governments and policies, but "I wish very much that you would tell me how you feel about it not how intensely, because I know that, but exactly what your point of view is, and what you think the nation ought to be feeling. We get English papers here, but they are not much use to a woman. I am less able than ever to understand men and their way of looking at things. It seems so strange to me-of course I am quite wrong, but it does seem strange-that this should be taken just as an external fact, a national disaster. I should have thought it was something much bigger than that a catastrophe in the history of mankind, an event that ought to be kept in remembrance by a Good Friday of its own. Gordon, of course, was an Englishman, and a servant of the State, but I can't think of him as that. He seems to belong to the other world, the real world, where Nelson and Philip Sidney and the Black Prince live and die. When they die I can't think why the universe doesn't stand still. Men don't feel anything like that, evidently. They go on with their debates and business, or they dine out and go to the play. Can it possibly be true that the Prime Minister was at the theatre the same night the news came? That is the kind of thing I mean-superlatively masculine. I should as soon have expected him to dance at a funeral. Death is so personal a thing-I don't understand why everyone it physically difficult to eat. doesn't feel it so. Why isn't everyone thinking, not about of Percy knew Althea by this time well enough to be able to read the inarticulate as well as the outspoken thoughts in her letter. He knew that she had a point of view which was not the masculine one-how should it be?-but he also saw that there was a special reason why her interest in this disaster should be of the personal rather than the national kind. It was not the loss of Khartoum but the death of her hero that was in her thoughts, and not that one death only but all death, all final partings from the body and its world, all sudden breakings of those personal relations which make life as we know it. He divined easily enough that she had written of this public loss in order to give voice to her private anxieties, and he very nearly made the mistake of replying to her indirect question directly. But he reflected in time, and answered her in the code which she had used herself. "No, you are quite right: such feelings can't be put into adverbs. I can only tell you that for several days I found It has been partly anger, course: the Government wasted time hideously. As to Mr Gladstone, it is quite true he went to the playnot on the Thursday when the news was announced, but on the day he first heard it. That shows an extraordinary want of feeling, I think, and everyone here hates him for it, so you mustn't call it 'masculine.' My tutor, old Billy Buck, wants him hanged. I took him an essay two nights ago, and he talked of nothing else but Gordon, whom he admired enormously in his own way. 'A fine feller, one of the finest instruments we had, criminally wasted.' You see his philosophy is that the mind is a function of the brain and dies with it, like a candleflame when the wax is done. He says we can only advance now by investigating the physical basis of mind-I believe he really regrets that he can't investigate the physical basis of Gordon's mind. 'Realism' he calls that, and you can imagine how maddening it seems to him when a flame like Gorden's is allowed to go out before his time. I got no consolation there, so last night I went to see Robbins, who doesn't coach me now, but is always good for a talk. He is a Hegelian, the only one I know. (Hegel isn't set for the Schools.) I asked him what the Hegelian theory of death is, and we discussed Gordon, and I put your view and the other-the subjective and objective views. He said there is truth in both, but neither view will do by itself. To the ordinary man, the realist, like Billy Buck, death is an event in Time, the last event of a life. Biologically, it is a necessity— for the good of the race— and historically, it is just a fact. On the other hand, to the idealist nothing exists except for the mind, so that death is as shadowy as everything else. If you depended on an abstract theory like that, you might well feel when a friend did die that your universe had been brought to a standstill. Even if he was only a thing in your dream, his death would spoil the dream. Gordon's death would spoil every one's dream. "So neither the candle theory nor the dream theory can satisfy us. The ordinary idea of a future life is no good either-it is only a prolongation or a repetition. When a man has died like Gordon or Nelson or Sidney, you don't want to repeat or prolong him, you want to make him permanent, including his death, because it was the most significant part of his life, and summed him up. As far as life in Time is concerned, he is complete: the finite view of him is done with. We must reach a point of view from which his completeness is eternal- timeless-like the perfection of a work of art. It is the same, Robbins said, with a friend who dies an ordinary death. We don't really desire that his life should be indefinitely prolonged into any future, here or elsewhere. We don't really wish to meet him again as we knew him yester day, after an interval in which we ourselves may have greatly changed or if we have not changed, he may have become in that other life quite a new person. What we do desire is to keep him always what he is to us, and to be always what we are to him. We want to realise the Everlasting Now, a timeless state which is not future but coexists with our life in Time. Do you remember we once talked of that before? It is difficult to put it so that anyone else can see it: I may not have got it right myself, but it is to me as if we were mentally amphibious kind of mermen. We land on the shores of Time, and spend a great part of our lives waddling about there more or less uncomfortably, but we have also the power, whenever we choose, of diving off again into the deep sea of the eternal. Down there we are no longer mere facts in Time, and our relation is not that of fact to fact: all union there is timeless and complete, spirit with spirit; our existence has the perfection of a poem or a great romance. Isn't that why we enjoy things like the Odyssey or the Morte Darthur or the Lovers of Gudrun more than any pleasure in the world?-because they are a deep dive back into the eternal beauty from which we came? Of course to those on shore this is a kind of madness. To State officials Gordon was no doubt the maddest of men and a fearful nuisance-he lived more than half his time in the deep sea. But the natural man knows better,-he may laugh at knights and pilgrims and poets, but in his heart he loves them more than politicians.' (To be continued.) THE PATWARI AND THE PEACOCK. It was late afternoon of a Bengal March, and rather warmer than it had been all day. When it is as warm as that, one is not sure whether it is cooler to sit quite still in a chair, or to get up and pant about for a little. I sat in a chair in front of a tent in the mango-grove which we had reached a few hours before in the sweat of our brows, travelling first by train and then by horse. The heat seemed to be massed and held by the trees. From their green shelter overhead invisible doves cooed, an oriole hung upside down on a branch above me, and now and again a partridge called from a piece of grass jungle not far off. That was like England. Not like England was the perpetual buzz of insect life. "So this is what a Government estate is like?" I said to the Collector, as he came out from his office tent. He had brought me there on one of his inspection rounds, having promised that if business could be got through in time, we should go together into a peacock jungle that lay to the south, and hunt peacocks from the back of an elephant. When he had spoken of the place as a Government estate, I had vaguely expected a parklike property with a manorhouse to it and a ring fence. Instead, there stretched, outside the mango - grove, the usual endless plain, part cultivated, part wild-all brown in the sunset except for that dark and mysterious patch in the distance which was the peacock jungle. The Collector nodded. "It seems very jolly," I added, in case he should think I was not appreciating this particular portion of his kingdom. "Especially the partridges." "It may seem jolly," said the Collector with a frown, "but it's in a considerable mess. I am sorry about those peafowl, but I daresay we shan't have time to go after them. It is quite clear the Patwari is a villain." "Perhaps he is really ill," I said. "Perhaps," said the Collector, not impressed. "I wish I knew what he has been up to for the last year or so." I ought to explain - since the Patwari is, so to speak, the cause of this paper-that a Patwari is something between a bailiff and an estate agent, and this particular Patwari was bailiff of this particular estate. The Bengal Government has upon its hands quite a number of similar properties. It does not exactly need them or hanker after them, but when their previous owners die without an heir, or decamp without paying rates and taxes, then if nobody else will buy the places-and upcountry in Bengal there seems no desperate desire to become an owner of property— the Government has to take over charge of these estates those discoverers, and with a willy - nilly. And "proputty view to discovering as much sticks." The Government as possible during the two officials at headquarters con- days the Collector had at his sole themselves with the disposal, the date of our visit thought that after all it is had not been announced beforean excellent thing that coun- hand. We had simply ridden try officers, such as Collectors up to the Patwari's house, and so forth, should come into before we came on to the direct contact with the land mango-grove, and the Collecand the peasants; and of tor had sent in word he would course they are quite right. like to see the Patwari at It is a most excellent thing. The only trouble is that when a man already has his hands full of other work, the supervision of a large number of separate estates varying in size, and cut off from one another perhaps by thirty or forty miles of jungle roads, tends to become more of a labour than a joy. The Collector had not grumbled to me about his forty estates. He had forty. But I had gathered that the impossibility of giving them a real and proper supervision irked him considerably. Here, for example, was one of the biggest of his estates, and he was seeing it for the first time. His immediate predecessor, whose term of office in that district had been a brief one, had not visited it at all, while the Collector before him had got there just previous to his promotion to some other place, and had only had time to leave some hasty notes, saying that the rents received seemed inadequate, and it might be as well to look after the Patwari. What sort of looking after was required he left to future discoverers to decide. We were about to become VOL. CLXXXIX.-NO. MCXLVIII. A once. Not thus is a Bengali a simple pathetic messageby the mouth of the Patwari's servant, to say that by a singular fatality the Patwari had that very morning been seized with bad fever, and would be compelled to keep his bed for at least two days. Even now, alas! he lay on the couch of suffering. Instead of expressing his regrets for the trials of a fellow-labourer in the work of the district, his Honour had returned a simple but I thought hard-hearted message to the effect that as he only proposed staying in the neighbourhood two days, and must in the course of that time thoroughly inspect the whole of the estate, it would be necessary for the Patwari in the public interests, at the risk of increasing his fever, to appear in the mango-grove in one hour from that time, bringing with him all the estate books. In one hour the Patwari had appeared, a benevolentfaced old man, looking a little injured perhaps, but cheery and anxious to help his Honour 3 G |