then as if he were rolling down a smooth side of the Matterhorn. He observed now that the height was rather less than that of the second storey of one of the stunted cottages he had noted on his return. He suddenly understood he had grown bigger; bigger in a bodily sense. He had doubts about any other.
“The Hole in Heaven!” he said. “What a good name! What a good poet I was in those days! The Hole in Heaven. But does it let one in, or let one out?”
In the last level shafts of the fallen sun the fantastic shadow of the long-eared quadruped, whom Pump had now tethered to a new and nearer pasture, fell across the last sunlit scrap of sand. Dalroy looked at the long exaggerated shadow of the ass; and laughed that short explosive laugh he had uttered when the doors of the harems had been closed after the Turkish war. He was normally a man much too loquacious; but he never explained those laughs.
Humphrey Pump plunged down again into the sunken nest, and began to broach the cask of rum in his own secret style, saying—
“We can get something else somehow tomorrow. For tonight we can eat cheese and drink rum, especially as there’s water on tap, so to speak. And now, Captain, sing us the Song Against Songs.”
Patrick Dalroy drank a little rum out of a small medicine glass which the generally unaccountable Mr. Pump unaccountably produced from his waistcoat pocket; but Patrick’s colour had risen, his brow was almost as red as his hair; and he was evidently reluctant.
“I don’t see why I should sing all the songs,” he said. “Why the divil don’t you sing a song yourself? And now I come to think of it,” he cried, with an accumulating brogue, not, perhaps, wholly unaffected by the rum, which he had not, in fact, drunk for years, “and now I come to think of it, what about that song of yours? All me youth’s coming back in this blest and cursed place; and I remember that song of yours, that never existed nor ever will. Don’t ye remember now, Humphrey Pump, that night when I sang ye no less than seventeen songs of me own composition?”
“I remember it very well,” answered the Englishman, with restraint.
“And don’t ye remember,” went on the exhilarated Irishman, with solemnity, “that unless ye could produce a poetic lyric of your own, written and sung by yourself, I threatened to. …”
“To sing again,” said the impenetrable Pump. “Yes, I know.”
He calmly proceeded to take out of his pockets, which were, alas, more like those of a poacher than an innkeeper, a folded and faded piece of paper.
“I wrote it when you asked me,” he said simply. “I have never tried to sing it. But I’ll sing it myself, when you’ve sung your song, against anybody singing at all.”
“All right,” cried the somewhat excited Captain, “to hear a song from you—why, I’ll sing anything. This is the Song Against Songs, Hump.”
And again he let his voice out like a bellow against the evening silence.
“The song of the sorrow of Melisande is a weary song and a dreary song,
The glory of Mariana’s grange had got into great decay,
The song of the Raven Never More has never been called a cheery song,
And the brightest things in Baudelaire are anything else but gay.
But who will write us a riding song,
Or a hunting song or a drinking song,
Fit for them that arose and rode,
When day and the wine were red?
But bring me a quart of claret out,
And I will write you a clinking song,
A song of war and a song of wine,
And a song to wake the dead.
“The song of the fury of Fragolette is a florid song and a torrid song,
The song of the sorrow of Tara is sung to a harp unstrung,
The song of the cheerful Shropshire Kid I consider a perfectly horrid song,
And the song of the happy Futurist is a song that can’t be sung.
But who will write us a riding song,
Or a fighting song or a drinking song,
Fit for the fathers of you and me,
That knew how to think and thrive?
But the song of Beauty and Art and Love
Is simply an utterly stinking song,
To double you up and drag you down.
And damn your soul alive.”
“Take some more rum,” concluded the Irish officer, affably, “and let’s hear your song at last.”
With the gravity inseparable from the deep conventionality of country people, Mr. Pump unfolded the paper on which he had recorded the only antagonistic emotion that was strong enough in him to screw his infinite English tolerance to the pitch of song. He read out the title very carefully and in full.
“Song Against Grocers, by Humphrey Pump, sole proprietor of ‘The Old Ship,’ Pebblewick. Good Accommodation for Man and Beast. Celebrated as the House at which both Queen Charlotte and Jonathan Wilde put up on different occasions; and where the Ice-cream man was mistaken for Bonaparte. This song is written against Grocers.”
“God made the wicked Grocer,
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops,
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon’s on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.
“The evil-hearted Grocer
Would call his mother ‘Ma’am,’
And bow at her and bob at her,
Her aged soul to damn;
And rub his horrid hands and ask,
What article was next;
Though mortis in articulo,
Should be her proper text.
“His props are not his children
But pert lads underpaid,
Who call out ‘Cash!’ and bang about,
To work his wicked trade;
He keeps a lady in a cage,
Most cruelly
