The Bride

by M P Shiel

‘He shall not see the rivers, the floods,
the brooks of honey and butter.’    —Job

They met at Krupp and Mason’s, musical-instrument-makers, of Little Britain, E.C., where Walter had been employed two years, and then came Annie to typewrite, and be serviceable.

They began to ‘go out’ together after six o’clock; and when Mrs Evans, Annie’s mamma, lost her lodger, Annie mentioned it, and Walter went to live with them at No. 13 Culford Road, N.; by which time Annie and Walter might almost be said to have been engaged. His salary, however, was only thirty shillings a week.

He was the thorough Cockney, Walter; a well-set-up person of thirty, strong-shouldered, with a square brow, a moustache, and black acne-specks in his nose and pale face.

It was on the night of his arrival at No. 13, that he for the first time saw Rachel, Annie’s younger sister. Both girls, in fact, were named ‘Rachel’—after a much-mourned mother of Mrs Evans’; but Annie Rachel was called ‘Annie,’ and Mary Rachel was called ‘Rachel.’ Rachel helped Walter at the handle of his box to the top-back room, and here, in the lamplight he was able to see that she was a tallish girl, with hair almost black, and with a sprinkling of freckles on her very white, thin nose, on the tip of which stood collected, usually, some little sweats. She was thin-faced, and her top teeth projected a little so that her lips only closed with effort, she not so pretty as pink-and-white little Annie, though one could guess, at a glance, that she was a person more to be respected.

‘What do you think of him?’ said Annie, meeting Rachel as she came down.

‘He seems a nice fellow,’ Rachel said: ‘rather good-looking. And strong in the back, you bet.’

Walter spent that evening with them in the area front-room, smoking a foul bulldog pipe, which slushed and gurgled to his suction; and at once Mrs Evans, a dark old lady without waist, all sighs and lack of breath, decided that he was ‘a gentlemanly, decent fellow.’ When bed-time came he made the proposal to lead them in prayer; and to this they submitted, Annie having forewarned them that he was ‘a Christian.’ As he climbed to his room, the devoted girl found an excuse to slip out after him, and in the passage of the first floor there was a little kiss.

‘Only one,’ she said, with an uplifted finger.

‘And what about his little brother, then?’ he chuckled—a chuckle with which all his jokes were accompanied: a kind of guttural chuckle, which seemed to descend or stick straining in the throat, instead of rising to the lips.

‘You go on,’ she said playfully, tapped his cheek, and ran down. So Walter slept for the first night at Mrs Evans’.

On the whole, as time passed, he had a good deal of the society of the women: for the theatre was a thing abominable to him, and in the evenings he stayed in the underground parlour, sharing the bread-and-cheese supper, and growing familiar with the sighs of Mrs Evans over her once estate in the world. Rachel, the silent, sewed; Annie, whose relation with Walter was still unannounced, though perhaps guessed, could play hymn-tunes on the old piano, and she played.

Last of all, Walter laid down the inveterate wet pipe, led them in prayer, and went to bed. Most mornings he and Annie set out together for Little Britain.

There came a day when he confided to her his intention to ask for a rise of ‘screw,’ and when this was actually promised by His Terror, the Boss, there was joy in heaven, and radiance in futurity, and secret talks of rings, a wedding, ‘a Home.’ Annie felt herself not far from the kingdom of Hymen, and rejoiced. But nothing, as yet, was said at No. 13: for to Mrs Evans’ past grandeurs thirty shillings a week was felt to be inappropriate.

The next Sunday, however, soon after dinner, this strangeness occurred: Rachel, the silent, disappeared. Mrs Evans called for her, Annie called, but it was found that she was not in the house, though the putting away of the dinner-things, her usual task, was only half accomplished.

Not till tea-time did Rachel return. She was then cold, and somewhat sullen, and somewhat pale, her lips closing firmly over her projecting teeth. When timidly questioned—for her resentment was greatly feared—-she replied that she had just been looking in upon Alice Soulsby, a few squares away, for a little chat: and this was the truth.

It was not, however, the whole truth; she had also looked in at the Church Lane Sunday School on her way: and this fact she guiltily concealed. For half an hour she had sat darkly at the end of the building in a corner, listening to the ‘address.’ This address was delivered by Walter. To this school every Sunday, after dinner, he put down the beloved pipe to go. He was in fact, its ‘superintendent.’

After this, the tone and temper of the little household rapidly changed, and a true element of hell was introduced into its platitude. It became, first of all, a question whether or not Rachel could be ‘experiencing religion,’ a thing which her mother and Annie had never dreamt of expecting of her. Praying people, and the Salvationist, had always been the contempt of her strong and callous mind. But on Sunday nights she was now observed to go out alone, and ‘chapel’ was the explanation which she coolly gave. Which chapel she did not specify: but in reality it was the Newton Street Hall, at which Walter frequently exhorted and ‘prayed.’ In the Church Lane schoolroom there was prayer-meeting on Thursday evenings; and twice within one month Rachel sallied forth on Thursday evening—soon after Walter. The secret disease which preyed upon the poor girl could hardly now be concealed. At first she suffered bitter, solitary shame; sobbed in a hundred paroxysms; hoped to draw a veil over her infirmity. But her gash was too glaring. In the long Sabbath evenings of summer he preached at street corners, and sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, Rachel would attend these meetings, singing meekly with the rest the undivine hymns of the modern evangelist. In his presence, in the parlour, on other nights, she quietly sewed, hardly speaking. When, at 7 p.m., she heard his key in the front door her heart darted toward its master; when in the morning he flew away to business her universe was cinders.

‘It’s a wonder to me what’s coming to our Rachel lately,’ said Annie in the train, coming home; ‘you’re doing her soul good, or something, aren’t you?’

He chuckled, with slushy suction-sounds about the back of the tongue and molars.

‘Oh, that be jiggered for a tale!’ he said: ‘she’s all right.’

‘I know her better than you, you see. She’s quite changed—-since you’ve come. Looks to me as if she’s having a touch of the blues, or something.’

‘Poor thing! She wants looking after, don’t she?’ Annie laughed, too: but less brutally, more uneasily. Walter said: ‘But she oughtn’t to have the blues, if she’s giving her heart to the Lord! People seem to think a Christian must be this and that. A Christian, if it comes to that, ought to be the jolliest fellow going!’

This was on a Thursday, the night of the Church Lane prayer-meeting, and Walter had only time to rush in at No. 13, wash his face, snatch his Bible, and be off. Rachel, for her part, must verily now have been badly bitten with the rabies of love, or she would have felt that to follow to-night, for the third time lately, could not fail to incur remark. But this consideration never even entered a mind now completely blinded and entranced by the personality of Walter.

Through the day her work about the house had been rushed forward with this very object, and at the moment when he banged the door after him she was before her glass, dressing in blanched, intense and trembling flurry, and casting as she bent to give the last touches to her fringe, a look of bitterest hate at the projection of her lip above the teeth.

This night, for the first time, she waited in the chapel till the end of the service, and walked slowly homeward on the way which she knew that Walter would take; and he came striding presently, that morocco Bible in his hand, nearly every passage in which was neatly under-ruled in black and red inks.

‘What, is that you?’ he said, taking into his a hand cold with sweat.

‘It is,’ she answered, in a hard, formal tone.

‘You don’t mean to say you’ve been to the meeting?’

‘I do.’

‘Why, where were my eyes? I didn’t see you.’

‘It isn’t likely that you would want to, Mr Teeger.’

‘Go on—drop that! What do you take me for? I’m only too glad! And I tell you what it is, Miss Rachel, I say to you as the Lord Jesus said to the young man: ‘Thou art not far from the kingdom of heaven.’’

She was in it!—near him, alone, in a darkling square, yet suffering, too, in the flames of a passion such as perhaps consumes only the strongest natures.

She caught for support at his unoffered arm; and when he bent his steps straight homeward, she said trembling violently: ‘I don’t wish to go home as yet. I wish to have a little walk. Do you mind, Mr Teeger?’

‘Mind, no. Come along, then,’ and they went walking among an intricacy of streets and squares, he talking of ‘the Work,’ and of common subjects. After half an hour, she was saying:

‘I often wish I was a man. A man can say and do what he likes; but with a girl it’s different.’

‘There’s you, now, Mr Teeger, always out and about, having people listening to you, and that. I often wish I was only a man.’

‘Oh, well, it all depends how you look at it,’ he said. ‘And, look here, you may as well call me Walter and be done.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think of that,’ she replied. ‘Not till—’

Her hand trembled on his arm.

‘Well, out with it, why don’t you?’

‘Till—till we know something more definite about you—-and Annie.’

He chuckled slushily, she now leading him fleetly round and round a square.

‘Ah, you girls again!’ he cried, ‘been blabbing again like all the girls! It takes a bright man to hide much from them, don’t it?’

‘But there isn’t much to hide in this case, as far as I can see—is there?’

Always Walter laughed, straining deep in the throat. He said: ‘Oh, come—that would be telling, wouldn’t it?’

After a minute’s stillness, this treacherous phrase came from Rachel: ‘Annie doesn’t care for anyone, Mr Teeger.’

‘Oh, come—that’s rather a tall order, anyone. She’s all right.’

‘But she doesn’t. Of course, most girls are silly, and that, and like to get married—’

‘Well, that’s only nature, ain’t it?’

This was a joke; and downward the laugh strained in his throat, like struggling phlegm.

‘Yes, but they don’t understand what love is,’ said Rachel. ‘They haven’t an idea. They like to be married women, and have a husband, and that. But they don’t know what love is—-believe me! The men don’t either.’

How she trembled!—her body, her dying voice—she pressing heavily upon him, while the moon triumphed now through cloud glaring a moment white on the lunacy of her ghostly face.

‘Well, I don’t know—I think I understand, lass, what it is,’ he said.

‘You don’t, Mr Teeger!’

‘How’s that, then?’

‘Because, when it takes you, it makes you—’

‘Well, let’s have it. You seem to know all about it.’

Now Rachel commenced to tell him what ‘it’ was—in frenzied definitions, and a power of expression strange for her. It was a lunacy, its name was Legion, it was possession by the furies; it was a spasm in the throat, and a sickness of the limbs, and a yearning of the eye-whites, and a fire in the marrow; it was catalepsy, trance, apocalypse; it was high as the galaxy, it was addicted to the gutter; it was Vesuvius, borealis, the sunset; it was the rainbow in a cesspool, St. John plus Heliogabalus, Beatrice plus Messalina; it was a transfiguration, and a leprosy, and a metempsychosis, and a neurosis; it was the dance of the mænads, and the bite of the tarantula, and baptism in a sun: out poured the wild definition in simple words, but with the strife of one fighting for life. And she had not half done when he understood her fully; and he had no sooner understood her, than he was subdued, and succumbed.

‘You don’t mean to say—’ he faltered.

‘Ah, Mr Teeger,’ she answered, ‘there’s none so blind as those who will not see.’

His arm stole round her shuddering body.

Everyone is said to have his failing; and this man, Walter, in no respect a man of strong mind, was certainly on his amatory side, most sudden, promiscuous, and infirm. And this tendency was, if anything, heightened by the quite sincere strain of his mind in the direction of ‘spiritual things’: for, under sudden temptation, back rushed his being, with the greater rigour, into its natural channel. On the whole, had he not been a Puritan, he would have been a Don Juan.

In an instant Rachel’s weight was hanging upon his neck, he kissing her with passion.

After this she said to him: ‘But you are only doing this out of pity, Walter. Tell the truth, you are in love with Annie?’

He, like Peter, tumbled at once into a fib. ‘That’s what you say!’

‘You are,’ she insisted, filled with the bliss of the fib.

‘Bah! I’m not. Never was. You are the girl for me.’

When they went home, they entered the house at different times, she first, he waiting twenty minutes in the street.

The house was small, so the sisters slept together in the second-floor front room; Walter in the second-floor back; Mrs Evans in the first-floor back, the first-floor front being ‘the drawing-room.’

The girls, therefore, generally went to bed together: and that night, as they undressed, there was a row.

First, a long silence. Then Rachel, to say something, pointed to some new gloves of Annie’s, asking: ‘How much did you give for those?’

‘Money and kind words,’ replied Annie.

This was the beginning.

‘Well, there’s no need to be rude about it,’ said Rachel. She was happy, in paradise, despised Annie that night.

‘Still,’ said Annie, after a silence of ten minutes before the glass, ‘still, I should never run after a man like that. I’d die first.’

‘I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,’ replied Rachel.

‘You have. I should be ashamed of myself, if I were you.’

‘Talk away. You’re a little fool.’

‘It’s you. Throwing yourself at the head of a man who doesn’t care for you. What can you call yourself?’

Rachel laughed—happily, yet dangerously.

‘Don’t bother yourself my girl,’ she said.

‘Think of going out every night to meet a man in that way: look here, it’s too disgusting of you, girl!’

‘Is it?’

‘You can’t deny that you were with Mr Teeger to-night?’

‘That I wasn’t.’

‘It’s false! Anyone can see it by the joy in your face.’

‘Well, suppose I was, what about it?’

‘But a woman should be decent, I think; a woman should be able to command her feelings, and not expose herself like that. Believe me, it gives me the creeps all over to think of.’

‘Never mind, don’t be jealous, my girl.’

The gentle Annie flamed!

‘Jealous! of you!’

‘There isn’t any need, you know—not yet.’

‘But I’m not! There never will be need! Do you take Mr Teeger for a raving lunatic? I should go and have some false teeth put in first if I were you!’

Thus did Annie drop to the rock-bed of vulgarity; but she knew it to be necessary in order to touch Rachel, as with a white-hot wire, on her very nerve of anguish, and, in fact, at these words Rachel’s face resembled white iron, while she cried out, ‘Never mind my teeth! It isn’t the teeth a man looks at! A man knows a finely built woman when he sees her—not like a little dumpy podge!’

‘Thank you. You are very polite,’ replied Annie, browbeaten by an intensity fiercer than her own. ‘But still, it’s nonsense, Rachel, to talk of my being jealous of you. I knew Mr Teeger six months before you. And you won’t know him much longer either, for I don’t want to have mother disgraced here, and this is no fit place for him to lodge in. I can easily make him leave it soon—’

At this thing Rachel flew, with minatory palm over Annie’s cheek, ready to strike. ‘You dare do anything to make him go away! I’ll tear your little—’

Annie winked, flinched, uttered a sob, no more fight left in her.

So for two weeks the situation lasted. Only, after that night, so intense grew the bitterness between the sisters, that Annie moved down to the first-floor back, sleeping now with Mrs Evans who dimly wondered. As for Walter, meanwhile, his heart was divided within him. He loved Annie; he was fascinated and mesmerised by Rachel. In another age and country he would have married both. Every day he came to a different resolve, not knowing what to do. One thing was evident—a wedding-ring would be necessary, and he purchased one, uncertain for which of the girls.

‘Look here, lass,’ he said to Annie in the train, coming home, ‘let us put a stop to this. The boss doesn’t seem to be in a hurry about that rise of screw, so suppose we get spliced, and be done?’

‘Privately?’

‘Rather. Your ma and sister mustn’t know,—not just yet a while.’

‘And you will still keep on living at the house?’

‘Well, of course, for the time being.’

She looked up into his face and smiled. It was settled. But two nights afterwards he met Rachel on his way home from prayer-meeting; at first was honest and distant; but then committed the incredible weakness of going with her for a walk among the squares, and ended by winning from her an easily granted promise of marriage, on the same terms as those arranged within Annie.

When, the next day at lunch-time, he put his foot on the threshold of the Registrar’s office to give notice, he was still in a state of agonized indecision as to the name which he should couple with his own.

When the official said, ‘Now the name of the other party?’ Walter hesitated, shuffled with his feet, then answered:

‘Rachel Evans.’

Not till he was again in the street did he remember that Rachel was the name of both the girls, and that liberty of choice between them still remained to him.

Now, from the day of ‘notice’ to the day of wedlock, an interval of twenty-one clear days must by law, elapse, and Walter, though weak enough to inform both the sisters of the step he had taken, was careful to give them only a vague idea of the date fixed. His once clear conscience, meanwhile, was grievously troubled, his feet in a net; he feared to speak to God; and went drifting like flotsam on the river of chance.

And chance alone it was which at last cast him upon the land. The fifth day before the marriage was a Bank Holiday, and he had arranged with Rachel to go out with her that day to Hyde Park, she to wait for him at an arranged spot at two o’clock. At two, then, at a street-corner, stood Rachel waiting, twirling her parasol, walking a little, returning. Walter, however, did not appear, and what could have happened was beyond her divination. Had he misunderstood or missed her? Though incredible, it was the only thing to think. To Hyde Park, at any rate, she went alone, feeling desolate and ennuyée, in the vague hope of there meeting him.

What had happened was this: Walter had been half-way toward the rendezvous with Rachel, when he was met in the street by Annie, who had gone to spend the day with a married friend at Stroud Green, but had returned, owing to the husband’s illness. Seeing Walter, her face lit up with smiles.

‘Harry’s down with the influenza,’ she said, ‘so I couldn’t stay and bore poor Ethel. Where are you going?’

For the first time since his ‘conversion’ twelve years before, Walter, with a high flush, now consciously lied.

‘Only to the schoolroom,’ he said, ‘to hunt for something.’

‘Well, I am open to be taken out, if any kind friend will be so kind,’ she said fondly.

Now he had that morning vowed to himself to wed Rachel; and by this vow he now again vowed to be bound. All the more reason why, for the last time, he should ‘take out’ Annie.

‘Come along, then, old girl,’ he gaily said: ‘where shall we go?’

‘Let us go to Hyde Park,’ said Annie. And to Hyde Park they went, Walter, ever and anon, stabbed by the bitter memory of waiting Rachel.

At five o’clock the two were walking along the north bank of the Serpentine westward toward a two-arched bridge, which is also pierced by a third narrow arch over the bank: to this narrow arch, since it was drizzling, they were making for shelter, when Rachel, a person of the keenest vision, sighted them from the south bank. She was frantic at once. Annie, who was supposed to be at Stroud Green! What treachery! This, then, was why . . . She ran panting along the bank, toward the bridge, then over it, northward, and now heard the two under the arch, who stood there talking—of the wedding. Unfortunately, just here is a block of masonry, which prevented Rachel from leaning directly over the arch to listen. Yet the necessity to hear was absolute: so she ran back clear of the masonry, and bent far over the parapet, outwards and sideways toward the arch, straining neck, body, ears, and anyone looking into those staring eyes then would have comprehended the doctrine of the Ferine Soul. But she was at a disadvantage, heard only murmurs, and—was that a kiss? Further and further forth she strained. And now suddenly, within a cry, she is in the water, where it is shallow near the bank. In the fall her head struck upon a stone in the mud.

For three days she screamed continuously the name of Walter, filling the street with it, calling him hers only. On the third night, in the midst of a frightful crisis of cries, she suddenly died.

‘Oh, Rachel, don’t say you are dead!’ cried Annie over her.

The death occurred two days before the marriage-day, and on the next, Walter, well wounded, said to Annie: ‘This knocks our little affair on the head, of course.’

Annie was silent. Then, with a pout, she said: ‘I don’t see why. After all, it was her own fault, entirely. Why should we suffer?’

For the feud between the sisters had become cruel as death; and it outlasted death: Annie, on the subject of Rachel and Walter, being no longer a gentle girl, but marble, without respect or pity.

And so, in spite of the trepidations and hesitancy of Walter, the marriage took place, even while Rachel lay stretched on the bed in the second-floor front of No. 13.

The ceremony did not, however transpire without hitch and omen. It was necessary, first of all, for Walter to forewarn Annie that he had given notice of her to the Registrar by her second name of ‘Rachel’—a mad-looking proceeding that was almost the cause of a rupture which nothing but Walter’s most ardent pleadings could steer him clear of. At any rate it was to ‘Rachel,’ and not to ‘Annie’ that he was, as a matter of fact, after all married.

After the ceremony, performed in their lunch-time, they returned to business together in Little Britain.

At ten o’clock the same night, as he was going up to bed, she ran after him, and in the passage there was a long, furtive kiss—their last on earth.

‘Twelve o’clock?’ he whispered intensely.

She held up her forefinger. ‘One!’

‘Oh, say twelve!’

She did not answer, but drew her palm playfully, across his cheek, meaning consent, for Mrs Evans was an inveterately heavy sleeper. He went up. And, careful to leave his door a little ajar, he extinguished his candle, and went to bed. In the apartment nearby lay stark in the dark—with learned, eternal eyelids and drowsy brow—the dead.

Walter could not but think of this presence close at hand. ‘Well, poor girl!’ he sighed. ‘Poor Rachel! Well, well. His way is in the sea, after all, and His path in the Great Deep, and His footsteps are not known.’ Then he thought of Annie—the little wife! But instead of Annie, there was Rachel. The two women fought vehemently for his thought—and ever the dead was stronger than the living. . . . Instead of Annie there was Rachel—and again Rachel.

At last he could hear twelve strike from a steeple, and sat up in bed, listening eagerly for the door to open, or a footfall on the floor.

A little American clock ticked in the room; and in the flue of the chimney was a sough and chaunt just audible.

Suddenly she was intensely with him, filling the chamber—-from nowhere. He had heard no footstep, no opening of the door: yet certainly, she was with him now, all suddenly, close to him, over him, talking breathlessly to him.

His first sensation was a shuddering which strongly shook him from head to foot, like the shuddering of Russian cold. She held him down by the shoulders; was stretched at length on the bed, over him; and the room seemed full of a rustling and rushing, very strange, like starched muslins rushing out in stormy agitation. She was speaking, too, to him in breathless haste, whimpering a secret gibberish which whimpered like a pup for passion—about love and its definition, and about the soul, and the worm, and Eternity, and the passion of death, and the nuptials of the tomb, and the lust and hollowness of the void. And he, too, was speaking, whispering through his pattering teeth, saying: ‘Sh-h-h, Rachel—Annie, I mean—sh-h-h, my girl—your ma will hear! Rachel, don’t—sh-h-h, now!’ But even while he kept up this ‘sh-h-h dear—sh-h-h, now,’ he was conscious of the invasion of a strange rage, of such a strength as if energy was being vehemently pumped into him from some behemoth omnipotence. The form above him he could hardly discern, the room was so dark, but he felt that her garment was flowing forth from her neck in a continuous flutter, with the rustling of the starch of a thousand shrouds, like the outflow of a pennant in wind; and the quivering gauze seemed now to swell and fill the chamber, and now to sink again to the size of woman. And ever the rhapsody of love and death went on, mixed with the chattered ‘Sh-h-h, Rachel—Annie, I mean,’ of Walter; till, suddenly, he was involved in an embrace so horrible, felt himself encompassed by a might so intolerable, that his soul fainted within him. He sank back; thought spun and failed in darkness beneath the spell of that lullaby; he muttered, ‘Receive my spirit…’

After two days Walter, still unconscious, died. His disfigured body they placed in a grave not far from Rachel’s.

Pollock and the Porroh Man

by H G Wells

It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock’s first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks—they are Gallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days of Vasco da Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man, too, was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition. (It’s a curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousins eating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At any rate, the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a mere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and, firing, hit the man in the hand.

He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the sunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had all happened in less time than it takes to read about it.

The woman was quite dead, and having ascertained this, Pollock went to the entrance of the hut and looked out. Things outside were dazzling bright. Half a dozen of the porters of the expedition were standing up in a group near the green huts they occupied, and staring towards him, wondering what the shots might signify. Behind the little group of men was the broad stretch of black fetid mud by the river, a green carpet of rafts of papyrus and water-grass, and then the leaden water. The mangroves beyond the stream loomed indistinctly through the blue haze. There were no signs of excitement in the squat village, whose fence was just visible above the cane-grass.

Pollock came out of the hut cautiously and walked towards the river, looking over his shoulder at intervals. But the Porroh man had vanished. Pollock clutched his revolver nervously in his hand.

One of his men came to meet him, and as he came, pointed to the bushes behind the hut in which the Porroh man had disappeared. Pollock had an irritating persuasion of having made an absolute fool of himself; he felt bitter, savage, at the turn things had taken. At the same time, he would have to tell Waterhouse—the moral, exemplary, cautious Waterhouse—who would inevitably take the matter seriously. Pollock cursed bitterly at his luck, at Waterhouse, and especially at the West Coast of Africa. He felt consummately sick of the expedition. And in the back of his mind all the time was a speculative doubt where precisely within the visible horizon the Porroh man might be.

It is perhaps rather shocking, but he was not at all upset by the murder that had just happened. He had seen so much brutality during the last three months, so many dead women, burnt huts, drying skeletons, up the Kittam River in the wake of the Sofa cavalry, that his senses were blunted. What disturbed him was the persuasion that this business was only beginning.

He swore savagely at the black, who ventured to ask a question, and went on into the tent under the orange-trees where Waterhouse was lying, feeling exasperatingly like a boy going into the headmaster’s study.

Waterhouse was still sleeping off the effects of his last dose of chlorodyne, and Pollock sat down on a packing-case beside him, and, lighting his pipe, waited for him to awake. About him were scattered the pots and weapons Waterhouse had collected from the Mendi people, and which he had been repacking for the canoe voyage to Sulyma.

Presently Waterhouse woke up, and after judicial stretching, decided he was all right again. Pollock got him some tea. Over the tea the incidents of the afternoon were described by Pollock, after some preliminary beating about the bush. Waterhouse took the matter even more seriously than Pollock had anticipated. He did not simply disapprove, he scolded, he insulted.

‘You’re one of those infernal fools who think a black man isn’t a human being,’ he said. ‘I can’t be ill a day without you must get into some dirty scrape or other. This is the third time in a month that you have come crossways-on with a native, and this time you’re in for it with a vengeance. Porroh, too! They’re down upon you enough as it is, about that idol you wrote your silly name on. And they’re the most vindictive devils on earth! You make a man ashamed of civilisation. To think you come of a decent family! If ever I cumber myself up with a vicious, stupid young lout like you again—’

‘Steady on, now,’ snarled Pollock, in the tone that always exasperated Waterhouse; ‘steady on.’

At that Waterhouse became speechless. He jumped to his feet.

‘Look here, Pollock,’ he said, after a struggle to control his breath. ‘You must go home. I won’t have you any longer. I’m ill enough as it is through you—’

‘Keep your hair on,’ said Pollock, staring in front of him. ‘I’m ready enough to go.’

Waterhouse became calmer again. He sat down on the camp-stool. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I don’t want a row, Pollock, you know; but it’s confoundedly annoying to have one’s plans put out by this kind of thing. I’ll come to Sulyma with you, and see you safe aboard—’

‘You needn’t,’ said Pollock. ‘I can go alone. From here.’

‘Not far,’ said Waterhouse. ‘You don’t understand this Porroh business.’

‘How should I know she belonged to a Porroh man?’ said Pollock, bitterly.

‘Well, she did,’ said Waterhouse; ‘and you can’t undo the thing. Go alone, indeed! I wonder what they’d do to you. You don’t seem to understand that this Porroh hokey-pokey rules this country, is its law, religion, constitution, medicine, magic—They appoint the chiefs. The Inquisition, at its best, couldn’t hold a candle to these chaps. He will probably set Awajale, the chief here, on to us. It’s lucky our porters are Mendis. We shall have to shift this little settlement of ours—Confound you, Pollock! And, of course, you must go and miss him.’

He thought, and his thoughts seemed disagreeable. Presently he stood up and took his rifle. ‘I’d keep close for a bit, if I were you,’ he said, over his shoulder, as he went out. ‘I’m going out to see what I can find out about it.’

Pollock remained sitting in the tent, meditating. ‘I was meant for a civilised life,’ he said to himself, regretfully, as he filled his pipe. ‘The sooner I get back to London or Paris the better for me.’

His eye fell on the sealed case in which Waterhouse had put the featherless poisoned arrows they had bought in the Mendi country. ‘I wish I had hit the beggar somewhere vital,’ said Pollock, viciously.

Waterhouse came back after a long interval. He was not communicative, though Pollock asked him questions enough. The Porroh man, it seems, was a prominent member of that mystical society. The village was interested, but not threatening. No doubt the witch-doctor had gone into the bush. He was a great witch-doctor. ‘Of course, he’s up to something,’ said Waterhouse, and became silent.

‘But what can he do?’ asked Pollock, unheeded.

‘I must get you out of this. There’s something brewing, or things would not be so quiet,’ said Waterhouse, after a gap of silence. Pollock wanted to know what the brew might be. ‘Dancing in a circle of skulls,’ said Waterhouse; ‘brewing a stink in a copper pot.’ Pollock wanted particulars. Waterhouse was vague, Pollock pressing. At last Waterhouse lost his temper. ‘How the devil should I know?’ he said to Pollock’s twentieth inquiry what the Porroh man would do. ‘He tried to kill you off-hand in the hut. Now, I fancy he will try something more elaborate. But you’ll see fast enough. I don’t want to help unnerve you. It’s probably all nonsense.’

That night, as they were sitting at their fire, Pollock again tried to draw Waterhouse out on the subject of Porroh methods. ‘Better get to sleep,’ said Waterhouse, when Pollock’s bent became apparent; ‘we start early to-morrow. You may want all your nerve about you.’

‘But what line will he take?’

‘Can’t say. They’re versatile people. They know a lot of rum dodges. You’d better get that copper-devil, Shakespear, to talk.’

There was a flash and a heavy bang out of the darkness behind the huts, and a clay bullet came whistling close to Pollock’s head. This, at least, was crude enough. The blacks and half-breeds sitting and yarning round their own fire jumped up, and someone fired into the dark.

‘Better go into one of the huts,’ said Waterhouse, quietly, still sitting unmoved.

Pollock stood up by the fire and drew his revolver. Fighting, at least, he was not afraid of. But a man in the dark is in the best of armour. Realising the wisdom of Waterhouse’s advice, Pollock went into the tent and lay down there.

What little sleep he had was disturbed by dreams, variegated dreams, but chiefly of the Porroh man’s face, upside down, as he went out of the hut, and looked up under his arm. It was odd that this transitory impression should have stuck so firmly in Pollock’s memory. Moreover, he was troubled by queer pains in his limbs.

In the white haze of the early morning, as they were loading the canoes, a barbed arrow suddenly appeared quivering in the ground close to Pollock’s foot. The boys made a perfunctory effort to clear out the thicket, but it led to no capture.

After these two occurrences, there was a disposition on the part of the expedition to leave Pollock to himself, and Pollock became, for the first time in his life, anxious to mingle with blacks. Waterhouse took one canoe, and Pollock, in spite of a friendly desire to chat with Waterhouse, had to take the other. He was left all alone in the front part of the canoe, and he had the greatest trouble to make the men—who did not love him—keep to the middle of the river, a clear hundred yards or more from either shore. However, he made Shakespear, the Freetown half-breed, come up to his own end of the canoe and tell him about Porroh, which Shakespear, failing in his attempts to leave Pollock alone, presently did with considerable freedom and gusto.

The day passed. The canoe glided swiftly along the ribbon of lagoon water, between the drift of water-figs, fallen trees, papyrus, and palm-wine palms, and with the dark mangrove swamp to the left, through which one could hear now and then the roar of the Atlantic surf. Shakespear told, in his soft blurred English, of how the Porroh could cast spells; how men withered up under their malice; how they could send dreams and devils; how they tormented and killed the sons of Ijibu; how they kidnapped a white trader from Sulyma who had maltreated one of the sect, and how his body looked when it was found. And Pollock after each narrative cursed under his breath at the want of missionary enterprise that allowed such things to be, and at the inert British Government that ruled over this dark heathendom of Sierra Leone. In the evening they came to the Kasi Lake, and sent a score of crocodiles lumbering off the island on which the expedition camped for the night.

The next day they reached Sulyma, and smelt the sea breeze; but Pollock had to put up there for five days before he could get on to Freetown. Waterhouse, considering him to be comparatively safe here, and within the pale of Freetown influence, left him and went back with the expedition to Gbemma, and Pollock became very friendly with Perera, the only resident white trader at Sulyma—so friendly, indeed, that he went about with him everywhere. Perera was a little Portuguese Jew, who had lived in England, and he appreciated the Englishman’s friendliness as a great compliment.

For two days nothing happened out of the ordinary; for the most part Pollock and Perera played Nap—the only game they had in common—and Pollock got into debt. Then, on the second evening, Pollock had a disagreeable intimation of the arrival of the Porroh man in Sulyma by getting a flesh-wound in the shoulder from a lump of filed iron. It was a long shot, and the missile had nearly spent its force when it hit him. Still it conveyed its message plainly enough. Pollock sat up in his hammock, revolver in hand, all that night, and next morning confided, to some extent, in the Anglo-Portuguese.

Perera took the matter seriously. He knew the local customs pretty thoroughly. ‘It is a personal question, you must know. It is revenge. And of course he is hurried by your leaving de country. None of de natives or half-breeds will interfere wid him very much—unless you make it wort deir while. If you come upon him suddenly, you might shoot him. But den he might shoot you.

‘Den dere’s dis—infernal magic,’ said Perera. ‘Of course, I don’t believe in it—superstition; but still it’s not nice to tink dat wherever you are, dere is a black man, who spends a moonlight night now and den a-dancing about a fire to send you bad dreams—Had any bad dreams?’

‘Rather,’ said Pollock. ‘I keep on seeing the beggar’s head upside down grinning at me and showing all his teeth as he did in the hut, and coming close up to me, and then going ever so far off, and coming back. It’s nothing to be afraid of, but somehow it simply paralyses me with terror in my sleep. Queer things—dreams. I know it’s a dream all the time, and I can’t wake up from it.’

‘It’s probably only fancy,’ said Perera. ‘Den my niggers say Porroh men can send snakes. Seen any snakes lately?’

‘Only one. I killed him this morning, on the floor near my hammock. Almost trod on him as I got up.’

‘Ah!’ said Perera, and then, reassuringly, ‘Of course it is a—coincidence. Still I would keep my eyes open. Den dere’s pains in de bones.’

‘I thought they were due to miasma,’ said Pollock.

‘Probably dey are. When did dey begin?’

Then Pollock remembered that he first noticed them the night after the fight in the hut. ‘It’s my opinion he don’t want to kill you,’ said Perera—’at least not yet. I’ve heard deir idea is to scare and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad dreams, and all dat, until he’s sick of life. Of course, it’s all talk, you know. You mustn’t worry about it—But I wonder what he’ll be up to next.’

‘I shall have to be up to something first,’ said Pollock, staring gloomily at the greasy cards that Perera was putting on the table. ‘It don’t suit my dignity to be followed about, and shot at, and blighted in this way. I wonder if Porroh hokey-pokey upsets your luck at cards.’

He looked at Perera suspiciously.

‘Very likely it does,’ said Perera, warmly, shuffling. ‘Dey are wonderful people.’

That afternoon Pollock killed two snakes in his hammock, and there was also an extraordinary increase in the number of red ants that swarmed over the place; and these annoyances put him in a fit temper to talk over business with a certain Mendi rough he had interviewed before. The Mendi rough showed Pollock a little iron dagger, and demonstrated where one struck in the neck, in a way that made Pollock shiver; and in return for certain considerations Pollock promised him a double-barrelled gun with an ornamental lock.

In the evening, as Pollock and Perera were playing cards, the Mendi rough came in through the doorway, carrying something in a blood-soaked piece of native cloth.

‘Not here!’ said Pollock, very hurriedly. ‘Not here!’

But he was not quick enough to prevent the man, who was anxious to get to Pollock’s side of the bargain, from opening the cloth and throwing the head of the Porroh man upon the table. It bounded from there on to the floor, leaving a red trail on the cards, and rolled into a corner, where it came to rest upside down, but glaring hard at Pollock.

Perera jumped up as the thing fell among the cards, and began in his excitement to gabble in Portuguese. The Mendi was bowing, with the red cloth in his hand. ‘De gun!’ he said. Pollock stared back at the head in the corner. It bore exactly the expression it had in his dreams. Something seemed to snap in his own brain as he looked at it.

Then Perera found his English again.

‘You got him killed?’ he said. ‘You did not kill him yourself?’

‘Why should I?’ said Pollock.

‘But he will not be able to take it off now!’

‘Take what off?’ said Pollock.

‘And all dese cards are spoiled!’

‘What do you mean by taking off?’ said Pollock.

‘You must send me a new pack from Freetown. You can buy dem dere.’

‘But—"take it off"?’

‘It is only superstition. I forgot. De niggers say dat if de witches—he was a witch—But it is rubbish—You must make de Porroh man take it off, or kill him yourself—It is very silly.’

Pollock swore under his breath, still staring hard at the head in the corner.

‘I can’t stand that glare,’ he said. Then suddenly he rushed at the thing and kicked it. It rolled some yards or so, and came to rest in the same position as before, upside down, and looking at him.

‘He is ugly,’ said the Anglo-Portuguese. ‘Very ugly. Dey do it on deir faces with little knives.’

Pollock would have kicked the head again, but the Mendi man touched him on the arm. ‘De gun?’ he said, looking nervously at the head.

‘Two—if you will take that beastly thing away,’ said Pollock.

The Mendi shook his head, and intimated that he only wanted one gun now due to him, and for which he would be obliged. Pollock found neither cajolery nor bullying any good with him. Perera had a gun to sell (at a profit of three hundred per cent.), and with that the man presently departed. Then Pollock’s eyes, against his will, were recalled to the thing on the floor.

‘It is funny dat his head keeps upside down,’ said Perera, with an uneasy laugh. ‘His brains must be heavy, like de weight in de little images one sees dat keep always upright wid lead in dem. You will take him wiv you when you go presently. You might take him now. De cards are all spoilt. Dere is a man sell dem in Freetown. De room is in a filty mess as it is. You should have killed him yourself.’

Pollock pulled himself together, and went and picked up the head. He would hang it up by the lamp-hook in the middle of the ceiling of his room, and dig a grave for it at once. He was under the impression that he hung it up by the hair, but that must have been wrong, for when he returned for it, it was hanging by the neck upside down.

He buried it before sunset on the north side of the shed he occupied, so that he should not have to pass the grave after dark when he was returning from Perera’s. He killed two snakes before he went to sleep. In the darkest part of the night he awoke with a start, and heard a pattering sound and something scraping on the floor. He sat up noiselessly, and felt under his pillow for his revolver. A mumbling growl followed, and Pollock fired at the sound. There was a yelp, and something dark passed for a moment across the hazy blue of the doorway. ‘A dog!’ said Pollock, lying down again.

In the early dawn he awoke again with a peculiar sense of unrest. The vague pain in his bones had returned. For some time he lay watching the red ants that were swarming over the ceiling, and then, as the light grew brighter, he looked over the edge of his hammock and saw something dark on the floor. He gave such a violent start that the hammock overset and flung him out.

He found himself lying, perhaps, a yard away from the head of the Porroh man. It had been disinterred by the dog, and the nose was grievously battered. Ants and flies swarmed over it. By an odd coincidence, it was still upside down, and with the same diabolical expression in the inverted eyes.

Pollock sat paralysed, and stared at the horror for some time. Then he got up and walked round it,—giving it a wide berth—and out of the shed. The clear light of the sunrise, the living stir of vegetation before the breath of the dying land-breeze, and the empty grave with the marks of the dog’s paws, lightened the weight upon his mind a little.

He told Perera of the business as though it was a jest,—a jest to be told with white lips. ‘You should not have frighten de dog,’ said Perera, with poorly simulated hilarity.

The next two days, until the steamer came, were spent by Pollock in making a more effectual disposition of his possession. Overcoming his aversion to handling the thing, he went down to the river mouth and threw it into the sea-water, but by some miracle it escaped the crocodiles, and was cast up by the tide on the mud a little way up the river, to be found by an intelligent Arab half-breed, and offered for sale to Pollock and Perera as a curiosity, just on the edge of night. The native hung about in the brief twilight, making lower and lower offers, and at last, getting scared in some way by the evident dread these wise white men had for the thing, went off, and, passing Pollock’s shed, threw his burden in there for Pollock to discover in the morning.

At this Pollock got into a kind of frenzy. He would burn the thing. He went out straightway into the dawn, and had constructed a big pyre of brushwood before the heat of the day. He was interrupted by the hooter of the little paddle steamer from Monrovia to Bathurst, which was coming through the gap in the bar. ‘Thank Heaven!’ said Pollock, with infinite piety, when the meaning of the sound dawned upon him. With trembling hands he lit his pile of wood hastily, threw the head upon it, and went away to pack his portmanteau and make his adieux to Perera.

That afternoon, with a sense of infinite relief, Pollock watched the flat swampy foreshore of Sulyma grow small in the distance. The gap in the long line of white surge became narrower and narrower. It seemed to be closing in and cutting him off from his trouble. The feeling of dread and worry began to slip from him bit by bit. At Sulyma belief in Porroh malignity and Porroh magic had been in the air, his sense of Porroh had been vast, pervading, threatening, dreadful. Now manifestly the domain of Porroh was only a little place, a little black band between the sea and the blue cloudy Mendi uplands.

‘Good-bye, Porroh!’ said Pollock. ‘Good-bye—certainly not au revoir.’

The captain of the steamer came and leant over the rail beside him, and wished him good evening, and spat at the froth of the wake in token of friendly ease.

‘I picked up a rummy curio on the beach this go,’ said the captain. ‘It’s a thing I never saw done this side of Indy before.’

‘What might that be?’ said Pollock.

‘Pickled ‘ed,’ said the captain.

‘What?’ said Pollock.

‘‘Ed—smoked. ‘Ed of one of these Porroh chaps, all ornamented with knife-cuts. Why! What’s up? Nothing? I shouldn’t have took you for a nervous chap. Green in the face. By gosh! you’re a bad sailor. All right, eh? Lord, how funny you went! Well, this ‘ed I was telling you of is a bit rum in a way. I’ve got it, along with some snakes, in a jar of spirit in my cabin what I keeps for such curios, and I’m hanged if it don’t float upsy-down. Hullo!’

Pollock had given an incoherent cry, and had his hands in his hair. He ran towards the paddle-boxes with a half-formed idea of jumping into the sea, and then he realised his position and turned back towards the captain.

‘Here!’ said the captain. ‘Jack Philips, just keep him off me! Stand off! No nearer, mister! What’s the matter with you? Are you mad?’

Pollock put his hand to his head. It was no good explaining. ‘I believe I am pretty nearly mad at times,’ he said. ‘It’s a pain I have here. Comes suddenly. You’ll excuse me, I hope.’

He was white and in a perspiration. He saw suddenly very clearly all the danger he ran of having his sanity doubted. He forced himself to restore the captain’s confidence, by answering his sympathetic inquiries, noting his suggestions, even trying a spoonful of neat brandy in his cheek, and, that matter settled, asking a number of questions about the captain’s private trade in curiosities. The captain described the head in detail. All the while Pollock was struggling to keep under a preposterous persuasion that the ship was as transparent as glass, and that he could distinctly see the inverted face looking at him from the cabin beneath his feet.

Pollock had a worse time almost on the steamer than he had at Sulyma. All day he had to control himself in spite of his intense perception of the imminent presence of that horrible head that was overshadowing his mind. At night his old nightmare returned, until, with a violent effort, he would force himself awake, rigid with the horror of it, and with the ghost of a hoarse scream in his throat.

He left the actual head behind at Bathurst, where he changed ship for Teneriffe, but not his dreams nor the dull ache in his bones. At Teneriffe Pollock transferred to a Cape liner, but the head followed him. He gambled, he tried chess, he even read books; but he knew the danger of drink. Yet whenever a round black shadow, a round black object came into his range, there he looked for the head, and—saw it. He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.

So, struggling grimly and silently with his excited imagination, Pollock reached England. He landed at Southampton, and went on straight from Waterloo to his banker’s in Cornhill in a cab. There he transacted some business with the manager in a private room; and all the while the head hung like an ornament under the black marble mantel and dripped upon the fender. He could hear the drops fall, and see the red on the fender.

‘A pretty fern,’ said the manager, following his eyes. ‘But it makes the fender rusty.’

‘Very,’ said Pollock; ‘a very pretty fern. And that reminds me. Can you recommend me a physician for mind troubles? I’ve got a little—what is it?—hallucination.’

The head laughed savagely, wildly. Pollock was surprised the manager did not notice it. But the manager only stared at his face.

With the address of a doctor, Pollock presently emerged in Cornhill. There was no cab in sight, and so he went on down to the western end of the street, and essayed the crossing opposite the Mansion House. The crossing is hardly easy even for the expert Londoner; cabs, vans, carriages, mailcarts, omnibuses go by in one incessant stream; to any one fresh from the malarious solitudes of Sierra Leone it is a boiling, maddening confusion. But when an inverted head suddenly comes bouncing, like an indiarubber ball, between your legs, leaving distinct smears of blood every time it touches the ground, you can scarcely hope to avoid an accident. Pollock lifted his feet convulsively to avoid it, and then kicked at the thing furiously. Then something hit him violently in the back, and a hot pain ran up his arm.

He had been hit by the pole of an omnibus, and three of the fingers of his left hand smashed by the hoof of one of the horses,—the very fingers, as it happened, that he shot from the Porroh man. They pulled him out from between the horses’ legs, and found the address of the physician in his crushed hand.

For a couple of days Pollock’s sensations were full of the sweet, pungent smell of chloroform, of painful operations that caused him no pain, of lying still and being given food and drink. Then he had a slight fever, and was very thirsty, and his old nightmare came back. It was only when it returned that he noticed it had left him for a day.

‘If my skull had been smashed instead of my fingers, it might have gone altogether,’ said Pollock, staring thoughtfully at the dark cushion that had taken on for the time the shape of the head.

Pollock at the first opportunity told the physician of his mind trouble. He knew clearly that he must go mad unless something should intervene to save him. He explained that he had witnessed a decapitation in Dahomey, and was haunted by one of the heads. Naturally, he did not care to state the actual facts. The physician looked grave.

Presently he spoke hesitatingly. ‘As a child, did you get very much religious training?’

‘Very little,’ said Pollock.

A shade passed over the physician’s face. ‘I don’t know if you have heard of the miraculous cures—it may be, of course, they are not miraculous—at Lourdes.’

‘Faith-healing will hardly suit me, I am afraid,’ said Pollock, with his eye on the dark cushion.

The head distorted its scarred features in an abominable grimace. The physician went upon a new track. ‘It’s all imagination,’ he said, speaking with sudden briskness. ‘A fair case for faith-healing, anyhow. Your nervous system has run down, you’re in that twilight state of health when the bogles come easiest. The strong impression was too much for you. I must make you up a little mixture that will strengthen your nervous system—especially your brain. And you must take exercise.’

‘I’m no good for faith-healing,’ said Pollock.

‘And therefore we must restore tone. Go in search of stimulating air—Scotland, Norway, the Alps—’

‘Jericho, if you like,’ said Pollock, ‘where Naaman went.’

However, so soon as his fingers would let him, Pollock made a gallant attempt to follow out the doctor’s suggestion. It was now November. He tried football; but to Pollock the game consisted in kicking a furious inverted head about a field. He was no good at the game. He kicked blindly, with a kind of horror, and when they put him back into goal, and the ball came swooping down upon him, he suddenly yelled and got out of its way. The discreditable stories that had driven him from England to wander in the tropics shut him off from any but men’s society, and now his increasingly strange behaviour made even his man friends avoid him. The thing was no longer a thing of the eye merely; it gibbered at him, spoke to him. A horrible fear came upon him that presently, when he took hold of the apparition, it would no longer become some mere article of furniture, but would feel like a real dissevered head. Alone, he would curse at the thing, defy it, entreat it; once or twice, in spite of his grim self-control, he addressed it in the presence of others. He felt the growing suspicion in the eyes of the people that watched him,—his landlady, the servant, his man.

One day early in December his cousin Arnold—his next of kin—came to see him and draw him out, and watch his sunken, yellow face with narrow, eager eyes. And it seemed to Pollock that the hat his cousin carried in his hand was no hat at all, but a Gorgon head that glared at him upside down, and fought with its eyes against his reason. However, he was still resolute to see the matter out. He got a bicycle, and, riding over the frosty road from Wandsworth to Kingston, found the thing rolling along at his side, and leaving a dark trail behind it. He set his teeth and rode faster. Then suddenly, as he came down the hill towards Richmond Park, the apparition rolled in front of him and under his wheel, so quickly that he had no time for thought, and, turning quickly to avoid it, was flung violently against a heap of stones and broke his left wrist.

The end came on Christmas morning. All night he had been in a fever, the bandages encircling his wrist like a band of fire, his dreams more vivid and terrible than ever. In the cold, colourless, uncertain light that came before the sunrise, he sat up in his bed, and saw the head upon the bracket in the place of the bronze jar that had stood there overnight.

‘I know that is a bronze jar,’ he said, with a chill doubt at his heart. Presently the doubt was irresistible. He got out of bed slowly, shivering, and advanced to the jar with his hand raised. Surely he would see now his imagination had deceived him, recognise the distinctive sheen of bronze. At last, after an age of hesitation, his fingers came down on the patterned cheek of the head. He withdrew them spasmodically. The last stage was reached. His sense of touch had betrayed him.

Trembling, stumbling against the bed, kicking against his shoes with his bare feet, a dark confusion eddying round him, he groped his way to the dressing-table, took his razor from the drawer, and sat down on the bed with this in his hand. In the looking-glass he saw his own face, colourless, haggard, full of the ultimate bitterness of despair.

He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched schooldays, the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfish dishonour leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, all its squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to the hut, to the fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the river to Sulyma, to the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavours to destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a hallucination! He knew it was. A hallucination merely. For a moment he snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on the bracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at him—With the stiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb of his arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.