SADLER came down late in the afternoon, and with him little Irish and King Ogel. If Mrs. Ulswater was expecting a contrite king, she was disappointed. He strutted across the deck in front of a bodyguard of three huge warriors, whose garb and outfit were more ferocious than ornamental, more ornamental than decorous, and more ornamental in intention than in result. He was unashamed. His misbehaviour had left no traces on his complacence. He was impertinently vain of that terrific bodyguard. I noticed Mrs. Ulswater's expression become suddenly set and determined. I knew the king's complacence irritated her, his unrepented misbehaviour roused her instinct for discipline. Something was going to happen. I looked at the warriors. I wished it might not be something that would cause the introduction into my anxious digestive organism of those shovel-headed spears, unpleasant objects, nay, surely indigestible. I hoped for the best. I was calm but expectant.
“Doctor,” said Mrs. Ulswater, “when kings are invited to tea, don't people have entertainments for them?”
“Invariably! Music and dancing!” I exclaimed, delighted, relieved at the turn Mrs. Ulswater's intentions seemed to be taking. “Daughters of Herodias—hem—I mean to say you are quite right. No barbaric potentate can swallow his victuals without some agreeable distraction.”
“Of course we haven't any of those things,” she said, and looked thoughtfully at Ram Nad, who was squatted near on the flowered carpet, “but if Ram Nad should hypnotise the king's men, don't you think it would amuse him?”
She pointed to the bodyguards. I thought it would. Ram Nad consented.
Venerable and unappalled, he drew near, sat down in front of the guards, and began his monotonous chant and circuitous gesturing before their stolid faces, whose stationary expressions and complexions variegated with tattoo were unmoved by Ram Nad's odd behaviour. Slowly those copper-skinned and impassive spearmen in ornamental outfit keeled over and lay stretched and rigid, mute symbols of barbarism, promiscuously prostrate, frozen ferocities, motionless images of war. A whirl of Ram Nad's hand, and they rolled, tumbled, turning promiscuity into chaos, across the deck, and brought up in the scuppers among the geranium pots. There lay shields and spears, sprawling legs and tattooed faces, grotesque and horrific, among the brown earthenware pots, the round velvety leaves and small red petals of that plant so familiar in the cleanly windows of our native land.
The king was delighted. He thumped his chest, and laughed.
Jimmie Hagan took his pipe out of his mouth, profoundly astonished.
Sadler murmured “Waxworks!”
“More!” the king commanded, doubled over with laughter. “More!”
He wanted the bodyguard tumbled down the companionway, but Mrs. Ulswater wouldn't allow it. The king turned sulky. Language rumbled in his throat preparing to be shrieked.
“Fiddlesticks!” said Mrs. Ulswater; “As if I'd let those things into my parlour! Have them tumbled down the gangway if you want to.”
The king brightened up. Infatuated man, he did not see—he had no inkling of—the danger that lurked in Mrs. Ulswater's set mouth and determined expression. I could have warned him, but refrained. Clearly she was right about the incongruity of fully armed and half-naked warriors precipitated down stairs into parlours. One feels the impropriety of it.
While Ram Nad, at the king's boisterous order, was extricating the warriors from the geranium pots, and while Mrs. Ulswater went forward and was talking with Captain Jansen, I was thinking it impossible that she meant to allow the bodyguard to be sent helplessly overboard, inhumanely, to the great peril of drowning. I was about to intervene, when I saw Mrs. Ulswater return, followed, to my surprise, by Captain Jansen and the crew.
“There!” she said, pointing; “Be quick!”
Judge of my astonishment, when Captain Jansen and our muscular crew fell upon Sadler, Hagan, and King Ogel, and jerking each backward, proceeded to tie them hands and feet.
“Murther!” said Hagan. “Murther,” he repeated more mildly, and then, “Hand up that poipe.”
Susannah cried, “Goody!” and rushed about. She was distracted by all that wealth of curious phenomena, and the scattered arrangement of objects of interest.
“Pirates!” shouted Sadler. After one huge lunge he subsided, and laughed. He thundered with husky merriment and unseasonable mirth.
The humiliated and outraged monarch began eloquently, but Captain Jansen clapped his hand over and corked up the royal anathema. They carried King Ogel forward. My impression is that Captain Jansen used a strap, varied, perhaps, at intervals, by a board, to impress upon him Mrs. Ulswater's opinion. We heard of him, for the time being, no more.
“Tie up those Kanakas!” said Mrs. Ulswater. “Now, Ram Nad, wake them up. Now, they must be taken ashore. Captain Jansen, you must get up steam. Untie Mr. Sadler and Mr. Hagan. There!”
She sat down, rocked nervously, and took up her knitting again. Sadler's laughter had ceased. We both looked at her. We wondered and waited.
“Well!” she said at last defiantly,—as the sound of oarlocks told of the boats drawing away shoreward, loaded with disentranced but well-roped, disarmed, bewildered warriors,—“I don't know what you think, but I think Ogel would have been a dreadful king, and from what Mr. Sadler said, I think Kolo will do better. Besides, it's easier to carry off the one that's handy, instead of running after the other, isn't it? Of course it is.” She added a moment later, “Of course, Mr. Sadler, you needn't come away unless you like, but you said you didn't get on with the other king, and I thought it would please Dr. Ulswater. I know he enjoys your company.”
Sadler wiped his eyes and sighed.
“I ain't been dished up so green and tasty, like a salad,” he said, “since me and Moses and Pharaoh used to play draw poker, and Moses kept special providences up his sleeve, nor I ain't had such a good time since the last time I was licked for stealing horehound candy; which my recollection, ma'am, is in favour of straps rather'n shingles. It's all right. Lua's too small for me. You can't stretch nights without kicking other families out of bed, which makes reverberating scandals. If you sit down, you squash the judiciary; if you get up, you shake the throne. This civil war's no good. Why,
What's a war without no slaughter?
I'd rather be at
A Coopdetat
By Mrs. James Ulswater.”
Mrs. Ulswater went below. Her nerves were perhaps a trifle upset. Not so Susannah. But Susannah was young. She sniffed the battle of life. She thrilled to the keynote of action. She fell upon Jimmie Hagan with eager inquiry as to his precise feelings throughout the late excitement. Sadler and myself stood watching the landing of the spearmen.
“You don't mind going with us?” I asked him.
“Me? No! I'll have to get even with you sometime or be restless. I ain't up to abducting Mrs. Ulswater nor Susannah, but I'll lay for you, doctor. You'd better put Jimmie on the crew. He's a good seaman. I'll be a guest, or a passenger, or an orphan, anything you like. Why, look yere, doctor. Mrs. Ulswater's been and took me out of temptation to stamp on my fellowman, and I'm grateful. She's given me a chance at innocence. Why, my fellowman's always lying around in my way, and I keep stepping on him, and kicking holes in his garments when he has any, and bumps on him where he hasn't, and then I goes off to eat sackcloth and ashes, and wear bread and water. That's mostly the monotonous way of it. But the point that gets me is this: I recommend an orphan, and she thinks that'll do for a king; I recommend a king, and she has him spanked for an orphan. Now, if a candidate for a throne ought to qualify that way, maybe he ought; but I never heard of it before, which is why you see me dished for a salad.”
So departed theViolettafrom the island of Lua. May its politics have peace!
The knock-out drops which Ram Nad kept in the ends of his fingers, on the whole, had worked better than mine, and Mrs. Uls-water's logic had been, as ever, penetrative, precise, practical.
The preparations for celebrating Christmas were resumed. My anxieties returned. I confided them to Sadler. I said:
“It is my fixed opinion, that for revelry and sorrow, for a taste of Eden's rapturous but snaky joys, a mince pie in the tropics lays over most things.”
“Why, look yere, doctor,” he said. “That there king's got a tempestuous liver that can't be downed, and he likes pies. The king 'll eat it, sure, he'll eat it.”
ALYRICAL poem composed by Sadler, and by him sung inharmoniously to a banjo:—
“I'm, so to speak, shanghaied to sea;
And who you think my shipmates be?
One family of millionaires,
Rambling the deep in search of heirs;
One hypnotiser Oriental;
One orphan maiden ornamental;
One widowed cat; one spinster hen;
A crew of blue-eyed Swedish men;
One head of hair too hot for wearing;
One captive monarch spanked for swearing—
is not what you would call amethystine or ethereal; but poetry, of a kind, we have come to expect of him. But when Susannah brought me a ballad, composed by herself, on the foregoing events, it produced in my mind—and I speak moderately—a state of exhausting confusion. I copy this ballad. It is entitled “The Kings of Lua.”
'There were two kings in Lua,
Which only could use one.
Now Sadler came from Sumatra
And needed some more fun.
“He was a white man, although
He was not exactly white,
But tanned and played on the banjo.
Which angels would delight.
“He said, 'Prime Ministers are good things,
And I'm one of those things, Hooroar!
I'll bet my last week s shirt, O Kings:
To yours of the week before.'
“The old King wore a pink one neat,
But not much else did wear.
His face looked something like mince meat.
Some bones were in his hair.
“Another man was Irish,
And I will make a joke,
His hair it was so fierish,
That always he did smoke.
“The other King we never saw;
He didn't come to tea.
Oh, wretched island of Lua
I weep and wail for thee.
“ So then they had a war,
Although they never fought.
'There's something ails this civil war,'
Said Sadler, 'I wonder what.'
“Ha! Ha! TheVioletta
Came sailing in one day.
Ogel and Sadler and Irish
We yanked and took away.
“About Lua now it is now known,
I'll tell you what I think.
I think Kolo ran up the throne
As quick as he could wink.”
Yours—ULSWATER.
Samoa.March.
IN respect to incisive logic, decision, and force, I have sometimes thought that Susannah resembles Mrs. Ulswater. The characters of both, in contact with my temperament, produce a harmony, thrilling but agreeable. But then my temperament is a kettle drum. I have sometimes thought that on a temperament more lute-like, the impact of Susannah might produce—shall I say?—surprise. On the temperament of Sadler,—melancholy and yet buoyant, intricate and yet simple,—the impact of Susannah seems to produce sometimes extraordinary jubilation, sometimes a condition quite the reverse. He calls her “a melojous circus,” a phrase implying jubilation.
He is a man of moods, a contrast to the consistent placidity of Ram Nad, the Occident to the Orient. Are they then supersignificant types of that new world and that old? One of them turns to life's mystery a bold but troubled face, and covers with a jocular and careless manner a soul unreconciled. The toil and restless wandering of individuals, the surging migration of races, the incessant change called progress, are all but the symptoms of his feverish discomfort, his cosmic ill adjustment? And the other, the Ram Nads, the old-world type, meek, timid, tricky, placid, has it found at least, out of its age-long thoughts, how to make its truckling peace with the mystery? C'est un grand peut-être. Meanwhile the education of Susannah is the principal enterprise of Mrs. Ulswater, Sadler, and me, to say nothing of Ram Nad.
It was my habit to read aloud from the poets, the divine Shelley, the noble Tennyson, the golden Keats. Susannah's opinion of these poets was, on the whole, scornful.
They appeared to her tortuous and deceitful. Their language was, she thought, “mussy.” She did not believe they stated the facts.
Hence, if any one had asked me sometime ago whether I thought it possible or likely that Susannah would bud, bloom, burst loose and explode into song, I should have said: “No! Impossible! Susannah has all the materials of strident criticism, but none of poesy.”
Nevertheless here lies her “Ballad of the Kings of Lua.” Here lies moreover her tragic and profound “Ballad of Georgiana and Dolores.” What can be said of them? First, this; that I take the immediate cause of Susannah's explosion to have been Sadler. He has the lyric habit. He composes as a rooster crows, whenever it occurs to him. He is apt to state his mind in that form. The lyric habit is infectious; youth is imitative; hence arise schools of poetry; hence Susannah's explosion. But Susannah's gift is for the narrative, the reflective. She has not the lyric cry. Hers rather are the forceful expression and the just remark.
We left King Ogel at Sydney. He was pensioned by Sadler. He will probably pass his remaining years in intemperate leisure. Mrs. Ulswater did not think there was any prospect of working his reformation. He was not a desirable orphan. My opinion was that Susannah was occupation enough for an orphanage.
Of Georgiana Tupper, that reserved, that exclusive hen from the island of Clementina, and of Dolores, that stricken cat from Lua, I am about to speak.
It was the 13th of February. We were steaming eastward somewhat to the south of the Loyalty Islands. The weather had been oppressive, the night turned threatening, and by morning it was blowing a gale. I went on deck to watch the watery phenomena. The sea was tumultuous and black, the clouds overhead hung low and rainy, and the intense wind trailed streamers of cloud across the sea.
Suddenly, as I stood there, a tall black column of water rose directly ahead of theVioletta.
She swerved aside in answer to her helm, narrowly escaped disaster; and that contorted and insurgent object, that careening maelstrom, and insensate Charybdis, that water spout, went whirling by on the port side.
But now, behold! the sea all about was columned with water spouts, mushroom-shaped, their summits lost in eddying gloom—infuriate smoke-stacks, roaring volcanoes waltzing on end—perpendicular and intoxicated whales, bowelless of compassion, active and voracious—gyrating black funnels of wind and water, full of exuberant malice, full of demons of the nethermost deep striving to climb the pendant and embattled heavens. Between the shattered sea and low curtaining clouds, rumbled about us that tremendous warfare. Now and again a spout would fall, broken like a pipe stem near its base, and another heave up, grip the vapourish canopy above it, and come racing over that chaotic ocean; through the midst of which forest of fluid insanity and monstrous fungi of the sea—even as through some vast cavern columned with maniac stalagmites and abandoned pillars of wet combustion—we fled.
How long this condition of affairs lasted, I could not say. How we escaped, Heaven and Captain Jansen may know. The seas now and again swept the deck.
When we found ourselves at last with no water spouts anywhere near, and the upper and lower world reasonably disconnected, Sadler and I went below, where we found Mrs. Ulswater nervous, Susannah excited, Ram Nad calm as a browsing cow. We discussed the experience. By night the weather was fairly calm. Not till then did we find that Dolores and Georgiana Tupper were missing.
In the forecastle, it had been supposed that they were aft; in the cabin, that they were forward. They were nowhere. The minutest search was in vain. From one end of the yacht to the other we went—from deck to keel. None could remember having noticed them, except Ram Nad, who stated that he had seen them on deck before the tumult arose. No doubt remained then. They were gone. What could be said? What interpretation could be put upon it? What other than this? that in endeavouring to pass, during the storm, from the forecastle to the cabin, or vice versa, they had been blown or swept overboard.
But why both? How, in particular, Dolores? Georgiana was but a hen; a hen can be swept or blown; her anchorage is weak, her sail area apt to enlarge with the wind; whereas Dolores was a cat, carrying four to five anchors to each foot, and a sail area small under all circumstances. What force then could have torn loose her desperate grapple? unless it were—a pathetic possibility here—that, seeing Georgiana, the companion and support of her bereaved existence, thus blown away, she had rushed devotedly to her rescue; or—a still more affecting thought—that, simply resolved not to outlive Georgiana but to perish with her, she had cast herself after Georgiana upon the weltering deep.
When this last idea occurred to me, I sought Susannah and turned it over to her. The first effect was unfortunate. Tearful, at the time, she burst out weeping. Mrs. Ulswater said I ought to be ashamed. Sadler, with mournful sarcasm, did not see why a man, because he was full of ideas, had to slop over like a tub of soapsuds—surely a mixed metaphor, a confused figure of speech.
Another idea occurred to me. It was that Susannah had the entire sympathies of theViolettain tow.
THERE was a cat and named Dolores,
And she had many worries.
They made her ill. They made her thin.
Her stomach was all tumbled in.
“Oh, grief! Oh, dear' Who does not wail!
Dolores had a beautiful tail
It was black and partly yellow.
She was so fair and good a fellow.
“ I don't mean she was ever fat,
I mean she was a woman cat
Now, there was a hen too. Oh Shame!
Now Georgiana was her name
“ Now, to be proud she had a right.
Her eyes they were very bright,
And all her toes she had but one,
Although some of her tail feathers were gone.
“Hark! The sea is full of awful posts
Which make a person think of ghosts.
Hark! The hurricane so fierce does blow.
She is gone off the ship Woe!
“ Dolores did not wait to purr.
'Farewell,' she cried. 'I go to her.'
The foam it slithered through her claws,
She was drowned in Friendship's Cause.
“ My precious darling! Oh, my pet!
You both so hated to get wet.
Now you're as wet inside as a water pail,
It makes me sick I die, I faint, I fail.
Now, sharks and whales, you are so big,
If you should eat them, you're a pig,
Now, little fish, make friends with them please,
With Georgiana and Dolores.”
First Stanza: As the Ancient Mariner began his marvellous tale, “There was a ship,” so Susannah begins, “There was a cat”—boldly, ruggedly, a leapin médias res. The first stanza is a condensed and yet accurate analysis of Dolores, ending with a striking bit of realism.
Second Stanza: A wild burst of grief subsiding sadly into tender reminiscence. Note how the proportions of black and yellow on the tail of Dolores are delicately discriminated, the “black” being, in point of fact, predominant.
Third Stanza: We are introduced to Georgiana. Here arises a difficulty. What was there in the condition of being “a hen” to warrant the exclamation, “Oh, Shame!” Surely none! I interpret the passage thus: the exclamation “Oh, Shame!” is simply the poetess' passion bursting through, as it were, the reserve of the narrative, and in this way it prophetically forecasts the fatal issue. It is not, I think, a reflection or invective against hens, as such.
Fourth Stanza: Observe how just and truthful are the details, how Georgiana's right to a certain pride of manner, which indeed was hers, is critically based upon the brightness of her eyes, upon the approximate completeness of her toes. And yet it is honourably admitted that there was a deficiency of tail feathers.
Fifth Stanza: As the ballads of folklore are ever distinguished by a certain abruptness of climax, so here Susannah. Note the present tense, used only in this stanza. In the last line, how remarkable in effect is the passionate interjection which follows the simple statement of Georgiana's catastrophe!
Sixth Stanza: Last line, “slithered”—a difficult word, and yet effective! The whole line is masterly.
Seventh Stanza: The last line is clearly a Shelleyan reminiscence, a trace of my readings aloud of that poet. And yet, if Susannah had plagiarised, it was at least, boldly, frankly.
Eighth and Last Stanza: Note the contrast between the defiant and denunciatory address to the “whales and sharks,” and the pleading gentleness of that petition to the “little fish,” that they receive with comfort and affection those sad and houseless visitants, who had perished not ignobly, not unworthily.
A poem composed by Sadler on the foregoing events:
“The climates got out on a spree,
A heaven-and-hell carouse,
And Satan built along the sea
The pillars of his house;
And 'mong them all they drowned one hen,
One played-out, seedy cat,
And then slid off to sea again,
And let it go at that,
Leaving some waves to sob and worry,
Leaving Susannah crying.—
Oh, Lord, this world is sound and fury,
And nothing signifying.
But come a time when heaven and hell
Has settled their arrears,—
'Bout twilight of the judgment day,
When all the books are put away,
And all the little souls gone home
Each to its place in kingdom come—
The Lord and me, we'll set and—well,
We'll set around and talk a spell
About some woman's tears.”
THE deck of theViolettahad resumed its ordinary domestic look. True, no Dolores lay on the carpet, no Georgiana pecked and scratched in the scuppers. At some distance apart on his rug, his basket behind him, in deep abstraction, sat Ram Nad.
Ram Nad had absent-mindedness down to a science. He could roll up his eyeballs and go off like a bullet. When not abstracted he usually played jackstraws. What recondite connection there was between him and jackstraws I never made out, but I suspected it was the delicate sleight of hand required, and the practice it gave him, which fastened him to that Occidental game. Certainly I would back him against any jackstraw player—But there never was such a jackstraw player before. The laws of physics were nothing to him. Gravitation in jackstraws he ignored.
Sadler, Susannah, and I were in conversation under the awning, but Mrs. Ulswater sat a long time silent.
“Doctor,” she said at last, “do you think Ram Nad could have Georgiana and Dolores in his basket?”
Susannah started. On me too the idea had a certain volcanic effect.
“Why suppose so?” I said. “Is there evidence? Have you a subtle instinct? Does he look a shade more virtuous than usual? If he does, it would go to prove he has been accumulating sin. But does he? He looks to be precisely as usual. Why suppose they didn't go overboard? Why not adopt my theory and Susannah's of Dolores' pathetic departure?”
“I suppose they did.”
Mrs. Ulswater sighed, and was silent for some moments before she went on:
“But if Ram Nad churned them into his basket the way he does with things, after what I've told him, it's flat disobedience, and I won't stand it from a heathen. Georgiana never would go on deck when the wind blew, and they were both in the cabin the night before the water spouts. Of course if I accused him of it, and it wasn't so, he'd be perfectly crushing. He'd be crushing if itwastrue, for that matter. But somehow I don't see how it could have happened, and I won't have Ram Nad getting the best of me. I wish you'd see if you can find out.”
Now if anything suits my temperament and talent, it is wily diplomacy, and the worming out of another man by devious ways the carefully guarded secret of his soul. I took a camp stool and sat down before Ram Nad. He was abstracted behind the whites of his rolled-up eyes. I said with subtle suavity:
“Wake up, you old Cingalese snake of a juggler!”
Ram Nad came out of infinity, and answered with welcoming gesture: “Imbecile, why do you trouble me?”
“Where,” I said, “are Georgiana and Dolores, you depraved and disgusting pundit?”
“How do I know, pig?”
But this limpid flow of pure reason was not, it seemed to me, really headed for Ram Nad's soul secret. I skilfully shifted the attack.
“Why, in this way you might have an idea, illustrious. As I understand your theory of everything, it's this: The entire universe, you say, is only a general idea which has the misfortune to be particularised in spots. Normally, it's just an abstract conception, but parts of the conception have somehow blundered into a curious condition called concreteness. A very distressing condition, very. Bless my soul! Concreteness is an awful catastrophe.”
“As you state it so, it may be so stated,” said Ram Nad.
“Now then, if any person then, such as Georgiana or Dolores, either tragically, or peacefully, or in any manner whatever, becomes dead, you say of them, simply: They have returned to generality; they are no more separately existent; they are rid of the burden of identity; they have, so to speak, disappeared in that airy original mixture again. Such would be your description of the case.”
“You possess some misunderstood fragments of truth, O brother,” said Ram Nad.
“Very good. But see here! When you churn things in that remarkable basket of yours, and they are gone, and I ask: 'Where are they?' you invariably say: 'They have become general ideas.' When I ask why I can't see or touch them, you answer, 'General ideas are not visible or tangible, but are of the mind purely.' Sometimes, at this point, I have perhaps ejaculated, 'Gammon!' I apologise. Sometimes, on the other hand, you have exclaimed, 'Imbecile!' I forgive. The question is this: What's the difference between being generalised in a basket, and being generalised by drowning? Are they not the same? Or do you follow my argument, illustrious?”
Ram Nad considered.
“This is a worthy inquiry, O brother. It may be your mind is at last becoming capable of thought? But how shall I answer. Is there a difference? Should I not answer that there is none?”
“There can't be, Ram Nad, there can't be!” I exclaimed. “Reason proves it. Then, see here! Why can't you, then, restore Georgiana and Dolores? It's all the same, for reason proves it.”
If there did, as I fancied, for an instant pass over Ram Nad's patriarchal face, into his meditative eyes, an expression, if not of cunning, at least of a certain pleasant humanity, it vanished quickly.
“You have yourself answered,” he said.
“The difference is this: if the cat and hen of inquiry had been generalised here by me, I could so restore them; but because they are drowned, I am not able. Therefore the question is answered.”
“I see. That was the point. I thought maybe you could—a pardonable mistake—your talents are so extraordinary. I thought you might be a resurrectionist on the side. You'll excuse me, I'm sure.”
Ram Nad withdrew again behind the whites of his eyes, and I returned to the awning, reflecting. Ram Nad had lacked hypnotic subjects since Mrs. Ulswater put her foot down on his fixing any human inhabitant of theViolettathat way.
But it struck me I'd never known a man with so fine an outfit for casuistry as Ram Nad, such a liquid and euphuistic term for slaughter and theft, such philosophic refinement in the practical process. Thus: you generalise your neighbour's watch. It becomes an abstract idea, and belongs to the original nebulous unity of pure conception. You go around the corner and concentrate your mind on the idea till it's particular again. You get about the same watch. Maybe not. Pretty similar. It seemed so to me.
“I pass,” I said to Mrs. Ulswater. “Who plays next? Ram Nad's got 'em, that's my penetrative opinion; but he can bluff like a fire engine.”
“I'm going to give him a piece of my mind,” said Mrs. Ulswater, indignantly.
“Why, my dear,” I said, “I don't believe it would fetch them. I believe Ram Nad could put even a piece of your mind into his basket, and churn it to a harmless generality. I do indeed. Your play, Sadler.”
“Spank him,” murmured Sadler, sleepily.
“Ha! King Ogel! Hum! Why didn't we induce Ram Nad to generalise that king? Mightn't it have had a sort of—shall I say?—a refining effect, a deodourising effect? Well, maybe not. Spanking was, in his case, I should say, bracing, suggestive; as applied to a king, I admit its point. But, now, as applied to a patriarch, I should draw the line, I really should. Your turn, Susannah.”
Susannah sprang up and started across the deck toward Ram Nad. We watched her in silence, in expectation. She stood before him a moment conversing, then dragged the conical basket around in front of him, and of her own accord climbed into it. This was interesting. We all three arose and drew near them, while Ram Nad covered the opening with a corner of his loose garments, and fell to that familiar procedure resembling the motion by which, with fork or spoon, the energetic housewife blends and fuses the delicately organised egg into a yellow somewhat, an inorganic mess.
Wherein Ram Nad's skill or secret consisted, its scientific theory, I did not—I do not now—profess or expect to know. I call him an A1 magician, and pass the deal. Did it consist in hypnotic deception of the observer? I incline to that idea, on account of the element of gammon therein. Was it some unusual sleight of hand? Was it a knowledge and control of some occult but natural law? I have at times leaned to that hypothesis, only to return again either to gammon or the pleasant repose of a gaseous doubt. He appeared to be able on request, with any object not too large to go into his absorbent basket, there to dissolve the said object into nothing. You could look into the basket. You could feel with the hand. You could search Ram Nad's clothes, or comb his beard. You would come to the end of ultimate wisdom, and conclude to pass the deal. Then, on request, he would reproduce the object.
Susannah is not a large object; she is about the size of Mrs. Ulswater.
“You're sure she isn't taking any harm?” said Mrs. Ulswater, peering into the mysteriously empty basket. “What on earth did you do with her? Well, she's not there. Fetch her out.”
Ram Nad covered the opening, churned a bit, and then rolled up the whites of his eyes and concentrated his mind.
“Stuff!” said Mrs. Ulswater, “You're pretending.”
“Show not knowledge to a woman,” said Ram Nad, politely, “but indulgence.”
“Fiddlesticks!”
He turned the basket upside down. Mrs. Ulswater tipped it over.
By the sacred Bo Tree, by the antiseptic waters of Benares, what is the wisdom of the East against the logic of Susannah?
“Susannah!” I cried. Sadler and I clasped hands and danced, glorious and flamboyant, in the circular manner of a “ring-round-rosy.”
“Susannah, hosannah!” I cried, and Sadler chaunted:
“Ram Nad, you're a son of a gun, tralala,
Ram Nad, if that isn't one, tralala,
On you I don't happen to know,”
and continued, chaunting:
“You'd better quit sinning of sins, tralala,
Or you'll maybe be breaking your shins, tralala,
On things you don't happen to know.”
For there on the deck, smiling quaintly, sat Susannah! There, clasped, one in each of her arms, were Georgiana and Dolores!
Ram Nad rose silently. Martyred meekness was the foundation of his facial expression. Dignity and charity were its fringes and decorations. He went forward among the sailors.
Calm was restored. Susannah explained. She had thought that, if Ram Nad had put Georgiana and Dolores in some sort of place, and if he did the same thing to her, perhaps she would be in the same place, and why shouldn't she find them? Such was Susannah's logic, simple, yet transcendental. Questioned on the matter of being churned, she said that she began to feel very comfortable and soft, and then something like custard, and then like custard that was all around everywhere; that is, she was both custard herself and contained in custard; and so, reaching out in the custard of which she consisted, she caught hold of Georgiana and Dolores. So far Susannah. Such is all the evidence bearing on this singular event.
“Susannah,” I said, “I like your analysis. Do you happen to feel anything in the nature of a ballad beginning to—to root around inside you? Because—here is the point. This ballad, as it stands, of Georgiana and Dolores, you see——”
“That!” said Susannah, scornfully, “that's no good now. It isn't so.”