover reposes, and which in her dying moments she had pointed out to us. Her father, at length aware of his daughter's danger, unable to see the changes of her dear countenance, obstinately held her hand, till it was chilled and stiffened by death. Nor did he then move or speak, till, twelve hours after, kindly death took him to his breakless repose. They rest beneath the sod, the tree their monument;—the hallowed spot is distinct in my memory, paled in by craggy Jura, and the far, immeasurable Alps; the spire of the church they frequented still points from out the embosoming trees; and though her hand be cold, still methinks the sounds of divine music which they loved wander about, solacing their gentle ghosts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER VIII.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >WE had now reached Switzerland, so long the final mark and aim of our exertions. We had looked, I know not wherefore, with hope and pleasing expectation on her congregation of hills and snowy crags, and opened our bosoms with renewed spirits to the icy Biz, which even at Midsummer used to come from the northern glacier laden with cold. Yet how could we nourish expectation of relief? Like our native England, and the vast extent of fertile France, this mountain-embowered land was desolate of its inhabitants. Nor bleak mountain-top, nor snow-nourished rivulet; not the ice-laden Biz, nor thunder, the tamer of contagion, had preserved them— why therefore should we claim exemption?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who was there indeed to save? What troop had we brought fit to stand at bay, and combat with the conqueror? We were a failing remnant, tamed to mere submission to the coming blow. A train half dead, through fear of death—a hopeless, unresisting, almost reckless crew, which, in the tossed bark of life, had given up all pilotage, and resigned themselves to the destructive force of ungoverned winds. Like a few furrows of unreaped corn, which, left standing on a wide field after the rest is gathered to the garner, are swiftly borne down by the winter storm. Like a few straggling swallows, which, remaining after their fellows had, on the first unkind breath of passing autumn, migrated to genial climes, were struck to earth by the first frost of November. Like a stray sheep that wanders over the sleet-beaten hill-side, while the flock is in the pen, and dies before morning-dawn. Like a cloud, like one of many that were spread in impenetrable woof over the sky, which, when the shepherd north has driven its companions "to drink Antipodean noon," fades and dissolves in the clear ether—Such were we!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We left the fair margin of the beauteous lake of Geneva, and entered the Alpine ravines; tracing to its source the brawling Arve, through the rock-bound valley of Servox, beside the mighty waterfalls, and under the shadow of the inaccessible mountains, we travelled on; while the luxuriant walnut-tree gave place to the dark pine, whose musical branches swung in the wind, and whose upright forms had braved a thousand storms—till the verdant sod, the flowery dell, and shrubbery hill were exchanged for the sky-piercing, untrodden, seedless rock, "the bones of the world, waiting to be clothed with every thing necessary to give life and beauty."[1] Strange that we should seek shelter here! Surely, if, in those countries where earth was wont, like a tender mother, to nourish her children, we had found her a destroyer, we need not seek it here, where stricken by keen penury she seems to shudder through her stony veins. Nor were we mistaken in our conjecture. We vainly sought the vast and ever moving glaciers of Chamounix, rifts of pendant ice, seas of congelated waters, the leafless groves of tempest-battered pines, dells, mere paths for the loud avalanche, and hill-tops, the resort of thunder-storms. Pestilence reigned paramount even here. By the time that day and night, like twin sisters of equal growth, shared equally their dominion over the hours, one by one, beneath the ice-caves, beside the waters springing from the thawed snows of a thousand winters, another and yet another of the remnant of the race of Man, closed their eyes for ever to the light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet we were not quite wrong in seeking a scene like this, whereon to close the drama. Nature, true to the last, consoled us in the very heart of misery. Sublime grandeur of outward objects soothed our hapless hearts, and were in harmony with our desolation. Many sorrows have befallen man during his chequered course; and many a woe-stricken mourner has found himself sole survivor among many. Our misery took its majestic shape and colouring from the vast ruin, that accompanied and made one with it. Thus on lovely earth, many a dark ravine contains a brawling stream, shadowed by romantic rocks, threaded by mossy paths—but all, except this, wanted the mighty back-ground, the towering Alps, whose snowy capes, or bared ridges, lifted us from our dull mortal abode, to the palaces of Nature's own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This solemn harmony of event and situation regulated our feelings, and gave as it were fitting costume to our last act. Majestic gloom and tragic pomp attended the decease of wretched humanity. The funeral procession of monarchs of old, was transcended by our splendid shews. Near the sources of the Arveiron we performed the rites for, four only excepted, the last of the species. Adrian and I, leaving Clara and Evelyn wrapt in peaceful unobserving slumber, carried the body to this desolate spot, and placed it in those caves of ice beneath the glacier, which rive and split with the slightest sound, and bring destruction on those within the clefts—no bird or beast of prey could here profane the frozen form. So, with hushed steps and in silence, we placed the dead on a bier of ice, and then, departing, stood on the rocky platform beside the river springs. All hushed as we had been, the very striking of the air with our persons had sufficed to disturb the repose of this thawless region; and we had hardly left the cavern, before vast blocks of ice, detaching themselves from the roof, fell, and covered the human image we had deposited within. We had chosen a fair moonlight night, but our journey thither had been long, and the crescent sank behind the western heights by the time we had accomplished our purpose. The snowy mountains and blue glaciers shone in their own light. The rugged and abrupt ravine, which formed one side of Mont Anvert, was opposite to us, the glacier at our side; at our feet Arveiron, white and foaming, dashed over the pointed rocks that jutted into it, and, with whirring spray and ceaseless roar, disturbed the stilly night. Yellow lightnings played around the vast dome of Mont Blanc, silent as the snow-clad rock they illuminated; all was bare, wild, and sublime, while the singing of the pines in melodious murmurings added a gentle interest to the rough magnificence. Now the riving and fall of icy rocks clave the air; now the thunder of the avalanche burst on our ears. In countries whose features are of less magnitude, nature betrays her living powers in the foliage of the trees, in the growth of herbage, in the soft purling of meandering streams; here, endowed with giant attributes, the torrent, the thunder-storm, and the flow of massive waters, display her activity. Such the church-yard, such the requiem, such the eternal congregation, that waited on our companion's funeral!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nor was it the human form alone which we had placed in this eternal sepulchre, whose obsequies we now celebrated. With this last victim Plague vanished from the earth. Death had never wanted weapons wherewith to destroy life, and we, few and weak as we had become, were still exposed to every other shaft with which his full quiver teemed. But pestilence was absent from among them. For seven years it had had full sway upon earth; she had trod every nook of our spacious globe; she had mingled with the atmosphere, which as a cloak enwraps all our fellow-creatures—the inhabitants of native Europe—the luxurious Asiatic—the swarthy African and free American had been vanquished and destroyed by her. Her barbarous tyranny came to its close here in the rocky vale of Chamounix.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Still recurring scenes of misery and pain, the fruits of this distemper, made no more a part of our lives—the word plague no longer rung in our ears—the aspect of plague incarnate in the human countenance no longer appeared before our eyes. From this moment I saw plague no more. She abdicated her throne, and despoiled herself of her imperial sceptre among the ice rocks that surrounded us. She left solitude and silence co-heirs of her kingdom.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My present feelings are so mingled with the past, that I cannot say whether the knowledge of this change visited us, as we stood on this sterile spot. It seems to me that it did; that a cloud seemed to pass from over us, that a weight was taken from the air; that henceforth we breathed more freely, and raised our heads with some portion of former liberty. Yet we did not hope. We were impressed by the sentiment, that our race was run, but that plague would not be our destroyer. The coming time was as a mighty river, down which a charmed boat is driven, whose mortal steersman knows, that the obvious peril is not the one he needs fear, yet that danger is nigh; and who floats awe-struck under beetling precipices, through the dark and turbid waters—seeing in the distance yet stranger and ruder shapes, towards which he is irresistibly impelled. What would become of us? O for some Delphic oracle, or Pythian maid, to utter the secrets of futurity! O for some Oedipus to solve the riddle of the cruel Sphynx! Such Oedipus was I to be—not divining a word's juggle, but whose agonizing pangs, and sorrow-tainted life were to be the engines, wherewith to lay bare the secrets of destiny, and reveal the meaning of the enigma, whose explanation closed the history of the human race.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dim fancies, akin to these, haunted our minds, and instilled feelings not unallied to pleasure, as we stood beside this silent tomb of nature, reared by these lifeless mountains, above her living veins, choking her vital principle. "Thus are we left," said Adrian, "two melancholy blasted trees, where once a forest waved. We are left to mourn, and pine, and die. Yet even now we have our duties, which we must string ourselves to fulfil: the duty of bestowing pleasure where we can, and by force of love, irradiating with rainbow hues the tempest of grief. Nor will I repine if in this extremity we preserve what we now possess. Something tells me, Verney, that we need no longer dread our cruel enemy, and I cling with delight to the oracular voice. Though strange, it will be sweet to mark the growth of your little boy, and the development of Clara's young heart. In the midst of a desert world, we are everything to them; and, if we live, it must be our task to make this new mode of life happy to them. At present this is easy, for their childish ideas do not wander into futurity, and the stinging craving for sympathy, and all of love of which our nature is susceptible, is not yet awake within them: we cannot guess what will happen then, when nature asserts her indefeasible and sacred powers; but, long before that time, we may all be cold, as he who lies in yonder tomb of ice. We need only provide for the present, and endeavour to fill with pleasant images the inexperienced fancy of your lovely niece. The scenes which now surround us, vast and sublime as they are, are not such as can best contribute to this work. Nature is here like our fortunes, grand, but too destructive, bare, and rude, to be able to afford delight to her young imagination. Let us descend to the sunny plains of Italy. Winter will soon be here, to clothe this wilderness in double desolation; but we will cross the bleak hill-tops, and lead her to scenes of fertility and beauty, where her path will be adorned with flowers, and the cheery atmosphere inspire pleasure and hope."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In pursuance of this plan we quitted Chamounix on the following day. We had no cause to hasten our steps; no event was transacted beyond our actual sphere to enchain our resolves, so we yielded to every idle whim, and deemed our time well spent, when we could behold the passage of the hours without dismay. We loitered along the lovely Vale of Servox; passed long hours on the bridge, which, crossing the ravine of Arve, commands a prospect of its pine-clothed depths, and the snowy mountains that wall it in. We rambled through romantic Switzerland; till, fear of coming winter leading us forward, the first days of October found us in the valley of La Maurienne, which leads to Cenis. I cannot explain the reluctance we felt at leaving this land of mountains; perhaps it was, that we regarded the Alps as boundaries between our former and our future state of existence, and so clung fondly to what of old we had loved. Perhaps, because we had now so few impulses urging to a choice between two modes of action, we were pleased to preserve the existence of one, and preferred the prospect of what we were to do, to the recollection of what had been done. We felt that for this year danger was past; and we believed that, for some months, we were secured to each other. There was a thrilling, agonizing delight in the thought—it filled the eyes with misty tears, it tore the heart with tumultuous heavings; frailer than the "snow fall in the river," were we each and all—but we strove to give life and individuality to the meteoric course of our several existences, and to feel that no moment escaped us unenjoyed. Thus tottering on the dizzy brink, we were happy. Yes! as we sat beneath the toppling rocks, beside the waterfalls, near</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >—Forests, ancient as the hills,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And folding sunny spots of greenery, where the chamois grazed, and the timid squirrel laid up its hoard—descanting on the charms of nature, drinking in the while her unalienable beauties—we were, in an empty world, happy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet, O days of joy—days, when eye spoke to eye, and voices, sweeter than the music of the swinging branches of the pines, or rivulet's gentle murmur, answered mine—yet, O days replete with beatitude, days of loved society—days unutterably dear to me forlorn—pass, O pass before me, making me in your memory forget what I am. Behold, how my streaming eyes blot this senseless paper—behold, how my features are convulsed by agonizing throes, at your mere recollection, now that, alone, my tears flow, my lips quiver, my cries fill the air, unseen, unmarked, unheard! Yet, O yet, days of delight! let me dwell on your long-drawn hours!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As the cold increased upon us, we passed the Alps, and descended into Italy. At the uprising of morn, we sat at our repast, and cheated our regrets by gay sallies or learned disquisitions. The live-long day we sauntered on, still keeping in view the end of our journey, but careless of the hour of its completion. As the evening star shone out, and the orange sunset, far in the west, marked the position of the dear land we had for ever left, talk, thought enchaining, made the hours fly—O that we had lived thus for ever and for ever! Of what consequence was it to our four hearts, that they alone were the fountains of life in the wide world? As far as mere individual sentiment was concerned, we had rather be left thus united together, than if, each alone in a populous desert of unknown men, we had wandered truly companionless till life's last term. In this manner, we endeavoured to console each other; in this manner, true philosophy taught us to reason.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was the delight of Adrian and myself to wait on Clara, naming her the little queen of the world, ourselves her humblest servitors. When we arrived at a town, our first care was to select for her its most choice abode; to make sure that no harrowing relic remained of its former inhabitants; to seek food for her, and minister to her wants with assiduous tenderness. Clara entered into our scheme with childish gaiety. Her chief business was to attend on Evelyn; but it was her sport to array herself in splendid robes, adorn herself with sunny gems, and ape a princely state. Her religion, deep and pure, did not teach her to refuse to blunt thus the keen sting of regret; her youthful vivacity made her enter, heart and soul, into these strange masquerades.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We had resolved to pass the ensuing winter at Milan, which, as being a large and luxurious city, would afford us choice of homes. We had descended the Alps, and left far behind their vast forests and mighty crags. We entered smiling Italy. Mingled grass and corn grew in her plains, the unpruned vines threw their luxuriant branches around the elms. The grapes, overripe, had fallen on the ground, or hung purple, or burnished green, among the red and yellow leaves. The ears of standing corn winnowed to emptiness by the spendthrift winds; the fallen foliage of the trees, the weed-grown brooks, the dusky olive, now spotted with its blackened fruit; the chestnuts, to which the squirrel only was harvest-man; all plenty, and yet, alas! all poverty, painted in wondrous hues and fantastic groupings this land of beauty. In the towns, in the voiceless towns, we visited the churches, adorned by pictures, master-pieces of art, or galleries of statues—while in this genial clime the animals, in new found liberty, rambled through the gorgeous palaces, and hardly feared our forgotten aspect. The dove-coloured oxen turned their full eyes on us, and paced slowly by; a startling throng of silly sheep, with pattering feet, would start up in some chamber, formerly dedicated to the repose of beauty, and rush, huddling past us, down the marble staircase into the street, and again in at the first open door, taking unrebuked possession of hallowed sanctuary, or kingly council-chamber. We no longer started at these occurrences, nor at worse exhibition of change—when the palace had become a mere tomb, pregnant with fetid stench, strewn with the dead; and we could perceive how pestilence and fear had played strange antics, chasing the luxurious dame to the dank fields and bare cottage; gathering, among carpets of Indian woof, and beds of silk, the rough peasant, or the deformed half-human shape of the wretched beggar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We arrived at Milan, and stationed ourselves in the Vice-Roy's palace. Here we made laws for ourselves, dividing our day, and fixing distinct occupations for each hour. In the morning we rode in the adjoining country, or wandered through the palaces, in search of pictures or antiquities. In the evening we assembled to read or to converse. There were few books that we dared read; few, that did not cruelly deface the painting we bestowed on our solitude, by recalling combinations and emotions never more to be experienced by us. Metaphysical disquisition; fiction, which wandering from all reality, lost itself in self-created errors; poets of times so far gone by, that to read of them was as to read of Atlantis and Utopia; or such as referred to nature only, and the workings of one particular mind; but most of all, talk, varied and ever new, beguiled our hours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >While we paused thus in our onward career towards death, time held on its accustomed course. Still and for ever did the earth roll on, enthroned in her atmospheric car, speeded by the force of the invisible coursers of never-erring necessity. And now, this dew-drop in the sky, this ball, ponderous with mountains, lucent with waves, passing from the short tyranny of watery Pisces and the frigid Ram, entered the radiant demesne of Taurus and the Twins. There, fanned by vernal airs, the Spirit of Beauty sprung from her cold repose; and, with winnowing wings and soft pacing feet, set a girdle of verdure around the earth, sporting among the violets, hiding within the springing foliage of the trees, tripping lightly down the radiant streams into the sunny deep. "For lo! winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines, with the tender grape, give a good smell."[2] Thus was it in the time of the ancient regal poet; thus was it now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet how could we miserable hail the approach of this delightful season? We hoped indeed that death did not now as heretofore walk in its shadow; yet, left as we were alone to each other, we looked in each other's faces with enquiring eyes, not daring altogether to trust to our presentiments, and endeavouring to divine which would be the hapless survivor to the other three. We were to pass the summer at the lake of Como, and thither we removed as soon as spring grew to her maturity, and the snow disappeared from the hill tops. Ten miles from Como, under the steep heights of the eastern mountains, by the margin of the lake, was a villa called the Pliniana, from its being built on the site of a fountain, whose periodical ebb and flow is described by the younger Pliny in his letters. The house had nearly fallen into ruin, till in the year 2090, an English nobleman had bought it, and fitted it up with every luxury. Two large halls, hung with splendid tapestry, and paved with marble, opened on each side of a court, of whose two other sides one overlooked the deep dark lake, and the other was bounded by a mountain, from whose stony side gushed, with roar and splash, the celebrated fountain. Above, underwood of myrtle and tufts of odorous plants crowned the rock, while the star-pointing giant cypresses reared themselves in the blue air, and the recesses of the hills were adorned with the luxuriant growth of chestnut-trees. Here we fixed our summer residence. We had a lovely skiff, in which we sailed, now stemming the midmost waves, now coasting the over-hanging and craggy banks, thick sown with evergreens, which dipped their shining leaves in the waters, and were mirrored in many a little bay and creek of waters of translucent darkness. Here orange plants bloomed, here birds poured forth melodious hymns; and here, during spring, the cold snake emerged from the clefts, and basked on the sunny terraces of rock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Were we not happy in this paradisiacal retreat? If some kind spirit had whispered forgetfulness to us, methinks we should have been happy here, where the precipitous mountains, nearly pathless, shut from our view the far fields of desolate earth, and with small exertion of the imagination, we might fancy that the cities were still resonant with popular hum, and the peasant still guided his plough through the furrow, and that we, the world's free denizens, enjoyed a voluntary exile, and not a remediless cutting off from our extinct species.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Not one among us enjoyed the beauty of this scenery so much as Clara. Before we quitted Milan, a change had taken place in her habits and manners. She lost her gaiety, she laid aside her sports, and assumed an almost vestal plainness of attire. She shunned us, retiring with Evelyn to some distant chamber or silent nook; nor did she enter into his pastimes with the same zest as she was wont, but would sit and watch him with sadly tender smiles, and eyes bright with tears, yet without a word of complaint. She approached us timidly, avoided our caresses, nor shook off her embarrassment till some serious discussion or lofty theme called her for awhile out of herself. Her beauty grew as a rose, which, opening to the summer wind, discloses leaf after leaf till the sense aches with its excess of loveliness. A slight and variable colour tinged her cheeks, and her motions seemed attuned by some hidden harmony of surpassing sweetness. We redoubled our tenderness and earnest attentions. She received them with grateful smiles, that fled swift as sunny beam from a glittering wave on an April day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Our only acknowledged point of sympathy with her, appeared to be Evelyn. This dear little fellow was a comforter and delight to us beyond all words. His buoyant spirit, and his innocent ignorance of our vast calamity, were balm to us, whose thoughts and feelings were over-wrought and spun out in the immensity of speculative sorrow. To cherish, to caress, to amuse him was the common task of all. Clara, who felt towards him in some degree like a young mother, gratefully acknowledged our kindness towards him. To me, O! to me, who saw the clear brows and soft eyes of the beloved of my heart, my lost and ever dear Idris, re-born in his gentle face, to me he was dear even to pain; if I pressed him to my heart, methought I clasped a real and living part of her, who had lain there through long years of youthful happiness.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was the custom of Adrian and myself to go out each day in our skiff to forage in the adjacent country. In these expeditions we were seldom accompanied by Clara or her little charge, but our return was an hour of hilarity. Evelyn ransacked our stores with childish eagerness, and we always brought some new found gift for our fair companion. Then too we made discoveries of lovely scenes or gay palaces, whither in the evening we all proceeded. Our sailing expeditions were most divine, and with a fair wind or transverse course we cut the liquid waves; and, if talk failed under the pressure of thought, I had my clarionet with me, which awoke the echoes, and gave the change to our careful minds. Clara at such times often returned to her former habits of free converse and gay sally; and though our four hearts alone beat in the world, those four hearts were happy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One day, on our return from the town of Como, with a laden boat, we expected as usual to be met at the port by Clara and Evelyn, and we were somewhat surprised to see the beach vacant. I, as my nature prompted, would not prognosticate evil, but explained it away as a mere casual incident. Not so Adrian. He was seized with sudden trembling and apprehension, and he called to me with vehemence to steer quickly for land, and, when near, leapt from the boat, half falling into the water; and, scrambling up the steep bank, hastened along the narrow strip of garden, the only level space between the lake and the mountain. I followed without delay; the garden and inner court were empty, so was the house, whose every room we visited. Adrian called loudly upon Clara's name, and was about to rush up the near mountain-path, when the door of a summer-house at the end of the garden slowly opened, and Clara appeared, not advancing towards us, but leaning against a column of the building with blanched cheeks, in a posture of utter despondency. Adrian sprang towards her with a cry of joy, and folded her delightedly in his arms. She withdrew from his embrace, and, without a word, again entered the summer-house. Her quivering lips, her despairing heart refused to afford her voice to express our misfortune. Poor little Evelyn had, while playing with her, been seized with sudden fever, and now lay torpid and speechless on a little couch in the summer-house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For a whole fortnight we unceasingly watched beside the poor child, as his life declined under the ravages of a virulent typhus. His little form and tiny lineaments encaged the embryo of the world-spanning mind of man. Man's nature, brimful of passions and affections, would have had an home in that little heart, whose swift pulsations hurried towards their close. His small hand's fine mechanism, now flaccid and unbent, would in the growth of sinew and muscle, have achieved works of beauty or of strength. His tender rosy feet would have trod in firm manhood the bowers and glades of earth— these reflections were now of little use: he lay, thought and strength suspended, waiting unresisting the final blow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We watched at his bedside, and when the access of fever was on him, we neither spoke nor looked at each other, marking only his obstructed breath and the mortal glow that tinged his sunken cheek, the heavy death that weighed on his eyelids. It is a trite evasion to say, that words could not express our long drawn agony; yet how can words image sensations, whose tormenting keenness throw us back, as it were, on the deep roots and hidden foundations of our nature, which shake our being with earth-quake-throe, so that we leave to confide in accustomed feelings which like mother-earth support us, and cling to some vain imagination or deceitful hope, which will soon be buried in the ruins occasioned by the final shock. I have called that period a fortnight, which we passed watching the changes of the sweet child's malady—and such it might have been—at night, we wondered to find another day gone, while each particular hour seemed endless. Day and night were exchanged for one another uncounted; we slept hardly at all, nor did we even quit his room, except when a pang of grief seized us, and we retired from each other for a short period to conceal our sobs and tears. We endeavoured in vain to abstract Clara from this deplorable scene. She sat, hour after hour, looking at him, now softly arranging his pillow, and, while he had power to swallow, administered his drink. At length the moment of his death came: the blood paused in its flow —his eyes opened, and then closed again: without convulsion or sigh, the frail tenement was left vacant of its spiritual inhabitant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I have heard that the sight of the dead has confirmed materialists in their belief. I ever felt otherwise. Was that my child—that moveless decaying inanimation? My child was enraptured by my caresses; his dear voice cloathed with meaning articulations his thoughts, otherwise inaccessible; his smile was a ray of the soul, and the same soul sat upon its throne in his eyes. I turn from this mockery of what he was. Take, O earth, thy debt! freely and for ever I consign to thee the garb thou didst afford. But thou, sweet child, amiable and beloved boy, either thy spirit has sought a fitter dwelling, or, shrined in my heart, thou livest while it lives.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We placed his remains under a cypress, the upright mountain being scooped out to receive them. And then Clara said, "If you wish me to live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us. I earnestly entreat you to take me away."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So on the fifteenth of August we bade adieu to our villa, and the embowering shades of this abode of beauty; to calm bay and noisy waterfall; to Evelyn's little grave we bade farewell! and then, with heavy hearts, we departed on our pilgrimage towards Rome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[1] Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Norway. [2] Solomon's Song.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER IX.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NOW—soft awhile—have I arrived so near the end? Yes! it is all over now—a step or two over those new made graves, and the wearisome way is done. Can I accomplish my task? Can I streak my paper with words capacious of the grand conclusion? Arise, black Melancholy! quit thy Cimmerian solitude! Bring with thee murky fogs from hell, which may drink up the day; bring blight and pestiferous exhalations, which, entering the hollow caverns and breathing places of earth, may fill her stony veins with corruption, so that not only herbage may no longer flourish, the trees may rot, and the rivers run with gall—but the everlasting mountains be decomposed, and the mighty deep putrify, and the genial atmosphere which clips the globe, lose all powers of generation and sustenance. Do this, sad visaged power, while I write, while eyes read these pages.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And who will read them? Beware, tender offspring of the re-born world— beware, fair being, with human heart, yet untamed by care, and human brow, yet unploughed by time—beware, lest the cheerful current of thy blood be checked, thy golden locks turn grey, thy sweet dimpling smiles be changed to fixed, harsh wrinkles! Let not day look on these lines, lest garish day waste, turn pale, and die. Seek a cypress grove, whose moaning boughs will be harmony befitting; seek some cave, deep embowered in earth's dark entrails, where no light will penetrate, save that which struggles, red and flickering, through a single fissure, staining thy page with grimmest livery of death.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is a painful confusion in my brain, which refuses to delineate distinctly succeeding events. Sometimes the irradiation of my friend's gentle smile comes before me; and methinks its light spans and fills eternity—then, again, I feel the gasping throes—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We quitted Como, and in compliance with Adrian's earnest desire, we took Venice in our way to Rome. There was something to the English peculiarly attractive in the idea of this wave-encircled, island-enthroned city. Adrian had never seen it. We went down the Po and the Brenta in a boat; and, the days proving intolerably hot, we rested in the bordering palaces during the day, travelling through the night, when darkness made the bordering banks indistinct, and our solitude less remarkable; when the wandering moon lit the waves that divided before our prow, and the night-wind filled our sails, and the murmuring stream, waving trees, and swelling canvass, accorded in harmonious strain. Clara, long overcome by excessive grief, had to a great degree cast aside her timid, cold reserve, and received our attentions with grateful tenderness. While Adrian with poetic fervour discoursed of the glorious nations of the dead, of the beauteous earth and the fate of man, she crept near him, drinking in his speech with silent pleasure. We banished from our talk, and as much as possible from our thoughts, the knowledge of our desolation. And it would be incredible to an inhabitant of cities, to one among a busy throng, to what extent we succeeded. It was as a man confined in a dungeon, whose small and grated rift at first renders the doubtful light more sensibly obscure, till, the visual orb having drunk in the beam, and adapted itself to its scantiness, he finds that clear noon inhabits his cell. So we, a simple triad on empty earth, were multiplied to each other, till we became all in all. We stood like trees, whose roots are loosened by the wind, which support one another, leaning and clinging with encreased fervour while the wintry storms howl. Thus we floated down the widening stream of the Po, sleeping when the cicale sang, awake with the stars. We entered the narrower banks of the Brenta, and arrived at the shore of the Laguna at sunrise on the sixth of September. The bright orb slowly rose from behind its cupolas and towers, and shed its penetrating light upon the glassy waters. Wrecks of gondolas, and some few uninjured ones, were strewed on the beach at Fusina. We embarked in one of these for the widowed daughter of ocean, who, abandoned and fallen, sat forlorn on her propping isles, looking towards the far mountains of Greece. We rowed lightly over the Laguna, and entered Canale Grande. The tide ebbed sullenly from out the broken portals and violated halls of Venice: sea weed and sea monsters were left on the blackened marble, while the salt ooze defaced the matchless works of art that adorned their walls, and the sea gull flew out from the shattered window. In the midst of this appalling ruin of the monuments of man's power, nature asserted her ascendancy, and shone more beauteous from the contrast. The radiant waters hardly trembled, while the rippling waves made many sided mirrors to the sun; the blue immensity, seen beyond Lido, stretched far, unspecked by boat, so tranquil, so lovely, that it seemed to invite us to quit the land strewn with ruins, and to seek refuge from sorrow and fear on its placid extent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We saw the ruins of this hapless city from the height of the tower of San Marco, immediately under us, and turned with sickening hearts to the sea, which, though it be a grave, rears no monument, discloses no ruin. Evening had come apace. The sun set in calm majesty behind the misty summits of the Apennines, and its golden and roseate hues painted the mountains of the opposite shore. "That land," said Adrian, "tinged with the last glories of the day, is Greece." Greece! The sound had a responsive chord in the bosom of Clara. She vehemently reminded us that we had promised to take her once again to Greece, to the tomb of her parents. Why go to Rome? what should we do at Rome? We might take one of the many vessels to be found here, embark in it, and steer right for Albania.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I objected the dangers of ocean, and the distance of the mountains we saw, from Athens; a distance which, from the savage uncultivation of the country, was almost impassable. Adrian, who was delighted with Clara's proposal, obviated these objections. The season was favourable; the north-west that blew would take us transversely across the gulph; and then we might find, in some abandoned port, a light Greek caique, adapted for such navigation, and run down the coast of the Morea, and, passing over the Isthmus of Corinth, without much land-travelling or fatigue, find ourselves at Athens. This appeared to me wild talk; but the sea, glowing with a thousand purple hues, looked so brilliant and safe; my beloved companions were so earnest, so determined, that, when Adrian said, "Well, though it is not exactly what you wish, yet consent, to please me"—I could no longer refuse. That evening we selected a vessel, whose size just seemed fitted for our enterprize; we bent the sails and put the rigging in order, and reposing that night in one of the city's thousand palaces, agreed to embark at sunrise the following morning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > When winds that move not its calm surface, sweep</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The azure sea, I love the land no more;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > The smiles of the serene and tranquil deep</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Tempt my unquiet mind—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thus said Adrian, quoting a translation of Moschus's poem, as in the clear morning light, we rowed over the Laguna, past Lido, into the open sea—I would have added in continuation,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > But when the roar</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Of ocean's gray abyss resounds, and foam</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Gathers upon the sea, and vast waves burst—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But my friends declared that such verses were evil augury; so in cheerful mood we left the shallow waters, and, when out at sea, unfurled our sails to catch the favourable breeze. The laughing morning air filled them, while sun-light bathed earth, sky and ocean—the placid waves divided to receive our keel, and playfully kissed the dark sides of our little skiff, murmuring a welcome; as land receded, still the blue expanse, most waveless, twin sister to the azure empyrean, afforded smooth conduct to our bark. As the air and waters were tranquil and balmy, so were our minds steeped in quiet. In comparison with the unstained deep, funereal earth appeared a grave, its high rocks and stately mountains were but monuments, its trees the plumes of a herse, the brooks and rivers brackish with tears for departed man. Farewell to desolate towns —to fields with their savage intermixture of corn and weeds—to ever multiplying relics of our lost species. Ocean, we commit ourselves to thee —even as the patriarch of old floated above the drowned world, let us be saved, as thus we betake ourselves to thy perennial flood.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Adrian sat at the helm; I attended to the rigging, the breeze right aft filled our swelling canvas, and we ran before it over the untroubled deep. The wind died away at noon; its idle breath just permitted us to hold our course. As lazy, fair-weather sailors, careless of the coming hour, we talked gaily of our coasting voyage, of our arrival at Athens. We would make our home of one of the Cyclades, and there in myrtle-groves, amidst perpetual spring, fanned by the wholesome sea-breezes—we would live long years in beatific union—Was there such a thing as death in the world?—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The sun passed its zenith, and lingered down the stainless floor of heaven. Lying in the boat, my face turned up to the sky, I thought I saw on its blue white, marbled streaks, so slight, so immaterial, that now I said— They are there—and now, It is a mere imagination. A sudden fear stung me while I gazed; and, starting up, and running to the prow,—as I stood, my hair was gently lifted on my brow—a dark line of ripples appeared to the east, gaining rapidly on us—my breathless remark to Adrian, was followed by the flapping of the canvas, as the adverse wind struck it, and our boat lurched—swift as speech, the web of the storm thickened over head, the sun went down red, the dark sea was strewed with foam, and our skiff rose and fell in its encreasing furrows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Behold us now in our frail tenement, hemmed in by hungry, roaring waves, buffeted by winds. In the inky east two vast clouds, sailing contrary ways, met; the lightning leapt forth, and the hoarse thunder muttered. Again in the south, the clouds replied, and the forked stream of fire running along the black sky, shewed us the appalling piles of clouds, now met and obliterated by the heaving waves. Great God! And we alone—we three— alone—alone—sole dwellers on the sea and on the earth, we three must perish! The vast universe, its myriad worlds, and the plains of boundless earth which we had left—the extent of shoreless sea around—contracted to my view—they and all that they contained, shrunk up to one point, even to our tossing bark, freighted with glorious humanity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A convulsion of despair crossed the love-beaming face of Adrian, while with set teeth he murmured, "Yet they shall be saved!" Clara, visited by an human pang, pale and trembling, crept near him—he looked on her with an encouraging smile—"Do you fear, sweet girl? O, do not fear, we shall soon be on shore!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The darkness prevented me from seeing the changes of her countenance; but her voice was clear and sweet, as she replied, "Why should I fear? neither sea nor storm can harm us, if mighty destiny or the ruler of destiny does not permit. And then the stinging fear of surviving either of you, is not here—one death will clasp us undivided."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Meanwhile we took in all our sails, save a gib; and, as soon as we might without danger, changed our course, running with the wind for the Italian shore. Dark night mixed everything; we hardly discerned the white crests of the murderous surges, except when lightning made brief noon, and drank the darkness, shewing us our danger, and restoring us to double night. We were all silent, except when Adrian, as steersman, made an encouraging observation. Our little shell obeyed the rudder miraculously well, and ran along on the top of the waves, as if she had been an offspring of the sea, and the angry mother sheltered her endangered child.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I sat at the prow, watching our course; when suddenly I heard the waters break with redoubled fury. We were certainly near the shore—at the same time I cried, "About there!" and a broad lightning filling the concave, shewed us for one moment the level beach a-head, disclosing even the sands, and stunted, ooze-sprinkled beds of reeds, that grew at high water mark. Again it was dark, and we drew in our breath with such content as one may, who, while fragments of volcano-hurled rock darken the air, sees a vast mass ploughing the ground immediately at his feet. What to do we knew not —the breakers here, there, everywhere, encompassed us—they roared, and dashed, and flung their hated spray in our faces. With considerable difficulty and danger we succeeded at length in altering our course, and stretched out from shore. I urged my companions to prepare for the wreck of our little skiff, and to bind themselves to some oar or spar which might suffice to float them. I was myself an excellent swimmer—the very sight of the sea was wont to raise in me such sensations, as a huntsman experiences, when he hears a pack of hounds in full cry; I loved to feel the waves wrap me and strive to overpower me; while I, lord of myself, moved this way or that, in spite of their angry buffetings. Adrian also could swim—but the weakness of his frame prevented him from feeling pleasure in the exercise, or acquiring any great expertness. But what power could the strongest swimmer oppose to the overpowering violence of ocean in its fury? My efforts to prepare my companions were rendered nearly futile —for the roaring breakers prevented our hearing one another speak, and the waves, that broke continually over our boat, obliged me to exert all my strength in lading the water out, as fast as it came in. The while darkness, palpable and rayless, hemmed us round, dissipated only by the lightning; sometimes we beheld thunderbolts, fiery red, fall into the sea, and at intervals vast spouts stooped from the clouds, churning the wild ocean, which rose to meet them; while the fierce gale bore the rack onwards, and they were lost in the chaotic mingling of sky and sea. Our gunwales had been torn away, our single sail had been rent to ribbands, and borne down the stream of the wind. We had cut away our mast, and lightened the boat of all she contained—Clara attempted to assist me in heaving the water from the hold, and, as she turned her eyes to look on the lightning, I could discern by that momentary gleam, that resignation had conquered every fear. We have a power given us in any worst extremity, which props the else feeble mind of man, and enables us to endure the most savage tortures with a stillness of soul which in hours of happiness we could not have imagined. A calm, more dreadful in truth than the tempest, allayed the wild beatings of my heart—a calm like that of the gamester, the suicide, and the murderer, when the last die is on the point of being cast—while the poisoned cup is at the lips,—as the death-blow is about to be given.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hours passed thus—hours which might write old age on the face of beardless youth, and grizzle the silky hair of infancy—-hours, while the chaotic uproar continued, while each dread gust transcended in fury the one before, and our skiff hung on the breaking wave, and then rushed into the valley below, and trembled and spun between the watery precipices that seemed most to meet above her. For a moment the gale paused, and ocean sank to comparative silence—it was a breathless interval; the wind which, as a practised leaper, had gathered itself up before it sprung, now with terrific roar rushed over the sea, and the waves struck our stern. Adrian exclaimed that the rudder was gone;—"We are lost," cried Clara, "Save yourselves—O save yourselves!" The lightning shewed me the poor girl half buried in the water at the bottom of the boat; as she was sinking in it Adrian caught her up, and sustained her in his arms. We were without a rudder—we rushed prow foremost into the vast billows piled up a-head— they broke over and filled the tiny skiff; one scream I heard—one cry that we were gone, I uttered; I found myself in the waters; darkness was around. When the light of the tempest flashed, I saw the keel of our upset boat close to me—I clung to this, grasping it with clenched hand and nails, while I endeavoured during each flash to discover any appearance of my companions. I thought I saw Adrian at no great distance from me, clinging to an oar; I sprung from my hold, and with energy beyond my human strength, I dashed aside the waters as I strove to lay hold of him. As that hope failed, instinctive love of life animated me, and feelings of contention, as if a hostile will combated with mine. I breasted the surges, and flung them from me, as I would the opposing front and sharpened claws of a lion about to enfang my bosom. When I had been beaten down by one wave, I rose on another, while I felt bitter pride curl my lip.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ever since the storm had carried us near the shore, we had never attained any great distance from it. With every flash I saw the bordering coast; yet the progress I made was small, while each wave, as it receded, carried me back into ocean's far abysses. At one moment I felt my foot touch the sand, and then again I was in deep water; my arms began to lose their power of motion; my breath failed me under the influence of the strangling waters— a thousand wild and delirious thoughts crossed me: as well as I can now recall them, my chief feeling was, how sweet it would be to lay my head on the quiet earth, where the surges would no longer strike my weakened frame, nor the sound of waters ring in my ears—to attain this repose, not to save my life, I made a last effort—the shelving shore suddenly presented a footing for me. I rose, and was again thrown down by the breakers—a point of rock to which I was enabled to cling, gave me a moment's respite; and then, taking advantage of the ebbing of the waves, I ran forwards— gained the dry sands, and fell senseless on the oozy reeds that sprinkled them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I must have lain long deprived of life; for when first, with a sickening feeling, I unclosed my eyes, the light of morning met them. Great change had taken place meanwhile: grey dawn dappled the flying clouds, which sped onwards, leaving visible at intervals vast lakes of pure ether. A fountain of light arose in an encreasing stream from the east, behind the waves of the Adriatic, changing the grey to a roseate hue, and then flooding sky and sea with aerial gold.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A kind of stupor followed my fainting; my senses were alive, but memory was extinct. The blessed respite was short—a snake lurked near me to sting me into life—on the first retrospective emotion I would have started up, but my limbs refused to obey me; my knees trembled, the muscles had lost all power. I still believed that I might find one of my beloved companions cast like me, half alive, on the beach; and I strove in every way to restore my frame to the use of its animal functions. I wrung the brine from my hair; and the rays of the risen sun soon visited me with genial warmth. With the restoration of my bodily powers, my mind became in some degree aware of the universe of misery, henceforth to be its dwelling. I ran to the water's edge, calling on the beloved names. Ocean drank in, and absorbed my feeble voice, replying with pitiless roar. I climbed a near tree: the level sands bounded by a pine forest, and the sea clipped round by the horizon, was all that I could discern. In vain I extended my researches along the beach; the mast we had thrown overboard, with tangled cordage, and remnants of a sail, was the sole relic land received of our wreck. Sometimes I stood still, and wrung my hands. I accused earth and sky —the universal machine and the Almighty power that misdirected it. Again I threw myself on the sands, and then the sighing wind, mimicking a human cry, roused me to bitter, fallacious hope. Assuredly if any little bark or smallest canoe had been near, I should have sought the savage plains of ocean, found the dear remains of my lost ones, and clinging round them, have shared their grave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The day passed thus; each moment contained eternity; although when hour after hour had gone by, I wondered at the quick flight of time. Yet even now I had not drunk the bitter potion to the dregs; I was not yet persuaded of my loss; I did not yet feel in every pulsation, in every nerve, in every thought, that I remained alone of my race,—that I was the LAST MAN.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The day had clouded over, and a drizzling rain set in at sunset. Even the eternal skies weep, I thought; is there any shame then, that mortal man should spend himself in tears? I remembered the ancient fables, in which human beings are described as dissolving away through weeping into ever-gushing fountains. Ah! that so it were; and then my destiny would be in some sort akin to the watery death of Adrian and Clara. Oh! grief is fantastic; it weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colours to all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had wandered in my search to some distance from the spot on which I had been cast, and came to one of those watch-towers, which at stated distances line the Italian shore. I was glad of shelter, glad to find a work of human hands, after I had gazed so long on nature's drear barrenness; so I entered, and ascended the rough winding staircase into the guard-room. So far was fate kind, that no harrowing vestige remained of its former inhabitants; a few planks laid across two iron tressels, and strewed with the dried leaves of Indian corn, was the bed presented to me; and an open chest, containing some half mouldered biscuit, awakened an appetite, which perhaps existed before, but of which, until now, I was not aware. Thirst also, violent and parching, the result of the sea-water I had drank, and of the exhaustion of my frame, tormented me. Kind nature had gifted the supply of these wants with pleasurable sensations, so that I—even I!—was refreshed and calmed, as I ate of this sorry fare, and drank a little of the sour wine which half filled a flask left in this abandoned dwelling. Then I stretched myself on the bed, not to be disdained by the victim of shipwreck. The earthy smell of the dried leaves was balm to my sense after the hateful odour of sea-weed. I forgot my state of loneliness. I neither looked backward nor forward; my senses were hushed to repose; I fell asleep and dreamed of all dear inland scenes, of hay-makers, of the shepherd's whistle to his dog, when he demanded his help to drive the flock to fold; of sights and sounds peculiar to my boyhood's mountain life, which I had long forgotten.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I awoke in a painful agony—for I fancied that ocean, breaking its bounds, carried away the fixed continent and deep rooted mountains, together with the streams I loved, the woods, and the flocks—it raged around, with that continued and dreadful roar which had accompanied the last wreck of surviving humanity. As my waking sense returned, the bare walls of the guard room closed round me, and the rain pattered against the single window. How dreadful it is, to emerge from the oblivion of slumber, and to receive as a good morrow the mute wailing of one's own hapless heart —to return from the land of deceptive dreams, to the heavy knowledge of unchanged disaster!—Thus was it with me, now, and for ever! The sting of other griefs might be blunted by time; and even mine yielded sometimes during the day, to the pleasure inspired by the imagination or the senses; but I never look first upon the morning-light but with my fingers pressed tight on my bursting heart, and my soul deluged with the interminable flood of hopeless misery. Now I awoke for the first time in the dead world—I awoke alone—and the dull dirge of the sea, heard even amidst the rain, recalled me to the reflection of the wretch I had become. The sound came like a reproach, a scoff—like the sting of remorse in the soul—I gasped—the veins and muscles of my throat swelled, suffocating me. I put my fingers to my ears, I buried my head in the leaves of my couch, I would have dived to the centre to lose hearing of that hideous moan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But another task must be mine—again I visited the detested beach— again I vainly looked far and wide—again I raised my unanswered cry, lifting up the only voice that could ever again force the mute air to syllable the human thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What a pitiable, forlorn, disconsolate being I was! My very aspect and garb told the tale of my despair. My hair was matted and wild—my limbs soiled with salt ooze; while at sea, I had thrown off those of my garments that encumbered me, and the rain drenched the thin summer-clothing I had retained—my feet were bare, and the stunted reeds and broken shells made them bleed—the while, I hurried to and fro, now looking earnestly on some distant rock which, islanded in the sands, bore for a moment a deceptive appearance—now with flashing eyes reproaching the murderous ocean for its unutterable cruelty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For a moment I compared myself to that monarch of the waste—Robinson Crusoe. We had been both thrown companionless—he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world. I was rich in the so called goods of life. If I turned my steps from the near barren scene, and entered any of the earth's million cities, I should find their wealth stored up for my accommodation—clothes, food, books, and a choice of dwelling beyond the command of the princes of former times—every climate was subject to my selection, while he was obliged to toil in the acquirement of every necessary, and was the inhabitant of a tropical island, against whose heats and storms he could obtain small shelter.—Viewing the question thus, who would not have preferred the Sybarite enjoyments I could command, the philosophic leisure, and ample intellectual resources, to his life of labour and peril? Yet he was far happier than I: for he could hope, nor hope in vain—the destined vessel at last arrived, to bear him to countrymen and kindred, where the events of his solitude became a fire-side tale. To none could I ever relate the story of my adversity; no hope had I. He knew that, beyond the ocean which begirt his lonely island, thousands lived whom the sun enlightened when it shone also on him: beneath the meridian sun and visiting moon, I alone bore human features; I alone could give articulation to thought; and, when I slept, both day and night were unbeheld of any. He had fled from his fellows, and was transported with terror at the print of a human foot. I would have knelt down and worshipped the same. The wild and cruel Caribbee, the merciless Cannibal—or worse than these, the uncouth, brute, and remorseless veteran in the vices of civilization, would have been to me a beloved companion, a treasure dearly prized—his nature would be kin to mine; his form cast in the same mould; human blood would flow in his veins; a human sympathy must link us for ever. It cannot be that I shall never behold a fellow being more!—never! —never!—not in the course of years!—Shall I wake, and speak to none, pass the interminable hours, my soul, islanded in the world, a solitary point, surrounded by vacuum? Will day follow day endlessly thus? —No! no! a God rules the world—providence has not exchanged its golden sceptre for an aspic's sting. Away! let me fly from the ocean-grave, let me depart from this barren nook, paled in, as it is, from access by its own desolateness; let me tread once again the paved towns; step over the threshold of man's dwellings, and most certainly I shall find this thought a horrible vision—a maddening, but evanescent dream.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I entered Ravenna, (the town nearest to the spot whereon I had been cast), before the second sun had set on the empty world; I saw many living creatures; oxen, and horses, and dogs, but there was no man among them; I entered a cottage, it was vacant; I ascended the marble stairs of a palace, the bats and the owls were nestled in the tapestry; I stepped softly, not to awaken the sleeping town: I rebuked a dog, that by yelping disturbed the sacred stillness; I would not believe that all was as it seemed—The world was not dead, but I was mad; I was deprived of sight, hearing, and sense of touch; I was labouring under the force of a spell, which permitted me to behold all sights of earth, except its human inhabitants; they were pursuing their ordinary labours. Every house had its inmate; but I could not perceive them. If I could have deluded myself into a belief of this kind, I should have been far more satisfied. But my brain, tenacious of its reason, refused to lend itself to such imaginations—and though I endeavoured to play the antic to myself, I knew that I, the offspring of man, during long years one among many—now remained sole survivor of my species.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The sun sank behind the western hills; I had fasted since the preceding evening, but, though faint and weary, I loathed food, nor ceased, while yet a ray of light remained, to pace the lonely streets. Night came on, and sent every living creature but me to the bosom of its mate. It was my solace, to blunt my mental agony by personal hardship—of the thousand beds around, I would not seek the luxury of one; I lay down on the pavement,—a cold marble step served me for a pillow—midnight came; and then, though not before, did my wearied lids shut out the sight of the twinkling stars, and their reflex on the pavement near. Thus I passed the second night of my desolation.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHAPTER X.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I AWOKE in the morning, just as the higher windows of the lofty houses received the first beams of the rising sun. The birds were chirping, perched on the windows sills and deserted thresholds of the doors. I awoke, and my first thought was, Adrian and Clara are dead. I no longer shall be hailed by their good-morrow—or pass the long day in their society. I shall never see them more. The ocean has robbed me of them—stolen their hearts of love from their breasts, and given over to corruption what was dearer to me than light, or life, or hope.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was an untaught shepherd-boy, when Adrian deigned to confer on me his friendship. The best years of my life had been passed with him. All I had possessed of this world's goods, of happiness, knowledge, or virtue—I owed to him. He had, in his person, his intellect, and rare qualities, given a glory to my life, which without him it had never known. Beyond all other beings he had taught me, that goodness, pure and single, can be an attribute of man. It was a sight for angels to congregate to behold, to view him lead, govern, and solace, the last days of the human race.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My lovely Clara also was lost to me—she who last of the daughters of man, exhibited all those feminine and maiden virtues, which poets, painters, and sculptors, have in their various languages strove to express. Yet, as far as she was concerned, could I lament that she was removed in early youth from the certain advent of misery? Pure she was of soul, and all her intents were holy. But her heart was the throne of love, and the sensibility her lovely countenance expressed, was the prophet of many woes, not the less deep and drear, because she would have for ever concealed them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These two wondrously endowed beings had been spared from the universal wreck, to be my companions during the last year of solitude. I had felt, while they were with me, all their worth. I was conscious that every other sentiment, regret, or passion had by degrees merged into a yearning, clinging affection for them. I had not forgotten the sweet partner of my youth, mother of my children, my adored Idris; but I saw at least a part of her spirit alive again in her brother; and after, that by Evelyn's death I had lost what most dearly recalled her to me; I enshrined her memory in Adrian's form, and endeavoured to confound the two dear ideas. I sound the depths of my heart, and try in vain to draw thence the expressions that can typify my love for these remnants of my race. If regret and sorrow came athwart me, as well it might in our solitary and uncertain state, the clear tones of Adrian's voice, and his fervent look, dissipated the gloom; or I was cheered unaware by the mild content and sweet resignation Clara's cloudless brow and deep blue eyes expressed. They were all to me—the suns of my benighted soul—repose in my weariness—slumber in my sleepless woe. Ill, most ill, with disjointed words, bare and weak, have I expressed the feeling with which I clung to them. I would have wound myself like ivy inextricably round them, so that the same blow might destroy us. I would have entered and been a part of them—so that</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >even now I had accompanied them to their new and incommunicable abode.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Never shall I see them more. I am bereft of their dear converse—bereft of sight of them. I am a tree rent by lightning; never will the bark close over the bared fibres—never will their quivering life, torn by the winds, receive the opiate of a moment's balm. I am alone in the world— but that expression as yet was less pregnant with misery, than that Adrian and Clara are dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The tide of thought and feeling rolls on for ever the same, though the banks and shapes around, which govern its course, and the reflection in the wave, vary. Thus the sentiment of immediate loss in some sort decayed, while that of utter, irremediable loneliness grew on me with time. Three days I wandered through Ravenna—now thinking only of the beloved beings who slept in the oozy caves of ocean—now looking forward on the dread blank before me; shuddering to make an onward step—writhing at each change that marked the progress of the hours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For three days I wandered to and fro in this melancholy town. I passed whole hours in going from house to house, listening whether I could detect some lurking sign of human existence. Sometimes I rang at a bell; it tinkled through the vaulted rooms, and silence succeeded to the sound. I called myself hopeless, yet still I hoped; and still disappointment ushered in the hours, intruding the cold, sharp steel which first pierced me, into the aching festering wound. I fed like a wild beast, which seizes its food only when stung by intolerable hunger. I did not change my garb, or seek the shelter of a roof, during all those days. Burning heats, nervous irritation, a ceaseless, but confused flow of thought, sleepless nights, and days instinct with a frenzy of agitation, possessed me during that time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As the fever of my blood encreased, a desire of wandering came upon me. I remember, that the sun had set on the fifth day after my wreck, when, without purpose or aim, I quitted the town of Ravenna. I must have been very ill. Had I been possessed by more or less of delirium, that night had surely been my last; for, as I continued to walk on the banks of the Mantone, whose upward course I followed, I looked wistfully on the stream, acknowledging to myself that its pellucid waves could medicine my woes for ever, and was unable to account to myself for my tardiness in seeking their shelter from the poisoned arrows of thought, that were piercing me through and through. I walked a considerable part of the night, and excessive weariness at length conquered my repugnance to the availing myself of the deserted habitations of my species. The waning moon, which had just risen, shewed me a cottage, whose neat entrance and trim garden reminded me of my own England. I lifted up the latch of the door and entered. A kitchen first presented itself, where, guided by the moon beams, I found materials for striking a light. Within this was a bed room; the couch was furnished with sheets of snowy whiteness; the wood piled on the hearth, and an array as for a meal, might almost have deceived me into the dear belief that I had here found what I had so long sought—one survivor, a companion for my loneliness, a solace to my despair. I steeled myself against the delusion; the room itself was vacant: it was only prudent, I repeated to myself, to examine the rest of the house. I fancied that I was proof against the expectation; yet my heart beat audibly, as I laid my hand on the lock of each door, and it sunk again, when I perceived in each the same vacancy. Dark and silent they were as vaults; so I returned to the first chamber, wondering what sightless host had spread the materials for my repast, and my repose. I drew a chair to the table, and examined what the viands were of which I was to partake. In truth it was a death feast! The bread was blue and mouldy; the cheese lay a heap of dust. I did not dare examine the other dishes; a troop of ants passed in a double line across the table cloth; every utensil was covered with dust, with cobwebs, and myriads of dead flies: these were objects each and all betokening the fallaciousness of my expectations. Tears rushed into my eyes; surely this was a wanton display of the power of the destroyer. What had I done, that each sensitive nerve was thus to be anatomized? Yet why complain more now than ever? This vacant cottage revealed no new sorrow— the world was empty; mankind was dead—I knew it well—why quarrel therefore with an acknowledged and stale truth? Yet, as I said, I had hoped in the very heart of despair, so that every new impression of the hard-cut reality on my soul brought with it a fresh pang, telling me the yet unstudied lesson, that neither change of place nor time could bring alleviation to my misery, but that, as I now was, I must continue, day after day, month after month, year after year, while I lived. I hardly dared conjecture what space of time that expression implied. It is true, I was no longer in the first blush of manhood; neither had I declined far in the vale of years—men have accounted mine the prime of life: I had just entered my thirty-seventh year; every limb was as well knit, every articulation as true, as when I had acted the shepherd on the hills of Cumberland; and with these advantages I was to commence the train of solitary life. Such were the reflections that ushered in my slumber on that night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The shelter, however, and less disturbed repose which I enjoyed, restored me the following morning to a greater portion of health and strength, than I had experienced since my fatal shipwreck. Among the stores I had discovered on searching the cottage the preceding night, was a quantity of dried grapes; these refreshed me in the morning, as I left my lodging and proceeded towards a town which I discerned at no great distance. As far as I could divine, it must have been Forli. I entered with pleasure its wide and grassy streets. All, it is true, pictured the excess of desolation; yet I loved to find myself in those spots which had been the abode of my fellow creatures. I delighted to traverse street after street, to look up at the tall houses, and repeat to myself, once they contained beings similar to myself—I was not always the wretch I am now. The wide square of Forli, the arcade around it, its light and pleasant aspect cheered me. I was pleased with the idea, that, if the earth should be again peopled, we, the lost race, would, in the relics left behind, present no contemptible exhibition of our powers to the new comers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I entered one of the palaces, and opened the door of a magnificent saloon. I started—I looked again with renewed wonder. What wild-looking, unkempt, half-naked savage was that before me? The surprise was momentary.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I perceived that it was I myself whom I beheld in a large mirror at the end of the hall. No wonder that the lover of the princely Idris should fail to recognize himself in the miserable object there pourtrayed. My tattered dress was that in which I had crawled half alive from the tempestuous sea. My long and tangled hair hung in elf locks on my brow—my dark eyes, now hollow and wild, gleamed from under them—my cheeks were discoloured by the jaundice, which (the effect of misery and neglect) suffused my skin, and were half hid by a beard of many days' growth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet why should I not remain thus, I thought; the world is dead, and this squalid attire is a fitter mourning garb than the foppery of a black suit. And thus, methinks, I should have remained, had not hope, without which I do not believe man could exist, whispered to me, that, in such a plight, I should be an object of fear and aversion to the being, preserved I knew not where, but I fondly trusted, at length, to be found by me. Will my readers scorn the vanity, that made me attire myself with some care, for the sake of this visionary being? Or will they forgive the freaks of a half crazed imagination? I can easily forgive myself—for hope, however vague, was so dear to me, and a sentiment of pleasure of so rare occurrence, that I yielded readily to any idea, that cherished the one, or promised any recurrence of the former to my sorrowing heart. After such occupation, I visited every street, alley, and nook of Forli. These Italian towns presented an appearance of still greater desolation, than those of England or France. Plague had appeared here earlier—it had finished its course, and achieved its work much sooner than with us. Probably the last summer had found no human being alive, in all the track included between the shores of Calabria and the northern Alps. My search was utterly vain, yet I did not despond. Reason methought was on my side; and the chances were by no means contemptible, that there should exist in some part of Italy a survivor like myself—of a wasted, depopulate land. As therefore I rambled through the empty town, I formed my plan for future operations. I would continue to journey on towards Rome. After I should have satisfied myself, by a narrow search, that I left behind no human being in the towns through which I passed, I would write up in a conspicuous part of each, with white paint, in three languages, that "Verney, the last of the race of Englishmen, had taken up his abode in Rome."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In pursuance of this scheme, I entered a painter's shop, and procured myself the paint. It is strange that so trivial an occupation should have consoled, and even enlivened me. But grief renders one childish, despair fantastic. To this simple inscription, I merely added the adjuration, "Friend, come! I wait for thee!—Deh, vieni! ti aspetto!" On the following morning, with something like hope for my companion, I quitted Forli on my way to Rome. Until now, agonizing retrospect, and dreary prospects for the future, had stung me when awake, and cradled me to my repose. Many times I had delivered myself up to the tyranny of anguish— many times I resolved a speedy end to my woes; and death by my own hands was a remedy, whose practicability was even cheering to me. What could I fear in the other world? If there were an hell, and I were doomed to it, I should come an adept to the sufferance of its tortures—the act were easy, the speedy and certain end of my deplorable tragedy. But now these thoughts faded before the new born expectation. I went on my way, not as before, feeling each hour, each minute, to be an age instinct with incalculable pain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As I wandered along the plain, at the foot of the Appennines—through their vallies, and over their bleak summits, my path led me through a country which had been trodden by heroes, visited and admired by thousands. They had, as a tide, receded, leaving me blank and bare in the midst. But why complain? Did I not hope?—so I schooled myself, even after the enlivening spirit had really deserted me, and thus I was obliged to call up all the fortitude I could command, and that was not much, to prevent a recurrence of that chaotic and intolerable despair, that had succeeded to the miserable shipwreck, that had consummated every fear, and dashed to annihilation every joy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I rose each day with the morning sun, and left my desolate inn. As my feet strayed through the unpeopled country, my thoughts rambled through the universe, and I was least miserable when I could, absorbed in reverie, forget the passage of the hours. Each evening, in spite of weariness, I detested to enter any dwelling, there to take up my nightly abode—I have sat, hour after hour, at the door of the cottage I had selected, unable to lift the latch, and meet face to face blank desertion within. Many nights, though autumnal mists were spread around, I passed under an ilex—many times I have supped on arbutus berries and chestnuts, making a fire, gypsy-like, on the ground—because wild natural scenery reminded me less acutely of my hopeless state of loneliness. I counted the days, and bore with me a peeled willow-wand, on which, as well as I could remember, I had notched the days that had elapsed since my wreck, and each night I added another unit to the melancholy sum.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had toiled up a hill which led to Spoleto. Around was spread a plain, encircled by the chestnut-covered Appennines. A dark ravine was on one side, spanned by an aqueduct, whose tall arches were rooted in the dell below, and attested that man had once deigned to bestow labour and thought here, to adorn and civilize nature. Savage, ungrateful nature, which in wild sport defaced his remains, protruding her easily renewed, and fragile growth of wild flowers and parasite plants around his eternal edifices. I sat on a fragment of rock, and looked round. The sun had bathed in gold the western atmosphere, and in the east the clouds caught the radiance, and budded into transient loveliness. It set on a world that contained me alone for its inhabitant. I took out my wand—I counted the marks. Twenty-five were already traced—twenty-five days had already elapsed, since human voice had gladdened my ears, or human countenance met my gaze. Twenty-five long, weary days, succeeded by dark and lonesome nights, had mingled with foregone years, and had become a part of the past—the never to be recalled—a real, undeniable portion of my life—twenty-five long, long days.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Why this was not a month!—Why talk of days—or weeks—or months—I must grasp years in my imagination, if I would truly picture the future to myself—three, five, ten, twenty, fifty anniversaries of that fatal epoch might elapse—every year containing twelve months, each of more numerous calculation in a diary, than the twenty-five days gone by—Can it be? Will it be?—We had been used to look forward to death tremulously— wherefore, but because its place was obscure? But more terrible, and far more obscure, was the unveiled course of my lone futurity. I broke my wand; I threw it from me. I needed no recorder of the inch and barley-corn growth of my life, while my unquiet thoughts created other divisions, than those ruled over by the planets—and, in looking back on the age that had elapsed since I had been alone, I disdained to give the name of days and hours to the throes of agony which had in truth portioned it out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I hid my face in my hands. The twitter of the young birds going to rest, and their rustling among the trees, disturbed the still evening-air—the crickets chirped—the aziolo cooed at intervals. My thoughts had been of death—these sounds spoke to me of life. I lifted up my eyes—a bat wheeled round—the sun had sunk behind the jagged line of mountains, and the paly, crescent moon was visible, silver white, amidst the orange sunset, and accompanied by one bright star, prolonged thus the twilight. A herd of cattle passed along in the dell below, untended, towards their watering place—the grass was rustled by a gentle breeze, and the olive-woods, mellowed into soft masses by the moonlight, contrasted their sea-green with the dark chestnut foliage. Yes, this is the earth; there is no change—no ruin—no rent made in her verdurous expanse; she continues to wheel round and round, with alternate night and day, through the sky, though man is not her adorner or inhabitant. Why could I not forget myself like one of those animals, and no longer suffer the wild tumult of misery that I endure? Yet, ah! what a deadly breach yawns between their state and mine! Have not they companions? Have not they each their mate—their cherished young, their home, which, though unexpressed to us, is, I doubt not, endeared and enriched, even in their eyes, by the society which kind nature has created for them? It is I only that am alone—I, on this little hill top, gazing on plain and mountain recess—on sky, and its starry population, listening to every sound of earth, and air, and murmuring wave,—I only cannot express to any companion my many thoughts, nor lay my throbbing head on any loved bosom, nor drink from meeting eyes an intoxicating dew, that transcends the fabulous nectar of the gods. Shall I not then complain? Shall I not curse the murderous engine which has mowed down the children of men, my brethren? Shall I not bestow a malediction on every other of nature's offspring, which dares live and enjoy, while I live and suffer?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ah, no! I will discipline my sorrowing heart to sympathy in your joys; I will be happy, because ye are so. Live on, ye innocents, nature's selected darlings; I am not much unlike to you. Nerves, pulse, brain, joint, and flesh, of such am I composed, and ye are organized by the same laws. I have something beyond this, but I will call it a defect, not an endowment, if it leads me to misery, while ye are happy. Just then, there emerged from a near copse two goats and a little kid, by the mother's side; they began to browze the herbage of the hill. I approached near to them, without their perceiving me; I gathered a handful of fresh grass, and held it out; the little one nestled close to its mother, while she timidly withdrew. The male stepped forward, fixing his eyes on me: I drew near, still holding out my lure, while he, depressing his head, rushed at me with his horns. I was a very fool; I knew it, yet I yielded to my rage. I snatched up a huge fragment of rock; it would have crushed my rash foe. I poized it—aimed it—then my heart failed me. I hurled it wide of the mark; it rolled clattering among the bushes into dell. My little visitants, all aghast, galloped back into the covert of the wood; while I, my very heart bleeding and torn, rushed down the hill, and by the violence of bodily exertion, sought to escape from my miserable self.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No, no, I will not live among the wild scenes of nature, the enemy of all that lives. I will seek the towns—Rome, the capital of the world, the crown of man's achievements. Among its storied streets, hallowed ruins, and stupendous remains of human exertion, I shall not, as here, find every thing forgetful of man; trampling on his memory, defacing his works, proclaiming from hill to hill, and vale to vale,—by the torrents freed from the boundaries which he imposed—by the vegetation liberated from the laws which he enforced—by his habitation abandoned to mildew and weeds, that his power is lost, his race annihilated for ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I hailed the Tiber, for that was as it were an unalienable possession of humanity. I hailed the wild Campagna, for every rood had been trod by man; and its savage uncultivation, of no recent date, only proclaimed more distinctly his power, since he had given an honourable name and sacred title to what else would have been a worthless, barren track. I entered Eternal Rome by the Porta del Popolo, and saluted with awe its time-honoured space. The wide square, the churches near, the long extent of the Corso, the near eminence of Trinita de' Monti appeared like fairy work, they were so silent, so peaceful, and so very fair. It was evening; and the population of animals which still existed in this mighty city, had gone to rest; there was no sound, save the murmur of its many fountains, whose soft monotony was harmony to my soul. The knowledge that I was in Rome, soothed me; that wondrous city, hardly more illustrious for its heroes and sages, than for the power it exercised over the imaginations of men. I went to rest that night; the eternal burning of my heart quenched,—my senses tranquil.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The next morning I eagerly began my rambles in search of oblivion. I ascended the many terraces of the garden of the Colonna Palace, under whose roof I had been sleeping; and passing out from it at its summit, I found myself on Monte Cavallo. The fountain sparkled in the sun; the obelisk above pierced the clear dark-blue air. The statues on each side, the works, as they are inscribed, of Phidias and Praxiteles, stood in undiminished grandeur, representing Castor and Pollux, who with majestic power tamed the rearing animal at their side. If those illustrious artists had in truth chiselled these forms, how many passing generations had their giant proportions outlived! and now they were viewed by the last of the species they were sculptured to represent and deify. I had shrunk into insignificance in my own eyes, as I considered the multitudinous beings these stone demigods had outlived, but this after-thought restored me to dignity in my own conception. The sight of the poetry eternized in these statues, took the sting from the thought, arraying it only in poetic ideality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I repeated to myself,—I am in Rome! I behold, and as it were, familiarly converse with the wonder of the world, sovereign mistress of the imagination, majestic and eternal survivor of millions of generations of extinct men. I endeavoured to quiet the sorrows of my aching heart, by even now taking an interest in what in my youth I had ardently longed to see. Every part of Rome is replete with relics of ancient times. The meanest streets are strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals—Corinthian and Ionic, and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry. The walls of the most penurious dwellings enclose a fluted pillar or ponderous stone, which once made part of the palace of the Caesars; and the voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I embraced the vast columns of the temple of Jupiter Stator, which survives in the open space that was the Forum, and leaning my burning cheek against its cold durability, I tried to lose the sense of present misery and present desertion, by recalling to the haunted cell of my brain vivid memories of times gone by. I rejoiced at my success, as I figured Camillus, the Gracchi, Cato, and last the heroes of Tacitus, which shine meteors of surpassing brightness during the murky night of the empire;—as the verses of Horace and Virgil, or the glowing periods of Cicero thronged into the opened gates of my mind, I felt myself exalted by long forgotten enthusiasm. I was delighted to know that I beheld the scene which they beheld—the scene which their wives and mothers, and crowds of the unnamed witnessed, while at the same time they honoured, applauded, or wept for these matchless specimens of humanity. At length, then, I had found a consolation. I had not vainly sought the storied precincts of Rome—I had discovered a medicine for my many and vital wounds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I sat at the foot of these vast columns. The Coliseum, whose naked ruin is robed by nature in a verdurous and glowing veil, lay in the sunlight on my right. Not far off, to the left, was the Tower of the Capitol. Triumphal arches, the falling walls of many temples, strewed the ground at my feet. I strove, I resolved, to force myself to see the Plebeian multitude and lofty Patrician forms congregated around; and, as the Diorama of ages passed across my subdued fancy, they were replaced by the modern Roman; the Pope, in his white stole, distributing benedictions to the kneeling worshippers; the friar in his cowl; the dark-eyed girl, veiled by her mezzera; the noisy, sun-burnt rustic, leading his heard of buffaloes and oxen to the Campo Vaccino. The romance with which, dipping our pencils in the rainbow hues of sky and transcendent nature, we to a degree gratuitously endow the Italians, replaced the solemn grandeur of antiquity. I remembered the dark monk, and floating figures of "The Italian," and how my boyish blood had thrilled at the description. I called to mind Corinna ascending the Capitol to be crowned, and, passing from the heroine to the author, reflected how the Enchantress Spirit of Rome held sovereign sway over the minds of the imaginative, until it rested on me—sole remaining spectator of its wonders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was long wrapt by such ideas; but the soul wearies of a pauseless flight; and, stooping from its wheeling circuits round and round this spot, suddenly it fell ten thousand fathom deep, into the abyss of the present— into self-knowledge—into tenfold sadness. I roused myself—I cast off my waking dreams; and I, who just now could almost hear the shouts of the Roman throng, and was hustled by countless multitudes, now beheld the desart ruins of Rome sleeping under its own blue sky; the shadows lay tranquilly on the ground; sheep were grazing untended on the Palatine, and a buffalo stalked down the Sacred Way that led to the Capitol. I was alone in the Forum; alone in Rome; alone in the world. Would not one living man —one companion in my weary solitude, be worth all the glory and remembered power of this time-honoured city? Double sorrow—sadness, bred in Cimmerian caves, robed my soul in a mourning garb. The generations I had conjured up to my fancy, contrasted more strongly with the end of all —the single point in which, as a pyramid, the mighty fabric of society had ended, while I, on the giddy height, saw vacant space around me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From such vague laments I turned to the contemplation of the minutiae of my situation. So far, I had not succeeded in the sole object of my desires, the finding a companion for my desolation. Yet I did not despair. It is true that my inscriptions were set up for the most part, in insignificant towns and villages; yet, even without these memorials, it was possible that the person, who like me should find himself alone in a depopulate land, should, like me, come to Rome. The more slender my expectation was, the more I chose to build on it, and to accommodate my actions to this vague possibility.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It became necessary therefore, that for a time I should domesticate myself at Rome. It became necessary, that I should look my disaster in the face— not playing the school-boy's part of obedience without submission; enduring life, and yet rebelling against the laws by which I lived.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet how could I resign myself? Without love, without sympathy, without communion with any, how could I meet the morning sun, and with it trace its oft repeated journey to the evening shades? Why did I continue to live— why not throw off the weary weight of time, and with my own hand, let out the fluttering prisoner from my agonized breast?—It was not cowardice that withheld me; for the true fortitude was to endure; and death had a soothing sound accompanying it, that would easily entice me to enter its demesne. But this I would not do. I had, from the moment I had reasoned on the subject, instituted myself the subject to fate, and the servant of necessity, the visible laws of the invisible God—I believed that my obedience was the result of sound reasoning, pure feeling, and an exalted sense of the true excellence and nobility of my nature. Could I have seen in this empty earth, in the seasons and their change, the hand of a blind power only, most willingly would I have placed my head on the sod, and closed my eyes on its loveliness for ever. But fate had administered life to me, when the plague had already seized on its prey—she had dragged me by the hair from out the strangling waves—By such miracles she had bought me for her own; I admitted her authority, and bowed to her decrees. If, after mature consideration, such was my resolve, it was doubly necessary that I should not lose the end of life, the improvement of my faculties, and poison its flow by repinings without end. Yet how cease to repine, since there was no hand near to extract the barbed spear that had entered my heart of hearts? I stretched out my hand, and it touched none whose sensations were responsive to mine. I was girded, walled in, vaulted over, by seven-fold barriers of loneliness. Occupation alone, if I could deliver myself up to it, would be capable of affording an opiate to my sleepless sense of woe. Having determined to make Rome my abode, at least for some months, I made arrangements for my accommodation—I selected my home. The Colonna Palace was well adapted for my purpose. Its grandeur— its treasure of paintings, its magnificent halls were objects soothing and even exhilarating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I found the granaries of Rome well stored with grain, and particularly with Indian corn; this product requiring less art in its preparation for food, I selected as my principal support. I now found the hardships and lawlessness of my youth turn to account. A man cannot throw off the habits of sixteen years. Since that age, it is true, I had lived luxuriously, or at least surrounded by all the conveniences civilization afforded. But before that time, I had been "as uncouth a savage, as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome"—and now, in Rome itself, robber and shepherd propensities, similar to those of its founder, were of advantage to its sole inhabitant. I spent the morning riding and shooting in the Campagna—I passed long hours in the various galleries—I gazed at each statue, and lost myself in a reverie before many a fair Madonna or beauteous nymph. I haunted the Vatican, and stood surrounded by marble forms of divine beauty. Each stone deity was possessed by sacred gladness, and the eternal fruition of love. They looked on me with unsympathizing complacency, and often in wild accents I reproached them for their supreme indifference—for they were human shapes, the human form divine was manifest in each fairest limb and lineament. The perfect moulding brought with it the idea of colour and motion; often, half in bitter mockery, half in self-delusion, I clasped their icy proportions, and, coming between Cupid and his Psyche's lips, pressed the unconceiving marble.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I endeavoured to read. I visited the libraries of Rome. I selected a volume, and, choosing some sequestered, shady nook, on the banks of the Tiber, or opposite the fair temple in the Borghese Gardens, or under the old pyramid of Cestius, I endeavoured to conceal me from myself, and immerse myself in the subject traced on the pages before me. As if in the same soil you plant nightshade and a myrtle tree, they will each appropriate the mould, moisture, and air administered, for the fostering their several properties—so did my grief find sustenance, and power of existence, and growth, in what else had been divine manna, to feed radiant meditation. Ah! while I streak this paper with the tale of what my so named occupations were—while I shape the skeleton of my days—my hand trembles—my heart pants, and my brain refuses to lend expression, or phrase, or idea, by which to image forth the veil of unutterable woe that clothed these bare realities. O, worn and beating heart, may I dissect thy fibres, and tell how in each unmitigable misery, sadness dire, repinings, and despair, existed? May I record my many ravings—the wild curses I hurled at torturing nature—and how I have passed days shut out from light and food—from all except the burning hell alive in my own bosom?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I was presented, meantime, with one other occupation, the one best fitted to discipline my melancholy thoughts, which strayed backwards, over many a ruin, and through many a flowery glade, even to the mountain recess, from which in early youth I had first emerged.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >During one of my rambles through the habitations of Rome, I found writing materials on a table in an author's study. Parts of a manuscript lay scattered about. It contained a learned disquisition on the Italian language; one page an unfinished dedication to posterity, for whose profit the writer had sifted and selected the niceties of this harmonious language —to whose everlasting benefit he bequeathed his labours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I also will write a book, I cried—for whom to read?—to whom dedicated? And then with silly flourish (what so capricious and childish as despair?) I wrote, DEDICATION TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL! BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE LAST MAN.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet, will not this world be re-peopled, and the children of a saved pair of lovers, in some to me unknown and unattainable seclusion, wandering to these prodigious relics of the ante-pestilential race, seek to learn how beings so wondrous in their achievements, with imaginations infinite, and powers godlike, had departed from their home to an unknown country?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I will write and leave in this most ancient city, this "world's sole monument," a record of these things. I will leave a monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man. At first I thought only to speak of plague, of death, and last, of desertion; but I lingered fondly on my early years, and recorded with sacred zeal the virtues of my companions. They have been with me during the fulfilment of my task. I have brought it to an end—I lift my eyes from my paper—again they are lost to me. Again I feel that I am alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A year has passed since I have been thus occupied. The seasons have made their wonted round, and decked this eternal city in a changeful robe of surpassing beauty. A year has passed; and I no longer guess at my state or my prospects—loneliness is my familiar, sorrow my inseparable companion. I have endeavoured to brave the storm—I have endeavoured to school myself to fortitude—I have sought to imbue myself with the lessons of wisdom. It will not do. My hair has become nearly grey—my voice, unused now to utter sound, comes strangely on my ears. My person, with its human powers and features, seem to me a monstrous excrescence of nature. How express in human language a woe human being until this hour never knew! How give intelligible expression to a pang none but I could ever understand!— No one has entered Rome. None will ever come. I smile bitterly at the delusion I have so long nourished, and still more, when I reflect that I have exchanged it for another as delusive, as false, but to which I now cling with the same fond trust.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Winter has come again; and the gardens of Rome have lost their leaves— the sharp air comes over the Campagna, and has driven its brute inhabitants to take up their abode in the many dwellings of the deserted city—frost has suspended the gushing fountains—and Trevi has stilled her eternal music. I had made a rough calculation, aided by the stars, by which I endeavoured to ascertain the first day of the new year. In the old out-worn age, the Sovereign Pontiff was used to go in solemn pomp, and mark the renewal of the year by driving a nail in the gate of the temple of Janus. On that day I ascended St. Peter's, and carved on its topmost stone the aera 2100, last year of the world!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My only companion was a dog, a shaggy fellow, half water and half shepherd's dog, whom I found tending sheep in the Campagna. His master was dead, but nevertheless he continued fulfilling his duties in expectation of his return. If a sheep strayed from the rest, he forced it to return to the flock, and sedulously kept off every intruder. Riding in the Campagna I had come upon his sheep-walk, and for some time observed his repetition of lessons learned from man, now useless, though unforgotten. His delight was excessive when he saw me. He sprung up to my knees; he capered round and round, wagging his tail, with the short, quick bark of pleasure: he left his fold to follow me, and from that day has never neglected to watch by and attend on me, shewing boisterous gratitude whenever I caressed or talked to him. His pattering steps and mine alone were heard, when we entered the magnificent extent of nave and aisle of St. Peter's. We ascended the myriad steps together, when on the summit I achieved my design, and in rough figures noted the date of the last year. I then turned to gaze on the country, and to take leave of Rome. I had long determined to quit it, and I now formed the plan I would adopt for my future career, after I had left this magnificent abode.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer, and that I would become. A hope of amelioration always attends on change of place, which would even lighten the burthen of my life. I had been a fool to remain in Rome all this time: Rome noted for Malaria, the famous caterer for death. But it was still possible, that, could I visit the whole extent of earth, I should find in some part of the wide extent a survivor. Methought the sea-side was the most probable retreat to be chosen by such a one. If left alone in an inland district, still they could not continue in the spot where their last hopes had been extinguished; they would journey on, like me, in search of a partner for their solitude, till the watery barrier stopped their further progress.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To that water—cause of my woes, perhaps now to be their cure, I would betake myself. Farewell, Italy!—farewell, thou ornament of the world, matchless Rome, the retreat of the solitary one during long months!—to civilized life—to the settled home and succession of monotonous days, farewell! Peril will now be mine; and I hail her as a friend—death will perpetually cross my path, and I will meet him as a benefactor; hardship, inclement weather, and dangerous tempests will be my sworn mates. Ye spirits of storm, receive me! ye powers of destruction, open wide your arms, and clasp me for ever! if a kinder power have not decreed another end, so that after long endurance I may reap my reward, and again feel my heart beat near the heart of another like to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tiber, the road which is spread by nature's own hand, threading her continent, was at my feet, and many a boat was tethered to the banks. I would with a few books, provisions, and my dog, embark in one of these and float down the current of the stream into the sea; and then, keeping near land, I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean, pass Naples, along Calabria, and would dare the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis; then, with fearless aim, (for what had I to lose?) skim ocean's surface towards Malta and the further Cyclades. I would avoid Constantinople, the sight of whose well-known towers and inlets belonged to another state of existence from my present one; I would coast Asia Minor, and Syria, and, passing the seven-mouthed Nile, steer northward again, till losing sight of forgotten Carthage and deserted Lybia, I should reach the pillars of Hercules. And then—no matter where—the oozy caves, and soundless depths of ocean may be my dwelling, before I accomplish this long-drawn voyage, or the arrow of disease find my heart as I float singly on the weltering Mediterranean; or, in some place I touch at, I may find what I seek—a companion; or if this may not be—to endless time, decrepid and grey headed—youth already in the grave with those I love— the lone wanderer will still unfurl his sail, and clasp the tiller—and, still obeying the breezes of heaven, for ever round another and another promontory, anchoring in another and another bay, still ploughing seedless ocean, leaving behind the verdant land of native Europe, adown the tawny shore of Africa, having weathered the fierce seas of the Cape, I may moor my worn skiff in a creek, shaded by spicy groves of the odorous islands of the far Indian ocean.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These are wild dreams. Yet since, now a week ago, they came on me, as I stood on the height of St. Peter's, they have ruled my imagination. I have chosen my boat, and laid in my scant stores. I have selected a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare—But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me—and in any port I can renew my stock. I form no expectation of alteration for the better; but the monotonous present is intolerable to me. Neither hope nor joy are my pilots—restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on. I long to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some task, however slight or voluntary, for each day's fulfilment. I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that the elements can assume—I shall read fair augury in the rainbow— menace in the cloud—some lesson or record dear to my heart in everything. Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney—the LAST MAN.<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2010/03/mary-wollstonecraft-shelleys-last-man_05.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br />Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's "The Last Man"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-76290573981086171732009-09-02T12:17:00.000-07:002009-09-02T12:33:10.945-07:00Harlow Shapley<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"The Scale of the Universe"</span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Harlow Shapley</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" >Bulletin of the National Research Council </span> <br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Volume 2</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Part 3</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 11</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >May 1921<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Click individual pages to enlarge for reading]</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJvOxqwvLQ2flcHy32g8OzFC3sdYb01FO95M4KLhn5Nizp0NwXebnnmF98DOeNlb8lF-m97zzEj-8fvSvcUdd3zT2M3ylseVbzdPYbfP20A6-UCvNp-igAyeJMj4rlqQUjfFL0Fl-BHj3/s1600-h/Shapley+1.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; 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display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 276px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-OElwWLBQLMvRRlc08nCVpbAev1HC8tSb5UcjcQIpSjqqimUoJ5FX5GBcimdo7K6sda5pcXZ-1yl5HP8j_FX1fp04l9kNGgoYmBQLSZZgH47dR0flRLwl2xWq2xBlenGTcsDN3LEBIw1p/s400/Shapley+23.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376952001572768802" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/09/shapley-and-curtis-documents-on.html"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shapley and Curtis documents on the universe--1921</span></a></div></div>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-14551093272044301772009-09-02T12:01:00.000-07:002009-09-02T12:34:34.755-07:00Heber Curtis<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Dimensions and Structure of the Galaxy"</span></span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br />by</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br />Heber Curtis</span> <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br />Bulletin of the National Research Council </span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br />Volume 2</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Part 3</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br />Number 11</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br />May 1921</span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[Click individual pages to enlarge for reading]</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd43Eb9J5BLV0LBTgz8qgqrCjkMbRwkZvm-q7bBfI2vS50E95v62BJJxOV090XAP5iYeZwYkM_AabjIvceC8-Qqj7kJyEn0rAdG1v0Bc8_QhtpEM3h25imiMCCcqrHHZ_dzSUK1uvuY8sR/s1600-h/Curtis+1.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 276px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd43Eb9J5BLV0LBTgz8qgqrCjkMbRwkZvm-q7bBfI2vS50E95v62BJJxOV090XAP5iYeZwYkM_AabjIvceC8-Qqj7kJyEn0rAdG1v0Bc8_QhtpEM3h25imiMCCcqrHHZ_dzSUK1uvuY8sR/s400/Curtis+1.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376950861732629298" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXfQ9E9FmpfDvXFh7SPLnWWdelIZvju6vMlSmSJVs8bJDFNtNqYJ1XJOxNNfWWQIdEFNCm-FJVYjgVyHk5DskqjNtC7RFj4abiM19n3NlIBOkMtoKhxkn6_YS4M4cTY7FbLsasR66FAlpn/s1600-h/Curtis+2.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; 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display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 276px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6rHrHVBBwPqYk6-av41L5CoHxmz_utzvR9qF2l0kWY1_Ks4pJeyLEB9E82lOXhE9KtP-CUkExo855NpKn7U1120VrV5ZOOnhawcWA_VTtcDl2drMgn2ou5xGktrsS9oyIEQdfedNtdNU4/s400/Curtis+24.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376949524865028626" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: left; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/09/shapley-and-curtis-documents-on.html">Shapley and Curtis documents on the universe--1921</a></div></div>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-88951152472527708072009-01-15T16:46:00.000-08:002009-01-15T16:49:27.830-08:00"The Prisoner"--Episode One<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Episode One</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">"Arrival"</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A clap of thunder starts the title theme: a man in a dark tieless suit speeds towards us along a stretch of deserted road. The man whom we will call "the Prisoner" drives his Lotus 7 through the traffic in central London, and into an underground car park where he collects a ticket from the barrier machine. He leaves the car, passes through double doors marked "WAY OUT" and strides briskly down a long corridor. With a sudden crescendo in the music, he wrenches open a second set of double doors, enters his boss's office and hurls his resignation onto the desk in an envelope marked "Private and Personal -- by hand". In his fury he slams his fist down and shatters a cup of tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He sets off into the traffic again, passing a hearse; we see a typewriter slapping a row of Xs over a photograph of the Prisoner; the hearse is now following him through the streets; a robotic arm drops the photograph into one of endless filing cabinets labelled "Resigned". The Prisoner parks outside his London home, goes inside and starts packing his bags for a holiday. But the hearse has also arrived; an undertaker emerges, and moments later gas pours in through the Prisoner's keyhole. The skyscrapers through the window sway before the Prisoner's eyes and he collapses onto his bed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He wakes up somewhat dazed in the same room, but when he raises the blinds the tower blocks have been replaced with a beautiful floral lawn surrounded by bizarrely colourful baroque architecture. Instantly alert he leaves his cottagelike home-from-home, looks around him, spies somebody watching him from a bell-tower and rapidly climbs the tower himself. By the time he gets to the top, it is deserted. There is nothing to hear but the wind and nobody else to be seen till a waitress appears on the terrace of a café to put up parasols at the tables. The bell suddenly chimes out and the Prisoner hurries down to the café.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress: We'll be open in a minute.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What's the name of this place?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress: You're new here, aren't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He starts following her round the table as she sets up some chairs. Behind them, a man in overalls is carefully hosing down the check-tiled floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress: Do you want breakfast?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where is this?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress: The Village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress:: I'll see if coffee's ready.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She starts to move away, but the Prisoner grabs her arm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where's the police station?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress: There isn't one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Can I use your phone?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress: We haven't got one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where can I make a call?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Waitress: Well there's a phone box round the corner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He strides hurriedly to the phone box, which bears the emblem of a canopied penny-farthing in a circle along with the advice "For information lift and press". The Prisoner picks up a strange L-shaped cordless phone. He hears a dialling tone, then a beep followed by a woman's voice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Operator: Number please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What exchange is this?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Operator: Number please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I want to make a call to---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Operator: Local calls only. What is your number, sir?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Haven't got a number.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Operator: No number, no call.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And the dialling tone returns. Wandering about, he next comes across a large map labelled "Your Village" on a board claiming to offer "Free information". There are several dozen numbered buttons next to an arrow marked "Push and find out". As soon as he pushes the "Taxi rank" button (number 9) an extraordinary little canopied taxi pulls up, driven by a woman in a striped shirt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Driver: Where to, sir? Où désirez-vous aller?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Take me to the nearest town.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Driver: Oh, we're only the local service.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Take me as far as you can.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They drive off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why did you speak to me in French?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Driver: French is international.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I suppose it's a waste of time asking the name of this place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Driver: As a matter of fact I thought you might be Polish, perhaps a Czech.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What would Poles or Czechs be doing here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Driver: It's very cosmopolitan. You never know who you'll meet next.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">After not very long at all, the driver stops the taxi.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Driver: I did tell you we are only local. The charge is two units.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Units?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Driver: Credit units. Oh well, pay me next time. Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As she says "Be seeing you", she forms a ring from her thumb and forefinger (like a diver's "OK" signal) and brings it first up to her eye and then out again towards the Prisoner. She drives away, leaving him outside a small shop labelled "General stores" in the seemingly ubiquitous Village typeface. He enters. The shopkeeper, a plump man in an apron and boater, is talking absolute gibberish to a lady customer. When he notices the Prisoner, he breaks off abruptly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Would you help yourself to a pineapple, madam?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She fetches one and he puts it in a bag for her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Thank you. Good day. Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He repeats the taxi-driver's gesture; she leaves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Good morning, sir. And what can I do for you then?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'd like a map of this area.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Map? Colour or black and white?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Just a map.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Map...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He pauses to remember where he keeps such a thing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Ah. Black and white...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He produces a map from a cupboard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: There we are, sir. I think you'll find that shows everything.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The map is labelled "Map of your Village". The Prisoner opens it; it shows the Village bordered by "the mountains": there are no external geographical names.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I... I meant a larger map.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Only in colour, sir. Much more expensive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's fine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The shopkeeper fetches him a colour map as inadequate as the last. It folds out as a larger sheet of paper, but still mentions only "the mountains", "the sea", and "the beach", together with the title "Your Village".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Er, that's not what I meant. I meant a... a larger area.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: No, we only have local maps, sir. There's no demand for any others. You're new here, aren't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where can I get a hire car? Self-drive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: No self-drive. Only taxis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I've tried those.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Another customer enters the shop.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Well, I look forward to the pleasure of your custom, sir. Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Again the gesture; the Prisoner glances back in irritation. The shopkeeper turns to his new customer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Shopkeeper: Yes, sir?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">No sooner has the Prisoner left the shop than a nearby loudspeaker blasts into life with a brief jingle. The loudspeaker has a coloured canopy like everything else in the Village. A cheerful woman's voice is heard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Loudspeaker: Good morning, all. It's another beautiful day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And syrupy muzak pours forth. The Prisoner spots a maid shaking a duster out of the window of his cottage and returns there hurriedly. He pauses only slightly at the sight of the canopied sign outside his new home; it says "6, Private" and wasn't there before. The door opens and shuts for him with an automatic hum; through the window he glimpses the maid walking away. On his desk is a doll holding a card with the message "Welcome to your home from home". As he snatches the card, the phone starts beeping noisily. It's an ordinary black London phone of the sixties, except for the number 6 in the centre of its analogue dial. The Prisoner answers cautiously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Operator: Is your number six?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Operator: Just one moment, I have a call for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good morning to you. I hope you slept well. Come and join me for breakfast: Number 2, the Green Dome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We next see the Prisoner walking suspectingly through the Village, to the accompaniment of silly music reminiscent of nursery rhymes. His destination, the building known as the Green Dome, is obvious. He passes a gardener tending a bush, and reaches Number 2's door. As he rings the bell the music stops, and a ludicrously vast and deep gong chimes out. The door opens for him automatically and he steps into a lavishly furnished hallway. A tiny butler bows to the Prisoner and leads the way to a pair of elegant white double doors. The Prisoner approaches, but there is only darkness beyond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Suddenly light pours in as great metal doors slide apart automatically, revealing a huge circular room empty except for a penny-farthing and a strange circular desk in the centre. A black sphere rises up from the centre of the desk and turns on its axis, revealing itself to be a chair containing Number 2, a man wearing a dark scarf with yellow and white stripes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: At last! Delighted to see you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner steps forward and the metal doors slide shut behind him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Come in, come in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner walks down a shallow ramp into the room. Weird colours dance and spin on an enormous screen on one wall and there is a dais of lights above Number 2's desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Do sit down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He reaches out with his shooting-stick (which is also a furled umbrella) and presses one of many switches on his desk. A circle slides out of the floor near the Prisoner and a chair rises up out of it. Number 2 chuckles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I'm sorry, I can never resist that. I hope you don't mind a working breakfast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He flicks another switch with his shooting-stick, and a small circular table appears from the floor. At the same time, the metal doors open and the butler wheels in a breakfast trolley. The doors close immediately.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Tea or coffee?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The butler has just placed a pot of tea on the table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Indian or China?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Either. With lemon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As he speaks, the butler adds a slice of lemon to the tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: One or two eggs with your bacon?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Two?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The butler unveils them in a dish.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: That will be all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They watch the butler wheel the trolley away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Help yourself to toast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner walks to the table, lifts the lid off the one remaining dish and finds slices of toast inside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I suppose you're wondering what you're doing here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It had crossed my mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He replaces the lid angrily.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What's it all about?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The chair rises out of the floor again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Sit down and I'll tell you. It's a question of your resignation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is walking round behind the penny-farthing. Number 2's chair swivels round to follow him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Go on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: The information in your head is priceless. I don't think you realize what a valuable property you've become. A man like you is worth a great deal on the open market.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who brought me here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I know how you feel, believe me. And they have taken quite a liberty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who are "they"?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: A lot of people are curious about what lies behind your resignation. You had a brilliant career. Your record is impeccable. They want to know why you suddenly left.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What people?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Now personally I believe your story. I do think it was a matter of principle. But, er, what I think doesn't really count, does it? One has to be sure about these things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner has completed his tour round the room and is now once again face to face with Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: And that gives you the right to poke your nose into my private business?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Now please. It's my job to check your motives.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I've been checked!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He strides away again in anger.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Of course, but when a man knows as much as you do, a double check does no harm. A few details may have been missed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I don't know who you are, or who you work for... and I don't care: I'm leaving.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He walks up the ramp to the metal doors. They open and shut in his face. Number 2's spherical chair descends slightly, allowing him to stand up. He places his shooting-stick on his desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Have you not yet realized there's no way out? Now look, I have something that will interest you...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He seizes a file from the desk and opens it. Sinister music swells from nowhere. The dancing colours on the wall screen change abruptly into a slide show: photographs of the Prisoner as an infant. The Prisoner grabs the file from him and flips through it in apparent alarm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh, feel free!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The pictures on the wall stay precisely in time with the Prisoner as he turns the pages in the file. There are shots of him at school, in the army, and...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: A most important day...remember? Getting ready to meet Chambers, about to become late of the Foreign Office.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Photographs appear of the Prisoner getting up one morning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You were hoping to, er, persuade him to change his mind before the big boys found out. You waited and waited, but he never turned up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is seen waiting in the rain and then checking in to a hotel. They even have shots of him lying on his hotel bed reading a dossier.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: A nice guy, Chambers. And so taut!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner slams the file shut.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You see there's not much we don't know about you, but one likes to know everything. For instance, do you remember that time you arrived back from Singapore? Change of climate, feeling a bit shaky. You were sickening for a cold -- sneezed yourself out of our camera.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The slides show the Prisoner with a handkerchief to his nose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Deciding to take a vacation!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is seen wearing various pondering expressions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Now where can you go? Ireland? A bit too cold that time of the year. Paris! Maybe not. What was that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Some of the next few photographs show the Prisoner looking straight into the hidden camera, others show him with his back to it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Sounded like a click. Something in the mirror? Or was it over there? Yes, over there too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The slide show suddenly ends.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: As I said, one likes to know everything. For instance I had no idea you liked lemon tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is leafing through the file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: The time of my birth is missing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well, there you are. Now let's bring it all up to date.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Four thirty-one a.m., nineteenth of March 1928. I've nothing to say. Is that clear?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He throws the file to the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Absolutely nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Now be reasonable, old boy. It's just a matter of time. Sooner or later you'll tell me. Sooner or later you'll want to. Let's make a deal. You cooperate, tell us what we want to know, and this can be a very nice place. You may even be given a position of authority.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes. You won't hold me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He sets off for the door again, but stops.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Won't we? Let me prove that we will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He picks up the file with one hand and his shooting-stick with the other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Come, I'll show you. We can take this up later.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The next thing we see is a helicopter taking off. Number 2 and the Prisoner are sitting inside, wearing headsets. The little butler is in the pilot's seat, wearing a red cape and black bowler hat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Are you receiving me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Loud and clear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They circle over the Village. It is an extraordinary place -- bizarre but elegant buildings in a seasidelike atmosphere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Quite a beautiful place really, isn't it? Almost like a world on its own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I shall miss it when I'm gone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh, it will grow on you. We have everything here: water, electricity...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He points down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: There's the council building -- we have our own council, democratically elected. We also use it for public meetings, amateur theatricals...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Fascinating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes indeed! There's the restaurant... But did you know we have our own little newspaper?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You must send me a copy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 laughs out loud.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You'll be the death of me. We also have our own graveyard... but you'd be more interested in our, er, social club, I think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They fly over the main square, where Villagers are strolling around in colourful costumes or riding equally colourful canopied bicycles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Members only, but I'll see what I can do for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You're too kind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Now if you have any problems, there's our Citizens' Advice Bureau. They do a marvellous job. Everybody's very nice. You might even meet people you know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner acknowledges this last remark with a simple smile. The helicopter touches down on the grass again and the passengers climb out. They walk across the lawn of the old people's home, where brightly dressed pensioners are being waited on at parasolled tables. Suddenly they come to a stone boat moored at the water's edge. It is decked out with coloured flags and rigging, and pensioners are clambering all over it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You'll probably see the funny side of that. I'm told some people even get seasick on it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What are they here for? St Vitus' dance?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I'm glad you've still got your sense of humour. They're the senior citizens. Of course they have every comfort.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They walk back over the lawn to the road.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You see you're looked after here -- as long as you live. Brilliant background: you see that old gentleman there? Ex-admiral. Excellent chess player.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Hope he finds a partner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Taxi!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They get into a canopied taxi (which says "taxi" on the back) and are driven rapidly through the streets of the Village, musical horn blaring loudly. When the taxi stops, they get out and go in different directions. The Prisoner wanders back to the main square, arriving at the same time as a colourful brass band playing the Radetski March. He notices a peculiar statue on a high plinth, showing Atlas supporting a large white ball. The loudspeakers ring out again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Loudspeaker: Good morning all, it's another beautiful day. Your attention please. Here are two announcements.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">With amusement, Number 2 turns to watch the Prisoner from a distance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Loudspeaker: Ice cream is now on sale for your enjoyment. The flavour of the day is strawberry. Here is a warning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner turns to stare at one of the loudspeakers as he passes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Loudspeaker: There is a possibility of light intermittent showers later in the day. Thank you for your attention.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 moves on, as does the Prisoner. He passes a canopied sign that says "Walk on the grass", climbs a wide flight of stone steps and reaches a paved area surrounding a long thin pond with a fountain at one end. Number 2, out of sight, starts speaking through a megaphone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Come along my dear fellow, don't be shy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner's way is blocked by a penny-farthing. An oldish gentleman in a boater approaches from the other side, performs the "Be seeing you" gesture and goes off with the bicycle. The little butler has also just walked past in a bowler hat and cape, holding an enormous black and white umbrella above his head. The Prisoner takes a pace forward. An elderly couple, brightly dressed, make the "Be seeing you" sign as they pass. The band can still be heard in the distance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Couple: Beautiful day!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is revealed to be standing in a bizarre tall pillared structure that overlooks the fountain area. He still has the megaphone to his mouth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: They didn't settle for ages. Now they wouldn't leave for the world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner answers from some distance without the aid of a megaphone, but Number 2 hears him clearly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You mean you brought them around to your way of thinking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: They had a choice. Wait! Wait!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">At which everything in the Village comes to a halt. The band stops playing and the Villagers become rooted to the spot. The only moving things are the Prisoner and Number 2...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Be still!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">... and a little white ball that bobs up and down at the top of the jet from the fountain. It suddenly inflates to enormous proportions and emits a low sinister rumbling whine. For some strange reason, one young man is standing in the middle of the pond, unfrozen. He cries out madly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Stop!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The young man runs from the pond, spinning round, arms outstretched.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Turn back!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">But the young man keeps running. The huge white ball suddenly flies towards him with a terrifying roar, engulfs him and suffocates him. We see him screaming as he dies inside the ball. Number 2 watches with a hint of a smile on his face. The Prisoner steps out of the whining ball's way as it bounces off across the grass. The Village suddenly comes back to life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What was that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: That would be telling.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Loudspeaker: Calling Number 2 -- ready for you at the Labour Exchange.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Be right with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is still speaking through his megaphone. He addresses the Prisoner, who looks understandably confused.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Come along my dear fellow, bear to your left. Now straight ahead. Follow the signs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner sees several signs on his way: "Free sea" at the pond, "Repairs" on a canopied van, "Citizens' Advice Bureau", and finally "Labour Exchange". Number 2 approaches him outside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well, how do you like it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Charming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: It will grow on you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">There are two queues of Villagers standing motionless outside the Exchange. Number 2 and the Prisoner go inside, into a waiting room where several people are sitting, humming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Clerk: Good morning, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good morning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Clerk: Go straight through.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner stares around him. The walls are covered with aphorisms such as "A still tongue makes a happy life", "Questions are a burden to others, answers a prison for oneself", "Honour is the natural expression of a democratic society" and "Of the people, by the people, for the people".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They enter a circular room with arches round the walls, a dais of lights in the ceiling, and a chair and table near the middle. The Labour Exchange Manager, a happy-looking man in a suit, stands behind a desk on which there is a giant wooden toy of cogs and dowels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Ah. This is our new friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Manager: Everything's ready, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He turns to the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Manager: Will you sit down?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He doesn't. Number 2 does instead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Nanager: Now, first of all, the aptitude test.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner walks over to the table, picks up a black cylinder and lowers it into a square hole, from whose sides a black circle shrinks down and grabs the cylinder precisely. This makes Number 2 laugh delightedly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Manager: And now the questionnaire. Just fill in your race, religion, hobbies...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He starts to play with the wooden toy, spinning the cogs with his finger.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Manager: ... what you like to read, what you like to eat... what you were, what you want to be... any family illnesses... any politics?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner smashes the toy to the ground. The pieces go everywhere. He strides towards the door and leaves. Number 2 has been watching the outburst calmly. He puts a file down on the table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Never mind, you can get all you need from this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Manager is crawling around on the floor, frantically trying to put his toy back together. Number 2 ignores him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I think we have a challenge...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner returns to his cottage, to find another maid there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What are you doing here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I'm your personal maid. Labour Exchange sent me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's another mistake they made. Get out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Puzzled and slightly upset, she leaves by the front door (which she has to open herself). A whole wall of the room suddenly slides up into the ceiling, revealing the full extent of the Prisoner's new home. Comforting music is playing somewhere. The Prisoner walks up the four new carpeted stairs and immediately finds the "Welcome to your home from home" doll again. The music is emanating from a switchless radio on the mantelpiece. He passes through a round archway into the bedroom, where he examines the wardrobe. It is empty. He successfully outstares an orange lava-lamp in the corner, and glances into the bathroom (which has a sliding door).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He finds a bureau on the wall of his living room, opens it and pulls out a notepad. The first page is headed "Things to do today" and someone has scrawled "Don't forget to send thank you note for flowers at earliest" on it. On another part of the page, under "Today's memoranda" he finds the words "Arrived to-day, made very welcome". He opens a nearby drawer and finds a "Map of Your Village". It is the same large colourful one he looked at in the General Stores. He puts it back and slams the bureau shut. In the kitchen he finds one cupboard completely bare, whilst another cupboard is crammed full of tins of "village foods" -- mainly "pea soup" and "spaghetti". He picks up a couple of tins and listens as he shakes them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The music is growing louder and louder. The Prisoner throws the tins down, and approaches the radio. He paces back and forth a couple of times, before turning the radio around (it has a speaker on the other side too) and hurling it to the floor. He kicks it and stamps on it, but the music refuses to die. Instead it is joined by the loudspeaker voice:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Voice: Attention, electrics department. Please go to Number 6, where adjustment is needed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner suddenly looks up as someone comes in. It is the maid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I... forgot my---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He shouts at her from the top of his living-room steps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How do you stop this thing?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: We can't.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: It's automatic.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who controls it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I have no i---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who runs this place?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I don't know!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He advances towards her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I -- I really don't know!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Have you never wondered? Have you never tried to find out?... How long have you been here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: As long as I can remember.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: And your parents?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: They died when I was a child.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You don't remember them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I've found out it's wiser not to ask questions. We have a saying here: "A still tongue makes a happy life".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: People must have tried to get away from here. How many have succeeded?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: ... Don't ask.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Has anyone ever escaped?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: Some have tried. They've been brought back. Not always alive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Go on. What are you afraid of?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: Nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She suddenly changes mood and makes for the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I've said too much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She turns round...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: What time tomorrow?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">... and suddenly starts sobbing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I know what you must think of me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She sits down and gazes up at him pleadingly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: Put yourself into my position. They offered me my freedom in exchange.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Exchange for what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: To get into your confidence. Make you trust me. And tell them everything about you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Then they'd let you go? You believe that? With that knowledge in your head, you really believe that they'd let you go?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: I hadn't thought about that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Obviously not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: They might. They might let me go. If you give me some sort of information. Oh please help me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She stands up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: Please help me!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Your services will not be required tomorrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We cut abruptly to a vast room with a revolving seesaw in the middle. On each end of the seesaw sits a man peering into an observation instrument. This is the Control Room. Its walls are covered with maps of the planet Earth and its night sky. A large spherical sensor hangs in the centre, diffusing red light. The Prisoner's conversation with the maid is being relayed to an enormous screen in the Control Room, where a disturbing-looking man, completely bald, watches them intently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Don't forget what you came back for.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the screen, the maid stares at him in apparent disbelief, then turns, picks something up, and leaves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the Control Room, the bald Supervisor walks over to Number 2 who is leaning on a staircase.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: She was most convincing. I felt sure she was going to pull it off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: He's no ordinary man. This has got to be handled very differently.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: That could be dangerous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You know how important this is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 exits up the staircase, leaving the Supervisor to ponder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In his cottage, the Prisoner looks out of the window and sees a canopied "Repairs" truck pull up outside. A moment later, a strange man in overalls comes in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Electrician: Electrics, sir. Sorry about the intrusion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Help yourself. Why do you drive those things?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Electrician: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The electrician puts a new radio on the table and taps it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: The---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Music fills the house again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... the tractors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Electrician: They're steady. Get you there in the end.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Bit slow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Electrician: In an emergency, we walk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I, er... I feel like a bit of a walk myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Electrician: Feel free.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner does not move, but the door of his house opens ready for him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Electrician: And you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He leaves the electrician repairing the smashed radio, and goes on a tour of the Village. As he turns off the road to ascend a winding flight of steps, a man cycles past under a colourful umbrella.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Lovely day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Man: Showers later.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Halfway up the steps he nearly bumps into a gardener with a basket of plants. The gardener is facially identical to the electrician.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Gardener: Careful sir, they're new plants.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Sorry...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They stare at each other awkwardly for a few seconds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Goodbye...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We next see him emerging from some undergrowth, running up a hill, and then darting about in a bizarre grove full of unrelated stone busts on narrow pedestals. The huge whining ball starts to approach from the road, and the Prisoner avoids it by hiding in a bush. He continues walking through the grove, unaware that the statues behind him are swivelling to watch him. His every move is being observed by the Supervisor on the big screen in the Control Room. Lights flash in the busts' eyes. The Prisoner rounds a corner and finds that the whining bouncing ball has arrived before him. He runs past the staring statues to the other end of the grove, but the sphere is there as well. In the Control Room, the Supervisor raises an L-shaped phone to his mouth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Attention post 14.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is trying in vain to find the way out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Attention post 14, yellow alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Whichever way the Prisoner goes, he seems to come back to the Village square.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Yellow alert, yellow alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner has climbed a turret which gives him a view of the beach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Now leaving northern perimeter... Number 6, repeat, Number... 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Both men are aware that a vehicle has just driven onto the beach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Now approaching.... contact imminent.... contact imminent...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner jumps down from a rock and starts to run along the beach. The vehicle chases him across the sands, and he eventually trips and falls. One of the thugs in the vehicle leaps out to see him off, but the Prisoner is back on his feet in time to punch the man down. The driver of the vehicle tries to ram the Prisoner, but he jumps aside, runs along behind the vehicle, and manages to climb aboard and get rid of the driver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Northern area... Number 6... heading for outer zone, in our vehicle. Orange alert...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">But the Prisoner has not got far before he encounters the inevitable whining ball. He throws himself out of the vehicle to avoid it and punches it desperately; but it rolls onto him and engulfs him. The Prisoner screams soundlessly inside the ball and it lets him go. He drops to the ground and lies there motionless. The ball remains, guarding him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Orange alert, all units.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">An ambulance appears as the Prisoner begins to stir. He is lifted to his feet and carried away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner sits up suddenly. He is in pyjamas in a hospital bed. An elderly woman sits in a rocking chair, knitting. She casts an enormous looming shadow on the wall behind the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: How are you feeling, son? You've had a nasty experience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: You're in the hospital, son.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner makes as if to get up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: There, don't exert yourself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She stands up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: I'll just tell the doctor that you're awake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She moves away weirdly. Her rocking chair continues rocking on its own. The Prisoner thinks he is alone in the ward, until he spies a familiar face in a nearby bed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Cobb...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He gets out of bed and goes over to the other man. He speaks in a whisper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Cobb!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb opens his eyes and looks to see who's there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: What are you doing here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: And you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: Don't know... Can't remember much...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How long have you been here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner glances nervously around him to check that nobody's watching. Cobb is completely dazed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: Three... four weeks... months... It's difficult to work out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What happened to you?... What are they doing?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: They keep asking me questions. They want to know all about me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Have you told them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: No. I don't know... I'm so tired... I must sleep...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He turns onto his side, but the Prisoner grabs him by the lapel of his pyjamas.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No, this is important! Who brought you here? How did you get here? Who brought you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: I was in Germany. I remember going back to my hotel... I went into the bedroom... I think I went to bed... then I was here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A white-coated doctor has entered the ward unseen by the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: What are you doing out of bed? You should be resting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner gets up from Cobb's bedside to face the doctor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: There's nothing the matter with me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Perhaps not. But I'd just like to check up to make sure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... I'm all right. I want to leave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Let me be the judge of that. The after-effects can be quite unpleasant. I'd like to put my mind at rest. Please come with me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Smiling, he hands him a dressing gown. The Prisoner takes it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What if I don't?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: It's for your own good. I advise you to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Very well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As he puts the dressing gown on and follows the doctor out of the ward, Cobb stares blankly after them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: There's nothing to worry about, the tests are quite routine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They are now in one of the corridors of the hospital. A door with a round window catches the Prisoner's attention. Behind it he sees a long passage filled with red light. Straight-jacketed patients sit motionlessly facing each other. The scene is immensely bizarre.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Group therapy. Counteracts obsessional guilt complexes producing neurosis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As they continue down the corridor, an insane-looking bald man is escorted past them with electrodes stuck all over his his head. They reach the door to the Examination Room. The Prisoner glances back towards the group-therapy window before entering.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: There we are. Sit down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: If I agree to this...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: My dear fellow, if you're fit there's no reason to keep you here. Of course if you have a relapse, you may have to come back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The doctor busies himself setting up various bits of equipment. There is a pair of slippers by the Prisoner's feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Slippers!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: My size?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Naturally. Now, just relax...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He pulls down an enormous panel of lights, of the type more at home in an operating theatre. The Prisoner has to squint to see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Now... just listen to the old ticker...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He puts his stethoscope into his ears and places the other end on the Prisoner's chest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Excuse me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is sitting in his spherical chair, watching the proceedings. He is on the phone to someone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No, he's having his medical... ... Mm-hmm... ... No, of course not... No, of course we don't mind. One has to make sure of these things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The doctor is now typing some information into a computer. The tape drives spin into action, lines dance on an oscilloscope, and a punched card emerges. The doctor examines the card briefly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: There you are. Everything's in order -- you're absolutely fit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: So?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: I told you. You're free to go in the morning. We'll fix you up with some new clothes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner rises from his chair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What about my old ones?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: They've been burnt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: I'll take you to your ward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He opens the door for the Prisoner. Outside, the sound of deranged laughter can be heard from the group therapy window. The Prisoner looks in. The rows of straight-jacketed patients have inexplicably disappeared, but at the far end of the corridor the mad bald man is sitting gibbering contentedly to himself. He seems to be in some way controlling the height of a small round object floating in mid-air in front of him. The most disturbing thing of all is that he is wearing the Prisoner's old clothes (unburnt).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: Ah, he's coming along nicely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Suddenly an alarm bell sounds and they run back to the ward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Doctor: What's happened?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Assistant: The amnesia case, sir -- Cobb -- he's jumped out of the window. He's dead!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is the next morning. A white-coated orderly is escorting the Prisoner out of the hospital, which turns out to resemble a mediaeval castle. The orderly holds a wallet, from which he pulls various cards all labelled "6".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Orderly: Here's your employment card, your card of identity, your health and welfare card, your credit card -- and a free ride home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The orderly departs. The main feature of the Prisoner's new outfit is a dark jacket with a white trim. He also wears a dark polo-neck sweater, a pair of fawn trousers, and dark shoes with thick white soles. He climbs into the waiting taxi and immediately discards the umbrella and boater with which he has been issued. Most significantly, he rips the circular badge from his jacket lapel -- it shows the number 6 in the centre of the larger wheel of a penny-farthing. The taxi drives off, but the Prisoner grabs the handbrake and halts his ride at the foot of the steps that lead up to the Green Dome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He runs up the steps, through the front door (which opens without him having to ring), through the white doors (which open automatically), past the butler, through the sliding doors (which are already open), and down the ramp into Number 2's office. The spherical chair swivels round, but someone else is sitting in it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Get him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">New 2: I have taken his place. I am the new Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Get Number 1.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">New 2: As far as you're concerned, I'm in charge. What can I do for you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Cobb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">New 2: What we do here has to be done. It's the law of survival, it's either them or us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You imprison people, steal their minds, destroy them...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Behind him, the screen shows nothing but huge floating orange bubbles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">New 2: It depends whose side you're on, doesn't it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'm on our side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">New 2: Then we have to find out where your sympathies lie.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You know where they lie.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The new Number 2 has picked up the Prisoner's file and now reads from it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: "Subject shows great enthusiasm for his work. He is utterly devoted and loyal." Is this a man that suddenly walks out?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: And I didn't walk out. I resigned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: People change, exactly. So do loyalties.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: All very commendable. But let's be practical. I'm interested in facts. Your only chance to get out of here is to give them to me. And if you don't give them, I'll take them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner turns to leave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: It's up to you, think about it. Good day, Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Number what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Six. For official purposes. Everyone has a number. Yours is number six.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I am not a number, I am a person.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Six of one, a half a dozen of another!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner strides up the ramp, but the doors do not open.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good day!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner turns for an explanation, but Number 2 has picked up a phone and is now dictating into it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Report on Number 6. Normal classification.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The doors open for the Prisoner, but he waits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: On arrival, subject showed shock symptoms followed by accepted behaviour pattern.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner leaves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Since then, has been uncooperative and distinctly aggressive. Attempted to escape. Subject proving exceptionally difficult, but in view of his importance no extreme measures to be used yet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Back in his cottage, the Prisoner hears the Radetski March once more. He opens a side door and steps out onto a tiny balcony. The band are marching past in full colours -- with a coffin in a colourful hearse. It is Cobb's funeral. The "mourners" carry black umbrellas to signify as much. Some way behind them a youngish woman (Number 9) in a bright cape wanders sadly along. The Prisoner dashes out after her through the Village streets.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He catches up with her on a hilltop overlooking the beach graveyard. The funeral procession has just arrived below them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Friend of yours?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She immediately starts to run, but the Prisoner grabs her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You knew him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: No!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You're crying.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Funerals make me emotional.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Even those of people you don't know?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I knew Cobb. I'd like to help.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: He's dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: He was a friend of mine. We met some time ago.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: How do I know I can trust you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Can I trust you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: You know how he died?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: He jumped from a window.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She looks away suddenly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'm sorry... Had you known him long?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: No. Just a short while.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where did you meet?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9 looks alarmed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Yes... Yes!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Cobb was a good man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Village bell begins to chime.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Get back, quickly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner grabs her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: When can we talk again?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: We'd better not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: We must.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9 becomes desperate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: ... Twelve o'clock... at the concert!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She flees. The Prisoner gazes up at the chiming bell-tower and then hurries away himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is now twelve o'clock. The concert is being staged in a peculiarly ornate bandstand near the central square. The brass band plays rousing music. Number 9 arrives and sits beside the Prisoner who is waiting in the audience. They speak in hushed tones.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Thought you weren't coming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: I want to help.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: I know a way out. We planned an escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: They found out?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: No, they came sooner than Cobb expected.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: He was expecting them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As they speak, they pretend to be merely looking round and enjoying the musical programme. Number 9 opens a book and they pretend to be interested in it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: In here, you have only so much time to give them what they want before they take it from you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Her voice becomes still more of a whisper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: His time had come and so will yours. Can you... fly a helicopter?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I might.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: It's due here at two o'clock. Only stays a couple of hours each trip.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How's it guarded?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Electronically. You'll need an electropass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: A what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: An electropass. It's synchronized with the alarm system and lets you through.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where do I get it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: From me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Safely hidden.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: If this gadget is so important, how did you get one?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9 seems distressed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: I knew the last pilot...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You did this for Cobb?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9 does not answer for a few seconds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: ... I'll meet you by the stone boat at two o'clock. Goodbye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She hurries off. The band concludes the piece it was playing, the audience applaud and the conductor turns to them and nods his thanks. The Prisoner follows Number 9 at a distance to see where she goes. He has his previously rejected umbrella with him. The trail ends at the Green Dome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Inside, the new Number 2 is dictating into a phone again:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: He has not volunteered any information so far, but appears to be settling down. He even attended the regular brass band concert today.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He addresses someone else in the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Thank you, my dear. More tea?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The other person is Number 9, looking uncomfortable. When she speaks, her voice is very feeble.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He pours her a cup of tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You've done very well. Pity about Cobb. Still, it wasn't your fault. Never mind. There's no blot on your record.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He passes her a dossier.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You'll find the details of your new assignment in here. We shall be watching your progress with great interest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She opens the dossier and finds a picture of the Prisoner inside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Down by the stone boat, the Prisoner is playing chess with the ex-admiral.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: Come along young man, we haven't got all day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Ah yes, I'm sorry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As he makes his move, a helicopter flies in behind him. He turns to watch it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: Your mind's not on the game.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: My apologies, er...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9 has also seen the helicopter arrive. She steps out from an alcove and walks alongside the quayside in full view of the Prisoner who is sitting on the terrace above. He keeps his eye on her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: Checkmate</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is only half-listening.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: I'll give you another chance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No, no, if you'll excuse me, I'm not on form today, I think I'll just take a little stroll.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: Try the boat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He points his thumb at the stone boat behind him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: I said try the boat. She's great in any weather. Sailed her many a time. Have a good trip.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner smiles humouringly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Thanks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As the Prisoner walks away, the Admiral starts humming "What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor" to himself. The incidental music picks this up as the Prisoner joins Number 9 in the stone boat. They sit down on a bench. She takes off her watch and gives it to him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Here, the electropass. Hurry, there's not much time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who gave you this? Your boss?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: What do you mean?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What were you doing in Number 2's house?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: You saw me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I saw you leave. After you'd made your report. You're assigned to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: I was assigned to Cobb too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: And you'd betray me in the same way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: I haven't betrayed either of you. We were trying to get out before it was too late. Soon it'll be too late for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She gets up, but he grabs her again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You're coming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: No!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: I never intended to without him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You're coming with me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: Go, and go now before it's too late.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She breaks free and rushes away. He watches her climb up to the terrace, from where she watches him make his way casually towards the helicopter's landing pad. He passes the butler, still walking about with his black and white umbrella.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The helicopter is guarded by the whining ball. As the Prisoner approaches, the electropass starts bleeping and flashing -- the three hands on its dial spin in time. He decides to go for it. The white ball rolls towards him as he edges towards the helicopter door, but it lets him climb aboard. Safely in the cockpit, he pockets the bleeping electropass and takes off. The Village falls away below him. Number 9 watches him fly off into the blue sky, and then sits down at a parasolled table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the Control Room, the Prisoner's flight is being watched on the big screen by Number 2 and another man (whom we cannot identify because he has his back to us). Number 2 suddenly gives a signal and one of the technicians in the Control Room pulls a hefty lever. The Prisoner immediately loses control of the helicopter. Number 2 watches like a gleeful child as the helicopter is slowly turned back towards the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the terrace, Number 9 watches sadly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: Game of chess, my dear?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She looks round.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 9: I don't play.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: You should learn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He beckons to her, and she comes and sits opposite him at the chessboard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Admiral: We're all pawns, my dear... Your move!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 signals again and the technician pulls the lever further back. The Prisoner lets go of the joystick; it moves about on its own. Number 2 continues giving signals, and the helicopter is eventually brought back to its pad in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 turns to the unknown man, who is now revealed to be Cobb, alive and well. He wears a suit and carries a bowler hat and umbrella.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I think I'll let him keep the watch, Cobb. Just to remind him escape is not possible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: Don't be too hard on the girl. She was most upset at my funeral.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Don't worry, she'll be well taken care of.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: Yes, that's what I was afraid of.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He climbs the stairs, past Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: Ah well, I'd better be going. Got a long journey. Mustn't keep my new masters waiting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: They'll be delighted with you. Give them our compliments.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: I will. And I'll tell them there are no loopholes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I appreciate that. I do hope that your stay had its lighter moments. Au revoir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He makes the "Be seeing you" sign to Cobb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cobb: You'll find him a tough nut to crack. Auf Wiedersehen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And Cobb be-seeings Number 2 as he leaves. We see the Prisoner step grimly from the helicopter. He is ushered away by the white ball. Meanwhile, on the lawn marked "Residents only", the butler in his cape and bowler hat strides towards us with his umbrella high above his head. The music peaks and the screen drops to black as we close in on the umbrella...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Suddenly an image of the Prisoner's face flies out from an aerial shot of the Village, and prison bars slam shut on him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Next episode: The Chimes of Big Ben</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Guest Stars:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Virginia Maskell as The Woman [Number 9]</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Guy Doleman as Number 2</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Paul Eddington as Cobb</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">George Baker as the New Number 2</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">with</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Angelo Muscat as the Butler</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Barbara Yu Ling as Taxi Driver</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Stephanie Randall as the Maid</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Jack Allen as the Doctor</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Fabia Drake as the Welfare Worker [Knitting Woman]</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Denis Shaw as the Shopkeeper</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Oliver MacGreevy as the Gardener/Electrician</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">and</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Frederick Piper as the Ex-Admiral</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Patsy Smart as the Waitress</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Christopher Benjamin as the Labour Exchange Manager</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Peter Swanwick as the Supervisor</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">David Garfield as the Hospital Attendant</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Peter Brace as the 1st Guardian</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Keith Peacock as the 2nd Guardian</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Episode written by George Markstein and David Tomblin</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Executive Producer: Patrick McGoohan</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Director: Don Chaffey</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Production Manager: Bernard Williams</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Director of Photography: Brendan J. Stafford B.S.C.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Art Director: Jack Shampan</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Camera Operator: Jack Lowin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Editor: Lee Doig</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Theme by Ron Grainer</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cameraman (2nd Unit): Robert Monks</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Assistant Director: Gino Marotta</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sound Editor: Wilfred Thompson</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sound Recordist: John Bramall</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Music Editor: Bob Dearberg</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Casting Director: Rose Tobias-Shaw</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Continuity: Doris Martin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Set Dresser: Kenneth Bridgeman</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Make-Up: Eddie Knight</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Hairdressing: Pat McDermot</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Wardrobe: Masada Wilmot</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Made on Location</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Borehamwood, England</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">An ITC Production</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Incorporated Television Company Limited MCMLXVII</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">by Everyman Films Limited</span><br /><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-not-number-i-am-free-man.html"><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">"I am not a number, I am a free man!"</span></a>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-29308104361151927702009-01-15T16:44:00.000-08:002009-01-15T16:46:17.795-08:00"The Prisoner"--Episode Two<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial; font-style: italic;">The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Episode Two</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">"The Chimes of Big Ben"</span><br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The man whom we will call "the Prisoner" resigns and is gassed exactly as before. He wakes up in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The following conversation accompanies a miscellany of images.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2's spherical chair rises from the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: In the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What do you want?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Information.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The newly arrived Prisoner explores the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Whose side are you on?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: That would be telling. We want information.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is running frantically along the beach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Information... Information...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You won't get it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A bubble rises through water. Ahead of the Prisoner there looms a huge white whining ball. Number 2 watches the coloured bubbles on his screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: By hook or by crook...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He faces us in his chair, and the reverb drops completely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: ... we will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">This Number 2 is a plumpish man with a dark beard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">His screen shows the Prisoner being chased through the water by the huge white ball. It knocks him down and rolls on past him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: The new Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who is Number 1?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We see the Control Room with its rotating seesaw of observers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You are Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Alone on the beach under a gloomy sky, the Prisoner punches the air in fury.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2's deranged laughter echoes away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Village awakes to a two-note jingle from the ubiquitous loudspeakers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: Good morning, good morning, good morning! And what a lovely day it is. Rise and shine, rise and shine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We zoom down onto the Prisoner's cottage. He is asleep in bed. The woman's cheerful voice forces him to stir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: Before our programme of early-morning music, here are two announcements.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He gives the speaker on his shelf a quick irritated stare...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: The long-range weather forecast is that the fine spell will continue for at least another month.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">... then turns over and tries to go back to sleep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: Your local council, and remember it is your local council, democratically elected by you, has decided to organize a great new competition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He gives up, now alert to the broadcast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: Can you paint? Can you draw? Can you model in clay? If you can, then your day is just six weeks today.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner gets up, takes his dressing gown from the end of his bed and flicks it like a whip.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: More about it later, but now music.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is watching from his spherical chair, evidently impressed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: He can make even the act of putting on his dressing gown appear as an act of defiance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Labour Exchange Manager is there with him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Manager: There are methods we haven't used yet, of course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 stands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I want him with a whole heart, body and soul...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner, wearing his dressing gown, goes to his kitchen and opens his fridge. Horrible syrupy music fills the room. He takes out the milk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 already has his cup of tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Manager: He'll crack.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Perhaps. One tiny piece at a time? I don't want a man of fragments!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner cannot concentrate on making his breakfast because of the music. He stares and stares at the speaker, eventually picking it up and shutting it in the fridge. The music is completely silenced. The Prisoner starts to whistle as he returns to his breakfast preparations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Fascinating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Manager: He doesn't even bend a little.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: That's why he'll break. It only needs one small thing. If he will answer one simple question, the rest will follow. Why did he resign?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is on his way through the Village. In his circular room, Number 2 is still watching. He presses a switch, walks round behind his desk and picks up an L-shaped phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Control Room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The bald Supervisor answers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Supervisor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Have you picked up the helicopter yet?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: I think it's just in range...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He moves over to look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Yes, she's on the radar now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">At Number 2's end of the line:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Do you want me to make radio contact?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No, but tell me when it's due. I want to meet it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner watches it flying in behind him. He is sitting on the terrace, playing chess with a gruff-voiced retired General.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: Your move, young man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He makes a move.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: Oh, you know what I think I'll do?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Resign.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: No, that announcement this morning. Exhibition of arts and crafts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He picks up one of the chessmen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: These aren't all they might be, you know. I think I'll make a chess set. Used to be quite a handyman once. Are you entering?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: You're a fool, Number 6, that's my opinion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The helicopter flies in to land. The Prisoner continues making moves on the chessboard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: You'll be here as long as you live.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: However long that is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: Might as well try to settle down, no point in being uncooperative.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Was there ever a time when you... were not... cooperative?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: No point in fighting battles you can't win.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Perhaps you came here of your own free will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: Oh, impudent too, huh? Wish I'd had you in my regiment for a few months.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Which regiment was that? Which army?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The General looks completely taken aback.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The helicopter touches down, as Number 2 approaches their table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good morning, General!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The General, who was leaving anyway, merely nods his head back in annoyance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: The General seems a little sour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Mate in seven moves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He is still moving the pieces. Number 2 sits down opposite him, fascinated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh...! How many do you know?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: A few more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: We must play some time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">An ambulance pulls up alongside the helicopter, whose blades are still rotating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Certainly we must. By post.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He gets up to investigate. Number 2 emits a booming laugh. The butler is standing there with his umbrella.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I must add "sense of humour" to your file. They tend to leave out things like that. Very important.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">An unconscious woman is carried from the helicopter on a stretcher.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What crime did she commit?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Nervous tension, that's all. She's come here to recuperate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How much are you charging her?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 laughs again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I really must bring your file up to date.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In Number 2's circular room, a file containing a photograph of the Prisoner lies open on the desk. The screen on the wall shows huge orange bubbles oozing around.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Sit down my dear chap.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He perches on the edge of the desk. Number 2 presses a switch with the tip of his umbrella and a round table rises from the floor. The butler proceeds to serve morning tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: File number 6, section 42, subsection 6, paragraph 3. Add: "Sense of humour strong and unimpaired".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He presses the switch again, then addresses the butler coldly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Thank you. That will be all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The butler nods and takes the empty trolley away. Number 2 is jovial again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I can never remember -- one lump or two?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It's in the file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes, as a matter of fact, yes. But it would save time if you just answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why? Are you running out of time?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 looks in the file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: "Does not take sugar".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He giggles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Frightened of putting on weight?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No. Nor of being reduced.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh, that's excellent. I am glad you're here. You really are a model.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: But I don't run on clockwork.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You will... my dear chap... you will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He hands the Prisoner a cup of tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Do you think so?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Do you still think you can escape, Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, I'm going to do better than that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Going to escape and come back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Come back?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Escape, come back, wipe this place off the face of the earth, obliterate it, and you with it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He stands up, looking satisfied, and pours himself another cup of tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Ah... Subsection 6, paragraph 4. Add: "On the other hand, persecution complex amounting to mania. Paranoid delusions of grandeur."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner drops three lumps of sugar into his tea. Number 2 leans back into the depths of his spherical chair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Don't worry, Number 6. You'll be cured. I'll see to it. No more nightmares. If you have so much as a bad dream, you will come whimpering to tell it to me. Whimpering.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner sips his tea contentedly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Watch. Just watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The big screen shows an empty stretcher being carried from a house with the sign "8, Private".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Inside, the previously unconscious woman is stirring on her bed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: She's your new neighbour, that's all. I thought you might be interested. The new Number 8.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What happened to the old one?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well, he vacated the premises. You noticed surely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Did he escape?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">This makes Number 2 laugh.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: There was no funeral.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: It's not always possible. You need a body. Oh look, she's getting up. It's quite like old times, isn't it, Number 6? Do you remember your first day?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the screen, Number 8 rubs her head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Oh, thank God I'm home...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: An exact replica of her own room, of course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Of course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 stands up and walks a little stiffly. Suddenly she notices the view through the window. Number 2 roars with laughter and reaches for a phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Ah, Number 8, please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The phone in Number 8's house bleeps loudly and repeatedly, just as the Prisoner's phone did before. They watch her jump at the noise, and then slowly make her way to the phone. Her voice is a whisper when she answers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Hello?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good morning. Quite recovered? No ill effects from the journey, I trust.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Who is it? ... Where am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: There's nothing to be afraid of, my dear. Come and have lunch with me: Number 2, the Green Dome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And he hangs up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Hello?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: A most pleasant addition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Hello?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I'm sure you'll agree.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Hello?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She jiggles the receiver-rest in desperation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I trust you'll be neighbourly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is walking towards the door. He turns slowly. Number 2 leans forward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I'll do a deal with you, Number 6. You tell me one thing and I'll release you. Why did you resign?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Release me? From the Village...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Mhm. That's really all we want to know. Now that's not much to ask, is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner knocks lightly on the metal doors which bar his way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: If you insist on staying here, I do hope you make some attempt to settle down! Try to take part in community life. This exhibition that's coming up for example. Wait a minute...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He grabs the Prisoner's file and searches through it rapidly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: There! "At the age of fifteen, top of his class in woodwork." That's the sort of thing I mean -- join in!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'll make you a handle for this door...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 guffaws as the doors open. The Prisoner strides away. Number 2 shouts after him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You'll be back!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The doors slide shut.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: ... Whimpering.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Outside, and the loudspeakers chime into life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: Good morning again! Further news of the exhibition of arts and crafts. Your Finance Committee has decided on the prizes to be awarded. There will be five prizes according to age group, but the exhibit judged to be the best of any group will receive a special prize of two thousand free work units...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner leaves Number 2's house and is heading for his own cottage when Number 8 calls to him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Excuse me... Could you please tell me where "Number 2, The Green Dome" is?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh yes, certainly. Across the square, across the street, up the steps, you can't miss it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: ... Two thousand free work units...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I know it sounds crazy, but...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: ... I don't know where I am.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... In the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A colourfully dressed couple pass by, giving the Prisoner the "Be seeing you" gesture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Couple: Lovely day!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 comes to stand next to the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: That sounds like a salute.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Could you take me over there, please?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: To the Green Dome? Yes, certainly. Across the square, across the street, up the steps, you can't miss it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They set off. They pass a canopied taxi in the street.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Can you get a car here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Taxis. Local service only.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Where will they take you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Anywhere you like, as long as you arrive back here in the end. That's why they're called local.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Another couple pass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Who are these people? Why are they here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He starts climbing the steps to the Green Dome. She follows him, as a musical taxi horn blares in the distance. They reach the door marked "2".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Here you are. The Green Dome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Who is Number 2?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who is Number 1?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The door opens automatically. Number 8 gasps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Oh, I'm frightened.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Goodbye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I've done nothing wrong. I've committed no crime. All I did was resign.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No use telling me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He smiles and leaves. She steps nervously inside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Afternoon has turned to evening by the time Number 8 returns to her new home. The Prisoner hails her from outside his own cottage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Good evening!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She turns.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's a long lunch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Nightcap?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: "Nightcap"?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Drink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She approaches, and they go inside the Prisoner's cottage. She looks around. Pleasant soothing music is playing somewhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: There's one good thing about this place. At least it's cheap. Genuine, non-alcoholic whisky, twenty-four work units. Or would you prefer a genuine, non-alcoholic vodka -- sixteen work units? I hope there's nothing significant in that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Yes, I would prefer it, Mr...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Er, sorry, no name. I am Number 6. You are Number 8.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I didn't think it would be like this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner joins her by the fireplace and gives her a vodka.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Are you, um... are you Russian?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Estonian.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Russian.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I don't think so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You speak very good English.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: It was my job.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: From which you resigned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She is about to drink, but stops and looks carefully at the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Number 2 is a very charming man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I would expect his assistant to be the same.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Do you mean me? What about you... Number 8?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She glares at him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I am no Number 8 or Number anything else. My name is Nadia Rakowski, and I've been interrogated enough for one day. Goodnight!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She storms out. The Prisoner brings his hand to his eye and down again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be seeing you...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The next day Number 8, dressed in sunglasses and beach robe, visits the beach. As she sits down on the sand, the Prisoner observes her from his table on the terrace above. She knows he's there. Number 2 approaches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: May I join you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner gestures for him to sit down. Number 2 leans his shooting-stick against the table and sits.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You're, er, good neighbours, I hope?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner looks down at her again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: There are some people who talk and some people who don't. Which means that there are some people who leave this place, and some who do not leave. You are obviously staying.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner catches Number 8's eye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Has it ever occurred to you that you're just as much a prisoner as I am?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh, my dear chap, of course, I know too much. We're both lifers. I am definitely an optimist, that's why it doesn't matter who Number 1 is. It doesn't matter which "side" runs the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">During this, the Prisoner looks down at Number 8 again. She breaks his eye contact by standing up and wandering down to the shore.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It's run by one side or the other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh certainly, but both sides are becoming identical. What in fact has been created? An international community.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 removes her sunglasses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: A perfect blueprint for world order.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She removes her beach robe, revealing a swimsuit (with a circular Number 8 badge), and wades rapidly out into the water. Number 2 seems too busy talking to notice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they're looking into a mirror, they will see that this is the pattern for the future.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: The whole earth as the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes. That is my hope. What's yours?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'd like to be the first man on the moon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They chuckle together as Number 8 starts to swim. Number 2 spots her and becomes more serious.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well, must go. Delightful chat. Thank you, Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He gets up and walks away. Number 6 also gets to his feet and watches Number 8 as she swims out into deeper water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is in his office, holding a file open at a photograph of Number 8.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: International swimmer. At the age of seventeen... Olympic bronze medallist!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He suddenly realizes what's going on, and picks up a phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Control Room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the Control Room:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Number 2. Tell me, what visual range do you have out to sea?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Do you mean direct TV transmission?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Two miles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Back in Number 2's office:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: After that, we're on radar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the Control Room:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Control room is now ready for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh, thank you, I'll be right there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 is still swimming strongly. Her image is on the screen in the Control Room as Number 2 arrives.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: She'll be out of range soon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: She's kept in training, I must say! Oh well, orange alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He presses a switch. The huge white ball bubbles up out of the water. The Prisoner watches impassively as it whines across the surface in Number 8's direction. She turns for a moment, sees it, and swims off again with even greater determination. The Control Room continues monitoring. The balloon reaches her, roars and suffocates her in a bewildering mass of light, sound and water. We see her being dragged back to the beach by the main ball and two other smaller side balloons. The Control Room continues monitoring.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner descends to beach level, and bends down to examine the seemingly lifeless form of Number 8. Two hospital men appear with a stretcher.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Man: Don't touch her, please! We'll take care of her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They place her onto the stretcher.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is on the phone to the Prisoner, whom he can see on the screen in his circular office.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Meet me at the hospital right away, Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be right there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They put their phones down simultaneously. On the screen, the Prisoner leaves his cottage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner arrives at the hospital in a taxi. In a corridor inside, he sees a bald and electrode-headed patient being wheeled past on a trolley. Number 2 comes out of a door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Ah, Number 6! How good of you to come! I wonder if you could help me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well, you've probably got to know Number 8 better than anybody while she's been here... Come with me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He goes back into the Observation Room (which is where the Examination Room was before), and the Prisoner follows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Through a one-way window, the Prisoner sees Number 8 sitting on her own in a room that's empty apart from a small table in front of her. She is being barraged with a stream of questions: "What was in your mind?", "Did you think you could escape?"., "What was the purpose of your swim?".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Won't say a word. I really don't want to be hard on her. She's not at all important. I'm surprised they even sent her here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The interrogator is revealed to be the Supervisor talking by phone from the Control Room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: What was the purpose of your swim? Were you attempting suicide?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 looks dazed and shaky.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Have you noticed any suicidal tendencies?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What are you doing to her?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (What was the purpose of your swim?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Nothing, as you can see. Oh, there's an alternating current in the floor. Four seconds on, four seconds off. It takes just three seconds to get to the door. If she times it correctly, she can leave whenever she likes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (Tell us. What was in your mind?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 puts her hand into a bowl of water on the table, then throws the drips onto the floor. Electricity sparks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (What was in your mind?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: She's caught onto that at last.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 throws more water onto the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (What was in your mind? What was the purpose of your swim?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: One... two...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The floor sparks again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (Did you think you could escape?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You see, if she has any confidence in her own timing, she's got no problem. It's self-inflicted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She lets more water drip onto the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: One... two... three...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The floor sparks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (What was in your mind? What were you thinking?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 becomes even more dazed. Surveillance cameras, tape drives, and all the equipment in the Control Room is trained on her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (Tell us. What was in your mind? What was the purpose of your swim? What was in your mind? Were you attempting suicide? Suicide? Suicide?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner turns away. Number 8 takes more water and throws it onto the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (What was in your mind? What was in your mind?)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I believe she's going to do it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: One... two... three... four...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The floor sparks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes! That's better.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (Your mind... your mind... your mind...)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 runs across the room to the door, and then stops.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: (Mind... mind... mind... mind... mind...)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No! Switch off! SWITCH OFF!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner turns to look. Number 8 falls to the floor, sobbing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Kill me, kill me, kill me! Kill me!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well well, we'll just have to try something else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He walks back out to the corridor, allowing the Prisoner through the doorway first.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Are you sure you can't help me? I really find this most distasteful.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Let her go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: It looks like a suicidal tendency, doesn't it? But one must be sure---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: LET HER GO!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Is that an order, Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: All right. You wanted a deal... I'll make a deal with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He crosses to peer into the group therapy corridor. Straight-jacketed patients line the walls as before.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Let her go and I'll collaborate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You'll what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Isn't that what you wanted?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: So obvious a weakness? In you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: For which you'll collaborate?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Don't get too excited. I'll tell you nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He looks into the corridor again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'll er, join in, try to settle down. I'll even carve something for your exhibition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: If I turn her over to you, you'll do some woodwork for me! Is that your deal?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Best you'll get.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He starts to walk away. Number 2 guffaws.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You really are the limit, Number 6!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He produces a tiny dictaphone and speaks into it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: File number 6, section 42, subsection 6, new paragraph 5: "Overweening sense of self-importance...".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner stops and turns.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: "... While here, his egomania has, if anything, increased."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Well?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: All right! She's all yours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And he strides out of the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It's another morning in the Village, and the Prisoner is preparing his breakfast. Number 8 enters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Ah yes, good morning! You're early!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Dobroye utro. I'll do it for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner makes a pleased grunt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: One egg or two?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Two, I think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the Green Dome, Number 2 and the Labour Exchange Manager are watching.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: One egg or two...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 hands the Prisoner a drink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Here you are.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: This is so nice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He raises the drink as a toast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 leaps up from his spherical chair, shooting-stick in hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Things couldn't be going better. I think I'll pay them a call.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 meets Number 8 and the Prisoner as they leave the latter's cottage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good morning to you both. Settling down I hope?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No swimming today, eh? Mm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No, off to the woods.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Naughty, naughty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: To carve for the exhibition. I've decided to do a series of abstracts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You're not using any offensive weapons, I hope. You know the ruling about axes, saws, chisels, that sort of thing. They may fall into the wrong hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Ah... abstract art is basically primitive. I've... I've made my own tools.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Tiptop! Doing as the caveman did, eh, Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I may even invent fire...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They wander off, leaving Number 2 to his laughter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They arrive at the grove of statues. Number 8 gasps as one of them swivels round, lights flashing in its eyes. The Prisoner simply acknowledges its presence with the "Be seeing you" gesture, and continues unwinding the ball of string he's carrying.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: They can see us, but they can't hear us. You can talk freely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Can I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You still think it's a trap.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I don't know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner walks over to a particular tree and pulls out a bundle hidden in its roots.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Were you sent here because you'd discovered the whereabouts of the Village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Don't tell them that!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: But you know where it is, don't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He puts the bundle on the ground and unwraps it. It contains a couple of crudely-fashioned tools, including an axe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: All I know is there's no escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not even by sea. You tried it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He tightens the string that binds the axehead to the shaft.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I was a fool. I couldn't swim so far.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How far? To where?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 sighs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: It's no good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Isn't it? If I knew where I was sailing from, I could calculate where I was sailing to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Sail?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: By boat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He has picked up the axe and now starts chopping into a tree. Number 8 starts to walk away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where are you going?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I must think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Keep to the paths.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He keeps chopping tirelessly until the tree falls. Number 2 watches approvingly from his spherical chair. The Prisoner takes the axe to the trunk, then uses the other tool -- a long pole and a sharp piece of stone -- to chisel the wood into the form of a bottomless hull. Number 2 continues looking on. The Prisoner lifts his sculpture onto its side and is still working hard when Number 2 arrives in person.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I say!... I say!... What is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It's er, not finished yet. It doesn't make sense without the whole group. There'll be three pieces.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Entries must be in two weeks tomorrow, you know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes, I'll be ready.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He continues chiselling.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Axe, stone chisels... Even these are outside the pale of the law, you know, technically speaking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes, I'm er, I'm sure you can wink a blind surveillance eye, can't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: My dear Number 6, I wouldn't dream of interfering. I can't tell you how delighted I am. Can I give you a lift back to the Village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Er, no thanks, I think I'll carry on while there's enough light, do a bit more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Ah... well... Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: And you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner pauses for a moment to return Number 2's "Be seeing you" gesture. He stares after Number 2 as he chuckles and wanders away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: But not for long...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is evening, and the radio is whispering sweet nothings. The Prisoner, reclining in a chair, checks his watch and gets up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Radio: Hello and good evening. Curfew time. Sleep tight. Fifteen minutes now to curfew. Meanwhile, allow us to lull you away with...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Syrupy muzak pours out of the radio. The Prisoner lifts it from its shelf just as Number 8 arrives and rings the door-buzzer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Is it safe to talk?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Speak softly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They go and sit with the radio at the table outside the Prisoner's cottage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Radio: Curfew in five minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Tell me...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Radio: To curfew, the minutes are five.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner strokes Number 8's forehead with his finger. Number 2 and the Labour Exchange Manager are watching as ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: The language of love...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 and the Prisoner speak in whispers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I do know where the Village is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How do you know?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I worked for the government.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Which... which government?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Well, it doesn't matter. But I saw a secret file on the Village, by accident and for a few seconds only.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Did you um, have access to other secret information?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where are we, Nadia?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Lithuania.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They stand up and walk back to the Prisoner's door, his arm round her shoulders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Radio: Curfew time, one minute...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Lithuania...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Radio: ... sixty seconds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: On the Baltic. That means making for West Germany, Denmark... It's um, three hundred miles at least.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: No, it doesn't have to be.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Gdynia, in Poland. Danzig. Will you take me with you? Will I be safe?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I can't answer for the British authorities -- for either of us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Can you answer for you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I give you my personal guarantee, for whatever that's worth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Thirty miles, that's all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Mhm?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Yes, that's how far we are from the Polish border.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Mm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Beyond, on the coast, there's a little village, Branyevo. Fishing people. They resist them. There's a little group; I... I know them. I have a contact man. He'll do anything for us once we get there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Is that where you were making for?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Oh, do you know what I want? To hear the chimes of Big Bill...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Radio: And now it's here; it's the curfew...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Or Big Ben...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I'll never call you anything else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Radio: ... chiming out...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Goodnight, Nadia.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Goodnight, Big Ben.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Big Bill...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They part, the Prisoner taking the radio back into his cottage. The door opens for him automatically.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is the day when the exhibition of arts and crafts will be judged. The Village is a riot of colour, the brass band plays, and a huge banner outside the hall proclaims "EXHIBITION of arts and crafts, open daily 9.30 am - 7.30 pm, ADMISSION FREE". Number 2 strides out of the hall and meets Number 8 and the Prisoner on the steps. He has to shout to be heard over the band.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good afternoon to you both!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Good afternoon!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Would you excuse me for a minute, Number 8? Number 6, I've just come from the exhibition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Pardon?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: The awards committee are intrigued with your abstract, but they're a little mystified. Could you spare a moment to give them a word?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Certainly, a great pleasure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He turns to Number 8.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes, I'll be right... right back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Excuse us!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Inside the exhibition hall, the little butler follows Number 2 around. All the works on display (apart from the Prisoner's own) are portraits or busts of Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Remarkably high standard, don't you agree?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, highly original.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They walk on. The General draws them over to his display.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Ah, General! Excellent!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: I've seen your stuff, Number 6. I didn't like it, bound to say so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Is this your chess set?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: Oh, it's nothing, nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It's very good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: Mm yes, I quite like the king, I must confess.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The figure of the king resembles Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: The king? Yes. Yes... First class...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">General: I'm glad to see you're settling down, by the way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Thank you. Thank you very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He continues into the main part of the hall, where his own wood sculpture is displayed on a revolving dais for the awards committee. Number 2 peers through a panel of the sculpture that contains holes of various sizes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: And here he is, our very own Epstein!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Can I help?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">First Man: We're not quite sure what it means.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It means what it is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 looks through the bottomless hull, now stood on its end for display purposes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Brilliant. It means what it is. Brilliant... Oh no! You mustn't let me influence you -- you are the awards committee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He climbs down off the dais.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: What puzzled me, Number 6, was the fact that you'd given the group a title, Escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner climbs up onto the dais, and indicates the hull.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: This piece -- what does it represent to you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Second Man: A church door?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Right first time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: I think I see what he's getting at.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes... now this other piece here, of the same general line, somewhat more abstract as you'll notice, representing freedom or a barrier -- depending how you look at it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Like Number 2 before him, he peers through the holed panel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: The barrier's down, the door is open, you're free, free to go, free to escape, to escape to this...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He has come back round to the front, and now looks up at what is obviously a mast. The first man on the committee takes off his hat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... the symbols of human aspirations: knowledge, freedom, escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">First Man: Why the cross-piece?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: Good, splendid! I was really quite worried for a moment. The only thing I really don't understand...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: Where is Number 2?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">All of a sudden there is a round of applause, and we are in the middle of the prize-giving ceremony. Number 2 stands on a podium, making the announcements through a megaphone. The butler stands by his side, and the awards committee are seated on the podium.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: And now, and now the special prize for the over-sixty group. And this goes for her magnificent tapestry to Number 38!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 38 is an old lady resembling the popular conception of Miss Marple. Those present applaud as she approaches the podium, where the butler hands her a rosette.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well done, 38!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 chuckles and starts another round of applause. He picks up the megaphone again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: And now, and now, the prize of prizes. The special merit award of 2000 work units for the best work in any of the five groups. And the committee have awarded it to... Number 6!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">There is applause. The Prisoner gives a knowing look to Nadia, and goes up to collect his rosette from the butler. Number 2 puts the megaphone down and raises both hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Speech, my dear chap!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Pardon?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Speech.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh yes. Um, ladies and gentleman... er, fellow citizens...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 nods appreciatively.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Um, my work is its own satisfaction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Spoken like a true artist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I am, however, deeply honoured by this award. I feel nevertheless that it should have gone not to me but to someone whose work, long life, in this Village has been an example to us all... Number 38!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">There is another round of applause. This time it is the Prisoner who raises his hand for silence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes. It... it's not for me to reverse the decision of the committee, however I... I would like to use these 2000 work units to buy Number 38's work to hang in my own home!... Agreed?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">There is a big round of applause, including cries of "Bravo" from Number 2 and others. Number 6 walks over to Number 38 and hands her his 2000-work-unit rosette. They all stride happily out of the exhibition hall as the brass band strikes up again. Number 2 remains on the steps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is the middle of the night. The Village's penny-farthing flag flutters in the wind as Number 8 and the Prisoner cautiously carry the bottomless hull out of the deserted exhibition hall and down to the beach. They spread out a canvas on the sand, place the holed panel on top of it, and the hull on top of that. They tie it all together and put the mast in place. Finally they unfurl the sail -- it's Number 38's tapestry of Number 2 -- and push off into the water...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: Good morning, good morning, good morning. And what a lovely day it is again! Rise and shine, rise and shine. First, your weather. It'll be hot and fine all day, though the fresh breeze will continue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner's cottage is of course empty. He and Number 8 are making progress along the coast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: How much further?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: About two miles. If your geography's correct, just around the next headland.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the Control Room, the Supervisor watches to make sure all is well. The various sensors have already detected that the Prisoner is missing; they soon locate the boat. The Supervisor smiles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Calling Number 2... calling Number 2...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The boat continues over the water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Supervisor points to an image on the radar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: There. Almost out of range.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The boat sails on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Thirty miles, eh? Better contact post five, just in case. And then orange alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Supervisor picks up an L-shaped phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Supervisor: Orange alert... Orange alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The white bubble rises up from the water with its familiar whine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the boat, Number 8 suddenly points.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: That's it! See the cave?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the land, a man (Karel) is watching them through binoculars. He sees the white ball hurtling across the water's surface, and takes aim with his rifle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: We're catching a crosswind from the rocks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 suddenly notices the ball.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Look!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The ball roars.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Swim for it! Right, SWIM FOR IT!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They jump overboard and start swimming. On the coast, Karel fires three times at the ball, but the shots have no effect. They simply keep it away from the shore. Number 8 and the Prisoner reach the shore and clamber out of the water.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Karel: Nadia!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He rushes down from his position on the rocks to greet her. They talk urgently in Russian. The Prisoner interrupts them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Get a pencil... paper...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She asks Karel for these things and gives them to the Prisoner. Karel takes her hand and dashes into the cave. The Prisoner stands outside for a minute, writing something down. He then goes into the cave himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Ask him to transmit this to London immediately. He will not...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She translates.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: He will not understand it. It is in code. It is a delivery note.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She translates this and hands him the note.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What route are we taking?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 translates.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Karel: Ah, I... understand. By sea... Gdansk... Danzig, you know. By air to Copenhagen. By air again to London.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner seems preoccupied with his own watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Karel: Quick now, please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: His watch. Ask him for his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She translates the request. The Prisoner indicates his own watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: This... this no good. Sea water, no good. Your watch!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Karel: Ah!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They swap watches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What now?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Karel: Quick now, please!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner and Number 8 lie down in a crate. A partition separates them. Each has a blanket. Karel nails the lid down with a hammer. A sign on the lid says "London via Danzig & Copenhagen". We see the crate driven through the Polish countryside in the back of a truck. Number 8 surprises the Prisoner by suddenly speaking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Big Ben?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I just wanted to hear your voice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I don't chime.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He looks at his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: The chimes should occur... in about... twelve hours' time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">We see their crate being loaded onto a ship, and the ship crossing the sea. This time the Prisoner is asleep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Big Ben?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Mm? What?... Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I feel a bit sick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's all right. Hold out. There's only another... three hours at sea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 grunts in resignation. The Prisoner tries to get back to sleep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Big Ben?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Have you got a wife in England?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No... Don't talk any more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: ... Big Ben?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: I feel a bit better.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's great... That's marvellous, wonderful... good night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He pulls his blanket round his head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In a government office somewhere, a red phone rings. A grey-haired man in suit and spectacles answers it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Fotheringay: Fotheringay here, yes... Yes, I've seen a copy of the deciphered message... What time would you say?... Good... My dear sir, I can't wait to see him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The crate is moved onto a plane. The Prisoner checks his watch again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: If that was, er, if that was Copenhagen, it's less than... less than an hour and a half to go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Big Ben?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes...?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Where are we going to land in England?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I don't know. If my message was received correctly, we'll land in an office that I shall know very well in London.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Big Ben?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Are you engaged to someone? Um... I mean, is that the right word? Um, "engaged"?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Go to sleep!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The plane touches down. They are buffeted around as the crate is moved by porters who complain of its weight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A rather pompous figure in an overcoat strides into Fotheringay's office and places his bowler hat on the desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Fotheringay: Good evening, Colonel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Evening, Fotheringay. Well, everything's gone according to schedule. Our friend'll be with us any minute.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The crate is carried into the antechamber by several men and deposited on the floor. Inside, the Prisoner receives a final jolt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Right, get it open.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The lid of the crate is prised off with a crowbar. The Prisoner and Number 8 emerge blinking into electric light -- the Venetian blinds on the windows are drawn. The Colonel looks at them both. The Prisoner takes his time in greeting him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Colonel...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: All right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They shake hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Fotheringay...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Fotheringay: Hello, old man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They shake hands warmly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Allow me to introduce you to Nadia...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: How do you do, m'dear?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 looks nervous and exhausted by the journey. The Colonel turns to Fotheringay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Right then, er, perhaps you'd leave us to it, old chap?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Fotheringay walks past the Prisoner as he leaves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Fotheringay: Might see you later, I hope.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes, I certainly hope so, Fotheringay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben starts to chime quarter-to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Is... is this... London?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Sh...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The chimes continue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: ... Is that it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Sh...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The chimes finish.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes. That's it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Perhaps you wouldn't mind waiting in the other room, m'dear? Er, Peters!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She hesitates.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It's all right, you can go with him. See you later.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Peters and another man lead her out, leaving the Prisoner alone with the Colonel. They walk into the office, the Prisoner somewhat stiffly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Well, the return of the prodigal son.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... I don't see any fatted calf.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Did you expect one?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Colonel shuts the double doors. The Prisoner laughs slightly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: So tell me, who's she?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Nadia Rakowski.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Oh really? And what was her name before she left Peckham Rye to train for the Bolshoi Ballet?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You haven't changed, have you? She told me she was an Estonian. In the Village...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: The village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... she was known as Number 8. Don't you know about the Village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: I'm here to ask the questions, old boy!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner smiles grimly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's what Number 2 used to say.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Number 2?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Chairman of the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: What village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh yes, I forgot, you don't know, do you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">His voice becomes angry and he starts pacing the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: The Village... is a place where people turn up, people who have resigned from a certain sort of job, have defected or have been extracted. The specialized knowledge in their heads is of great value to one side or the other. Are you sure you haven't got a Village here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Colonel starts to stroke his moustache.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Where's this Village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Lithuania. On the Baltic. Thirty miles from the Polish border.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: How did you find out?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner lowers himself painfully into a chair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Nadia told me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: How did she know?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: She used to work for their government. She came across a secret file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: On how to catch a spy in six lessons?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I risked my life and hers to come back here, home, because I thought it was different. It is, isn't it, ISN'T IT DIFFERENT?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: ... My dear chap, I do apologize. You've had a long journey, you must be exhausted. Now... I expect you could do with a decent drink. Scotch?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He pours one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Twenty-four work units.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's how much it cost in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Ah yes, the Village...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Surely you know about it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: All I know, old boy, is that you resigned from a post of the highest possible secrecy in this country, refused to give your reasons, and then promptly vanished.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I was kidnapped.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Oh really? How dramatic! And then, after a gap of months, we suddenly receive a suitably coded message that you're coming back -- from the other side of the Iron Curtain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You think I've gone over.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: And come back here to carry on the good work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: "No" he says! No -- "Nyet"! "Nyet"! What sort of imbeciles do you think we are?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben starts to chime the hour. The Colonel hands the Prisoner his drink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Thanks... What do you want me to do?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Quite a lot of things. But let's start at square one though, shall we? First, why did you resign?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It was a matter of conscience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Oh listen, sonny boy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner stands up and crosses the room. Big Ben chimes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Do you think you're safe in London? If they thought it worth kidnapping you...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben chimes again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: ... it's worth killing you. I doubt if you'll be alive...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben chimes a third time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: ... twenty-four hours after you leave this building... unless you get protection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben chimes again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Do you want it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: For the girl as well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: If you'd come across with the goodies, yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben chimes a fifth time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Political asylum guaranteed for the girl.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Well, that depends---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It depends nothing! It's guaranteed!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben chimes again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: All right! So long as you keep your part of the bargain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben chimes a seventh time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Right...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner looks at his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Right, question one: why did you resign?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Big Ben chimes a final time. The Prisoner crosses the room to lean on the desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I resigned... because... for a very long time I... just a minute... it's eight o'clock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: That's right. The night is young, and there are many questions. First, why did you resign?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner crosses back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Big Ben has just struck eight. My watch says eight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: So?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I was given this watch by a man in Poland. I particularly wanted it to check the time, to make sure that the trip... tallied with the journey to London.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He takes the watch off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Which it presumably did?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes, of course. Would you like to explain to me how a man in Poland came to have a watch showing English time...when there's one hour's difference?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He grabs the Colonel by the waistcoat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colonel: Maybe he was slow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'll bet he was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He finds a wire on the floor by the desk and tugs it loose. Nothing happens. In a rage, he looks in a cabinet, and then tries turning off a mains switch on the wall. The noise of the London traffic stops abruptly. Throwing open a cupboard by the mains switch, the Prisoner discovers a tape recorder on a shelf. He turns the switch back on, and the tape starts simulating the traffic again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Without a word he wanders past the Colonel, out of the room and into a blue-carpeted corridor. London traffic can still be heard. The corridor ends in a large set of double doors. He opens one and hears brass-band music. He opens the other and steps back into the Village. Hands in pockets, he walks off along the path.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 comes out of a building ahead of him... along with Fotheringay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Well done, Fotheringay. Well, you'd better get back to London before any embarrassing questions are asked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Fotheringay: What's my next assignment?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: The Colonel will give you your orders when he returns.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8 emerges from the doorway behind them. The Prisoner approaches the group, staring down at his feet. He stops, looks up, and makes the "Be seeing you" gesture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He walks on. The loudspeakers burst into life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: Good evening citizens! Your local council wishes to announce another exciting competition...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Meeting a couple on his route, the Prisoner be-seeings them emotionlessly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Speaker: ... the subject this time, seascapes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner has reached his cottage. Looking back over his shoulder, he clicks his fingers and the door opens. He enters, and the door shuts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is walking round the Control Room with Number 8. She is staring at her feet; he is speaking into his dictaphone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: File number 6, section 42, subsection 1, paragraph 1: "Back to the beginning"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: You were right about him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She walks up the stairs, leaving him at floor level.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I told you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 8: Don't worry. It was a good idea and you did your best. I'll stress it in my report.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prison bars slam shut on the Prisoner's face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Next episode: A, B and C</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Guest Stars:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Leo McKern as Number 2</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Nadia Gray as Nadia [Number 8]</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Finlay Currie as the General</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Richard Wattis as Fotheringay</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">with</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Angelo Muscat as the Butler</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Kevin Stoney as Colonel J.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Christopher Benjamin as Number 2's Assistant [Manager]</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">David Arlen as Karel</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Peter Swanwick as the Supervisor</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">and</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Hilda Barry as Number 38</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Jack Le-White as the First Judge</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">John Maxim as the Second Judge</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucy Griffiths as the Third Judge</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Episode written by Vincent Tilsley and Don Chaffey</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Executive Producer: Patrick McGoohan</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Director: Don Chaffey</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Production Manager: Bernard Williams</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Director of Photography: Brendan J. Stafford B.S.C.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Art Director: Jack Shampan</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Camera Operator: Jack Lowin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Editor: Spencer Reeve</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Theme by Ron Grainer</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Cameraman (2nd Unit): Robert Monks</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Assistant Director: Gino Marotta</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sound Editor: Wilfred Thompson</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sound Recordist: John Bramall</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Music Editor: Bob Dearberg</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Casting Director: Rose Tobias-Shaw</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Continuity: Doris Martin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Set Dresser: Kenneth Bridgeman</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Make-Up: Eddie Knight</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Hairdressing: Pat McDermot</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Wardrobe: Masada Wilmot</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Made on Location</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Borehamwood, England</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">An ITC Production</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Incorporated Television Company Limited MCMLXVII</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">by Everyman Films Limited</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"></span><br /><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-not-number-i-am-free-man.html"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">"I am not a number, I am a free man!"</span></a>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-77955688043379801382009-01-15T16:41:00.000-08:002009-01-15T16:43:58.465-08:00"The Prisoner"--Episode Three<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial; font-style: italic;">The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Episode Three</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">"A, B and C</span>"<br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The man whom we will call "the Prisoner" resigns and is gassed exactly as before. He wakes up in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The following conversation accompanies a similar miscellany of images.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: In the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What do you want?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Information.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Whose side are you on?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information... Information...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You won't get it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: By hook or by crook... we will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">This Number 2 is a youngish chap with a moustache and glasses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: The new Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who is Number 1?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: You are Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is another morning in the Village. Number 2 is pacing round his circular office. A huge red L-shaped phone on the desk suddenly emits a loud repeated beeping noise. Number 2 turns, startled, and approaches worriedly. He picks up the phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Number 2 here... Er, yes sir, I am doing my best -- he's very difficult... I know it's important, sir---... He's no ordinary person, sir, but if I had a free hand---... I know, sir, yes... I know I'm not indispensable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He puts the phone down and slowly pours himself a glass of milk from a jug on the desk. He drinks, and recovers some dignity. He picks up a smaller, yellow phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Get me Number 14... Number 14? The experiment must come forward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He drinks another mouthful of milk. The voice of Number 14, a woman, is heard at the other end of the line.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Impossible! I need all of a week.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I haven't got a week.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He is about to take yet another gulp, but Number 14's next words stop him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I haven't even finished testing it on animals, let alone people.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Then now's your chance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: When?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Tonight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">There is a sudden thunderclap, and a fork of lightning illuminates the night sky. A metal door slides open at the end of a corridor, revealing two men and a trolley, lit up by further lightning flashes. The men are in oilskins, soaking wet. Number 14 is waiting for them at the far end of the corridor. She wears a white lab coat and speaks authoritatively.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Stop! Don't bring that wet in here! Take your macs and boots off!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The men comply as the thunderstorm continues. They then wheel the trolley down the sloping corridor and into a large laboratory full of strange equipment. Number 2 stands at the back of the room, watching as the men take the coverings off the trolley. Underneath is the blanketed form of the Prisoner; he is in a deep sleep, apparently induced by a circlet on his forehead. The men lift the Prisoner onto a table that Number 14 has prepared, and then exit with the trolley.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: This brainchild of yours had better work -- for your sake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 clamps a cable to the Prisoner's right wrist, and attaches an electrode to his right temple.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: If this man is damaged, I shall hold you responsible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: You know I haven't had a chance to prove the drug.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Just get it right, or I'll see that it's proved on you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 follows a cable back from the Prisoner to a device resembling an oscilloscope. She turns it on; it emits a warbling whine. Number 2 comes and looks at its screen, where vertical bars are flickering across from left to right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: What's all that about?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Energy from his brain. Thoughts, like sound waves, converted into electrical impulses, and finally...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She turns to a device on a trolley and adjusts its dials and switches. A large screen in front of them, above the Prisoner's unconscious form, shows a loop of the Prisoner resigning (as in the title sequence).</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: ... into pictures.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 watches the images.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Extraordinary... How very single-minded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: He's not conventional.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I sometimes think he's not human.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: It's an anguish pattern.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She moves forward to the Prisoner, and to a small box containing three syringes -- labelled 1, 2 and 3 -- full of a red liquid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: So this is your wonder-drug?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Yes. Three doses -- and that's the absolute limit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Three's dangerous enough. Four would kill him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 wanders away and starts examining a file while she prepares to inject the Prisoner with the contents of the first syringe. The Prisoner opens his eyes and looks at her, holding the syringe. What he is seeing appears on the large screen. She gently shuts his eyes by passing her hand over his face. She then injects him with the drug.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: His mind is now yours. What do you want from it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 steps forward again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Why he resigned. I believe that he was going to sell out. I want to know what he had to sell, and to whom he was going to sell it. We've researched and computed his whole life, and it boils down to three people...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He walks back to a table on which stand three box-files, labelled "a", "b" and "c" in the Village typeface. He taps them in turn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: A... B... and C. He must meet each one of them. We shall then know what would have happened if we had not got to him first.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He picks up a small reel of tape from the table and walks back to Number 14.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Where do you want them to meet?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Paris. They have one thing in common. They all attended Madame Engadine's celebrated parties. Here's some film of the most recent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He gives her the tape. She walks over to another machine and sticks the tape onto one of three upright capstans. She presses some buttons, and on a small monitor screen nearby there appears an image of couples in evening dress strolling in an elegant garden.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Ah! Nothing like a good party. I'm sure he'll welcome the change of environment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Go on, feed it into him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She looks hesitantly at Number 2, but then proceeds to adjust the setting on the oscilloscope and connect another cable from it to the Prisoner's left wrist and temple. She turns away. The Prisoner emits a sudden grunt of pain. Number 14 turns back and hurriedly checks his heartbeat with a stethoscope.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Is he all right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: So far.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She walks back to the device on the trolley. Still hesitating, she turns up the setting on its main dial.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: The moment of truth...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">An image of the Prisoner in black tie fades into view on the large screen. Number 2 and Number 14 look at each other, pleased. Gradually the garden scene materializes behind him. He turns round and walks out into his dream, as his real-world body continues to lie unconscious in front of the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A waltz is being played at the party. As the Prisoner journeys through the garden, he greets several acquaintances with a hearty "Good evening!". He ascends a flight of stone steps and enters the house. He greets a few more people, then suddenly turns round as an elegant French lady in a red and white dress enters. A couple of lackeys close a pair of doors behind her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Engadine!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Darling!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Aha! How are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He kisses her cheek.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: I am so happy you are here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You look as wonderful as ever.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: I should -- what it cost! Oh, aïe aïe aïe! Uh-uh, you look tired, darling. Things are bad?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner looks suspicious for a second, then switches the charm back on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No, not now. I'm starting a holiday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oh! The English holiday? Big boots and fishing sticks?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not quite like that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Where then?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Somewhere different, somewhere quiet, where I can think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oh, there is no quiet anywhere!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner laughs. She catches sight of someone over his shoulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Hello!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner turns politely but briefly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Hello.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Sorry darling. I'll come back soon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She starts to move off into the crowd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Of course, yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Uh-uh, and remember -- you're mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Be horrible to other women.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I promise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oh, thank you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She makes a kissing noise with her lips, and departs to mingle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: See you anon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the laboratory, Number 2 opens box file "a". It contains a reel of tape and a photograph of a dark-haired man with a moustache.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I think it's time we introduced A.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He hands the tape to Number 14. She attaches it to the capstan machine, and a colour image of A appears on the monitor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: His face looks vaguely familiar. What's his real name?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I'm surprised you don't remember him. He made world news a few years ago.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 makes further adjustments to the controls, and A appears in black tie behind the Prisoner at the party. The Prisoner concludes a conversation ("... I'll be immediately back") and turns round the long way to face A -- who hands him a drink. A holds a drink of his own and a cigarette.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'm surprised.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: Not unpleasantly, I trust.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I knew you came to these parties.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: And wondered why we never had met? She's a tactful lady -- she's kept us apart, I think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Till tonight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: Perhaps tonight is spécial...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... I feel it to the special core.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They smile politely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: To us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: As we are -- or as we were?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Oh, I remember him. He defected about six years ago.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A keeps his eyes on the Prisoner, while the Prisoner's eyes roam around the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: It's been a long time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not long enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: We used to be friends.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Once.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: With a lot in common.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: That's in the past.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: Then let us think of the future. We're still the same people.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Working for different sides.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: Sides don't matter. Only success.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: In that case we should have a great deal in common.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: We do the same jobs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: For different reasons, yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A laughs slightly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: I see you still overrate absolute truth. Whatever way you look at it, we both want to conquer the world. I hope you're, er, happy in your new life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He sips his drink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: New life?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: Well, news of old friends travels quickly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: In a few hours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: To you and to me, news is like air. So we breathe it deeply, we draw it from far and wide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner whispers his next two utterances.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: If it's interesting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: What are you going to do with your freedom?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Go fishing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Again, A laughs slightly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: ... Perhaps you're fishing now. What's your price?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: What am I selling?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Both A and the Prisoner whisper their next exchange.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: I'm anxious to find out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Madame's wine... it's always... excellent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He samples the wine's aroma.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: If you haven't got a price, you must have a reason.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner whispers patronisingly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: They're not always the same thing. Excuse me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He walks off into the crowd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the lab, Number 2 gestures wildly to Number 14.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: He's going, and we haven't found out a thing -- he must not go!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: He's only doing what he would have done. I can only create the situation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Get him back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: It's his dream -- it must take its course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the screen, A has wandered off, and the Prisoner is about to leave. A lackey helps him into his grey overcoat, and he and another open the door for him. A stands there in a black coat, clearly barring the way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You never could take a hint.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: I don't want a hint. I want you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He motions to the lackeys, his henchmen, who escort the Prisoner out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: I'm saving myself money.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner is travelling in the back of a car, sitting between A and one of his men.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Paris hasn't changed much, has it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A tries to suppress a smile.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Where are they going?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I don't know. But it's what would have happened. That's what you wanted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The car stops in front of a country house at the end of a long driveway. The three back-seat travellers get out, A's henchman holding a revolver and the Prisoner adjusting his cuffs. The driver of the car vanishes into the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A: Well, you're in my country now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, diplomatic immunity, ha! I like travel. It broadens the, um... MIND!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He suddenly punches A who staggers backwards. The Prisoner turns to A's henchman.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You there, excuse me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The henchman tosses his revolver and catches it in a different grip.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, that's wonderful...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The henchman tries to hit the Prisoner in the face with the butt of the revolver, but the Prisoner catches the man's arm, twists him round and punches him in the face. But a punch from A sends him reeling over the car's bonnet. He recovers quickly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Let us stay... on different sides... please---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A lunges for him again, but the Prisoner steps to one side, hurling A over the bonnet. The henchman is getting to his feet again, but the Prisoner easily knocks him unconscious. The Prisoner straightens his bow tie.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the laboratory, Number 2 looks resigned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: At least I know it wasn't A he was selling out to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 walks over and starts to switch the machine off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No. Let's try the second dose. Let's get on to B.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: He must rest first.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She continues switching things off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: How long?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Twenty-four hours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: It's a very dangerous drug. He must have time to readjust.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 concedes, but reluctantly. He stares warily at a huge red phone, identical to the one in his own office.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It is the next morning and Number 6 is getting up. As he stands, he winces at a pain in his back. He puts on his dressing gown and wanders out of his bedroom, rubbing his head as if it is sore. On some instinct, he opens his front door: a woman in a brightly coloured cape is buying flowers from another woman at a stall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Stallholder: I meet everybody. I know everything: who is sick, who is getting better.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Woman: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She turns round and briefly makes eye contact with the Prisoner before walking away. It is Number 14. He stands deep in thought for a few seconds, then suddenly looks at his wrist. It bears an injection scar...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Once dressed, the Prisoner seeks her out and finds her reading the Tally Ho newspaper at a parasolled table on one of the Village's lawns. He sits down beside her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: My handbook on social etiquette doesn't deal with this. How does one talk to someone that one has met in a dream?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She lowers the newspaper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Look, er, Number...?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: 6. I'm usually a social animal, but not now. Another time?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She turns back to her paper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Last week, Number 14 was an old lady in a wheelchair. You're new here, and you're one of them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She folds the paper up and picks up her flowers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Your nonsense bores me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, my mistake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Oh, don't worry. We all happen to make mistakes. Sometimes we have to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They depart in different directions. He glances up at the Green Dome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2, seated in his spherical chair, answers a phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes?... Oh really? Send him in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He smiles. A moment later, the metal doors to his office slide open, revealing the Prisoner -- escorted by the little butler, who bows as the Prisoner steps through.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Come in, my dear fellow. Come and sit down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner strolls down towards Number 2's desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'm not tired. I slept well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Good! We don't seem to have seen a lot of each other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I haven't seen very much of you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I don't spend all my time spying.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Don't you? Your predecessors did.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Hm-hm, I have other things to do... Now all this nonsense about why you resigned: if people can't chuck up a job, things have come to a pretty pass. Do sit down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'm still not tired.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: In that case, perhaps you'd pour me out some milk. I didn't have a very good night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He carefully adjusts his cuff, then pours a glass of milk from the jug.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: A pleasure. Your milk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He hands the glass to Number 2, revealing the scar on the inside of his wrist. Number 2 ignores it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Thank you. Milk is the perfect food. It creates good temper. Would you like some?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: My temper's fine. Anyone who had nothing to hide would ask...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He holds up his wrist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... where I got it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Where did you get it, Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: In my sleep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Oh, you must have been restless. Perhaps you need a checkup.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I have a favourite doctor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Number 14.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">And on that bombshell, he exits. Number 2 slowly stands up and starts to pace. Almost immediately, the huge red phone begins to beep. Warily, Number 2 approaches it and answers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Sir?... Yes sir, within two days, you have my word... Yes sir, I realize my future's at stake. Two days, I guarantee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Slowly, he puts the phone down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">That night, a maid makes the Prisoner a hot drink and places it by his bed. As she leaves, the Prisoner comes out of the bathroom.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Maid: 'Night, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Goodnight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner sits on his bed, stirs the drink and then takes a sip. Immediately feeling strange, he starts to put the cup down but succeeds only in spilling it and collapsing onto the floor...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the laboratory, Number 14's hand reaches for the second syringe...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">At the dream party, the Prisoner steps outside and sits on a low wall. He looks around suspiciously. Engadine approaches from another door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Where have you been, darling?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner jumps up, surprised and genuinely puzzled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Been?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oh, ho-ho! Men always evade questions! All my husbands did.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Ah.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Where is my other handsome guest?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner looks over his shoulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Your old friend. Ah, you were talking to him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, he's... he's gone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Ah, just like that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: How very rude. Without saying goodbye? Ho-ho! Anyway I never did like that man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Ah!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A lackey comes out of the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lackey: Madame?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oui?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lackey: Excusez-moi.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oui, je viens, merci.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She turns back to the Prisoner as she goes inside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: I'll see you later, darling?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes. Goodbye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the laboratory, the real-world Prisoner is once again lying motionless, wired up to the machine. Number 2 closes a file he's been reading and hands another reel of tape to Number 14.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Time for B.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She fixes the tape to the capstan and presses a button. The image of a young aristocratic-looking brunette appears on the monitor screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: She even looks like a spy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: She's a very good one from a long line of spies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 reactivates the main screen. The Prisoner is sitting alone at a table outside the party.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: He's full of the party spirit, isn't he?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Nothing else seems to be happening.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Where is she?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I don't know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: She should be there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I think he's resisting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Don't you know?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: It may take longer for the drug to work this time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She crosses over to check on the Prisoner. On the screen, the Prisoner gets up from his table and starts to walk about. Number 2 steps up for a closer look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Wait a minute, he's seen someone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner has seen a young waitress hurrying across the courtyard. Number 2 laughs embarassedly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No. No, that's certainly not B.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I expect she's there somewhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I very much hope so.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The waitress is carrying a note. She hurries up the steps towards the Prisoner, but Engadine suddenly emerges from the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Ah, Lucette, I was looking for you. What have you been up to?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucette: Nothing, madame. I was helping Louis to collect the glasses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Ah...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She sees the note.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: What is that, Lucette?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucette: A note, madame. A lady, she gave it to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine reaches for it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucette: No, madame. It's for...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She indicates the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Thank you, Lucette.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine takes the note and hands it to the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: It's for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh? Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: A woman's hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Mm-hm?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: I'm jealous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner extracts a letter-opener from his pocket and opens the note.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: What does she want?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I dare not tell you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He lets her see the note instead. The resulting conversation is sarcastic.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: To meet her in the arbour. Oh, ha-ha! My guest at my party... in the arbour!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: She's an old friend.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oh, there is no name!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Old friends don't need names.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Then, you prefer her to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes. Maybe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: All right, all right, I shall go. The party's finished, finished!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She strides away, but then turns with a broad smile.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Enjoy yourself!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner's face gives nothing away. He wanders down the steps and crosses the courtyard, pocketing the note as he goes. Once in the arbour, he peers cautiously down various pathways before hearing a champagne cork pop. B is seated at a table, pouring herself a glass. Numbers 2 and 14 look on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'd recognize that signal anywhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Let's get distressed together.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: There we are.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner approaches, and B pours him a glass too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You are still the most intriguing spy... I have ever met.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: It's taken a lot of thought and experience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Last I remember, you were hiking across the mountains to, er, Switzerland?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: I got sore feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You should have stayed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner comes round to her side of the table, and she hands him his glass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: I have no friends there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Your enemy is a very bad loser. He was here earlier. Does he know you're back?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: His chums are all over the place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: He and I had a little ride together. I left him in a most unforgiving mood. He may return.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Oh, being killed is an occupational hazard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Like a sitting duck?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Don't worry. Tonight's a party.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Soft music starts up. The Prisoner smiles and takes B's hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You used to be... a very good dancer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: I still am.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Mm-hm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: This side...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">They begin a complicated slow dance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Where are you going for your holiday?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner laughs out loud.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Ah, so you've heard! I, er... I don't know yet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: A long one?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Oh, a very long one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I need time to think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Ha! I can't bear to think. I can't bear to be alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Can't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: That's why I like parties. I drown myself in chatter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Tonight there is no need for that. Just... dance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the laboratory, the Prisoner is grunting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: He's far too relaxed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: He may be there, but he's not here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The bars on the oscilloscope are in rapid motion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: With this kind of resistance he'll burn up the drug in no time. We haven't got long.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Then you'd better do something about it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She wanders over to look at the main screen, where the Prisoner and B continue their dance. She absent-mindedly holds the earpieces of her stethoscope to her mouth as she paces and ponders.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: The only way to manipulate his dreams is to get into them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Is that possible?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I was wondering...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: ... if I could put words into her mouth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Go on. How?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: We've fed him with pictures... Why can't we feed him with sound?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: But the voice... Would he hear yours or hers?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: That's the danger. If he hears my voice and recognizes it, the shock'll wake him, he'll see everything... we'll have failed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: We must make the most of this chance or we'll never know if it was B.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: This is the worst time to try anything. Just look at the state he's in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Where's your scientific enthusiasm?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Giving in, she picks up a phone and plugs it into the dream machine. Then she hesitates.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: What shall I say?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Anything. Try it... Go on!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Shall we have some more?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Shall we have some more?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... More?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Champagne.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Champagne.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not yet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Now get to the point. You said we hadn't long.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I wonder if they will kill me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: I wonder if they will kill me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I thought you didn't care.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I do.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: I do.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'll help you, you know that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: They are here to kill me. They want me to make a deal with you. They want to know why you've resigned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner's expression freezes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Go on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: If you'd just talk about it, they'd let me off the hook.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: If you'd just talk about it, they'd let me off the hook... Are you shocked?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'm surprised. I can't believe it's you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: I'm such a mess. I need something to swap. Will you meet them? They're here now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Are you asking this?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Don't hate me. We all make mistakes. Sometimes we have to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Have you the feeling that you're being manipulated?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Manipulated?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: WHO ARE YOU?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: They're here!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A thug in black tie has appeared from a pathway.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: If you don't tell them, they'll kill me!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You are not who you pretend to be. Excuse me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He turns to leave, but the thug blocks his way. Another thug appears from a path to the Prisoner's right, but the Prisoner throws him to the ground. He then ducks and the first thug falls over him. A punch to the second thug's face sends him sprawling into a hedge; the Prisoner then ducks a blow from the first thug, and concludes by punching him to the ground too. Unfortunately a third thug has appeared -- with a gun, which he points at B's head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Tell him! He'll kill me!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... I don't believe in you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: He'll kill me!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How long has your husband been dead?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She looks blank. So does Number 14.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Four years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Four years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Four years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How old is your son now?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 leafs through the file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Son?... Husband, yes... But there's no son.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Help me, please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Help me, please!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: WHAT IS YOUR SON'S NAME? That's an easier question.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She says nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Thought you couldn't answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He turns and walks briskly away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">B: Come back! Don't leave me! Come back! I can explain everything! PLEASE!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 gives up. Number 2 is about to hurl the file to the floor, but he stops when he once again catches sight of the big red phone...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The next morning, the Prisoner wakes up to the sight of an unspilled cup on his bedside table. He shuts his eyes, but it's still there when he opens them. He grabs his wrist: it now bears a second scar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Later on, when Number 14 in her multicoloured cape emerges from her house, the Prisoner is watching. He follows her through the Village into increasingly thick undergrowth. She looks back a couple of times, but he evades detection. A metal door grates open; the Prisoner races forward, but by the time he gets there the door has sealed itself shut again. Unable to move it, he starts to climb up the surrounding rockface.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 enters the laboratory as the Prisoner reaches the top of the rockface and discovers the entrance to a ventilation shaft. He climbs down the shaft while Number 14 makes adjustments to the laboratory equipment. The shaft brings him to a grille in the corridor outside the laboratory. He is about to push the grille off the wall when Number 14 passes through on her way out; he ducks back to avoid being seen. Once all is clear, he kicks the grille away, emerges and carefully replaces the grille.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He steps through into the laboratory, wary of the doors that close automatically behind him. He explores, following a cable from the trolley to the various bits of the dream machine. He flicks a switch, and the sights and sounds of Engadine's party appear on the monitor. Gradually he starts to piece everything together.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">His eye is caught by the three files "a", "b" and "c" He grabs file "c", but it contains only a sheet of paper. File "b" contains a picture of B and a reel of tape. He attaches the tape to the capstan machine, but nothing changes on the monitor. Learning from this, he looks briefly into file "a" and finds a photo of A and another tape. He takes care to replace the files exactly as he found them, and then turns off the monitor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He finds the third syringe, now alone in its box, and looks once again at the marks on his wrist. Glancing about to check there are no hidden observers, he empties the syringe into his handkerchief and refills it from a nearby jug of water. He then puts everything back as he found it and leaves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Later in the day, the little butler brings Number 2 a fresh jug of milk as his spherical chair rises swiftly out of the floor. Number 2 is in his dressing gown, and his hair is dishevelled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I couldn't sleep. What's that Number 6 doing?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He stands up, flicks a switch and walks over to the big screen on the wall, which shows the Prisoner wandering around the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Ah, he's always walking! Irritating man!... DOESN'T HE EVER GET TIRED?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the screen, the Prisoner turns to the camera that he knows is there, makes the "Be seeing you" gesture and indeed says "Be seeing you".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: NO! I'll be seeing you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">That evening, the Prisoner emerges from his bathroom to find the usual hot drink waiting for him. He stirs it and wanders into his kitchen with it, where he pours it down the sink. He fills a glass with tap water, checks it's clear, and sips it contentedly. Finally he turns back to his bedroom, and totters around for a few seconds before falling flat on his back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the laboratory, Number 14 in her lab coat prepares to inject the Prisoner with the contents of the third syringe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 activates the dream machine while Number 14 adjusts the oscilloscope. But the image of the party that appears on the main screen is unbalanced, wobbling about between the guests as though inebriated. The music is also more upbeat and jangly than usual.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: What's happened? What's gone wrong?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 comes over and alters the settings on the dream machine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: The strength's too much for him. I'm going to stop it!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 holds her back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No! This is our last chance. It's now or never.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: On your head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I'll worry about that later.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner appears at the party, which continues to pitch and yaw. Smiling strangely, he walks behind a woman who looks like B.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Haven't they killed you yet?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The woman turns round. It is not B at all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Sorry. Must have been thinking of someone else...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He wanders off into the milling crowd. Engadine approaches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: It is so wild, darling. It will end in tears.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: All the best parties do.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oh, it's terrible! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner makes a strange sprinkling gesture with his right hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Terrible? It's dreamy! THIS IS A DREAMY PARTY!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Feeling disoriented, he puts his fingers to his temples and staggers over to a mirror that hangs extremely crookedly on the wall. Using all his strength, he starts to straighten it. From the mirror's point of view, it is the party that straightens up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: We'll have to hurry. Get me C's picture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: There isn't one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He takes the sheet of paper from file "c".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: This is all we have on him: known to be French, known to have attended Engadine's parties, probably disguised; known to have been in contact with Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: How do you expect me to bring them together if there's no picture?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: It's a process of elimination. C's the only one left. He'll find him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: Well... he'll have to hurry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">At the party, Engadine is tipsy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Champagne? We all need more champagne!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She leads him over to a blonde lady.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Watch him for me, will you darling? He's the last sane man in the world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She moves away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Blonde: I like sane men. Are you in business?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Blonde: You're young to retire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Age is relative.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Blonde: Meaning you're free?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... Possibly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Blonde: I know something, and the pay is very good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I'm free.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She removes one of her diamond earrings and hands it to the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Blonde: Number six. I'm sure it's your lucky number.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Amused, the Prisoner takes the earring to the roulette table and places it on the six.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Croupier: Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The blonde lady looks on as the croupier spins the wheel, then wanders away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Croupier: Six, noir, pair et manque.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner looks around, but the blonde is nowhere to be seen. The croupier puts down a large key and holds up the diamond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Croupier: Pour le service, monsieur.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A little perplexed, the Prisoner takes the key and walks away from the gaming table, gently tapping the key. A woman's hand suddenly holds out an identical key.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 is astonished.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: It can't be her! She can't be C...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">It's Engadine herself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: It takes you a long time to sell yourself, darling.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It took a lot of thought.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Come on. This way...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: She's fooled us for years! But not any longer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: You'll be bringing her to the Village?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sedately Engadine leads the Prisoner outside, through a line of people doing the conga.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: You are sure? No change of mind?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No change of mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: And no doubt?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not any more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: It's a one-way journey. You have a veil?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes, these... papers from London.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He takes some papers out of his pocket and briefly shows them to her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: If you want to go back, you can. Back to the party, back to your life. But once through this door, you can never return.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He holds up his key. She holds up hers. They approach the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: This is what I've been waiting for...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As they insert their keys, the image on the screen begins to sway and spin. The Prisoner grunts and gasps; Number 14 adjusts his electrodes, but his head suddenly lolls. The image vanishes from the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: It's gone dead. What's happened?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: He's collapsed!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 gives him oxygen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: That's it. We've pushed him as far as we dare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: No, I must have that dream back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: You know who C is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Yes, but I still don't know what he was selling.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: And if it kills him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: ... I shall have to take that risk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: ... I'll try a hard stimulant. Hold this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 takes over with the oxygen mask.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine and the Prisoner swim into view, driving down the Champs Élysées.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Where are you taking me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: To the summit. To hand over your papers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not to you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Even I work for someone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2's jaw drops and he speaks in an awed whisper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Someone else?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Who?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: I've never seen him. No one has ever seen him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: I thought you'd boiled it down to three.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: I had. I didn't know about this one. It's great!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: You'll have to call him D.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The car drives under a low arch and draws to a halt outside a remote mediaeval building.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: We're here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Are we?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: Oh yes! He likes impressive offices. Good luck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Aren't you coming?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: I must go back. I can't leave a party so long. People will talk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner gets out, then hesitates.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: How will I know him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Engadine: He will know you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">She reverses under the arch, as the Prisoner crosses the courtyard and ascends the steps to a huge pair of Gothic doors.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2's eyes are glued to the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">As the Prisoner opens the doors, the sound of an express train fills the air. On the other side it is night-time in a deserted echoing town square. The Prisoner wanders out, as D's slightly French accent booms from nowhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: I am glad you could come.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: WHERE ARE YOU?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: It doesn't matter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I WANT TO SEE YOU. I'VE BEEN DYING TO SEE YOU.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: It won't make any difference.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: PEOPLE WHO HIDE ARE AFRAID.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">A church bell chimes as a shadowy figure in hat and red-lined cloak emerges from the shadows at the far end of the square. The man's face is masked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 continues to watch avidly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I didn't know you existed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: It is often the case with really important people. Anonymity is the best disguise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: You are afraid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D holds out his hand. Simultaneously, the Prisoner reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: This is very important to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: It is only a commodity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No. It's my future.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: You belong to me now. You were told there was no return.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Not until I know who you are. I've never liked secrets.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2 can barely contain his eagerness. He scurries up to the big screen for the closest possible look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Nor have I. I want to see him!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: No one will ever see me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I will. I want to know who I'm selling out to. We must all know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: All? Aren't you alone?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: No... But you are.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He advances towards D.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: Violence will do you no good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: It relieves the feelings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He reaches for D's mask, but D pushes the Prisoner's hands apart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">D: Does it matter?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: ... It does to them. We mustn't disappoint them, the people who are watching.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He grabs D's hat, turns him so his back is to us and unmasks him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">In the laboratory, Number 2's eyes are practically popping out of his head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: I knew of course. Now... show them!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He spins D round. The masked man is Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14 gasps; Number 2's face registers pure shock. He staggers away from his own face on the screen. The Prisoner walks back up the square as the doors creak shut in front of him. He pushes them open again to reveal a view of the Village: he is even wearing his white-trimmed Number 6 jacket once more. He turns back to look straight at the watchers in the laboratory, before walking on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: He knew all the time. He was playing with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Your drug failed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: No. He... succeeded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">On the screen, the Prisoner has walked through the Village and reached the metal door in the rockface. It opens for him and he walks down the corridor. Startled, both Number 2 and Number 14 look round at the real door to their laboratory as the Prisoner on the screen enters a copy of it that also contains them. The real door doesn't move.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: (On the screen) I owe you an apology.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: An apology?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: Yes. I forgot to give you this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He walks into the room and hands the all-important envelope to Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: (On the screen) A bargain's a bargain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">The real Number 2 is furious.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2: Open it, you fool! Open it! I must see what's in it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 2's dream counterpart unseals the envelope and takes out a selection of travel brochures.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Number 14: He was going on holiday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prisoner: (On the screen) I wasn't selling out. That wasn't the reason I resigned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">He lies down on the table, thereby mirroring his real-world body. The image on the screen fades to black, and is then replaced by the original dream loop of the Prisoner resigning. Number 14 finally detaches the Prisoner from the machine, as the huge red phone starts beeping noisily. Number 2 stares at it in horror...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Prison bars slam shut on the Prisoner's face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Next episode: Free For All</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Guest Stars:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Katherine Kath as Engadine</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sheila Allen as Number 14</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Colin Gordon as Number 2</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Peter Bowles as A</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">with</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Angelo Muscat as the Butler</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Georgina Cookson as the Blonde Lady</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Annette Carrell as B</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Lucille Soong as the Flower Girl</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">and</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Bettine Le Beau as the Maid at the Party (Lucette)</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Terry Yorke and Peter Brayham as the Thugs</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Bill Cummings as the Henchman</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Episode written by Anthony Skene</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Executive Producer: Patrick McGoohan</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Director: Pat Jackson</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Production Manager: Bernard Williams</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Director of Photography: Brendan J. Stafford B.S.C.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Art Director: Jack Shampan</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Camera Operator: Jack Lowin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Editor: Geoffrey Foot</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Theme by Ron Grainer</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Incidental Music by Albert Elms</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Assistant Director: Gino Marotta</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sound Editor: Peter Elliott</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Sound Recordist: John Bramall</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Music Editor: Eric Mival</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Casting Director: Rose Tobias-Shaw</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Continuity: Doris Martin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Set Dresser: Kenneth Bridgeman</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Make-Up: Eddie Knight</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Hairdressing: Pat McDermot</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Wardrobe: Masada Wilmot</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Made on Location</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Borehamwood, England</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">An ITC Production</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Incorporated Television Company Limited MCMLXVII</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">by Everyman Films Limited</span><br /><br /><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-not-number-i-am-free-man.html"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">"I am not a number, I am a free man!"</span></a>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-12206408421954370272009-01-15T16:38:00.000-08:002009-01-15T16:54:58.980-08:00"The Prisoner"--Episode Four<div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: arial;">The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">Episode Four</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">"Free For All"</span><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: left; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The man whom we will call "the Prisoner" resigns and is gassed exactly as before. He wakes up in the Village.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The following conversation accompanies a similar miscellany of images.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Where am I?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: In the Village.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: What do you want?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Information.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Whose side are you on?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information...Information...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: You won't get it.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: By hook or by crook... we will.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">This Number 2 is a affable-looking fellow in his fifties.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Who are you?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: The new Number 2.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Who is Number 1?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: You are Number 6.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">It is early morning in the Village, and the Prisoner's "6" phone is beeping noisily. The Prisoner emerges from his bathroom, pulls on his jacket and answers the phone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: What do you want?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Operator: Number 6?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I said, what do you want?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Operator: You are Number 6?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: That is the number of this place.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Operator: Call from Number 2.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 appears on the Prisoner's television screen, holding an L-shaped phone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Good morning, good morning. Any complaints?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Yes. I'd like to mind my own business.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: So do we. Do you fancy a chat?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: The mountain can come to Mahomet.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He slams the phone down and stomps off towards his kitchen. But his front door opens almost immediately and Number 2 walks in. He wears a Number 2 badge on his left lapel and a large Number 2 rosette on his right.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Mahomet?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Everest, I presume?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: I've never had a head for heights.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: How's Number 1?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: At the summit.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Play it according to Hoyle?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: All cards on the table, you may rely on that.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner laughs doubtfully. They proceed into his kitchen.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Um, whose move?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Yours only. Confide... and we concede.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He leans his shooting-stick against the wall and picks up two mugs.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Breakfast?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The front door opens again, and a young dark-haired maid enters with a breakfast tray.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Ah, Number 58! Allow me to introduce you to Number 6. Don't be shy, my dear.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She curtseys nervously and puts the tray on the worktop. Number 2 addresses the Prisoner again.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Keep up your strength. She may be a mere Number 58, but she used to work in records. She has a great variety of information, haven't you my dear? Animukat ta inen zabot, mm?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ona! Njav ta ist japuk zaborta.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Zabot, vi.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She curtseys again and leaves. Number 2 and the Prisoner sit down to breakfast; Number 2 serves.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Wonderful gift. Photographic memory, you know. She's done well. I don't think she'll be with us for long.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner puts some food in his mouth and smiles.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Nicely done.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: International cuisine, the best.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: French.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: International.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Toast.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He picks up the toast rack and offers it to Number 2. The radio bursts into life.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Radio: Good morning! Congratulations on yet another day. It will be fine and dry, some cloud perhaps, but dry. Enjoy your day.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Marmalade?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Thank you. What a piece of luck: we start our election campaign today.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner looks up, disbelieving.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Showery outlook is very depressing, don't you think?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Elections? In this place.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Of course. We make our choice every twelve months. Every citizen has a choice. Are you going to run?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Like blazes, the first chance I get.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: I meant, run for office.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Whose?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Mine, for instance.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: You have a delicate sense of humour.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Naturally. Humour is the very essence of a democratic society.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They both smile. Inspiring brass-band music suddenly blares out of the radio. They cross to the window, pausing only to glance at the television screen which shows the profiled head and shoulders of a man in silhouette.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">There's a large crowd of Villagers outside. In addition to their usual colourful umbrellas, they also have huge placards showing Number 2's face with the words "Vote No 2". As Number 2 appears on the Prisoner's balcony, they cheer, raising and lowering their umbrellas in time with the music. Number 2 waves in acknowledgment as they parade past, chanting "Number 2... Number 2..."<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Exactly, that's what's worrying me. Very bad for morale. Some of these good people don't seem to appreciate the value of free elections. They think it's a game.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Everyone votes for a dictator.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Not at all, just that their resistance is low. Frankly my dear fellow, you are just the sort of candidate we need.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner stares at him for a few seconds.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: What happens if I run against you? I might as well, while I'm waiting.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Delightful.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: What physically happens if I win?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: You're the boss.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Number 1's the boss.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Join me.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He steps back inside and stands in front of the television screen, still showing the silhouetted figure.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: If you win, Number 1 will no longer be a mystery to you, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'll introduce you properly, and we'll see how you feel after assessing the madding crowd.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They go out through the front door. Villagers line the streets, and as one they abruptly cease their chant. The Prisoner looks slightly unnerved.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A man starts beating a bass drum and marches in front of the Prisoner and Number 2, leading them to a taxi with a big "Vote No 2" placard. There is silence. Number 2 gestures for the Prisoner to step on board, then he himself gets in and stands at the front. Number 2 signals to the drummer and the parade begins again. Everyone cheers and accompanies the taxi through the streets of the Village. The taxi stops to let its passengers off at an archway, then continues on round the corner, taking the parade with it. At the tail of the parade marches the little butler with his huge black and white umbrella.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 motions for the Prisoner to pass through the archway, and follows him through. He finds himself on the pillared balcony overlooking the fountain square, in the company of a number of men clad sombrely in black. The Villagers pour into the square, still cheering for all they're worth. Number 2 raises a hand and silence falls instantly. He address the crowd through a megaphone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Good people of our community...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The butler holds up a large cuecard marked "ra ra ra". The crowd responds as the drummer beats time.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Crowd: Ra! Ra! Ra!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: There is recently a lack of opposition in the matter of free elections. This is not good for our community and reflects an acceptance of things as they are. We know what we must do. What must we do?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The butler holds up another cuecard, marked "progress progress progress".<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Crowd: Progress! Progress! Progress! Progress! Progress!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Exactly. We are however fortunate in having with us a recent recruit whose outlook is particularly militant and individualistic.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The crowd cheers.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Let us hope that he will not deny his duty to the community by refusing to take up the challenge. Good people, it is my pleasure to present to you the one and only Number 6!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The crowd cheers again. The Prisoner has his own megaphone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a person.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The crowd bursts out laughing.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: In some place, at some time, all of you held positions of a secret nature and had knowledge that was invaluable to an enemy.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">By now the Villagers' laughter has evaporated, leaving them standing like soulless waxworks.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Like me, you are here to have that knowledge protected... or extracted.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: That's the stuff to give 'em.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment and will die here like rotten cabbages.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Keep going, they love it.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: The rest of you have gone over to the side of our keepers. Which is which? How many of each? Who's standing beside you now? I intend to discover who are the prisoners and who the warders. I shall be running for office in this election.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 brings his megaphone back to his lips.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Good people! Let us applaud a citizen of character. May the better man win, and a big hand for Number 6!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Music strikes up and the crowd, suddenly reanimated, starts the parade once more. The Prisoner stares in astonishment at the "Vote No 6" placards that have appeared, depicting his own face.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">On the road behind the archway, Number 2 steps into his taxi. He puts the megaphone to his mouth to address the Prisoner who stands in the archway looking on.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Be seeing you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner is suddenly mobbed from behind by a huge crowd of people cheering and throwing confetti. It is total pandemonium. A "Vote No 6" taxi drives up and the Prisoner is jostled on board. The driver is an excited Number 58.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ditka pernaish gorovish! Tich!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They drive off.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Later, the Prisoner looks out from his balcony, sees Number 58 smiling inanely at him from the taxi, and hurries back inside. He phones Number 2, who again appears on the television screen.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Don't get het up, my dear fellow.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: She will not go away and she doesn't even speak English.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Precisely. Knowing your, shall we say, prejudices, I thought you'd rather not have one of the regulars. She's new here and quite delightfully charming, don't you think?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: What's the procedure?!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Now that's more like it. The, er, buggy transport with lady driver will be at your disposal for the election period, and anything else you may desire... within reason.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Next...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: You'll be expected to attend the dissolution of the outgoing council in half an hour's time in chambers at the Town Hall.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Thanks very much.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He goes outside to the taxi. He now wears a dark Number 6 rosette on his lapel.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Er...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Tika ti?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Yes, you will take me... take me to the... Town Hall.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Irej ta pozna!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: No, no, the Town Hall.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ah! Pozna!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: It's all right, thank you, I'll... I'll walk. It's all right.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He sets off down a flight of steps. She pats the passenger seat and drives off at frantic speed. On the other side of the gardens, he stops to consult the map of the Village on the Free Information board. Number 58 drives up alongside and gets out. The Prisoner pushes the button marked Town Hall. Something inside the board whirrs and goes ping.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Jota meluta?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Yes, that's it.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Mjesa, mjesa!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She jumps about excitedly, thinking for a moment. Then she rushes back to the map.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Dataj vni khalini.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She pushes the button labelled "6". Again, the map goes ping and she points at the depiction of the Prisoner's cottage.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Perosh nogdad! Hee hee!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She claps her hands and runs back to the taxi. She beckons him to join her, and he consents. As they drive off, a reporter and a photographer jump on board too, the photographer clinging to the bonnet.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: Congratulations.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Come again.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: Allow me to introduce myself. I am Number 113 and this is my photographic colleague...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Photographer: Smile!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: Number 113B.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 113B takes a photo.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: We, er, contribute to the local newspaper, the Tally Ho you know.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Drive on.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: This is red hot stuff, you know. Haven't had a candidate of your calibre for ages.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Congratulations.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: How are you going to handle your campaign?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: No comment.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 113 starts taking notes.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: "Intends to fight for freedom at all costs."<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Photographer: Smile!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He takes another picture.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: How about your internal policy?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: No comment.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: "Will tighten up on Village security."<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Photographer: Smile!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Another photo.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: How about your external policy?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: No comment.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: "Our exports will operate in every corner of the globe." How do you feel about life and death?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Mind your own business.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: "No comment."<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The taxi pulls up at the Town Hall. The Prisoner gets off, followed by the photographer.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Photographer: Thanks a lot. Be seeing you!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">And he takes one final photo. A loudspeaker mounted in an alcove high up on a nearby wall starts relaying the voice of Number 2.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Calling Number 6! Calling Number 6!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A newspaper salesman pitches in.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Salesman: Read all about it! Read all about it! Get your election edition now!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner turns in puzzlement to see the reporter and photographer running off down the road. The photographer waves at him madly.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Salesman: Read all about it! Get your election edition now!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The salesman stores his newspapers in the form of rolls of tear-off sheets on a device resembling a mangle. The upper roll advertizes the paper's content in large letters: "opinion poll, latest, freedom, security". The salesman tears off a copy of the Tally Ho for the Prisoner. The Prisoner stares at the headline "No 6 speaks his mind" and starts to read the article, when he is interrupted by the massive roar of the huge white ball as it bounces down from nowhere towards him across the Village. The loudspeakers relay the sound of Number 2 speaking and banging his gavel in the council chambers.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Assembly is called to order!... Calling Number 6! Calling Number 6!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner has no choice but to enter the Town Hall. In the elegant foyer he approaches a sweeping staircase.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Not that way!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner spins in surprise, but there's no one else there. He moves towards a set of double doors.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Nor that. Straight ahead. Now.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He advances to another pair of doors, white ones with arched windows, opens them and stares down an immense staircase into the council chamber. The walls of this vast space are lit in red, and the top-hatted but otherwise colourfully dressed councillors standing round its circular perimeter cast huge shadows across the floor. The councillors's lecterns are labelled "2a", "2b", "2c" and so on. At the back of the room, directly ahead of the Prisoner and behind the podium where Number 2 is seated, is an enormous pulsating eye atop a pyramid.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Good show. Come ahead, my dear fellow.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner starts to descend the staircase. His election portrait and that of Number 2 are on the wall to one side.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: You are formally welcomed to this gathering as the prospective opposition candidate. Kindly approach the centre dais.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner hesitates.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Play the game!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: According to Hoyle?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: According to the laws of a democratic society. These are designed for the protection of the citizens. You are a civilized man and would not, I'm sure, deny the right of proper procedure. Kindly approach the centre dais.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He does so. The main feature of the dais is a lectern-like structure behind the Prisoner stands.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: The final resolution of this outgoing council is a vote of thanks to Number 6. It is carried unanimously...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He bangs his gavel.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: ... and there is no further business at this time.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">There is a longish pause.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Any questions?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Certainly.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Where'd you get this bunch of tailor's dummies?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He indicates the councillors.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: They were here when I arrived. Do you wish to question them?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I do.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Proceed.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He presses a button and the Prisoner's lectern starts to revolve, bringing him face to face with each councillor in turn.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Who do you represent? Who elected you? To what race or country do you owe allegiance? Whose side are you on?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 bangs his gavel four times in close succession and the lectern stops revolving. The Prisoner is once again facing Number 2.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Mustn't get too personal, my dear fellow.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A bright spotlight shines down onto the Prisoner, accompanied by an eerie whine.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Any further questions?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: This... farce... This twentieth-century Bastille that pretends to be a pocket democracy... Why don't you put us all into solitary confinement until you get what you're after and have done with it?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 bangs his gavel repeatedly.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Enough! I call this meeting to order!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Look at them. Brainwashed imbeciles. Can you laugh? Can you cry? Can you think?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 agains bangs his gavel. The Prisoner holds up his copy of the Tally Ho and displays its invented headline to all present.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Is this... is this what they did to you? Is this how they tried to break you till they got what they were after?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 starts banging his gavel with increasing frequency.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: In your heads must still be the remnant of a brain. In your hearts must still be the desire to be a human being again.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The spotlight blasts down on him again, accompanied this time by a bizarre rumble.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: This is a most serious breach of etiquette. I had imagined your desire to stand for election was genuine.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He sets the Prisoner revolving again, a bit faster this time.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Personally I'm prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt, believe that you were carried away by an excessive enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the rules demand that you should undergo the Test. All those in favour? Carried unanimously!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Without waiting for any votes, he bangs his gavel down, and again, and again, faster and faster, while the rumble grows ever louder and the Prisoner spins ever more rapidly... until he finally disappears through the floor into a roaring wind that leaves him sprawled in a demented red-lit corridor. It is furnished with straps as in an Underground train, and he uses these to haul himself along it.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A pair of metal doors slide open in front of him, revealing a weirdly vaulted chamber with a pleasant man in a grey tail-coat seated behind a desk at its centre. This is the new Labour Exchange Manager. He is pouring tea.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: They told me you were coming. Do you take sugar?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner falls forward and collapses onto the floor. The Manager gets up and walks over to him. The Prisoner tries to jump to his feet, but fails.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: In case you're feeling violent, please let me assure you that I could be a friend.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Friend?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Yes indeed!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He helps the Prisoner to his feet and into a chair.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: You know they're watching; I know it. It does not prove that you or I are sympathetic. But the community has to live; so must you. Come, have some tea and we'll talk.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He fetches him a cup of tea from his desk.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: How many lumps?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: No lumps.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: You don't take sugar? Good, that shows discipline for a start. Of course, I knew it anyway.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: What's that?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: From your records. We have everything.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He returns to his desk and consults a file.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: "Gave up sugar four years and three months ago on medical advice." That shows you're afraid.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: What?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: You are afraid of death.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I am afraid of nothing!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He starts to rise angrily, but restrains himself.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: You are afraid of yourself. You are aware of that? Good, you're honest. That is of use here. Honesty attracts confidence and confidences are the core of our businesses. See how honest I'm being with you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">In the Village Control Room, the large screen is relaying these events in silhouette. Number 2 speaks to one of the observers on the rotating see-saw.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Very good technique. Where did you get it?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Observer: Came from the Civil Service. It adapted immediately.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A phone rings.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Number 2 here... Sorry, but things got out of hand. I'm aware that he's valuable to us, but I couldn't risk the entire project falling apart... Certainly I'll be more careful, but he's a very stubborn customer... Yes, right away... Certainly I'll warn them not to damage the tissue.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">In the vaulted room, we therefore find the Labour Exchange Manager on the phone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Yes? Oh yes, indeed. First stage only... Oh absolutely... Clearly understood.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He puts the phone down and, very slowly, with just the hint of a smile on his face, turns to the Prisoner, crosses the floor to his chair, takes the teacup from him and returns it to his desk. While his back is turned, the Prisoner tries to stand up, but the Manager lunges at a button on the desk and sends an electric current through the arms of the Prisoner's chair. The Prisoner judders for a few seconds. The Manager presses a couple more buttons, and a large blue screen lights up.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: This is merely the Truth Test. And there's no need to be alarmed.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He starts pacing around the room. The screen shows a silhouette of the Prisoner's head with two lines entering at the left to converge at the silhouette's eyes.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Why did you wish to run for electoral office?... Why did you wish to run for electoral office?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A circle appears at the left of the upper line and, accompanied by a high-pitched tone, slides a short way along it. The Prisoner shuts his eyes for a second.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: That is a lie, but won't be held against you. Everything you think here is in the strictest confidence.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A duller tone accompanies the square that now proceeds the same distance along the lower line.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: That's better!... Why did you run for office?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Both the circle and the square advance, the former getting ahead of the latter.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Come, come. You thought that if you won and took over our Village, that you would be able to control an organized breakout. Correct?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner raises an eyebrow. The square moves, overtaking the circle.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Good. But this was a mistake, wasn't it?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Now the circle overtakes the square.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: You're not being honest. You are on the side of the people, aren't you?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Both advance, getting very close to the silhouette.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: You mustn't think only of yourself. You have a responsibility.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Both shapes now retreat a short way. The Prisoner's face is visibly shaking with the strain. Gradually, the shapes advance until they merge with his silhouette on the screen. He gasps and lolls.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">In the Control Room, the Prisoner's silhouette is limp. Number 2 picks up a phone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Central Area? Have Number 6 pound squad standing by.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">In the vaulted room, the Manager straightens the Prisoner's head and opens his eyelids. The Prisoner gawps upwards into a bright light.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Good. Good, simply splendid.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He closes the Prisoner's eyelids and lets his head loll again. He returns to his desk and switches off the screen. Slowly the Prisoner comes round and stands up gingerly. He appears calm, but puts his hands to his head, then takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his brow. The Manager watches, satisfied. The Prisoner looks around him, then smiles and approaches the desk.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Thanks for the tea.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Any time.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They shake hands vigorously.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: You're voting for me, of course?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Naturally.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He makes the "Be seeing you" sign and walks to the door. The Manager proudly pins a Number 6 rosette to his own lapel. At the door, the Prisoner turns once more.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Be seeing you!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Smiling, the Manager removes his spectacles.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner emerges into the reception area of the Labour Exchange, through a door marked "private, managers only", be-seeings the receptionist (who is preparing Number 6 rosettes), and strolls outside into the midst of a jubilant crowd.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He raises his hands in victory, then makes his way through the throng of press and public to his taxi, where Number 58 is waiting for him.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Evaz dai! Tich ti!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He finds himself being interviewed by a reporter.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: What do you think of your chances now?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I have every confidence!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Reporter: Number 2 has said that he considers you a worthy opponent. What are your feelings?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Er, yes, yes, very kind of him to say so. I'll do my best to give him a run for his money.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">And the parade goes on, the Prisoner acknowledging the crowd with waves. Later, in his cottage, the Prisoner watches himself giving a monotonous wooden speech on television.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: The Community can rest assured that their interests are very much my own, and that anything I can do to maintain the security of the citizens will be my primary objective. Be seeing you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner in his cottage makes the "Be seeing you" gesture in precise sync with his image on the television. The picture changes to a silhouette, but now a two-faced one composed from the profiles of the Prisoner and Number Two.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Announcer: That was the lunchtime news on this election day. It looks as though it's going to be neck and neck. Stand by for our next bulletin on the hour, every hour.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner and Number 58 stop watching and wander over to the kitchen. Number 58 pours some tea.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: You see, although you've only been here a short time, my dear, there is only one thing to learn and it can be learned very quickly: obey the rules and we will take good care of you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He suddenly sounds a little doubtful.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Try it.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Mm? Mm, daj pozna.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner smiles politely.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Be seeing you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Daj pozna.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: TRY IT!!!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Daj pozna?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: ... Laj... izit... zoon.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">As he works out this last phrase, he makes the "Be seeing you" sign. She shrieks in joyful recognition, then repeats the action over and over again.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ah! Laj izit zon. Laj izit zona! Laj izit zona! Laj izit zona!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner starts to tremble.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Laj izit zona! Laj izit zona! Laj izit zona! Laj izit zona!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She comes round the worktop towards him. He jumps up suddenly and collides with a lamp. He notices the rosette he's wearing, tears it off and runs outside. Number 58 follows him but stops when he drives off in the taxi at breakneck speed. He soon finds the road blocked by another taxi, the newspaper seller and his mangle and a small group of people with placards chanting "Six... Six... Six..."<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He stops the car and runs off through the gardens, closely followed by Number 58 who waves at him excitedly. The Prisoner dashes ahead. On the waterfront lawn his route is blocked by a helicopter on one side, his advancing troop of election campaigners on another, and the butler with his umbrella on a third. The only way he can go is to the sea, so he jumps onto a motorboat that's moored close by. As he starts the engine, a couple of mechanics notice him and just have time to leap aboard.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The helicopter keeps pace with the boat as it heads out to sea. The mechanics put up a good fight, but the Prisoner soon sends one of them flying off the stern. The other picks up a pole and manages to use it to knock the Prisoner into the water. He lifts the pole high in the air and is about to bring it down on the Prisoner's head when he is distracted by the amplified voice of Number 2, who is piloting the helicopter.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Don't do anything rash. Give him time.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner hurls the man overboard, then clambers back into the boat himself. Number 2's amplified voice addresses him.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: You were doing so well. Now you're being simply foolish. It won't get you anywhere, you know. Go back before it's too late. Go back before it's too late.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">But the Prisoner doesn't deviate from his path. In the helicopter, Number 2 picks up a phone that relays his voice to the Control Room.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Southern perimeter alert. Southern perimeter... alert.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Supervisor watches a diagrammatic representation of the white ball as it speeds out in pursuit.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Supervisor: Now approaching.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The ball reaches the surface of the water.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Supervisor: Contact imminent.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 puts the phone down and sadly turns the helicopter back towards land. The Prisoner is now heading straight for the ball; he spins the steering wheel furiously but to no effect. At the last minute he throws himself into the water; the ball bounces over the boat, which then returns itself automatically to land. An ambulance is dispatched; the Prisoner attempts to strike out for shore, but is too weak to avoid being suffocated by the ball and its two smaller companions. He ends up floating between them, repeating his lifeless political speech.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: The Community can rest assured that their interests are very much my own, and that anything I can do to maintain the security of the citizens will be my primary objective. Be seeing you... Be seeing you...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">As the ambulance takes him to the hospital, a satisfied Supervisor watches the ball return to its watery home.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner lies in his hospital bed as recent sights and sounds drift through his dreaming mind: Number 2 saying "You are just the sort of candidate we need"; the parade marching past; the Prisoner himself announcing "I am not a number, I am a person" to general merriment; his placard being raised; him being showered with confetti to a chant of "Six! Six! Six!"; Number 2 declaring "The final resolution of this outgoing council is a vote of thanks to Number 6"; the Prisoner being whirled round to more cries of "Six!" and the beating of Number 2's gavel; him staggering through the red corridor; him emerging jubilantly to the waiting crowd; his own voice yelling "I am not a number, I am a free man!"<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He wakes up suddenly, but is soon lulled back to sleep by the pulsating light and tone above his head.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Later, we find him campaigning in a thoroughly brainwashed way. He stands with Number 58 on top of the stone boat and addresses the crowd through a megaphone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: There are those who come here and deny that we can supply every conceivable civilized amenity within our boundaries. You can enjoy yourselves... and you will. You can partake of the most hazardous sports and you will. The price is cheap. All you have to do in exchange is give us... information. You are then eligible for promotion to other and perhaps more attractive spheres. Where do you desire to go? What has been your dream? I can supply it. Winter, spring, summer or fall, they can all be yours at any time. Apply to me, and it will be easier and better.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Elsewhere, Number 2 is also in rhetorical mood. He stands, megaphone in hand, on a stone balcony overlooking the gardens; the butler holds the black and white umbrella over him. The crowd here are much more sombre.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: There are those who come here with a fresh face, with an enthusiasm that cannot be denied. Beware, be careful. Their promises ring richly in your ears. Our friend Number 6 has a splendid record, has adapted himself admirably to our procedure, but he has no experience whatsoever of the manipulation of such a community as ours. Beware! Has he got the administrative ability to implement his policies? Can you trust him?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner is now haranguing the Village from a moving taxi.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Place your trust in the old régime: the policies are defined, the future certain. The old régime forever... and the old Number 2 forever? Confession by coercion, is that what you want? Vote for him and you have it! Or, stand firm upon this election platform and speak a word without fear! The word... is "freedom". They say "six of one and half a dozen of the other"... not here. It's "six for two and two for nothing" and six for free... for all... for free for all! Vote! Vote!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">His boisterous parade winds its way into the garden below Number 2, chanting "Six! Six!" and waving placards. Suddenly everything stops, including the brass band. Number 2 shouts down through his megaphone, and the Prisoner's amplified voice floats back.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: You seem to be doing pretty well.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Far be it for me to carp, but what will you do in your spare time?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: I cannot afford spare time.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Do you hear that? He's working to his limit! Can't afford spare time! We're all entitled to spare time! Leisure is our right!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">His crowd wave their placards and chant "Six for Two! Six for Two! Six for Two! Six for Two!"<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: In your spare time, if you get it, what will you do?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Less work... and more play!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Crowd: Six! Six! Six! Six!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Later, at the Cat and Mouse nightclub, a waitress brings a tray of drinks over from the bar to the table where the Prisoner is sitting with Number 58. Like everyone else in the bar, she wears a Number 6 rosette.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Waitress: Sir, non-alcoholic gin, whisky, vodka. Looks the same and tastes the same.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Bet you can't get me tiddly.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Waitress: No alcohol here, sir!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: You going to vote for me?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Waitress: You and only you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Go away.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Waitress: Gin, whisky, vodka. Looks the same and tastes the same.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: GET OUT!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Scared, she runs away. Behind them a woman dances oddly to the jolly music of the mechanical band. The Prisoner points a finger at Number 58.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: You're spying on me, aren't you?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ik...?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Get me a drink.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He holds up a glass. Number 58 whipers agitatedly.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Kokazi trak ozamuk ni, tak ta.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Alcoholic drink.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Kokazi trak ozamuk ni, nas ta.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: A DRINK!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He hurls the glass violently to the floor. Number 58 quickly leads him out, collecting her coat in the foyer. He mumbles at passing customers as though drunk.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Vote for 6... vote for 6... vote for me and a drink... vohhhhte for 6...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ibazka!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Vote for me... six... vote...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ibazka!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Outside the club, she leads him to their taxi.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I'm for you... let me be... ever let me go... ever let me go...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They drive to the outskirts of the Village, where they get out and walk through the grove of statues.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Vote for me...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58 points to the concealed mouth of a cave and mimes drinking.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Eng brifti nakh, abartuk. Sluch! Sluchje...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She starts to run back the way they've come, but the Prisoner grabs her, smiling stupidly.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Spying on me, aren't you?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ag... sluchje! Sluchje!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She escapes his clutches and flees in terror. The Prisoner stares after her for a moment, then wanders into the cave.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Vote for me... I'm for you... let me be... let me be...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Inside the cave, a middle-aged man in an apron throws a bit of wood onto a roaring fire, then walks over to tend to a still in the corner. There is little else in this seedy drinking establishment apart from a hooded figure boozing on his own at one of the few tables. The aproned barman steps towards this figure, failing to notice the Prisoner in the entranceway.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Barman: Large or small, sir?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Figure: Massive.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner suddenly steps forward.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I'll have a double!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Barman: With or without water, sir?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The figure leaps up and pulls the hood from his head. It is Number 2. He focuses groggily on the Prisoner. The Prisoner simply smiles back in acknowledgment.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: ... Without.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Barman: Please take a seat, I'll be right with you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner wanders over to Number 2's table, but neither of them sit down yet.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Little drop now and again keeps the nerves steady.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: ... You're scared, aren't you?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Frankly, yes.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Of what?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: It may seem improbable to you, but I'm wondering what's going to happen to you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He pokes him drunkenly. The barman brings them each a beaker. The Prisoner glances behind him suspiciously.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Don't worry. There's no surveillance here. This is the Therapy Zone.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They sit down together.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Clever, aren't they? CLEVER, AREN'T YOU?!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: They are, damn clever. Think of it: if you want to be an alcoholic, you can be one here in perfect privacy, so long as you rejoin the flock in good time.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: You don't approve?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Of the Village?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Yes.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: ... To hell with the Village. Cheers.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner blinks.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: ... Cheers.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They drink. Number 2 puts his hand on the Prisoner's shoulder, then indicates the barman, now busy again at his still.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: See him?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Yes.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Cheers.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: ... Cheers.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Again they drink.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: He's a brilliant scientist. Just does that for a hobby. Come with me. I'll show you something.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 leads the way into a small dingy chamber at the back of the cavern, containing chemical equipment and a blackboard covered in diagrams.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: We leave him here in peace, he brews his brew, plays with his chalk; we come down once a week, photograph the stuff, clean it up for him so that he can start on another lot.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He laughs and the Prisoner joins in. They both drink.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Clever as hell!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Cheers!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2 starts singing; the Prisoner again joins in. Number 2 absently wipes some of the writing off the blackboard.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Vote for me...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Vote for me...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: And I'll be...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: And I'll be...<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Ever so comforty!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">They drain their beakers. Number 2 giggles. The Prisoner teeters and topples onto the floor, out cold. Number 2, completely sober, removes the tatty shawl he is wearing and regains his normal composure.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Barman: Quicker than usual.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: I warned you not to make it too strong. We mustn't damage the tissue.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Barman: You needn't worry. There will be no remembrances. The portions were exact to take him right through the election.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">It is voting day, and the parade continues, marching right through the polling station. The cry is unanimous: "Six for Two! Six for Two! Six for Two!..." Inside, the Prisoner and Number 2 stand behind their respective ballot boxes as the people vote with their rosettes. The Prisoner's box is overflowing; Number 2's is completely empty. Number 2 picks up one of the Number 6 rosettes and tosses it back onto the pile.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: I don't think we shall need a recount.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Sorry... Sorry.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Don't mention it.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Outside, the crowd's chant has changed to "We want Number Two!" The Prisoner picks up the rosettes that have spilled out of his ballot box.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Looks as if they want Number 2. Well, I haven't cast my vote.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He takes the 6 rosette from the Prisoner's lapel, tosses it onto the huge pile and replaces it with the solitary 2 rosette that identifies his own ballot box.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Come with me. I'll show you the ropes.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">As they emerge, the crowd falls totally silent. There is triumphant music, but it soon turns into a sinister parody of "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow". The Villagers stare blankly at the Prisoner as his arm is held victoriously aloft by the former Number 2. They climb aboard the taxi, driven as always by Number 58, and set off through the streets. Bizarrely, the Prisoner continues to acknowledge the motionless uninterested crowd.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The taxi draws up at the foot of the steps that wind up to Number 2's house, the Green Dome. The former Number 2 takes the Prisoner's hand and leads him up the steps. Number 58 follows behind. The Prisoner hesitates at the entrance, but the former Number 2's arm beckons him in. He enters the hallway like a robot, while the other two stare at him strangely.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: No point in going into detail. Anything you want to know, press a button. You're the boss.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The white double doors leading into the heart of the Dome open automatically. The former Number 2 takes off his scarf of office and lays it on the table next to his shooting-stick. He picks up an attaché case and puts it under his arm.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Well, I'll be on my way. Thanks for everything.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He shakes hands with the Prisoner, then turns to Number 58 and makes the "Be seeing you" sign, which she reciprocates.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 2: Laj izit zona.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Laj izit zona.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">And the front door, marked "2", shuts itself behind him. Number 58 approaches the white double doors and the metal doors beyond slide open to reveal Number 2's vast circular office behind.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Oj!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She beckons delightedly for the Prisoner to join her. Slowly he walks over; she takes him by the arm and leads him down to the centre of the room. The chamber is empty, except for the chairless desk, a penny-farthing... and the large screen, which is showing a swirling mass of lights. Somewhere, something is emitting a reassuring beep. They look around, then come to the desk.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ona movetje bojda!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She presses a button on the desk, and Number 2's circular chair rises out of the floor.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ah!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner smiles at her stupidly. She presses another button, and the screen starts showing various images of the Village.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Hi tatu!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Prisoner's own face appears in one of the scenes. Number 58 shrieks joyfully, claps her hands and runs about. Between them they call up more pictures. Suddenly she pushes a button that makes one of the L-shaped phones on the desk ring. She hands it to the Prisoner.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Ta ku! Parje tusti!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Mm?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Tusti!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The Labour Exchange Manager answers at the other end.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: Anything I can do for you?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: Just checking... Be seeing you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Manager: And you.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He hands the phone to Number 58, who places it back on the desk. They start pushing every button at once, Number 58 repeating the word "Bojda!" excitedly. Various chairs bob up and down through holes in the floor, the lights on the screen swirl faster... and a bright lamp casts its pulsating light down onto the Prisoner, as during his brainwashing. He stiffens. All trace of joy has vanished from Number 58's face. Very quietly she says "Tik... tik?" and manoeuvres him to a position in front of the screen where he stands staring into the hypnotic patterns.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">After a while she turns him to face the other way, steps in front of him and removes the Number 2 rosette from his lapel.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Tik... tik?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She clicks her fingers in front of his eyes. He remains in his trance.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Number 58: Tik tik?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">She slaps him hard across the face four times until he snaps out of it. She continues to slap him and say "Tik tik" until he stumbles back into the spherical chair. He revolves in it once, then leaps to his feet, grabs a pair of phones from the desk and shouts into them urgently. A stretcher rolls down the ramp behind him.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: This is our chance! This is our chance, take it now! I have command!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">He starts adjusting switches on the desk.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I will immobilize all electronic controls. Listen to me, you are free to go! You are FREE TO GO!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">His voice echoes out of every loudspeaker in the Village.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: FREE TO GO! FREE TO GO! You are free to go! You are free, free, free to go! You are free to go!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">But the Villagers just continue about their normal business.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Prisoner: I am in command! Obey me and be free! You are free to go, you are free to go, you are free to go!<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">A couple of grey-clad guards rise up through the floor on platforms and grab him. With a mighty effort and a final yell of "FREE TO GO!" he throws them both off and dashes past the stretcher and up the ramp to the metal doors.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The doors slide open but beyond them, instead of Number 2's hallway, there is a cave strewn with straw. The Prisoner stumbles in surprise, picks himself up and turns to see four men in coloured overalls and dark glasses sitting, arms folded, round the huge white ball, almost as if in worship. A bust like those in the grove stands on a nearby plinth. The men turn as one; unnerved, the Prisoner backs away and finds himself confronting the grey-clad guards again. After a short fight, the Prisoner is knocked down by a savage blow to his back.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The men in overalls drag him upright and hold his arms and legs while the guards punch him a dozen times in the stomach. Then they carry him back into Number 2's office and stand him up in front of Number 58, who stands behind the desk, wearing Number 2's scarf and the Prisoner's Number 2 rosette. She addresses him in perfect English.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">New 2: Will you never learn? This is only the beginning. We have many ways and means, but we don't wish to damage you permanently. Are you ready to talk?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The battered Prisoner says nothing. The guards lay him on the stretcher and carry him to his cottage. Meanwhile, the former Number 2 is conversing with the new Number 2 (the former Number 58) by phone from his helicopter.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Former 2: Just on my way. Everything go according to plan?<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">New 2: Don't worry. All will be satisfactory in the end. Give my regards to the homeland.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">The former Number 2 pilots himself away from the Village as prison bars slam shut on the Prisoner's face.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Next episode: The Schizoid Man<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Guest Star:<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Eric Portman as Number 2<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">with<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Rachel Herbert as Number 58<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">George Benson as the Labour Exchange Manager<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">and<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Angelo Muscat as the Butler<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Harold Berens as the Reporter<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">John Cazabon as the Man in the Cave (Barman)<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Dene Cooper as the Photographer<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Kenneth Benda as the Supervisor (Observer)<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Holly Doone as the Waitress<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Peter Brace and Alf Joint as the Mechanics<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Peter Swanwick as the Supervisor (only in shots from "Arrival")<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Episode written and directed by Paddy Fitz (i.e. Patrick McGoohan)<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Executive Producer: Patrick McGoohan<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Production Manager: Bernard Williams<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Director of Photography: Brendan J. Stafford B.S.C.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Art Director: Jack Shampan<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Camera Operator: Jack Lowin<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Editor: Geoffrey Foot<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Theme by Ron Grainer<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Incidental Music by Albert Elms<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Cameraman (2nd Unit): Robert Monks<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Assistant Director: Gino Marotta<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Sound Editor: Wilfred Thompson<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Sound Recordist: John Bramall<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Music Editor: Eric Mival<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Casting Director: Rose Tobias-Shaw<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Continuity: Doris Martin<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Set Dresser: Kenneth Bridgeman<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Make-Up: Eddie Knight<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Hairdressing: Pat McDermot<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Wardrobe: Masada Wilmot<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Made on Location<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Borehamwood, England<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">An ITC Production<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Incorporated Television Company Limited MCMLXVII<br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">by Everyman Films Limited</span></div></div><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-not-number-i-am-free-man.html"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am not a number, I am a free man!"</span></a>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-12897096352725196162009-01-15T16:35:00.000-08:002009-01-15T16:41:11.853-08:00"The Prisoner"--Episode Five<div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Prisoner</span><br /><br />Episode Five<br /><br />"The Schizoid Man"<br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man whom we will call "the Prisoner" resigns and is gassed exactly as before. He wakes up in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The following conversation accompanies a similar miscellany of images.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: In the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What do you want?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Information.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Whose side are you on?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information... Information...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You won't get it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: By hook or by crook... we will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This Number 2 is a determined-looking man of about thirty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: The new Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who is Number 1?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You are Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Outside the Prisoner's cottage, the birds are singing. Inside, on the Prisoner's kitchen table, is a large heap of cards marked with the traditional ESP symbols: the circle, the cross, the square, the star, and the three wavy lines. Next to the heap is a small pile of cards that are face-down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a second, a young woman -- Alison, Number 24 -- replies in a confident voice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: ... A circle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He throws the card he is holding onto the heap. It is indeed marked with a circle. He picks up the next card from the pile and looks first at it, then at Alison, who we see is sitting in a meditative pose facing away from the Prisoner on the edge of the coffee table in the living room. She has her index fingers steepled against her forehead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: A... star.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up the next card. It has a square on it. Alison turns to look at him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Thank you, Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What for?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: For letting me practise my mind-reading act on you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She resumes her pose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: ... A square, no, a cross... no, a square. Definitely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Are you sure it's a square?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Yes!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner puts the card down, impressed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: I don't know what I'd have done without your help; nobody else believed in me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: They have no imagination.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up the next card. It's marked with a cross like an X.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You should concentrate, otherwise you won't be ready for the Village Festival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: There's still a month.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looks at the card, then at her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: NOW!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Again she resumes her pose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: ... A cross.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Right... Now?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: ... Three wavy lines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That's the lot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She leaps up, eagerly grabbing her Polaroid camera from the table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Can I take another picture now?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You've taken five already.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Yes, but I need lots of practice if I'm to stand a chance in the photographic section.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Is there any event you haven't entered?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He starts to sort the cards out. She approaches, holding the camera to her eye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Only the pole vault, but I might.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Bet you haven't -- aagh!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She has knocked a soda siphon over and the nozzle has struck the Prisoner's left index finger.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Oh, I'm terribly sorry! Did it hurt?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It's a mortal injury, wounded for life, look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He shows her his finger. There's a dark bruise at the base of the nail.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Oh, I'm so sorry, it was clumsy of me, really.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Don't worry, it'll mend itself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Can I... still take the picture?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You'll have to hurry up!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He fans out the cards she got right, and holds them up to the camera, smiling.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Seventeen out of twenty-five's quite remarkable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She takes a photograph. He makes some notes on a pad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Couldn't it just mean that we're... simpatico?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It might, but there's more to it than that: out of the last four runs, you've got seventy-three out of a hundred. You're gifted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She removes the picture from the camera and puts it on the table in front of him. The bruise on the Prisoner's finger is clearly visible in black and white, as is the date on the calendar behind him: it's the 10th of the month.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Like it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, as you say, you... need a little more practice!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Ye-es, I see what you mean. Could we try another?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What? Yes, all right, what do you want me to do?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Well, erm, look this way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: And... put your hand to your face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He buries his face in his left hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Yes, but not over your face! Just to your mouth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Thinking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Because they... that's marvellous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She photographs him looking pensive. He grunts in response.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Yes, I'll keep this one for myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: OK.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Erm, can we try another run with the cards?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Ah, no no, it's getting a bit late. You might reduce your average and get discouraged.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Are you tired?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Don't forget the cards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Tomorrow?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: We'll see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Tomorrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner shows her to the door. He clicks his fingers as it opens.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Be seeing you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: And you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She leaves and the door closes behind her. The Prisoner continues to click his fingers as he wanders back toward the kitchen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That night, Number 2 strolls into the Village Control Room and beckons to a white-coated doctor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Switch me in to Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Supervisor -- a Haitian gentleman -- operates a switch, and the dimly-lit interior of the Prisoner's cottage appears on the main screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Closer, and infrared.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We see the Prisoner asleep in bed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: The breathing is shallow, his sleep is light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Let's deepen it for him, shall we? Pulsator. Visual.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A bright pulsating light descends from the ceiling towards the Prisoner, accompanied by a low resonant tone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Aural.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After a few seconds of this, the doctor and his assistant enter the Prisoner's bedroom and give him an injection. He doesn't react, even when they lift him onto a stretcher. Number 2 smiles. They take the Prisoner's calendar and wristwatch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Time passes. The Prisoner lies inert in a hospital bed as a mole is surgically removed from his wrist. He receives another injection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >More time passes. The report sheet ("Serial No. 22.49.698") on the end of his bed gives the date as "Feb 11th"; the space for noting "Physical marks" is blank. The Prisoner is sitting up in bed, totally dazed. The doctor advances towards him, wheeling a large electrical generator connected to a long metal pole held by his assistant. The Prisoner bats the end of the pole away with his right hand and receives an electric shock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Left-handed, Number 12...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They pull the pole back and repeat the process.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Later still, with the Prisoner now asleep again, a new calendar is put by his bedside with the date wound back to the 10th.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Finally, the Prisoner wakes up. He sits up and rubs his eyes, and thereby discovers that he now has a moustache. He sits there in shock for a good ten seconds, then checks the date on his calendar to see how long he's been asleep. The calendar says it's "WEDNESDAY 10 FEBRUARY". He gets out of bed and notices his surroundings. This is not his bedroom, nor his cottage. He staggers about in confusion for a moment, then sees a mirror and examines himself in it. His hair is now black rather than brown, and differently parted; his pyjamas are also a different colour. He touches his face and tugs at his moustache in disbelief. Bewildered, he rushes to the wardrobe and finds his familiar jacket there... with a Number 12 badge on it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At that moment, the phone starts beeping. Cautiously he walks over to it and picks the receiver up with his left hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2's Voice: Good morning, Number 12. I hope you slept well after your flight. I'll expect you for breakfast in fifteen minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 says nothing else, so the Prisoner hangs up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A few minutes later, the new-look Prisoner steps out of his new home (which has a sign outside saying "12, Private"). A man in a turban and Village costume walks past.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Good morning, Number 12.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Be seeing you...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stares after him for a few seconds, then sets off towards his breakfast appointment. On the way he meets a woman, Number 36, pushing a wheelchair containing a man wearing a welding mask with a cap on top.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 36: Morning, Number 12! Nice to see you again!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes, why do you call me Number 12?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 36: Well, that's what you were called when I last saw you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She continues on her way. The Prisoner arrives at the door to the Green Dome, Number 2's residence. He reaches for the bell, but the door opens automatically. Inside, the little butler bows to him in the hallway and opens the double doors for him. The Prisoner steps through the sliding doors beyond into the circular office, where a smiling Number 2 comes forward to shake his hand warmly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Ah, my dear chap! Delighted to see you, ha ha ha! You're looking fine, you really are! I don't mind telling you we had to pull every string we could to get you seconded back to us. Now, breakfast!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He has guided the Prisoner towards a trolley of covered dishes, next to a table with a covered plate already on it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: À la carte? Table d'hôte?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner starts examining the contents of the dishes on the trolley.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes, they screamed as if I were taking their pensions away!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Did they?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He has found a dish of flapjacks and eagerly helps himself to three. He then walks over to the table and lifts the cover off the plate that's there. It's a plate of flapjacks. Number 2 chuckles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Did you think I'd forgotten we used to call you "Flapjack Charlie"?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner just grunts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Even in those days it was obvious you were going to make a top field man. Here am I, stuck in admin. You always did enjoy your food, even before a job from the black file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner puts the cover back on the flapjacks and walks away from them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Sorry I didn't shave. Couldn't find a razor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh, my dear chap, I'm so sorry---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Must have been mislaid. Strange apartment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: And after all that flying.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You must feel a bit disorientated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: ... What's it all about?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Our prize prisoner, the one we call Number 6. Toughest case I've ever handled. I could crack him of course, but I can't use the normal techniques. He's too valuable. "Mustn't damage him permanently," say our masters. That's why I need you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Why do you need me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You bring two great gifts to bear. Firstly, your ability as an agent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh yes. Secondly?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He starts to pace round the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You have a unique physical advantage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Physical advantage of GROWING A MOUSTACHE OVERNIGHT?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This makes Number 2 laugh.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: No, not quite. You took longer that time in Bucharest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Bucharest?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You remember how Susan hated you without it? She told me she wouldn't kiss you until you grew it again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh yes, good for Susan!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He nibbles something from the breakfast table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You know, you really do bear a remarkable resemblance, remarkable. Your job, Number 12, will be to impersonate him. Take his sense of reality away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner picks up the Tally Ho and checks the date. It's "Feb 10th".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Once he begins to doubt his own identity, he'll crack. What do you think of the idea?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I think it has fascinating possibilities, but you'll have an awful job convincing me that I am not your Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >For a moment Number 2 looks confused, then he beams.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Ah, ha ha! Excellent, Number 12, of course! Always the professional! Started living the part already, eh? Oh, that reminds me. Allow me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He attaches a Number 6 badge to the Prisoner's lapel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You're now officially Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner immediately removes it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I shan't need this to remind me that I am... your Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 picks up a file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You'll find all his background details in here. Study them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He tosses the file to the Prisoner, who catches it with his left hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Er, you want to watch that, Number 12: Number 6 is right-handed... Yes, we'll just have to make a very few changes. Oh, don't worry, I'll get a couple of my girls to work you over a little. But they're very pretty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This is in fact what we see next. They shave the Prisoner's moustache off and restore his hair to its normal colour and style. Number 2 walks in just as they are showing the Prisoner his "new" appearance in a mirror.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You'd hardly know yourself, would you, Number 12?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Shortly afterwards, Number 2 takes the Prisoner to cottage 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: This is Number 6's. Familiarise yourself with it. I want you to look as much at home here as he does.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That shouldn't be too difficult.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Hm-hm! The idea is that when he comes back, in a few minutes as a matter of fact, you will be in position.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It's not the same.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: The same?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You've changed things, little things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He flicks through a sheaf of papers lying on top of the bureau.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: This rubbish -- it's not mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up an ornament.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: This should be gilt, not silver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I shouldn't try that line with him, if I were you. Number 6 has got a very strong sense of territory. You won't shake him on his possessions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: No, you won't.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh, erm, once we get started, even I won't be able to tell you apart. You'll need a password to identify yourself. The password is "Gemini". Well...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He glances at his watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes, he should be here in a minute. I think it's more effective if you meet him alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turns to go, but pauses briefly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh, er, good luck!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He goes out, leaving the Prisoner still checking the contents of his home. A few seconds later, the door opens and someone else comes in, whistling, hands in pockets. He is the spitting image of the Prisoner, except he's wearing a light-coloured jacket with a Number 6 badge on the lapel. He also seems a bit more casual and self-satisfied than the Prisoner we know. We will refer to this person as "the Double". He stops whistling as soon as he sees the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: ... What the devil? ... Oh, very good! Very very good indeed! One of Number 2's little ideas, I suppose? Where did they get you, a people's copying service, or are you one of those double agents we hear so much about these days?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Seeing as you've gone to so much trouble, the least I can do is offer you a drink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Scotch!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner goes to the cabinet where he keeps his drinks, but it's empty. The Double has gone to a different cabinet, and starts pouring himself a glass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I take it I'm supposed to go all fuzzy round the edges and run off into the distance, screaming "Who am I?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Probably. I've no idea. Would you like some ice?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Thank you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I think it spoils it, myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Yes, I always keep it in that thermos bucket over there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He comes over to the Prisoner and starts serving himself some ice from the adjacent bucket.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You know, I never realised I had a freckle on the right-hand side of my nose. When they come to film my life story, you've got the part! Cigar?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He approaches and nods at the cigar case on top of the cabinet. The Prisoner opens it, takes out a cigar and puts in his mouth with his left hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Oh, you'll... have to learn to smoke it right-handed first.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He takes a lighter from his jacket pocket and lights it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: And you, how to light a cigar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He lights the cigar with a match, left-handed, and starts to smoke. It makes him cough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: And you, how to smoke my brand without having a heart attack. There's some black Russian cigarettes in the box there on the table: I never touch them myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It's not going to work, you know!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: It certainly isn't. Why don't you run away and play somewhere else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I have a very strong sense of identity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You -- oh yes, of course, I'm sorry, I was forgetting, you're supposed to be me! You are the goodie Number 6, and I am the baddie who is supposed to be proving you wrong, is that it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That's right, except there's no "supposed" about it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I'll tell you what. Erm, why don't we settle this like gentlemen?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Hm! You're claiming to be a gentleman too?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Oh very good, very good indeed, that line is worthy of me. We're both claiming to be Number 6, are we not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I am Number 6, you are doing the claiming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Well, let's prove which one is correct.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: How?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Oh, many ways... pistol-shooting, for instance: erm, what was Number 6's average?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Ninety per cent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Correct. Shall we go?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: The Recreation Room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We move to the Recreation Room, a gymnasium where the two Number 6's are checking their pistols. The Prisoner holds his pistol in his left hand, the Double holds his in his right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I don't wish to take unfair advantage: check synchronisation... one...two... three...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In perfect synch, two person-shaped targets pop up on the bright screen in front of them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Good. Electronic, you see: no bullets. Can't kill any one with them. Number 2 takes no chances. Three-second intervals, what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Whatever you say.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I'm sorry, old boy. Erm, Number 6 is a right-handed shot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Reluctantly, the Prisoner transfers the gun to his left hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Good. Ready to go now! Three-second intervals! Now, one, two, three!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Two low targets pop up and the men fire. Then the standing targets appear again, followed by a succession of further targets. The Prisoner manages to land his shot somewhere on each target, but the Double's aim unerringly hits the targets' hearts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 and the Supervisor are watching from the Control Room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: It's uncanny. Number 12 has caught the man's whole style.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: In Haiti, we'd say he has stolen his soul.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The shooting match comes to an end, and the target screen goes dark.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Well, I certainly shoot more like me than you do.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What does all that prove?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: That you should have put in more shooting practice before you took on this job. How's your fencing?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You should know, you've studied my file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Turning the tables -- very neat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They have approached a rack of fencing equipment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: "These foils have all a length?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: "Ay, my good lord."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Hamlet, Act Five.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Scene Two.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You have done your homework, haven't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They each put on a fencing mask.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: No, you've done yours... even the Shakespeare bit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Supervisor laughs with Number 2, as the fencing begins. Both men fight right-handed. The Double quickly forces the Prisoner back towards the wall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Ah yes, good agricultural stuff, but it'd hardly have got you my place on the Olympic TEAM!... No swordsman, no shot either... If ever...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He knocks the foil clean out of the Prisoner's hand and holds his swordpoint against his opponent's throat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: If ever you do challenge me to a duel, your safest best would be battle-axes in a very dark cellar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He lets the Prisoner go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A few minutes later, the men emerge onto the steps in front of the Recreation Hall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Er, you... you still claim to be Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: This is beginning to get on my nerves a little bit. I suppose you're an Olympic boxer as well, are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Oh, you should know: it's in my record. Perhaps you'd like to find out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He suddenly lunges at the Prisoner, who defends himself weakly against the barrage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Oh, now, now, come, make up your mind: are you orthodox or southpaw?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He punches the Prisoner in the stomach, winding him. He falls down the steps to the ground in pain. The Double becomes smug and triumphant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I'm surprised at Number 2. His agents just aren't what they were.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At that moment, there is a loud roar and the huge white ball comes billowing towards them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Oh dear, looks as though we're in trouble with the headmaster!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ball forces them in a particular direction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Must be confusing for it, not knowing which one of us to bite... This way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The ball accompanies them right up to the Green Dome. The door opens automatically and they step inside. The Double is suddenly grabbed by two thugs and manhandled violently into the circular office; meanwhile Number 2 emerges to shake the Prisoner's hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Number 6! Come along in! Heard you were having a spot of bother.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner is confused, but shakes Number 2's hand and smiles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In Number 2's office, the Double is being interrogated. He is made to stand staring at a bright light against a dark curtain behind Number 2's spherical chair. Some other piece of interrogation apparatus emits a pulsating electronic cacophony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Switch that idiot thing off. I'm getting cramp.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You know who I am. I am Number SIX!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Where did you come from?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You know that too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: How did you get here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You know that better than I do. I was unconscious at the time, if you REMEMBER!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A deeper note enters the cacophony.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What was your purpose in coming here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I had none. I'LL GO AWAY AGAIN IF YOU LIKE!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 holds up two fingers as a signal to the people manning the equipment. The noise changes again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: How did your people know that Number 6 was here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: What people?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: How did they know enough about him to produce you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I do not UNDERSTAND!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 signals again. The cacophony becomes high-pitched.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What were you doing in the Recreation Room?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Teaching that synthetic twin of mine how to shoot and FENCE!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Another signal from Number 2: the cacophony reduces to a intense pulsating beep. The light falling on the Double is reduced to a small circle concentrated on his forehead. He grits his teeth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: For the last time, what do your people want with Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I am Number 6. I... am... Number 6! Number 6! SIX! SIX! SIX! SIX!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As he says this, the cacophony increases again, becoming higher and shriller until he loses consciousness and collapses onto the floor. The platform on which Number 2 has been standing descends, bringing him face to face with the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Hm! Your... boy is dedicated to his work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I told you he was a tough nut, Number 12.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Number 6, er... 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh you're quite right, of course, that was careless of me. He might have heard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thugs pull the Double to his feet. He is still muttering "6... 6". Number 2 beckons and the thugs bring him close.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Do you still insist you're Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: ... Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Your mind can lie, but your body can't. You'll see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thugs drag him away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: By the time we've finished with him, he won't know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity. Now, this should be rather interesting. We have a complete set of Number 6's fingerprints.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes, I know my own fingerprints.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 looks at him humouringly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Let's start with the thumb, shall we?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He flicks a switch on his desk, and the Prisoner's thumbprint appears on the screen on the wall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That's mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Never off duty, are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He flicks another switch, and a small circular table with an illuminated centre rises from the floor. The thugs bring the Double back in. Number 2 addresses him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: And I suppose you know your fingerprints too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He looks at the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: That's mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: So that if I say that on the contrary it belongs to Number 6, one of us is lying.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Not at all. As I am Number 6, we'd both be telling the truth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Let's find out, shall we?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He pushes his own thumb against the illuminated tabletop. A second thumbprint appears to the right of the one from Number 6's records. It's clearly different.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: There, that's my thumb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He pushes a switch on his desk and removes his thumbprint from the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Now it's your turn. Right thumb only, I think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thugs have marched the Double up to the table. He records his thumbprint: it's not Number 6's. On a smaller screen nearby, the Prisoner records his own thumbprint: it's an exact match.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Simple. Foolproof.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Too simple and foolproof.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Very ingenious and scientific. The trouble with science is that it can be perverted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm inclined to agree, Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You agree?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm inclined to believe in human instinct.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: How do you mean?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, I mean that... if I were in his shoes, I'd rather be convinced by a human being than by a piece of machinery.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Do you have something in mind?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Certainly... May I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Mm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up a phone from Number 2's desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Number 24.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He waits to be connected.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Alison?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm at, er, Number 2's residence. Could you come over right away?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: I was just going to wash my hair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Er, don't worry about that, won't take a minute. And, er, Alison? Bring the cards with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He puts the phone down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What do you hope to achieve?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: To prove that I am Number 6... and he is the fake. That's what you wanted, isn't it? That's what it's all about?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But Number 2 looks worried. Alison arrives at the Green Dome. The front door opens as she touches the bell pull, and the butler bows and shows her through to the circular office. She steps back in astonishment at the sight of the two identical men.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Good heavens, it can't be!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Mother Nature has been up to her tricks again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: It's weird... I mean, which one of you...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I am the original. He is the economy pack.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner turns and points at the Double. Alison's voice is reduced to a whisper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: It's impossible!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: On the contrary.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: But I... I still don't understand which of you is...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That is what you are here to settle. Number 2 says it's not possible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Oh I see, that's why you wanted me to bring the cards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That's right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I don't follow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Number 6 and I have a mental link.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes, now let's see which one of us you have a mental link with. I think a run of five should be sufficient.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He has positioned Alison near the door, and stands just in front of Number 2's desk himself. Number 2 looks increasingly worried. The Prisoner picks up the first card. It's a square.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Right... Now!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Square.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Smugly, he puts the card down and takes the next, which is a star.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: ... Circle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 sighs in the background. The Prisoner is also disappointed, but takes the next card: a square.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Cross.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: OK now, just... just relax. It's exactly the same as it was in my cottage. I'm... looking at the next card now. Are you ready?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Cross.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Double looks on contentedly as he takes the fourth card: a circle. The Prisoner glances at Number 2, whose face is despondent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Three wavy lines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The final card bears three wavy lines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Square.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner looks very concerned, while the Double is now intensely casual. He approaches the desk and picks up the cards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: A run of five, you say?... Good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He holds up the first card: three wavy lines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Now...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Three wavy lines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner looks nervously at Number 2 and fidgets with his chin. The Double's next three cards are a cross, a star and a circle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Now?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: ... A cross.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: ... Now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Star.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: ... Now!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: A circle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up the final card. We don't see what it is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Square.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She approaches the Double, smiling.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: You don't have to tell me, I just know that's five out of five. He's the one, he's Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I could have identified myself much earlier, but it would hardly have been fair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He reaches into his top pocket and pulls out the photograph that Alison took of the Prisoner holding up a fan of cards, and hands it to her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Isn't it awful? I took it last night. He's all arms and neck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She holds the photo out, and the Prisoner grabs it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Actually, there was a much simpler way to identify Number 6. He has a mole on his left wrist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Oh yes, of course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He rolls back his sleeve to show the mole.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: So's this one, my dear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner pulls back his sleeve. There is no mole to be seen. Both Number 2 and the Prisoner seem surprised.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: There, see?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Well, if you gentlemen have finished for today, if you don't mind I'll see the young lady at home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They go to the doors, which slide open for them. The Double turns briefly at the top.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They leave. Number 2 turns to the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What in heaven's name made you do a stupid thing like that? Surely you must realise that Number 6 and that girl have got a genuine rapport? Someone's going to have to pay dearly for this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He pushes a switch on his desk. The screen lights up, showing the doctor working in his office.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Number 118! Why was their no mole on Number 12's left wrist?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The doctor gets up from his desk and walks meekly towards the camera, saying nothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I said, why was there no mole? Don't you realise you've jeopardised the whole operation? Report to me first thing in the morning. First thing!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That night, the Prisoner lies in a tormented sleep, fully dressed, in the bed where he woke up with a moustache. His left hand jerks about as though he is reliving the memory of the electric shock conditioning he was given. His dreams are filled with gibbering laughter and distorted images from the nightmare he is living: Number 2 saying "My dear chap", Alison stating "There was a much simpler way to identify Number 6. He has a mole on his left wrist", Number 2 asking "Who are you?", and Alison claiming "He's the one, he's Number 6." In the Control Room, Number 2 and the Double watch his throes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: He's cracking, Number 12, won't be long now...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner wakes up in the middle of the night and sits on the edge of his bed, his left hand fidgeting on his knee. Noticing this, his attention is drawn to the bruise on his fingernail: it's in the middle of the nail. He takes out the photograph that he'd earlier grabbed from Alison, but the image of the nail there is too small to be distinct. He wanders round the house, clicking his fingers, looking for a magnifying glass. Eventually he finds one in a drawer of the dressing table. It reveals that the bruise was right at the base of his nail when the photograph was taken... "yesterday". Also, the calendar in the photo gives the date as "10 FEB", as does the actual calendar in the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stares at himself in the mirror, and recalls how he looked with the moustache. This gradually releases memories of the conditioning he experienced. We see the doctor again with his metal pole.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: The left hand, Number 12.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The bearded Prisoner in his bed bats it away with his right hand and receives an electric shock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Your left hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This time he bats it safely with his left hand, which is in some kind of insulating glove.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: It's always left, that's right. Now catch!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He tosses a small metal device to the Prisoner, who catches it right-handed and gets another shock. But he transfers it to his left hand and throws it back. Next we see him hooked up to some kind of brainwashing machine. He chants the new thoughts as they are fed into his mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I am Number 12... I am left-handed... I am Number 12... I do not smoke cigars... I do not smoke white cigarettes... I smoke black cigarettes... Black cigarettes I smoke... Flapjacks are my favourite dish... Flapjacks... favourite dish...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Next we see him sitting up in bed with a tray of bacon and eggs. He salts them, and is about to eat, but then stops, sniffs the food and rejects it. A nurse takes the tray away and replaces it with a plate of seafood, which he rejects with disgust. The next tray contains flapjacks: after a slight hesitation, he tucks in eagerly. Finally we see his beard being shaved off and his hair being restyled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Back in the cottage that he now knows isn't his, the Prisoner carefully takes a white cigarette from a case. He breaks it open and examines its contents, then crumples it with his left hand and throws it down. He wanders into the living room and opens another case, from which he takes a cigar. He breaks this open too, and finds a mysterious filament inside: evidence of doctoring. Slowly he moves to the sofa and sits down next to a light that's flickering on and off inside its shade. He takes a cigarette from a third box, and then notices that he's been doing all of this with his left hand. The doctor's voice echoes in his head: "Don't forget, Number 12, you're now left-handed. You're now left-handed."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He throws the cigarette away with his left hand, then he picks up the dodgy light and places it on the coffee table. He grabs a metal pipe by the fireplace in his right hand, and then reaches out to the lamp's metal base, giving himself a substantial electric shock that hurls him to the floor. As he gets to his feet, he knocks a small box off a table... and catches it with his right hand. He tosses it and catches it several times, then returns it to the table, all with his new dominant hand. He strides to the door and steps outside. The white ball roars past, ignoring him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In Number 2's office, the butler is giving Number 2 a massage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stands up and puts his jacket back on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Let's see how Number 6 is getting on, shall we?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He touches a switch on his desk, and the empty interior of cottage 12 appears on the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Number 6?... Control Room, Number 6 is gone. Find him!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 6 is creeping through the Village, heading for cottage 6. Two thugs suddenly step out from the shadows to challenge him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The atmosphere here is very different here from what it was... elsewhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thug: What's the password?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: "Gemini".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thug: That's not the password!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The thugs attack him, but he has recovered enough of his former fighting skills to dispatch them both. He continues on his way, but his path is blocked by the huge white ball. He spies a canopied vehicle on the other side of a hedge, runs to it, starts its engine, but then jumps out and hides in a bush. The ball follows the car through the moonlight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 receives a call from the Control Room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: Control Room here. Negative search result so far: no trace of him yet, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Send out a general alarm. Orange alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Double is peacefully asleep on the bed in cottage 6, his light-coloured jacket now removed. The Prsioner enters with scarcely a sound, and creeps towards the bedroom. But the Double has a pistol trained on him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I'm a very light sleeper: it's in my file.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He indicates the gun.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Five-yard range, nerve gas. One squirt -- you're paralysed; two squirts -- you're dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Couldn't sleep. Came here because... ... who am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You know who you are. You're Number 12.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes, yes -- I am Number 12. But sometimes in my dreams I'm... I'm somebody else.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Who?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I don't know. Sometimes in my dreams I resign my job.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Why did you resign your job, in your dream?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Sometimes I'm here in my dreams, and then I come back. I want to know: who am I, why am I here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I think we'll call Number 2. He might be able to help.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He reaches for the telephone and the Prisoner punches him. They fight, hurling themselves round the cottage. The Prisoner manages to push the Double backwards over the kitchen table, picks him up and pins him against the wall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The PASSWORD!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: I don't know what... don't know what you're talking about.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: WHAT IS IT?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: What password?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: WHAT IS IT?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: "Schizoid"... "Schizoid Man".</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: "Schizoid Man"... What's your name?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Curtis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Give me your left wrist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He peels off the mole and sticks it on his own wrist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: You won't get far.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Won't I? We'll see about that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Double punches him and dashes for the door. But the white ball is waiting there for them both. The Prisoner gives the password first.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Schizoid Man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Double: Schizoid Man... Schizoid Man... Schizoid Man!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He backs away from it up a flight of steps, but it squashes him against the wall and suffocates him. The Prisoner goes back inside and picks up the phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Get me Number 2... Curtis here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Password?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Schizoid Man. Number 6 is dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: WHAT?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Rover got him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 slams down the phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Control Room! Deactivate Rover immediately, pending further instruction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the bedroom, the Prisoner swaps his own dark jacket for the light-coloured one with the Number 6 badge that he finds in the wardrobe. He then goes to the Green Dome, where Number 2 is looking upset.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: We're still trying to discover why Rover killed Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: There's going to be hell to pay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Mm. You're to return immediately to report your failure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: My failure? You wanted him broken: I've broken him. I wasn't to know he'd go berserk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Nor was I.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You've studied him: you should have known. It was your idea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: That's a strange thing to say. You know it wasn't.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner walks about.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, you certainly didn't resist.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Bearing in mind its origin, no I didn't. Nor did you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Recriminations aren't going to help. It's a disgrace for us both. When do I leave?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Half an hour. Oh they, er, they want you to talk to the girl Alison before you go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What for?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: They think she might have some insight into Number 6's motivations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh... all right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turns and leaves. Number 2 stares after him for a moment as a suspicion forms in his mind, but he shakes his head and dismisses it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison has just picked up a book called The Mind Reader when there is a knock at the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Come in!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner comes in, still wearing Curtis's light-coloured jacket.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Just leaving. I thought we ought to have a little chat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Oh?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, you're supposed to have had a certain rapport with Number 6. My masters will want to know if you had any insight into his mind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: ... Insight?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes, I... I don't believe in such things myself, but, erm, you were supposed to be able to read each other's minds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: It doesn't work like that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Ah... how does it work?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He moves forward so that she is behind him. She takes a cigarette from a box.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: In, er, spasms: little things, sudden coincidences which aren't really coincidences.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner has taken the lighter from his jacket pocket. Now he swings back to her and lights her cigarette. They stare at each other for a couple of seconds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Bad habit of mine, playing with lighters. Hm! I'll probably start a fire one day. Well, you've nothing to tell me. I'll be on my way. Be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In his cottage, the Prisoner changes into Curtis's civilian suit and notices a photograph signed "from your loving wife Susan" in the wallet. Number 2 enters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Are you ready?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes, just coming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up his case and they step outside and into a taxi.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh, by the way, have you thought any more about that proposition I put to you when you arrived?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Sorry, I've had no time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: But you must have some views?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm afraid not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Look, old chap, we've been through many scrapes before, but we've never fallen out over them. The General's not going to behead you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: We won't know until I've reported to the General, will we?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Report to the General? That's a new one!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, I don't mean report to him personally. For Pete's sake, you know what I mean!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You are edgy! Never known you quite so strung up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You mean I'm not as I was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes... I remember Susan saying only a month ago that you're generally quite unflappable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You have changed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: We all change. The job... changes us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The taxi has brought them to the Recreation Hall, in front of which is a helicopter. The Prisoner picks up his case and walks towards it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: It's a quick flip in the helicopter to the landing stage; you'll pick up a jet from there. Now excuse me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison is waiting for the Prisoner by the helicopter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: I'm ashamed of what I did to Number 6 yesterday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Why are you telling me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: Everyone has to tell someone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It was your job.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: It was a betrayal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Isn't everything we do here a betrayal?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: It's not often one gets a second chance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: There are no second chances.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Alison: There are sometimes, for the lucky ones. If I had a second chance, I want you to know that I wouldn't do it again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She stares at him knowingly, then walks off. Number 2 approaches and holds the helicopter door open for the Prisoner. The pilot gets in on the other side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Well, bon voyage!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh, one last thing. You forgot security regulations... Must be obeyed... The blindfold, old chap.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh, yes, yes, of course!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You, er, you won't forget to give Susan my regards, will you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I won't. Goodbye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Goodbye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 closes the door as the Prisoner puts his blindfold on. The helicopter takes off and flies high over the Village. A few minutes later, it touches down. The door opens and the Prisoner is helped out. His blindfold is removed and he finds himself... exactly where he was, facing Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Susan... died a year ago, Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prison bars slam shut on the Prisoner's face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Next episode: The General</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Guest Stars:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jane Merrow as Alison</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Anton Rodgers as Number 2</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >with</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Angelo Muscat as the Butler</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Earl Cameron as the Supervisor</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Gay Cameron as Number 36</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >David Nettheim as the Doctor</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Pat Keen as the Nurse</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Gerry Crampton as the First Guardian</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dinney Powell as the Second Guardian</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Episode written by Terence Feely and directed by Pat Jackson</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Executive Producer: Patrick McGoohan</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Production Manager: Bernard Williams</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Director of Photography: Brendan J. Stafford B.S.C.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Art Director: Jack Shampan</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Camera Operator: Jack Lowin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Editor: Geoffrey Foot G.B.F.E</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Theme by Ron Grainer</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Musical Director Albert Elms</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Assistant Director: Gino Marotta</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sound Editor: Stanley Smith</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sound Recordist: John Bramall</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Music Editor: Eric Mival</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Casting Director: Rose Tobias-Shaw</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Continuity: Doris Martin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Set Dresser: Kenneth Bridgeman</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Make-Up: Eddie Knight</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hairdressing: Pat McDermot</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wardrobe: Masada Wilmot</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Made on Location</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Borehamwood, England</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An ITC Production</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Incorporated Television Company Limited MCMLXVII</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by Everyman Films Limited</span><br /><br /><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-not-number-i-am-free-man.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am not a number, I am a free man!"</span></a>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-59922664490133015622009-01-15T16:31:00.000-08:002009-01-15T16:34:24.182-08:00"The Prisoner"--Episode Six<div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Prisoner</span><br /><br />Episode Six<br /><br />"The General"<br /></span></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man whom we will call "the Prisoner" resigns and is gassed exactly as before. He wakes up in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The following conversation accompanies a similar miscellany of images.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: In the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What do you want?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Information.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Whose side are you on?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information... Information...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You won't get it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: By hook or by crook... we will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Number 2 from "A, B and C" has been reinstated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: The new Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who is Number 1?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You are Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A helicopter surveys the Village from the air. The Prisoner watches it from a table outside the café, but nobody else pays it any attention. A poster on the wall behind him shows a distinguished face and the words "It can be done. Trust me." The Prisoner looks down and sees a young man staring at him from a nearby table. He glances away, but the man continues staring at him. The Prisoner returns the stare, and the man eventually looks away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At that moment, a voice with a slight American accent issues from the café's loudspeaker, and the Villagers fall silent to listen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Attention, ladies and gentlemen, attention. This is an announcement from the General's department. Will all students taking the three-part history course please return to their dwellings immediately. The Professor will be lecturing in approximately thirty minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With the exception of the Prisoner, all of the café's customers get up and leave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: I will repeat that. This is a special announcement from the General's department, repeat, from the General. Will all students taking the three-part history course return to their dwellings immediately.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner calls to the café's white-haired waiter, who is clearing tables.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Waiter?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: Sir?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Another coffee, please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: Sorry, sir, we're closing. You did hear the announcement, sir? About the Professor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm not one of his students.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: One coffee, sir. Two credit units, if you please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner hands him a piece of card.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: You're never too old to learn, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: (In an icy whisper) Who told you that? The Professor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: No, sir, the General.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The General...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The waiter takes a small device from his pocket and stamps the card.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: Best of luck with your exams, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The waiter wanders off to get the coffee, but the Prisoner gets up without waiting for it. The loudspeaker repeats its announcement.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: This is a special announcement from the General's department, repeat, from the General. Will all students taking the three-part history course return to their dwellings immediately. The Professor will be giving his lecture in thirty minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the archway leading away from the café, the Prisoner pauses to read another poster displaying the same distinguished face. This one additionally bears a slogan attributed to "the General" -- "Our aim: one hundred per cent entry, one hundred per cent pass" -- and attributes to "the Professor" the claim "Speed Learn. A three year course in three minutes. It can be done. Trust me." He is about to proceed on his way, but then steps back to read the poster again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man who was staring at him earlier appears out of nowhere. He is Number 12.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: You don't believe it? A university-level degree in three minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It's improbable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: But not impossible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Nothing's impossible in this place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: You should enrol, Number 6. You'll find the Professor most interesting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: With an extraordinary range of knowledge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The only subject that I'm interested in is, um, getting away from this place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Exactly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12 smiles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: A cog... in the machine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: And the General?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The helicopter suddenly flies overhead and an emergency buggy sets out for the beach, where a crowd of Villagers are chasing someone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who are they after?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: The Professor, I think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He glances at the poster, implying that it is the Professor's face that is there displayed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: You know professors: absent-minded. Best of luck with your exams.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The buggy speeds towards the beach, under orders from the Control Room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: All units: orange alert. Orange alert. All units, all posts: orange alert, orange alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner hurries down to the beach himself, where he sees the mob still haring after the Professor. His foot strikes something buried just below the surface of the sand, and a tinny voice is heard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Voice: Ladies and gentlemen... ladies and gentlemen, fellow Villagers, students, this is the Professor speaking... this is the Professor speaking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner pulls the object from the sand and finds it to be a small tape recorder. He turns up the volume.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Villagers, students... this is the Professor speaking... I have an urgent message for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He suddenly hears the emergency buggy approaching. He stops the tape recorder and casually drops it behind a nearby clump of grass, kicking sand over it to hide it. The vehicle pulls up in front of him and two men get out suspiciously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Are you a student?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who isn't? Are you prefects?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: What are you doing here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Playing truant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Further along the beach, the Professor collapses, exhausted. The crowd drag him back to his feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Come on, we'll give you a lift.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where to?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Home. Hundred per cent entry, hundred per cent pass: you know what the General said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who's the General?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Come on, you don't want to start the term with a black mark.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: All right, let's go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They move towards the buggy, and the guards get in. In the distance, the crowd are pushing the Professor back towards the Village. The Prisoner watches the helicopter as it circles overhead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Get in, mister.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Do you think he'll make it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Who's that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The Professor: he's due to lecture in a few minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: He'll make it. Great man, the Professor. Treats lectures as though his life depended on it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: All right, let's go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They zoom off across the sand. The huge screen in the Control Room tracks them all the way back to the Prisoner's cottage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'll... be seeing you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The buggy departs, leaving him to enter his home. The TV is on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: ... a significance far beyond the confines of this community. To quote our friend the Professor, Speed Learn is nothing less than a revolution in educational technique.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is a rapid three-note fanfare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: The latest figures show a 72.4% enrolment in the "Three Years in Three Minutes" history course. Many thanks... and congratulations!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Another blast of fanfare. The Prisoner gets a drink from the fridge. The TV plays light music for a few seconds, then the fanfare strikes again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: And I think we can promise the General that we will improve even on that figure! And now, someone who needs no introduction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner sits down to watch. The Professor's wife appears on the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Hello. Nice to be seeing you all again. My husband, the Professor, has asked me personally to convey his apologies for detaining you for a few moments. As you know, the huge success of this course has put an added strain upon him, and he's just now completing the notes for the second lecture and should be with us shortly. Meanwhile, poor substitute though I am for my husband, to bring you up to date on our future programme, the extracurricular seminar for post-graduate and advanced students will be held next week---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The announcer's phone rings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Er, excuse me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He answers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: ... Right, thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He puts the phone down again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Thank you, Madam Professor. Your husband is now ready to complete the lecture. We now take you over to the Professor in his study. Best of luck with the exams!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Yet another fanfare. The Prisoner watches, intrigued.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: My apologies, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to say a brief word about Speed Learn. It is quite simply the most important, most far-reaching, most beneficent development in mass education since the beginning of time, a marriage of science and mass communication which results in the abolition of years of tedious and wasteful schooling... a three-year course indelibly impressed upon the mind in three minutes. Impossible? That's what I said, until I was introduced to the General, and then I realised that not only was it possible, but that education was ready for a giant leap forward from the dark ages into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ladies and gentlemen, I have been a teacher for thirty years. Speed Learn has made me as obsolete as the dodo.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: And we're going to prove it!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fanfare, followed by bizarre swirling music.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: The subject of tonight's lecture is "Europe Since Napoleon", a hard, complicated, six-month study. Ladies and gentlemen, sit back, relax, watch the screen. We're going to cover it in fifteen seconds flat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The music becomes intense as a black and white still of the Professor's face gazes out from the screen. The Prisoner stares back, hypnotised. After a few seconds, we zoom into the Professor's left eye where a mysterious coloured light pulses erratically. The Prisoner drops his glass, the TV plays its fanfare, and normality resumes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Fifteen seconds flat! Students wishing supplementary information will please address their queries to The General, Speed Learn, Town Hall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner snaps out of his trance, and cleans up the spilled drink.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: I will repeat that. Please address your queries to The General, Speed Learn, Town Hall. Many thanks, ladies and gentlemen, and... congratulations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 enters with one of his henchmen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Mopping-up operations, Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The henchman passes an electronic device around the Prisoner's body.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Have you lost something?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Not me, the Professor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The henchman starts searching the furniture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I believe you took a stroll on the beach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What beach?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Poor old Professor, losing his recorder with all his notes in it. You didn't see it, of course?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner feigns ignorance, miming a largish object.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Would it have been something about, er, erm, that big, wouldn't it be?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: The Professor is rather worried about it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Why don't you get your man to look in the wardrobe?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The henchman goes into the bedroom and examines the contents of the wardrobe. The Prisoner smiles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Very amusing. Tell me, are you still as keen as ever to leave us?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Any more questions?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I was thinking that a compromise could be arranged in exchange for the recorder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I wonder who has it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The henchman leaves, having failed to find anything.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Enjoy the lecture?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What lecture?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: It's a great experiment, Number 6. You can learn a lot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: History's not my subject.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Isn't it? When was the Treaty of Adrianople?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: September 1829.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What happened in 1830?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Greek independence was assured and guaranteed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: By whom?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Russia, France, Britain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Who was Bismarck's ally against Danish Prince Christian of Glücksburg?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Frederick of Augustenburg. He and the German Bundestag had never accepted the Treaty of London in 1852. Bismarck wanted war, but he wanted it waged by Prussia and Austria in alliance and not by the whole German Bund. He realised that a successful war against the Danes in 1864 would serve the same purpose as Cavour of Italy's entrance into the Crimean War...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 has been watching the Prisoner's speech with satisfaction, and they speak the conclusion in unison.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Both: ... namely that it would indicate future leadership and would at the same time raise Prussia's prestige.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Very good. Ten out of ten. Don't underestimate yourself, Number 6. And don't underestimate me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He leaves, smugly. The Prisoner stands in bewilderment for a few seconds, then rushes for the phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Operator: Can I help you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: When was the treaty of Adrianople?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Operator: September 1829.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What happened in 1830?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Operator: Greek independence was guaranteed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: BY WHOM?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Operator: By Russia, France and Britain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who was Frederick of Augustenburg?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Operator: Bismarck's ally against the Danes under Prince Christian of Glücksburg. Frederick, like the Bundestag, had never adopted the Treaty of London in 1852. He, like Bismarck, was not---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Having heard enough, the Prisoner hangs up. The radio speaks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Radio: Curfew time: fifteen minutes. Curfew time: fifteen minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner paces up and down, then comes to a decision and sneaks down to the beach. He drops to his knees and looks for the tape recorder in the spot where he hid it, but it is no longer there. He is suddenly alerted by the sound of a twig snapping nearby. Acting casual, he slowly gets back to his feet and starts to wander away, but as he passes a bush, he lunges in and angrily hauls out Number 12 by his lapels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Is there anything I can do for you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: You want to get out of this place, don't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: So?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12 reaches into his pocket and pulls out the tape recorder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Here's your passport. Number 2 offered you a deal, didn't he? Don't you trust him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I don't trust Number 2, I don't trust you, and I don't trust your tame Professor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Who do you trust, Number 6?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I trust me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Join the club.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turns to go, then pauses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Oh, er, what was the Treaty of Adrianople?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: September 1829.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Wrong. I said "what", not "when". You need some special coaching.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He wanders off, leaving the Prisoner to listen to the Professor's message on the tape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Villagers, students... this is the Professor speaking... I have an urgent message for you. You are being tricked. Speed Learn is an abomination. It is slavery. If you wish to be free, there is only one way: destroy the General. Learn this and learn it well: the General must be destroyed!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is the next morning, and the brass band are playing. At the café, one of the Villagers passes the waiter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Morning! Nice day again!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: It'll be nice again tomorrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: What happened in 1878?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Waiter: 1878? Eastern Rumania was declared an autonomous province of the Turkish Empire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man laughs warmly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Word-perfect, eh? Well, best of luck with the exams!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 is in what we will later discover to be the board room. There is no one else there apart from the little butler, who is wheeling in a jug of milk on a trolley. Number 2 is on the phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: No, I assure you there's no problem, sir. We're getting a hundred per cent cooperation from everyone and I'm anticipating a truly exciting result... Who, sir? ... Oh, the Professor, just a mild aberration, I assure you. A couple of days' rest and adjustment and he'll be doing everything that we need.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The butler pours a glass of milk, hands it to Number 2 and then wheels the trolley away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes, yes, I will keep in touch, sir, in the closest touch... Thank you, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Grave-faced, he puts the phone down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Probably the most important human experiment we've ever had to conduct. Must treat it like a military exercise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The doors slide open and Number 12 enters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Anything new on the Professor yet?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: He is responding, sir. The doctor will be in to see you personally.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Get over there and tell him to hurry things up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Yes, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turns to go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: No. No, I'll do it myself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He sips his milk. Number 12 steps forward, down the ramp.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Yes, sir... Frankly, sir, I think we're going the wrong way about it with him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You mean about the Professor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: We indulge his idiocies far too much. He's a crank and should be treated as such.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You think so?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: I know he's the cornerstone of Speed Learn, but...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: I can't help feeling he's a troublemaker and he attracts troublemakers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: How long have you been with us, Number 12?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Me, sir? Quite a long time, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: But obviously not long enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Yes, sir... Sorry, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He again turns to go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Number 12. Your opinions about the Professor should be carefully guarded.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12 leaves. We move to the Control Room, which is performing its routine scans of the Village. Number 2 arrives and takes charge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Section 32, sound and vision!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Supervisor speaks into a phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: Put up section 32, sound and vision.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The image on the big screen changes to show the Professor beavering away at his typewriter. A white-coated doctor and nurse enter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: How's it going, Professor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: Please, I'm busy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Breaking the back of the next lecture?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: Please don't distract me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The doctor picks up some sheets of paper from the Professor's desk. The Professor himself keeps typing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Very good, very good indeed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: I'm glad you approve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: You mustn't overdo it. All right, nurse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With the nurse's help, he hauls the Professor away from his work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: I have to finish these notes!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Yes, of course you do, and after a little rest and some mild therapy, you'll be able to work twice as fast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The nurse leads the Professor away. The doctor shuts the door (which we see is marked "The General"), then gathers up the Professor's typings and feeds them into a machine in the corner. It almost immediately emits a perforated strip of metal, which the doctor examines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: Track the Professor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: No, the seminar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: (Into his phone) Right, put up section 39, sound and vision.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The screen changes again to show the Professor's wife supervising an art class in the gardens of a large house. People are sitting all over the place, peacefully sketching. One is asleep, but apparently being sketched by... the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: It's Number 6!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Really, how very odd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner beckons the Professor's wife over.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Can I help you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I don't know. Can you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Finding things a bit strange?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That is the trouble. I can't find anything at all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Well, what exactly are you looking for?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What are we all looking for?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Well, let's see...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She looks around the garden and sees a man sitting in a deckchair. He is ripping pages out of a book and dropping them on the ground.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: That gentleman over there. What do you think he's doing?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Tearing up a book.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: He's creating a fresh concept. Construction arises out of the ashes of destruction. And that woman?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She indicates a woman who is leaning upside down against a wall by some steps.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Standing on her head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: She's developing a new perspective.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He points to the man he was sketching.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: He's asleep. One learns only when the mind wants to, not at set times.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh, is that what your husband believes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: It's self-evident, surely? What's your subject?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What's yours?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Mine? Modern art.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Really? What do you think of this?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He shows her his drawing, which is of her in a general's uniform.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Not altogether flattering. So art's your subject too?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh, no! Military history. Er, generals... and, er, that kind of thing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: I'm afraid you may be wasting your time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What a pity. I understood that your husband was quite an authority on the subject.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: He may be, but I am not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She tears the drawing in half.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh, creation out of destruction?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She walks off in a huff. The Prisoner cautiously starts exploring the gardens.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: Number 6 out of vision.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Scan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Supervisor: (Into his phone) Scan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner enters the house through a window and walks down a darkened hallway into a darkened room. He turns the light on. The room is full of objects covered by white sheets and mounted on low pillars. He crosses to the shuttered window and peeks out at the garden with its art class still continuing. The Professor's wife enters the room behind him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: This is a private room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Interesting view from here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Who are you? A spy?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: How long have you been in this place?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: I don't have to answer your questions. Kindly leave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The whole house is most elegant. Books, paintings and a very beautiful garden.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up a book and idly through it. She seizes it from him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: The Professor and I have certain privileges.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: As prisoners or as warders?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: We came here voluntarily. We have everything we need. We're perfectly happy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Doing what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: My husband is a teacher. He teaches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Ah yes, indeed. And you, er...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He unveils one of the objects. It's a bust.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: ... are the artist?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: For the last time, I'm asking you to leave.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But he continues round the room, unveiling statue after statue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Studies from life?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Rough exercises.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Very good! You really have a, um, considerable talent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: What are you looking for?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I would have thought that with all these privileges, we might find at least one study of, er, the General?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He uncovers a bust of himself, then one of Number 2. The man himself appears at the door, with the doctor visible behind him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: It's really not a bad likeness, is it? Are you playing truant?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm just, um, doing a little homework.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: I didn't ask him here. I found him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You don't have to explain, my dear. Number 6 and I are old friends. I can recommend him as a thoroughly zealous student. With a tendency to overdo it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner has pulled a hefty walking stick from a rack. He now addresses the doctor, who emerges from a room in which we can see the Professor sleeping in a large bed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: How's the Professor? Cooperating?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: I've given him some sedation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Has he been overdoing it too?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Probably a bit excited. You know your husband, my dear. This Speed Learn: he's as enthusiastic as a child.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Now he's sleeping like a babe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: He's not to be disturbed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I wouldn't dream of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He strolls through into the bedroom, waving the stick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Get out! Stop him!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner suddenly smashes the stick down onto the Professor's face. She screams. But the Professor isn't real: the stick has punctured his face, showing it to be a mere plastic shell. The Prisoner picks up a fragment of debris and hands it to the Professor's bewildered wife.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You should take greater care of him, ma'am: he's gone to pieces.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He strides out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You are an odd fellow. I'm afraid you have the wrong end of the stick.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: No, I haven't -- the doctor has.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He throws the stick to the doctor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Just a minute. The offer I made you about the Professor's notes...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: It's cancelled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: He changed his mind. He doesn't need them now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, that's extraordinary. Neither do I!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He pulls the tape-recorder from his pocket and tosses it to Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Best of luck with your exams! Why don't you open the blinds, let in some daylight? You've got nothing to hide, have you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He leaves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Have we to warn Control?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Don't warn anyone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: But he's---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You do your job, I'll do mine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The doctor moves away to pursue his own business.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Ah, my dear, I'm afraid he's made a bit of a mess of your masterpiece.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: ... What does he want?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What some of us want ultimately: to escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: He persists about the General.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I shouldn't worry too much, my dear. I have an obsession about him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The sculpture of the Prisoner's resolutely staring face fills the screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Suddenly we are thrown into the midst of a jubilabnt crowd of Villagers, noisily celebrating the success of the day's lecture. One of them carries a placard with the words "No homework with Speed Learn". The TV announcer is there, reporting from the scene.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: ... far exceeded expectations. Why, it seems that everybody, and I do mean everybody, is falling over themselves to enjoy the fruits of Speed Learn. And why not? A three-year course in three minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12 is also there, watching impassively. The announcer turns to a nearby young woman who removes a pumpkin mask from in front of her face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Madam, Czar Nicholas I occupied the Danubian principalities...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Woman: 1853.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Absolutely correct!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turns to the similarly masked man standing next to her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Sir, when was Victor Emmanuel declared king of Italy in Turin?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: 1861.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Absolutely correct again!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He continues in this questionmasterly fashion. Meanwhile, Number 12 and the Prisoner stand watching each other. The announcer reaches the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: ... Excellent answer, ha-ha ha-ha-ha! Ah, Number 6, what was the date of the Boer War?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: 1899 to 1902.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: And in 1910?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: In 1910 the two Boer republics were incorporated into the Union of South Africa.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: Well done! Coming along nicely, Number 6!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He wanders off, as does Number 12. The Prisoner returns to his cottage and heads for his bedroom, where the ceiling lamp is swaying slightly. As he touches the light switch, all the other lights go off with a bang and the telephone immediately starts beeping. The Prisoner answers it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Voice: Please stay where you are, Number 6. Do not leave. The fault in the electrical circuit will be attended to shortly. Electrics and administration are on their way. You will find candles for such an emergency in the upper kitchen cabinet, second right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A little canopied "Electronics" truck arrives, and the man driving it enters the cottage. The Prisoner is busy lighting a candle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mechanic: Electrics.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Over there, I think.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The mechanic goes over to examine the bedroom light. Someone else enters the cottage: it is Number 12.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Administration here, what's the trouble?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mechanic: This, sir: a deliberate short-circuit across the contacts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Sabotage? That's punishable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mechanic: We need a two-stroke-D replacement, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: All right, contact Control. Get them to switch in temporary reserve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mechanic: Very good, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The mechanic goes out to his truck and takes a headset out of one of the compartments at the back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mechanic: Calling Electrics Control.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Inside the cottage, a whispered conversation is taking place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Is this some of your work?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Some. Listen carefully, we have about fifteen seconds. The Professor's real lecture, the one you heard on the tape recorder: would you like it to go out?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I might.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12 hands him a pen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Take it. In the ink cylinder, micro. Be careful.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: How?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He hands him a couple of tiny white discs bearing the Village's penny-farthing emblem.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: With these. Passes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: When?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Tomorrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The mechanic briefly reenters the cottage. Number 12 jumps away from the Prisoner and speaks authoritatively again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: I'll fix it!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mechanic: All in order, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The mechanic turns and wanders out again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: I'll fix it, Number 6, so that you become aware that deliberate destruction of official property is a most serious offence. I must recommend the full penalty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Which is?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: It could be imprisonment, it could be a fine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'll take the fine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Yes, I thought you might. Report to my office in Administration tomorrow morning.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12 leaves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes... sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is the next morning, in the Professor's house. The Professor (the real one) is lying asleep in bed while the doctor examines him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: How is he, doctor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Fine, beautiful response.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Will he be able to complete the lecture?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Doctor: Able, and willing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She bends over the Professor to make sure he is comfortable.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Outside, two men in black suits, overcoats, top hats and dark glasses, each carrying a briefcase, march through the Village, enter the Town Hall and pass through automatic sliding doors to a room containing a small security device. The device has a loudspeaker. The first man approaches it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Your business, please?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >First Man: Board member, lecture approval session: Education.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Proceed to pass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man takes one of the tiny passes from his pocket and places it in a slot on top of the security device. The device's lid slowly tips back and a little plastic arm, complete with hand, reaches for the pass. As soon as it touches it, it grabs it and the device slams shut.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Pass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The second man approaches the device, as the first man walks into the main part of the room. Number 2 and 12 are already there, also dressed in black suits, hats and glasses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Ah, you have them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >First Man: Right here, sir. Ready processed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He hands him his briefcase. Number 2 takes out some sheets of paper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Excellent. Summon the board.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He hands the papers to Number 12 who crosses to another security device and inserts a pass. The second man approaches and hands Number 2 his briefcase. This one contains a cylinder, carefully packed. The security device lets Number 12 deeper into the building. Number 2 holds the cylinder up to the light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Micro-reduction report satisfactory?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >First Man: Oh, first-class, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Splendid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He touches a control on the desk in front of him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Number 2 calling the General's office. The lectures have arrived. Full security alert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Voice: Yes, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >First Man: Everything all right, sir?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: I don't know about the General, but I think I can say in advance that the experiment is going to be a hundred per cent success.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >More board members, all in black, line up to present their security passes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Your business, please?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Board Member: Board member, lecture approval session: Education.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Proceed to pass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of those in the line is the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 has meanwhile arrived at a heavily guarded door labelled "Projection room". He shows an identity card to one of the guards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Number 2, the Sublimator.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Inside, Number 2 hurries over to the projectionist, a man wearing a white uniform, headphones and the ubiquitous dark glasses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Projectionist: Did the micro come through, sir?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Transmission has been scheduled.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Projectionist: Has this been cleared with the board?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: It will be. Prepare to transmit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Back in the lobby, the Prisoner is leafing through the sheets in his briefcase, eavesdropping on the phrases used by board members to identify themselves. A man dashes in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Education board about to enter session. Hurry, please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Man: Lecture approval session: Education. New member.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Proceed to pass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He slots in his pass and the device duly accepts it. The man runs on into the building without listening to the response from the speaker.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Pass. Board room straight on, first right, first left, straight ahead. You were nearly late. Ninety seconds to session time. Board about to enter session in eighty-seven seconds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner puts his papers away into his briefcase, and then turns to face the security device. He tosses his briefcase past it. There is a small explosion and the briefcase bounces back to him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Do not attempt to pass without using a key. Second occasion is fatal. Session time in eight minutes. Your business, please?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Lecture approval session: Education. New member.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Proceed to pass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He inserts the pass Number 12 gave him, and waits while the device takes it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Pass.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner walks forward into a labyrinth of corridors and advances cautiously.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the board room, the session has now started. The board members are seated round a huge ring-shaped table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Thank you, gentlemen, for your confidence in the General. And now, to show our confidence in you, we will give you a breakdown of the entire operation, in confidence of course.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 sits down, the board members applaud, and Number 12 gets to his feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the corridors, the Prisoner passes the board room door, and hears a muffled voice coming from inside. He continues on his way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Speed Learn is the outcome of the General's prolific knowledge. Its basis is the students' confidence in a tried and trusted Professor, and the Professor's confidence in science.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner arrives at the door to the projection room. Two guards are pacing up in front of it. Concealed behind the corner, he claps his hands to get their attention. One of them turns to see a beckoning hand poking out round the corner. The guard motions to his colleague to approach from the other side, then strides forward, truncheon at the ready, and is neatly felled by a punch out of nowhere as he reaches the corner. The Prisoner drags the unconscious guards into a nearby room, then cautiously enters the projection room. There, the projectionist is busy loading the projector with the miniaturised lecture cylinder, while a voice issues commands via a speaker on the wall.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Stand by, all operatives. Transmission will begin in approximately five minutes. Check in, please. Sound... General studio... Lecture studio... Telecine... Cameras... Projection...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner has by now crept around the back of the projector platform. He reaches up and grabs the projectionist's ankle, but the projectionist stabs him in the left arm with the rod-like instrument he is holding. The Prisoner nevertheless manages to send him crashing off the platform onto the floor below.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Projection?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner discards his hat, grabs the projectionist's white coat and rushes back up onto the platform.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Projection, will you clear please?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner reaches up to the projector's control box and lowers it for use.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Projection!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: All clear. Standing by.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: All operatives clear. Stand by, please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner pauses for a moment to look at the blood flowing down from his wound onto his hand. Then he reaches into his pocket, pulls out the pen that Number 12 gave him and starts to unscrew it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the board room, Number 12 is concluding his speech.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Thus the miniaturised course can be projected through the Sublimator at a speed thousands of times faster than the eye can record.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner carefully extracts the miniaturised cylinder from the pen and loads it into the projector.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Transmission will start in two minutes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: It is imposed directly onto the cortex of the brain and is, with occasional boosts, virtually indelible. Tonight's lecture, for instance...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner has by now put on the projectionist's white coat and headphones and is preparing to operate the projector.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: The transmission will commence in sixty seconds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: And so much for the theory, gentlemen. Now for the practice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 nods to Number 12, who pushes a button. Curtains sweep aside to reveal a large screen displaying the pretransmission checks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Final clearance, please. Sound studio?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A man on the screen gives the thumbs up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: General studio?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The screen shows the announcer, who nods.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Lecture studio?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Professor gives the thumbs up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Cameras?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The shot on the screen pans to show the cameraman filming the Professor. He too gives the thumbs up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Projection?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The screen shows the Prisoner, who unfortunately chooses this moment to remove his shades. Number 2 leaps to his feet.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Telecine?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Hold that picture!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: What picture, sir?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Projection... Closer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The shot zooms in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Closer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The shot closes in on the Prisoner's hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: He's cut his hand, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The shot moves up to show the Prisoner's undisguised face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Poor old chap...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up a phone. Moments later, guards creep up behind the Prisoner in the projection room, hit him over the head and carry him away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With another projectionist installed and the peculiar spoked projector rotating, the real lecture can be broadcast. The board members look anxiously on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Loudspeaker: Transmission will start in five seconds from now. Five... four... three... two... one... it!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The transmission begins, accompanied by the usual weird music. The Professor's face gazes out, and we again zoom into his left eye. This time we get to see all the strange whirling, flashing, pulsating equipment that comprises the Sublimator. After a few seconds, we zoom out of the announcer's eye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Announcer: And so, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the end of another successful edition of Speed Learn. Our thanks to the Professor, and our congratulations to the General. Goodnight to you all. Sweet dreams.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner has been brought to the board room. He sits in the centre of the ring table, still wearing the projectionist's white coat, but with his arm now in a sling. Number 12 paces around him. The only others there are Number 2 and a couple of guards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Who were they, Number 6? Who let you in? What are their names? And there's an organisation, isn't there? Dissidents. Who's the head man?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Santa Claus.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Who's the head of the organisation? You'd be wise to tell us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: He won't tell you anything. He's a trained conspirator. Very hard man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up a sheet of paper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: This reactionary drivel that you were on the point of sending out to our conscientious students: "the freedom to learn", "the liberty to make mistakes", old-fashioned slogans. You are an odd fellow, Number 6, full of surprises.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The phone beeps. It's the Professor's wife.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: 2 here... Ah yes, my dear, congratulations, the lecture went splendidly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: You're pleased?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: Then may I see him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Of course. As soon as he's completed the first phase of the next instalment. He's performing so well it seems a pity to disturb him now. How long? Oh, who can tell? But not long, my dear. He needs you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wife: You'll let me know?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Naturally I'll let you know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He puts the phone down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Lovely woman, warm, sympathetic. She'd talk him into anything to keep him alive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The Professor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Indeed. Such is the course of true love.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Do you need him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: They're both necessary. One for the other. Even essential.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He jumps up and approaches the Prisoner, shoving one of the sections of the table aside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Now, to the matter in hand! I'm sure that a man of your calibre will appreciate that rebels... that rebels must be kept under the closest possible surveillance with a view to their extinction if the rebellion is absolute.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The Professor?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Oh no no no, not the Professor. No problem, he has an adoring wife and an even more attentive doctor. No, no, a lovely fellow. People love him, they'll take anything from him. It's the image, you see, that's important: the kindly image.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up the phone again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: The General's office, if you please.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He turns back to the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You see, my dear chap, he won't answer our questions, but the General can answer anything, given the basic facts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The phone interrupts him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Ah, yes. Yes, it all went splendidly: delighted, absolutely delighted. Er, just a slight problem for you. Mind if we come round?... Thank you, right away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He puts on his top hat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: The General awaits us. We shall soon know what's what.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He puts on his shades and they all set off through the corridors. Eventually they arrive at the door marked "The General". Number 2 knocks and they go in. The Professor is working at his typewriter. Number 2 examines the books on his table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Rousseau and the rest: they're all here, all available to the General. There is no question, no question from advanced mathematics to molecular structure, from philosophy to... crop spraying the General cannot answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Professor finishes his page of typing and feeds it into the nearby machine. The machine emits a strip of metal which Number 2 and the Professor briefly examine. Number 2 nods to the Professor, who crosses to stand beside a large pair of full-length curtains.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: This is how it works. Allow me to introduce... the General.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The curtains pull back to reveal a corridor containing a ramp that leads up to a platform where an assistant is attending to an enormous computer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: All the Professor's own work. He gave birth to it and loves it with a passionate love; probably hates it even more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Professor walks up the ramp and inserts the metal strip into the General. The computer starts to make number-crunching noises.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: That mass of circuits, my dear fellow, is as revolutionary as nuclear fission. No more wastage in schools, no more tedious learning by rote: a brilliantly devised course, delivered by a leading teacher, subliminally learned, checked and corrected by an infallible authority... and what have we got?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: A row of cabbages.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Indeed. Knowledgeable cabbages.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What sort of knowledge?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: For the time being, past history will have to do, but shortly we shall be making our own.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Napoleon could have used it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Professor? Come here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Professor comes back down the ramp.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Take down a problem for the General: an illustration of infallibility.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Professor takes his seat at the typewriter and transcribes what Number 2 says.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Point one: a traitor in the Village. Point two: security pass discs were issued to Number 6. Point three: access to these is through...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He has come to stand right in front of Number 12, who initially avoids eye contact.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: ... through where? Through where?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12: Administration, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Exactly. Put that down! Also that Number 12 is an official in Administration. Now, ask the General---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: A question that can't be answered.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What's that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: There is a question that the General cannot answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Impossible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Allow me to ask it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Are you afraid?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Go ahead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Excuse me, Professor... Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Professor stands up and the Prisoner moves to the typewriter. He removes the sheet on the which the Professor had been typing Number 2's question, and inserts a new one. He then presses four keys and takes the sheet out again. Number 2 peers over to see what he has typed, but the Prisoner keeps it hidden.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: With your permission?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He inserts the sheet into the machine which converts it into the usual metallic strip. He hands this to Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Feed it in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2 passes the strip to the Professor, who ascends the ramp and feeds the strip into the General. Almost immediately, dials start creeping up to their "Danger" zones, while the Professor makes frantic adjustments. The computer starts to roar and spark.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Switch it off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Professor: I CAN'T!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Smoke pours out of the General's ventilation grilles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: SWITCH IT OFF!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As the Professors attempts to do so, he touches a handle that gives him a powerful electric shock. Number 2 steps forward to see what is going on; the Prisoner follows him and the guards try to club him down. While he is busy fighting them off, Number 12 dashes up to help the Professor: as he grabs him, there is a massive explosion and they both fall to the floor, electrocuted. Number 2 staggers up to the burnt-out computer, and picks up the now bent and blackened metallic strip that carried the Prisoner's question.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What was the question?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It's insoluble, for man or machine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: What was it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: W. H. Y. Question mark.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: ... Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 12 and the Professor lie dead in the wreckage. Some time later, the Prisoner walks through the Professor's garden and passes his widowed wife without a word.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prison bars slam shut on the Prisoner's face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Next episode: Many Happy Returns</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Guest Stars:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colin Gordon as Number 2</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >John Castle as Number 12</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Peter Howell as the Professor</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >with</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Angelo Muscat as the Butler</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Al Mancini as the Announcer</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Betty McDowall as the Professor's Wife</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Peter Swanwick as the Supervisor</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Conrad Phillips as the Doctor</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Michael Miller as the Man in the Buggy</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >and</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Keith Pyott as the Waiter</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ian Fleming as the Man at Café/First Top Hat</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Norman Mitchell as the Mechanic</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Peter Bourne as the Projection Operator</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >George Leech as the First Corridor Guard</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jackie Cooper as the Second Corridor Guard</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Episode written by Joshua Adams (i.e. Lewis Greifer) and directed by Peter Graham Scott</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Executive Producer: Patrick McGoohan</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Production Manager: Bernard Williams</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Director of Photography: Brendan J. Stafford B.S.C.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Art Director: Jack Shampan</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Camera Operator: Jack Lowin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Editor: John S. Smith</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Theme by Ron Grainer</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Musical Director Albert Elms</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Assistant Director: Gino Marotta</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sound Editor: Ken Rolls</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sound Recordist: John Bramall</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Music Editor: Eric Mival</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Casting Director: Rose Tobias-Shaw</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Continuity: Doris Martin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Set Dresser: Kenneth Bridgeman</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Make-Up: Eddie Knight</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hairdressing: Pat McDermot</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wardrobe: Masada Wilmot</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Made on Location</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Borehamwood, England</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An ITC Production</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Incorporated Television Company Limited MCMLXVII</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by Everyman Films Limited<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-not-number-i-am-free-man.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am not a number, I am a free man!"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-35424218795474962582009-01-15T16:24:00.000-08:002009-01-15T16:35:27.662-08:00"The Prisoner"--Episode Seven<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">The Prisoner</span><br /><br />Episode Seven<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;">"Many Happy Returns</span>"<br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man whom we will call "the Prisoner" resigns and is gassed exactly as before. He wakes up in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The following conversation accompanies a similar miscellany of images.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where am I?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: In the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What do you want?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Information.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Whose side are you on?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: That would be telling. We want information. Information... Information...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You won't get it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: By hook or by crook, we will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: The new Number 2.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who is Number 1?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: You are Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner wakes up and looks at his watch. He pulls on a dressing gown and wanders into his kitchen, where he switches the kettle on. It doesn't boil. In the bathroom he turns on the shower, but no water comes out. The kitchen radio is broadcasting none of the usual Village announcements: it's completely silent. He picks it up and shakes it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He steps outside. The only sign of life is a black cat, and the only sound to be heard is the howl of the wind. Back inside, he picks up the phone and jiggles the receiver rest: no response.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Having got dressed, he goes to the café. There is crockery on the tables outside, but the door is locked. He walks down to the stone boat. The terrace above it is littered with toppled tables and parasols. He climbs the bell-tower. There is nothing up there but a strong wind, the cry of the seagulls... and the bell. He rings it vigorously, but summons no one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Next he comes across one of the Village taxis parked in a square. He checks that the engine is working, then pockets the key.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Green Dome of Number 2's house looms over him: so he heads there for answers. The doorbell fails to make its usual massive gonglike chime, the door itself isn't locked, and in the hallway there's no sign of the normally ubiquitous butler. The Prisoner approaches the sliding metal doors, but for once they don't open automatically: he has to prise them apart to get in. Number 2's spherical chair has its back to him; when he spins it round, he finds only a shooting-stick umbrella.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He drives off in the taxi, following a road out of the Village. It brings him to a cliff, with a view of high mountains all around.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now in a purposeful pullover, he fells a couple of trees and uses the taxi to haul them down to the shore. He finds some barrels, which he empties, and busies himself constructing a raft. He raids the General Stores for provisions, chalking the words "I.O.U. 964. No 6?" on the counter. He takes a radio and also a camera, with which he takes many photographs of the Village to corroborate his story.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With the raft now ready, he releases it from its mooring... then tenses as he hears something shatter to his right. Slowly he turns to look. The black cat has knocked over a jug on a table. He boards the raft and pushes off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Once some way out to sea, sail billowing, the Prisoner removes the film from the camera and wraps it in a waterproof bag. He takes the radio apart and uses the speaker to magnetise a needle, with which he makes a compass. He back-folds a copy of the Tally Ho (with headline "What are facts behind Town Hall?") and starts a diary on the blank side: "Day 1."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >We see him shaving. It is "Day 5". We see him eating from a tin. It is "Day 7". He catches himself nodding off. It is "Day 18". He collapses from exhaustion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He stirs at the sound of an engine. Someone steps over him. He is able to see two men transferring his provisions onto their own boat, before they dump him into the water and leave him for dead. They retire to the helm and motor off, failing to notice the Prisoner climbing aboard at the stern. He goes below deck and ducks out of sight as one of the men comes out of the galley with a tray of the Prisoner's food.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >While the men feast at the wheel, the Prisoner slips into a cabin and prises the lid off a large crate: it's full of guns and ammunition. At the helm, one of the smugglers turns on the boat's radio, which gabbles in an unintelligible language. The Prisoner meanwhile enters the galley, puts a frying pan on the stove, soaks some cloths in alcohol from a bottle, and sets fire to them. He then puts a large wet cloth over the pan, turning its contents into a smoking mass. He hides in the cabin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of the gunrunners (Gunther) smells the smoke, and shouts in German. He dashes down to the galley, leaving the other man (Ernst) at the helm. The Prisoner grabs him from behind and silently renders him unconscious by locking his arm round the man's neck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ernst: Gunther! Wo bist du?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ernst stops the boat, descends to the galley and gets rid of the smoking cloths. The Prisoner punches him to the floor as he emerges, and drags him to join Gunther in the cabin. He ties their hands behind their backs, ties their ankles and puts a chain on the door. On the bed, Gunther opens an eye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner goes to the helm and steers the boat on through the night. Gunther manages to pull himself into a sitting position, and then lies down on the floor back to back with Ernst, attempting to wake him. The Prisoner sees a light on the horizon to port, and points the boat towards it. Meanwhile the gunrunners have managed to untie each other and are now thwarted by the chained door. There's a cupboard on the floor against one wall; they take everything out of it and kick their way through the back into the next cabin. The Prisoner hears nothing over the noise of the engine, and keeps making for the light.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ernst starts to creep up the stairs to the helm, but Gunther indicates with a gesture that they should go up by the aft stairs. They crawl forward on opposite sites of the boat, then burst in on the Prisoner. Gunther is quickly sent hurtling headfirst down the stairs, while Ernst forces the Prisoner out onto the deck where they continue to fight. Gunther reappears at the helm and takes a revolver from a drawer. The Prisoner sees him approaching and jumps overboard, frantically swimming for shore as shots hit the water around him. The gunrunners head back out to sea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner wakes up in daylight, unkempt and bedraggled on a stony beach. He gets to his feet and sees the lighthouse of the night before. He takes something from his pocket: his makeshift diary and the roll of film, still wrapped in their bag and undamaged by water. A sheer cliff rises from the beach, and he starts to climb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the top of the cliff he encounters a man walking his dog.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where is this?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He gets no reply. The man hesitates, then simply turns and walks off along the clifftop. The Prisoner follows at a distance. They come to a horse, grazing in front of a gypsy caravan, where a woman and another man are cooking over a fire. The man with the dog sits down and has a brief argument with the woman in Romany. The woman walks over to the Prisoner, silhouetted against the sky, and speaks unintelligibly to him. She calls to those at the fire and gestures for them to bring something. The man with the dog starts arguing again, and the woman storms back to the fire, picks up a beaker and offers it to the Prisoner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner approaches, and the woman gestures for him to drink. He takes a sip. She says something to the others with an "I-told-you-so" expression on her face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where is this place?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Woman: Uh?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: A road. Where is there a road?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Woman: Ah! Dondaro doa doi.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She points. The Prisoner nods, then finishes his drink, hands the beaker back to her, thanking her, and hurries off in the indicated direction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He walks across a moor and through a wood, and eventually reaches a road... where a British policeman is waving the traffic on. The Prisoner retreats into the trees and emerges again at a point further down the road, where the police have blocked the road. He sees a large lorry approaching the roadblock, and races off again through countryside. He reaches the road beyond the roadblock, and waits for the lorry to arrive. As it passes him, he runs out behind it and manages to hurl himself inside. The lorry is largely empty, and the Prisoner climbs up onto a flat area above the cab, covers himself in some old sacks, and falls asleep.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Some time later he wakes to the sound of a police siren. In a fit of panic, he jumps straight out of the back of the lorry onto a busy street. He recognises where he is: he is back in London with its red double-decker buses and its tourists with their cameras.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He wanders through the capital, and finds his way back to his own house. He casually walks past it as far as the street corner, looks around, then goes and knocks on his own door. A maid answers, eyeing his dishevelled appearance with disdain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maid: Yes?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Who owns this house?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maid: I beg your pardon!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I... I'm sorry, what I meant was, I... I'd like to see your master.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maid: My mistress is not at home!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, do you mind if I wait?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She shuts the door in his face. He slowly wanders off, then stops as he hears a familiar noise behind him. His own Lotus 7 pulls up outside his house, driven by a middle-aged lady in a trouser suit. She gets out and opens the front door of what was once the Prisoner's house. The Prisoner stares at the car for a second, and is just in time to address the lady before she closes the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What's the number of that car?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She steps back onto the doorstep and regards him with mild amusement.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lady: Terribly interesting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: K-A-R, a hundred and twenty C. What's the engine number?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lady: Do tell me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: 461034TZ.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lady: Marvellous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I know every nut and bolt and cog. I built it with my own hands.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lady: Then you're just the man I want to see. I've been having a good deal of overheating in traffic. Perhaps you'd care to advise me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She turns to go in. The Prisoner looks awkward.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lady: Come in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Slowly, the Prisoner steps inside. As a clock chimes somewhere in the house, we watch through the Prisoner's eyes as the lady leads him across a chequered floor and opens the door to the living room -- a door that looks just like the front door to the Prisoner's cottage in the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lady: This way... Make yourself at home. And I'll organise some tea. You would like some tea?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Lady: I'm Mrs Butterworth. And you are?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner enters the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: An exile.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: A nameless exile?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: No. Smith... Peter... Smith.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Enchanting! Be comfortable and I'll be back in a moment. And then you can enlighten me on the intricacies of KAR 120C.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She goes out, shutting the door behind her. The Prisoner is left alone to wander round the room, which is just as he left it, and of course exactly like the front area of his cottage. He looks out of the window and sees a skyscraper, then performs a further reality check by picking up the phone and hearing the dialling tone. The only object he doesn't recognise is a wedding photo on the writing desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth comes back in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Refreshment's on the way. Now, tell me more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: What's the date?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Saturday, March the eighteenth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Tomorrow's my birthday.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: You're an odd fellow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She takes a cigar from a box and proceeds to light it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Er, sorry, you, er, er... you must think I'm crazy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Who isn't these days?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Do you know, this was, er... this was my house?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: In better days?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Before I went away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: You must miss it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The lease, um, had six months to run.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: It's been renewed. I have it for ten years, fully furnished.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Oh really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Is the inventory in order?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'll bet. The only thing that's missing is a body.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Don't tell me you've been prying into my private affairs?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is a long pause.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Forgive me, I'm... I'm very sorry. Er, would you do me a very great favour?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Are you growing a beard?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Pity. I've always had rather a soft spot for bearded men, but I could never get dear Arthur to grow one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Arthur?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: My late husband. Navy, you know: unhappily now deceased.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is a knock at the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Come in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The maid comes in with a tray of tea and sandwiches. She puts it down on the coffee table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Oh, thank you Martha. Is this the, um, gentleman you said called earlier?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maid: It is, madam.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth sits on the couch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Her description of you was hardly flattering, Mr Smith. You must learn to delve beneath the surface, Martha. Who knows what treasures you may find? All right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maid: Thank you, madam.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She departs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Come and sit down, Mr Smith.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He joins her on the couch. She offers him the plate of small triangular sandwiches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Sandwich?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Thanks very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He takes one and eats it whole. Mrs Butterworth hands him a napkin, and then gives him the plate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: You're very kind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: It's a pleasure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner starts eating voraciously. Some time later, we see him wiping his mouth with the napkin. There's an empty cakestand on the table in front of him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That was the best fruitcake I've ever tasted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: I'm a very good cook. It's one of my hobbies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes... Mrs Butterworth, I asked if you would do me a very great favour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Certainly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He goes over to the writing desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Behind this desk there was an area of dry rot which was made good about twelve months ago. The bathroom door is sliding: it opens to the left. The sink is on the right as you go in. The hot and cold taps on the shower were put on the wrong way round.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth laughs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: I had them changed. Don't be so silly, you haven't got to prove anything: I believe you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm sorry. I'm not used to that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: What can I do for you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I would like to see the lease of the house and the logbook of the car.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: How mysterious.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She joins him at the desk and gives him an envelope. The Prisoner opens it and examines the lease it contains while Mrs Butterworth rummages further.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: This is a new one. Yours is the, um, the first name on it. There's no indication of a previous owner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: The estate agents arranged it all. They said the car was for sale, it was reasonable, and I've always had a taste for a little speed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She hands him another enveloped document. He examines it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The, erm, estate agents were Stombell and Croydon?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Most reputable. And a charming man dealt with me: Mr Croydon himself. Did you ever meet him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: No. That wasn't the firm that I did business with.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: How odd.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Isn't it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He returns the documents to the desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Mrs Butterworth, you've been extremely kind in allowing me to intrude upon your privacy in this way. I have to make two important calls, one in the country, one in town, so if you'll please excuse me, I'll say goodbye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Mr Smith, you mustn't!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm sorry, I have to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: You mustn't go like that!... Some of dear Arthur's things, you're very welcome. I've kept them all, you see. I suppose it's stupid, but even though there isn't a man about the place, I like to feel that there is. Do you understand what I mean?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Well, yes, I...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: I just know you're in some kind of trouble. Have you any money?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Ah! There you are, you see. How are you going to get about?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Perfectly all right. I can manage, thank you... very much indeed... you've been terribly kind...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He makes for the front door, but she takes him by the arm and guides him protestingly to the staircase.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: You're silly and independent and proud. Now come on, upstairs. You'll find everything you want in the bathroom, and I'll lay out some of Arthur's clothes out for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The next thing we see is the Prisoner, washed and brushed and wearing clean clothes, sitting in the Lotus 7 outside the house. Mrs Butterworth stands on the pavement.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: On condition you stop that nasty overheating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: It's a deal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Bon voyage.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Mrs Butterworth, you've been tremendously---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: No speeches! Off you go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He starts the engine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Don't forget to come back!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'll be back!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: I might even bake you a birthday cake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I hope you will!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And with a cheery wave he sets off through London to the accompaniment of the title theme, taking the same route as he did on the day of his resignation. He opens the double doors to the office where it all started, and steps up to the same man working busily at the same desk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Anyone at home?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A while later, we find the Prisoner pacing up and down in a large, lavish suite of roomns that opens onto a enclosed garden. A man (the Colonel) is sitting on the wall by the garden, examining the black and white photographs that the Prisoner took in the Village. Another man (Thorpe) stands at a table in an inner room, looking through another set of photos.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Pretty spot: mixture of architectures: Italianate. Difficult. Certainly has a Mediterranean flavour. What do you think, Thorpe?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: I think I wouldn't mind a fortnight's leave there. Prison for life, eh? It's a far cry from Sing Sing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm sorry to interrupt an afternoon's golf, Colonel, but this is not a joking matter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Colonel gets up and joins the other two by the table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: My dear fellow, you really mustn't blame Thorpe. After all, you yourself on occasion could be a little sceptical. That's why you were such a good man... why we were so sorry to lose you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up the unfolded copy of the Tally Ho and peruses it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The evidence is there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: A set of photographs from ground level of a holiday resort, and a schoolboy log on the back of what you call the Village newspaper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe pours himself a drink and goes and sits in an armchair. The Colonel leans on the mantelpiece.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I'm sorry, it's the best I could do in the circumstances. You'd hardly expect the Village store to issue sextants, would you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He goes and faces them from the other side of the room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Indeed, indeed, if the place is as you say it was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: The Tally Ho.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: A daily issue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Morning or evening?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Daily at noon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: "What are facts behind Town Hall?" Town Hall?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That's right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Town Council?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Correct.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Were you a member?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I could have been. It's democratically elected once a year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Democratically.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That's what they claim.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: And they're all numbers. No names. No names at all?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Just numbers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: I see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Numbers in a village that is a complete unit of our own society. A place to put people who can't be left around. People who know too much or too little. A place with many means of breaking a man.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Intriguing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: They have their own cinema, their own newspaper, their own television station, a credit-card system, and if you're a good boy and cough up the secrets, you are gracefully retired into the old people's home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: But, er, no escape?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: They also have a very impressive graveyard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Which you avoided.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The Village was deserted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Perhaps they were on the democratic annual outing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner strides to the table, grabs a pile of photographs and angrily shows each in turn to the Colonel. The Colonel watches the Prisoner rather than the photos.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: The Town Hall. Number 2's residence. My house. The old people's home---</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: My dear fellow, you really mustn't get excited. You must forgive us but, you see, we have a problem. Er, tell him our problem, Thorpe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: You resign, you disappear, you return. You spin a yarn that Hans Christian Andersen would reject for a fairytale.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: And we must be sure. People defect. An unhappy thought, but a fact of life. They defect... from one side to the other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: I also have a problem. I'm not sure which side runs this Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: A mutual problem.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Which I'm going to solve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Quite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: If not here, then elsewhere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They stare unblinkingly at each other for a few seconds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Thorpe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Sir?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Check.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Yes, sir.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Check every detail contained in our ex-colleague's report.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe gets up from his chair. We cut to Mrs Butterworth being interviewed by a policeman with a notebook in her living room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mrs Butterworth: Of course I helped him. I'd help anyone in trouble... wouldn't you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Another policeman, this one in uniform, pokes the remains of the gypsies' fire with his foot before cycling off along the clifftop. We return to the Colonel's rooms, where a large world map has been put up on an easel. The table is covered in navigational charts, which two men (an old Marine Commander and an RAF Group Captain) are poring over. Thorpe is on the phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Never mind, keep checking and report when you have anything.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He puts the phone down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: All corroborated apart from the boat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: The beach?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Gypsies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Romanies. What about the roadblock?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Oh, nothing to do with you, my dear fellow: an escaped convict.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner picks up a cup of tea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Can't you give us anything more on the boat? No name?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Would you advertise if you were gunrunning?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: No. I would not. I most certainly would not. Would you, Thorpe?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He picks up a cup and saucer and moves away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Are you satisfied?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Let us say that the dice are heavily loaded in your favour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: All right, let's get to work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He goes to the table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Commander, how's it going?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: On the basis of your log, and allowing for the variance of your primitive device, and the lack of speed of your craft, I estimate you would have averaged some three and a half knots.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: Assuming fair winds. You had fair winds?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Mostly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: You appreciate there is no allowance for time?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: No, there couldn't have been. I had no charts nor any means of assessing them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: You slept for how long?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Four hours out of each twenty-four.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: Remarkable. So, in your twenty-five days at sea, you proceeded at an average of three and a half knots for twenty hours out of each twenty-four on a northeasterly course, which would put us at, er...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Captain: Four hours' sleep, twenty hours' under fair sail, maximum travel on a true course: one thousand seven hundred and fifty miles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Where was the lighthouse?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe points to the south coast of England on the world map.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Captain sets a pair of compasses against a ruler.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Captain: Two hundred and fifty miles to the inch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He goes to the map and draws a large circle centred on the lighthouse. The circle clips the coasts of Iceland and the Black Sea, and contains the western half of the Mediterranean and a large chunk of the Atlantic.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Yes, that's my maximum possible travel. Minimum would be, Commander?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: I'd be inclined to allow at least four hundred miles' differential.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Captain: Call it five hundred to cover drift and tide.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He draws a smaller circle inside the other one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: Yes... on a northeasterly course with an equable climate...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Commander takes a set square and draws one line on a northeasterly bearing, then another running north-south.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Commander: Somewhere about here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He shades in the southwest region delimited by the various lines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Coast of Morocco; southwest of Portugal and Spain.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Captain: Might be an island.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is dawn on the next day, the Prisoner's birthday. The Prisoner is in a building at an airfield, wearing a flying suit ready for departure. A milkfloat pulls up outside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: We've got five hundred by fifteen hundred to sweep: seven hundred and fifty thousand square miles. Quite an area.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Behind them, the Captain comes off the phone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Captain: The clearance has just come through for refuelling in Gibraltar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Captain starts to fasten the boots of his flying suit. The Prisoner picks up his flying helmet and wanders out with the Colonel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Good. Then we'll sweep as far as we can today, and then again tomorrow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: And tomorrow and tomorrow. You're a stubborn fellow, Number 6.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: James, you call me that once again and you're liable for a bout in hospital.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Captain: I won't be a minute!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They shut the door, leaving the Captain to his boots.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: Good luck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Thanks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They shake hands and the Prisoner walks off towards the waiting two-seater plane. Behind them, the milkman takes a crate of milk into the room they have just left. The Prisoner passes Thorpe, standing by a Rolls Royce, and waves. The Colonel joins Thorpe, and together they watch the Prisoner climb aboard and don his helmet. The Captain, already helmeted, approaches from the building and climbs into the pilot's seat. The plane moves off down the runway.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thorpe: Interesting fellow.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Colonel: He's an old, old friend who never gives up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The plane soars into the air and the Rolls Royce drives off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hours pass and the plane is now flying over the search area: islands in a gorgeous blue sea. The Prisoner is keeping an accurate navigational log.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: Turn. Sweep back fifteen degrees southwest... ... Sweep nine degrees southwest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At last, the Prisoner catches a familiar sight in the distance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: That could be it. Go closer...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Captain nods. Far below them is, unmistakably, the Village.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prisoner: There it is. We've found it: that's it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Captain suddenly removes his oxygen mask and briefly turns to face the Prisoner. It's not the Captain: it's the milkman!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Milkman: Be seeing you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He pulls a control on the panel in front of him and the Prisoner is ejected into the air. The Prisoner's parachute opens and he drifts down to land on the Village beach. The black cat is still there, watching him from the table with the broken jug. Bewildered and angry, the Prisoner scrambles out of his parachute and gets to his feet. He walks across the sand and back into the Village, back to his cottage. The place is as deserted as the day he left.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He goes indoors. The shower, lights and kettle all come on simultaneously. A miaow alerts him to the presence of the black cat, and he turns to see Mrs Butterworth walk in. She carries a birthday cake with flaming candles, and wears a black Number 2 badge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Number 2: Many happy returns.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Prisoner hears jolly marching music. Ignoring Number 2, he crosses to the window and sees colourfully dressed Villagers parading round the central pond. Between him and the procession, the little butler stands motionless, holding his black and white umbrella above his head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prison bars slam shut on the Prisoner's face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Guest Stars:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Donald Sinden as the Colonel</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Patrick Cargill as Thorpe</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Georgina Cookson as Mrs Butterworth</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >with</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Brian Worth as the Group Captain</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Richard Caldicot as the Commander</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dennis Chinnery as Gunther</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jon Laurimore as Ernst</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Nike Arrighi as the Gypsy Girl</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Grace Arnold as the Maid</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Larry Taylor as the Gypsy Man</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Episode written by Joshua Adams (i.e. Lewis Greifer) and directed by Peter Graham Scott</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Executive Producer: Patrick McGoohan</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Production Manager: Bernard Williams</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Director of Photography: Brendan J. Stafford B.S.C.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Art Director: Jack Shampan</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Camera Operator: Jack Lowin</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Editor: Geoffrey Foot G.B.F.E.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Theme by Ron Grainer</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Musical Director Albert Elms</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Cameraman (2nd Unit): Robert Monks</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Assistant Director: Ernie Morris</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sound Editor: Wilfred Thompson</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Sound Recordist: John Bramall</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Music Editor: Eric Mival</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Casting Director: Rose Tobias-Shaw</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Continuity: Josie Fulford</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Set Dresser: Kenneth Bridgeman</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Make-Up: Eddie Knight</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hairdressing: Pat McDermot</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Wardrobe: Masada Wilmot</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Made on Location</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Borehamwood, England</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An ITC Production</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Incorporated Television Company Limited MCMLXVII</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by Everyman Films Limited</span><br /><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2009/01/i-am-not-number-i-am-free-man.html"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I am not a number, I am a free man!"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br /></span></div></div>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-17938007519758266152008-11-21T13:28:00.000-08:002008-11-21T13:39:32.125-08:00Some astronomy poems<div style="text-align: center;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >The Shortest Day</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Ann R. Cantu</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >December calls on the Status Quo</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >to mingle and snuggle, sigh and glow,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >to look to the heavens and pray for snow.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Yet there's something different we long to know.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Feathered beings would beg to differ</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >that a warmer clime is better for winter.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >For who can sleep when it's 10 below</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >and your home is naught but a hedgerow?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >It's months from purple martin time.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >An order must be followed, by the bye.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >But we ride along a strange frontier, where</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >science takes a back seat and storm clouds drive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Wee folk dance with sugared dreams.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Things scurry invisible through forest cover.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Tapestries woven from all we call known</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >display complacent ancestory, bound in time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >When you look to the sky, what common denominator</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >cries out that nature makes us brothers and sisters,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Defying genetics, heritage and convention,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >above our chemistry, a mystery in history?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >So exactly what will the Fates allow?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Have yourself a merry little Solstice.</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >The Star-Splitter</span><br /><br />by<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > Robert Frost</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >You know Orien always comes up sideways.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And rising on his hands, he looks in on me</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >I should have done by daylight, and indeed,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >After the ground is frozen, I should have done</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >To make fun of my way of doing things,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >These forces are obliged to pay respect to?"</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >He burned his house down for the fire insurance</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And spent the proceeds on a telescope</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >To satisfy a life-long curiosity</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >About our place among the infinities.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >"What do you want with one of those blame things?"</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!"</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >More blameless in the sense of being less</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >A weapon in our human fight," he said.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it."</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >He burned his house down for the fire insurance</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And bought the telescope with what it came to.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >He had been heard to say by several:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >The strongest thing that's given us to see with's</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >A telescope. Someone in every town</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >In Littleton it may as well be me."</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >After such loose talk it was no surprise</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >When he did what he did and burned his house down.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Mean laughter went about the town that day</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And he could wait--we'd see to him to-morrow.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >But the first thing next morning we reflected</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >If one by one we counted people out</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >To get so we had no one left to live with.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >For to be social is to be forgiving.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >But what we miss we go to him and ask for.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >He promptly gives it back, that is if still</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >About his telescope. Beyond the age</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Of being given one's gift for Christmas,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >He had to take the best way he knew how</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >To find himself in one. Well, all we said was</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >He took a strange thing to be roguish over.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Some sympathy was wasted on the house,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >A good old-timer dating back along;</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >But a house isn't sentient; the house</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Didn't feel anything. And if it did,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Why not regard it as a sacrifice,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Out of a house and so out of a farm</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >To earn a living on the Concord railroad,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >As under-ticket-agent at a station</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Was setting out up track and down, not plants</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >As on a farm, but planets, evening stars</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >That varied in their hue from red to green.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Often he bid me come and have a look</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >At a star quaking in the other end.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >I recollect a night of broken clouds</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And underfoot snow melted down to ice,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And melting further in the wind to mud.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Bradford and I had out the telescope.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >We spread our two legs as it spread its three,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And standing at our leisure till the day broke,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Said some of the best things we ever said.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Because it didn't do a thing but split</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >A star in two or three the way you split</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >A globule of quicksilver in your hand</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >With one stroke of your finger in the middle.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >It's a star-splitter if there ever was one</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And ought to do some good if splitting stars</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Do we know any better where we are,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And how it stands between the night to-night</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >How different from the way it ever stood?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" ><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >Bright Star</span><br /><br />by<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >John Keats </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And watching, with eternal lids apart,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >The moving waters at their priest like task</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And so live ever--or else swoon to death.</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:130%;" >Star Watcher</span><br /><br />by<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >slmitchell</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > 11/26/01 </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >The moon tonight is elsewhere</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Dark scudding cloud cover</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Heavy grumbles through the air</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Misty touch like a lover</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Stay and laugh for just awhile</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Illuminating flashes</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Something here makes me smile</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Whipping wind giving lashes</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Above beyond the rain cloud</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Rainbows follow stormy weather</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Clustered starshine light so</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > proud</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Still wish us together</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > Sudden small opening break</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Want to touch and then to hold</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >A bright star begins an ache</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Embrace to enfold</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" > The moon tonight is elsewhere</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >And so should I be, too</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Not just to stand and stare</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:arial;" >Star watcher thinks of you</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > </span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;"></span><br /><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/11/therapy-in-starssure.html"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: arial;">Return to "Therapy in the stars?...sure"</span></a></div></div>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-65878971138093129962008-11-17T08:46:00.000-08:002008-11-17T09:21:03.773-08:00Lawrence H. Summers speech on January 14th, 2005<span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This is the January 14th, 2005 speech given behind closed doors at Harvard by President Lawrence H. Summers.</span><br /></div><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS, Harvard President: I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard's policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation, because I was willing to do the second and didn't feel like doing the first. And so we have agreed that I am speaking unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we're doing at Harvard to promote the crucial objective of diversity. There are many aspects of the problems you're discussing and it seems to me they're all very important from a national point of view.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I'm going to confine myself to addressing one portion of the problem, or of the challenge we're discussing, which is the issue of women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions, not because that's necessarily the most important problem or the most interesting problem, but because it's the only one of these problems that I've made an effort to think in a very serious way about.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The other prefatory comment that I would make is that I am going to, until most of the way through, attempt to adopt an entirely positive, rather than normative approach, and just try to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we observe what we observe without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It is after all not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the -- I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are -- the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Maybe it would be helpful to just, for a moment, broaden the problem, or the issue, beyond science and engineering. I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or 25 years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are 40, 45, 50 years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like 50-50, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, 20 or 25 years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What does one make of that? I think it is hard -- and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively -- to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their 40s near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect -- and this is harder to measure -- but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe. One can put it differently. Of a class, and the work that Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz are doing will, I'm sure, over time, contribute greatly to our understanding of these issues and for all I know may prove my conjectures completely wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Another way to put the point is to say, what fraction of young women in their mid-20s make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about 80 hours a week. What fraction of young men make a decision that they're unwilling to have a job that they think about 80 hours a week, and to observe what the difference is. And that has got to be a large part of what is observed. Now that begs entirely the normative questions -- which I'll get to a little later -- of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance. To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. She reports that of her first year section, there were 22 women, of whom three are working full time at this point. That may, the dean of the Business School reports to me, that that is not an implausible observation given their experience with their alumnae. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do high-powered intense work?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability -- there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means -- which can be debated -- there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top 25 research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three-and-a-half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, 20 different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper -- looked at the book, rather -- looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5 percent of twelfth graders. If you look at those -- they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth -- but 50 percent women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20 percent. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If you do that calculation -- and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways -- you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Because if my reading of the data is right -- it's something people can argue about -- that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth -- I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true -- is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There may also be elements, by the way, of differing, there is some, particularly in some attributes, that bear on engineering, there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I just returned from Israel, where we had the opportunity to visit a kibbutz, and to spend some time talking about the history of the kibbutz movement, and it is really very striking to hear how the movement started with an absolute commitment, of a kind one doesn't encounter in other places, that everybody was going to do the same jobs. Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries, sometimes the men were going to fix the tractors and the women were going to work in the nurseries, and just under the pressure of what everyone wanted, in a hundred different kibbutzes, each one of which evolved, it all moved in the same direction.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my 2-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters, who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There are two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis for two reasons. First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last 15 years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The second empirical problem is that girls are persisting longer and longer. When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are 20, or when people are 25, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again, to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The most controversial in a way, question, and the most difficult question to judge, is what is the role of discrimination? To what extent is there overt discrimination? Surely there is some. Much more tellingly, to what extent are there pervasive patterns of passive discrimination and stereotyping in which people like to choose people like themselves, and the people in the previous group are disproportionately white male, and so they choose people who are like themselves, who are disproportionately white male. No one who's been in a university department or who has been involved in personnel processes can deny that this kind of taste does go on, and it is something that happens, and it is something that absolutely, vigorously needs to be combated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >On the other hand, I think before regarding it as pervasive, and as the dominant explanation of the patterns we observe, there are two points that should make one hesitate. The first is the fallacy of composition. No doubt it is true that if any one institution makes a major effort to focus on reducing stereotyping, on achieving diversity, on hiring more people, no doubt it can succeed in hiring more. But each person it hires will come from a different institution, and so everyone observes that when an institution works very hard at this, to some extent they are able to produce better results. If I stand up at a football game and everybody else is sitting down, I can see much better, but if everybody stands up, the views may get a little better, but they don't get a lot better.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And there's a real question as to how plausible it is to believe that there is anything like half as many people who are qualified to be scientists at top 10 schools and who are now not at top 10 schools, and that's the argument that one has to make in thinking about this as a national problem rather than an individual institutional problem.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The second problem is the one that Gary Becker very powerfully pointed out in addressing racial discrimination many years ago. If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap. And I think one sees relatively little evidence of that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What's to be done? And what further questions should one know the answers to? Let me take a second, first to just remark on a few questions that it seems to me are ripe for research, and for all I know, some of them have been researched.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >First, it would be very useful to know, with hard data, what the quality of marginal hires are when major diversity efforts are mounted. When major diversity efforts are mounted, and consciousness is raised, and special efforts are made, and you look five years later at the quality of the people who have been hired during that period, how many are there who have turned out to be much better than the institutional norm who wouldn't have been found without a greater search. And how many of them are plausible compromises that aren't unreasonable, and how many of them are what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent clear abandonments of quality standards. I don't know the answer, but I think if people want to move the world on this question, they have to be willing to ask the question in ways that could face any possible answer that came out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Second, and by the way, I think a more systematic effort to look at citation records of male and female scholars in disciplines where citations are relatively well-correlated with academic rank and with people's judgments of quality would be very valuable. Of course, most of the critiques of citations go to reasons why they should not be useful in judging an individual scholar. Most of them are not reasons why they would not be useful in comparing two large groups of scholars and so there is significant potential, it seems to me, for citation analysis in this regard.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Second, what about objective versus subjective factors in hiring? I've been exposed, by those who want to see the university hiring practices changed to favor women more and to assure more diversity, to two very different views. One group has urged that we make the processes consistently more clear-cut and objective, based on papers, numbers of papers published, numbers of articles cited, objectivity, measurement of performance, no judgments of potential, no reference to other things, because if it's made more objective, the subjectivity that is associated with discrimination and which invariably works to the disadvantage of minority groups will not be present.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I've also been exposed to exactly the opposite view, that those criteria and those objective criteria systematically bias the comparisons away from many attributes that those who contribute to the diversity have: a greater sense of collegiality, a greater sense of institutional responsibility. Somebody ought to be able to figure out the answer to the question of, if you did it more objectively versus less objectively, what would happen. Then you can debate whether you should or whether you shouldn't, if objective or subjective is better. But that question ought to be a question that has an answer, that people can find.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Third, the third kind of question is, what do we know about search procedures in universities? Is it the case that more systematic comprehensive search processes lead to minority group members who otherwise would have not been noticed being noticed? Or does fetishizing the search procedure make it very difficult to pursue the targets of opportunity that are often available arising out of particular family situations or particular moments, and does fetishizing and formalizing search procedures further actually work to the disadvantage of minority group members. Again, everybody's got an opinion; I don't think anybody actually has a clue as to what the answer is.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Fourth, what do we actually know about the incidence of financial incentives and other support for child care in terms of what happens to people's career patterns. I've been struck at Harvard that there's something unfortunate and ironic about the fact that if you're a faculty member and you have a kid who's 18 who goes to college, we in effect, through an interest-free loan, give you about $9,000. If you have a 6-year-old, we give you nothing. And I don't think we're very different from most other universities in this regard, but there is something odd about that strategic choice, if the goal is to recruit people to come to the university. But I don't think we know much about the child care issue.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The fifth question -- which it seems to me would be useful to study and to actually learn the answer to -- is what do we know, or what can we learn, about the costs of career interruptions. There is something we would like to believe. We would like to believe that you can take a year off, or two years off, or three years off, or be half-time for five years, and it affects your productivity during the time, but that it really doesn't have any fundamental effect on the career path. And a whole set of conclusions would follow from that in terms of flexible work arrangements and so forth. And the question is, in what areas of academic life and in what ways is it actually true.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Somebody reported to me on a study that they found, I don't remember who had told me about this -- maybe it was you, Richard -- that there was a very clear correlation between the average length of time, from the time a paper was cited. That is, in fields where the average papers cited had been written nine months ago, women had a much harder time than in fields where the average thing cited had been written 10 years ago. And that is suggestive in this regard. On the discouraging side of it, someone remarked once that no economist who had gone to work at the President's Council of Economic Advisors for two years had done highly important academic work after they returned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now, I'm sure there are counterexamples to that, and I'm sure people are kind of processing that Tobin's Q is the best-known counterexample to that proposition, and there are obviously different kinds of effects that happen from working in Washington for two years. But it would be useful to explore a variety of kinds of natural interruption experiments, to see what actual difference it makes, and to see whether it's actually true, and to see in what ways interruptions can be managed, and in what fields it makes a difference. I think it's an area in which there's conviction but where it doesn't seem to me there's an enormous amount of evidence.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What should we all do? I think the case is overwhelming for employers trying to be the [unintelligible] employer who responds to everybody else's discrimination by competing effectively to locate people who others are discriminating against, or to provide different compensation packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care. I think a lot of discussion of issues around child care, issues around extending tenure clocks, issues around providing family benefits, are enormously important. I think there's a strong case for monitoring and making sure that searches are done very carefully and that there are enough people looking and watching that that pattern of choosing people like yourself is not allowed to take insidious effect. But I think it's something that has to be done with very great care because it slides easily into pressure to achieve given fractions in given years, which runs the enormous risk of people who were hired because they were terrific being made to feel, or even if not made to feel, being seen by others as having been hired for some other reason. And I think that's something we all need to be enormously careful of as we approach these issues, and it's something we need to do, but I think it's something that we need to do with great care.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let me just conclude by saying that I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That's why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. Thank you.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" > </span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Questions and Answers</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: Well, I don't want to take up much time because I know other people have questions, so, first of all I'd like to say thank you for your input. It's very interesting -- I noticed it's being recorded so I hope that we'll be able to have a copy of it. That would be nice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: We'll see. (Laughter)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: Secondly, you make a point, which I very much agree with, that this is a wonderful opportunity for other universities to hire women and minorities, and you said you didn't have an example of an instance in which that is being done. The chemistry department at Rutgers is doing that, and they are bragging about it and they are saying, "Any woman who is having problems in her home department, send me your resume." They are now at 25 percent women, which is double the national average -- among the top 50 universities -- so I agree with you on that. I think it is a wonderful opportunity and I hope others follow that example.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One thing that I do sort of disagree with is the use of identical twins that have been separated and their environment followed. I think that the environments that a lot of women and minorities experience would not be something that would be -- that a twin would be subjected to if the person knows that their environment is being watched. Because a lot of the things that are done to women and minorities are simply illegal, and so they'll never experience that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I don't think that. I don't actually think that's the point at all. My point was a very different one. My point was simply that the field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last 15 years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren't, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature, and that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization. I wasn't at all trying to connect those studies to the particular experiences of women and minorities who were thinking about academic careers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: Raising that particular issue, as a biologist, I neither believe in all genetic or all environment, that in fact behavior in any other country actually develops [unintelligible] interaction of those aspects. And I agree with you, in fact, that it is wrong-headed to just dismiss the biology. But to put too much weight to it is also incredibly wrong-headed, given the fact that had people actually had different kinds of opportunities, and different opportunities for socialization, there is good evidence to indicate in fact that it would have had different outcomes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I cite by way of research the [unintelligible] project in North Carolina, which essentially shows that, where every indicator with regard to mother's education, socioeconomic status, et cetera, would have left a kid in a particular place educationally, that, essentially, they are seeing totally different outcomes with regard to performance, being referred to special education, et cetera, so I think that there is some evidence on that particular side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The other issue is this whole question about objective versus subjective. I think that it is very difficult to have anything that is basically objective, and the work of [unintelligible] I think point out that in a case where you are actually trying to -- this case from the Swedish Medical Council, where they were trying to identify very high-powered research opportunities for, I guess it was post-docs by that point, that indicated that essentially that it ended up with larger numbers of men than women.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Two of the women who were basically in the affected group were able to utilize the transparency rules that were in place in Sweden, get access to the data, get access to the issues, and in fact, discovered that it was not as objective as everyone claimed, and that in fact, different standards were actually being used for the women as well as for the men, including the men's presence in sort of a central network, the kinds of journals that they had to publish in to be considered at the same level, so I think that there are pieces of research that begin to actually relate to this -- yes, there is the need to look more carefully at a lot of these areas.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I would -- in addition looking at this whole question of the quality of marginal hires -- I would also like to look at the quality of class one hires, in terms of seeing who disappoints, and what it was that they happened to be looking at and making judgments on, and then what the people could not deliver.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So I think that there is a real great need on both sides to begin to talk about whether or not we can predict. I hate to use a sports metaphor, but I will. This is drawn basically from an example from Claude Steele, where he says, he starts by using free throws as a way of actually determining, who should -- you've got to field a basketball team, and you clearly want the people who make 10 out of 10, and you say, "Well, I may not want the people who make zero out of 10," but what about the people who make four out of 10. If you use that as the measure, Shaq will be left on the sidelines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I understand. I think you're obviously right that there's no absolute objectivity, and you're -- there's no question about that. My own instincts actually are that you could go wrong in a number of respects fetishizing objectivity for exactly the reasons that you suggest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There is a very simple and straightforward methodology that was used many years ago in the case of baseball. Somebody wrote a very powerful article about baseball, probably in the seventies, in which they basically said, look, it is true that if you look at people's salaries, and you control for their batting averages and their fielding averages and whatnot, whites and blacks are in the same salary once you control. It is also true that there are no black .240 hitters in the major leagues, that the only blacks who are in the major leagues are people who bat over .300 -- I'm exaggerating -- and that is exactly what you'd predict on a model of discrimination, that because there's a natural bias against.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And there's an absolute and clear prediction. The prediction is that if there's a discriminated-against group, that if you measure subsequent performance, their subsequent performance will be stronger than that of the non-discriminated-against group. And that's a simple prediction of a theory of discrimination. And it's a testable prediction of a theory of discrimination, and it would be a revolution, and it would be an enormously powerful finding in this field, to demonstrate, and I suspect there are contexts in which that can be demonstrated, but there's a straightforward methodology, it seems to me, for testing exactly that idea. I'm going to run out of time. But, let me take-if people ask very short questions, I will give very short answers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: What about the rest of the world. Are we keeping up? Physics, France, very high powered women in science in top positions. Same nature, same hormones, same ambitions we have to assume. Different cultural, given.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: Good question. Good question. I don't know much about it. My guess is that you'll find that in most of those places, the pressure to be high powered, to work eighty hours a week, is not the same as it is in the United States. And therefore it is easier to balance on both sides. But I thought about that, and I think that you'll find that's probably at least part of the explanation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: [unintelligible] because his book was referred to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: Right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: I would like to make an on observation and then make a suggestion. The observation is that of the three. There is a contradiction in your three major observations that is the high-powered intensive need of scientific work -- that's the first -- and then the ability, and then the socialization, the social process. Would it be possible the first two result from the last one and that math ability could be a result of education, parenting, a lot of things. We only observe what happens, we don't know the reason for why there's a variance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I'll give you another thing, a suggestion. The suggestion is that one way to read your remarks is to say maybe those are not the things we can solve immediately. Especially as leaders of higher education because they are just so wide, so deep, and involves all aspects of society, institution, education, a lot of things, parenting, marriages are institutions, for example. We could have changed the institution of those things a lot of things we cannot change. Rather, it's not nature and nurture, it is really pre-college versus post-college. From your college point of view maybe those are things too late and too little you can do but a lot of things which are determined by sources outside the college you're in. Is that...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I think...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: That's a different read on your set of remarks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I think your observation goes much more to my second point about the abilities and the variances than it does to the first point about what married woman....</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: [unintelligible]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: Yeah, look anything could be social, ultimately in all of that. I think that if you look at the literature on behavioral genetics and you look at the impact, the changed view as to what difference parenting makes, the evidence is really quite striking and amazing. I mean, just read Judith Rich Harris's book. It is just very striking that people's -- and her book is probably wrong and its probably more than she says it is, and I know there are 13 critiques and you can argue about it and I am not certainly a leading expert on that -- but there is a lot there. And I think what it surely establishes is that human intuition tends to substantially overestimate the role -- just like teachers overestimate their impact on their students relative to fellow students on other students -- I think we all have a tendency with our intuitions to do it. So, you may be right, but my guess is that there are some very deep forces here that are going to be with us for a long time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I'm not an expert in this area but a lot of people in the room are, and they've written a lot of papers in here that address ....</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I've read a lot of them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: And, you know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your premises...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: Fair enough.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: So it's not so clear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: It's not clear at all. I think I said it wasn't clear. I was giving you my best guess but I hope we could argue on the basis of as much evidence as we can marshal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: It's here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: No, no, no. Let me say. I have actually read that and I'm not saying there aren't rooms to debate this in, but if somebody, but with the greatest respect -- I think there's an enormous amount one can learn from the papers in this conference and from those two books -- but if somebody thinks that there is proof in these two books, that these phenomenon are caused by something else, I guess I would very respectfully have to disagree very very strongly with that. I don't presume to have proved any view that I expressed here, but if you think there is proof for an alternative theory, I'd want you to be hesitant about that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: Just one quick question in terms of the data. We saw this morning lots of data showing the drop in white males entering science and engineering, and I'm having trouble squaring that with your model of who wants to work 80 hours a week. It's mostly people coming from other countries that have filled that gap in terms of men versus women.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I think there are two different things, frankly, actually, is my guess -- I'm not an expert. Somebody reported to me that -- someone who is knowledgeable -- said that it is surprisingly hard to get Americans rather than immigrants or the children of immigrants to be cardiac surgeons. Cardiac surgeon is about prestigious, certain kind of prestige as you can be, fact is that people want control of their lifestyles, people want flexibility, they don't want to do it, and it's disproportionately immigrants that want to do some of the careers that are most demanding in terms of time and most interfering with your lifestyle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So I think that's exactly right and I think it's precisely the package of number of hours' work what it is, that's leading more Americans to choose to have careers of one kind or another in business that are less demanding of passionate thought all the time and that includes white males as well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: That's my point, that social-psychological in nature [unintelligible].</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I would actually much rather stay -- yes, and then I'm on my way out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: I have no idea how you would evaluate the productivity of the marginal hire if this person is coming into an environment where [unintelligible] is marginal and there's [unintelligible].</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. I used the term -- I realized I had not spoken carefully -- I used the term marginal in the economic sense to mean, only additional, to only mean...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Q: [unintelligible].</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LAWRENCE SUMMERS: No, to mean only the additional [unintelligible]. Yeah, obviously [unintelligible] going to identify X is the additional hire, is the marginal hire, the question you can ask is, you know, here is a time when, as a consequence of an effort, there was a very substantial increase in the number of people who were hired in a given group, what was the observed ex post quality? And what was the observed ex post performance? It's hard to believe that that's not a useful thing to try to know. It may well be that one will produce powerful evidence that the people are much better than the people who were there and that the institutions went up in quality and that made things much better.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All I'm saying is one needs to ask the question. And as for the groping in the kitchen, and whatnot, look, it's absolutely important that in every university in America there be norms of civility and proper treatment of colleagues that be absolutely established and that that be true universally, and that's a hugely important part of this, and that's why at Harvard we're doing a whole set of things that are making junior faculty positions much more real faculty positions with real mentoring, real feedback, serious searches before the people are hired, and much greater prospects for tenure than there ever have been before because exactly that kind of collegiality is absolutely central to the academic enterprise.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Thank you.<br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/11/lawrence-h-summersremember-him.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br />Return to "Lawrence H. Summers...remember him?"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-28782324708277928872008-11-14T13:58:00.000-08:002008-11-14T14:14:07.877-08:00"Jewel of the Earth"--transcript<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Jewel of the Earth"</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NOVA</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >February 14th, 2006</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Amber: its jewel-like beauty has held humans spellbound for thousands of years, but inside an even greater treasure glows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: It's hard to imagine a more perfect time capsule than this. This little bee has been trapped in there for literally millions of years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Suspended in time, these tiny prisoners have tales to tell of a world that belonged to the dinosaurs, of enemies long extinct, of supercontinents that no longer exist. Now scientists can peer deeper into these time machines than they ever did before, opening the door to the unthinkable, bringing dinosaurs back to life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI (American Museum of Natural History): I was astounded at the possibility of DNA being preserved.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ROBERTA POINAR (Oregon State University): Every once in a while, in your life, you witness something that's just too spectacular for words, and this was one of the times.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Host David Attenborough takes you on a quest for amber. Jewel of the Earth, right now on NOVA.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Google is proud to support NOVA in the search for knowledge: Google.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, serving society through biomedical research and science education: HHMI.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Major funding for NOVA is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by PBS viewers like you. Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: There is a substance so strange and so beautiful that whenever people encountered it, they thought they had found something magical. And its magic is real, because this material has traveled through time, bringing with it passengers from the distant past that have wonderful tales to tell.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This extraordinary substance has fascinated me since I first held a piece, this piece, when I was 12. My first piece of amber arrived in a very unexpected way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In 1938, during the build up to the Second World War, my parents helped some of the many children fleeing from Germany. They had left their families behind and were allowed to bring almost nothing with them. I remember one girl, in particular. Her name was Marianne. She was 12, about the same age as I was, and she came from a city on the Baltic coast where her father was a doctor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He had given her one small but precious thing, as a sign of his thanks to whoever it was who was going to look after his daughter. And this is it. It felt surprisingly warm and light in my hand, but what made me fall in love with amber was what I discovered inside it. I found something miraculous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were insects preserved in astonishing detail. I burned with questions. What sort of world were they from? They must have lived a long time ago, but how long? Years later, my brother Richard would play a scientist in a movie which made amber famous the world over.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH (Actor/John Hammond in clip from "Jurassic Park"): Welcome to Jurassic Park.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Richard's character extracted DNA from dinosaur's blood trapped in amber and, with it, brought dinosaurs back to life. Could that ever be done?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SAM NEILL (Actor/Dr. Alan Grant in clip from "Jurassic Park"): How did you do this?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH (Actor/John Hammond in clip from "Jurassic Park"): I'll show you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: I started my journey with the amber time machine by taking Marianne's gift back to where it came from, to the shores of the Baltic Sea.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The amber comes from rocks on the seabed, some distance out from the coast, but people don't find it until it washes up on the shore. Little bits like this are quite common. Sometimes, if you are lucky, particularly after a storm, you can find bigger bits. Some even have barnacles still attached to them. People have been collecting such bits for thousands of years but had no idea how amber originated. Some said it was solidified sunshine, some that it was the tears of the gods.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then, around the year 77 A.D., a great Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, conducted a simple experiment. He did this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The smell? Unmistakable: pine resin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Several types of plants, among them conifers, seal any wound inflicted by storms or insect attack, by producing a sticky resin which oozes out from them. And because it continues to gently flow around whatever it traps, it can preserve creatures in the finest detail. As the resin hardens around its captives, they become suspended in time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Of course, many creatures are fossilized in rock, like this small flat fish, for example. It's a kind of ray. It was squashed, its soft parts decayed, even its little spines turned into rock.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But amber preserves creatures in a quite different fashion. When this little bee touched this drop of resin she was caught by its stickiness, and she was instantly and perfectly preserved in three dimensions. These eyes saw a world which existed long before mankind evolved. She scented flowers before the first human being ever smelled one. And I can even tell that she was working hard when she died, by the bundles of cargo on her hind legs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It's hard to imagine a more perfect time capsule than this. This little bee has been trapped in there for, literally, millions of years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Amber's ability to travel through time can take us back into more recent history, our history. Stonehenge is one of the earliest man-made structures in the world. These stones have been standing here for something like three and a half thousand years, and we know that, even then, the people who erected them treasured amber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But they weren't the first. It was considered to be precious way back in the Stone Age, and this may be why. When you scrape its rough surface, with a flint blade, perhaps, you quickly reveal the wonderful golden color inside. It's quite magical.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Stone Age people also carved bone and stone in order to make tools, but amber was different. It seemed to have had no practical use, so they must have valued it for some other reason.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The carvings they made, around 10,000 years ago, give us an idea of how they viewed the world, and, in particular, which animals mattered most to them. Imagine the value of amber to a Stone Age hunter who believed that capturing an animal's spirit by carving it in amber made the animal itself easier to hunt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The people who built the great stone circle at Stonehenge lived in the Bronze Age, several thousand years later, but they, too, treasured amber. None but the wealthiest of them could afford a material as rare as this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Once, there were a thousand beads in this necklace. Over 3,000 years, their surfaces have become opaque and crumbly. But when they were new, and freshly polished, and glowing, it must have been a wondrous piece of jewelry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One woman's grave contained a rather more mysterious object, a disc of amber, now browned with age, encircled by gold. It was certainly a remarkable piece of personal decoration, but maybe it had a rather deeper significance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The sun is central to our understanding of Stonehenge. The monument may have been used as a solar calendar, and it may be that its builders treasured amber, because it captured the warmth and the light of the sun. It may or may not have been considered magical in prehistoric Britain, but it was most certainly rare, for it came from far away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This is the Baltic city of Gdansk, in Poland. The jewelry worn by the people of Stonehenge, and buried with them, came from around here. It is evidence of one of the world's first long distance trade routes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But what brought the big boom in amber was the rise of Imperial Rome. The Romans bought it for prestige. Amber carvings cost more than the best slaves, and even the emperor Nero treasured it. He decorated his amphitheaters with tons of it, to show how unbelievably wealthy he was.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So Baltic amber can take us back at least 10,000 years into our own past, but it reaches back much further than that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To find out how far, I went to one of the Gdansk workshops where amber jewelry is made, to meet Elzbieta Sontag.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG (University of Gdansk): ...very thin, it's most probably with inclusion inside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Elzbieta is a biologist who comes here to look for "inclusions," animals and plants trapped in the amber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It takes a practiced eye to search through as much raw amber as this, and I was delighted to get a lesson from the expert.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How do I start? I mean, there are a million pieces, all right a thousand pieces. What...is there a particular color I should look for?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Sometime color yes, because white and milky is without inclusion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Are they good?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Oh. That's bad?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: It's bad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Okay, I'm not interested in that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Okay, I avoid it, that kind of color.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: So what do I...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: I'm looking for transparent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Would that one be any good?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Yes. I think, yes. We can split it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Ah, really?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Oh, yes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: And...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: And may be something is inside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: How many pieces do you look at before you find something?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Oh, about 20.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Twenty. Eleven...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Not good, shape is not good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Why is it the wrong shape? Twelve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Next one...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Thirteen...spit...there's a lot of bubbles. Fourteen...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Wow! Oh, no. Maybe.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Fifteen, nothing. Yes, I think so, 16. It's a mosquito.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: No mosquito, midges.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Oh, but this is beautiful. The midge looks as though it took off from its twig only yesterday. But, amazingly, it has been frozen in flight for around 40 million years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So what about the creatures in my piece? What exactly were they? I could see them clearly, for Elzbieta's microscope had a projection screen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Oh, well that's an old friend, because it's quite big and it's near the surface, and I've known it for a long time. So it's a fly but what kind of a fly?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: It's a long-legged fly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A long-legged fly? And in what part of the forest do they live?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Low on the forest. Sometimes sit on the bark.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: So the likelihood is, then, that this fly, and therefore this piece of amber, this gum, this resin, was low down on the tree.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Yes, low down on the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Okay, what else is there?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >With her powerful microscope, Elzbieta was exploring far deeper into my amber than I had been able to do, and there she found another fly, a fungus gnat. It must have died searching for rotten wood, for that is where it lays its eggs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then Elzbieta found an aphid and, right above it, an ant. Perhaps they had fallen together from a leaf where they were feeding. I think that's a fantastic picture. I mean, I...and it's deep in the amber. I know, because I've never seen it like this before.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But the last animal she found was the most surprising. Ah, what a monster! What is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: There is a mite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A mite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Yes, a very small monster.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Yes. That's tiny though, isn't it? How big is that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: That one? Half a millimeter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Half a millimeter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I've never seen it before. So we've got a whole community-and we know that they all lived together because, because they all died together-in my one piece of amber. And that alone has given us a whole rounded picture of a tiny little ecosystem, at the bottom of a tree, 40 million years ago.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ELZBIETA SONTAG: Exactly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Amazing. Thank you very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It had taken me more than 60 years to find and identify all the animals inside my amber. And seeing them together had given me something more, a glimpse of their world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >By comparing many amber animals to modern forms, scientists like Elzbieta are sure that the forest they inhabited was a temperate one. But how broad a picture can these time travelers give us? Could it encompass a whole forest or even a whole continent?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Well, in the 1960s, on a Caribbean mountainside, science discovered a new source of amber which seemed perfectly suited to answer those questions. I had a chance to visit it 15 years ago. I hoped that for the first time, I, myself, might collect some amber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here in the Dominican Republic, amber is mined. And by dating the mudstones that contain it, we can tell that it is about 20 million years old, rather younger than Baltic amber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Picking a piece of amber from the mudstones in which it has lain for so long was hugely exciting. I brought a small collection back home with me. So what kind of forest did this amber come from? Well thanks to some remarkable detective work, we can answer that question in amazing detail.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In this piece, there's a leaf from the plants that produced the amber. And this is what those plants looked like. They were giant bean trees. But what matters most about them is not what they looked like but where they grew. They were tropical.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Scientists had long imagined that the ancient tropical forests contained a vast diversity of life, but very few fossilized traces had ever been found, until they discovered these.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dominican amber preserves such a huge variety of animals and plants, with such perfection, that it inspired two scientists, George and Roberta Poinar, to try something that had previously been thought impossible. In the same way that Elzbieta reconstructed the world around a single Baltic tree, they started to use these tiny fossils to bring a whole tropical forest back to life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I had found a piece which contained a little bee. She must have been familiar with many of the plants in that forest, indeed she depended on them. So, based on the Poinar's findings, and with a little bit of amber magic, we can follow her back home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This tiny flower shows that the amber trees were not the only giants reaching up into the forest canopy. It belonged to a sebo, whose great trunk is supported by wide buttress roots.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But the commonest flowers of all came from a different tree, the nazareno. It seems likely that these trees dominated the forest canopy. When one of these giants fell, it would have opened up a light gap, which other, faster-growing plants could fill, plants like palms.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And here are their flowers, confirming that palms were another key element of that forest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So we have built up a picture of what part of the forest was like and even identified some of the flowers which might have tempted my bee. But I don't think she died collecting nectar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She was searching the forest for something else. Remember those bundles on her back legs? They are clues to what she was after. She was collecting resin, and not just any resin, but resin from the amber trees themselves. And that was a very dangerous thing to do. She was a stingless bee, very skilled at handling resin. Even so, there was a real chance that while collecting it, a bee might get stuck. Stingless bees are among the most common animals trapped in Dominican amber. Why did they take the risk?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Resin is very valuable to these bees. Mixed with plant waxes and fibers, it makes a strong building material for their nests. But it also brings another benefit. It contains antibiotics which disinfect the wounds in the bark of the tree from which it oozes. By bringing it here, into the nests, the bees protect their developing young from infection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So now we know exactly what this little bee was doing in that forest 20 million years ago. This piece of amber has not only trapped her body, it also caught her behavior. And we know from other pieces of amber, too, that she had enemies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This is an assassin bug. It hunts stingless bees, and their addiction to resin makes it easy for it to find them. The bug can't move swiftly enough to snatch a bee from midair, but it's strong enough to pull off strands of resin. With these sticky gloves it can hold on to any bee which touches them. It's using resin to set a trap. Now the assassin stabs its dagger-like mouthparts into a weak point behind the bee's head and injects its saliva, paralyzing the bee. As she dies, she releases a pheromone, a scent calling for help, which normally rallies other bees to defend the nest, and that entices them into the assassin's reach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But one assassin lost its grip and now lies in amber, together with its victim. Once small animals like this were in the resin's grip they were as doomed as flies on fly paper. But, even so, amber sometimes contains animals that, normally, would never go near it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >How can George Poinar explain his next discovery? It was an amber tadpole. It couldn't have come into contact with resin underwater, yet when he looked further, he found other pond animals: a young marsh beetle, even a diving beetle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The challenge was to explain how they had found their way into a flow of resin on the trunk of a tree. This is a poison dart frog. She is only half the size of your thumb, and, remarkably, she is carrying a tadpole on her back. She moves in a very determined and purposeful way, and starts to climb a tree.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These are what she is looking for: plants that collect water, called tank bromeliads. No one has yet found a piece of a bromeliad in amber, but we know they were there because there are amber damselflies of a kind which today lays its eggs between the tightly packed leaves of bromeliads.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >She's reached a branch. Her tadpole will soon have a nursery. She lowers her rear end into the bromeliad's pond.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Other animals also lived in these tiny ponds. Up here they may have been safe from predators but not, it seems, from resin. So bromeliads held tiny complete worlds high up above the ground, but, even so, they probably didn't contain enough food to sustain a fast growing tadpole. What, then, did it eat? Amazingly the piece of amber that held the tadpole also contained the answer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Poison dart frogs are very attentive parents. Every few days the tadpole's mother climbs back up the tree to the bromeliad to care for her youngster. She's laying an egg. That's what the other object was in the amber. These eggs are sterile and don't grow into frogs, they are food. But occasionally these little worlds up in the branches were shattered. And at least one falling tadpole came to a sticky end.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Who would have thought that amber could reveal such intimate details of life in tiny ponds high up in such trees as these?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But what about the bigger animals of the forest? Amber surely can't tell us anything about the presence or absence of these. Or can it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Remarkably, amber does contain evidence of one such creature, thanks to some very oddly shaped seeds. These are the seeds of a kind of bamboo. The hooks on them get stuck in the hairs of animals so that the seeds travel with them and so are dispersed. But what sort of animals carried these seeds? Well, sometimes such seeds have hairs still attached to them, and the only animals with hairs are mammals.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >There were certainly a number of mammals around 20 million years ago, but can these hairs help us to be a little more specific as to which mammals were here? They can.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The shape of the scales on the surface of hairs varies, and George Poinar used them to narrow down the possibilities. They came from some kind of carnivore.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It seems there were big cats in the ancient forest. Perhaps they even hunted the ancestors of modern coatis. So that's one more animal that I know that lived in that forest, but what about organisms for which there is not even a hair to serve as evidence?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Amber really is astonishing, because, as well as carrying animals' bodies through time, it can bring clues to their relationships. And that is what makes me certain that the forest contained enormous fig trees like this, although no trace of such a tree has yet been found in amber.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let me explain. George Poinar found the crucial evidence. Exhibit A: a minute wasp. This wasp proves that the forest had figs, but to find out what makes it such a conclusive witness, we need to see what goes on today, inside the figs themselves. Although they look like fruit, figs are really containers for the tree's flowers and its developing seeds. But some also house wasps. Fig wasps spend almost all their lives inside figs, which are sealed so nothing but a fig wasp can collect their pollen. And that is how the wasps repay the fig trees for providing their nursery, by distributing their pollen.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These two organisms have come to rely on each other so closely that it's impossible for one to exist without the other. That is why a single wasp can guarantee that the forest contained fig trees. The partnership between figs and wasps is one of the most intimate in the whole of nature.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But that piece of amber had something else to reveal, something that was rather more sinister. The rear end of the wasp is surrounded by minute nematode worms. As the wasps emerge inside a fig, so do these nematodes. Each has just a few minutes to find a wasp and burrow into its body before it leaves the fig. But these are not conventional parasites. The only thing they will take from the wasps is a free ride to the next fig. Only amber could have preserved such minute details and, with them, revealed an extraordinary fact.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The relationship between the forest's fig trees, their wasps and worms, that we know today, clearly existed 20 million years ago. Amber, again and again, demonstrates this constancy.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Take this, for example. It looks like a death scene, a scale insect in the jaws of a predatory ant. But the truth is very different. Scale insects drink the stress, anxiety or panic of pods, but this takes time. Predators would soon pick them off, if it wasn't for the teams of ant bodyguards that protect them. And in exchange, the ants receive a share of the sap. By providing ants with food that they can't otherwise reach, the scale insects have made themselves indispensable. This relationship was so important that, far from eating her captive, this queen ant was gently carrying it away, so it would set up a new colony beside her own. And for 20 million years neither partner has had any reason to change.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What does this astonishing absence of change imply? If conditions had altered radically, many of these complex relationships would have disappeared. So their presence tells us that tropical forests must have existed, largely unchanged, for at least 20 million years.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But now George Poinar has traveled back even further in time. One of his latest finds in Dominican amber takes us back not just 20 million years, but 150 million, for it has implications about the Earth's geological history. And this startling new evidence comes from a single ant.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I have come across its modern relatives myself, and their behavior can tell us something unexpected about the Dominican amber forest. They are honeypot ants whose workers have become jars in which the colony stores honey to help it through times when liquid and nectar are scarce in the dry season.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So this amber honeypot ant suggests that the ancient forest also had a dry season. And if the modern ants are anything to go by, then it lasted around three to four months.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So, now, amber can tell us how often it rained 20 million years ago. But it is also evidence of an event that occurred even further back in time, because the living honeypot ants I found don't occur in the Dominican Republic or even in South America; they live in Australia.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >So these little ants are evidence not only of climate, but the fact that once Australia and South America were joined together in one supercontinent. Who would have thought a single ant could tell us so much?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The amber time machine could hardly illuminate a more global event than the drift of continents, but it can also take us to the opposite extreme. What surprises might we find inside an amber animal?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Dr. David Grimaldi, of the American Museum of Natural History, is especially interested in lizards. These Anolis lizards are very territorial and the males take great risks to secure a patch of bark for themselves. They spend a lot of time displaying aggressively to one another, doing press-ups and erecting their throat flaps. And sometimes they fall. A few have achieved fame and immortality in amber, but such specimens are very rare, and not surprisingly. A lizard should be strong enough to unstick itself from a flow of resin. But some did not, and that puzzled David Grimaldi.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He wondered whether they could be as well-preserved inside as they were outside. Could he actually look inside an amber lizard? He turned to the latest high tech scanners.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: These are scans that use very high intensity x-rays that are too high for medical purposes, and we have incredible detail in any view that we want. This scan of a gecko's head shows the finest details of its skull and even its teeth. Amber's preservation is clearly more than skin deep but nothing in this scan could explain why this gecko was trapped.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: So David Grimaldi turned to another gecko and looked at its whole body, this time with conventional x-rays.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: The x-ray revealed that the bones were beautifully preserved. Bones of the skull, delicate little toe bones, bones of the leg and even individual vertebrae are revealed. But, from the jumble of bones, it is clear that the gecko's back was broken. It had probably been picked up and dropped, perhaps by a bird of prey. It didn't escape from the resin because, when it hit it, it was already dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: As researchers started finding even smaller internal details preserved by amber, they began to ask themselves something almost unthinkable. Could amber have preserved molecular structures inside an animal? Perhaps even its DNA? Some people even imagined that such DNA could bring monsters back to life. And look where that got us. But there are no remains of dinosaurs in amber. Surely their DNA is beyond our reach.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Poinars dared to wonder if that was so. The story begins 20 years ago, when Roberta first focused an electron microscope on an amber animal. Inside a fungus gnat, like the one in my piece of Baltic amber, she discovered something quite amazing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ROBERTA POINAR: It's like a miracle. Every once in a while, in your life, you witness something that's just too spectacular for words, and this was one of the times.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: The Poinars had found 40-million-year-old cells, and more than that, even the minute structures inside the cells were clear to see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEORGE POINAR (Oregon State University): We were kind of flabbergasted that it was possible to have such a degree of preservation after such a long time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ROBERTA POINAR: And so I, you know, zoomed on up to a higher magnification and just was amazed to see that there were nuclei with bits of chromatin in the nucleus. And that is the step that led us to believe that DNA was there, in the cell, and could, perhaps, be pulled out and looked at.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: It was an astonishing discovery. The prospect of finding such ancient DNA electrified the scientific community. And Hollywood wasn't far behind. The storyline of Jurassic Park is very ingenious. My brother, who played the scientist, didn't actually need to find bits of dinosaur in amber. Nature had already extracted their DNA in blood cells and preserved it inside an amber mosquito. But that's pure fiction isn't it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: Surely it is impossible to recover DNA from any animal which lived in the distant past.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Well, two teams set out to attempt exactly that. One of them included David Grimaldi. The other was set up by the Poinars. Both knew that their only chance of finding DNA was in the best-preserved animals, so the Poinars chose to use my favorites, some stingless bees, while the other team decided to work on an amber termite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: We had no expectations-at least I didn't-when we did the study. We did the extractions. We tried it. Several of the extractions were unsuccessful.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: But then both teams struck gold. Tissue extracted from the Poinar's bees tested positive for DNA, and David Grimaldi got the same result from the termite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: Our first reaction, particularly mine, was really disbelief. I was astounded at the possibility of DNA being preserved.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: It really was astounding. They were claiming to have recovered DNA from animals which had died 20 million years before; not yet as old as the dinosaurs, but that's what a new team, including the Poinars, turned to next. And when they said what they had found, they caught the attention of the world. They had DNA from an insect older than T. Rex. So could Hollywood possibly have got it right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEORGE POINAR: We felt that bringing back an entire dinosaur was not in the realm of possibility, at this time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: Barraged with the common question, when are you going to clone extinct organisms, we constantly had to repeat ourselves: "We are not going to do that."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: But why not?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: If DNA is indeed preserved in amber, it is so chopped up, so fragmentary, that it is impossible to reconstruct the entire genome and then insert it into some surrogate organism, and then have a complete resurrected extinct species out of that. That is absolutely impossible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: As the blaze of publicity surrounding the film faded, so other scientists tried to extract DNA from amber insects. And their results, when they were published, were bad news for the Poinars and David Grimaldi. None of them had found even a trace of ancient DNA. But what went wrong?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID GRIMALDI: What some of them found, in fact, were contaminant DNA sequences. And I have to admit, by that point, that I was pretty much convinced that the original reports of DNA sequences in amber were of contaminant DNA.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEORGE POINAR: And some of the scientists that did make an attempt got all kinds of strange things. They would get fish DNA. Well, perhaps they had a tuna fish sandwich that day and were careless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Like most other researchers, David Grimaldi has changed his mind. But George Poinar is still confident that a few rare pieces of amber do contain DNA. And some insects certainly could have drunk the blood of dinosaurs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >These sandflies have been preserved in amber for 100 million years. Who knows what might be inside them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And that is why amber fascinates me so much. It has brought us so many surprises. The prospect of it preserving DNA brought dinosaurs back, at least in our imaginations. And the creatures that traveled in it through time bring us vivid snapshots of the Caribbean forest as it was 20 million years ago. And my piece of Baltic amber, the first I ever owned, has preserved creatures with such perfection that they are still startlingly beautiful.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >What a journey amber has taken me on! And it all came from a gift from a small girl over 60 years ago. I imagine Marianne and her father found my piece of amber by walking along a Baltic shore, just as thousands of people had done before them. Its magic may not extend to recreating a dinosaur, but, for me, amber remains a substance of wonder, a time machine that can show us exactly how some things looked tens of millions of years ago.<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/11/ambers-encapsulated-gems.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Return to "Amber's encapsulated gems"</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-91186259917261372562008-11-07T17:03:00.000-08:002008-11-09T19:41:38.822-08:00X Files..."How the Ghosts Stole Christmas"<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ></span><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"How the Ghosts Stole Christmas"</span><br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >December 1998<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >X-Files</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCENE 1</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHRISTMAS EVE</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SOMEWHERE IN MARYLAND</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Night. Outside a spooky old mansion. Car radio is playing Christmas songs. We hear Bing Crosby's version of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas". We see that it is MULDER's radio. SCULLY drives up beside him. They both roll down their power windows.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BING CROSBY: Have yourself a merry little Christmas let yourself be light From now on, our troubles will be out of sight....</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (happy to see her) I almost gave up on you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Sorry. Checkout lines were worse than rush hour on the 95. If I heard "Silent Night" one more time I was going to start taking hostages. What are we doing here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Stakeout.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: On Christmas Eve?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: It's an important date.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: No kidding.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Important to why we're here. Why don't you turn off your car and I'll fill you in on the details.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, I've got wrapping to do. It's the night before Christmas.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BING CROSBY: Here we are...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER looks in the back of SCULLY's car. It is completely filled with bags of packages.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Oh.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BING CROSBY: Happy golden days of yore...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY rolls up her window, gets out of her car and joins MULDER in his car.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Let's hear it. Give me the details.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Look, if you've got Christmas stuff to do I don't want to... you know...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, I drove all the way out here. I might as well know why. Right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I just thought you'd be more... curious.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Who lives in the house?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Then who are we staking out?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: The former occupants.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: They've come back?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: That's the story.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I see. The dark, gothic manor the, uh, omnipresent low fog hugging the thicket of overgrowth. Wait-- is that a hound I hear baying out on the moors?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No. Actually that was a left cheek sneak.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, tell me you didn't call me out here on Christmas Eve to go ghost busting with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Technically speaking they're called apparitions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, call it what you want. I've got holiday cheer to spread. I've got a family roll call under the tree at 6:00 a.m.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER locks her door.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I'll make it fast. I'll just give you the details.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Okay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (mysteriously) Christmas, 1917. It was a time of dark, dark despair. American soldiers were dying at an ungodly rate in a war-torn Europe while at home, a deadly strain of the flu virus attacked young and old alike. Tragedy was a visitor on every doorstep while a creeping hopelessness set in with every man, woman and child. It was a time of dark, dark despair.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (not impressed) You said that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: But here at 1501 Larkspur Lane for a pair of star-crossed lovers tragedy came not from war or pestilence-- not by the boot heel or the bombardier-- but by their own innocent hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Go on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: His name was Maurice. He was a... a brooding but heroic young man beloved of Lyda, a sublime beauty with a light that seemed to follow her wherever she went. They were likened to two angels descended from heaven whom the gods could not protect from the horrors being visited upon this cold, grey earth.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: And what happened to them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Driven by a tragic fear of separation they forged a lovers' pact so that they might spend eternity together and not spend one precious Christmas apart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: They killed themselves?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: And their ghosts haunt this house every Christmas Eve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY laughs.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I just gave myself chills.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: It's a good story, Mulder... And very well told but I don't believe it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: You don't believe in ghosts?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: That surprises you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Well... Yeah. I thought everybody believed in ghosts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, if it were any other night I might let you talk me into it but the halls are decked and I got to go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY gets out of the car and heads for her car. MULDER also gets out and heads for the house.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: My best to the family.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: What are you doing? Mulder, don't you have somewhere to be?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I'm just going to take a look.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (alone, to herself) I'm not going to do it. My New Year's resolution.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY checks her pockets. No keys. She looks in MULDER's car. No keys. She looks in her car. No keys.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Sound of door creaking as MULDER enters the house. He turns on his flashlight and shines it around the foyer. Thunder rumbles as SCULLY follows him into the house.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Change your mind?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Did you take my car keys?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Come on, Mulder. Don't kid around.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Why would I take your car keys?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Maybe you, uh... Maybe you grabbed them by mistake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Maybe it was a ghost.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They both look up at the knocking sound above them, then over at the clock chiming in the foyer. Note the name on the clock: J. Cameron. Cute "Titanic" ref. Sound of wind blowing.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: That's a cold wind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: There must be a window open upstairs. You know, the weather report said that there was an 80 percent chance of rain maybe even a... maybe even a white Christmas.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Sound of thunder crashing. Front door slams shut. SCULLY runs to try to open them. They do not budge.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCENE 2</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Same scene.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I think the spirits are among us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (still trying the doors) Mulder, will you quit trying to scare me and help me get these doors open.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Sounds like there's somebody walking around upstairs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(More knocking upstairs.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: There. You hear that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, I really have to go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: There's nothing to be afraid of.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I'm not afraid, okay?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Ghosts are benevolent entities.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Sound of chains clanking from above.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Mostly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: You are not scaring me, Mulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY checks her watch. 11:03. She looks at the clock in the hall. It also reads 11:03.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Look, I really have to get home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER starts up the stairs leaving SCULLY alone. Lightening flashes showing her the silhouette of a figure next to the window. When the lightening flashes again, the figure is gone. SCULLY follows MULDER.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Shh! What was that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(The knocking stops.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: These are tricks that the mind plays. They are ingrained cliches from a thousand different horror films. When we hear a sound, we get a chill. We-we see a shadow and we allow ourselves to imagine something that an otherwise rational person would discount out of hand. The whole... Mulder...? (follows him up to the second floor) The whole idea of a benevolent entity fits perfectly with what I'm saying. That a spirit would materialize or return for no other purpose than to show itself is silly and ridiculous. I mean, what it really shows is how silly and ridiculous we have become in believing such things. I mean, that... That we can ignore all natural laws about the corporeal body- (MULDER tries a locked door) that-that we witness these spirits clad in-in their own shabby outfits with the same old haircuts and hairstyles never aging, never... Never in search of more comfortable surroundings-- it actually ends up saying more about the living than it does about the dead.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (trying another locked door) Mm-hmm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I mean, Mulder, it doesn't take an advanced degree in psychology to understand the... the unconscious yearnings that these imaginings satisfy. You know, the-the longing for immortality the hope that there is something beyond this mortal coil- (MULDER tries another locked door) that-that we might never be long without our loved ones. I mean, these are powerful, powerful desires. I mean, they're the very essence of what make us human. The very essence of Christmas, actually.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They both turn as a door creaks as it opens slightly by itself. A light is on in the room behind it.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Tell me you're not afraid.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: All right. I'm afraid... but it's an irrational fear.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY takes a few breaths, then heads for the cracked open door.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (not moving) I got your back.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (whispers) Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY pushes the door open and looks inside.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, did it occur to you that there aren't ghosts here but that somebody actually might be living in this house?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No one lives here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: But when you and I were sitting out in the car there was not a light on. And look at this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER and SCULLY walk into an elegant turn of the century two story library. There is a ladder leading down to the lower level. Furniture is covered with white cloth. Chandelier. Great harpsichord music.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Must have been some kind of electrical surge.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, did you happen to notice the clock downstairs is keeping perfect time?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: And how do you explain that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Indicates smoking fireplace. They go down the ladder to the fireplace.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: This fire has just gone out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Yeah.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Don't look so disappointed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Why would anyone want to live in a cursed house?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, it's not enough that it's haunted? It has to be cursed?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Every couple that's ever lived here has met a tragic end. Three double murders in the last 80 years. All on Christmas Eve.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(From above there is the sound of a door slamming and a thumping.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Whoa... There's that sound again</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They look down at the floor boards which are creaking. MULDER moves the furniture out of the way and puts his ear down to the floor. The doors to the library creak. SCULLY looks up at them, then notices that the ladder to the upper level of the library is missing.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY turns back to MULDER who has gotten up from the floor and is holding the flashlight under his chin in the classic "scare the bejeebees out of your little sister/friend" pose. It works. SCULLY turns and screams and he screams back at her.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: That's not funny!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (chuckling) I think there's a hiding space under the floorboards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: What are you going to do?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: There may be somebody trapped under there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, don't.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I got to get them out.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Not now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Hey, you have a gun, right? Rationally, you've been in much more dangerous situations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER begins pulling up floor boards. Exposes a very dead man.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I was half right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Oh, my God.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER keeps pulling up boards, exposes another body.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Hey, Scully... Look at this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: It's a woman.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY shines her flashlight on the two very decomposed corpses. Woman appears to have a bullet wound in her belly, man a wound in his chest.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, it looks like they were shot to death.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Yeah.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: You know what's weird?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, she's wearing my outfit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY and the female corpse are both wearing a white blouse and black jacket.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: How embarrassing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Yeah, well, you know what? He's wearing yours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER checks what he's wearing- white T-shirt and leather jacket.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Oh... Scully...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: That's us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They run out of the room and into … the library again. Great flashlight sequence, shining opposite directions, then over each other.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (realizing) Hey, Scully...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: This is the same room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They try again, and enter the library again. They still see the dead bodies.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: All right. I'm beginning to... Get this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: You go through that door and I...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I should come out... This door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER crosses to the opposite end of the room and exits into the library again. SCULLY waits for him to enter the door next to her, but he doesn't. They are separated.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Scully!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Doors slam between them. MULDER crosses to the door that just closed. He goes through it into the library again. The room is empty.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Scully!</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCENE 3</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Same scene continued. MULDER is banging on the door trying to connect with SCULLY.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Hey, Scully. Scully, can you hear me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER shoots the lock off the door, then opens it only to find that the doorway has been bricked up. He turns to see MAURICE, an older man wearing a hat standing in the room.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Hey! Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: That's a question I should be asking being this is my house you're standing in. This isn't one of those home invasions, is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Good. Would you like me to show you the door?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: That's very funny.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: I wasn't making a joke.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Have you looked at the door?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Uh-huh, I'm looking at it now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Tell me what you see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: I see a door with the lock shot off it. You going to pay for that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: That's a door with a brick wall behind it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: (disbelieving) Okay, sure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: You're playing tricks on me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: If I am, I'm sorry but I don't know any tricks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Yeah? That's a trick in itself, isn't it? You've been playing tricks on us since we got here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Am I to take it we're not alone?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER chuckles.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Ah, that's very funny coming from a ghost.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: ( laughs heartily ) Yeah, oh... the gun fooled me a little at first. You're a ghost hunter, huh? And you think I'm a ghost, huh? I've seen a lot of strange folks coming around here with a lot of strange equipment but I think you must be the first I've seen come armed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Strange folks?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Mm-hmm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Like those folks under the floorboard</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER turns and shines his light on the floor, but the corpses are missing, the floor untouched.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: How did you do that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: I didn't do anything.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: There were corpses here-- bodies buried under the floorboards.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Why don't you have a seat, son.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Short time later. MULDER is sitting with his face in his hands.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: You drink? Take drugs?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Get high?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Are you overcome by the impulse to make everyone believe you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER looks up at him in surprise.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: I'm in the field of mental health. I specialize in disorders and manias related to pathological behavior as it pertains to the paranormal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Wow. I didn't know such a thing existed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: My specialty is in what I call soul prospectors-- a crossaxial classification I've codified by extensive interaction with visitors like yourself. I've found you all tend to fall into pretty much the same category.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: And what category is that?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Narcissistic, overzealous, self-righteous egomaniac.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: That's a category?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: You kindly think of yourself as single-minded but you're prone to obsessive compulsiveness workaholism, antisocialism... Fertile fields for the descent into total wacko breakdown.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I don't think that pegs me exactly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Oh, really? Waving a gun around my house? Huh? Raving like a lunatic about some imaginary brick wall?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER looks over at … the brick wall in the doorway.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: You've probably convinced yourself you've seen aliens. You know why you think you see the things you do?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Because I have seen them?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: 'Cause you're a lonely man. A lonely man chasing paramasturbatory illusions that you believe will give your life meaning and significance and which your pathetic social maladjustment makes impossible for you to find elsewhere. You probably consider yourself passionate, serious, misunderstood. Am I right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: "Paramasturbatory"?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Most people would rather stick their fingers in a wall socket than spend a minute with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: All right, now just, uh... Just back off for a second.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Spend every Christmas this way... Alone?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (confident) I'm not alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: More self-delusion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: No, I came here with my partner. She's somewhere in the house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Behind a brick wall?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER smiles and nods.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: How'd you get her to come with you? Steal her car keys?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER drops his smile.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: You know why you do it-- listen endlessly to her droning rationalizations. 'Cause you're afraid. Afraid of the loneliness. Am I right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I'd just like to find my partner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Good... Easy. Piece of cake.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MAURICE gets up and walks through the clear doorway. He turns back to face MULDER.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Brick wall (indicates doorway) ... Or brick wall? (points to his head) Go ahead, change your life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER gets up and starts to walk through the now clear doorway. He runs into an invisible wall which we quickly perceive as the brick wall again. MAURICE is now out of sight. MULDER turns to see the now dark library which quickly cuts to SCULLY's version of the library.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY backs away from the locked door then turns and screams when she sees LYDA, an older woman dressed in a long white dressing gown. LYDA screams back. SCULLY frantically tries to get her gun out of the holster at the small of her back, but is shaking so badly she can't get hold of it.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: No, no, please, I won't hurt you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I'm a federal agent! I'm armed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: (turning on lights) You're what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (finally getting her gun out) I'm armed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: You said...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (gun shaking) I'm armed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: You're a federal agent?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Please, I'm a little on edge. Don't come any closer. My name is Special Agent Dana Scully. And, uh, I can... I can show you my I.D.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: My goodness, I... I thought you were a ghost.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I can assure you that I'm not. I, uh, I got stuck in this room looking for my partner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Oh, the gangly fellow with the distinguished profile.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: You've seen him?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: With you in the foyer. I thought he was a ghost, too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Oh... That was you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I sleepwalk sometimes. I thought maybe I'd dreamed it. But then here you were again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (catching her breath) I am sorry... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. I, uh... It's just that we found bodies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Bodies... Where?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Right...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(The floor is untouched.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: You look like you saw a ghost. There are ghosts in this house, you know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (raising gun again) Who are you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I live here, thank you very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Where's my partner?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Why are you pointing that gun?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: There were corpses right there underneath the floor!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(LYDA chuckles.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I think maybe the ghosts have been playing tricks on you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I don't believe in ghosts.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Then what are you doing here?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: It's my partner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: He believes in ghosts?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Yeah.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Oh, you poor child. You must have an awful small life. Spending your Christmas Eve with him... Running around chasing things you don't even believe in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Don't come any closer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: (coming closer) I can see it in your face... The fear... The conflicted yearnings... A subconscious desire to find fulfillment through another. Intimacy through co-dependency.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Maybe you repress the truth about why you're really here pretending it's out of duty or loyalty-- unable to admit your dirty little secret. Your only joy in life is proving him wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: You don't know me. And you don't live here. This isn't your house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: You wouldn't think so, the way I'm being treated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Well, then why is all the furniture covered?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: We're having the house painted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Well then where's your Christmas tree?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: We're Jewish. Boo.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY turns as MAURICE enters the room.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Hold it right there. Don't make me shoot you. Stay where you are.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: We really attract them, don't we?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Where's Mulder?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Mulder? Is that his name?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Where is he?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: He'll be along.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Move over there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They just look at her.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (trying to sound authoritative) Both of you, move. Move over there. Move other there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: This violates our civil rights. I have friends at the ACLU.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Put your hands up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They do. LYDA has a gunshot hole through her abdomen. SCULLY stares at her, then walks over to MAURICE and lifts his hat. There is a gunshot hole through is head. Camera pans to show her looking through the hole, then SCULLY faints. LYDA and MAURICE put their hands down.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: You see what we've resorted to? Gimmicks and cheap tricks. We used to be so good at this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: We used to have years to drive them mad. Now we get one night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: This pop psychology approach is crap. All it does is annoy them. When's the last time we actually haunted anyone?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: When was the last time we had a good double murder? Not since the house was condemned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: This is embarrassing-- amateur kid stuff.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Look, if we let our reputations slip they're going to take us off the tourist literature. Last year no one even showed up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Oh, of all days, why did you pick Christmas? Why not Halloween?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: (grabbing him by the lapels) Now, who is filled with hopelessness and futility on Halloween? Christmas comes but once a year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: You're right. These two do seem pretty miserable. We need to show them just how lonely Christmas can be.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Now that's the old Yuletide spirit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They kiss and begin laughing.)</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCENE 4</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER's version of the library. Flashlight in his mouth, MULDER is straining to pull himself up to the upper level of the library. LYDA watches from the lower level. Just as he gets up, LYDA enters the upper level.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Are you Agent Mulder?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Who are you, now?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: What are you doing using my chair for a ladder?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I'm trying to get out of this room.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Trying to get out?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Excuse me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: No, no. You can't get out that way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER hesitates, then pokes her in the shoulder. She is solid. He pushes her against the wall.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Masher.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Frump.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER opens the door and is confronted by another brick wall.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I don't know who you're calling a frump but I don't appreciate that-- being manhandled, or called names. Certainly not at this hour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: You're a ghost.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Oh, more names!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They go down the suddenly reappeared ladder to the chairs on the lower level.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: What happened to the star-crossed lovers?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Oh, let me tell you the romance is the first thing to go.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (realizing) It's you. You're Lyda, and that was Maurice. But you've aged.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I hope your partner finds you a lot more charming than I do. (prances to bookcase) Let's see. Where is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(LYDA mutters as, by themselves, books pull out of bookcase. MULDER is fascinated.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: No, no, no, no... (continues muttering ) there it is. (selects a book - The Ghosts Who Stole Christmas) I was young and beautiful once, just like your partner. Whoo! Look at us. Maurice was so handsome. (fire blazes up) He didn't have a gut.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(She hands MULDER the book which has a picture of an attractive couple in it - chapter title - Tale of the Star Crossed Lovers.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I hope you're not expecting any great advantages to all this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: To all what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I'm assuming you came here with similar misconceptions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: We came here looking for you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Oh, yeah? You didn't come here to be together for eternity?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (chuckling) No.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Because you're filled with despair and woeful Christmas melancholy?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Why?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: (sighing) Maybe it was your partner then.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (crossing his arms over his chest) What about her?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: You knew this house was haunted.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Yeah.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Maybe you two should have discussed your real feelings before you came out here. I'm speaking from experience.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: What experience?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I'm not going to get into semantics. A murder-suicide is all about trust.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I thought you had a lovers' pact.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: (laughs) Poetic illusions aside, the outcome, Mulder, is pretty much the same.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(LYDA stands and holds open her robe exposing the bullet wound.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (shocked) Oh...!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: I don't show my hole to just anyone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (rather disgusted) Why are you showing it to me?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: It isn't like you're going to be eating any Christmas ham, is it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Oh, you're trying to tell me that Scully's going to shoot me. Scully is not going to shoot me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Suit yourself, but if you shoot first, for her, the rest is an act of faith.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I wouldn't shoot her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Maybe she shoots herself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (confidently) I wouldn't let her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: The bodies under the floor-- maybe that was just some kind of Jungian symbolism. Or maybe... there's a secret lovers' pact.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (sighing with a smile) We're not lovers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: And this isn't a pure science. But you're both so attractive and there'll be a lot of time to work that out. (holds a gun out to him) Go ahead, take it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER quickly checks his holster and finds that the gun is missing)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Take it. Think of it as the last Christmas you'll ever spend alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(LYDA disappears letting the gun fall into a surprised MULDER's hand.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(CUT TO: SCULLY's version of the library. SCULLY wakes up from her faint and looks around holding her gun and flashlight. Tries a locked door.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: (sitting in one of the chairs) I locked it. For your protection.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY whips around to face him.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Stay away from me. Look, I want you to get me out of here. I am quite capable of pulling this trigger.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: I'm glad to hear it. You may well have to defend yourself against that crazy partner of yours.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: What have you done with him?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Kept him safe from his own mad devices-- at least for now. Do you have any idea why he brought you here to this house?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Look, all I know is this is just some bad dream. This is all in my head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Yet here you are waving a gun at me like your partner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(There is a pounding at the door.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (outside door) Hey, Scully!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Do you realize how seriously disturbed that man is? How dark and lonely? What he's capable of?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (outside door) Scully?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY starts to run to the door, but stops for MAURICE.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Want your car keys?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MAURICE dangles her car keys in front of her. She stares at them.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Where did you get those?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: He's got nowhere to go this Christmas. No one to go with. Did he happen to mention a story about a lovers' pact?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Where did you get those keys?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: The man is acting out an unconscious yearning. The deep-seated terror of being alone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(More pounding on door.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (outside door) Scully... Scully, are you there?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I'm here, Mulder!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (outside door) Open the door, Scully!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (taking keys, to MAURICE) Open the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MAURICE goes reluctantly to the door.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: I've seen it happen too many times in this house.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I don't believe you. Just open the door.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: But...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Open the door!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MAURICE opens the door and MULDER enters the room, gun drawn.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Where's Scully?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER turns to face her and fires his gun at her.)</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCENE 5</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Scene continues. MULDER, holding his gun keeps advancing on SCULLY. She holds her gun, but doesn't fire. He fires, shattering a mirror behind her.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, what are you doing? (he fires again) Mulder!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: There's no getting out of here, Scully. There's no way home. (fires)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, come on... Mulder, don't come any closer. You're scaring me. Put the gun down!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: You going to shoot me?!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I'm not going to shoot you! I don't want to shoot you!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (maniacal) It's me or you... You or me. One of us has to do it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder, look... We don't have to do this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Oh, yes, we do.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: We can get out of here.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Even if we could what's waiting for us? More loneliness! And then 365 more shopping days till even more loneliness!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I don't believe what you're saying! Mulder, I don't believe a word of it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER lowers the angle of the gun and fires. SCULLY drops her gun and stares down in shock at the bullet wound in her abdomen. She looks back up at MULDER who is biting his lower lip as if in pain himself, but still has a wild look in his eyes. Slowly she falls to the floor, still staring up at him.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Merry Christmas, Scully.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER raises the gun to his own temple. Camera angle changes, showing us that is not MULDER, but LYDA.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: And a happy New Year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MAURICE walks over and restrains MULDER/LYDA from firing the gun.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER/LYDA: Let me go!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Camera angle changes. We see again that it is LYDA. SCULLY still sees MULDER.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Let me go!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Let me go... Let me go...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER/LYDA: Let me go!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Scully!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(CUT TO: MULDER entering another version of the library. SCULLY lies bleeding on the floor. He runs to her side.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Scully?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (weak) Mulder... Is that you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: What did you do?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I didn't believe it, Mulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: You didn't believe what?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I didn't believe that you'd do it... That I would...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER looks down and sees that she has raised her gun to his chest.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Merry Christmas, Mulder.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (not pulling away) What are you doing?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(She fires the gun. MULDER, in shock falls back bleeding from the chest.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(LYDA, lying where MULDER just perceived SCULLY, giggles happily. Old phonograph player begins playing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." )</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY groggily rolls over and begins pulling herself out of the room.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MUSIC:</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Have yourself a merry little Christmas</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Let yourself be light</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >From now on, your troubles will be out of sight</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER is stumbling down the stairs, bleeding heavily.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Have yourself a merry little Christmas Make the Yuletide gay From now on, our troubles will be miles away Here we are, as in olden days</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER reaches and falls into the foyer which has a trail of blood across it. He sees SCULLY a few feet away also crawling to the door.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Scully?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Happy golden days of yore Faithful friends who are dear to us Gather near to us...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (gasping) Scully...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Through the years, we all will be together...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY rolls over painfully and points her gun at MULDER. MULDER manages to point his gun at her.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Until then, we'll have...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: ( whispering as she lowers the gun and falls back on to the floor) Ah... I'm not going to make it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (holding his gun on her) No, you're not... Not without me, you're not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Are you afraid, Mulder? (gasping) I am.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: I am, too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They both drop their guns and roll over painfully.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Faithful friends who are dear to us Gather near to us...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: You should have thought of this.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: You should have.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (accusing) You shot me first!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: (also accusing) I didn't shoot you. You shot me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If the fates allow Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(With dawning realization, MULDER stands up.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Scully...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY coughs.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Get up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I can't.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Get up... You're not shot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER holds his bloody shirt away from his stomach.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: What?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Come on. It's a trick. It's all in your head.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(He pulls SCULLY to her feet and holds out her bloody shirt. She looks down, then they both run out the now unlocked front door. Once outside, they look down at their now clean shirts, then run to their cars and drive off quickly.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Faithful friends who are dear to us</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Gather near to us once more</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Through the years, we all will be together</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If the fates allow</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Hang a shining star upon the highest bough</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And have yourself a merry... little Christmas now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Inside, clock begins striking twelve. MAURICE and LYDA are sitting in the library.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: You hear that? It's Christmas.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: One for the books.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: We almost had those two, didn't we?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: ( chuckling ) Almost had them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Two such lonely souls.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: We can't let our failures haunt us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: You wonder what they were really out here looking for.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: Hard to say. People now... This is just another joyless day of the year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LYDA: Not for us.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MAURICE: No. We haven't forgotten the meaning of Christmas.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They hold hands and fade away as the clock strikes twelve.)</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCENE 5</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER's apartment. Later that morning, but still dark outside. MULDER, still dressed in his jacket, is on his couch watching a black and white version of A Christmas Carol. He looks rather depressed.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >TV SCROOGE: (laughing) I don't deserve to be so happy. I can't help it. I just can't help it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >TV NARRATOR: Scrooge was better than his word. ( knocking ) He became as good a friend, as good a master and as good a man as the good old city ever knew or any other good old city, town or borough in the good old world. And to Tiny Tim...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(There is a knocking sound. He looks up first, then realizes it is his door. He looks around the corner of the wall, then shuts off the TV and opens the door. It is SCULLY, also still dressed.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: I, uh... I couldn't sleep. I was, um... ( sighing )</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(MULDER puts his arm around her shoulders and pulls her into the apartment and closes the door. They are both exhausted.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Come in. Aren't you supposed to be opening Christmas gifts with your family?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder... None of that really happened out there tonight... That was all in our heads, right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (unsure of what to say) I-it must have been.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mmm. Not that, uh, my only joy in life is proving you wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: When have you proved me wrong?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Well... Why else would you want me out there with you?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: You didn't want to be there?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(SCULLY has no answer. They both think about it.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: (self-analyzing) Oh, that's, um... That's self-righteous and... narcissistic of me to say, isn't it?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: No, I mean... Maybe I did want to be out there with you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(They look at each other for a moment.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Now, um... I know we said that we weren't going to exchange gifts but, uh... I got you... a little something.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(With a shy smile, he holds out a small wrapped tubular present - about the size of a short paper towel roll insert.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Mulder...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MULDER: Merry Christmas.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SCULLY: Well, I got you a little something, too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >(Embarrassed she holds out a small rectangular wrapped gift - size of a small book. Or a video. He chuckles as they take each other's presents. He shakes his, and she grins happily, then like kids they run over to the couch and begin opening their gifts as the camera pans away outside the window through the falling snow.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BING CROSBY: Have yourself a merry little Christmas now.</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[THE END] </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);">The characters, plotlines, quotes, etc. included here are owned by Chris Carter and 1013 Productions, all rights reserved. The above transcript is in no way a substitute for the show "The X-Files" and is merely meant as a homage. This transcript is not authorized or endorsed by Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, or Fox Entertainment. It was painstakingly typed out by Carri Kendl and made available for your personal enjoyment by me, Dr. Weesh from my website, </span> </span><a style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);" href="http://www.insidethex.co.uk/"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The X-Files Scripts Archive</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);">.<br /><br /></span></span><span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/11/christmas-2008.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Return to post</span></a></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-7981558669687441112008-11-05T14:14:00.001-08:002008-11-05T14:37:55.772-08:00An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Louisa May Alcott</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >SIXTY YEARS AGO, up among the New Hampshire hills, lived Farmer Bassett, with a houseful of sturdy sons and daughters growing up about him. They were poor in money, but rich in land and love, for the wide acres of wood, corn, and pasture land fed, warmed, and clothed the flock, while mutual patience, affection, and courage made the old farmhouse a very happy home.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >November had come; the crops were in, and barn, buttery, and bin were overflowing with the harvest that rewarded the summer's hard work. The big kitchen was a jolly place just now, for in the great fireplace roared a cheerful fire; on the walls hung garlands of dried apples, onions, and corn; up aloft from the beams shone crook-necked squashes, juicy hams, and dried venison--for in those days deer still haunted the deep forests, and hunters flourished. Savory smells were in the air; on the crane hung steaming kettles, and down among the red embers copper saucepans simmered, all suggestive of some approaching feast.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A white-headed baby lay in the old blue cradle that had rocked six other babies, now and then lifting his head to look out, like a round, full moon, then subsided to kick and crow contentedly, and suck the rosy apple he had no teeth to bite. Two small boys sat on the wooden settle shelling corn for popping, and picking out the biggest nuts from the goodly store their own hands had gathered in October. Four young girls stood at the long dresser, busily chopping meat, pounding spice, and slicing apples; and the tongues of Tilly, Prue, Roxy, and Rhody went as fast as their hands. Farmer Bassett, and Eph, the oldest boy, were "chorin' 'round" outside, for Thanksgiving was at hand, and all must be in order for that time-honored day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To and fro, from table to hearth, bustled buxom Mrs. Bassett, flushed and floury, but busy and blithe as the queen bee of this busy little hive should be.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I do like to begin seasonable and have things to my mind. Thanksgivin' dinners can't be drove, and it does take a sight of victuals to fill all these hungry stomicks," said the good woman, as she gave a vigorous stir to the great kettle of cider applesauce, and cast a glance of housewifely pride at the fine array of pies set forth on the buttery shelves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Only one more day and then it will be the time to eat. I didn't take but one bowl of hasty pudding this morning, so I shall have plenty of room when the nice things come," confided Seth to Sol, as he cracked a large hazelnut as easily as a squirrel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No need of my starvin' beforehand. I always have room enough, and I'd like to have Thanksgiving every day," answered Solomon, gloating like a young ogre over the little pig that lay near by, ready for roasting.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Sakes alive, I don't, boys! It's a marcy it don't come but once a year. I should be worn to a thread paper with all this extra work atop of my winter weavin' and spinnin'," laughed their mother, as she plunged her plump arms into the long bread trough and began to knead the dough as if a famine were at hand.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tilly, the oldest girl, a red-cheeked, black-eyed lass of fourteen, was grinding briskly at the mortar, for spices were costly, and not a grain must be wasted. Prue kept time with the chopper, and the twins sliced away at the apples till their little brown arms ached, for all knew how to work, and did so now with a will.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I think it's real fun to have Thanksgiving at home. I'm sorry Gran'ma is sick, so we can't go there as usual, but I like to mess 'round here, don't you, girls?" asked Tilly, pausing to take a sniff at the spicy pestle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It will be kind of lonesome with only our own folks." "I like to see all the cousins and aunts, and have games, and sing," cried the twins, who were regular little romps, and could run, swim, coast, and shout as well as their brothers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't care a mite for all that. It will be so nice to eat dinner together, warm and comfortable at home," said quiet Prue, who loved her own cozy nooks like a cat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come, girls, fly 'round and get your chores done, so we can clear away for dinner jest as soon as I clap my bread into the oven," called Mrs. Bassett presently, as she rounded off the last loaf of brown bread which was to feed the hungry mouths that seldom tasted any other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Here's a man comin' up the hill lively!" "Guess it's Gad Hopkins. Pa told him to bring a dezzen oranges, if they warn't too high!" shouted Sol and Seth, running to the door, while the girls smacked their lips at the thought of this rare treat, and Baby threw his apple overboard, as if getting ready for a new cargo.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But all were doomed to disappointment, for it was not Gad, with the much-desired fruit. It was a stranger, who threw himself off his horse and hurried up to Mr. Bassett in the yard, with some brief message that made the farmer drop his ax and look so sober that his wife guessed at once some bad news had come; and crying, "Mother's wuss! I know she is!" Out ran the good woman, forgetful of the flour on her arms and the oven waiting for its most important batch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The man said old Mr. Chadwick, down to Keene, stopped him as he passed, and told him to tell Mrs. Bassett her mother was failin' fast, and she'd better come today. He knew no more, and having delivered his errand he rode away, saying it looked like snow and he must be jogging, or he wouldn't get home till night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We must go right off, Eldad. Hitch up, and I'll be ready in less'n no time," said Mrs. Bassett, wasting not a minute in tears and lamentations, but pulling off her apron as she went in, with her head in a sad jumble of bread, anxiety, turkey, sorrow, haste, and cider applesauce.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >A few words told the story, and the children left their work to help her get ready, mingling their grief for "Gran'ma" with regrets for the lost dinner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I'm dreadful sorry, dears, but it can't be helped. I couldn't cook nor eat no way now, and if that blessed woman gets better sudden, as she has before, we'll have cause for thanksgivin', and I'll give you a dinner you won't forget in a hurry," said Mrs. Bassett, as she tied on her brown silk pumpkin-hood, with a sob for the good old mother who had made it for her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Not a child complained after that, but ran about helpfully, bringing moccasins, heating the footstone, and getting ready for a long drive, because Gran'ma lived twenty miles away, and there were no railroads in those parts to whisk people to and fro like magic. By the time the old yellow sleigh was at the door, the bread was in the oven, and Mrs. Bassett was waiting, with her camlet cloak on, and the baby done up like a small bale of blankets.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now, Eph, you must look after the cattle like a man and keep up the fires, for there's a storm brewin', and' neither the children nor dumb critters must suffer," said Mr. Bassett, as he turned up the collar of his rough coat and put on his blue mittens, while the old mare shook her bells as if she preferred a trip to Keene to hauling wood all day.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Tilly, put extry comfortables on the beds to-night, the wind is so searchin' up chamber. Have the baked beans and Injun-puddin' for dinner, and whatever you do, don't let the boys get at the mince-pies, or you'll have them down sick. I shall come back the minute I can leave Mother. Pa will come to-morrer anyway, so keep snug and be good. I depend on you, my darter; use your jedgment, and don't let nothin' happen while Mother's away."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes'm, yes'm--good-bye, good-bye!" called the children, as Mrs. Bassett was packed into the sleigh and driven away, leaving a stream of directions behind her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eph, the sixteen-year-old boy, immediately put on his biggest boots, assumed a sober, responsible manner and surveyed his little responsibilities with a paternal air, drolly like his father's. Tilly tied on her mother's bunch of keys, rolled up the sleeves of her homespun gown, and began to order about the younger girls. They soon forgot poor Granny, and found it great fun to keep house all alone, for Mother seldom left home, but ruled her family in the good old-fashioned way. There were no servants, for the little daughters were Mrs. Bassett's only maids, and the stout boys helped their father, all working happily together with no wages but love; learning in the best manner the use of the heads and hands with which they were to make their own way in the world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The few flakes that caused the farmer to predict bad weather soon increased to a regular snowstorm, with gusts of wind, for up among the hills winter came early and lingered long. But the children were busy, gay, and warm indoors, and never minded the rising gale nor the whirling white storm outside.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tilly got them a good dinner, and when it was over the two elder girls went to their spinning, for in the kitchen stood the big and little wheels, and baskets of wool rolls ready to be twisted into yarn for the winter's knitting, and each day brought its stint of work to the daughters, who hoped to be as thrifty as their mother.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eph kept up a glorious fire, and superintended the small boys, who popped corn and whittled boats on the hearth; while Roxy and Rhody dressed corncob dolls in the settle corner, and Bose, the brindled mastiff, lay on the braided mat, luxuriously warming his old legs. Thus employed, they made a pretty picture, these rosy boys and girls, in their homespun suits, with the rustic toys or tasks which most children nowadays would find very poor or tiresome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tilly and Prue sang, as they stepped to and fro, drawing out the smoothly twisted threads to the musical hum of the great spinning wheels. The little girls chattered like magpies over their dolls and the new bedspread they were planning to make, all white dimity stars on a blue calico ground, as a Christmas present to Ma. The boys roared at Eph's jokes, and had rough and tumble games over Bose, who didn't mind them in the least; and so the afternoon wore pleasantly away.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At sunset the boys went out to feed the cattle, bring in heaps of wood, and lock up for the night, as the lonely farmhouse seldom had visitors after dark. The girls got the simple supper of brown bread and milk, baked apples, and a doughnut all 'round as a treat. Then they sat before the fire, the sisters knitting, the brothers with books or games, for Eph loved reading, and Sol and Seth never failed to play a few games of Morris with barley corns, on the little board they had themselves at one corner of the dresser.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Read out a piece," said Tilly from Mother's chair, where she sat in state, finishing off the sixth woolen sock she had knit that month.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's the old history book, but here's a bit you may like, since it's about our folks," answered Eph, turning the yellow page to look at a picture of two quaintly dressed children in some ancient castle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, read that. I always like to hear about the Lady Matildy I was named for, and Lord Bassett, Pa's great-great-great grandpa. He's only a farmer now, but it's nice to know we were somebody two or three hundred years ago," said Tilly, bridling and tossing her curly head as she fancied the Lady Matilda might have done.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't read the queer words, 'cause we don't understand 'em. Tell it," commanded Roxy, from the cradle, where she was drowsily cuddled with Rhody.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, a long time ago, when Charles the First was in prison, Lord Bassett was a true friend to him," began Eph, plunging into his story without delay. "The lord had some papers that would have hung a lot of people if the king's enemies got hold of 'em, so when he heard one day, all of a sudden, that soldiers were at the castle gate to carry him off, he had just time to call his girl to him and say: 'I may be going to my death, but I won't betray my master. There is no time to burn the papers, and I can not take them with me; they are hidden in the old leathern chair where I sit. No one knows this but you, and you must guard them till I come or send you a safe messenger to take them away. Promise me to be brave and silent, and I can go without fear.' You see, he wasn't afraid to die, but he was to seem a traitor. Lady Matildy promised solemnly, and the words were hardly out of her mouth when the men came in, and her father was carried away a prisoner and sent off to the Tower."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But she didn't cry; she just called her brother, and sat down in that chair, with her head leaning back on those papers, like a queen, and waited while the soldiers hunted the house over for 'em: wasn't that a smart girl?" cried Tilly, beaming with pride, for she was named for this ancestress, and knew the story by heart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I reckon she was scared, though, when the men came swearin in and asked her if she knew anything about it. The boy did his part then, for he didn't know, and fired up and stood before his sister; and he says, says he, as bold as a lion: 'If my lord had told us where the papers be, we would die before we would betray him. But we are children and know nothing, and it is cowardly of you to try to fight us with oaths and drawn swords!'"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As Eph quoted from the book, Seth planted himself before Tilly, with the long poker in his hand, saying, as he flourished it valiantly:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Why didn't the boy take his father's sword and lay about him? I would, if any one was ha'sh to Tilly."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You bantam! He was only a bit of a boy, and couldn't do anything. Sit down and hear the rest of it," commanded Tilly, with a pat on the yellow head, and a private resolve that Seth should have the largest piece of pie at dinner next day, as reward for his chivalry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, the men went off after turning the castle out of window, but they said they should come again; so faithful Matildy was full of trouble, and hardly dared to leave the room where the chair stood. All day she sat there, and at night her sleep was so full of fear about it, that she often got up and went to see that all was safe. The servants thought the fright had hurt her wits, and let her be, but Rupert, the boy, stood by her and never was afraid of her queer ways. She was 'a pious maid,' the book says, and often spent the long evenings reading the Bible, with her brother by her, all alone in the great room, with no one to help her bear her secret, and no good news of her father. At last, word came that the king was dead and his friends banished out of England. Then the poor children were in a sad plight, for they had no mother, and the servants all ran away, leaving only one faithful old man to help them."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"But the father did come?" cried Roxy, eagerly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You'll see," continued Eph, half telling, half reading. "Matilda was sure he would, so she sat on in the big chair, guarding the papers, and no one could get her away, till one day a man came with her father's ring and told her to give up the secret. She knew the ring, but would not tell until she had asked many questions, so as to be very sure, and while the man answered all about her father and the king, she looked at him sharply. Then she stood up and said, in a tremble, for there was something strange about the man: 'Sir, I doubt you in spite of the ring, and I will not answer till you pull off the false beard you wear, that I may see your face and know if you are my father's friend or foe.' Off came the disguise, and Matilda found it was my lord himself, come to take them with him out of England. He was very proud of that faithful girl, I guess, for the old chair still stands in the castle, and the I name keeps in the family, Pa says, even over here, where some of the Bassetts came along with the Pilgrims."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Our Tilly would have been as brave, I know, and she looks like the old picter down to Gran' ma's, don't she, Eph?" cried Prue, who admired her bold, bright sister very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I think you'd do the settin' part best, Prue, you are so patient. Till would fight like a wild cat, but she can't hold her tongue worth a cent" answered Eph; whereat Tilly pulled his hair, and the story ended with a general frolic.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the moon-faced clock behind the door struck nine, Tilly tucked up the children under the "extry cornfortables," and having kissed them all around, as Mother did, crept into her own nest, never minding the little drifts of snow that sifted in upon her coverlet between the shingles of the roof, nor the storm that raged without.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As if he felt the need of unusual vigilance, old Bose lay down on the mat before the door, and pussy had the warm hearth all to herself. If any late wanderer had looked in at midnight, he would have seen the fire blazing up again, and in the cheefful glow the old cat blinking her yellow eyes, as she sat bolt upright beside the spinning wheel, like some sort of household goblin, guarding the children while they slept.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When they woke, like early birds, it still snowed, but up the little Bassetts jumped, broke the ice in their jugs, and went down with cheeks glowing like winter apples, after a brisk scrub and scramble into their clothes. Eph was off to the barn, and Tilly soon had a great kettle of mush ready, which, with milk warm from the cows made a wholesome breakfast for the seven hearty children.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now about dinner," said the young housekeeper, as the pewter spoons stopped clattering, and the earthen bowls stood empty.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ma said, have what we liked, but she didn't expect us to have a real Thanksgiving dinner, because she won't be here to cook it, and we don't know how," began Prue, doubtfully.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I can roast a turkey and make a pudding as well as anybody, I guess. The pies are all ready, and if we can't boil vegetables and so on, we don't deserve any dinner," cried Tilly, burning to distinguish herself, and bound to enjoy to the utmost her brief authority.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes, yes!" cried all the boys, "let's have a dinner anyway; Ma won't care, and the good victuals will spoil if they ain't eaten right up."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pa is coming tonight, so we won't have dinner till late; that will be real genteel and give us plenty of time," added Tilly, suddenly realizing the novelty of the task she had undertaken.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Did you ever roast a turkey?" asked Roxy, with an air of deep interest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Should you darst to try?" said Rhody, in an awe-stricken tone.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You will see what I can do. Ma said I was to use my judgment about things, and I'm going to. All you children have got to do is to keep out of the way, and let Prue and me work. Eph, I wish you'd put a fire in the best room, so the little ones can play in there. We shall want the settin-room for the table, and I won t have them pickin' round when we get things fixed," commanded Tilly, bound to make her short reign a brilliant one.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I don't know about that. Ma didn't tell us to," began cautious Eph who felt that this invasion of the sacred best parlor was a daring step.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't we always do it Sundays and Thanksgivings? Wouldn't Ma wish the children kept safe and warm anyhow? Can I get up a nice dinner with four rascals under my feet all the time? Come, now, if you want roast turkey and onions, plum-puddin' and mince-pie, you'll have to do as I tell you, and be lively about it."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tilly spoke with such spirit, and her suggestion was so irresistible, that Eph gave in, and, laughing good-naturedly, tramped away to heat up the best room, devoutly hoping that nothing serious would happen to punish such audacity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The young folks delightedly trooped away to destroy the order of that prim apartment with housekeeping under the black horsehair sofa, "horseback-riders" on the arms of the best rocking chair, and an Indian war dance all over the well-waxed furniture. Eph, finding the society of peaceful sheep and cows more to his mind than that of two excited sisters, lingered over his chores in the barn as long as possible, and left the girls in peace.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Now Tilly and Prue were in their glory, and as soon as the breakfast things were out of the way, they prepared for a grand cooking time. They were handy girls, though they had never heard of a cooking school, never touched a piano, and knew nothing of embroidery beyond the samplers which hung framed in the parlor; one ornamented with a pink mourner under a blue weeping willow, the other with this pleasing verse, each word being done in a different color, which gave the effect of a distracted rainbow:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This sampler neat was worked by me,</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In my twelfth year, Prudence B. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Both rolled up their sleeves, put on their largest aprons, and got out all the spoons, dishes, pots, and pans they could find, "so as to have everything handy," Prue said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now, sister, we'll have dinner at five; Pa will be here by that time, if he is coming tonight, and be so surprised to find us all ready, for he won't have had any very nice victuals if Gran'ma is so sick," said Tilly, importantly. "I shall give the children a piece at noon" (Tilly meant luncheon); "doughnuts and cheese, with apple pie and cider, will please 'em. There's beans for Eph; he likes cold pork, so we won't stop to warm it up, for there's lots to do, and I don't mind saying to you I'm dreadful dubersome about the turkey."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's all ready but the stuffing, and roasting is as easy as can be. I can baste first-rate. Ma always likes to have me, I'm so patient and stiddy, she says," answered Prue, for the responsibility of this great undertaking did not rest upon her, so she took a cheerful view of things.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I know, but it's the stuffin' that troubles me," said Tilly, rubbing her round elbows as she eyed the immense fowl laid out on a platter before her. "I don't know how much I want, nor what sort of yarbs to put in, and he's so awful big, I'm kind of afraid of him."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I ain't! I fed him all summer, and he never gobbled at me. I feel real mean to be thinking of gobbling him, poor old chap," laughed Prue, patting her departed pet with an air of mingled affection and appetite.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I'll get the puddin' off my mind fust, for it ought to bile all day. Put the big kettle on, and see that the spit is clean, while I get ready."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prue obediently tugged away at the crane, with its black hooks, from which hung the iron teakettle and three-legged pot; then she settled the long spit in the grooves made for it in the tall andirons, and put the dripping pan underneath, for in those days meat was roasted as it should be, not baked in ovens.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Meantime Tilly attacked the plum pudding. She felt pretty sure of coming out right, here, for she had seen her mother do it so many times, it looked very easy. So in went suet and fruit; all sorts of spice, to be sure she got the right ones, and brandy instead of wine. But she forgot both sugar and salt, and tied it in the cloth so tightly that it had no room to swell, so it would come out as heavy as lead and as hard as a cannonball, if the bag did not burst and spoil it all. Happily unconscious of these mistakes, Tilly popped it into the pot, and proudly watched it bobbing about before she put the cover on and left it to its fate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I can't remember what flavorin' Ma puts in," she said, when she had got her bread well soaked for stuffing. "Sage and onions and applesauce go with goose, but I can't feel sure of anything but pepper and salt for a turkey."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ma puts in some kind of mint, I know, but I forget whether it is spearmint, peppermint, or pennyroyal," answered Prue, in a tone of doubt, but trying to show her knowledge of "yarbs," or, at least, of their names.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Seems to me it's sweet majoram or summer savory. I guess we'll put both in, and then we are sure to be right. The best is up garret; you run and get some, while I mash the bread," commanded Tilly, diving into the mess.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Away trotted Prue, but in her haste she got catnip and wormwood, for the garret was darkish, and Prue's little nose was so full of the smell of the onions she had been peeling, that everything smelt of them. Eager to be of use, she pounded up the herbs and scattered the mixture with a liberal hand into the bowl.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It doesn't smell just right, but I suppose it will when it is cooked," said Tilly, as she filled the empty stomach, that seemed aching for food, and sewed it up with the blue yarn, which happened to be handy. She forgot to tie down his legs and wings, but she set him by till his hour came, well satisfied with her work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Shall we roast the little pig, too? I think he'd look nice with a necklace of sausages, as Ma fixed him at Christmas," asked Prue, elated with their success.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I couldn't do it. I loved that little pig, and cried when he was killed. I should feel as if I was roasting the baby," answered Tilly, glancing toward the buttery where piggy hung, looking so pink and pretty it certainly did seem cruel to eat him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It took a long time to get all the vegetables ready, for, as the cellar was full, the girls thought they would have every sort. Eph helped, and by noon all was ready for cooking, and the cranberry sauce, a good deal scorched, was cooking in the lean-to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Luncheon was a lively meal, and doughnuts and cheese vanished in such quantities that Tilly feared no one would have an appetite for her sumptuous dinner. The boys assured her they would be starving by five o'clock, and Sol mourned bitterly over the little pig that was not to be served up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Now you all go and coast, while Prue and I set the table and get out the best chiny," said Tilly, bent on having her dinner look well, no matter what its other failings might be.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Out came the rough sleds, on went the round hoods, old hats, red cloaks, and moccasins, and away trudged the four younger Bassetts, to disport themselves in the snow, and try the ice down by the old mill, where the great wheel turned and splashed so merrily in the summertime.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eph took his fiddle and scraped away to his heart's content in the parlor, while the girls, after a short rest, set the table and made all ready to dish up the dinner when that exciting moment came. It was not at all the sort of table we see now, but would look very plain and countrified to us, with its green-handled knives, and two-pronged steel forks, its red-and-white china, and pewter platters, scoured till they shone, with mugs and spoons to match, and a brown jug for the cider. The cloth was coarse, but white as snow, and the little maids had seen the blue-eyed flax grow, out of which their mother wove the linen; they had watched and watched while it bleached in the green meadow. They had no napkins and little silver; but the best tankard and Ma's few wedding spoons were set forth in state. Nuts and apples at the corners gave an air, and the place of honor was left in the middle for the oranges yet to come.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't it look beautiful?" said Prue, when they paused to admire the general effect.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Pretty nice, I think. I wish Ma could see how well we can do it," began Tilly, when a loud howling startled both girls, and sent them flying to the window. The short afternoon had passed so quickly that twilight had come before they knew it, and now, as they looked out through the gathering dusk, they saw four small black figures tearing up the road, to come bursting in, all screaming at once: "The bear, the bear! Eph, get the gun! He's coming, he's coming!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Eph had dropped his fiddle, and got down his gun before the girls could calm the children enough to tell their story, which they did in a somewhat incoherent manner. "Down in the holler, coastin', we heard a growl," began Sol, with his eyes as big as saucers. "I see him fust lookin' over the wall," roared Seth, eager to get his share of honor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Awful big and shaggy," quavered Roxy, clinging to Tilly, while Rhody hid in Prue's skirts, and piped out:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"His great paws kept clawing at us, and I was so scared my legs would hardly go."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"We ran away as fast as we could go, and he came growlin' after us. He's awful hungry, and he'll eat every one of us if he gets in," continued Sol, looking about him for a safe retreat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, Eph, don't let him eat us," cried both little girls, flying upstairs to hide under their mother's bed, as their surest shelter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"No danger of that, you little geese. I'll shoot him as soon as he comes. Get out of the way, boys," and Eph raised the window to get good aim.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There he is! Fire away, and don't miss!" cried Seth, hastily following Sol, who had climbed to the top of the dresser as a good perch from which to view the approaching fray.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Prue retired to the hearth as if bent on dying at her post rather than desert the turkey, now "browning beautiful," as she expressed it. But Tilly boldly stood at the open window, ready to lend a hand if the enemy proved too much for Eph.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >All had seen bears, but none had ever come so near before, and even brave Eph felt that the big brown beast slowly trotting up the dooryard was an unusually formidable specimen. He was growling horribly, and stopped now and then as if to rest and shake himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Get the ax, Tilly, and if I should miss, stand ready to keep him off while I load again," said Eph, anxious to kill his first bear in style and alone; a girl's help didn't count.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tilly flew for the ax, and was at her brother's side by the time the bear was near enough to be dangerous. He stood on his hind legs, and seemed to sniff with relish the savory odors that poured out of the window.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Fire, Eph!" cried Tilly, firmly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Wait till he rears again. I'll get a better shot then" answered the boy, while Prue covered her ears to shut out the bang, and the small boys cheered from their dusty refuge among the pumpkins.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But a very singular thing happened next, and all who saw it stood amazed, for suddenly Tilly threw down the ax, flung open the door, and ran straight into the arms of the bear, who stood erect to receive her, while his growlings changed to a loud "Haw, haw!" that startled the children more than the report of a gun.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It's Gad Hopkins, tryin' to fool us!" cried Eph, much disgusted at the loss of his prey, for these hardy boys loved to hunt and prided themselves on the number of wild animals and birds they could shoot in a year.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, Gad, how could you scare us so?" laughed Tilly, still held fast in one shaggy arm of the bear, while the other drew a dozen oranges from some deep pocket in the buffalo-skin coat, and fired them into the kitchen with such good aim that Eph ducked, Prue screamed, and Sol and Seth came down much quicker than they went up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Wal, you see I got upsot over yonder, and the old horse went home while I was floundering in a drift, so I tied on the buffalers to tote 'em easy, and come along till I see the children playin' in the holler. I jest meant to give 'em a little scare, but they run like partridges, and I kep' up the joke to see how Eph would like this sort of company," and Gad haw-hawed again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"You'd have had a warm welcome if we hadn't found you out. I'd have put a bullet through you in a jiffy, old chap," said Eph, coming out to shake hands with the young giant, who was only a year or two older than himself.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Come in and set up to dinner with us. Prue and I have done it all ourselves, and Pa will be along soon, I reckon," cried Tilly, trying to escape.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Couldn't, no ways. My folks will think I'm dead ef I don't get along home, sence the horse and sleigh have gone ahead empty I've done my arrant and had my joke; now I want my pay, Tilly," and Gad took a hearty kiss from the rosy cheeks of his "little sweetheart," as he called her. His own cheeks tingled with the smart slap she gave him as she ran away, calling out that she hated bears and would bring her ax next time.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I ain't afeared--your sharp eyes found me out: and ef you run into a bear's arms you must expect a hug," answered Gad, as he pushed back the robe and settled his fur cap more becomingly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I should have known you in a minute if I hadn't been asleep when the girls squalled. You did it well, though, and I advise you not to try it again in a hurry, or you'll get shot," said Eph, as they parted, he rather crestfallen and Gad in high glee.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"My sakes alive--the turkey is all burnt one side, and the kettles have biled over so the pies I put to warm are all ashes!" scolded Tilly, as the flurry subsided and she remembered her dinner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Well, I can't help it. I couldn't think of victuals when I expected to be eaten alive myself, could I?" pleaded poor Prue, who had tumbled into the cradle when the rain of oranges began.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tilly laughed, and all the rest joined in, so goodhumor was restored, and the spirits of the younger ones were revived by sucks from the one orange which passed from hand to hand with great rapidity while the older girls dished up the dinner. They were just struggling to get the pudding out of the cloth when Roxy called out: "Here's Pa!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"There's folks with him," added Rhody.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Lots of 'em! I see two big sleighs chock full," shouted Seth, peering through the dusk.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"It looks like a semintary. Guess Gran'ma's dead and come up to be buried here," said Sol, in a solemn tone. This startling suggestion made Tilly, Prue, and Eph hasten to look out, full of dismay at such an ending of their festival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"If that is a funeral, the mourners are uncommonly jolly," said Eph, dryly, as merry voices and loud laughter broke the white silence without.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I see Aunt Cinthy, and Cousin Hetty--and there's Mose and Amos. I do declare, Pa's bringin' 'em all home to have some fun here," cried Prue, as she recognized one familiar face after another.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Oh, my patience! Ain't I glad I got dinner, and don't I hope it will turn out good!" exclaimed Tilly, while the twins pranced with delight, and the small boys roared:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hooray for Pa! Hooray for Thanksgivin'!"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The cheer was answered heartily, and in came Father, Mother, Baby, aunts, and cousins, all in great spirits; and all much surprised to find such a festive welcome awaiting them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Ain't Gran'ma dead at all?" asked Sol, in the midst of the kissing and handshaking.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Bless your heart, no! It was all a mistake of old Mr. Chadwick's. He's as deaf as an adder, and when Mrs. Brooks told him Mother was mendin' fast, and she wanted me to come down today, certain sure, he got the message all wrong, and give it to the fust person passin' in such a way as to scare me 'most to death, and send us down in a hurry. Mother was sittin' up as chirk as you please, and dreadful sorry you didn't all come."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"So, to keep the house quiet for her, and give you a taste of the fun, your Pa fetched us all up to spend the evenin', and we are goin' to have a jolly time on't, to jedge by the looks of things," said Aunt Cinthy, briskly finishing the tale when Mrs. Bassett paused for want of breath.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"What in the world put it into your head we was comm', and set you to gittin' up such a supper?" asked Mr. Bassett, looking about him, well pleased and much surprised at the plentiful table.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Tilly modestly began to tell, but the others broke in and sang her praises in a sort of chorus, in which bears, pigs, pies, and oranges were oddly mixed. Great satisfaction was expressed by all, and Tilly and Prue were so elated by the commendation of Ma and the aunts, that they set forth their dinner, sure everything was perfect.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But when the eating began, which it did the moment wraps were off; then their pride got a fall; for the first person who tasted the stuffing (it was big Cousin Mose, and that made it harder to bear) nearly choked over the bitter morsel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Tilly Bassett, whatever made you put wormwood and catnip in your stuffin'?" demanded Ma, trying not to be severe, for all the rest were laughing, and Tilly looked ready to cry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I did it," said Prue, nobly taking all the blame, which caused Pa to kiss her on the spot, and declare that it didn't do a mite of harm, for the turkey was all right.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I never see onions cooked better. All the vegetables is well done, and the dinner a credit to you, my dears," declared Aunt Cinthy, with her mouth full of the fragrant vegetable she praised.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The pudding was an utter failure in spite of the blazing brandy in which it lay--as hard and heavy as one of the stone balls on Squire Dunkin's great gate. It was speedily whisked out of sight, and all fell upon the pies, which were perfect. But Tilly and Prue were much depressed, and didn't recover their spirits till dinner was over and the evening fun well under way.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Blind-man's bluff," "Hunt the slipper," "Come, Philander," and other lively games soon set everyone bubbling over with jollity, and when Eph struck up "Money Musk" on his fiddle, old and young fell into their places for a dance. All down the long kitchen they stood, Mr. and Mrs. Bassett at the top, the twins at the bottom, and then away they went, heeling and toeing, cutting pigeon-wings, and taking their steps in a way that would convulse modern children with their new-fangled romps called dancing. Mose and Tilly covered themselves with glory by the vigor with which they kept it up, till fat Aunt Cinthy fell into a chair, breathlessly declaring that a very little of such exercise was enough for a woman of her "heft."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Apples and cider, chat and singing, finished the evening, and after a grand kissing all round, the guests drove away in the clear moonlight which came out to cheer their long drive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the jingle of the last bell had died away, Mr. Bassett said soberly, as they stood together on the hearth:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Children, we have special cause to be thankful that the sorrow we expected was changed into joy, so we'll read a chapter 'fore we go to bed, and give thanks where thanks is due."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then Tilly set out the light stand with the big Bible on it, and a candle on each side, and all sat quietly in the firelight, smiling as they listened with happy hearts to the sweet old words that fit all times and seasons so beautifully.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the good-nights were over, and the children in bed, Prue put her arm round Tilly and whispered tenderly, for she felt her shake, and was sure she was crying:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Don't mind about the old stuffin' and puddin', deary--nobody cared, and Ma said we really did do surprisin' well for such young girls."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The laughter Tilly was trying to smother broke out then, and was so infectious, Prue could not help joining her, even before she knew the cause of the merriment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I was mad about the mistakes, but don't care enough to cry. I'm laughing to think how Gad fooled Eph and I found him out. I thought Mose and Amos would have died over it, when I told them, it was so funny," explained Tilly, when she got her breath.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"I was so scared that when the first orange hit me, I thought it was a bullet, and scrabbled into the cradle as fast as I could. It was real mean to frighten the little ones so," laughed Prue, as Tilly gave a growl.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Here a smart rap on the wall of the next room caused a sudden lull in the fun, and Mrs. Bassett's voice was heard, saying warningly, "Girls, go to sleep immediate, or you'll wake the baby."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Yes'm," answered two meek voices, and after a few irrepressible giggles, silence reigned, broken only by an occasional snore from the boys, or the soft scurry of mice in the buttery, taking their part in this old-fashioned Thanksgiving.<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/11/thanksgiving-2008.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Return</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-67055750529712989632008-11-05T14:11:00.000-08:002008-11-05T14:39:07.535-08:00Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;font-family:arial;font-size:130%;" >Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >by </span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >O. Henry</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >[William Sydney Porter]</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at 1 o'clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him -- Charles Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat above his heart, and equally on the other side.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But today Stuffy Pete's appearance at the annual trysting place seemed to have been rather the result of habit than of the yearly hunger which, as the philanthropists seem to think, afflicts the poor at such extended intervals.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Certainly Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a feast that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat collar. Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation fingers a week before flew like popcorn, strewing the earth around him. Ragged he was, with a split shirt front open to the wishbone; but the November breeze, carrying fine snowflakes, brought him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner, beginning with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including (it seemed to him) all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the world with after-dinner contempt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The meal had been an unexpected one. He was passing a red brick mansion near the beginning of Fifth Avenue, in which lived two old ladies of ancient family and a reverence for traditions. They even denied the existence of New York, and believed that Thanksgiving Day was declared solely for Washington Square. One of their traditional habits was to station a servant at the postern gate with orders to admit the first hungry wayfarer that came along after the hour of noon had struck, and banquet him to a finish. Stuffy Pete happened to pass by on his way to the park, and the seneschals gathered him in and upheld the custom of the castle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >After Stuffy Pete had gazed straight before him for ten minutes he was conscious of a desire for a more varied field of vision. With a tremendous effort he moved his head slowly to the left. And then his eyes bulged out fearfully, and his breath ceased, and the rough-shod ends of his short legs wriggled and rustled on the gravel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Old Gentleman was coming across Fourth Avenue toward his bench.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years the Old Gentleman had come there and found Stuffy Pete on his bench. That was a thing that the Old Gentleman was trying to make a tradition of. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had found Stuffy there, and had led him to a restaurant and watched him eat a big dinner. They do those things in England unconsciously. But this is a young country, and nine years is not so bad. The Old Gentleman was a staunch American patriot, and considered himself a pioneer in American tradition. In order to become picturesque we must keep on doing one thing for a long time without ever letting it get away from us. Something like collecting the weekly dimes in industrial insurance. Or cleaning the streets.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Old Gentleman moved, straight and stately, toward the Institution that he was rearing. Truly, the annual feeding of Stuffy Pete was nothing national in its character, such as the Magna Charta or jam for breakfast was in England. But it was a step. It was almost feudal. It showed, at least, that a Custom was not impossible to New Y-- ahem! -- America.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Old Gentleman was thin and tall and sixty. He was dressed all in black, and wore the old-fashioned kind of glasses that won't stay on your nose. His hair was whiter and thinner than it had been last years, and he seemed to make more use of his big, knobby cane with the crooked handle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >As his established benefactor came up Stuffy wheezed and shuddered like some woman's over-fat pug when a street dog bristles up at him. He would have flown, but all the skill of Santos-Dumont could not have separated him from his bench. Well had the myrmidons of the two old ladies done their work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Good morning," said the Old Gentleman. "I am glad to perceive that the vicissitudes of another year have spared you to move in health about the beautiful world. For that blessing alone this day of thanksgiving is well proclaimed to each of us. If you will come with me, my man, I will provide you with a dinner that should make your physical being accord with the mental."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That is what the Old Gentleman said every time. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years. The words themselves almost formed an Institution. Nothing could be compared with them except the Declaration of Independence. Always before they had been music in Stuffy's ears. But now he looked up at the Old Gentleman's face with tearful agony in his own. The fine snow almost sizzled when it fell upon his perspiring brow. But the Old Gentleman shivered a little and turned his back to the wind.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Stuffy had always wondered why the Old Gentleman spoke his speech rather sadly. He did not know that it was because he was wishing every time that he had a son to succeed him. A son who would come there after he was gone -- a son who would stand proud and strong before some subsequent Stuffy, and say: "In memory of my father." Then it would be an Institution.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But the Old Gentleman had no relatives. He lived in rented rooms in one of the decayed old family brownstone mansions in one of the quiet streets east of the park. In the winter he raised fuchsias in a little conservatory the size of a steamer trunk. In the spring he walked in the Easter parade. In the summer he lived at a farmhouse in the New Jersey hills, and sat in a wicker armchair, speaking of a butterfly, the ornithoptera amphrisius, that he hoped to find someday. In the autumn he fed Stuffy a dinner. These were the Old Gentleman's occupations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Stuffy Pete looked up at him for a half minute. Stewing and helpless in his own self-pity. The Old Gentleman's eyes were bright with the giving pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year, but his little black necktie was in as jaunty a bow as ever, and his linen was beautiful and white, and his gray mustache was curled gracefully at the ends. And then Stuffy made a noise that sounded like peas bubbling in a pot. Speech was intended; and as the Old Gentleman had heard the sounds nine times before, he rightly construed them into Stuffy's old formula of acceptance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Thankee, sir. I'll go with ye, and much obliged. I'm very hungry, sir."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The coma of repletion had not prevented from entering Stuffy's mind the conviction that he was the bias of an Institution. His Thanksgiving appetite was not his own; it belonged by all the sacred rights of established custom, if not by the actual Statute of Limitations, to this kind old gentleman who had preempted it. True, America is free; but in order to establish tradition someone must be a repetend -- a repeating decimal. The heroes are not all heroes of steel and gold. See one here that wielded only weapons of iron, badly silvered, and tin.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Old Gentleman led his annual protege southward to the restaurant, and to the table where the feast had always occurred. They were recognized.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Here comes de old guy," said a waiter, "dat blows dat same bum to a meal every Thanksgiving."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The Old Gentleman sat across the table glowing like a smoked pearl at his cornerstone of future ancient Tradition. The waiters heaped the table with holiday food -- and Stuffy, with a sigh that was mistaken for hunger's expression, raised knife and fork and carved for himself a crown of imperishable bay.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >No more valiant hero ever fought his way through the ranks of an enemy. Turkey, chops, soups, vegetables, pies, disappeared before him as fast as they could be served. Gorged nearly to the uttermost when he entered the restaurant, the smell of food had almost caused him to lose his honor as a gentleman, but he rallied like a true knight. He saw the look of beneficent happiness on the Old Gentleman's face -- a happier look than even the fuchsias and the ornithoptera amphrisius had ever brought to it -- and he had not the heart to see it wane.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In an hour Stuffy leaned back with a battle won.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Thankee kindly, sir," he puffed like a leaky steam pipe; "thankee kindly for a hearty meal."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Then he arose heavily with glazed eyes and started toward the kitchen. A waiter turned him about like a top, and pointed him toward the door. The Old Gentleman carefully counted out $1.30 in silver change, leaving three nickels for the waiter.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >They parted as they did each year at the door, the Old Gentleman going south, Stuffy north.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Around the first corner Stuffy turned, and stood for one minute. Then he seemed to puff out his rags as an owl puffs out his feathers, and fell to the sidewalk like a sunstricken horse.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When the ambulance came the young surgeon and the driver cursed softly at his weight. There was no smell of whiskey to justify a transfer to the patrol wagon, so Stuffy and his two dinners went to the hospital. There they stretched him on a bed and began to test him for strange diseases, with the hope of getting a chance at some problem with the bare steel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And lo! An hour later another ambulance brought the Old Gentleman. And they laid him on another bed and spoke of appendicitis, for he looked good for the bill.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >But pretty soon one of the young doctors met one of the young nurses whose eyes he liked, and stopped to chat with her about the cases.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"That nice old gentleman over there, now" he said, "you wouldn't think that was a case of almost starvation. Proud old family, I guess. He told me he hadn't eaten a thing for three days."<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/11/thanksgiving-2008.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Return</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656577633206782947.post-77348978048650632542008-11-01T05:19:00.000-07:002008-11-01T05:26:47.603-07:00"Hunting the Hidden Dimension"--transcript<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >"Hunting the Hidden Dimension"</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >PBS</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >October 28th, 2008</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: You can find it in the rain forest, on the frontiers of medical research, in the movies, and it's all over the world of wireless communications. One of nature's biggest design secrets has finally been revealed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEOFFREY WEST (Santa Fe Institute): My god, of course. It's obvious.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: It's an odd-looking shape you may never have heard of, but it's everywhere around you: the jagged repeating form called a fractal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JAMES BROWN (University of New Mexico): They're all over in biology. They're solutions that natural selection has come up with over and over and over again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Fractals are in our lungs, kidneys and blood vessels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN (Stanford University): Flowers, plants, weather systems, the rhythms of the heart, the very essences of life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: But it took a maverick mathematician to figure out how they work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT (Yale University): I don't play with formulas, I play with pictures. And that is what I've been doing all my life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: His was a bold challenge to centuries-old assumptions about the various forms that nature takes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM (University of California, Santa Cruz): The blinders came off, and people could see forms that were always there but, formerly, were invisible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Making the invisible visible, finding order in disorder; what mysteries can it help us unravel? Coming up next, on NOVA: Hunting the Hidden Dimension.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Well, it might surprise a lot of people that ExxonMobil would be interested in lithium ion battery technology applied to hybrid electric vehicles. Our new battery separator film is a true breakthrough that's going to enable the deployment of more hybrid vehicles, faster. This means a tremendous reduction in greenhouse gases, the equivalent of removing millions of cars from the road. I think this is the most important project that I've worked on in my career.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And David H. Koch. And...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Discover new knowledge: HHMI.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Major funding for Hunting the Hidden Dimension is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to portray the lives of men and women engaged in scientific and technological pursuit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Major funding for NOVA is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by PBS viewers like you. Thank you.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: In 1978, at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle, engineers were designing experimental aircraft.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER (Pixar Animation Studios): Exotic things, with two wings or two tails or two fuselages, and just weird stuff because, "who knows, it might work."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: A young computer scientist named Loren Carpenter was helping them visualize what the planes might look like in flight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: I would get the data from them and make pictures from various angles, but I wanted to be able to put a mountain behind it, because every Boeing publicity photo in existence has a mountain behind it. But there was no way to do mountains. Mountains had millions and millions of little triangles or polygons or whatever you want to call it, and we had enough trouble with a hundred. Especially in those days when our machines were slower than the ones you have in your watch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Carpenter didn't want to make just any mountains. He wanted to create a landscape the planes could fly through. But there was no way to do that with existing animation techniques. From the time movies began, animators had to draw each frame by hand—thousands of them—to make even a short cartoon.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >THUMPER (Bambi/Filmclip): That's why they call me Thumper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: But that was before Loren Carpenter stumbled across the work of a little-known mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: In 1978, I ran into this book in a bookstore: Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension, by Benoit Mandelbrot, and it has to do with the fractal geometry of nature. So I bought the book and took it home and read it, cover to cover, every last little word, including the footnotes and references, twice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: In his book, Mandelbrot said that many forms in nature can be described mathematically as fractals: a word he invented to define shapes that look jagged and broken. He said that you can create a fractal by taking a smooth-looking shape and breaking it into pieces, over and over again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Carpenter decided he'd try doing that on his computer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: Within three days, I was producing pictures of mountains on my computer at work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The method is dead simple. You start with a landscape made out of very rough triangles, big ones. And then for each triangle, break it into, into four triangles. And then do that again, and then again and again and again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Endless repetition—what mathematicians call iteration—it's one of the keys to fractal geometry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: The pictures were stunning. They were just totally stunning. No one has had ever seen anything like this. And I just opened a whole new door to a new world of making pictures. And it got the computer graphics community excited about fractals, because, suddenly, they were easy to do. And so people started doing them all over the place.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Carpenter soon left Boeing to join Lucasfilm, where, instead of making mountains, he created a whole new planet, for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >It was the first ever completely computer-generated sequence in a feature film...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LEONARD NIMOY (As Mr. Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan/Filmclip): Fascinating.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: ...made possible by the new mathematics of fractal geometry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Benoit Mandelbrot, whose work had inspired that innovation, was someone who prided himself on standing outside the mainstream.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: I can see things that nobody else suspects, until I point out to them. "Oh, of course, of course." But they haven't seen it before.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: You can see it in the clouds, in the mountains, even inside the human body.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: The key to fractal geometry, and the thing that evaded anyone until, really, Mandelbrot sort of said, "This is the way to look at things, is that if you look on the surface, you see complexity, and it looks very non-mathematical." What Mandelbrot said was that..."think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: It takes endless repetition, and that gives rise to one of the defining characteristics of a fractal: what mathematicians call self-similarity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: The main idea is always—as you zoom in and zoom out—the object looks the same.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: If you look at something at this scale, and then you pick a small piece of it and you zoom in, it looks very much the same.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The whole of the fractal looks just like a part, which looks just like the next smaller part. The similarity of the pattern just keeps on going.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >One of the most familiar examples of self-similarity is a tree.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST (University of Arizona): If we look at each of the nodes, the branching nodes of this tree, what you'll actually see is that the pattern of branching is very similar throughout the tree. As we go from the base of the tree to higher up, you'll see we have mother branches then branching then into daughter branches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >If we take this one branch and node and then go up to a higher branch or node, what we'll actually find is, again, that the pattern of branching is similar. Again, this pattern of branching is repeated throughout the tree, all the way, ultimately, out to the tips where the leaves are.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: You see self-similarity in everything from a stalk of broccoli, to the surface of the moon, to the arteries that transport blood through our bodies. But Mandelbrot's fascination with these irregular-looking shapes put him squarely at odds with centuries of mathematical tradition.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: In the whole of science, the whole of mathematics, smoothness was everything. What I did was to open up roughness for investigation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: We used mathematics to build the pyramids, to construct the Parthenon. We used mathematics to study the regular motion of the planets and so forth. We became used to the fact that certain patterns were amenable to mathematics: the architectural ones—largely the patterns of human-made structures where we had straight lines and circles—and the perfect geometric shapes. The basic assumption that underlies classical mathematics is that everything is extremely regular. I mean, you reduce everything to straight lines...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: ...circles, triangles...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: ...flat surfaces...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: ...pyramids, tetrahedrons, icosahedrons, dodecahedrons.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: Smooth edges.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Classical mathematics is really only well-suited to study the world that we've created, the things we've built using that classical mathematics. The patterns in nature, the things that were already there before we came onto the planet—the trees, the plants, the clouds, the weather systems—those were outside of mathematics.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: ...until the 1970s, when Benoit Mandelbrot introduced his new geometry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Mandelbrot came along and said, "Hey, guys, all you need to do is look at these patterns of nature in the right way, and you can apply mathematics. There is an order beneath the seeming chaos. You can write down formulas that describe clouds and flowers and plants. It's just that they're different kinds of formulas, and they give you a different kind of geometry."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD TAYLOR (University of Oregon): The big question is, why did it take 'til the 1970s before somebody wrote a book called The Fractal Geometry of Nature. If they're all around us, why didn't we see them before? The answer seems to be, well, people were seeing them before. People clearly recognized this repeating quality in nature.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: People like the great 19th century Japanese artist, Katsushika Hokusai.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: If you look well enough, you see a shadow of a cloud over Mount Fuji. The cloud is billows upon billows upon billows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD TAYLOR: Hokusai, "The Great Wave," you know, on top of the great wave there's smaller waves.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: After my book mentioned that Hokusai was fractal, I got inundated with people saying, "Now we understand Hokusai. Hokusai was drawing fractals."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD TAYLOR: Everybody thinks that mathematicians are very different from artists. I've come to realize that art is actually really close to mathematics, and that they're just using different language. And so for Mandelbrot it's not about equations. It's about, "How do we explain this visual phenomenon?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot's fascination with the visual side of math began when he was a student.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: It is only in January, '44, that, suddenly, I fell in love with mathematics, and not mathematics in general, with geometry in its most concrete, sensual form—that part of geometry in which mathematics and the eye meet. The professor was talking about algebra. But I began to see, in my mind, geometric pictures which fitted this algebra. And once you see these pictures, the answers become obvious. So I discovered something which I had no clue before, that I knew how to transform, in my mind, instantly, the formulas into pictures.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: As a young man, Mandelbrot developed a strong sense of self-reliance, shaped in large part by his experience as a Jew, living under Nazi occupation in France. For four years, he managed to evade the constant threat of arrest and deportation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: There is nothing more hardening, in a certain sense, than surviving a war, even, not a soldier, but as a hunted civilian. I knew how to act, and I didn't trust people's wisdom very much.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: After the war, Mandelbrot got his Ph.D. He tried teaching at a French university, but he didn't seem to fit in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: They say, well, I'm very gifted but very misled, and I do things the wrong way. I was very much a fish out of water. So I abandoned this job in France and took a gamble to go to IBM.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: It was 1958. The giant American corporation was pioneering a technology that would soon revolutionize the way we all live: the computer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: IBM was looking for creative thinkers, non-conformists, even rebels; people like Benoit Mandelbrot.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: In fact, they had cornered the market for a certain type of oddball. We never had the slightest feeling of being the establishment.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot's colleagues told the young mathematician about a problem of great concern to the company. IBM engineers were transmitting computer data over phone lines, but sometimes the information was not getting through.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: They realized that every so often the lines became extremely noisy, errors occurred in large numbers. It was indeed an extremely messy situation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot graphed the noise data, and what he saw surprised him. Regardless of the timescale, the graph looked similar: one day, one hour, one second, it didn't matter. It looked about the same.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: It turned out to be self-similar with a vengeance.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot was amazed. The strange pattern reminded him of something that had intrigued him as a young man: a mathematical mystery that dated back nearly a hundred years, the mystery of the "monsters."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: The story really begins in the late 19th century. Mathematicians had written down a formal description of what a curve must be. But within that description, there were these other things, things that satisfied the formal definition of what a curve is but were so weird that you could never draw them, or you couldn't even imagine drawing them. They were just regarded as "monsters" or "things beyond the realm."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: They're not lines, they're nothing like lines; they're not circles. They were like really, really weird.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The German mathematician Georg Cantor created the first of the monsters in 1883.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RON EGLASH (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute): He just took a straight line and he said, "I'm going to break this line into thirds, and the middle third I'm going to erase. So you're left with two lines at each end. And now I'm going to take those two lines, take out the middle third, and we'll do it again." So he does that over and over again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Most people would think, "Well, if I've thrown everything away, eventually there's nothing left." Not the case; there's not just one point left, there's not just two points left. There's infinitely many points left.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: As you zoom in on the Cantor set, the pattern stays the same, much like the noise patterns that Mandelbrot had seen at IBM.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Another strange shape was put forward by the Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Koch said was, "Well, you start with an equilateral triangle, one of the classical Euclidean geometric figures, and on each side..."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: "...I take a piece and I substitute two pieces that are now longer than the original piece. And for each of those pieces, I substitute two pieces that are each longer than the original piece..."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: "...over and over again."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RON EGLASH: You get the same shape, but now each line has that little triangular bump on it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: And I break it again. And I break it again. And I break it again. And each time I break it, the line gets longer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RON EGLASH: Every iteration, every cycle, he's adding on another little triangle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Imagine iterating that process of adding little bits, infinitely, many times. What you end up with is something that's infinitely long.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The Koch curve was a paradox. To the eye, the curve appears to be perfectly finite. But mathematically, it is infinite, which means it cannot be measured.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RON EGLASH: At the time, they called it a pathological curve, because it made no sense, according to the way people were thinking about measurement and Euclidean geometry and so on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: But the Koch curve turned out to be crucial to a nagging measurement problem: the length of a coastline.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >In the 1940s, British scientist Lewis Richardson had observed that there can be great variation between different measurements of a coastline.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: It depends on how long your yardstick is and how much patience you have. If you measure the coastline of Britain with a one-mile yardstick, you'd get so many yardsticks, which gives you so many miles. If you measure it with a one-foot yardstick, it turns out that it's longer. And every time you use a shorter yardstick, you get a longer number.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Because you can always find finer indentations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot saw that the finer and finer indentations in the Koch curve were precisely what was needed to model coastlines.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: He wrote a very famous article in Science magazine called "How Long is the Coastline of Britain?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: A coastline, in geometric terms, said Mandelbrot, is a fractal. And though he knew he couldn't measure its length, he suspected he could measure something else: its roughness. To do that required rethinking one of the most basic concepts in math: dimension.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JENNIFER OUELLETTE (Science Writer): What we would think of as normal geometry, one dimension is the straight line, two dimensions is, say, the box that has surface area.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: And three dimensions is a cube. But could something have a dimension somewhere in between, say, two and three? Mandelbrot said, "Yes. Fractals do. And the rougher they are, the higher their fractal dimension."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: There are all of these technical terms, like fractal dimension and self-similarity, but those are the nuts and bolts of the mathematics itself. What that fractal geometry does is give us a way of looking at—in a way that's extremely precise—the world in which we live, in particular, the living world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot's fresh ways of thinking were made possible by his enthusiastic embrace of new technology. Computers made it easy for Mandelbrot to do iteration, the endlessly repeating cycles of calculation that were demanded by the mathematical monsters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: The computer was totally essential; otherwise, it would have taken a very big, long effort.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot decided to zero in on yet another of the monsters, a problem introduced during World War I by a young French mathematician named Gaston Julia.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Gaston Julia, he was actually looking at what happens when you take a simple equation and you iterate it through a feedback loop. That means you take a number, you plug it into the formula, you get a number out. You take that number, go back to the beginning, and you feed it into the same formula, get another number out. And you keep iterating that over and over again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And the question is, what happens when you iterate it lots of times.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The series of numbers you get is called a set, the Julia set. But working by hand, you could never really know what the complete set looked like.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: There were attempts to draw it, doing a bunch of arithmetic by hand and putting a point on graph paper.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: You would have to feed it back hundreds, thousands, millions of times. The development of that new kind of mathematics had to wait until fast computers were invented.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: At IBM, Mandelbrot did something Julia could never do: use a computer to run the equations millions of times. He then turned the numbers from his Julia sets into points on a graph.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: My first step was to just draw mindlessly, a large number of Julia sets. Not one picture, hundreds of pictures.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Those images led Mandelbrot to a breakthrough. In 1980, he created an equation of his own, one that combined all of the Julia sets into a single image.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When Mandelbrot iterated his equation he got his own set of numbers. Graphed on a computer, it was a kind of roadmap of all the Julia sets and quickly became famous as the emblem of fractal geometry: the Mandelbrot set.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JENNIFER OUELLETTE: They intersect at certain areas, and it's got like a, you know...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >LOREN CARPENTER: And they have little curlicues built into them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DANA CARTWRIGHT (Designer Software LLC): ...black beetle-like thing...</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD TAYLOR: ...crawling across the floor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ARY GOLDBERGER (Harvard Medical School): Seahorses.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: Dragons.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD TAYLOR: Something similar to my hair, actually.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: With this mysterious image, Mandelbrot was issuing a bold challenge to longstanding ideas about the limits of mathematics.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: The blinders came off and people could see forms that were always there, but, formerly, were invisible.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: The Mandelbrot set was a great example of what you could do in fractal geometry, just as the archetypical example of classical geometry is the circle.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: When you zoom in, you see them coming up again, so you see self-similarity. You see, by zooming in, you zoom, zoom, zoom, you're zooming in, and you're zooming in, and "pop!" Suddenly it seems like you're exactly where you were before, but you're not. It's just that way down there it has the same kind of structure as way up here. And the sameness can be grokked.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot's mesmerizing images launched a fad in the world of popular culture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: Suddenly, this thing caught like a bush fire. Everybody wanted to have it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: I thought, "This is something big going on." This was a cultural event of great proportions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: In the late 1970s, Jhane Barnes had just launched a business designing men's clothing.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JHANE BARNES (Jhane Barnes, Inc.): When I started my business, in '76, I was doing fabrics the old-fashioned way, just on graph paper, weaving them on a little handloom.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: But then she discovered fractals and realized that the simple rules that made them could be used to create intricate clothing designs.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JHANE BARNES: I thought, "This is amazing." So, that very simple concept, I said, "Oh, I can make designs with that." But in the '80s, I really didn't know how to design a fractal because there wasn't software.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: So Barnes got help from two people who knew a lot about math and computers: Bill Jones and Dana Cartwright.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JHANE BARNES: I had Dana and Bill writing my software for me. They said, "Oh, your work is very mathematical." And I was like, "It is? That's my weakest subject in school."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DANA CARTWRIGHT: We had a physicist and a mathematician and a textile designer.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JHANE BARNES: We had so much to learn from each other.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DANA CARTWRIGHT: I did not know what a warp and a weft is. You know, Jhane, her ability with numbers is fairly restricted, if I can put that politely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JHANE BARNES: There was a way we were going to communicate; we were going to get together, somehow. And it really did happen pretty quickly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The general fashion press thought, "Jhane's a little nuts." They started calling me the fashion nerd, you know? But that was okay. That was okay with me, because I was learning a lot. This was fun, and very, very inspirational. I'm getting things that wouldn't be possible by hand. You know, sometimes when, when I think about things in my head, and I say, you know, "I just saw light coming through that screen door, and look at the moireing effects that are happening on the ground."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Can I go draw that? No way. But I can describe that to my mathematician. He sends me back the generator, all ready for me to try, and I sit down at the computer and say, "Well, let's see what it's doing." And I have parameters that I can control. And I keep pushing, and I go, "Wow, this is not what I expected at all, at all." But it's cool.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MOVIE VOICE (Star Wars/Film Clip): Use the force, Luke.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The same kinds of fractal design principles have completely transformed the magic of special effects.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DAN PIPONI (Industrial Light & Magic): This is a key moment from Star Wars: Episode III, where our two heroes have run out onto the end of this giant mechanical arm, and the lava splashes down onto the arm. My starting point, here, is to actually take the three-dimensional model and take, essentially, a jet and, and just shoot lava up into the air.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >This looks kind of boring. It's doing roughly the right thing, but the motion has no kind of visual interest to it. Let's look at what happens, here, when I add the fractal swirl to it. Where this becomes fractal is we take that same swirl pattern, we shrink it down, and reapply it. We take that, we shrink it down again, we reapply it. We shrink it down again, we reapply it. And from here on, it's just a case of layering up more and more and more.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >I've used the same technique to create these additional lava streams. I then do it again, here, to get some...just red-hot embers. Then we take all of those layers, and we add them up, and we get the final composite image.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >My hero lava in the foreground, the extra lava in the background, the embers, sparks, steam, smoke.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Designers and artists, the world over, have embraced the visual potential of fractals. But when the Mandelbrot set was first published, mathematicians, for the most part, reacted with scorn.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: In The Mathematical Intelligencer, which is a gossip sheet for professional mathematicians, there were article after article saying he wasn't a mathematician; he was a bad mathematician; "It's not mathematics;" "Fractal geometry is worthless."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: The eye had been banished out of science. The eye had been excommunicated.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: His colleagues, especially the really good ones, pure mathematicians that he respected, they turned against him.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: Because, see now, you, you get used to the world that you've created and that you live in. And mathematicians had become very used to this world of smooth curves that they could do things with.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: They were clinging to the old paradigm, when Mandelbrot and a few people were way out there, bringing in the new paradigm.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >And he used to call me up on the telephone, late at night, because he was bothered. And we'd talk about it. Mandelbrot was saying, "This is a branch of geometry, just like Euclid." Well, that offended them. They said, "No, this is an artifact of your stupid computing machine."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: I know very well that there is this line that fractals are pretty pictures, but are pretty useless. Well, it's a pretty jingle, but it's completely ridiculous.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Mandelbrot replied to his critics with his new book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature. It was filled with examples of how his ideas could be useful to science.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Mandelbrot argued that, with fractals, he could precisely measure natural shapes and make calculations that could be applied to all kinds of formations, from the drainage patterns of rivers to the movements of clouds.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >KEITH DEVLIN: So this domain of growing, living systems, which I, along with most other mathematicians, had always regarded as pretty well off-limits for mathematics, and certainly off-limits for geometry, suddenly was center stage. It was Mandelbrot's book that convinced us that this wasn't just artwork; this was new science in the making. This was a completely new way of looking at the world in which we live that allowed us, not just to look at it, not just to measure it, but to do mathematics and, thereby, understand it in a deeper way than we had before.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NATHAN COHEN (Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc.): As someone who's been working with fractals for 20 years, I'm not going to tell you fractals are cool, I'm going to tell you fractals are useful. And that's what's important to me.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: In the 1990s, a Boston radio astronomer named Nathan Cohen used fractal mathematics to make a technological breakthrough in electronic communication.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Cohen had a hobby: he was a ham radio operator. But his landlord had a rule against rigging antennas on the building.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NATHAN COHEN: I was at an astronomy conference in Hungary, and Dr. Mandelbrot was giving a talk about the large-scale structure of the universe, and reporting how using fractals is a very good way of understanding that kind of structure, which really wowed the entire group of astronomers.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >He showed several different fractals that I, in my own mind, looked at and said, "Oh, wouldn't it be funny if you made an antenna out of that shape. I wonder what it would do."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: One of the first designs he tried was inspired by one of the 19th century "monsters," the snowflake of Helge von Koch.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NATHAN COHEN: I thought back to the lecture and said, "Well, I've got a piece of wire, what happens if I bend it?" After I bent the wire, I hooked it up to the cable and my ham radio, and I was quite surprised to see that it worked the first time out of the box. It worked very well. And I discovered that—much of a surprise to me—that I could actually make the antenna much smaller, using the fractal design. So it was, frankly, an interesting way to beat a bad rap with the landlord.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Cohen's experiments soon led him to another discovery. Using a fractal design not only made antennas smaller, but enabled them to receive a much wider range of frequencies.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NATHAN COHEN: Using fractals, experimentally, I came up with a very-wide-band antenna, and then I worked backwards and said, "Why is it working this way? What is it about nature that requires you to use the fractal to get there?"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >The result of that work was a mathematical theorem that showed if you want to get something that works as an antenna over a very wide range of frequencies, you need to have self-similarity. It has to be fractal in its shape to make it work. And that was an exact solution. It wasn't like, "Oh, here's a way of doing it and there's a lot of other ways of doing it." It turned out, mathematically, we were able to demonstrate that was the only technique we could use to get there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Cohen made his discovery at a time when cell phone companies were facing a problem. They were offering new features to their customers, like Bluetooth, walkie-talkie and Wi-Fi, but each of them ran on a separate frequency.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NATHAN COHEN: You need to be able to use all those different frequencies and have access to them, without 10 stubby antennas sticking out at the same time. The alternative option is you can let your cell phone look like a porcupine, but most people don't want to carry around a porcupine.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Today, fractal antennas are used in tens of millions of cell phones and other wireless communication devices all over the world.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NATHAN COHEN: We're going to see over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years that you're going to have to use fractals because it's the only way to get cheaper costs and smaller size for all the complex telecommunication needs we're having.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BENOIT MANDELBROT: Once you, you realize that a shrewd engineer would use fractals in many, many contexts, you better understand why nature, which is shrewder, uses them in its ways.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JAMES BROWN: They're all over in biology. They're solutions that natural selection has come up with over and over and over again.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: One powerful example: the rhythms of the heart. Something that Boston cardiologist Ary Goldberger has been studying his entire professional life.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ARY GOLDBERGER: The notion of, sort of, the human body as a machine goes back through the tradition of Newton and the machine-like universe. So somehow we're machines, we're mechanisms; the heartbeat is this timekeeper. Galileo was reported to have used his pulse to time the swinging of a pendular motion. So that all fit in with the idea that the normal heartbeat is like a metronome.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: But when Goldberger and his colleagues analyzed data from thousands of people, they found the old theory was wrong.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MADALENA DAMASIO COSTA (Harvard Medical School): This is where I show the heartbeat time series of a healthy subject. And, as you can see, the heartbeat is not constant over time. It fluctuates, and it fluctuates a lot. For example, in this case, it fluctuates between 60 beats per minute and 120 beats per minute.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The patterns looked familiar to Goldberger, who happened to have read Benoit Mandelbrot's book.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >ARY GOLDBERGER: When you actually plotted out the intervals between heartbeats, what you saw was very close to the rough edges of the mountain ranges that were in Mandelbrot's book. You blow them up, expand them, you actually see that there are more of these wrinkles upon wrinkles. The healthy heartbeat, it turned out, had this fractal architecture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >People said, "This isn't cardiology. Do cardiology, if you want to get funded." But it turns out it is cardiology.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Goldberger found that the healthy heartbeat has a distinctive fractal pattern, a signature that, one day, may help cardiologists spot heart problems sooner.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >At the University of Oregon, Richard Taylor is using fractals to reveal the secrets of another part of the body: the eye.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD TAYLOR: What we want to do is see, "What is that eye doing, that allows it to absorb so much visual information?" And so that's what led us into the eye trajectories. Under the monitor is a little infrared camera, which will actually monitor where the eye is looking. And it actually records that data, and so what we get out is a trajectory of where the eye has been looking. And so the computer will get out this graph, and it will look...you know...have all of these various little structures in it. And it's that pattern that we zoom in...we tell the computer to zoom in on and see the fractal dimension.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The tests show that the eye does not always look at things in an orderly or smooth way. If we could understand more about how the eye takes in information, we could do a better job of designing the things that we really need to see.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RICHARD TAYLOR: A traffic light: you're looking at the traffic light, you've got traffic, you've got pedestrians; your eye is looking all over the place, trying to assess all of this information.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >People design aircraft cockpits, rows of dials and things like that. If your eye is darting around based on a fractal geometry, though, maybe that's not the best way. Maybe you don't want these things in a simple row. We're trying to work out the natural way that the eye wants to absorb the information. Is it going to be similar to a lot of these other subconscious processes? Body motion: when you're balancing, what are you actually doing there? It's something subconscious and it works. And you're stringing together big sways and small sways and smaller sways. Could those all be connected together to actually be doing a fractal pattern there? More and more physiological processes have been found to be fractal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Not everyone in science is convinced of fractal geometry's potential for delivering new knowledge. Skeptics argue that it's done little to advance mathematical theory. But in Toronto, biophysicist Peter Burns and his colleagues see fractals as a practical tool, a way to develop mathematical models that might help in diagnosing cancer earlier.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >PETER BURNS (University of Toronto): Detecting very small tumors is one of the big challenges in medical imaging.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Burns knew that one early sign of cancer is particularly difficult to see: a network of tiny blood vessels that forms with the tumor. Conventional imaging techniques, like ultrasound, aren't powerful enough to show them.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >PETER BURNS: We need to be able to see structures which are just a few tenths-of-a-millionths of a meter across. When it comes to a living patient, we don't have the tools to be able to see these tiny blood vessels.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: But ultrasound does provide a very good picture of the overall movement of blood. Is there any way, Burns wondered, that images of blood-flow could reveal the hidden structure of the blood vessels?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >To find out, Burns and his colleagues used fractal geometry to make a mathematical model.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >PETER BURNS: If you have a mathematical way of analyzing a structure, you can make a model. What fractals do is they give you some simple rules by which you can create models, and by changing some of the parameters of the model, we can change how the structure looks.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: The model showed the flow of blood in a kidney; first through normal blood vessels and then through vessels feeding a cancerous tumor. Burns discovered that the two kinds of networks had very different fractal dimensions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >PETER BURNS: Instead of being neatly bifurcating, looking like a, a nice elm tree, the tumor vasculature is chaotic and tangled and disorganized, looking more like a mistletoe bush.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: And the flow of blood through those tangled vessels looked very different than in a normal network, a difference doctors might one day be able to detect with ultrasound.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >PETER BURNS: We always thought that we have to make medical images sharper and sharper, ever more precise, ever more microscopic in their resolution, to find out the information about the structure that's there. What's exciting about this is it's giving us microscopic information without us actually having to look through a microscope. We think that this fractal approach may be helpful in distinguishing benign from malignant lesions in a way that hasn't been possible up to now.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: It may take years before fractals can help doctors predict cancer, but they are already offering clues to one of biology's more tantalizing mysteries: why big animals use energy more efficiently than little ones.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >That's a question that fascinates biologists James Brown and Brian Enquist and physicist Geoffrey West.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEOFFREY WEST: There is an extraordinary economy of scale as you increase in size.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: An elephant, for example, is 200,000 times heavier than a mouse, but uses only about ten thousand times more energy in the form of calories it consumes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEOFFREY WEST: The bigger you are, you actually need less energy per gram of tissue to stay alive. That is an amazing fact.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: And even more amazing is the fact that this relationship between the mass and energy use of any living thing is governed by a strict mathematical formula.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JAMES BROWN: So far as we know, that law is universal, or almost universal, across all of life. So it operates from the tiniest bacteria to whales and sequoia trees.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: But even though this law had been discovered back in the 1930s, no one had been able to explain it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JAMES BROWN: We had this idea that it probably had something to do with how resources are distributed within the bodies of organisms as they varied in size.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEOFFREY WEST: We took this big leap and said all of life in some way is sustained by these underlying networks that are transporting oxygen resources, metabolites that are feeding cells, circulatory systems and respiratory systems and renal systems and neural systems. It was obvious that fractals were staring us in the face.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: If all these biological networks are fractal, it means they obey some simple mathematical rules, which can lead to new insights into how they work.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JAMES BROWN: If you think about it for a minute, it would be incredibly inefficient to have a set of blueprints for every single stage of increasing size. But if you have a fractal code, a code that says when to branch as you get bigger and bigger, then a very simple genetic code can produce what looks like a complicated organism.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: Evolution by natural selection has hit upon a design that appears to give the most bang for the buck.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: In 1997, West, Brown and Enquist announced their controversial theory that fractals hold the key to the mysterious relationship between mass and energy use in animals. Now, they are putting their theory to a bold new test, an experiment to help determine if the fractal structure of a single tree can predict how an entire rainforest works.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Enquist has traveled to Costa Rica, to Guanacaste Province, in the northwestern part of the country. The government has set aside more than 300,000 acres in Guanacaste as a conservation area. This rainforest, like others around the world, plays a vital role in regulating the Earth's climate, by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: If you look at the xforest, it, basically, breathes. And if we understand the total amount of carbon dioxide that's coming into these trees within this forest, we can then better understand how this forest then, ultimately, regulates the total amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: With carbon dioxide levels around the world rising, how much CO2 can rainforests like this one absorb, and how important is their role in protecting us from further global warming?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Enquist and a team of U.S. scientists think that fractal geometry may help answer these questions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: ...baseline. Let's try to get the height of the tree measured.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: They are going to start by doing just about the last thing you'd think a scientist would do here: cut down a balsa tree. It's dying anyway, and they have the permission of the authorities.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: So, Christina, as soon as you know the height of that tree, we can actually figure out the approximate angle that we need to take it down on.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Hooking a guide line on a high branch helps insure the tree will land where they want it to.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GROUP: Yay!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: Very good, very nice.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >Jose, perfecto!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Enquist and his colleagues then measure the width and length of the branches to quantify the tree's fractal structure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: Eight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CATHY: Ten point zero six.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: No, that's eight. Six point three</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MALE: Point zero three.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MALE: Six, zero.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CATHY: Eight.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >MALE: Seven on the nose.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: They also measure how much carbon a single leaf contains, which should allow them to figure out what the whole tree can absorb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >CHRISTINA LAMANNA (Santa Fe Institute): So, if we know the amount of carbon dioxide that one leaf is able to take in, then, hopefully, using the fractal branching rule, we can know how much carbon dioxide the entire tree is taking in.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Their next step is to move from the tree to the whole forest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: All right, this is good.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRAD BOYLE: Thirteen point two, three point three.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: We're going to census this forest. We're going to be measuring the diameter at the base of the trees, ranging all the way from the largest trees down to the smallest trees. And in that way we can then sample the distribution of sizes within the forest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRAD BOYLE: It's 61.8 centimeters.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Even though the forest may appear random and chaotic, the team believes it actually has a structure, one that, amazingly, is almost identical to the fractal structure of the tree they have just cut down.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >JAMES BROWN: The beautiful thing is that the distribution of the sizes of individual trees in the forest appears to exactly match the distribution of the sizes of individual branches within a single tree.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: If they're correct, studying a single tree will make it easier to predict how much carbon dioxide an entire forest can absorb.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >When they finish here, they take their measurements back to base camp, where they'll see if their ideas hold up.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: So is this the, this is the tree plot, right?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DREW KERKHOFF: Yeah. The cool thing is that, if you look at the tree, you see the same pattern amongst the branches as we see amongst the trunks in the forest.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: Just as they predicted, the relative number of big and small trees closely matches the relative number of big and small branches.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: It's actually phenomenal, that it is parallel. The slope of that line for the tree appears to be the same for the forest, as well.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >DREW KERKHOFF: So I guess it was worth cutting up the tree.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: It was definitely worth cutting up the tree.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: So far, the measurements from the field appear to support the scientists' theory that a single tree can help scientists assess how much this rainforest is helping to slow down global warming.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: By analyzing the fractal patterns within the forest, that then enables us to do something that we haven't really been able to do before: have, then, a mathematical basis to then predict how the forest as a whole takes in carbon dioxide. And ultimately, that's important for understanding what may happen with global climate change.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: For generations, scientists believed that the wildness of nature could not be defined by mathematics. But fractal geometry is leading to a whole new understanding, revealing an underlying order governed by simple mathematical rules.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >GEOFFREY WEST: What I thought of in my hikes through forests, that, you know, it's just a bunch of trees of different sizes, big ones here, small ones there, looking like it's sort of some arbitrary chaotic mess, actually has an extraordinary structure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NARRATOR: A structure that can be mapped out and measured using fractal geometry.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >BRIAN ENQUIST: What's absolutely amazing is that you can translate what you see in the natural world in the language of mathematics. And I can't think of anything more beautiful than that.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >RALPH ABRAHAM: Math is our one and only strategy for understanding the complexity of nature. Now, fractal geometry has given us a much larger vocabulary. And with larger vocabulary we can read more of the book of nature.<br /><br /></span><a href="http://philosophyofscienceportal.blogspot.com/2008/11/novas-hunting-hidden-dimension.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" >NOVA's "Hunting the Hidden Dimension" transcript available</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" ><br /><br /></span>Mercuryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13757909461674304095noreply@blogger.com