Conscience
J. Galsworthy
Taggart sat up. The scoop under the ranger's fence, cannily selected for his sleeping-place, was overhung by branches, and the birds of Hyde Park were at matins already. His watch had gone the way of his other belongings during the last three months, and he could only assume from the meager light that it was but little after dawn. He was not grateful to the birds; he would be hungry long before a breakfast coming from he hardly knew where. But he listened to them with interest. This was the first night he had passed in the open, and, like all amateurs, he felt a kind of triumph at having achieved vagrancy in spite of the law, the ranger, and the dew. He was a Northumbrian, too, and his tail still up,' as he expressed it. Born in a town,
Taggart had not much country lore - at sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, his knowledge stopped; but he enjoyed the bobbery the little beggars were kicking up, and though a trifle stiff perhaps, he felt fine'.
He lit his pipe, and almost at once his brain began to revolve the daily problem of how to get a job, and why he had lost the one he had.
Walking, three months ago, burly, upright, and secure and jolly, into the room of his chief at the officers of Conglomerated Journals Ltd. , he had been greeted with: Morning, Taggart. Georgie Grebe is to give us an article for the Lighthouse. He won't have time to write it, of course. I want you just to do us a column he could sign something Grebeish. I'm anxious for a feature of that sort every week now in the
Lighthouse; got half a dozen really good names. We must get it on its legs with the big
Public.
Taggart smiled. Georgia Grebe! The name was a household word - tophole idea to get him!
Did he ever write a line in his life, sir?
Don't suppose so - but you know the sort of thing he would write; he gets nothing for it but the Ad. The week