Dinner over, we drew our chairs to the hearth, and fell to talk and the slow consumption of tobacco.When two men from the ends of the earth meet by a winter fire, their thoughts are certain to drift overseas.We spoke of the racing tides off Vancouver, and the lonely pine-clad ridges running up to the snow-peaks of the Selkirks, to which we had both travelled once upon a time in search of sport.Thirlstone on his own account had gone wandering to Alaska, and brought back some bear-skins and a frost-bitten toe as trophies, and from his tales had consorted with the finest band of rogues which survives unhanged on this planet.Then some casual word took our thoughts to the south, and our memories dallied with Africa.Thirlstone had hunted in Somaliland and done mighty slaughter; while I had spent some never-to-be forgotten weeks long ago in the hinterland of Zanzibar, in the days before railways and game-preserves.I have gone through life with a keen eye for the discovery of earthly paradises, to which I intend to retire when my work is over, and the fairest I thought I had found above the Rift valley, where you had a hundred miles of blue horizon and the weather of Scotland.Thirlstone, not having been there, naturally differed, and urged the claim of a certain glen in Kashmir, where you may hunt two varieties of bear and three of buck in thickets of rhododendron, and see the mightiest mountain-wall on earth from your tent door.The mention of the Indian frontier brought us back to our professions, and for a little we talked "shop" with the unblushing confidence of those who know each other's work and approve it.As a very young soldier Thirlstone had gone shooting in the Pamirs, and had blundered into a Russian party of exploration which contained Kuropatkin.He had in consequence grossly outstayed his leave, having been detained for a fortnight by an arbitrary hospitality; but he had learned many things, and the experience had given him strong views on frontier questions.
Half an hour was devoted to a masterly survey of the East, until a word pulled us up.
"I went there in '99" Thirlstone was saying,--"the time Wiston and I were sent--" and then he stopped, and his eager face clouded.Wiston's name cast a shadow over our reminiscences.
"What did he actually do?" I asked after a short silence.
"Pretty bad! He seemed a commonplace, good sort of fellow, popular, fairly competent, a little bad-tempered perhaps.And then suddenly he did something so extremely blackguardly that everything was at an end.It's no good repeating details, and Ihate to think about it.We know little about our neighbours, and I'm not so sure that we know much about ourselves.There may be appalling depths of iniquity in every one of us, only most people are fortunate enough to go through the world without meeting anything to wake the devil in them.I don't believe Wiston was bad in the ordinary sense.Only there was something else in him-somebody else, if you like--and in a moment it came uppermost, and he was a branded man.Ugh! it's a gruesome thought." Thirlstone had let his pipe go out, and was staring moodily into the fire.
"How do you explain things like that?" he asked."I have an idea of my own about them.We talk glibly of ourselves and our personality and our conscience, as if every man's nature were a smooth, round, white thing, like a chuckie-stone.But I believe there are two men-perhaps more-in every one of us.There's our ordinary self, generally rather humdrum; and then there's a bit of something else, good, bad, but never indifferent,--and it is that something else which may make a man a saint or a great villain.""'The Kings of Orion have come to earth,'" I quoted.
Something in the words struck Thirlstone, and he asked me what was the yarn I spoke of.
"It's an old legend," I explained."When the kings were driven out of Orion, they were sent to this planet and given each his habitation in some mortal soul.There were differences of character in that royal family, and so the alter ego which dwells alongside of us may be virtuous or very much the reverse.But the point is that he is always greater than ourselves, for he has been a king.It's a foolish story, but very widely believed.
There is something oi the sort in Celtic folk-lore, and there's a reference to it in Ausonius.Also the bandits in the Bakhtiari have a version of it in a very excellent ballad.""Kings of Orion," said Thirlstone musingly."I like that idea.
