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 "Well—for one thing"—he hesitated, eyes roving questioningly as his mind did—"for one thing, I am leaving here tomorrow!" he discovered suddenly.

"Leaving?" The shaken Old Two Blades almost wept. He was aghast, frightened, trembling. Horror peered out of his recessed eyes. "Why, you are the only man who can cope with the situation at all—the only man everybody trusts!" he quavered.

"Everybody? Huh!" scoffed Henry, with another bitter laugh: for the one person who hadn't trusted him made all the rest negligible. Yet the very genuineness of this tenacious old man's consternation waked something within that made Henry question wildly the justice of his own sudden resolve, so that instead of arguing with a hated enemy, he seemed to himself to be merely protesting to his own conscience, and was presently answering in hoarse desperation, eyes roving helplessly again: "I had thought I—I might cope with it—try to cope with it; but—it's not worth the—the Oh, what the hell's the use?" And a frankly harried man, harried beyond enduring, beyond caring, opened his hands in a gesture of helpless negation.

"But you're trustee for the Indians," reminded Boland, taking hope. "They sent me here to make terms with you."

Henry recalled the Salisheuttes with a start, and then with a sigh of resignation, consigned them to the discard. "They'll have to get somebody else."

"But the townspeople have put their faith in you!" argued Boland cunningly.

"They'll have to put it in somebody else," said Harrington desperately.

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Rh This salutation of the old lady was the first example of Eustace's strange behaviour, and we were both surprised and alarmed. It was useless talking to him, for he either made silly replies, or else bounded away without replying at all.

He made no reference on the way home to Gennaro, and I hoped that that was forgotten. But, when we came to the Piazza, in front of the Cathedral, he screamed out: "Gennaro! Gennaro!" at the top of his voice, and began running up the little alley that led to the hotel. Sure enough, there was Gennaro at the end of it, with his arms and legs sticking out of the nice little English-speaking waiter's dress suit, and a dirty fisherman's cap on his head—for, as the poor landlady truly said, however much she superintended his toilette, he always managed to introduce something incongruous into it before he had done.

Eustace sprang to meet him, and leapt right up into his arms, and put his own arms round his neck. And this in the presence, not only of us, but also of the landlady, the chambermaid, the facchino, and of two American ladies who were coming for a few days' visit to the little hotel.

I always make a point of behaving pleasantly

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 "There isn't anybody else," agonized Old Two Blades, with a wail in his voice.

But for Henry this thing had reached its limit. Nerves frazzled, tears of vexation springing to his eyes, banging the table with his hand, he cried: "Damn it, what if there isn't? . . . This place is torture to me. Torture! Do you understand. I'm going to get out of it—tomorrow—today—now! Ditch the whole thing!"

Despite the frenzy of this announcement, there was a ring of unalterable conviction in the words and in the manner, from which Old Two Blades stood back appalled. That this young man should fail them, prove a deserter, refuse himself to him—to Edgewater! Well—if Henry Harrington was going to collapse, what was there left? Who was there left?

The Boland chin was trembling. This seemed the last, the crowning calamity to Old Two Blades—greater than the upsetting of his fortune, the burning of his mills, the destruction of the town. Why, they had all, all of them, come to believe in these last forty-eight hours that Henry Harrington was a sort of human rock who could not crumble.

The spectacle of him weakening, threatening to run away, affected Boland strangely. As he looked at this disheveled, distraught young man so innocently ruined, he fancied he saw a picture of himself. He wondered if he too had not been innocently ruined. It raised the whole question. It sent him like a Napoleon groping back over the plan of his Waterloo to see why and wherein he had lost the battle. As of a comrade in catastrophe, he asked: "Why did it have to happen, Harrington—all—all of this?"

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 But sensing this note of self-pity on Boland's part, Henry was instantly fierce. "Because you made it happen!" he snapped out.

"I? . . . How could I have helped it?" fended Two Blades, forgetting his penitence, leaning on the old fallacies again.

"By being what you seemed to be—an honest, benevolent-hearted man!" retorted Henry, direct and painful as a poke to the nose.

Boland winced. "But I've stood for the law!" he urged.

"Law?" scorned Harrington, wrathfully. There was something he had been waiting the longest days of his life to say to this old half-devil, who was trying to repent and couldn't quite make the grade; and here was his opportunity. "Boland," he began hotly, "I told you once you must make the law respectable if you wanted people to respect it. Your regard for law has been pretense only. You have made the law a convenient weapon—a pistol to make the world stand still while you picked pockets."

Boland lifted a hand in pained protest, but Henry blazed along: "By the subtlest forms of bribery, Boland, by the most skilful appeals to self-interest, you have corrupted this whole community. Councils, legislatures, yes, and the very voters, have framed the laws to suit your purposes. District attorneys, sheriffs, tax-assessors, juries and judges have bent the laws to suit your will—because you had enlisted them all in a selfish partnership."

"But it was a partnership for the common good," labored J. B., when Henry had stopped to breathe.

"It was a partnership in selfish lawlessness," in-

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 sisted Harrington. "Lawless in your heart, you have made these people lawless; hence the mobs. A crowd does not proceed by the nice forms of diplomacy and self-control that you employ. It gets what it wants as you get what you want; but its methods are different. It is quick, primal, brutal—yet not more brutal, not more remorseless than you with your calculating cunning—less cruel, if you ask me."

"Why, even—even the big—the biggest chance I took was a chance in the interest of civilization," Boland defended stubbornly.

But Henry lashed out indignantly: "You mean that fundamental rapacity of yours in accepting U. S. patents which you knew were based on an error—an error which you connived at suppressing? No—emphatically no! It was cold, calculating fraud. Better, Boland, that forest had stood untouched for generations than that you should hack it down to build a business on a crime, and create a county government which was not sound because the power was in the top instead of in the bottom. Oh, you can't be law and court and conscience for forty thousand people and have them retain character and courage and self-control! You make children out of them, not citizens. The very essential of democracy is that people shall do their own thinking."

"But the people make mistakes," urged Old Two Blades weakly.

"They couldn't make a bigger one than you have!"

Boland started, then went white and stood silent, with head slightly bowed.

"This country is a democracy, not a paternalism," Harrington declaimed. "You want to go too fast. The

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 fern grows six feet in the season, but it takes a hundred years to grow a fir. The civilization which you created, Boland, has reduced itself to the ashes you see around you."

This was the final unanswerable argument. Ashes—failure! By it Boland was crushed and self-convicted. He reached for a chair and sank into it. There was nothing left but—but this young man who had weakened so incomprehensibly but now seemed to have grown strong again. He reached an appealing hand across the table. "You—you won't refuse—the receivership?" he implored.

"Yes, Boland; I do refuse it," he answered decisively. "And in saying my say to you, I think I've done my last duty to the town of Edgewater. Good day!"

John Boland started and stared, then wet a pendent lip. This was refusal, flat and final; it was also dismissal, so curt and imperative that no course was left him but to accept it. Rebuked and rebuffed, he gathered what shreds of dignity remained to him into the stiffest bow that he could manage and went out, baffled in mind, buffeted in spirit, wondering what could possibly have made Henry Harrington so hard.

On his part, Henry watched that departure with a vast deal of satisfaction. "I guess I made him look crooked, what! Even to himself," he reflected, recalling that last word with Scanlon—who was upstairs now in the cell de luxe.

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Rh to Italians, however little they may deserve it; but this habit of promiscuous intimacy was perfectly intolerable and could only lead to familiarity and mortification for all. Taking Miss Robinson aside, I asked her permission to speak seriously to Eustace on the subject of intercourse with social inferiors. She granted it; but I determined to wait till the absurd boy had calmed down a little from the excitement of the day. Meanwhile, Gennaro, instead of attending to the wants of the two new ladies, carried Eustace into the house, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

"Ho capito," I heard him say as he passed me. 'Ho capito' is the Italian for 'I have understood'; but, as Eustace had not spoken to him, I could not see the force of the remark. It served to increase our bewilderment, and, by the time we sat down at the dinner-table, our imaginations and our tongues were alike exhausted.

I omit from this account the various comments that were made, as few of them seem worthy of being recorded. But, for three or four hours, seven of us were pouring forth our bewilderment in a stream of appropriate and inappropriate exclamations. Some traced a con-


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OR a few seconds after John Boland's departure, Harrington sat pondering wretchedly. "Yes; that's the thing," he decided. "Chuck the whole mess. I'm not up to it."

But by now, Jailor White, having noted the manner of John Boland's departure and reflected upon it, felt himself impelled to break in upon Henry immediately, and to guarantee against interruptions this time, he closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. "Gee! You must have soaked Old Two Blades between the eyes!" he remarked, gazing in awe upon the man who could do such a thing.

"It was coming to him," affirmed Harrington, seething still.

"I'll tell 'em," agreed White with diplomatic emphasis. "But say! I was starting to tell you about Miss Billie coming down here the night of the fire."

For a moment Harrington's face wore a silly, staring look, as if someone might have clipped him behind the ear with a black-jack. Then he lifted himself, slowly at first, while his voice deepened with incredulous amazement. "Billie Boland . . . down here . . . the night of the fire?" He had ended by leaping to his feet while his hands reached out fiercely to the jailor as if he would tear the story out of him. "What for? . . . Who for?" he pleaded excitedly.

"Well, she didn't say who," qualified White cannily;

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 "but . . ." And then, while Harrington held him madly by the shoulders, shaking the story out of him, urging continually, "Yes, yes; go on, man; go on!" the jailor told him all about it.

"Oh, my God!" breathed Harrington like a prayer of thanksgiving, as he pushed White from him. "Why, then, she—she did care for me—enough to come for me at the first sign of any immediate danger." He stood a moment drinking in the significance of what he had heard, a wondrous smile of heart-happiness forming on his lips, the lines in his face filling, his figure straightening, his head going up as he adjusted himself to the perception that she had loved him all the while and that there must be some key that furnished a satisfying solution of her conduct.

"Billie!" he trumpeted exultingly, his voice breaking with the sheer weight of its joy into something mellow and marvelously revealing of the depths of his passion for the girl. "Bil-lie!" and it seemed as if he were calling to her, far away in Humboldt House.

"White, you blundering old coot, you! Why didn't you tell me this before?" he demanded, at the same time reaching for his hat, when there came a tap on the locked door, faint and muffled, as from a gloved knuckle. The two men exchanged inquiring glances in a kind of strained silence. "Now, what the" White started to ejaculate, then felt his way noiselessly around the table to the door and opened it.

Pale and perturbed, Billie Boland stood there—in her shapeless tweed coat, in her little cloth hat, the brim of which had been pulled moodily low but was now alertly up; and out from under it her blue pain-filled eyes gazed in doubt and fear, wonder and glory

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 upon the paralyzed person of Henry Harrington. Her lips tremblingly framed a word but her spirit could not utter it.

"Billie!" her lover exclaimed, and leaped for her. "Billie!" In one hoarse inarticulate cry, all the anguish, all the bitterness of his sore heart emptied itself, and he swept her rapturously into his arms; yet not to cover her tremulous lips with kisses. The moment, the event, was too sacred to him even for the interchange of that most sacred of tokens between lovers. Instead he gathered her closely in his arms and, as making sure that she was there, pressed her soft cheek upon his, head bowed over her shoulder in acknowledgment to God of this inestimable gift while between his lids, closed in a transport of happiness, there streamed grateful tears. So he held her! She had come! She was there! He already knew enough to make sure that misunderstandings would be explained. Love would justify itself to love.

"The key is on the inside of the door, Henry!" shouted a far-away voice, and the rapt man broke out of his delirium long enough to note that White had somehow vanished and that the door was closed. He reached out and gave the key precautionary attention; yet with his first motion became aware that Billie began gently to put hersclf away from him.

"But you—you did love me—didn't you dear? . . . You did believe in me every minute?" he began to importune, clinging as if he would refuse to lose her.

"Yes, oh, yes, Henry! Of course I loved you!" she sighed with painful intensity. "Of course I believed in you; but—" the blue eyes, lifting themselves now to his, were shame-charged—"but—I failed you!"

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 "You did hurt me, Billie," Henry admitted soberly, feeling that the sooner some things came out the sooner they could be put behind forever. "But there must have been some reason," he conceded quickly; then urged gently: "Why was it, dear, that you didn't send—didn't come to me?"

"Because I was a jealous cat!" she accused herself bitterly.

"Jealous? . . . You? Billie!" Henry was both incredulous and tenderly reproachful.

"Although at first it was just because I loved you," she recalled, her distressed features beautiful in their perfect candor.

"Because you loved me?" Harrington asked, perplexed.

"Yes," she averred with a nod of simple conviction. "I thought I was helping to save you."

This was what had sounded so preposterous when Lahleet had told it to him; but it fell differently from Billie's white lips, the dear! She had actually believed it.

"Besides, Henry," Billie explained—entirely in the tone of self-indictment, not at all in self-justification—"you'd hurt my pride by refusing to let me persuade you out of your course, as I'd boasted to father I could. But the chamber of commerce meeting was the worst. I actually thought it was you who were traitor to your town, Henry." Her voice quavered and her blue eyes filled with horror of herself. "Oh, I was bitter at you—until they went further and put you in jail on that absurd murder charge." As she said this, her voice got a shudder in it and the deeps of the eyes glowed with a reminiscent indignation

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 glowed beautifully to Henry's delighted perception. "Then I was wild at them all. By morning I think I should have rushed down to tear your bars away myself, but that"

"Yes? Yes?" demanded Henry eagerly.

"But that little Miss Marceau came and told me you were breaking under the strain. That gave me hope—hope that you were going to turn and be sensible—be one of us again. Oh, wasn't I a fool? You standing like a rock, and me trying to make another—another—Scanlon out of you. But that's what I was, and so each day I said to my heart: 'O heart, be hard! Be hard for Henry's sake!' But finally I couldn't be hard any longer. I was dressed and ready to rush to you when father told me about that little teacher-woman being on the island with you. That's when I turned into a jealous cat, Henry! From that moment there wasn't a chance that I would come. Oh, Henry, wasn't it shameful?" Her face reddened, and unable to bear even his sympathetic glance, with its surprised light of growing comprehension, she turned from him entirely and dropped into a chair, yet not weakly—dropped into it to sit bolt upright, staring out the window, breathing fast, utterly indignant with herself.

Harrington stood confounded at perceiving how comprehensible all her actions and reactions had been, once he got her point of view. He was not only deeply touched but moved to a new admiration for that stern slender figure, so utterly out of patience with itself. "Oh, Billie!" he was going to cry out to her in remorse when she, in a plaintive little voice, eyes still turned out the window, and, not in extenuation at all, merely as completing the record, recalled:

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Rh nection between our behaviour in the afternoon and the behaviour of Eustace now. Others saw no connexion at all. Mr. Sandbach still held to the possibility of infernal influences, and also said that he ought to have a doctor. Leyland only saw the development of "that unspeakable Philistine, the boy." Rose maintained, to my surprise, that everything was excusable; while I began to see that the young gentleman wanted a sound thrashing. The poor Miss Robinsons swayed helplessly about between these diverse opinions; inclining now to careful supervision, now to acquiescence, now to corporal chastisement, now to Eno's Fruit Salt.

Dinner passed off fairly well, though Eustace was terribly fidgety, Gennaro as usual dropping the knives and spoons, and hawking and clearing his throat. He only knew a few words of English, and we were all reduced to Italian for making known our wants. Eustace, who had picked up a little somehow, asked for some oranges. To my annoyance, Gennaro, in his answer made use of the second person singular—a form only used when addressing those who are both intimates and equals. Eustace had brought it on himself; but an impertinence of


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 "Of course you'd never told me anything about you and this little teacher-woman being so—so well acquainted."

Henry's eyes widened, his heart stabbed with a memory of guilty concealments of—of nothings, that had become significant because they were concealments—for no other reason.

"And after," she went on, still in that plaintive, non-accusing voice, "after they put you in jail, you—you didn't send me word or anything—offer me any explanation—say that you wanted to hear from me or—anything."

"Yes; my accursed pride!" groaned Henry, outraged to perceive how he had expected everything and offered nothing. Ruthless with himself now, determined this girl should prove herself entirely innocent of that coldness of heart of which he had accused her so bitterly, he reminded her calculatingly: "But for two hours now—ever since they arrested Scanlon, you have known there was nothing in any of it but just a damnable plot."

"Oh, before that," she explained quickly, eyebrows lifted high in the fulness of her candor, "ever since the court decision and the other great upsetting things, the mob and the fire and all, every instinct cried out that you had been right in everything. Oh, from that moment you have seemed a heroic, a tragic, a triumphant figure to me; but"—a look of deeper distress came into her face—"but then it was too late," she whispered hoarsely, pulling at her hands. "Because if—if—if I wouldn't go to you when the daughter of John Boland was somebody, I couldn't come to you when she was nobody."

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 "But, dear"

"And while I was just, just wringing my hands," she went on, with now a pathetic little cry in her every word, "that—that teacher-woman went out and saved you—saved you by finding the real murderer weeks before anyone else might have done it. Hers was a real helpful love. Mine was just—" she was laboring pitifully now—"just selfish and useless like—like me! She's entitled to you, Henry. I release you from your engagement. That's what I came to tell you. Oh, Henry!"

At last she had burst into tears and lowered her face into her hands; but even then she had not done with the indictment: "Oh, I've been so disappointed with myself," she sobbed through her fingers. "I thought I was strong, but I've been weak. I thought I was keen, but I've been blind. Oh, Henry! I've been so wrong—so wrong all the way."

Harrington stood quite astounded—at her—at himself; for he was strangely gratified by these tears. He'd seen her in tears before, of course; petulant storms of weeping that came after thwarting or bafftement of some sort; but those were tears of defeat. These, he discerned, were tears of triumph—tears of victory over herself. Why—he gazed more startled still, with a sudden feeling that he had been bereft of something—why, his old Billie, imperious, self-willed, self-sufficient, was gone. But there had come a new Billie, this contrite, broken blossom of a woman, humbly winsome, helplessly appealing as she proposed a most astounding sacrifice. Why, she was finer in every way, more lovable than the old Billie, who had swept him into raptures enough. He wanted to fall down

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 and worship this Billie. Yet his first duty was to lighten the burden of her self-reproaches. They were too many, too unjust.

"Why, you were loving me all the while, dear," he soothed her in a voice breaking with the weight of its sympathetic devotion.

"But I didn't do a thing," she wailed, inconsolable.

"You came down to the jail the night of the fire."

Abruptly the girl lifted her tear-stained face with a new fright upon it. "That—that jailor told on me," she divined; then managed a sporting half-smile.

"Yes; he did," said Henry with satisfaction; "but only just before you got here or I'd have been spared a good deal and got to you sooner; for I'd already had a chance to know how you were feeling that night because I saw you."

"Saw me?" breathed Billie, beautiful in her surprise and incomprehension.

"Yes. When you came to the jail I wasn't even here. I'd gone up to Humboldt House to make sure that you were safe. I was in the rose garden when you came back—you passed within a yard of me; I stood within a foot of you."

"You—you were there? In the rose garden?" She beamed up at him, her eyes jeweled by their late moisture. "Oh, I can't believe it! And I was wanting you so! But—the woman outside," she suddenly remembered, bitter with herself but still firm in her resolution. "She has won the right to you. Go! Go to her quick, or—oh, Henry, dear, I—I can't stand it; I can't!" Her face was white again, lips quivering, tears starting.

But Harrington could smile quite light-heartedly

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 now. "Say, girl; come out of it!" he commanded, but with a lump of welling joy in his throat. "Love doesn't go by rights, Billie. Love goes by—by itself; by whims, by attractions, by—I can't tell you what. But mine goes all to you. I should have been concealing something if I hadn't admitted that your silence stung me terribly. In fact my love for you seemed to die in each of those awful nights; but it came to life each morning. Only today it was dead again, I thought; till White told me of your visit to the jail; and then it came alive again forevermore. You speak of shame, but you've made me a thousand times ashamed that I ever doubted you or reproached you. Now I know, Billie, that you were as right all the time as I thought I was. Our love is a deathless thing; yours couldn't be killed and mine couldn't.

"Here we are together, Billie, in the least romantic place in the world, this dingy old jail, in this tobacco-smelling office of Larry White's; but it all fades away. We're alone—alone on a mountainpeak. God and the sunlight are all around us, and the pulse of love sings in our veins. I want you, Billie; I want you, and I'm going to take you."

"In spite of everything?" she cried up to him timidly, her face lighting brilliantly with that new glory which had been growing upon it all the while her lover had been speaking.

"Because of everything," he answered fondly.

With a long, happy sigh, she rose to his embrace and he took her. But after what they two had passed through, it was withal a spiritual embrace; tenderness rather than heat; devotion, adoration rather than pas-

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Rh this kind was an affront to us all, and I was determined to speak, and to speak at once.

When I heard him clearing the table I went in, and, summoning up my Italian, or rather Neapolitan—the Southern dialects are execrable—I said, "Gennaro! I heard you address Signor Eustace with 'Tu.

"It is true."

"You are not right. You must use 'Lei' or 'Voi'—more polite forms. And remember that, though Signor Eustace is sometimes silly and foolish—this afternoon for example—yet you must always behave respectfully to him; for he is a young English gentleman, and you are a poor Italian fisher-boy."

I know that speech sounds terribly snobbish, but in Italian one can say things that one would never dream of saying in English. Besides, it is no good speaking delicately to persons of that class. Unless you put things plainly, they take a vicious pleasure in misunderstanding you.

An honest English fisherman would have landed me one in the eye in a minute for such a remark, but the wretched down-trodden Italians have no pride. Gennaro only sighed, and said: "It is true."

"Quite so," I said, and turned to go. To my


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 sion characterized it; and its breathless moments were followed presently by little bursts of confidence.

"We understand each other this time," Henry reflected gratefully; "you take me for what I am."

"And you take me for what I'm not," Billie said with a little laugh. "Oh, Henry! My money's gone, I haven't got a thing but you; and I never felt so rich in all my life. And, oh, I'm so glad I couldn't bend you—make you into a conceited imperialist of business. You remembered the little cases still, and it's because you were true in the little things that you made good in the big things."

"You're the first big thing I ever made good in," insisted Henry fondly, "and I came near messing that. We'll get married and we'll shake the ashes of this place off our feet and get away and never see it again."

"Never see it again?" Billie exclaimed in amazement. "Why, you're going to be receiver of Boland General," she told him, and in her blue eyes there was just a faint return of the old imperiousness, and it made her wonderfully attractive.

"Oh, am I?" ejaculated Henry, suddenly doubtful as he looked into those violet deeps and began to take new account of all that lay behind them.

"Why, yes, Henry; you are," she told him, though not imperiously; merely as reminding him of a duty.

As accepting the reminder Harrington turned, still with his arm around the slender grace in the tweed coat beneath which he could feel a heart beating so happily—turned and looked out upon that scarred, chimney-stabbed segment of ruins that lay beneath his vision and with his mind's eye also that wide band of mourning on both sides the inlet where the Boland

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 erections had been. He saw it all and the chaos in the hearts of the citizens as well—he saw the task it would be and slowly his mind kindled to it. To resuscitate, to re-create, to organize anew and on a right basis this little sector of the world-front, to build again and build better—this was a job worth while if ever a worth-while job was offered to a man. And it was his for the taking. He remembered his Salisheutte Indians too, with vast business problems thrust upon them; and the Shell Point Indians with the millions of oil beneath their feet—and both tribes trusting him, needing him.

Billie was watching his absorbed face concernedly. "We haven't gone through all—all this to be just selfish at the last, when we've gained each other, have wef" she asked, giving his arm an intimate squeeze.

He looked at her startled. "No, no; of course not, dear, "he confessed, and felt himself somehow sublimated and consecrated to unselfishness forever because of this priceless treasure within the circle of his arm.

"Yes, we'll—we'll stay right here. We'll have our honeymoon 'on the lot,' as they say in moviedom."

Three days later many things had happened. Various courts had appointed Henry Harrington receiver of Boland General and of numbers of its subsidiaries. The Commissioners of the Land Office and of Indian Affairs had both telegraphed from Washington to Henry an appointment as special agent. Another Shell Point Land Company was to be organized, of which Henry Harrington was to be president, and Lahleet Marceau, vice-president; for she had reconsidered her determination to return to the blanket. She too had

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 consulted her better self and found that she could not desert.

Yellow piles of lumber and red piles of brick began to fleck the ruins, machinery was being ordered, a vast program of reconstruction was being inaugurated; and one way and another, officially or unofficially, Henry Harrington was in the forefront of it all. Tsar of the Zone, someone had already called him playfully.

But most important of all to the two people concerned, Henry and Billie had been married. On this, the first morning of their wedded life, Billie was reminding Henry: Member that lofty talk of mine once about the world wanting producers—stuff I'd heard father use—and me mourning over you because you weren't a producer—only a lawyer? Well, Henry, dear, you're going to be the greatest producer of all—a producer of happiness; and most of all to me!"

The bride kissed her husband ecstatically and he accepted the caress with evidences of satisfaction; then warned: "You know, Billie, hardly anybody is as big, as important as they think they are, or as other people may think. Let's just play our part kind of—kind of small. Let's, as you sort of hinted the other day—let's try to make good in the little things and trust the big things to take care of themselves."

"Which reminds me," said Billie; "for one little thing, I'm going to have the Salzberg children sent up to the house this morning—until their father can do for them."

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Rh indignation I heard him add: "But sometimes it is not important."

"What do you mean?" I shouted.

He came close up to me with horrid gesticulating fingers.

"Signor Tytler, I wish to say this. If Eustazio asks me to call him 'Voi,' I will call him 'Voi.' Otherwise, no."

With that he seized up a tray of dinner things, and fled from the room with them; and I heard two more wine-glasses go on the court-yard floor.

I was now fairly angry, and strode out to interview Eustace. But he had gone to bed, and the landlady, to whom I also wished to speak, was engaged. After more vague wonderings, obscurely expressed owing to the presence of Janet and the two American ladies, we all went to bed, too, after a harassing and most extraordinary day.

the day was nothing to the night.

I suppose I had slept for about four hours, when I woke suddenly thinking I heard a noise


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Rh in the garden. And, immediately, before my eyes were open, cold terrible fear seized me—not fear of something that was happening, like the fear in the wood, but fear of something that might happen.

Our room was on the first floor, looking out on to the garden—or terrace, it was rather: a wedge-shaped block of ground covered with roses and vines, and intersected with little asphalt paths. It was bounded on the small side by the house; round the two long sides ran a wall, only three feet above the terrace level, but with a good twenty feet drop over it into the olive yards, for the ground fell very precipitously away.

Trembling all over I stole to the window. There, pattering up and down the asphalt, paths, was something white. I was too much alarmed to see clearly; and in the uncertain light of the stars the thing took all manner of curious shapes. Now it was a great dog, now an enormous white bat, now a mass of quickly travelling cloud. It would bounce like a ball, or take short flights like a bird, or glide slowly; like a wraith. It gave no sound—save the pattering sound of what, after all, must be human feet. And at last the obvious explanation forced itself upon my disordered mind; and I realized


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Rh that Eustace had got out of bed, and that we were in for something more.

I hastily dressed myself, and went down into the dining-room which opened upon the terrace. The door was already unfastened. My terror had almost entirely passed away, but for quite five minutes I struggled with a curious cowardly feeling, which bade me not interfere with the poor strange boy, but leave him to his ghostly patterings, and merely watch him from the window, to see he took no harm.

But better impulses prevailed and, opening the door, I called out:

"Eustace! what on earth are you doing? Come in at once."

He stopped his antics, and said: "I hate my bedroom. I could not stop in it, it is too small."

"Come! come! I'm tired of affectation. You've never complained of it before."

"Besides I can't see anything—no flowers, no leaves, no sky: only a stone wall." The outlook of Eustace's room certainly was limited; but, as I told him, he had never complained of it before.

"Eustace, you talk like a child. Come in! Prompt obedience, if you please."

He did not move.


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Rh "Very well: I shall carry you in by force." I added, and made a few steps towards him. But I was soon convinced of the futility of pursuing a boy through a tangle of asphalt paths, and went in instead, to call Mr. Sandbach and Leyland to my aid.

When I returned with them he was worse than ever. He would not even answer us when we spoke, but began singing and chattering to himself in a most alarming way.

"It's a case for the doctor now," said Mr. Sandbach, gravely tapping his forehead.

He had stopped his running and was singing, first low, then loud—singing five-finger exercises, scales, hymn tunes, scraps of Wagner—anything that came into his head. His voice—a very untuneful voice—grew stronger and stronger, and he ended with a tremendous shout which boomed like a gun among the mountains, and awoke everyone who was still sleeping in the hotel. My poor wife and the two girls appeared at their respective windows, and the American ladies were heard violently ringing their bell.

"Eustace," we all cried, "stop! stop, dear boy, and come into the house."

He shook his head, and started off again


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Rh talking this time. Never have I listened to such an extraordinary speech. At any other time it would have been ludicrous, for here was a boy, with no sense of beauty and a puerile command of words, attempting to tackle themes which the greatest poets have found almost beyond their power. Eustace Robinson, aged fourteen, was standing in his nightshirt saluting, praising, and blessing, the great forces and manifestations of Nature.

He spoke first of night and the stars and planets above his head, of the swarms of fire-flies below him, of the invisible sea below the fire-flies, of the great rocks covered with anemones and shells that were slumbering in the invisible sea. He spoke of the rivers and water-falls, of the ripening bunches of grapes, of the smoking cone of Vesuvius and the hidden fire-channels that made the smoke, of the myriads of lizards who were lying curled up in the crannies of the sultry earth, of the showers of white rose-leaves that were tangled in his hair. And then he spoke of the rain and the wind by which all things are changed, of the air through which all things live, and of the woods in which all things can be hidden.

Of course, it was all absurdly high faluting:


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Rh yet I could have kicked Leyland for audibly observing that it was 'a diabolical caricature of all that was most holy and beautiful in life.'

"And then,"—Eustace was going on in the pitiable conversational doggerel which was his only mode of expression—"and then there are men, but I can't make them out so well." He knelt down by the parapet, and rested his head on his arms.

"Now's the time," whispered Leyland. I hate stealth, but we darted forward and endeavoured to catch hold of him from behind. He was away in a twinkling, but turned round at once to look at us. As far as I could see in the starlight, he was crying. Leyland rushed at him again, and we tried to corner him among the asphalt paths, but without the slightest approach to success.

We returned, breathless and discomfited, leaving him to his madness in the further corner of the terrace. But my Rose had an inspiration.

"Papa," she called from the window, "if you get Gennaro, he might be able to catch him for you."

I had no wish to ask a favour of Gennaro, but, as the landlady had by now appeared on


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 and its sky overhung with gray threatening-looking cloud, is one that extends from just below Cameroons to Angola, i.e., to the edge of the Kalahari desert, where wet seasons are not; it strikes the person coming south from the Bights, where the dry season is the hot season and the wet the cooler, as most strange and peculiar. One of the many difficulties of travelling down the West African coast is that you are certain to get your season wrong somewhere. It is not so bad for me as it is for some people, because I rather prefer the wet and am reconciled to the climate. Now a person with a predilection for dry seasons has an awful life of it, and I must in justice remark that this predilection is the sane one to possess. I know an American gentleman, who lowed he'd do West Africa," but ultimately lowed West Africa had done him," who got so bothered by the different times different seasons were going on in different parts of the Coast that he characterised the entire West African climate as "a fried eel." Why fried I do not know. We do not fry in the Coast climate, we stew,—and I consider the statement harsh. Of course we have got the worst climate in the world and we are proud of it. Some day I will write a work in ten volumes that will be an ABC of the whole affair, and be what my German friends would call the essential pocket-book for West African travellers, and it will let them know what to expect, when, where, and how; but meantime I may note that both wet and dry seasons have their points. If you want to go far up a river, without having ample opportunities of studying the various ways in which your craft can get wrecked on sandbanks, you must go in the full wet. Of course this ends in your returning, or attempting to return in the dry, and as when you have penetrated the interior any distance you usually start on your return journey full tilt, pursued by rapacious and ferocious cannibals, the fact that you stick on sandbanks on an average three times in a mile, gives you considerable worry. If you wish to penetrate the interior on foot, you must choose the dry season because of those swamps—a good bottomless swamp is impassable in the wet. In the dry it bears a crust over it, which, with suitable precautions, can be crossed, while the shallow swamps can be waded. And all the rivers are


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Rh the scene, I begged her to summon him from the charcoal-bin in which he slept, and make him try what he could do.

She soon returned, and was shortly followed by Gennaro, attired in a dress coat, without either waistcoat, shirt, or vest, and a ragged pair of what had been trousers, cut short above the knees for purposes of wading. The landlady, who had quite picked up English ways, rebuked him for the incongruous and even indecent appearance which he presented.

"I have a coat and I have trousers. What more do you desire?"

"Never mind, Signora Scafetti," I put in, "As there are no ladies here, it is not of the slightest consequence." Then, turning to Gennaro, I said: "The aunts of Signor Eustace wish you to fetch him into the house."

He did not answer.

"Do you hear me? He is not well. I order you to fetch him into the house."

"Fetch! fetch!" said Signora Scafetti, and shook him roughly by the arm.

"Eustazio is well where he is."

"Fetch! fetch!" Signora Scafetti screamed, and let loose a flood of Italian, most of which, I am glad to say, I could not follow. I glanced


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Rh up nervously at the girls' window, but they hardly know as much as I do, and I am thankful to say that none of us caught one word of Gennaro's answer.

The two yelled and shouted at each other for quite ten minutes, at the end of which Gennaro rushed back to his charcoal-bin and Signora Scafetti burst into tears, as well she might, for she greatly valued her English guests.

"He says," she sobbed, "that Signer Eustace is well where he is, and that he will not fetch him. I can do no more."

But I could, for, in my stupid British way, I have got some insight into the Italian character. I followed Mr. Gennaro to his place of repose, and found him wriggling down on to a dirty sack.

"I wish you to fetch Signor Eustace to me," I began.

He hurled at me an unintelligible reply.

"If you fetch him, I will give you this." And out of my pocket I took a new ten lira note.

This time he did not answer.

"This note is equal to ten lire in silver," I continued, for I knew that the poor-class


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Rh Italian is unable to conceive of a single large sum.

"I know it."

"That is, two hundred soldi."

"I do not desire them. Eustazio is my friend."

I put the note into my pocket.

"Besides, you would not give it me."

"I am an Englishman. The English always do what they promise."

"That is true." It is astonishing how the most dishonest of nations trust us. Indeed they often trust us more than we trust one another. Gennaro knelt up on his sack. It was too dark to see his face, but I could feel his warm garlicky breath coming out in gasps, and I knew that the eternal avarice of the South had laid hold upon him.

"I could not fetch Eustazio to the house. He might die there."

"You need not do that," I replied patiently. "You need only bring him to me; and I will stand outside in the garden." And to this, as if it were something quite different, the pitiable youth consented.

"But give me first the ten lire."

"No,"—for I knew the kind of person with


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Rh whom I had to deal. Once faithless, always faithless.

We returned to the terrace, and Gennaro, without a single word, pattered off towards the pattering that could be heard at the remoter end. Mr. Sandbach, Leyland, and myself moved away a little from the house, and stood in the shadow of the white climbing roses, practically invisible.

We heard "Eustazio" called, followed by absurd cries of pleasure from the poor boy. The pattering ceased, and we heard them talking. Their voices got nearer, and presently I could discern them through the creepers, the grotesque figure of the young man, and the slim little white-robed boy. Gennaro had his arm round Eustace's neck, and Eustace was talking away in his fluent, slip-shod Italian.

"I understand almost everything," I heard him say. "The trees, hills, stars, water, I can see all. But isn't it odd! I can't make out men a bit. Do you know what I mean?"

"Ho capito," said Gennaro gravely, and took his arm off Eustace's shoulder. But I made the new note crackle in my pocket; and he heard it. He stuck his hand out with a


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Rh jerk; and the unsuspecting Eustace gripped it in his own.

"It is odd!" Eustace went on—they were quite close now—"It almost seems as if—as if——"

I darted out and caught hold of his arm, and Leyland got hold of the other arm, and Mr. Sandbach hung on to his feet. He gave shrill heart-piercing screams; and the white roses, which were falling early that year, descended in showers on him as we dragged him into the house.

As soon as we entered the house he stopped shrieking; but floods of tears silently burst forth, and spread over his upturned face.

"Not to my room," he pleaded. "It is so small."

His infinitely dolorous look filled me with strange pity, but what could I do? Besides, his window was the only one that had bars to it.

"Never mind, dear boy," said kind Mr. Sandbach. "I will bear you company till the morning."

At this his convulsive struggles began again. "Oh, please, not that. Anything but that. I will promise to lie still and not to cry more than I can help, if I am left alone."


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Rh So we laid him on the bed, and drew the sheets over him, and left him sobbing bitterly, and saying: "I nearly saw everything, and now I can see nothing at all."

We informed the Miss Robinsons of all that had happened, and returned to the dining-room, where we found Signora Scafetti and Gennaro whispering together. Mr. Sandbach got pen and paper, and began writing to the English doctor at Naples. I at once drew out the note, and flung it down on the table to Gennaro.

"Here is your pay," I said sternly, for I was thinking of the Thirty Pieces of Silver.

"Thank you very much, sir," said Gennaro, and grabbed it.

He was going off, when Leyland, whose interest and indifference were always equally misplaced, asked him what Eustace had meant by saying 'he could not make out men a bit.'

"I cannot say. Signor Eustazio—" (I was glad to observe a little deference at last) "has a subtle brain. He understands many things."

"But I heard you say you understood," Leyland persisted.

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Rh try." I saw to my alarm that his manner was changing, and tried to stop him. But he sat down on the edge of the table and started off, with some absolutely incoherent remarks.

"It is sad," he observed at last. "What has happened is very sad. But what can I do? I am poor. It is not I."

I turned away in contempt. Leyland went on asking questions. He wanted to know who it was that Eustace had in his mind when he spoke.

"That is easy to say," Gennaro gravely answered. "It is you, it is I. It is all in this house, and many outside it. If he wishes for mirth, we discomfort him. If he asks to be alone, we disturb him. He longed for a friend, and found none for fifteen years. Then he found me, and the first night I—I who have been in the woods and understood things too—betray him to you, and send him in to die. But what could I do?"

"Gently, gently," said I.

"Oh, assuredly he will die. He will lie in the small room all night, and in the morning he will be dead. That I know for certain."

"There, that will do," said Mr. Sandbach. "I shall be sitting with him."

"Filomena Giusti sat all night with Caterina,


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A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 2

 * On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. 'Teacher,' he asked, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?'
 * 'What is written in the Law?' he replied. 'How do you read it?'
 * He answered: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind"; and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.'"
 * 'You have answered correctly,' Jesus replied. 'Do this and you will live.'
 * But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbour?'
 * In reply Jesus said: 'A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half-dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. "Look after him," he said, "and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have."
 * 'Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?'
 * The expert in the law replied, 'The one who had mercy on him.’
 * Jesus told him, 'Go and do likewise.'
 * Luke 10:25-37

Judging by the frequency with which the word is celebrated in the Top Twenty, it's quite clear that for many the single answer to the world's troubles is 'love'. And it's not difficult to agree with such a sentiment when you observe what hate does on the world's stage; all the misery it inflicts, the violence it perpetrates, the broken homes, communities, lives and hearts for which it is responsible. It's almost platitudinous to say, in the words of that Beatles song from the 1960s, 'All you need is love.' The problem is, it's one thing to sing about it, and another thing altogether to do it, isn't it?

We all know that love could bring enduring reconciliation in Northern Ireland; it could solve the tensions of the Middle East; it could heal the warring factions of Bosnia and Rwanda. In short, we all know that love could make the whole world go round a great deal more smoothly. The trouble is, we just don't seem to be able to inject enough of this miracle-working moral lubricant into the world's bearings.

Everyone gives assent in principle to the importance of love. But one despairs of finding any out of all the divided peoples of our globe where it is actually being demonstrated. This is nothing new, of course. Two thousand years ago, the thoughtful scribes of Judea had already identified the primary importance of love from their studies of the Bible. But in their case, too, there was a disappointing performance gap between theory and practice. And in Luke 10 Jesus tells a classic story to impress that very point on one learned rabbi with whom he discusses the matter.

The theory of love (Luke 10:25-28)
If you've ever tried your hand at public debate, you'll be familiar with the kind of person who stands up during question time, not with the aim of furthering serious discussion, but simply in order to make a fool of the speaker. When I was at school we had a mock general election, when various senior scholars stood as candidates for the major political parties. I was going through my anarchist phase at that time, so I declined to stand for office myself. But I did gain, I remember, immense satisfaction instead by interrupting every campaign speech I could by demanding in a loud voice, 'What about pig-rearing in the Shetland Islands?' None of the adolescent parliamentarians at my school, I discovered, had given much thought to this serious question. And not a few were reduced to total confusion by being asked to comment on it.

These days, unfortunately, I tend to be on the other end of such subversive tactics. In fact, any church minister who accepts speaking engagements at schools with a preponderance of 'A' level students quickly forms a list of old chestnuts of this sort. Who was Cain's wife? That's a good one. Did Noah have polar bears in the Ark? That's another. One soon learns that people who ask questions like this don't really want an answer, they just want to score points in an intellectual sparring match. It was Martin Luther who executed the most sardonic parry to such an enquiry. He was asked by one garrulous sceptic once, 'What was God doing before he made the world?' To which Luther is reputed to have replied (quoting his own mentor, Augustine), 'Making hell for people who ask stupid questions like that.'

When we read the gospels we discover that Jesus had to cope with a good many such insincere enquirers. Again and again the theologians of his day tried to trap him into making some injudicious comment by which he could be discredited. But it's interesting to observe the way that Jesus refused to be drawn into sterile, speculative arguments. He was, in fact, the master of turning such questions back on the interrogator.

In these verses we find a classic example of Jesus handling just such a would-be controversialist, an expert in the law, Luke calls him, or as we would say, an Old Testament scholar. He raises a query which on the surface sounds guileless enough. Indeed, the man seems to hold Jesus in considerable esteem. He stands to put his question and addresses him respectfully as Teacher'. What's more, the enquiry itself appears, superficially at any rate, to be rather promising. 'Teacher,' he says, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?' But in order that we should not be misled, Luke tells us that his inner motive was rather more disappointing. He stood up, he tells us, to put Jesus to the test.

So this man was not a genuine seeker after spiritual illumination. He was one more of those hostile inquisitors from the Jewish Establishment who were looking for an opportunity to examine Jesus' theological credentials and, if possible, to expose his theological incompetence. No doubt he hoped that Jesus would make some wild messianic claim or utter some heretical statement which could be taken down and used later as evidence against him.

But if so, he was frustrated. For instead of volunteering some theological novelty for him to seize upon, Jesus invited the man to answer his own question from the Old Testament which he knew so well. 'What's written in the Law?' he asked. 'How do you read it?'

And the man was, not surprisingly, only too willing to exhibit the fruits of his biblical research. 'Love the Lord your God,' he said, 'and your neighbour as yourself.'

'You've answered correctly,' Jesus replied.

You may be a little surprised to find this man summarizing the Old Testament law in those terms. For Jesus himself, when asked on another occasion to identify the most important commandment in the Bible, could do no better than to cite precisely the same two texts which this scribe quotes here, namely Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, 'Love God. Love your neighbour. The entire moral teaching of the Bible,' he said, hinges on these two pivotal imperatives.' (See Matthew 22:34-40.)

So it says much, does it not, for the profundity of this scribe's reflection on biblical ethics, that he had come independently to exactly the same conclusion as Jesus on this point?

Well, actually, no. It probably indicates nothing of the sort. Almost certainly, the fact that the lawyer fastens here on the same two Old Testament quotations as Jesus implies rather that, contrary perhaps to what many of us assume, Jesus was not the first to distil out of these two commandments the essence of God's moral requirement. It seems likely that this scribe's answer represented the conventional wisdom of at least some of the rabbis of Jesus' day. If you had asked any of them, 'What's the essence of the Law? What is the cardinal virtue?' they would have all answered with one voice, 'Love God and love your neighbour.'

And that being so, I suspect this Old Testament expert may have been a little nonplussed when Jesus, this Galilean with such a reputation for radical ideas, applauded his very traditional answer and agreed with its uncontroversial orthodoxy. 'You've answered correctly,' Jesus replied. 'Do this, and you will live.'

Perhaps some of us too are a little disturbed that Jesus should seem to endorse this man's ideas so uncritically. Surely the whole point about Jesus was that he had something new to say about the way to eternal life, something fundamentally contradictory to the Judaism in which this man had grown up. But by replying to him in such a flattering and supportive fashion, it sounds for all the world as if Jesus wants to deny any revolutionary or innovative element in his proclamation of the kingdom of God.

Well, if that's how you're tempted to react, I have to tell you that I think you're making two mistakes.

First, you're misunderstanding the teaching of Jesus. For the New Testament never abrogates the moral demands of the Old Testament law. On the contrary, it everywhere insists that the new-covenant people of God can be identified by their obedience to the moral law which the Holy Spirit works into their lives. When Jesus says, in verse 28, 'Do this and you will live', he's not implying that loving deeds can earn heaven for us; but he is most certainly confirming that loving deeds are the infallible mark of a heaven-bound personality.

This ties in, of course, with the conclusion we drew from the parable of the sower in the last chapter: that you can tell fertile ground which has received the seed of the Word by the moral fruit of obedience to that Word which it bears. This man was effectively asking, 'How can I be certain I belong to the people of God, that I'm one of those who'll inherit the messianic kingdom of God when it arrives?' Jesus' answer is no revolutionary new concept. It is in Deuteronomy just as it is in John. It is in Leviticus just as it is in Romans. 'We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love' (see 1 John 3:14; Romans 13:8-10). Love is the divine requirement. Without it we shall not enter heaven, for heaven is a world of love.

This lawyer, you see, answered better than he knew. People who are going to heaven do love God and their neighbour. The law written on tablets of stone by Moses in the Old Testament, which this man knew so well, is the same moral law which is written on the tablets of the human heart by the Holy Spirit of the new covenant which Jesus had come to inaugurate. As Christ himself said, 'I haven't come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it' (see Matthew 5:17). And love is the fulfilment of the law. In that sense, Jesus is saying nothing at all contradictory to the general tenor of the New Testament when he says, 'Do this, and you will live.'

But I imagine some will still not be satisfied with that. They will object further. 'Oh, that may be so. Moral obedience is the evidence of a spiritually renewed personality. We all know that.' But it is certain that this scribe did not have such a New Testament theological perspective on things. It's quite clear he was spiritually astray, for just look at the way he frames his initial question, 'What must I do to inherit eternal life?' Didn't he see the contradiction in his own words? Nobody inherits anything by doing things, do they? An inheritance is something you receive by virtue of a relationship, not of an achievement.'

Clearly, like many Jews of this period and many nominal Christians today, this man thought of eternal life as something purchased by his own works of piety rather than given freely by God's grace. It was not a matter of 'What has God done for me?' but rather of 'What must I do for God?' He didn't see love of God and neighbour as the evidential fruit which the Holy Spirit produced in the lives of those who had received eternal life. He saw it as the moral duty which he, by his own unaided efforts, had to perform in order to gain eternal life as a divine reward. That was how his mind worked.

Surely Jesus should have corrected that legalistic self-righteousness underlying the scribe's words? But instead, Jesus seems almost to pat the man on the back and compliment him on his sound approach. 'Do this and you will live.'

'That's not the right answer, Jesus; not for this man! You should have pointed him to faith, not to works, just as Paul does in the letter to the Galatians.' If that's your response, it brings me to the second mistake I think you may be making. Besides perhaps misunderstanding the teaching of Jesus, you may also be underestimating his pastoral wisdom.

Think for a moment about the kind of man this expert in the law was. A professional Bible student, a man who had memorized Genesis to Deuteronomy, who had participated in seminar after seminar of learned debate, sharpening his arguments, clarifying his finer points. A man who had not only examined countless real legal cases but had dreamed up thousands of imaginary ones, so that he could feel absolutely sure that there was no conceivable ethical problem upon which he could not pronounce an authoritative opinion. In short, here was a man with all the answers. Such a person neither needs nor wants theological instruction. That wasn't why he came to Jesus. He had a mind stuffed to the brim with theological instruction, and given half a chance would be only too delighted to parade it for everybody's benefit.

Debate with a person like that is a pointless exercise. It might entertain the crowd, but it's most unlikely to change his mind in any way. Indeed, the philosopher Karl Popper may have been right when he argued that such debate only serves to cement the protagonists ever more securely in their rival positions. Even if Jesus had succeeded in confuting the scribe's theology, he would not have succeeded in converting his soul. He would have won the argument but not the man.

For this fellow needed not to be taught but to be humbled. That first-person pronoun, 'What must I do?' betrayed altogether too much self-confidence. He really thought he could love God and neighbour. That was his most fundamental error; not his legalistic theology, but his moral complacency. The only way this man could be really helped was if that over-confident veneer of smug self-righteousness was punctured by a little bit of old- fashioned conviction of sin.

But as every counsellor knows, conviction of sin cannot be imparted by lecturing people on the subject. When you're seeking to lead a person along the path to repentance, indirect methods are often far more effective than confrontational ones. Jesus, the master psychiatrist, knew that. He would show this man the inadequacy of his theology of good works. But not by scoring a victory over him in theoretical debate; rather, by touching his conscience with a very practical story.

And that brings us to our second parable.

The practice of love (Luke 10:29-35)
It's clear from verse 29 that the lawyer felt that, in spite of Jesus' apparently complimentary response, he had nevertheless somehow experienced a defeat. Perhaps there had been just an edge to Jesus' tone when he said, 'Do this and you will live', as if to imply 'but you don't really love like this, do you?' That certainly seems to be the implication of Luke's observation, that the man felt the need to 'justify himself'. That is, to put himself in the right. The moral challenge of Jesus' words had left him on the defensive. Though nothing explicitly disapproving had been said, he unaccountably felt as though he had been rebuked.

But isn't that how we all feel when someone challenges us with the command to love? G. K. Chesterton once said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting; it had been found difficult and left untried. That's about the size of it. As we said earlier, everybody agrees that 'Love your neighbour' is fine in theory, but when it comes to practice we find ourselves embarrassed by the unconditional demands such a rule makes upon our lives. Almost unconsciously, we seek to ease the pressure on our consciences, to convince ourselves that in spite of that nagging, uncomfortable feeling of self-reproach, we do love our neighbour as ourselves, don't we?

There are two classic ways in which we habitually seek to achieve this sense of self-justification. And it's the genius of Jesus' parable that it unmasks the essential hypocrisy in both of them.

a. The 'I don't do anybody any harm' technique
This first technique is quite simple. You turn God's positive command into a negative prohibition. 'Love your neighbour' is transformed into 'Don't do anybody any harm'. Such passive righteousness is far easier to handle. We can comfort ourselves, since we haven't stolen from, murdered or slandered our neighbour, that we have thereby succeeded in loving him or her. That was clearly the attitude of the priest and the Levite in Jesus' story. I've no doubt these two clergymen were well able to rationalize their decision to pass by on the other side in any number of ways. Just like this lawyer, they could justify themselves.

To begin with, they could claim that it would be foolish to stop. This injured man might have been a decoy to trap naive travellers who let their emotions get the better of their common sense. Then they could argue that it would have been unbiblical for them to stop. We are told that the man was 'half-dead', that is, unconscious. For all they knew, he might have been fully dead. If so, then the ceremonial law of the Old Testament forbade any member of the temple staff to go within 6 feet of him. If either of these clergymen had gone over to investigate, only to find they were dealing with a corpse, they would have become ritually defiled. And that would have meant not only going through an irksome procedure of ceremonial cleansing, but being ruled unfit to carry out their liturgical duties for a considerable period of time, to everybody's inconvenience and their considerable embarrassment.

But the chief reason they were able to defend their neglect of this injured man was that their interpretation of the law of love did not require them to do anything for him. A passive righteousness that simply refrained from inflicting actual harm on other people was all that was demanded, as far as they were concerned. They hadn't beaten the poor fellow up, had they? Therefore they were not responsible; therefore they didn't have to get involved. That was how their minds worked. Theirs was an ethic which took no account at all of sins of omission, and which could therefore ignore the man without suffering the slightest pang of guilt. 'Why,' they might have said to themselves as they continued down the road, 'he might not even have been a Jew, anyway!'

And that brings us to the second strategy of moral evasion.

b. The 'charity begins at home' technique
This technique involves setting limits on the extent of the application of God's command to love. It restricts the operation of that command to a particular group of people who are regarded as the exclusive recipients of the love of which it speaks. 'Who is my neighbour?' our scribe asks, the implication being that some people are my neighbour and some people aren't. He would have taken it for granted that 'Love your neighbour' meant 'Love your fellow Jew'. No rabbi of the day would have suggested anything else. The question in his mind was probably, 'Does that include Gentile converts to Judaism?' because we know that the rabbis were divided on that issue in Jesus' day. Perhaps he thought that by getting Jesus' opinion on that controversy he could generate the academic debate he was seeking. But he can scarcely have been ready for the bombshell that would fall at the very centre of Jesus' story in reply to this technical query.

To understand the emotional impact of verses 33-34 on Jesus' original audience, one needs somehow to get inside the feelings of contempt which Jews entertained towards Samaritans in the first century. The reasons for that contempt we needn't go into. Like all ethnophobia, it was thoroughly irrational. But seldom in the history of the world, I suspect, has there been a racist prejudice that was quite so extreme in the intensity of its mutual loathing.

Unfortunately, this dimension of the story is lost on us. We are so familiar with this parable that the very word 'Samaritan' for us has connotations of benevolence. We all know Samaritans are good. They are those good people who sit on the end of telephones all night long, waiting to counsel potential suicides. But such philanthropic associations were quite foreign to the first-century Jewish mind. On the contrary, in their culture there was no such thing as a 'good Samaritan'. As the American cavalry used to say of the Apaches, the only good Samaritan was a dead Samaritan. And that's no exaggeration. Samaritans were publicly cursed in the synagogues. Petitions were daily offered begging God to deny them any participation in eternal life. Many rabbis even said that a Jewish beggar should refuse alms from a Samaritan because their very money was contaminated.

Jesus could not possibly have chosen a hero more offensive to the sensitivities of his audience. It is not going too far to suggest that he displayed considerable physical courage in doing so. It would be like siding with a black at an Afrikaner brotherhood meeting in Johannesburg. Or like praising a UDR soldier in a Catholic pub in Belfast. If Jesus had made it a Jew helping a Jew, it would have been acceptable. Even a Jew helping a Samaritan might have been tolerable. Some, I'm sure, would have applauded if he'd made his story a piece of anticlerical propaganda, with the Jewish layman showing up the hypocrisy of these two members of the priesthood. But to suggest that two pillars of the Jewish Establishment should be morally outclassed by this mongrel heretic—why, it would have stung every Jewish patriot into hostile indignation! Yet that was exactly Jesus' suggestion.

At every step in the narrative, he makes the Samaritan fulfil the duty of love so conspicuously neglected by the priest and the Levite. Their hearts had been cold and calculating, but his bums with an extravagant compassion. Their oil and wine remain undefiled in their saddlebags, ready, no doubt, for later use in temple ritual. But his becomes a soothing and antiseptic balm to treat the man's wounds. They stay securely seated on their beasts, ready to gallop off should the man's prone body prove to be a decoy. He bravely dismounts, risking possible ambush, and walks the rest of the way to Jericho with the injured man slumped in his own saddle. They kept their money safe in their purse, congratulating themselves, no doubt, on the 10% tithe they had just paid. But he freely sacrifices a month's wages or more in order to secure the nursing care this man would need to make a full recovery.

And note very carefully: all this he did in complete ignorance of the man's racial identity. That is the significance, you see, of Jesus' observation that this man was unconscious and stripped naked. All the normal means by which the ethnic identity of somebody could be established were missing. His dialect and manner of dress were undefined. The Samaritan encounters this victim of criminal violence simply as an anonymous human being. Jew, Gentile, fellow Samaritan—he can't know which. Yet he cares for him. He rescues him. He provides sacrificially for his future welfare. The implication is clear, and Jesus pulls no punches in pointing it out.

The challenge of love (Luke 10:36-37)
You can see the lawyer swallowing hard, can't you, as Jesus forces him to answer his own question again. He can't bring himself to say 'the Samaritan', for that hated word would have stuck in his throat. On the other hand, he can't deny the moral force of the story he's heard. So he replies with embarrassed circumlocution, 'the one who had mercy on him'.

There must have been a glimmer of a smile on Jesus' lips as he observes his discomfiture. This man who had come for a sparring match now finds himself, not just defeated, but convicted. 'Go and do likewise,' is Jesus' call to him (Luke 10:37). And surely in those two imperatives, 'go' and 'do', Jesus unmasks the hypocrisy not only of his original enquirer but also of us all. It is so easy, isn't it, to engage in high-sounding generalizations about loving people. But this masterpiece of a parable grounds the practical implications of that moral theory in real life. How much are we really prepared to 'go and do' for love of neighbour's sake? it asks.

How much value does love place on a human being? The legalist wants to calculate that sum in very precise terms, so that he might know the limit of his moral duty. 'If I do this much, I have loved.' The effect of that kind of moral computation is to turn love into a very tepid thing; a vague, generalized benevolence which cannot possibly express the infinite preciousness of a human individual at all. We put our subscription in the famine relief fund, we buy our flag from the street collector, and we say, "There! I've done it. I've loved my neighbour. I've obeyed the command.'

'Rubbish,' says Jesus. 'You haven't even begun yet.' Have you noticed how very careful God is to express his command in the singular? 'You shall love your neighbour.' Love cannot be satisfied with charitable generalities. Says Charlie Brown indignantly in the Peanuts cartoon: 'Of course I love the human race, I just can't stand Lucy.' But Lucy is the measure of love.

Jesus is here concerned to show us that love requires an intensity of preoccupation with an individual. That is love's test. For the human race, we can do very little; that's why it's so easy to say we love them. But there is no limit at all to the lengths to which we might go in showing generosity to specific needy individuals who happen to cross our path, if we value them highly enough.

I'm not denying that the world today is in such great need that bureaucratic charity is necessary. Hungry people have to become statistics on pieces of paper that are passed around desks and offices and through computer memory banks. But be sure of this. That kind of de-personalized care cannot possibly fulfil our obligation to love as God sees it. Real neighbour-love can only flow in the context of a one-to-one, I-thou relationship. For only in such a relationship can the extravagance of love find practical expression.

The gospel of John recounts Judas' irritation when Mary of Bethany, overcome with devotion to the Lord, poured a valuable jar of perfumed ointment at his feet: 'Why wasn't this perfume sold and the money given to the poor?' asked Judas (John 12:5). Notice the phrase 'the poor'. Judas characteristically thought in such categories. Nice, safe, plural, generalized, collective nouns. 'The poor.' But Mary didn't think that way at all. For her, it was Jesus, an individual, a person she loved and would do anything for. Of course it was extravagant. But love is extravagant. In vain do you tell the lover, when he looks in the jeweller's window, 'You can't possibly afford that one.' Love sweeps such economic considerations aside. It goes the extra mile, it offers the cloak as well as the coat, it even turns the other cheek. To cold, calculating Judas this was unintelligible and wasteful. But Mary knew that love could not limit itself by degrees. Love is not interested in calculating 'What is the least I can do to fulfil my duty?' It sets such enormous value on a human individual that it must sacrifice anything on his or her behalf. Until it has been so extravagant, it is frustrated and unexpressed.

'Go and do likewise,' says Jesus. 'Next time, Mr Lawyer, you see somebody whom it lies in your power to help, remember my story of the good Samaritan and go and do likewise. Then you'll know what loving your neighbour is all about.'

Must he not say something similar to us? Has he not at a single stroke exposed the fallaciousness of all those clever excuses and rationalizations we use? 'I don't do anybody any harm.' What sort of neighbour-love is that? Such a love would have left this poor man to perish, and congratulated itself on its sound judgment. 'Charity begins at home.' What sort of neighbour-love is that? Had the noble Samaritan himself been the victim in question, such a love would have left him to die and congratulated itself on its moral discrimination.

Jesus' story dramatizes what our consciences already know, if we were only more honest with ourselves: that when God says 'Love your neighbour' he means a love which willingly engages in positive acts of care and extravagant gestures of self-sacrifice, irrespective of the race, colour or creed of the one in need. A love which refuses to ask, as this lawyer did, 'Who?' but insists on asking only 'How?' A love which is not interested in the possibility of evasion, only in finding opportunity for expression. A love which is not content to be merely applauded theoretically, but which demands to be demonstrated in practice. 'Go and do likewise,' he says.

I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how this world of ours would be turned upside down by such a love. It would work a social transformation far more radical than any economic revolution, whether from the Left or from the Right. Consider the 'charity at home' philosophy, for instance. Take your newspaper and spend a few moments identifying how many of the intractable conflicts, problems and hurts that disturb our world are caused by people asking, just as the lawyer does, 'Who is my neighbour?' We refuse to love with a universal willingness. We consistently adopt a clannishness that discriminates between 'them' and 'us'. Jew and Arab in Palestine, Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, Serb and Croat in the former Yugoslavia, resurgent nationalism in the former Soviet Union, endemic tribalism in black Africa, class prejudice and race prejudice here in Britain—the list goes on and on and on. It doesn't matter which comer of the world you live in, you find neighbour-love perverted by chauvinism and sectarianism into something which isn't love at all, but just an enlightened form of self-interest.

Or consider the 'I don't do anybody any harm' attitude. Hasn't it struck you how much appalling neglect of social responsibility in our modem world is justified by that phrase? Back in 1964, a classic example of this was acted out on the streets of New York. A woman in her late twenties was attacked on her way home by an assailant who stabbed her repeatedly as she screamed for help, and at least thirty-eight people peering through their apartment windows witnessed the crime. Not one even bothered to telephone the police. When they were asked later why they had done nothing, the answer was unanimous: 'We just didn't want to get involved.'

An isolated incident? I'm afraid it isn't. Here's a clip from the Daily Mail. 'Motorists slowed down to watch as a man raped a three-year-old girl in broad daylight next to a busy road, but no-one stopped to help her.'

This is the sick world we live in. Jesus' parable is real life today. But in our city centres at night, there are not many good Samaritans around to give the story a happy ending. Our western society has become so preoccupied with its individualistic and materialistic priorities that nobody wants to get involved in anybody else's problem. We just don't do anybody any harm. That's how we comfort ourselves. The victims of crime, of war, of exploitation, of oppression—what business are they of ours? These human tragedies that scar the world aren't our responsibility. So, just like the priest and the Levite, we pass by on the other side, defending ourselves all the time with the excuse, 'We don't do anybody any harm.'

'Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me' (Matthew 25:45). We have it, then, from the mouth of Christ himself that sins of omission are so heinous, so culpable in God's sight, that they can damn us. For love is the fulfilment of the law. Confronted by the spectacle of human need, love can never stand idly by and do nothing.

I said in the last chapter that it was possible for social concern so to dominate the Christian agenda that we lose sight of the priority of telling the good news of God's kingdom. I don't retract that emphasis. The seed of the kingdom is the Word. But any Christian who fails to demonstrate real social concern in a world like ours, no matter how zealous he may be in his evangelistic endeavour, will face the judgment of Christ. For the seed of the kingdom is the Word, and that very Word demands social concern. Social concern is part of the fruit of obedience which is the evidence of our fertility as soil. John Stott is surely right, then, when he insists that we may not pursue Christ's great commission, 'Go into all the world and preach the good news,' to the neglect of his great commandment. 'My command is this,' he says: 'Love' (Mark 16:15; John 15:12).

There was a time, of course, when the Christian church was, indeed, renowned for its practical obedience to that injunction of the Master. Even unsympathetic critics have to admit that in nineteenth-century England, for instance, it was the Christian believers who toiled indefatigably in the slums for the relief of the poor and the marginalized in society. Would that that were the church's image today! I fear it is not. The virus of individualistic self-indulgence which infects our western society generally is very little resisted by the church today. Like the priest and the Levite, Christians are far more interested in the buzz they get from public worship than in the social responsibility which love demands.

The story of the good Samaritan is as compelling, then, in its relevance to the twentieth-century world and to the twentieth-century church as when Jesus told it 2,000 years ago. Many years ago, I did a Bible study with a small group of students, one of them from Latin America, on this very parable of the good Samaritan. His comment was, 'If only the church had told us this story and demonstrated to us this Jesus, many of my friends would never have become Marxists.' This is, without doubt, one of the most potent recipes for social change the world has ever heard: 'Go and do likewise' (Luke 10:37).

And yet the astonishing irony is this: that wasn't why Jesus told the story. Jesus did not tell this parable because he believed it would change the world. Indeed, if he did tell it for that purpose he must be feeling thoroughly disappointed now, 2,000 years on, for it manifestly hasn't.

Now, Jesus is no utopian socialist. Recall again the question with which this whole incident began, for that is the key to it. 'Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' (Luke 10:25). Here, remember, is a man under the monumental delusion that he can earn his ticket to heaven by good works. And the ultimate purpose of this story is to show that man that he could not. The only reason this scholar could deceive himself into thinking that he could earn his ticket to heaven that way was that he interpreted God's law of love in such a reductionist manner. Once the full extent of his moral obligation is made plain to him, once he examines his life without the fig-leaf of excuses and evasions to hide his failure behind, he quickly discovers that he is not the great moral expert he thought he was. He knows the theory all right, but the practice just isn't there.

We could not be further from the truth, then, when we suggest that Jesus was confirming this man in his Judaistic legalism when he says, 'Do this and you will live' (Luke 10:28). On the contrary, the whole point of his conversation is to strike a hammer-blow at that moral complacency of his.

That's the real reason this story stands in Luke's gospel. We misunderstand it completely if we think its primary purpose is to teach us our moral duty. It is intended, rather, to expose to us our moral bankruptcy. The good Samaritan is Jesus' demolition job on the self-righteousness of those who dare to justify themselves. 'Face up to the performance gap in your life,' the parable says. 'You know God's standards of love, but you don't keep them. Go away and try to keep them if you're so sure you can. But once you stop rationalizing your way out of the full force of God's command, once you stop emasculating the demands of love with comforting cliches like "Charity begins at home", and "I never do anybody any harm", once you start comparing your loving with the extravagant generosity of that good Samaritan of mine, then you will realize what a moral failure you really are. You will not come to me then asking pompous, self-inflated questions like, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"'

No. Rather, like a man in the next story we shall be looking at, you will be found with your head bowed, beating your breast, saying, 'God be merciful to me, a sinner.' Have you got to that point of self-despair yet? Plenty of people come, like this expert, to have a debate with Jesus. Too few come to him seeking what he really wants to offer—a rescue.

Once we do get to that point where we know we need a rescue, however, we shall discover that there is yet a further dimension to this remarkable story of the good Samaritan; perhaps the most precious dimension of all.

In the last chapter I said that the parables were often abused during the Middle Ages, as a result of the allegorical interpretation of scholars. This story of the good Samaritan suffered more than most in that regard. A typical medieval reconstruction, for instance, tells us that the wounded man represents Adam, and that Jerusalem, from which he journeys, represents the state of innocence from which Adam fell. The thieves who beat him up are the devil who deprived Adam of eternal life. The priest and the Levite are Old Testament religion which passed by and could not help him. And the Good Samaritan, of course, is Christ, who comes to his rescue. The inn to which he takes him is the church; the two coins which are given for his care are the sacraments of baptism and the mass; and the innkeeper, self-evidently, is the pope!

Well, suffice it to say there is no evidence at all that Jesus intended his story to be understood in such a fashion. Yet those medieval scholars were not without their spiritual insight. For even if the good Samaritan was not intended to be an allegorical representation of the mission of Christ, it is true to say that Christ is the perfect fulfilment of the command to love, which the good Samaritan illustrates.

There is a man who travelled that Jericho road, but in the opposite direction: toward Jerusalem, not away from it, and with a cross on his back. And from that cross the Story-teller himself repeats to us that old commandment of love. Only, because he is saying it, it has somehow now also become a new commandment. 'Love one another,' he says, ‘as l have loved you' (see John 13:34). Moses could never have added that second clause, could he? Nor could the lawyer. But Jesus can. For he has turned the good Samaritan from fiction into fact. His is a love that does indeed break down the man-made barriers of race and tribe and class. His is a love that was not satisfied with mere passive goodwill, but insisted upon active, extravagant sacrificial service. 'Love one another,' he says, ‘as I have loved you. You can love that way, now; because, unlike Moses, I have not only brought you the command to love; I have brought you the power to love. My Spirit, poured out from heaven, will reproduce my love in your hearts. Go and do likewise.'

To those who, like this lawyer, think they can earn their ticket to heaven by good deeds, Jesus' words are a challenge to face up to their true moral inadequacy. You don't love like this; you can't love like this. You don't want to love like this. Stop fooling yourself.

But to those who have learnt that lesson, who have come to Christ in repentance and faith, confessing their failure and sin, the challenge of these final words comes afresh a second time and with even more force. 'Go and do likewise,' he says. 'Prove the quality of the Spirit-filled life which I have given you. All will know you are my disciples if you love one another as I have loved you.'

title: A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 2


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Rh but Caterina was dead in the morning. They would not let her out, though I begged, and prayed, and cursed, and beat the door, and climbed the wall. They were ignorant fools, and thought I wished to carry her away. And in the morning she was dead."

"What is all this?" I asked Signora Scafetti.

"All kinds of stories will get about," she replied, "and he, least of anyone, has reason to repeat them."

"And I am alive now," he went on, "because I had neither parents nor relatives nor friends, so that, when the first night came, I could run through the woods, and climb the rocks, and plunge into the water, until I had accomplished my desire!"

We heard a cry from Eustace's room—a faint but steady sound, like the sound of wind in a distant wood, heard by one standing in tranquillity.

"That," said Gennaro, "was the last noise of Caterina. I was hanging on to her window then, and it blew out past me."

And, lifting up his hand, in which my ten lira note was safely packed, he solemnly cursed Mr. Sandbach, and Leyland, and myself, and Fate, because Eustace was dying in the up-


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Rh stairs room. Such is the working of the Southern mind; and I verily believe that he would not have moved even then, had not Leyland, that unspeakable idiot, upset the lamp with his elbow. It was a patent self-extinguishing lamp, bought by Signora Scafetti, at my special request, to replace the dangerous thing that she was using. The result was, that it went out; and the mere physical change from light to darkness had more power over the ignorant animal nature of Gennaro than the most obvious dictates of logic and reason.

I felt, rather than saw, that he had left the room, and shouted out to Mr. Sandbach: "Have you got the key of Eustace's room in your pocket?" But Mr. Sandbach and Leyland were both on the floor, having mistaken each other for Gennaro, and some more precious time was wasted in finding a match. Mr. Sandbach had only just time to say that he had left the key in the door, in case the Miss Robinsons wished to pay Eustace a visit, when we heard a noise on the stairs, and there was Gennaro, carrying Eustace down.

We rushed out and blocked up the passage, and they lost heart and retreated to the upper landing.


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Rh "Now they are caught," cried Signora Scafetti. "There is no other way out."

We were cautiously ascending the staircase, when there was a terrific scream from my wife's room, followed by a heavy thud on the asphalt path. They had leapt out of her window.

I reached the terrace just in time to see Eustace jumping over the parapet of the garden wall. This time I knew for certain he would be killed. But he alighted in an olive tree, looking like a great white moth; and from the tree he slid on to the earth. And as soon as his bare feet touched the clods of earth he uttered a strange loud cry, such as I should not have thought the human voice could have produced, and disappeared among the trees below.

"He has understood and he is saved," cried Gennaro, who was still sitting on the asphalt path. "Now, instead of dying he will live!"

"And you, instead of keeping the ten lire, will give them up," I retorted, for at this theatrical remark I could contain myself no longer.

"The ten lire are mine," he hissed back, in a scarcely audible voice. He clasped his hand over his breast to protect his ill-gotten gains, and, as he did so, he swayed forward and fell


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 navigable in canoes in the dry, if too shallow for steamers, and canoes are the most comfortable things to travel in in the whole world. The predilection in favour of small steam launches is to me a mystery. What joy any sane person can have in one, who is not in a hurry, I do not know. I have had some experience in them, and some of those experiences have been the worst I have gone through. I remember one occasion when I tried to get a little launch through a creek which was, although deep, full of water grass. Well! I will be careful, but it was enough to make my distinguished Liverpool friends use bad language. You see you could not get the screw to work because of the grass. Attempts at using the screw merely made the poor thing into a chaff cutter, and it was not made for that, so choked. You could not get up a sail, because there was no wind sufficiently strong to get through the grass, which towered in a dense mass some ten feet above your funnel. You could not row or paddle, because of the said grass, and you could not get out and walk or tow because the water was too deep. I should like to have the situation put as a problem at a nautical examination. The only solution I found to it was to get two brawny blacks with matchets in the bows to cut a way for her, and the rest of the crew to pull her forward by catching hold of the grass ahead.