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heart? She would take thy thanks at least, and, by God and the Prophet and Beebee Miriam, the mother of thy Prophet, that I will never endure. My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish talk of going away. Where thou art, I am. It is enough." She put an arm round his neck and a hand on his mouth.

There are not many happinesses so complete as those that are snatched under the shadow of the sword. They sat together and laughed, calling each other openly by every pet name that could move the wrath of the gods. The city below them was locked up in its own torments. Sulphur-fires blazed in the streets; the conches in the Hindu temples screamed and bellowed, for the gods were inattentive in those days. There was a service in the great Mohammedan shrine, and the call to prayer from the minarets was almost unceasing. They heard the wailing in the houses of the dead, and once the shriek of a mother who had lost a child and was calling for its return. In the gray dawn they saw the dead borne out through the city gates, each litter with its own little knot of mourners. Wherefore they kissed each other and shivered.

It was a red and heavy audit, for the land was very sick and needed a little breathing-space ere the torrent of cheap life should flood it anew. The children of immature fathers and undeveloped mothers made no resistance. They were cowed and sat still, waiting till the sword should be sheathed in November, if it were so willed. There were gaps among the English, but the gaps were filled. The work of superintending famine-relief, cholera-sheds, medicine distribution, and what little sanitation was possible, went forward because it was so ordered.

Holden had been told to hold himself in readiness to move to replace the next man who should fall. There were twelve

hours in each day when he could not see Ameera, and she might die in three. He was considering what his pain would be if he could not see her for three months, or if she died out of his sight. He was absolutely certain that her death would be demanded-so certain that, when he looked up from the telegram and saw Pir Khan breathless in the doorway, he laughed aloud, "And?-" said he.

"When there is a cry in the night and the spirit flutters into the throat, who has a charm that will restore? Come swiftly, heaven born! It is the black cholera."

Holden galloped to his home. The sky was heavy with clouds, for the long-deferred rains were at hand, and the heat was stifling. Ameera's mother met him in the courtyard, whimpering: "She is dying. She is nursing herself into death. She is all but dead. What shall I do, sahib?"

Ameera was lying in the room in which Tota had been born. She made no sign when Holden entered, because the human soul is a very lonely thing, and when it is getting ready to go away hides itself in a misty borderland where the living may not follow. The black cholera does its work quietly and without explanation. Ameera was being thrust out of life as though the Angel of Death had himself put his hand upon her. The quick breathing seemed to show that she was either afraid or in pain, but neither eyes nor mouth gave any answer to Holden's kisses. There was nothing to be said or done. Holden could only wait and suffer. The first drops of the rain began to fall on the roof, and he could hear shouts of joy in the parched city.

The soul came back a little and the lips moved. Holden bent down to listen. "Keep nothing of mine," said Ameera. "Take no hair from my head. She would make thee burn it later on. That flame I should feel. Lower! Stoop lower! Remember only that I was thine and bore

thee a son. Though thou wed a white woman to-morrow, the pleasure of taking in thy arms thy first son is taken from thee forever. Remember me when thy son is born-the one that shall carry thy name before all men. His misfortunes be on my head. I bear witness-I bear witness" the lips were forming the words on his ear-"that there is no God butthee, beloved."

Then she died. Holden sat still, and all thought of any kind was taken from him till he heard Ameera's mother lift the curtain.

"Is she dead, sahib?"
"She is dead."

"Then I will mourn, and afterward take an inventory of the furniture in this house; for that will be mine. The sahib does not mean to resume it? It is so little, so very little, sahib, and I am an old woman. I would like to lie softly."

"For the mercy of God, be silent a while! Go out and mourn where I cannot hear."

"Sahib, she will be buried in four hours."

"I know the custom. I shall go ere she is taken away. That matter is in thy hands. Look to it that the bed-on which-on which-she lies

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"Aha! That beautiful red-lacquered bed. I have long desired—_”

"That the bed is left here untouched for my disposal. All else in the house is thine. Hire a cart, take everything, go hence, and before sunrise let there be nothing in this house but that which I have ordered thee to respect."

"I am an old woman. I would stay at least for the days of mourning, and the rains have just broken. Whither shall I go?"

"What is that to me? My order is that there is a going. The house-gear is worth a thousand rupees and my orderly

shall bring thee a hundred rupees tonight."

"That is very little. Think of the carthire."

"It shall be nothing unless thou goest, and with speed. O woman, get hence, and leave me with my dead!"

The mother shuffled down the staircase, and in her anxiety to take stock of the house-fittings forgot to mourn. Holden stayed by Ameera's side, and the rain roared on the roof. He could not think connectedly by reason of the noise, though he made many attempts to do so. Then four sheeted ghosts glided dripping into the room and stared at him through their veils. They were the washers of the dead. Holden left the room and went out to his horse. He had come in a dead, stifling calm, through ankle-deep dust. He found the courtyard a rain-lashed pond alive with frogs; a torrent of yellow water ran under the gate, and a roaring wind drove the bolts of the rain like buckshot against the mud walls. Pir Khan was shivering in his little hut by the gate, and the horse was stamping uneasily in the

water.

"I have been told the sahib's order," said he. "It is well. This house is now desolate. I go also, for my monkey face would be a reminder of that which has been. Concerning the bed, I will bring that to thy house yonder in the morning. But remember, sahib, it will be to thee a knife turned in a green wound. I go upon a pilgrimage and I will take no money. I have grown fat in the protection of the Presence, whose sorrow is my sorrow. For the last time I hold his stirrup."

He touched Holden's foot with both hands, and the horse sprung out into the road, where the creaking bamboos were whipping the sky and all the frogs were chuckling. Holden could not see for the rain in his face. He put his hands before

his eyes and muttered: "Oh you brute! You utter brute!"

The news of his trouble was already in his bungalow. He read the knowledge in his butler's eyes when Ahmed Khan brought in food, and for the first and last time in his life laid a hand upon his master's shoulder, saying, "Eat, sahib, eat. Meat is good against sorrow. I also have known. Moreover, the shadows come and go, sahib. The shadows come and go. These be curried eggs.'

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Holden could neither eat nor sleep. The heavens sent down eight inches of rain in that night and scoured the earth clean. The waters tore down walls, broke roads, and washed open the shallow graves in the Mohammedan burying ground. All next day it rained, and Holden sat still in his house considering his sorrow. On the morning of the third day he received a telegram which said. only: "Ricketts, Myndonie. Dying. Holden. Relieve. Immediate." Then he thought that before he departed he would look at the house wherein he had been master and lord. There was a break in the weather. The rank earth steamed with vapour, and Holden was vermilion from head to heel with the prickly-heat born of sultry moisture.

He found that the rains had torn down the mud-pillars of the gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that had guarded his life hung drunkenly from one hinge. There was grass three inches high in the courtyard; Pir Khan's lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch sagged between the

beams. A gray squirrel was in possession of the veranda, as if the house had been untenanted for thirty years instead of three days. Ameera's mother had removed everything except some mildewed matting. The tick-tick of the little scorpions as they hurried across the floor was the only sound in the house. Ameera's room and the other one where Tota had lived were heavy with mildew, and the narrow staircase leading to the roof was streaked and stained with rain-borne mud. Holden saw all these things, and came out again to meet in the road Durga Dass, his landlord,-portly, affable, clothed in white muslin, and driving a C-spring buggy. He was overlooking his property, to see how the roofs withstood the stress of the first rains.

"I have heard," said he, "you will not take this place any more, sahib?" "What are you going to do with it?" "Perhaps I shall let it again." "Then I will keep it on while I am away."

Durga Dass was silent for some time. "You shall not take it on, sahib," he said. "When I was a young man I also― But to-day I am a member of the municipality. Ho! ho! No. When the birds have gone, what need to keep the nest? I will have it pulled down; the timber will sell for something always. It shall be pulled down, and the municipality shall make a road across, as they desire, from the burning-ghat to the city wall. So that no man may say where this house stood."

THE CONTEMPORARY LYRIC

The period covered by the lyrics in the present section extends roughly from 1890 to the present day. The verse of these years is not infrequently called "the new poetry" as representing a conscious break with the traditions of the Victorian Age just passing. There had been some opposition to these traditions earlier, but it was not until the close of the century that the full reaction got under way. The objections which the poets of the eighteen-nineties raised to the practice of the preceding period were threefold. They felt that poetry, both lyric and narrative, was too much absorbed with literary themes not sufficiently close to real life; that it was hampered by a deadening sense of propriety and moral restraint; and that it had fallen into a conventional poetic diction not like the speech of the people. The reaction against these tendencies, recalling similar revolts in the past, showed itself in various ways.

In general it may be described as a spirit of insurgency characteristic of the time, a spirit that finds its counterpart in the sculpture of Rodin, the music of Strauss, and the painting of the "moderns." In English literature perhaps the earliest form which it took was a denial of the connection, formerly assumed, between literature and ethics, the doctrine of Oscar Wilde that art is worthy to be cultivated for its own sake without reference to morals. Opposition to the Victorian reticence and instinctive shrinking from the unpleasant in life became in some quarters a desire frankly to shock. There were those who tasted life at the dregs or assumed the air of having done so. In some this attitude was carried to a point where it became plainly decadent and is reflected in their verse.

The revolt against Victorian convention soon became more general. The nonconformist, the revolutionist, the reformer, and even the poseur are not always easily distinguished, but they have one quality in common. They are all sympathetic to change, and tolerant of novelty. It is a fundamental assumption in contemporary poetry that each man has the right to complete self-development, the right to be different. Ours is an age of experiment: imagist poetry and free verse are merely evidences of the desire to seek new effects by new methods. Under the circumstances we must expect to find variety and complexity as characteristics of the period.

It would be impossible in this brief compass to pursue the separate movements that have a place in these recent decades of English poetry. Important among them would be the Celtic Renaissance, of which William Butler Yeats is the outstanding figure. The "poets of empire," of whom Rudyard Kipling heads the list, and the poets of the war, who have given us such splendid pieces as "In Flanders Fields," "The Spires of Oxford," and "The Soldier," all printed below, illustrate important sources of inspiration. One tendency of great importance must be mentioned, the

return to the simplicity of everyday life and the idiom of everyday speech. The truth of Synge's assertion that "when men lose their poetic feeling for ordinary life, and cannot write poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to lose its strength of exaltation, in the way that men cease to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness in building shops" has been fully recognized. A. E. Housman's little collection of verses, A Shropshire Lad, admirably illustrates the power inherent in simple themes. Fortunately its influence has been great, for its simplicity, directness, and sincerity are the qualities of contemporary lyric poetry, as of all art, at its best.

Of recent years a further poetic revolt has been in progress in the verse of a radical wing whose attitude towards poetry is part of a larger opposition to the old order of things in general. Its views are very stimulating. It insists on hard, sharp effects, and asserts a preference for short simple words; it is characterized by great freedom of rhythm and phrasing, at times by perversity of mood and theme tending toward disillusionment, pessimism, and even the nasty, and seeks to create its effects without interpreting the emotion for the reader. Some excellent poetry guarantees the sincerity of the movement.

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