And these two, as I have told you, Were the friends of Hiawatha,
Chibiabos, the musician,
And the very strong man, Kwasind.
 
—Hiawatha.
 
Torpenhow was paging the last sheets of some manuscript, while the Nilghai, who had come for chess and remained to talk tactics, was reading through the first part, commenting scornfully the while.
 
“It’s enough and it’s sketchy,” said he; “but as a serious consideration of affairs in Eastern Europe, it’s not worth much.”
 
“It’s off my hands at any rate.... Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine slips altogether, aren’t there? That should make between eleven and twelve pages of valuable misinformation. Heigho!” Torpenhow the writing together and hummed—
 
Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell,
If I’d as much money as I could tell,
I never would cry, Young lambs to sell!
 
Dick entered, self-conscious and a little , but in the best of tempers with all the world.
 
“Back at last?” said Torpenhow.
 
“More or less. What have you been doing?”
 
“Work. Dickie, you behave as though the Bank of England were behind you. Here’s Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday gone and you haven’t done a line. It’s scandalous.”
 
“The notions come and go, my children—they come and go like our “baccy,” he answered, filling his pipe. “Moreover,” he stooped to thrust a spill into the grate, “Apollo does not always stretch his—— Oh, confound your clumsy jests, Nilghai!”
 
“This is not the place to preach the theory of direct inspiration,” said the Nilghai, returning Torpenhow’s large and workmanlike to their nail on the wall. “We believe in cobblers’ wax. La!—where you sit down.”
 
“If you weren’t so big and fat,” said Dick, looking round for a weapon, “I’d——”
 
“No skylarking in my rooms. You two smashed half my furniture last time you threw the cushions about. You might have the to say How d’you do? to Binkie. Look at him.”
 
Binkie had jumped down from the sofa and was round Dick’s knee, and scratching at his boots.
 
“Dear man!” said Dick, snatching him up, and kissing him on the black patch above his right eye. “Did ums was, Binks? Did that ugly Nilghai turn you off the sofa? Bite him, Mr. Binkie.” He pitched him on the Nilghai’s stomach, as the big man lay at ease, and Binkie pretended to destroy the Nilghai inch by inch, till a sofa cushion extinguished him, and panting he stuck out his tongue at the company.
 
“The Binkie-boy went for a walk this morning before you were up, Torp.
 
I saw him making love to the butcher at the corner when the were being taken down—just as if he hadn’t enough to eat in his own proper house,” said Dick.
 
“Binks, is that a true bill?” said Torpenhow, . The little dog retreated under the sofa cushion, and showed by the fat white back of him that he really had no further interest in the discussion.
 
“Strikes me that another disreputable dog went for a walk, too,” said the Nilghai. “What made you get up so early? Torp said you might be buying a horse.”
 
“He knows it would need three of us for a serious business like that. No, I felt lonesome and unhappy, so I went out to look at the sea, and watch the pretty ships go by.”
 
“Where did you go?”
 
“Somewhere on the Channel. Progly or Snigly, or some watering-place was its name; I’ve forgotten; but it was only two hours’ run from London and the ships went by.”
 
“Did you see anything you knew?”
 
“Only the Barralong to Australia, and an Odessa grain-boat loaded down by the head. It was a thick day, but the sea good.”
 
“Wherefore put on one’s best trousers to see the Barralong?” said Torpenhow, pointing.
 
“Because I’ve nothing except these things and my painting duds. Besides, I wanted to do honour to the sea.”
 
“Did She make you feel restless?” asked the Nilghai, keenly.
 
“Crazy. Don’t speak of it. I’m sorry I went.”
 
Torpenhow and the Nilghai exchanged a look as Dick, stooping, busied himself among the former’s boots and trees.
 
“These will do,” he said at last; “I can’t say I think much of your taste in , but the fit’s the thing.” He slipped his feet into a pair of sock-like sambhur-skin foot coverings, found a long chair, and lay at length.
 
“They’re my own pet pair,” Torpenhow said. “I was just going to put them on myself.”
 
“All your selfishness. Just because you see me happy for a minute, you want to worry me and stir me up. Find another pair.”
 
“Good for you that Dick can’t wear your clothes, Torp. You two live communistically,” said the Nilghai.
 
“Dick never has anything that I can wear. He’s only useful to sponge upon.”
 
“Confound you, have you been round among my clothes, then?” said Dick. “I put a sovereign in the tobacco-jar yesterday. How do you expect a man to keep his accounts properly if you——”
 
Here the Nilghai began to laugh, and Torpenhow joined him.
 
“Hid a sovereign yesterday! You’re no sort of financier. You lent me a fiver about a month back. Do you remember?” Torpenhow said.
 
“Yes, of course.”
 
“Do you remember that I paid it you ten days later, and you put it at the bottom of the tobacco?”
 
“By Jove, did I? I thought it was in one of my colour-boxes.”
 
“You thought! About a week ago I went into your studio to get some “baccy and found it.”
 
“What did you do with it?”
 
“Took the Nilghai to a theatre and fed him.”
 
“You couldn’t feed the Nilghai under twice the money—not though you gave him Army beef. Well, I suppose I should have found it out sooner or later. What is there to laugh at?”
 
“You’re a most amazing cuckoo in many directions,” said the Nilghai, still over the thought of the dinner. “Never mind. We had both been working very hard, and it was your unearned we spent, and as you’re only a loafer it didn’t matter.”
 
“That’s pleasant—from the man who is bursting with my meat, too. I’ll get that dinner back one of these days. Suppose we go to a theatre now.”
 
“Put our boots on,—and dress,—and wash?” The Nilghai very lazily.
 
“I withdraw the motion.”
 
“Suppose, just for a change—as a startling variety, you know—we, that is to say we, get our and our canvas and go on with our work.”
 
Torpenhow spoke , but Dick only his toes inside the soft leather moccasins.
 
“What a one-ideaed clucker that is! If I had any unfinished figures on hand, I haven’t any model; if I had my model, I haven’t any spray, and I never leave charcoal unfixed overnight; and if I had my spray and twenty photographs of backgrounds, I couldn’t do anything to-night. I don’t feel that way.”
 
“Binkie-dog, he’s a lazy , isn’t he?” said the Nilghai.
 
“Very good, I will do some work,” said Dick, rising swiftly. “I’ll fetch the Nungapunga Book, and we’ll add another picture to the Nilghai .”
 
“Aren’t you worrying him a little too much?” asked the Nilghai, when Dick had left the room.
 
“Perhaps, but I know what he can turn out if he likes. It makes me to hear him praised for past work when I know what he ought to do. You and I are arranged for——”
 
“By Kismet and our own powers, more’s the pity. I have dreamed of a good deal.”
 
“So have I, but we know our limitations now. I’m dashed if I know what Dick’s may be when he gives himself to his work. That’s what makes me so keen about him.”
 
“And when all’s said and done, you will be put aside—quite rightly—for a female girl.”
 
“I wonder... Where do you think he has been to-day?”
 
“To the sea. Didn’t you see the look in his eyes when he talked about her? He’s as restless as a swallow in autumn.”
 
“Yes; but did he go alone?”
 
“I don’t know, and I don’t care, but he has the beginnings of the go-fever upon him. He wants to up-stakes and move out. There’s no mistaking the signs. Whatever he may have said before, he has the call upon him now.”
 
“It might be his salvation,” Torpenhow said.
 
“Perhaps—if you care to take the responsibility of being a .”
 
Dick returned with the big clasped -book that the Nilghai knew well and did not love too much. In it Dick had all manner of moving incidents, experienced by himself or related to him by the others, of all the four corners of the earth. But the wider range of the Nilghai’s body and life attracted him most. When truth failed he fell back on fiction of the wildest, and represented incidents in the Nilghai’s career that were unseemly,—his marriages with many African princesses, his shameless betrayal, for Arab wives, of an army to the Mahdi, his tattooment by skilled operators in Burmah, his interview (and his fears) with the yellow headsman in the blood-stained execution-ground of Canton, and finally, the passings of his spirit into the bodies of whales, elephants, and . Torpenhow from time to time had added rhymed descriptions, and the whole was a curious piece of art, because Dick , having regard to the name of the book which being interpreted means “naked,” that it would be wrong to draw the Nilghai with any clothes on, under any circumstances. Consequently the last sketch, representing that much-enduring man calling on the War Office to press his claims to the Egyptian medal, was hardly delicate. He settled himself comfortably on Torpenhow’s table and turned over the pages.
 
“What a fortune you would have been to Blake, Nilghai!” he said. “There’s a succulent pinkness about some of these that’s more than life-like. “The Nilghai surrounded while bathing by the Mahdieh”—that was founded on fact, eh?”
 
“It was very nearly my last bath, you irreverent dauber. Has Binkie come into the Saga yet?”
 
“No; the Binkie-boy hasn’t done anything except eat and kill cats. Let’s see. Here you are as a stained-glass saint in a church. Deuced lines about your ; you ought to be grateful for being handed down to in this way. Fifty years hence you’ll exist in rare and curious facsimiles at ten guineas each. What shall I try this time? The domestic life of the Nilghai?”
 
“Hasn’t got any.”
 
“The undomestic life of the Nilghai, then. Of course. Mass-meeting of his wives in Trafalgar Square. That’s it. They came from the ends of the earth to attend Nilghai’s wedding to an English bride. This shall be an . It’s a sweet material to work with.”
 
“It’s a scandalous waste of time,” said Torpenhow.
 
“Don’t worry; it keeps one’s hand in—specially when you begin without the pencil.” He set to work rapidly. “That’s Nelson’s Column. Presently the Nilghai will appear shinning up it.”
 
“Give him some clothes this time.”
 
“Certainly—a veil and an orange-wreath, because he’s been married.”
 
“Gad, that’s clever enough!” said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as Dick brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.
 
“Just imagine,” Dick continued, “if we could publish a few of these dear little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.”
 
“Well, you’ll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that kind. I know I can’t hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance——”
 
“No-o—one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of the wall-paper—you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder’s out of drawing. I must throw a veil over that. Where’s my pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan?”
 
“I only gave him his riding-orders to—to lambast you on general principles for not producing work that will last.”
 
“Whereupon that young fool,”—Dick threw back his head and shut one eye as he shifted the page under his hand,—“being left alone with an ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for the business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp?”
 
“How the deuce do three and two scratches make the stuff stand away from the body as it does?” said Torpenhow, to whom Dick’s methods were always new.
 
“It just depends on where you put ’em. If Maclagan had know that much about his business he might have done better.”
 
“Why don’t you put the damned dabs into something that will stay, then?” insisted the Nilghai, who had really taken considerable trouble in hiring for Dick’s benefit the pen of a young gentleman who most of his waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and ends of Art, which, he wrote, was one and indivisible.
 
“Wait a minute till I see how I am going to manage my procession of wives. You seem to have married extensively, and I must rough ’em in with the pencil—Medes, Parthians, Edomites.... Now, setting aside the weakness and the wickedness and—and the fat-headedness of trying to do work that will live, as they call it, I’m content with the knowledge that I’ve done my best up to date, and I shan’t do anything like it again for some hours at least—probably years. Most probably never.”
 
“What! any stuff you have in stock your best work?” said Torpenhow.
 
“Anything you’ve sold?” said the Nilghai.
 
“Oh no. It isn’t here and it isn’t sold. Better than that, it can’t be sold, and I don’t think any one knows where it is. I’m sure I don’t.... And yet more and more wives, on the north side of the square. Observe the horror of the lions!”
 
“You may as well explain,” said Torpenhow, and Dick lifted his head from the paper.
 
“The sea reminded me of it,” he said slowly. “I wish it hadn’t. It weighs some few thousand tons—unless you cut it out with a cold .”
 
“Don’t be an idiot. You can’t pose with us here,” said the Nilghai.
 
“There’s no pose in the matter at all. It’s a fact. I was loafing from Lima to Auckland in a big, old, passenger-ship turned into a cargo-boat and owned by a second-had Italian firm. She was a crazy basket. We were cut down to fifteen ton of coal a day, and we thought ourselves lucky when we kicked seven knots an hour out of her. Then we used to stop and let the bearings cool down, and wonder whether the crack in the was spreading.”
 
“Were you a or a stoker in those days?”
 
“I was flush for the time being, so I was a passenger, or else I should have been a steward, I think,” said Dick, with perfect gravity, returning to the procession of angry wives. “I was the only other passenger from Lima, and the ship was half empty, and full of rats and and .”
 
“But what has this to do with the picture?”
 
“Wait a minute. She had been in the China passenger trade and her lower decks had for two thousand pigtails. Those were all taken down, and she was empty up to her nose, and the lights came through the port holes—most annoying lights to work in till you got used to them. I hadn’t anything to do for weeks. The ship’s charts were in pieces and our skipper daren’t run south for fear of a storm. So he did his best to knock all the Society Islands out of the water one by one, and I went into the lower deck, and did my picture on the port side as far forward in her as I could go. There was some brown paint and some green paint that they used for the boats, and some black paint for ironwork, and that was all I had.”
 
“The passengers must have thought you mad.”
 
“There was only one, and it was a woman; but it gave me the notion of my picture.”
 
“What was she like?” said Torpenhow.
 
“She was a sort of Negroid-Jewess-Cuban; with morals to match. She couldn’t read or write, and she didn’t want to, but she used to come down and watch me paint, and the skipper didn’t like it, because he was paying her passage and had to be on the bridge occasionally.”
 
“I see. That must have been cheerful.”
 
“It was the best time I ever had. To begin with, we didn’t know whether we should go up or go down any minute when there was a sea on; and when it was calm it was paradise; and the woman used to mix the paints and talk broken English, and the skipper used to steal down every few minutes to the lower deck, because he said he was afraid of fire. So, you see, we could never tell when we might be caught, and I had a splendid notion to work out in only three keys of colour.”
 
“What was the notion?”
 
“Two lines in Poe—
 
Neither the angels in Heaven above nor the down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
 
It came out of the sea—all by itself. I drew that fight, fought out in green water over the naked, choking soul, and the woman served as the model for the devils and the angels both—sea-devils and sea-angels, and the soul half drowned between them. It doesn’t sound much, but when there was a good light on the lower deck it looked very fine and creepy. It was seven by fourteen feet, all done in shifting light for shifting light.”
 
“Did the woman inspire you much?” said Torpenhow.
 
“She and the sea between them—immensely. There was a heap of bad drawing in that picture. I remember I went out of my way to foreshorten for sheer delight of doing it, and I foreshortened damnably, but for all that it’s the best thing I’ve ever done; and now I suppose the ship’s broken up or gone down. Whew! What a time that was!”
 
“What happened after all?”
 
“It all ended. They were loading her with wool when I left the ship, but even the kept the picture clear to the last. The eyes of the demons scared them, I honestly believe.”
 
“And the woman?”
 
“She was scared too when it was finished. She used to cross herself before she went down to look at it. Just three colours and no chance of getting any more, and the sea outside and love-making inside, and the fear of death atop of everything else, O Lord!” He had ceased to look at the sketch, but was staring straight in front of him across the room.
 
“Why don’t you try something of the same kind now?” said the Nilghai.
 
“Because those things come not by fasting and prayer. When I find a cargo-boat and a Jewess-Cuban and another notion and the same old life, I may.”
 
“You won’t find them here,&r............