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Beasts and Super-Beasts

by Saki · English · Gutenberg #269 · 376,220 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Beasts and Super-Beasts

Author: Saki


        
Release date: May 1, 1995 [eBook #269]
                Most recently updated: December 26, 2011

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/269

Credits: Transcribed from the 1914 John Lane, The Bodley Head edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEASTS AND SUPER-BEASTS ***


Transcribed from the 1914 John Lane, The Bodley Head edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org





                                BEASTS AND
                               SUPER-BEASTS


                         By H. H. MUNRO (“SAKI”)

                                * * * * *

                    LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
                       NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
                     TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN  MCMXIV




AUTHOR’S NOTE


“The Open Window,” “The Schartz-Metterklume Method,” and “Clovis on
Parental Responsibilities,” originally appeared in the _Westminster
Gazette_, “The Elk” in the _Bystander_, and the remaining stories in the
_Morning Post_.  To the Editors of these papers I am indebted for their
courtesy in allowing me to reprint them.

                                                                  H. H. M.




THE SHE-WOLF


Leonard Bilsiter was one of those people who have failed to find this
world attractive or interesting, and who have sought compensation in an
“unseen world” of their own experience or imagination—or invention.
Children do that sort of thing successfully, but children are content to
convince themselves, and do not vulgarise their beliefs by trying to
convince other people.  Leonard Bilsiter’s beliefs were for “the few,”
that is to say, anyone who would listen to him.

His dabblings in the unseen might not have carried him beyond the
customary platitudes of the drawing-room visionary if accident had not
reinforced his stock-in-trade of mystical lore.  In company with a
friend, who was interested in a Ural mining concern, he had made a trip
across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great Russian railway strike
was developing from a threat to a reality; its outbreak caught him on the
return journey, somewhere on the further side of Perm, and it was while
waiting for a couple of days at a wayside station in a state of suspended
locomotion that he made the acquaintance of a dealer in harness and
metalware, who profitably whiled away the tedium of the long halt by
initiating his English travelling companion in a fragmentary system of
folk-lore that he had picked up from Trans-Baikal traders and natives.
Leonard returned to his home circle garrulous about his Russian strike
experiences, but oppressively reticent about certain dark mysteries,
which he alluded to under the resounding title of Siberian Magic.  The
reticence wore off in a week or two under the influence of an entire lack
of general curiosity, and Leonard began to make more detailed allusions
to the enormous powers which this new esoteric force, to use his own
description of it, conferred on the initiated few who knew how to wield
it.  His aunt, Cecilia Hoops, who loved sensation perhaps rather better
than she loved the truth, gave him as clamorous an advertisement as
anyone could wish for by retailing an account of how he had turned a
vegetable marrow into a wood pigeon before her very eyes.  As a
manifestation of the possession of supernatural powers, the story was
discounted in some quarters by the respect accorded to Mrs. Hoops’ powers
of imagination.

However divided opinion might be on the question of Leonard’s status as a
wonderworker or a charlatan, he certainly arrived at Mary Hampton’s
house-party with a reputation for pre-eminence in one or other of those
professions, and he was not disposed to shun such publicity as might fall
to his share.  Esoteric forces and unusual powers figured largely in
whatever conversation he or his aunt had a share in, and his own
performances, past and potential, were the subject of mysterious hints
and dark avowals.

“I wish you would turn me into a wolf, Mr. Bilsiter,” said his hostess at
luncheon the day after his arrival.

“My dear Mary,” said Colonel Hampton, “I never knew you had a craving in
that direction.”

“A she-wolf, of course,” continued Mrs. Hampton; “it would be too
confusing to change one’s sex as well as one’s species at a moment’s
notice.”

“I don’t think one should jest on these subjects,” said Leonard.

“I’m not jesting, I’m quite serious, I assure you.  Only don’t do it
to-day; we have only eight available bridge players, and it would break
up one of our tables.  To-morrow we shall be a larger party.  To-morrow
night, after dinner—”

“In our present imperfect understanding of these hidden forces I think
one should approach them with humbleness rather than mockery,” observed
Leonard, with such severity that the subject was forthwith dropped.

Clovis Sangrail had sat unusually silent during the discussion on the
possibilities of Siberian Magic; after lunch he side-tracked Lord Pabham
into the comparative seclusion of the billiard-room and delivered himself
of a searching question.

“Have you such a thing as a she-wolf in your collection of wild animals?
A she-wolf of moderately good temper?”

Lord Pabham considered.  “There is Louisa,” he said, “a rather fine
specimen of the timber-wolf.  I got her two years ago in exchange for
some Arctic foxes.  Most of my animals get to be fairly tame before
they’ve been with me very long; I think I can say Louisa has an angelic
temper, as she-wolves go.  Why do you ask?”

“I was wondering whether you would lend her to me for to-morrow night,”
said Clovis, with the careless solicitude of one who borrows a collar
stud or a tennis racquet.

“To-morrow night?”

“Yes, wolves are nocturnal animals, so the late hours won’t hurt her,”
said Clovis, with the air of one who has taken everything into
consideration; “one of your men could bring her over from Pabham Park
after dusk, and with a little help he ought to be able to smuggle her
into the conservatory at the same moment that Mary Hampton makes an
unobtrusive exit.”

Lord Pabham stared at Clovis for a moment in pardonable bewilderment;
then his face broke into a wrinkled network of laughter.

“Oh, that’s your game, is it?  You are going to do a little Siberian
Magic on your own account.  And is Mrs. Hampton willing to be a
fellow-conspirator?”

“Mary is pledged to see me through with it, if you will guarantee
Louisa’s temper.”

“I’ll answer for Louisa,” said Lord Pabham.

By the following day the house-party had swollen to larger proportions,
and Bilsiter’s instinct for self-advertisement expanded duly under the
stimulant of an increased audience.  At dinner that evening he held forth
at length on the subject of unseen forces and untested powers, and his
flow of impressive eloquence continued unabated while coffee was being
served in the drawing-room preparatory to a general migration to the
card-room.

His aunt ensured a respectful hearing for his utterances, but her
sensation-loving soul hankered after something more dramatic than mere
vocal demonstration.

“Won’t you do something to _convince_ them of your powers, Leonard?” she
pleaded; “change something into another shape.  He can, you know, if he
only chooses to,” she informed the company.

“Oh, do,” said Mavis Pellington earnestly, and her request was echoed by
nearly everyone present.  Even those who were not open to conviction were
perfectly willing to be entertained by an exhibition of amateur
conjuring.

Leonard felt that something tangible was expected of him.

“Has anyone present,” he asked, “got a three-penny bit or some small
object of no particular value—?”

“You’re surely not going to make coins disappear, or something primitive
of that sort?” said Clovis contemptuously.

“I think it very unkind of you not to carry out my suggestion of turning
me into a wolf,” said Mary Hampton, as she crossed over to the
conservatory to give her macaws their usual tribute from the dessert
dishes.

“I have already warned you of the danger of treating these powers in a
mocking spirit,” said Leonard solemnly.

“I don’t believe you can do it,” laughed Mary provocatively from the
conservatory; “I dare you to do it if you can.  I defy you to turn me
into a wolf.”

As she said this she was lost to view behind a clump of azaleas.

“Mrs. Hampton—” began Leonard with increased solemnity, but he got no
further.  A breath of chill air seemed to rush across the room, and at
the same time the macaws broke forth into ear-splitting screams.

“What on earth is the matter with those confounded birds, Mary?”
exclaimed Colonel Hampton; at the same moment an even more piercing
scream from Mavis Pellington stampeded the entire company from their
seats.  In various attitudes of helpless horror or instinctive defence
they confronted the evil-looking grey beast that was peering at them from
amid a setting of fern and azalea.

Mrs. Hoops was the first to recover from the general chaos of fright and
bewilderment.

“Leonard!” she screamed shrilly to her nephew, “turn it back into Mrs.
Hampton at once!  It may fly at us at any moment.  Turn it back!”

“I—I don’t know how to,” faltered Leonard, who looked more scared and
horrified than anyone.

“What!” shouted Colonel Hampton, “you’ve taken the abominable liberty of
turning my wife into a wolf, and now you stand there calmly and say you
can’t turn her back again!”

To do strict justice to Leonard, calmness was not a distinguishing
feature of his attitude at the moment.

“I assure you I didn’t turn Mrs. Hampton into a wolf; nothing was farther
from my intentions,” he protested.

“Then where is she, and how came that animal into the conservatory?”
demanded the Colonel.

“Of course we must accept your assurance that you didn’t turn Mrs.
Hampton into a wolf,” said Clovis politely, “but you will agree that
appearances are against you.”

“Are we to have all these recriminations with that beast standing there
ready to tear us to pieces?” wailed Mavis indignantly.

“Lord Pabham, you know a good deal about wild beasts—” suggested Colonel
Hampton.

“The wild beasts that I have been accustomed to,” said Lord Pabham, “have
come with proper credentials from well-known dealers, or have been bred
in my own menagerie.  I’ve never before been confronted with an animal
that walks unconcernedly out of an azalea bush, leaving a charming and
popular hostess unaccounted for.  As far as one can judge from _outward_
characteristics,” he continued, “it has the appearance of a well-grown
female of the North American timber-wolf, a variety of the common species
_canis lupus_.”

“Oh, never mind its Latin name,” screamed Mavis, as the beast came a step
or two further into the room; “can’t you entice it away with food, and
shut it up where it can’t do any harm?”

“If it is really Mrs. Hampton, who has just had a very good dinner, I
don’t suppose food will appeal to it very strongly,” said Clovis.

“Leonard,” beseeched Mrs. Hoops tearfully, “even if this is none of your
doing can’t you use your great powers to turn this dreadful beast into
something harmless before it bites us all—a rabbit or something?”

“I don’t suppose Colonel Hampton would care to have his wife turned into
a succession of fancy animals as though we were playing a round game with
her,” interposed Clovis.

“I absolutely forbid it,” thundered the Colonel.

“Most wolves that I’ve had anything to do with have been inordinately
fond of sugar,” said Lord Pabham; “if you like I’ll try the effect on
this one.”

He took a piece of sugar from the saucer of his coffee cup and flung it
to the expectant Louisa, who snapped it in mid-air.  There was a sigh of
relief from the company; a wolf that ate sugar when it might at the least
have been employed in tearing macaws to pieces had already shed some of
its terrors.  The sigh deepened to a gasp of thanks-giving when Lord
Pabham decoyed the animal out of the room by a pretended largesse of
further sugar.  There was an instant rush to the vacated conservatory.
There was no trace of Mrs. Hampton except the plate containing the
macaws’ supper.

“The door is locked on the inside!” exclaimed Clovis, who had deftly
turned the key as he affected to test it.

Everyone turned towards Bilsiter.

“If you haven’t turned my wife into a wolf,” said Colonel Hampton, “will
you kindly explain where she has disappeared to, since she obviously
could not have gone through a locked door?  I will not press you for an
explanation of how a North American timber-wolf suddenly appeared in the
conservatory, but I think I have some right to inquire what has become of
Mrs. Hampton.”

Bilsiter’s reiterated disclaimer was met with a general murmur of
impatient disbelief.

“I refuse to stay another hour under this roof,” declared Mavis
Pellington.

“If our hostess has really vanished out of human form,” said Mrs. Hoops,
“none of the ladies of the party can very well remain.  I absolutely
decline to be chaperoned by a wolf!”

“It’s a she-wolf,” said Clovis soothingly.

The correct etiquette to be observed under the unusual circumstances
received no further elucidation.  The sudden entry of Mary Hampton
deprived the discussion of its immediate interest.

“Some one has mesmerised me,” she exclaimed crossly; “I found myself in
the game larder, of all places, being fed with sugar by Lord Pabham.  I
hate being mesmerised, and the doctor has forbidden me to touch sugar.”

The situation was explained to her, as far as it permitted of anything
that could be called explanation.

“Then you _really_ did turn me into a wolf, Mr. Bilsiter?” she exclaimed
excitedly.

But Leonard had burned the boat in which he might now have embarked on a
sea of glory.  He could only shake his head feebly.

“It was I who took that liberty,” said Clovis; “you see, I happen to have
lived for a couple of years in North-Eastern Russia, and I have more than
a tourist’s acquaintance with the magic craft of that region.  One does
not care to speak about these strange powers, but once in a way, when one
hears a lot of nonsense being talked about them, one is tempted to show
what Siberian magic can accomplish in the hands of someone who really
understands it.  I yielded to that temptation.  May I have some brandy?
the effort has left me rather faint.”

If Leonard Bilsiter could at that moment have transformed Clovis into a
cockroach and then have stepped on him he would gladly have performed
both operations.




LAURA


“You are not really dying, are you?” asked Amanda.

“I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,” said Laura.

“But to-day is Saturday; this is serious!” gasped Amanda.

“I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” said
Laura.

“Death is always serious,” said Amanda.

“I never said I was going to die.  I am presumably going to leave off
being Laura, but I shall go on being something.  An animal of some kind,
I suppose.  You see, when one hasn’t been very good in the life one has
just lived, one reincarnates in some lower organism.  And I haven’t been
very good, when one comes to think of it.  I’ve been petty and mean and
vindictive and all that sort of thing when circumstances have seemed to
warrant it.”

“Circumstances never warrant that sort of thing,” said Amanda hastily.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” observed Laura, “Egbert is a
circumstance that would warrant any amount of that sort of thing.  You’re
married to him—that’s different; you’ve sworn to love, honour, and endure
him: I haven’t.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with Egbert,” protested Amanda.

“Oh, I daresay the wrongness has been on my part,” admitted Laura
dispassionately; “he has merely been the extenuating circumstance.  He
made a thin, peevish kind of fuss, for instance, when I took the collie
puppies from the farm out for a run the other day.”

“They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex and drove two sitting
hens off their nests, besides running all over the flower beds.  You know
how devoted he is to his poultry and garden.”

“Anyhow, he needn’t have gone on about it for the entire evening and then
have said, ‘Let’s say no more about it’ just when I was beginning to
enjoy the discussion.  That’s where one of my petty vindictive revenges
came in,” added Laura with an unrepentant chuckle; “I turned the entire
family of speckled Sussex into his seedling shed the day after the puppy
episode.”

“How could you?” exclaimed Amanda.

“It came quite easy,” said Laura; “two of the hens pretended to be laying
at the time, but I was firm.”

“And we thought it was an accident!”

“You see,” resumed Laura, “I really _have_ some grounds for supposing
that my next incarnation will be in a lower organism.  I shall be an
animal of some kind.  On the other hand, I haven’t been a bad sort in my
way, so I think I may count on being a nice animal, something elegant and
lively, with a love of fun.  An otter, perhaps.”

“I can’t imagine you as an otter,” said Amanda.

“Well, I don’t suppose you can imagine me as an angel, if it comes to
that,” said Laura.

Amanda was silent.  She couldn’t.

“Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable,” continued
Laura; “salmon to eat all the year round, and the satisfaction of being
able to fetch the trout in their own homes without having to wait for
hours till they condescend to rise to the fly you’ve been dangling before
them; and an elegant svelte figure—”

“Think of the otter hounds,” interposed Amanda; “how dreadful to be
hunted and harried and finally worried to death!”

“Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse
than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I
should go on into something else.  If I had been a moderately good otter
I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably
something rather primitive—a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should
think.”

“I wish you would be serious,” sighed Amanda; “you really ought to be if
you’re only going to live till Tuesday.”

As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.

“So dreadfully upsetting,” Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir
Lulworth Quayne.  “I’ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf and
fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best.”

“Laura always was inconsiderate,” said Sir Lulworth; “she was born during
Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies.”

“She had the maddest kind of ideas,” said Amanda; “do you know if there
was any insanity in her family?”

“Insanity?  No, I never heard of any.  Her father lives in West
Kensington, but I believe he’s sane on all other subjects.”

“She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter,” said
Amanda.

“One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in the
West,” said Sir Lulworth, “that one can hardly set them down as being
mad.  And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that I
should not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doing
in an after state.”

“You think she really might have passed into some animal form?” asked
Amanda.  She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily
from the standpoint of those around them.

Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air of
bereavement that Laura’s demise would have been insufficient, in itself,
to account for.

“Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed,” he exclaimed; “the very
four that were to go to the show on Friday.  One of them was dragged away
and eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I’ve been to
such trouble and expense over.  My best flower bed and my best fowls
singled out for destruction; it almost seems as if the brute that did the
deed had special knowledge how to be as devastating as possible in a
short space of time.”

“Was it a fox, do you think?” asked Amanda.

“Sounds more like a polecat,” said Sir Lulworth.

“No,” said Egbert, “there were marks of webbed feet all over the place,
and we followed the tracks down to the stream at the bottom of the
garden; evidently an otter.”

Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir Lulworth.

Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintend
the strengthening of the poultry yard defences.

“I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,” said
Amanda in a scandalised voice.

“It’s her own funeral, you know,” said Sir Lulworth; “it’s a nice point
in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortal
remains.”

Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to further lengths next
day; during the absence of the family at the funeral ceremony the
remaining survivors of the speckled Sussex were massacred.  The
marauder’s line of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flower
beds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower garden had also
suffered.

“I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the earliest possible
moment,” said Egbert savagely.

“On no account!  You can’t dream of such a thing!” exclaimed Amanda.  “I
mean, it wouldn’t do, so soon after a funeral in the house.”

“It’s a case of necessity,” said Egbert; “once an otter takes to that
sort of thing it won’t stop.”

“Perhaps it will go elsewhere now there are no more fowls left,”
suggested Amanda.

“One would think you wanted to shield the beast,” said Egbert.

“There’s been so little water in the stream lately,” objected Amanda; “it
seems hardly sporting to hunt an animal when it has so little chance of
taking refuge anywhere.”

“Good gracious!” fumed Egbert, “I’m not thinking about sport.  I want to
have the animal killed as soon as possible.”

Even Amanda’s opposition weakened when, during church time on the
following Sunday, the otter made its way into the house, raided half a
salmon from the larder and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persian
rug in Egbert’s studio.

“We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feet
before long,” said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particular
otter she felt that the possibility was not a remote one.

On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt Amanda spent a
solitary hour walking by the banks of the stream, making what she
imagined to be hound noises.  It was charitably supposed by those who
overheard her performance, that she was practising for farmyard
imitations at the forth-coming village entertainment.

It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who brought her news of
the day’s sport.

“Pity you weren’t out; we had quite a good day.  We found at once, in the
pool just below your garden.”

“Did you—kill?” asked Amanda.

“Rather.  A fine she-otter.  Your husband got rather badly bitten in
trying to ‘tail it.’  Poor beast, I felt quite sorry for it, it had such
a human look in its eyes when it was killed.  You’ll call me silly, but
do you know who the look reminded me of?  My dear woman, what is the
matter?”

When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from her attack of nervous
prostration Egbert took her to the Nile Valley to recuperate.  Change of
scene speedily brought about the desired recovery of health and mental
balance.  The escapades of an adventurous otter in search of a variation
of diet were viewed in their proper light.  Amanda’s normally placid
temperament reasserted itself.  Even a hurricane of shouted curses,
coming from her husband’s dressing-room, in her husband’s voice, but
hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she
made a leisurely toilet one evening in a Cairo hotel.

“What is the matter?  What has happened?” she asked in amused curiosity.

“The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath!  Wait
till I catch you, you little—”

“What little beast?” asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh;
Egbert’s language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outraged
feelings.

“A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy,” spluttered Egbert.

And now Amanda is seriously ill.




THE BOAR-PIG


“There is a back way on to the lawn,” said Mrs. Philidore Stossen to her
daughter, “through a small grass paddock and then through a walled fruit
garden full of gooseberry bushes.  I went all over the place last year
when the family were away.  There is a door that opens from the fruit
garden into a shrubbery, and once we emerge from there we can mingle with
the guests as if we had come in by the ordinary way.  It’s much safer
than going in by the front entrance and running the risk of coming bang
up against the hostess; that would be so awkward when she doesn’t happen
to have invited us.”

“Isn’t it a lot of trouble to take for getting admittance to a garden
party?”

“To a garden party, yes; to _the_ garden party of the season, certainly
not.  Every one of any consequence in the county, with the exception of
ourselves, has been asked to meet the Princess, and it would be far more
troublesome to invent explanations as to why we weren’t there than to get
in by a roundabout way.  I stopped Mrs. Cuvering in the road yesterday
and talked very pointedly about the Princess.  If she didn’t choose to
take the hint and send me an invitation it’s not my fault, is it?  Here
we are: we just cut across the grass and through that little gate into
the garden.”

Mrs. Stossen and her daughter, suitably arrayed for a county garden party
function with an infusion of Almanack de Gotha, sailed through the narrow
grass paddock and the ensuing gooseberry garden with the air of state
barges making an unofficial progress along a rural trout stream.  There
was a certain amount of furtive haste mingled with the stateliness of
their advance, as though hostile search-lights might be turned on them at
any moment; and, as a matter of fact, they were not unobserved.  Matilda
Cuvering, with the alert eyes of thirteen years old and the added
advantage of an exalted position in the branches of a medlar tree, had
enjoyed a good view of the Stossen flanking movement and had foreseen
exactly where it would break down in execution.

“They’ll find the door locked, and they’ll jolly well have to go back the
way they came,” she remarked to herself.  “Serves them right for not
coming in by the proper entrance.  What a pity Tarquin Superbus isn’t
loose in the paddock.  After all, as every one else is enjoying
themselves, I don’t see why Tarquin shouldn’t have an afternoon out.”

Matilda was of an age when thought is action; she slid down from the
branches of the medlar tree, and when she clambered back again Tarquin,
the huge white Yorkshire boar-pig, had exchanged the narrow limits of his
stye for the wider range of the grass paddock.  The discomfited Stossen
expedition, returning in recriminatory but otherwise orderly retreat from
the unyielding obstacle of the locked door, came to a sudden halt at the
gate dividing the paddock from the gooseberry garden.

“What a villainous-looking animal,” exclaimed Mrs. Stossen; “it wasn’t
there when we came in.”

“It’s there now, anyhow,” said her daughter.  “What on earth are we to
do?  I wish we had never come.”

The boar-pig had drawn nearer to the gate for a closer inspection of the
human intruders, and stood champing his jaws and blinking his small red
eyes in a manner that was doubtless intended to be disconcerting, and, as
far as the Stossens were concerned, thoroughly achieved that result.

“Shoo!  Hish!  Hish!  Shoo!” cried the ladies in chorus.

“If they think they’re going to drive him away by reciting lists of the
kings of Israel and Judah they’re laying themselves out for
disappointment,” observed Matilda from her seat in the medlar tree.  As
she made the observation aloud Mrs. Stossen became for the first time
aware of her presence.  A moment or two earlier she would have been
anything but pleased at the discovery that the garden was not as deserted
as it looked, but now she hailed the fact of the child’s presence on the
scene with absolute relief.

“Little girl, can you find some one to drive away—” she began hopefully.

“_Comment_?  _Comprends pas_,” was the response.

“Oh, are you French?  _Êtes vous française_?”

“_Pas de tous_.  _’Suis anglaise_.”

“Then why not talk English?  I want to know if—”

“_Permettez-moi expliquer_.  You see, I’m rather under a cloud,” said
Matilda.  “I’m staying with my aunt, and I was told I must behave
particularly well to-day, as lots of people were coming for a garden
party, and I was told to imitate Claude, that’s my young cousin, who
never does anything wrong except by accident, and then is always
apologetic about it.  It seems they thought I ate too much raspberry
trifle at lunch, and they said Claude never eats too much raspberry
trifle.  Well, Claude always goes to sleep for half an hour after lunch,
because he’s told to, and I waited till he was asleep, and tied his hands
and started forcible feeding with a whole bucketful of raspberry trifle
that they were keeping for the garden-party.  Lots of it went on to his
sailor-suit and some of it on to the bed, but a good deal went down
Claude’s throat, and they can’t say again that he has never been known to
eat too much raspberry trifle.  That is why I am not allowed to go to the
party, and as an additional punishment I must speak French all the
afternoon.  I’ve had to tell you all this in English, as there were words
like ‘forcible feeding’ that I didn’t know the French for; of course I
could have invented them, but if I had said _nourriture obligatoire_ you
wouldn’t have had the least idea what I was talking about.  _Mais
maintenant_, _nous parlons français_.”

“Oh, very well, _trés bien_,” said Mrs. Stossen reluctantly; in moments
of flurry such French as she knew was not under very good control.
“_Là_, _à l’autre côté de la porte_, _est un cochon_—”

“_Un cochon_? _Ah_, _le petit charmant_!” exclaimed Matilda with
enthusiasm.

“_Mais non_, _pas du tout petit_, _et pas du tout charmant_; _un bête
féroce_—”

“_Une bête_,” corrected Matilda; “a pig is masculine as long as you call
it a pig, but if you lose your temper with it and call it a ferocious
beast it becomes one of us at once.  French is a dreadfully unsexing
language.”

“For goodness’ sake let us talk English then,” said Mrs. Stossen.  “Is
there any way out of this garden except through the paddock where the pig
is?”

“I always go over the wall, by way of the plum tree,” said Matilda.

“Dressed as we are we could hardly do that,” said Mrs. Stossen; it was
difficult to imagine her doing it in any costume.

“Do you think you could go and get some one who would drive the pig
away?” asked Miss Stossen.

“I promised my aunt I would stay here till five o’clock; it’s not four
yet.”

“I am sure, under the circumstances, your aunt would permit—”

“My conscience would not permit,” said Matilda with cold dignity.

“We can’t stay here till five o’clock,” exclaimed Mrs. Stossen with
growing exasperation.

“Shall I recite to you to make the time pass quicker?” asked Matilda
obligingly.  “‘Belinda, the little Breadwinner,’ is considered my best
piece, or, perhaps, it ought to be something in French.  Henri Quatre’s
address to his soldiers is the only thing I really know in that
language.”

“If you will go and fetch some one to drive that animal away I will give
you something to buy yourself a nice present,” said Mrs. Stossen.

Matilda came several inches lower down the medlar tree.

“That is the most practical suggestion you have made yet for getting out
of the garden,” she remarked cheerfully; “Claude and I are collecting
money for the Children’s Fresh Air Fund, and we are seeing which of us
can collect the biggest sum.”

“I shall be very glad to contribute half a crown, very glad indeed,” said
Mrs. Stossen, digging that coin out of the depths of a receptacle which
formed a detached outwork of her toilet.

“Claude is a long way ahead of me at present,” continued Matilda, taking
no notice of the suggested offering; “you see, he’s only eleven, and has
golden hair, and those are enormous advantages when you’re on the
collecting job.  Only the other day a Russian lady gave him ten
shillings.  Russians understand the art of giving far better than we do.
I expect Claude will net quite twenty-five shillings this afternoon;
he’ll have the field to himself, and he’ll be able to do the pale,
fragile, not-long-for-this-world business to perfection after his
raspberry trifle experience.  Yes, he’ll be _quite_ two pounds ahead of
me by now.”

With much probing and plucking and many regretful murmurs the beleaguered
ladies managed to produce seven-and-sixpence between them.

“I am afraid this is all we’ve got,” said Mrs. Stossen.

Matilda showed no sign of coming down either to the earth or to their
figure.

“I could not do violence to my conscience for anything less than ten
shillings,” she announced stiffly.

Mother and daughter muttered certain remarks under their breath, in which
the word “beast” was prominent, and probably had no reference to Tarquin.

“I find I _have_ got another half-crown,” said Mrs. Stossen in a shaking
voice; “here you are.  Now please fetch some one quickly.”

Matilda slipped down from the tree, took possession of the donation, and
proceeded to pick up a handful of over-ripe medlars from the grass at her
feet.  Then she climbed over the gate and addressed herself
affectionately to the boar-pig.

“Come, Tarquin, dear old boy; you know you can’t resist medlars when
they’re rotten and squashy.”

Tarquin couldn’t.  By dint of throwing the fruit in front of him at
judicious intervals Matilda decoyed him back to his stye, while the
delivered captives hurried across the paddock.

“Well, I never!  The little minx!” exclaimed Mrs. Stossen when she was
safely on the high road.  “The animal wasn’t savage at all, and as for
the ten shillings, I don’t believe the Fresh Air Fund will see a penny of
it!”

There she was unwarrantably harsh in her judgment.  If you examine the
books of the fund you will find the acknowledgment: “Collected by Miss
Matilda Cuvering, 2s. 6d.”




THE BROGUE


The hunting season had come to an end, and the Mullets had not succeeded
in selling the Brogue.  There had been a kind of tradition in the family
for the past three or four years, a sort of fatalistic hope, that the
Brogue would find a purchaser before the hunting was over; but seasons
came and went without anything happening to justify such ill-founded
optimism.  The animal had been named Berserker in the earlier stages of
its career; it had been rechristened the Brogue later on, in recognition
of the fact that, once acquired, it was extremely difficult to get rid
of.  The unkinder wits of the neighbourhood had been known to suggest
that the first letter of its name was superfluous.  The Brogue had been
variously described in sale catalogues as a light-weight hunter, a lady’s
hack, and, more simply, but still with a touch of imagination, as a
useful brown gelding, standing 15.1.  Toby Mullet had ridden him for four
seasons with the West Wessex; you can ride almost any sort of horse with
the West Wessex as long as it is an animal that knows the country.  The
Brogue knew the country intimately, having personally created most of the
gaps that were to be met with in banks and hedges for many miles round.
His manners and characteristics were not ideal in the hunting field, but
he was probably rather safer to ride to hounds than he was as a hack on
country roads.  According to the Mullet family, he was not really
road-shy, but there were one or two objects of dislike that brought on
sudden attacks of what Toby called the swerving sickness.  Motors and
cycles he treated with tolerant disregard, but pigs, wheelbarrows, piles
of stones by the roadside, perambulators in a village street, gates
painted too aggressively white, and sometimes, but not always, the newer
kind of beehives, turned him aside from his tracks in vivid imitation of
the zigzag course of forked lightning.  If a pheasant rose noisily from
the other side of a hedgerow the Brogue would spring into the air at the
same moment, but this may have been due to a desire to be companionable.
The Mullet family contradicted the widely prevalent report that the horse
was a confirmed crib-biter.

It was about the third week in May that Mrs. Mullet, relict of the late
Sylvester Mullet, and mother of Toby and a bunch of daughters, assailed
Clovis Sangrail on the outskirts of the village with a breathless
catalogue of local happenings.

“You know our new neighbour, Mr. Penricarde?” she vociferated; “awfully
rich, owns tin mines in Cornwall, middle-aged and rather quiet.  He’s
taken the Red House on a long lease and spent a lot of money on
alterations and improvements.  Well, Toby’s sold him the Brogue!”

Clovis spent a moment or two in assimilating the astonishing news; then
he broke out into unstinted congratulation.  If he had belonged to a more
emotional race he would probably have kissed Mrs. Mullet.

“How wonderfully lucky to have pulled it off at last!  Now you can buy a
decent animal.  I’ve always said that Toby was clever.  Ever so many
congratulations.”

“Don’t congratulate me.  It’s the most unfortunate thing that could have
happened!” said Mrs. Mullet dramatically.

Clovis stared at her in amazement.

“Mr. Penricarde,” said Mrs. Mullet, sinking her voice to what she
imagined to be an impressive whisper, though it rather resembled a
hoarse, excited squeak, “Mr. Penricarde has just begun to pay attentions
to Jessie.  Slight at first, but now unmistakable.  I was a fool not to
have seen it sooner.  Yesterday, at the Rectory garden party, he asked
her what her favourite flowers were, and she told him carnations, and
to-day a whole stack of carnations has arrived, clove and malmaison and
lovely dark red ones, regular exhibition blooms, and a box of chocolates
that he must have got on purpose from London.  And he’s asked her to go
round the links with him to-morrow.  And now, just at this critical
moment, Toby has sold him that animal.  It’s a calamity!”

“But you’ve been trying to get the horse off your hands for years,” said
Clovis.

“I’ve got a houseful of daughters,” said Mrs. Mullet, “and I’ve been
trying—well, not to get them off my hands, of course, but a husband or
two wouldn’t be amiss among the lot of them; there are six of them, you
know.”

“I don’t know,” said Clovis, “I’ve never counted, but I expect you’re
right as to the number; mothers generally know these things.”

“And now,” continued Mrs. Mullet, in her tragic whisper, “when there’s a
rich husband-in-prospect imminent on the horizon Toby goes and sells him
that miserable animal.  It will probably kill him if he tries to ride it;
anyway it will kill any affection he might have felt towards any member
of our family.  What is to be done?  We can’t very well ask to have the
horse back; you see, we praised it up like anything when we thought there
was a chance of his buying it, and said it was just the animal to suit
him.”

“Couldn’t you steal it out of his stable and send it to grass at some
farm miles away?” suggested Clovis; “write ‘Votes for Women’ on the
stable door, and the thing would pass for a Suffragette outrage.  No one
who knew the horse could possibly suspect you of wanting to get it back
again.”

“Every newspaper in the country would ring with the affair,” said Mrs.
Mullet; “can’t you imagine the headline, ‘Valuable Hunter Stolen by
Suffragettes’?  The police would scour the countryside till they found
the animal.”

“Well, Jessie must try and get it back from Penricarde on the plea that
it’s an old favourite.  She can say it was only sold because the stable
had to be pulled down under the terms of an old repairing lease, and that
now it has been arranged that the stable is to stand for a couple of
years longer.”

“It sounds a queer proceeding to ask for a horse back when you’ve just
sold him,” said Mrs. Mullet, “but something must be done, and done at
once.  The man is not used to horses, and I believe I told him it was as
quiet as a lamb.  After all, lambs go kicking and twisting about as if
they were demented, don’t they?”

“The lamb has an entirely unmerited character for sedateness,” agreed
Clovis.

Jessie came back from the golf links next day in a state of mingled
elation and concern.

“It’s all right about the proposal,” she announced; “he came out with it
at the sixth hole.  I said I must have time to think it over.  I accepted
him at the seventh.”

“My dear,” said her mother, “I think a little more maidenly reserve and
hesitation would have been advisable, as you’ve known him so short a
time.  You might have waited till the ninth hole.”

“The seventh is a very long hole,” said Jessie; “besides, the tension was
putting us both off our game.  By the time we’d got to the ninth hole
we’d settled lots of things.  The honeymoon is to be spent in Corsica,
with perhaps a flying visit to Naples if we feel like it, and a week in
London to wind up with.  Two of his nieces are to be asked to be
bridesmaids, so with our lot there will be seven, which is rather a lucky
number.  You are to wear your pearl grey, with any amount of Honiton lace
jabbed into it.  By the way, he’s coming over this evening to ask your
consent to the whole affair.  So far all’s well, but about the Brogue
it’s a different matter.  I told him the legend about the stable, and how
keen we were about buying the horse back, but he seems equally keen on
keeping it.  He said he must have horse exercise now that he’s living in
the country, and he’s going to start riding to-morrow.  He’s ridden a few
times in the Row, on an animal that was accustomed to carry octogenarians
and people undergoing rest cures, and that’s about all his experience in
the saddle—oh, and he rode a pony once in Norfolk, when he was fifteen
and the pony twenty-four; and to-morrow he’s going to ride the Brogue!  I
shall be a widow before I’m married, and I do so want to see what
Corsica’s like; it looks so silly on the map.”

Clovis was sent for in haste, and the developments of the situation put
before him.

“Nobody can ride that animal with any safety,” said Mrs. Mullet, “except
Toby, and he knows by long experience what it is going to shy at, and
manages to swerve at the same time.”

“I did hint to Mr. Penricarde—to Vincent, I should say—that the Brogue
didn’t like white gates,” said Jessie.

“White gates!” exclaimed Mrs. Mullet; “did you mention what effect a pig
has on him?  He’ll have to go past Lockyer’s farm to get to the high
road, and there’s sure to be a pig or two grunting about in the lane.”

“He’s taken rather a dislike to turkeys lately,” said Toby.

“It’s obvious that Penricarde mustn’t be allowed to go out on that
animal,” said Clovis, “at least not till Jessie has married him, and
tired of him.  I tell you what: ask him to a picnic to-morrow, starting
at an early hour; he’s not the sort to go out for a ride before
breakfast.  The day after I’ll get the rector to drive him over to
Crowleigh before lunch, to see the new cottage hospital they’re building
there.  The Brogue will be standing idle in the stable and Toby can offer
to exercise it; then it can pick up a stone or something of the sort and
go conveniently lame.  If you hurry on the wedding a bit the lameness
fiction can be kept up till the ceremony is safely over.”

Mrs. Mullet belonged to an emotional race, and she kissed Clovis.

It was nobody’s fault that the rain came down in torrents the next
morning, making a picnic a fantastic impossibility.  It was also nobody’s
fault, but sheer ill-luck, that the weather cleared up sufficiently in
the afternoon to tempt Mr. Penricarde to make his first essay with the
Brogue.  They did not get as far as the pigs at Lockyer’s farm; the
rectory gate was painted a dull unobtrusive green, but it had been white
a year or two ago, and the Brogue never forgot that he had been in the
habit of making a violent curtsey, a back-pedal and a swerve at this
particular point of the road.  Subsequently, there being apparently no
further call on his services, he broke his way into the rectory orchard,
where he found a hen turkey in a coop; later visitors to the orchard
found the coop almost intact, but very little left of the turkey.

Mr. Penricarde, a little stunned and shaken, and suffering from a bruised
knee and some minor damages, good-naturedly ascribed the accident to his
own inexperience with horses and country roads, and allowed Jessie to
nurse him back into complete recovery and golf-fitness within something
less than a week.

In the list of wedding presents which the local newspaper published a
fortnight or so later appeared the following item:

“Brown saddle-horse, ‘The Brogue,’ bridegroom’s gift to bride.”

“Which shows,” said Toby Mullet, “that he knew nothing.”

“Or else,” said Clovis, “that he has a very pleasing wit.”




THE HEN


“Dora Bittholz is coming on Thursday,” said Mrs. Sangrail.

“This next Thursday?” asked Clovis

His mother nodded.

“You’ve rather done it, haven’t you?” he chuckled; “Jane Martlet has only
been here five days, and she never stays less than a fortnight, even when
she’s asked definitely for a week.  You’ll never get her out of the house
by Thursday.”

“Why should I?” asked Mrs. Sangrail; “she and Dora are good friends,
aren’t they?  They used to be, as far as I remember.”

“They used to be; that’s what makes them all the more bitter now.  Each
feels that she has nursed a viper in her bosom.  Nothing fans the flame
of human resentment so much as the discovery that one’s bosom has been
utilised as a snake sanatorium.”

“But what has happened?  Has some one been making mischief?”

“Not exactly,” said Clovis; “a hen came between them.”

“A hen?  What hen?”

“It was a bronze Leghorn or some such exotic breed, and Dora sold it to
Jane at a rather exotic price.  They both go in for prize poultry, you
know, and Jane thought she was going to get her money back in a large
family of pedigree chickens.  The bird turned out to be an abstainer from
the egg habit, and I’m told that the letters which passed between the two
women were a revelation as to how much invective could be got on to a
sheet of notepaper.”

“How ridiculous!” said Mrs. Sangrail.  “Couldn’t some of their friends
compose the quarrel?”

“People tried,” said Clovis, “but it must have been rather like composing
the storm music of the ‘Fliegende Holländer.’  Jane was willing to take
back some of her most libellous remarks if Dora would take back the hen,
but Dora said that would be owning herself in the wrong, and you know
she’d as soon think of owning slum property in Whitechapel as do that.”

“It’s a most awkward situation,” said Mrs. Sangrail.  “Do you suppose
they won’t speak to one another?”

“On the contrary, the difficulty will be to get them to leave off.  Their
remarks on each other’s conduct and character have hitherto been governed
by the fact that only four ounces of plain speaking can be sent through
the post for a penny.”

“I can’t put Dora off,” said Mrs. Sangrail.  “I’ve already postponed her
visit once, and nothing short of a miracle would make Jane leave before
her self-allotted fortnight is over.”

“Miracles are rather in my line,” said Clovis.  “I don’t pretend to be
very hopeful in this case but I’ll do my best.”

“As long as you don’t drag me into it—” stipulated his mother.

                                * * * * *

“Servants are a bit of a nuisance,” muttered Clovis, as he sat in the
smoking-room after lunch, talking fitfully to Jane Martlet in the
intervals of putting together the materials of a cocktail, which he had
irreverently patented under the name of an Ella Wheeler Wilcox.  It was
partly compounded of old brandy and partly of curaçoa; there were other
ingredients, but they were never indiscriminately revealed.

“Servants a nuisance!” exclaimed Jane, bounding into the topic with the
exuberant plunge of a hunter when it leaves the high road and feels turf
under its hoofs; “I should think they were!  The trouble I’ve had in
getting suited this year you would hardly believe.  But I don’t see what
you have to complain of—your mother is so wonderfully lucky in her
servants.  Sturridge, for instance—he’s been with you for years, and I’m
sure he’s a paragon as butlers go.”

“That’s just the trouble,” said Clovis.  “It’s when servants have been
with you for years that they become a really serious nuisance.  The ‘here
to-day and gone to-morrow’ sort don’t matter—you’ve simply got to replace
them; it’s the stayers and the paragons that are the real worry.”

“But if they give satisfaction—”

“That doesn’t prevent them from giving trouble.  Now, you’ve mentioned
Sturridge—it was Sturridge I was particularly thinking of when I made the
observation about servants being a nuisance.”

“The excellent Sturridge a nuisance!  I can’t believe it.”

“I know he’s excellent, and we just couldn’t get along without him; he’s
the one reliable element in this rather haphazard household.  But his
very orderliness has had an effect on him.  Have you ever considered what
it must be like to go on unceasingly doing the correct thing in the
correct manner in the same surroundings for the greater part of a
lifetime?  To know and ordain and superintend exactly what silver and
glass and table linen shall be used and set out on what occasions, to
have cellar and pantry and plate-cupboard under a minutely devised and
undeviating administration, to be noiseless, impalpable, omnipresent,
and, as far as your own department is concerned, omniscient?”

“I should go mad,” said Jane with conviction.

“Exactly,” said Clovis thoughtfully, swallowing his completed Ella
Wheeler Wilcox.

“But Sturridge hasn’t gone mad,” said Jane with a flutter of inquiry in
her voice.

“On most points he’s thoroughly sane and reliable,” said Clovis, “but at
times he is subject to the most obstinate delusions, and on those
occasions he becomes not merely a nuisance but a decided embarrassment.”

“What sort of delusions?”

“Unfortunately they usually centre round one of the guests of the house
party, and that is where the awkwardness comes in.  For instance, he took
it into his head that Matilda Sheringham was the Prophet Elijah, and as
all that he remembered about Elijah’s history was the episode of the
ravens in the wilderness he absolutely declined to interfere with what he
imagined to be Matilda’s private catering arrangements, wouldn’t allow
any tea to be sent up to her in the morning, and if he was waiting at
table he passed her over altogether in handing round the dishes.”

“How very unpleasant.  Whatever did you do about it?”

“Oh, Matilda got fed, after a fashion, but it was judged to be best for
her to cut her visit short.  It was really the only thing to be done,”
said Clovis with some emphasis.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” said Jane, “I should have humoured him in
some way.  I certainly shouldn’t have gone away.”

Clovis frowned.

“It is not always wise to humour people when they get these ideas into
their heads.  There’s no knowing to what lengths they may go if you
encourage them.”

“You don’t mean to say he might be dangerous, do you?” asked Jane with
some anxiety.

“One can never be certain,” said Clovis; “now and then he gets some idea
about a guest which might take an unfortunate turn.  That is precisely
what is worrying me at the present moment.”

“What, has he taken a fancy about some one here now?” asked Jane
excitedly; “how thrilling!  Do tell me who it is.”

“You,” said Clovis briefly.

“Me?”

Clovis nodded.

“Who on earth does he think I am?”

“Queen Anne,” was the unexpected answer.

“Queen Anne!  What an idea.  But, anyhow, there’s nothing dangerous about
her; she’s such a colourless personality.”

“What does posterity chiefly say about Queen Anne?” asked Clovis rather
sternly.

“The only thing that I can remember about her,” said Jane, “is the saying
‘Queen Anne’s dead.’”

“Exactly,” said Clovis, staring at the glass that had held the Ella
Wheeler Wilcox, “dead.”

“Do you mean he takes me for the ghost of Queen Anne?” asked Jane.

“Ghost?  Dear no.  No one ever heard of a ghost that came down to
breakfast and ate kidneys and toast and honey with a healthy appetite.
No, it’s the fact of you being so very much alive and flourishing that
perplexes and annoys him.  All his life he has been accustomed to look on
Queen Anne as the personification of everything that is dead and done
with, ‘as dead as Queen Anne,’ you know; and now he has to fill your
glass at lunch and dinner and listen to your accounts of the gay time you
had at the Dublin Horse Show, and naturally he feels that something’s
very wrong with you.”

“But he wouldn’t be downright hostile to me on that account, would he?”
Jane asked anxiously.

“I didn’t get really alarmed about it till lunch to-day,” said Clovis; “I
caught him glowering at you with a very sinister look and muttering:
‘Ought to be dead long ago, she ought, and some one should see to it.’
That’s why I mentioned the matter to you.”

“This is awful,” said Jane; “your mother must be told about it at once.”

“My mother mustn’t hear a word about it,” said Clovis earnestly; “it
would upset her dreadfully.  She relies on Sturridge for everything.”

“But he might kill me at any moment,” protested Jane.

“Not at any moment; he’s busy with the silver all the afternoon.”

“You’ll have to keep a sharp look-out all the time and be on your guard
to frustrate any murderous attack,” said Jane, adding in a tone of weak
obstinacy: “It’s a dreadful situation to be in, with a mad butler
dangling over you like the sword of What’s-his-name, but I’m certainly
not going to cut my visit short.”

Clovis swore horribly under his breath; the miracle was an obvious
misfire.

It was in the hall the next morning after a late breakfast that Clovis
had his final inspiration as he stood engaged in coaxing rust spots from
an old putter.

“Where is Miss Martlet?” he asked the butler, who was at that moment
crossing the hall.

“Writing letters in the morning-room, sir,” said Sturridge, announcing a
fact of which his questioner was already aware.

“She wants to copy the inscription on that old basket-hilted sabre,” said
Clovis, pointing to a venerable weapon hanging on the wall.  “I wish
you’d take it to her; my hands are all over oil.  Take it without the
sheath, it will be less trouble.”

The butler drew the blade, still keen and bright in its well-cared for
old age, and carried it into the morning-room.  There was a door near the
writing-table leading to a back stairway; Jane vanished through it with
such lightning rapidity that the butler doubted whether she had seen him
come in.  Half an hour later Clovis was driving her and her
hastily-packed luggage to the station.

“Mother will be awfully vexed when she comes back from her ride and finds
you have gone,” he observed to the departing guest, “but I’ll make up
some story about an urgent wire having called you away.  It wouldn’t do
to alarm her unnecessarily about Sturridge.”

Jane sniffed slightly at Clovis’ ideas of unnecessary alarm, and was
almost rude to the young man who came round with thoughtful inquiries as
to luncheon-baskets.

The miracle lost some of its usefulness from the fact that Dora wrote the
same day postponing the date of her visit, but, at any rate, Clovis holds
the record as the only human being who ever hustled Jane Martlet out of
the time-table of her migrations.




THE OPEN WINDOW


“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed
young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly
flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that
was to come.  Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal
visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping
the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

“I know how it will be,” his sister had said when he was preparing to
migrate to this rural retreat; “you will bury yourself down there and not
speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from
moping.  I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people
I know there.  Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice.”

Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was
presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice
division.

“Do you know many of the people round here?” asked the niece, when she
judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

“Hardly a soul,” said Framton.  “My sister was staying here, at the
rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of
introduction to some of the people here.”

He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.

“Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?” pursued the
self-possessed young lady.

“Only her name and address,” admitted the caller.  He was wondering
whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state.  An
undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine
habitation.

“Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,” said the child; “that
would be since your sister’s time.”

“Her tragedy?” asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot
tragedies seemed out of place.

“You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October
afternoon,” said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened
on to a lawn.

“It is quite warm for the time of the year,” said Framton; “but has that
window got anything to do with the tragedy?”

“Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her
two young brothers went off for their day’s shooting.  They never came
back.  In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they
were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog.  It had been that
dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other years
gave way suddenly without warning.  Their bodies were never recovered.
That was the dreadful part of it.”  Here the child’s voice lost its
self-possessed note and became falteringly human.  “Poor aunt always
thinks that they will come back some day, they and the little brown
spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that window just as they
used to do.  That is why the window is kept open every evening till it is
quite dusk.  Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they went out, her
husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her
youngest brother, singing ‘Bertie, why do you bound?’ as he always did to
tease her, because she said it got on her nerves.  Do you know, sometimes
on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that
they will all walk in through that window—”

She broke off with a little shudder.  It was a relief to Framton when the
aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in
making her appearance.

“I hope Vera has been amusing you?” she said.

“She has been very interesting,” said Framton.

“I hope you don’t mind the open window,” said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; “my
husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always
come in this way.  They’ve been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so
they’ll make a fine mess over my poor carpets.  So like you men-folk,
isn’t it?”

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds,
and the prospects for duck in the winter.  To Framton it was all purely
horrible.  He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to
turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his
hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes
were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond.
It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his
visit on this tragic anniversary.

“The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental
excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical
exercise,” announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread
delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the
least detail of one’s ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure.
“On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement,” he continued.

“No?” said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the
last moment.  Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention—but not
to what Framton was saying.

“Here they are at last!” she cried.  “Just in time for tea, and don’t
they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!”

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look
intended to convey sympathetic comprehension.  The child was staring out
through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes.  In a chill shock
of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same
direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn
towards the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of
them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders.
A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels.  Noiselessly they neared
the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the dusk: “I
said, Bertie, why do you bound?”

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the
gravel-drive, and the front gate were dimly-noted stages in his headlong
retreat.  A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to
avoid an imminent collision.

“Here we are, my dear,” said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming
in through the window; “fairly muddy, but most of it’s dry.  Who was that
who bolted out as we came up?”

“A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel,” said Mrs. Sappleton; “could
only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye
or apology when you arrived.  One would think he had seen a ghost.”

“I expect it was the spaniel,” said the niece calmly; “he told me he had
a horror of dogs.  He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the
banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night
in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming
just above him.  Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.”

Romance at short notice was her speciality.




THE TREASURE SHIP


The great galleon lay in semi-retirement under the sand and weed and
water of the northern bay where the fortune of war and weather had long
ago ensconced it.  Three and a quarter centuries had passed since the day
when it had taken the high seas as an important unit of a fighting
squadron—precisely which squadron the learned were not agreed.  The
galleon had brought nothing into the world, but it had, according to
tradition and report, taken much out of it.  But how much?  There again
the learned were in disagreement.  Some were as generous in their
estimate as an income-tax assessor, others applied a species of higher
criticism to the submerged treasure chests, and debased their contents to
the currency of goblin gold.  Of the former school was Lulu, Duchess of
Dulverton.

The Duchess was not only a believer in the existence of a sunken treasure
of alluring proportions; she also believed that she knew of a method by
which the said treasure might be precisely located and cheaply
disembedded.  An aunt on her mother’s side of the family had been Maid of
Honour at the Court of Monaco, and had taken a respectful interest in the
deep-sea researches in which the Throne of that country, impatient
perhaps of its terrestrial restrictions, was wont to immerse itself.  It
was through the instrumentality of this relative that the Duchess learned
of an invention, perfected and very nearly patented by a Monegaskan
savant, by means of which the home-life of the Mediterranean sardine
might be studied at a depth of many fathoms in a cold white light of more
than ball-room brilliancy.  Implicated in this invention (and, in the
Duchess’s eyes, the most attractive part of it) was an electric suction
dredge, specially designed for dragging to the surface such objects of
interest and value as might be found in the more accessible levels of the
ocean-bed.  The rights of the invention were to be acquired for a matter
of eighteen hundred francs, and the apparatus for a few thousand more.
The Duchess of Dulverton was rich, as the world counted wealth; she
nursed the hope, of being one day rich at her own computation.  Companies
had been formed and efforts had been made again and again during the
course of three centuries to probe for the alleged treasures of the
interesting galleon; with the aid of this invention she considered that
she might go to work on the wreck privately and independently.  After
all, one of her ancestors on her mother’s side was descended from Medina
Sidonia, so she was of opinion that she had as much right to the treasure
as anyone.  She acquired the invention and bought the apparatus.

Among other family ties and encumbrances, Lulu possessed a nephew, Vasco
Honiton, a young gentleman who was blessed with a small income and a
large circle of relatives, and lived impartially and precariously on
both.  The name Vasco had been given him possibly in the hope that he
might live up to its adventurous tradition, but he limited himself
strictly to the home industry of adventurer, preferring to exploit the
assured rather than to explore the unknown.  Lulu’s intercourse with him
had been restricted of recent years to the negative processes of being
out of town when he called on her, and short of money when he wrote to
her.  Now, however, she bethought herself of his eminent suitability for
the direction of a treasure-seeking experiment; if anyone could extract
gold from an unpromising situation it would certainly be Vasco—of course,
under the necessary safeguards in the way of supervision.  Where money
was in question Vasco’s conscience was liable to fits of obstinate
silence.

Somewhere on the west coast of Ireland the Dulverton property included a
few acres of shingle, rock, and heather, too barren to support even an
agrarian outrage, but embracing a small and fairly deep bay where the
lobster yield was good in most seasons.  There was a bleak little house
on the property, and for those who liked lobsters and solitude, and were
able to accept an Irish cook’s ideas as to what might be perpetrated in
the name of mayonnaise, Innisgluther was a tolerable exile during the
summer months.  Lulu seldom went there herself, but she lent the house
lavishly to friends and relations.  She put it now at Vasco’s disposal.

“It will be the very place to practise and experiment with the salvage
apparatus,” she said; “the bay is quite deep in places, and you will be
able to test everything thoroughly before starting on the treasure hunt.”

In less than three weeks Vasco turned up in town to report progress.

“The apparatus works beautifully,” he informed his aunt; “the deeper one
got the clearer everything grew.  We found something in the way of a
sunken wreck to operate on, too!”

“A wreck in Innisgluther Bay!” exclaimed Lulu.

“A submerged motor-boat, the _Sub-Rosa_,” said Vasco.

“No! really?” said Lulu; “poor Billy Yuttley’s boat.  I remember it went
down somewhere off that coast some three years ago.  His body was washed
ashore at the Point.  People said at the time that the boat was capsized
intentionally—a case of suicide, you know.  People always say that sort
of thing when anything tragic happens.”

“In this case they were right,” said Vasco.

“What do you mean?” asked the Duchess hurriedly.  “What makes you think
so?”

“I know,” said Vasco simply.

“Know?  How can you know?  How can anyone know?  The thing happened three
years ago.”

“In a locker of the _Sub-Rosa_ I found a water-tight strong-box.  It
contained papers.”  Vasco paused with dramatic effect and searched for a
moment in the inner breast-pocket of his coat.  He drew out a folded slip
of paper.  The Duchess snatched at it in almost indecent haste and moved
appreciably nearer the fireplace.

“Was this in the _Sub-Rosa’s_ strong-box?” she asked.

“Oh no,” said Vasco carelessly, “that is a list of the well-known people
who would be involved in a very disagreeable scandal if the _Sub-Rosa’s_
papers were made public.  I’ve put you at the head of it, otherwise it
follows alphabetical order.”

The Duchess gazed helplessly at the string of names, which seemed for the
moment to include nearly every one she knew.  As a matter of fact, her
own name at the head of the list exercised an almost paralysing effect on
her thinking faculties.

“Of course you have destroyed the papers?” she asked, when she had
somewhat recovered herself.  She was conscious that she made the remark
with an entire lack of conviction.

Vasco shook his head.

“But you should have,” said Lulu angrily; “if, as you say, they are
highly compromising—”

“Oh, they are, I assure you of that,” interposed the young man.

“Then you should put them out of harm’s way at once.  Supposing anything
should leak out, think of all these poor, unfortunate people who would be
involved in the disclosures,” and Lulu tapped the list with an agitated
gesture.

“Unfortunate, perhaps, but not poor,” corrected Vasco; “if you read the
list carefully you’ll notice that I haven’t troubled to include anyone
whose financial standing isn’t above question.”

Lulu glared at her nephew for some moments in silence.  Then she asked
hoarsely: “What are you going to do?”

“Nothing—for the remainder of my life,” he answered meaningly.  “A little
hunting, perhaps,” he continued, “and I shall have a villa at Florence.
The Villa Sub-Rosa would sound rather quaint and picturesque, don’t you
think, and quite a lot of people would be able to attach a meaning to the
name.  And I suppose I must have a hobby; I shall probably collect
Raeburns.”

Lulu’s relative, who lived at the Court of Monaco, got quite a snappish
answer when she wrote recommending some further invention in the realm of
marine research.




THE COBWEB


The farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as a matter of accident
or haphazard choice; yet its situation might have been planned by a
master-strategist in farmhouse architecture.  Dairy and poultry-yard, and
herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed to lead by easy
access into its wide flagged haven, where there was room for everything
and where muddy boots left traces that were easily swept away.  And yet,
for all that it stood so well in the centre of human bustle, its long,
latticed window, with the wide window-seat, built into an embrasure
beyond the huge fireplace, looked out on a wild spreading view of hill
and heather and wooded combe.  The window nook made almost a little room
in itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as situation and
capabilities went.  Young Mrs. Ladbruk, whose husband had just come into
the farm by way of inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner,
and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains
and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china.  The musty farm
parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within
high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either to
comfort or decoration.

“When we are more settled I shall work wonders in the way of making the
kitchen habitable,” said the young woman to her occasional visitors.
There was an unspoken wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed
as well as unspoken.  Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; jointly
with her husband she might have her say, and to a certain extent her way,
in ordering its affairs.  But she was not mistress of the kitchen.

On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company with chipped
sauce-boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters, and paid bills, rested a worn
and ragged Bible, on whose front page was the record, in faded ink, of a
baptism dated ninety-four years ago.  “Martha Crale” was the name written
on that yellow page.  The yellow, wrinkled old dame who hobbled and
muttered about the kitchen, looking like a dead autumn leaf which the
winter winds still pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy.  For longer than
anyone could remember she had pattered to and fro between oven and
wash-house and dairy, and out to chicken-run and garden, grumbling and
muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly.  Emma Ladbruk, of whose
coming she took as little notice as she would of a bee wandering in at a
window on a summer’s day, used at first to watch her with a kind of
frightened curiosity.  She was so old and so much a part of the place, it
was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing.  Old Shep, the
white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for his time to die, seemed
almost more human than the withered, dried-up old woman.  He had been a
riotous, roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was already
a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a blind, breathing carcase,
nothing more, and she still worked with frail energy, still swept and
baked and washed, fetched and carried.  If there were something in these
wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think
to herself, what generations of ghost-dogs there must be out on those
hills, that Martha had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last
good-bye word to in that old kitchen.  And what memories she must have of
human generations that had passed away in her time.  It was difficult for
anyone, let alone a stranger like Emma, to get her to talk of the days
that had been; her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose feeding-time
was overdue, and the various little faults and lapses that chequer a
farmhouse routine.  Now and again, when election time came round, she
would unstore her recollections of the old names round which the fight
had waged in the days gone by.  There had been a Palmerston, that had
been a name down Tiverton way; Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow
flies, but to Martha it was almost a foreign country.  Later there had
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names that she had
forgotten; the names changed, but it was always Libruls and Toories,
Yellows and Blues.  And they always quarrelled and shouted as to who was
right and who was wrong.  The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face—she had seen his picture on the walls.
She had seen it on the floor too, with a rotten apple squashed over it,
for the farm had changed its politics from time to time.  Martha had
never been on one side or the other; none of “they” had ever done the
farm a stroke of good.  Such was her sweeping verdict, given with all a
peasant’s distrust of the outside world.

When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat faded away, Emma Ladbruk
was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman.
She was a quaint old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part
and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once pathetic and
picturesque—but she was dreadfully in the way.  Emma had come to the farm
full of plans for little reforms and improvements, in part the result of
training in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of her own
ideas and fancies.  Reforms in the kitchen region, if those deaf old ears
could have been induced to give them even a hearing, would have met with
short shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region spread over
the zone of dairy and market business and half the work of the household.
Emma, with the latest science of dead-poultry dressing at her
finger-tips, sat by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed the
chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for nearly
fourscore years—all leg and no breast.  And the hundred hints anent
effective cleaning and labour-lightening and the things that make for
wholesomeness which the young woman was ready to impart or to put into
action dropped away into nothingness before that wan, muttering,
unheeding presence.  Above all, the coveted window corner, that was to be
a dainty, cheerful oasis in the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and
lumbered with a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal
authority, would not have dared or cared to displace; over them seemed to
be spun the protection of something that was like a human cobweb.
Decidedly Martha was in the way.  It would have been an unworthy meanness
to have wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened by a few
paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was conscious that the wish
was there, disowned though it might be, lurking at the back of her mind.

She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with a qualm of
self-reproach one day when she came into the kitchen and found an
unaccustomed state of things in that usually busy quarter.  Old Martha
was not working.  A basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out
in the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest of overdue
feeding-time.  But Martha sat huddled in a shrunken bunch on the window
seat, looking out with her dim old eyes as though she saw something
stranger than the autumn landscape.

“Is anything the matter, Martha?” asked the young woman.

“’Tis death, ’tis death a-coming,” answered the quavering voice; “I knew
’twere coming.  I knew it.  ’Tweren’t for nothing that old Shep’s been
howling all morning.  An’ last night I heard the screech-owl give the
death-cry, and there were something white as run across the yard
yesterday; ’tweren’t a cat nor a stoat, ’twere something.  The fowls knew
’twere something; they all drew off to one side.  Ay, there’s been
warnings.  I knew it were a-coming.”

The young woman’s eyes clouded with pity.  The old thing sitting there so
white and shrunken had once been a merry, noisy child, playing about in
lanes and hay-lofts and farmhouse garrets; that had been eighty odd years
ago, and now she was just a frail old body cowering under the approaching
chill of the death that was coming at last to take her.  It was not
probable that much could be done for her, but Emma hastened away to get
assistance and counsel.  Her husband, she knew, was down at a
tree-felling some little distance off, but she might find some other
intelligent soul who knew the old woman better than she did.  The farm,
she soon found out, had that faculty common to farmyards of swallowing up
and losing its human population.  The poultry followed her in interested
fashion, and swine grunted interrogations at her from behind the bars of
their styes, but barnyard and rickyard, orchard and stables and dairy,
gave no reward to her search.  Then, as she retraced her steps towards
the kitchen, she came suddenly on her cousin, young Mr. Jim, as every one
called him, who divided his time between amateur horse-dealing,
rabbit-shooting, and flirting with the farm maids.

“I’m afraid old Martha is dying,” said Emma.  Jim was not the sort of
person to whom one had to break news gently.

“Nonsense,” he said; “Martha means to live to a hundred.  She told me so,
and she’ll do it.”

“She may be actually dying at this moment, or it may just be the
beginning of the break-up,” persisted Emma, with a feeling of contempt
for the slowness and dulness of the young man.

A grin spread over his good-natured features.

“It don’t look like it,” he said, nodding towards the yard.  Emma turned
to catch the meaning of his remark.  Old Martha stood in the middle of a
mob of poultry scattering handfuls of grain around her.  The turkey-cock,
with the bronzed sheen of his feathers and the purple-red of his wattles,
the gamecock, with the glowing metallic lustre of his Eastern plumage,
the hens, with their ochres and buffs and umbers and their scarlet combs,
and the drakes, with their bottle-green heads, made a medley of rich
colour, in the centre of which the old woman looked like a withered stalk
standing amid a riotous growth of gaily-hued flowers.  But she threw the
grain deftly amid the wilderness of beaks, and her quavering voice
carried as far as the two people who were watching her.  She was still
harping on the theme of death coming to the farm.

“I knew ’twere a-coming.  There’s been signs an’ warnings.”

“Who’s dead, then, old Mother?” called out the young man.

“’Tis young Mister Ladbruk,” she shrilled back; “they’ve just a-carried
his body in.  Run out of the way of a tree that was coming down an’ ran
hisself on to an iron post.  Dead when they picked un up.  Aye, I knew
’twere coming.”

And she turned to fling a handful of barley at a belated group of
guinea-fowl that came racing toward her.

                                * * * * *

The farm was a family property, and passed to the rabbit-shooting cousin
as the next-of-kin.  Emma Ladbruk drifted out of its history as a bee
that had wandered in at an open window might flit its way out again.  On
a cold grey morning she stood waiting, with her boxes already stowed in
the farm cart, till the last of the market produce should be ready, for
the train she was to catch was of less importance than the chickens and
butter and eggs that were to be offered for sale.  From where she stood
she could see an angle of the long latticed window that was to have been
cosy with curtains and gay with bowls of flowers.  Into her mind came the
thought that for months, perhaps for years, long after she had been
utterly forgotten, a white, unheeding face would be seen peering out
through those latticed panes, and a weak muttering voice would be heard
quavering up and down those flagged passages.  She made her way to a
narrow barred casement that opened into the farm larder.  Old Martha was
standing at a table trussing a pair of chickens for the market stall as
she had trussed them for nearly fourscore years.




THE LULL


“I’ve asked Latimer Springfield to spend Sunday with us and stop the
night,” announced Mrs. Durmot at the breakfast-table.

“I thought he was in the throes of an election,” remarked her husband.

“Exactly; the poll is on Wednesday, and the poor man will have worked
himself to a shadow by that time.  Imagine what electioneering must be
like in this awful soaking rain, going along slushy country roads and
speaking to damp audiences in draughty schoolrooms, day after day for a
fortnight.  He’ll have to put in an appearance at some place of worship
on Sunday morning, and he can come to us immediately afterwards and have
a thorough respite from everything connected with politics.  I won’t let
him even think of them.  I’ve had the picture of Cromwell dissolving the
Long Parliament taken down from the staircase, and even the portrait of
Lord Rosebery’s ‘Ladas’ removed from the smoking-room.  And Vera,” added
Mrs. Durmot, turning to her sixteen-year-old niece, “be careful what
colour ribbon you wear in your hair; not blue or yellow on any account;
those are the rival party colours, and emerald green or orange would be
almost as bad, with this Home Rule business to the fore.”

“On state occasions I always wear a black ribbon in my hair,” said Vera
with crushing dignity.

Latimer Springfield was a rather cheerless, oldish young man, who went
into politics somewhat in the spirit in which other people might go into
half-mourning.  Without being an enthusiast, however, he was a fairly
strenuous plodder, and Mrs. Durmot had been reasonably near the mark in
asserting that he was working at high pressure over this election.  The
restful lull which his hostess enforced on him was decidedly welcome, and
yet the nervous excitement of the contest had too great a hold on him to
be totally banished.

“I know he’s going to sit up half the night working up points for his
final speeches,” said Mrs. Durmot regretfully; “however, we’ve kept
politics at arm’s length all the afternoon and evening.  More than that
we cannot do.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Vera, but she said it to herself.

Latimer had scarcely shut his bedroom door before he was immersed in a
sheaf of notes and pamphlets, while a fountain-pen and pocket-book were
brought into play for the due marshalling of useful facts and discreet
fictions.  He had been at work for perhaps thirty-five minutes, and the
house was seemingly consecrated to the healthy slumber of country life,
when a stifled squealing and scuffling in the passage was followed by a
loud tap at his door.  Before he had time to answer, a much-encumbered
Vera burst into the room with the question; “I say, can I leave these
here?”

“These” were a small black pig and a lusty specimen of black-red
gamecock.

Latimer was moderately fond of animals, and particularly interested in
small livestock rearing from the economic point of view; in fact, one of
the pamphlets on which he was at that moment engaged warmly advocated the
further development of the pig and poultry industry in our rural
districts; but he was pardonably unwilling to share even a commodious
bedroom with samples of henroost and stye products.

“Wouldn’t they be happier somewhere outside?” he asked, tactfully
expressing his own preference in the matter in an apparent solicitude for
theirs.

“There is no outside,” said Vera impressively, “nothing but a waste of
dark, swirling waters.  The reservoir at Brinkley has burst.”

“I didn’t know there was a reservoir at Brinkley,” said Latimer.

“Well, there isn’t now, it’s jolly well all over the place, and as we
stand particularly low we’re the centre of an inland sea just at present.
You see the river has overflowed its banks as well.”

“Good gracious!  Have any lives been lost?”

“Heaps, I should say.  The second housemaid has already identified three
bodies that have floated past the billiard-room window as being the young
man she’s engaged to.  Either she’s engaged to a large assortment of the
population round here or else she’s very careless at identification.  Of
course it may be the same body coming round again and again in a swirl; I
hadn’t thought of that.”

“But we ought to go out and do rescue work, oughtn’t we?” said Latimer,
with the instinct of a Parliamentary candidate for getting into the local
limelight.

“We can’t,” said Vera decidedly, “we haven’t any boats and we’re cut off
by a raging torrent from any human habitation.  My aunt particularly
hoped you would keep to your room and not add to the confusion, but she
thought it would be so kind of you if you would take in Hartlepool’s
Wonder, the gamecock, you know, for the night.  You see, there are eight
other gamecocks, and they fight like furies if they get together, so
we’re putting one in each bedroom.  The fowl-houses are all flooded out,
you know.  And then I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking in this
wee piggie; he’s rather a little love, but he has a vile temper.  He gets
that from his mother—not that I like to say things against her when she’s
lying dead and drowned in her stye, poor thing.  What he really wants is
a man’s firm hand to keep him in order.  I’d try and grapple with him
myself, only I’ve got my chow in my room, you know, and he goes for pigs
wherever he finds them.”

“Couldn’t the pig go in the bathroom?” asked Latimer faintly, wishing
that he had taken up as determined a stand on the subject of bedroom
swine as the chow had.

“The bathroom?” Vera laughed shrilly.  “It’ll be full of Boy Scouts till
morning if the hot water holds out.”

“Boy Scouts?”

“Yes, thirty of them came to rescue us while the water was only
waist-high; then it rose another three feet or so and we had to rescue
them.  We’re giving them hot baths in batches and drying their clothes in
the hot-air cupboard, but, of course, drenched clothes don’t dry in a
minute, and the corridor and staircase are beginning to look like a bit
of coast scenery by Tuke.  Two of the boys are wearing your Melton
overcoat; I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s a new overcoat,” said Latimer, with every indication of minding
dreadfully.

“You’ll take every care of Hartlepool’s Wonder, won’t you?” said Vera.
“His mother took three firsts at Birmingham, and he was second in the
cockerel class last year at Gloucester.  He’ll probably roost on the rail
at the bottom of your bed.  I wonder if he’d feel more at home if some of
his wives were up here with him?  The hens are all in the pantry, and I
think I could pick out Hartlepool Helen; she’s his favourite.”

Latimer showed a belated firmness on the subject of Hartlepool Helen, and
Vera withdrew without pressing the point, having first settled the
gamecock on his extemporised perch and taken an affectionate farewell of
the pigling.  Latimer undressed and got into bed with all due speed,
judging that the pig would abate its inquisitorial restlessness once the
light was turned out.  As a substitute for a cosy, straw-bedded sty the
room offered, at first inspection, few attractions, but the disconsolate
animal suddenly discovered an appliance in which the most luxuriously
contrived piggeries were notably deficient.  The sharp edge of the
underneath part of the bed was pitched at exactly the right elevation to
permit the pigling to scrape himself ecstatically backwards and forwards,
with an artistic humping of the back at the crucial moment and an
accompanying gurgle of long-drawn delight.  The gamecock, who may have
fancied that he was being rocked in the branches of a pine-tree, bore the
motion with greater fortitude than Latimer was able to command.  A series
of slaps directed at the pig’s body were accepted more as an additional
and pleasing irritant than as a criticism of conduct or a hint to desist;
evidently something more than a man’s firm hand was needed to deal with
the case.  Latimer slipped out of bed in search of a weapon of
dissuasion.  There was sufficient light in the room to enable the pig to
detect this manœuvre, and the vile temper, inherited from the drowned
mother, found full play.  Latimer bounded back into bed, and his
conqueror, after a few threatening snorts and champings of its jaws,
resumed its massage operations with renewed zeal.  During the long
wakeful hours which ensued Latimer tried to distract his mind from his
own immediate troubles by dwelling with decent sympathy on the second
housemaid’s bereavement, but he found himself more often wondering how
many Boy Scouts were sharing his Melton overcoat.  The rôle of Saint
Martin malgré lui was not one which appealed to him.

Towards dawn the pigling fell into a happy slumber, and Latimer might
have followed its example, but at about the same time Stupor Hartlepooli
gave a rousing crow, clattered down to the floor and forthwith commenced
a spirited combat with his reflection in the wardrobe mirror.
Remembering that the bird was more or less under his care Latimer
performed Hague Tribunal offices by draping a bath-towel over the
provocative mirror, but the ensuing peace was local and short-lived.  The
deflected energies of the gamecock found new outlet in a sudden and
sustained attack on the sleeping and temporarily inoffensive pigling, and
the duel which followed was desperate and embittered beyond any
possibility of effective intervention.  The feathered combatant had the
advantage of being able, when hard pressed, to take refuge on the bed,
and freely availed himself of this circumstance; the pigling never quite
succeeded in hurling himself on to the same eminence, but it was not from
want of trying.

Neither side could claim any decisive success, and the struggle had been
practically fought to a standstill by the time that the maid appeared
with the early morning tea.

“Lor, sir,” she exclaimed in undisguised astonishment, “do you want those
animals in your room?”

_Want_!

The pigling, as though aware that it might have outstayed its welcome,
dashed out at the door, and the gamecock followed it at a more dignified
pace.

“If Miss Vera’s dog sees that pig—!” exclaimed the maid, and hurried off
to avert such a catastrophe.

A cold suspicion was stealing over Latimer’s mind; he went to the window
and drew up the blind.  A light, drizzling rain was falling, but there
was not the faintest trace of any inundation.

Some half-hour later he met Vera on the way to the breakfast-room.

“I should not like to think of you as a deliberate liar,” he observed
coldly, “but one occasionally has to do things one does not like.”

“At any rate I kept your mind from dwelling on politics all the night,”
said Vera.

Which was, of course, perfectly true.




THE UNKINDEST BLOW


The season of strikes seemed to have run itself to a standstill.  Almost
every trade and industry and calling in which a dislocation could
possibly be engineered had indulged in that luxury.  The last and least
successful convulsion had been the strike of the World’s Union of
Zoological Garden attendants, who, pending the settlement of certain
demands, refused to minister further to the wants of the animals
committed to their charge or to allow any other keepers to take their
place.  In this case the threat of the Zoological Gardens authorities
that if the men “came out” the animals should come out also had
intensified and precipitated the crisis.  The imminent prospect of the
larger carnivores, to say nothing of rhinoceroses and bull bison, roaming
at large and unfed in the heart of London, was not one which permitted of
prolonged conferences.  The Government of the day, which from its
tendency to be a few hours behind the course of events had been nicknamed
the Government of the afternoon, was obliged to intervene with
promptitude and decision.  A strong force of Bluejackets was despatched
to Regent’s Park to take over the temporarily abandoned duties of the
strikers.  Bluejackets were chosen in preference to land forces, partly
on account of the traditional readiness of the British Navy to go
anywhere and do anything, partly by reason of the familiarity of the
average sailor with monkeys, parrots, and other tropical fauna, but
chiefly at the urgent request of the First Lord of the Admiralty, who was
keenly desirous of an opportunity for performing some personal act of
unobtrusive public service within the province of his department.

“If he insists on feeding the infant jaguar himself, in defiance of its
mother’s wishes, there may be another by-election in the north,” said one
of his colleagues, with a hopeful inflection in his voice.  “By-elections
are not very desirable at present, but we must not be selfish.”

As a matter of fact the strike collapsed peacefully without any outside
intervention.  The majority of the keepers had become so attached to
their charges that they returned to work of their own accord.

And then the nation and the newspapers turned with a sense of relief to
happier things.  It seemed as if a new era of contentment was about to
dawn.  Everybody had struck who could possibly want to strike or who
could possibly be cajoled or bullied into striking, whether they wanted
to or not.  The lighter and brighter side of life might now claim some
attention.  And conspicuous among the other topics that sprang into
sudden prominence was the pending Falvertoon divorce suit.

The Duke of Falvertoon was one of those human _hors d’œuvres_ that
stimulate the public appetite for sensation without giving it much to
feed on.  As a mere child he had been precociously brilliant; he had
declined the editorship of the _Anglian Review_ at an age when most boys
are content to have declined _mensa_, a table, and though he could not
claim to have originated the Futurist movement in literature, his
“Letters to a possible Grandson,” written at the age of fourteen, had
attracted considerable notice.  In later days his brilliancy had been
less conspicuously displayed.  During a debate in the House of Lords on
affairs in Morocco, at a moment when that country, for the fifth time in
seven years, had brought half Europe to the verge of war, he had
interpolated the remark “a little Moor and how much it is,” but in spite
of the encouraging reception accorded to this one political utterance he
was never tempted to a further display in that direction.  It began to be
generally understood that he did not intend to supplement his numerous
town and country residences by living overmuch in the public eye.

And then had come the unlooked-for tidings of the imminent proceedings
for divorce.  And such a divorce!  There were cross-suits and allegations
and counter-allegations, charges of cruelty and desertion, everything in
fact that was necessary to make the case one of the most complicated and
sensational of its kind.  And the number of distinguished people involved
or cited as witnesses not only embraced both political parties in the
realm and several Colonial governors, but included an exotic contingent
from France, Hungary, the United States of North America, and the Grand
Duchy of Baden.  Hotel accommodation of the more expensive sort began to
experience a strain on its resources.  “It will be quite like the Durbar
without the elephants,” exclaimed an enthusiastic lady who, to do her
justice, had never seen a Durbar.  The general feeling was one of
thankfulness that the last of the strikes had been got over before the
date fixed for the hearing of the great suit.

As a reaction from the season of gloom and industrial strife that had
just passed away the agencies that purvey and stage-manage sensations
laid themselves out to do their level best on this momentous occasion.
Men who had made their reputations as special descriptive writers were
mobilised from distant corners of Europe and the further side of the
Atlantic in order to enrich with their pens the daily printed records of
the case; one word-painter, who specialised in descriptions of how
witnesses turn pale under cross-examination, was summoned hurriedly back
from a famous and prolonged murder trial in Sicily, where indeed his
talents were being decidedly wasted.  Thumb-nail artists and expert kodak
manipulators were retained at extravagant salaries, and special dress
reporters were in high demand.  An enterprising Paris firm of costume
builders presented the defendant Duchess with three special creations, to
be worn, marked, learned, and extensively reported at various critical
stages of the trial; and as for the cinematograph agents, their industry
and persistence was untiring.  Films representing the Duke saying
good-bye to his favourite canary on the eve of the trial were in
readiness weeks before the event was due to take place; other films
depicted the Duchess holding imaginary consultations with fictitious
lawyers or making a light repast off specially advertised vegetarian
sandwiches during a supposed luncheon interval.  As far as human
foresight and human enterprise could go nothing was lacking to make the
trial a success.

Two days before the case was down for hearing the advance reporter of an
important syndicate obtained an interview with the Duke for the purpose
of gleaning some final grains of information concerning his Grace’s
personal arrangements during the trial.

“I suppose I may say this will be one of the biggest affairs of its kind
during the lifetime of a generation,” began the reporter as an excuse for
the unsparing minuteness of detail that he was about to make quest for.

“I suppose so—if it comes off,” said the Duke lazily.

“If?” queried the reporter, in a voice that was something between a gasp
and a scream.

“The Duchess and I are both thinking of going on strike,” said the Duke.

“Strike!”

The baleful word flashed out in all its old hideous familiarity.  Was
there to be no end to its recurrence?

“Do you mean,” faltered the reporter, “that you are contemplating a
mutual withdrawal of the charges?”

“Precisely,” said the Duke.

“But think of the arrangements that have been made, the special
reporting, the cinematographs, the catering for the distinguished foreign
witnesses, the prepared music-hall allusions; think of all the money that
has been sunk—”

“Exactly,” said the Duke coldly, “the Duchess and I have realised that it
is we who provide the material out of which this great far-reaching
industry has been built up.  Widespread employment will be given and
enormous profits made during the duration of the case, and we, on whom
all the stress and racket falls, will get—what?  An unenviable notoriety
and the privilege of paying heavy legal expenses whichever way the
verdict goes.  Hence our decision to strike.  We don’t wish to be
reconciled; we fully realise that it is a grave step to take, but unless
we get some reasonable consideration out of this vast stream of wealth
and industry that we have called into being we intend coming out of court
and staying out.  Good afternoon.”

The news of this latest strike spread universal dismay.  Its
inaccessibility to the ordinary methods of persuasion made it peculiarly
formidable.  If the Duke and Duchess persisted in being reconciled the
Government could hardly be called on to interfere.  Public opinion in the
shape of social ostracism might be brought to bear on them, but that was
as far as coercive measures could go.  There was nothing for it but a
conference, with powers to propose liberal terms.  As it was, several of
the foreign witnesses had already departed and others had telegraphed
cancelling their hotel arrangements.

The conference, protracted, uncomfortable, and occasionally acrimonious,
succeeded at last in arranging for a resumption of litigation, but it was
a fruitless victory.  The Duke, with a touch of his earlier precocity,
died of premature decay a fortnight before the date fixed for the new
trial.




THE ROMANCERS


It was autumn in London, that blessed season between the harshness of
winter and the insincerities of summer; a trustful season when one buys
bulbs and sees to the registration of one’s vote, believing perpetually
in spring and a change of Government.

Morton Crosby sat on a bench in a secluded corner of Hyde Park, lazily
enjoying a cigarette and watching the slow grazing promenade of a pair of
snow-geese, the male looking rather like an albino edition of the
russet-hued female.  Out of the corner of his eye Crosby also noted with
some interest the hesitating hoverings of a human figure, which had
passed and repassed his seat two or three times at shortening intervals,
like a wary crow about to alight near some possibly edible morsel.
Inevitably the figure came to an anchorage on the bench, within easy
talking distance of its original occupant.  The uncared-for clothes, the
aggressive, grizzled beard, and the furtive, evasive eye of the new-comer
bespoke the professional cadger, the man who would undergo hours of
humiliating tale-spinning and rebuff rather than adventure on half a
day’s decent work.

For a while the new-comer fixed his eyes straight in front of him in a
strenuous, unseeing gaze; then his voice broke out with the insinuating
inflection of one who has a story to retail well worth any loiterer’s
while to listen to.

“It’s a strange world,” he said.

As the statement met with no response he altered it to the form of a
question.

“I daresay you’ve found it to be a strange world, mister?”

“As far as I am concerned,” said Crosby, “the strangeness has worn off in
the course of thirty-six years.”

“Ah,” said the greybeard, “I could tell you things that you’d hardly
believe.  Marvellous things that have really happened to me.”

“Nowadays there is no demand for marvellous things that have really
happened,” said Crosby discouragingly; “the professional writers of
fiction turn these things out so much better.  For instance, my
neighbours tell me wonderful, incredible things that their Aberdeens and
chows and borzois have done; I never listen to them.  On the other hand,
I have read ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ three times.”

The greybeard moved uneasily in his seat; then he opened up new country.

“I take it that you are a professing Christian,” he observed.

“I am a prominent and I think I may say an influential member of the
Mussulman community of Eastern Persia,” said Crosby, making an excursion
himself into the realms of fiction.

The greybeard was obviously disconcerted at this new check to
introductory conversation, but the defeat was only momentary.

“Persia.  I should never have taken you for a Persian,” he remarked, with
a somewhat aggrieved air.

“I am not,” said Crosby; “my father was an Afghan.”

“An Afghan!” said the other, smitten into bewildered silence for a
moment.  Then he recovered himself and renewed his attack.

“Afghanistan.  Ah!  We’ve had some wars with that country; now, I
daresay, instead of fighting it we might have learned something from it.
A very wealthy country, I believe.  No real poverty there.”

He raised his voice on the word “poverty” with a suggestion of intense
feeling.  Crosby saw the opening and avoided it.

“It possesses, nevertheless, a number of highly talented and ingenious
beggars,” he said; “if I had not spoken so disparagingly of marvellous
things that have really happened I would tell you the story of Ibrahim
and the eleven camel-loads of blotting-paper.  Also I have forgotten
exactly how it ended.”

“My own life-story is a curious one,” said the stranger, apparently
stifling all desire to hear the history of Ibrahim; “I was not always as
you see me now.”

“We are supposed to undergo complete change in the course of every seven
years,” said Crosby, as an explanation of the foregoing announcement.

“I mean I was not always in such distressing circumstances as I am at
present,” pursued the stranger doggedly.

“That sounds rather rude,” said Crosby stiffly, “considering that you are
at present talking to a man reputed to be one of the most gifted
conversationalists of the Afghan border.”

“I don’t mean in that way,” said the greybeard hastily; “I’ve been very
much interested in your conversation.  I was alluding to my unfortunate
financial situation.  You mayn’t hardly believe it, but at the present
moment I am absolutely without a farthing.  Don’t see any prospect of
getting any money, either, for the next few days.  I don’t suppose you’ve
ever found yourself in such a position,” he added.

“In the town of Yom,” said Crosby, “which is in Southern Afghanistan, and
which also happens to be my birthplace, there was a Chinese philosopher
who used to say that one of the three chiefest human blessings was to be
absolutely without money.  I forget what the other two were.”

“Ah, I daresay,” said the stranger, in a tone that betrayed no enthusiasm
for the philosopher’s memory; “and did he practise what he preached?
That’s the test.”

“He lived happily with very little money or resources,” said Crosby.

“Then I expect he had friends who would help him liberally whenever he
was in difficulties, such as I am in at present.”

“In Yom,” said Crosby, “it is not necessary to have friends in order to
obtain help.  Any citizen of Yom would help a stranger as a matter of
course.”

The greybeard was now genuinely interested.

The conversation had at last taken a favourable turn.

“If someone, like me, for instance, who was in undeserved difficulties,
asked a citizen of that town you speak of for a small loan to tide over a
few days’ impecuniosity—five shillings, or perhaps a rather larger
sum—would it be given to him as a matter of course?”

“There would be a certain preliminary,” said Crosby; “one would take him
to a wine-shop and treat him to a measure of wine, and then, after a
little high-flown conversation, one would put the desired sum in his hand
and wish him good-day.  It is a roundabout way of performing a simple
transaction, but in the East all ways are roundabout.”

The listener’s eyes were glittering.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, with a thin sneer ringing meaningly through his
words, “I suppose you’ve given up all those generous customs since you
left your town.  Don’t practise them now, I expect.”

“No one who has lived in Yom,” said Crosby fervently, “and remembers its
green hills covered with apricot and almond trees, and the cold water
that rushes down like a caress from the upland snows and dashes under the
little wooden bridges, no one who remembers these things and treasures
the memory of them would ever give up a single one of its unwritten laws
and customs.  To me they are as binding as though I still lived in that
hallowed home of my youth.”

“Then if I was to ask you for a small loan—” began the greybeard
fawningly, edging nearer on the seat and hurriedly wondering how large he
might safely make his request, “if I was to ask you for, say—”

“At any other time, certainly,” said Crosby; “in the months of November
and December, however, it is absolutely forbidden for anyone of our race
to give or receive loans or gifts; in fact, one does not willingly speak
of them.  It is considered unlucky.  We will therefore close this
discussion.”

“But it is still October!” exclaimed the adventurer with an eager, angry
whine, as Crosby rose from his seat; “wants eight days to the end of the
month!”

“The Afghan November began yesterday,” said Crosby severely, and in
another moment he was striding across the Park, leaving his recent
companion scowling and muttering furiously on the seat.

“I don’t believe a word of his story,” he chattered to himself; “pack of
nasty lies from beginning to end.  Wish I’d told him so to his face.
Calling himself an Afghan!”

The snorts and snarls that escaped from him for the next quarter of an
hour went far to support the truth of the old saying that two of a trade
never agree.




THE SCHARTZ-METTERKLUME METHOD


Lady Carlotta stepped out on to the platform of the small wayside station
and took a turn or two up and down its uninteresting length, to kill time
till the train should be pleased to proceed on its way.  Then, in the
roadway beyond, she saw a horse struggling with a more than ample load,
and a carter of the sort that seems to bear a sullen hatred against the
animal that helps him to earn a living.  Lady Carlotta promptly betook
her to the roadway, and put rather a different complexion on the
struggle.  Certain of her acquaintances were wont to give her plentiful
admonition as to the undesirability of interfering on behalf of a
distressed animal, such interference being “none of her business.”  Only
once had she put the doctrine of non-interference into practice, when one
of its most eloquent exponents had been besieged for nearly three hours
in a small and extremely uncomfortable may-tree by an angry boar-pig,
while Lady Carlotta, on the other side of the fence, had proceeded with
the water-colour sketch she was engaged on, and refused to interfere
between the boar and his prisoner.  It is to be feared that she lost the
friendship of the ultimately rescued lady.  On this occasion she merely
lost the train, which gave way to the first sign of impatience it had
shown throughout the journey, and steamed off without her.  She bore the
desertion with philosophical indifference; her friends and relations were
thoroughly well used to the fact of her luggage arriving without her.
She wired a vague non-committal message to her destination to say that
she was coming on “by another train.”  Before she had time to think what
her next move might be she was confronted by an imposingly attired lady,
who seemed to be taking a prolonged mental inventory of her clothes and
looks.

“You must be Miss Hope, the governess I’ve come to meet,” said the
apparition, in a tone that admitted of very little argument.

“Very well, if I must I must,” said Lady Carlotta to herself with
dangerous meekness.

“I am Mrs. Quabarl,” continued the lady; “and where, pray, is your
luggage?”

“It’s gone astray,” said the alleged governess, falling in with the
excellent rule of life that the absent are always to blame; the luggage
had, in point of fact, behaved with perfect correctitude.  “I’ve just
telegraphed about it,” she added, with a nearer approach to truth.

“How provoking,” said Mrs. Quabarl; “these railway companies are so
careless.  However, my maid can lend you things for the night,” and she
led the way to her car.

During the drive to the Quabarl mansion Lady Carlotta was impressively
introduced to the nature of the charge that had been thrust upon her; she
learned that Claude and Wilfrid were delicate, sensitive young people,
that Irene had the artistic temperament highly developed, and that Viola
was something or other else of a mould equally commonplace among children
of that class and type in the twentieth century.

“I wish them not only to be _taught_,” said Mrs. Quabarl, “but
_interested_ in what they learn.  In their history lessons, for instance,
you must try to make them feel that they are being introduced to the
life-stories of men and women who really lived, not merely committing a
mass of names and dates to memory.  French, of course, I shall expect you
to talk at meal-times several days in the week.”

“I shall talk French four days of the week and Russian in the remaining
three.”

“Russian?  My dear Miss Hope, no one in the house speaks or understands
Russian.”

“That will not embarrass me in the least,” said Lady Carlotta coldly.

Mrs. Quabarl, to use a colloquial expression, was knocked off her perch.
She was one of those imperfectly self-assured individuals who are
magnificent and autocratic as long as they are not seriously opposed.
The least show of unexpected resistance goes a long way towards rendering
them cowed and apologetic.  When the new governess failed to express
wondering admiration of the large newly-purchased and expensive car, and
lightly alluded to the superior advantages of one or two makes which had
just been put on the market, the discomfiture of her patroness became
almost abject.  Her feelings were those which might have animated a
general of ancient warfaring days, on beholding his heaviest
battle-elephant ignominiously driven off the field by slingers and
javelin throwers.

At dinner that evening, although reinforced by her husband, who usually
duplicated her opinions and lent her moral support generally, Mrs.
Quabarl regained none of her lost ground.  The governess not only helped
herself well and truly to wine, but held forth with considerable show of
critical knowledge on various vintage matters, concerning which the
Quabarls were in no wise able to pose as authorities.  Previous
governesses had limited their conversation on the wine topic to a
respectful and doubtless sincere expression of a preference for water.
When this one went as far as to recommend a wine firm in whose hands you
could not go very far wrong Mrs. Quabarl thought it time to turn the
conversation into more usual channels.

“We got very satisfactory references about you from Canon Teep,” she
observed; “a very estimable man, I should think.”

“Drinks like a fish and beats his wife, otherwise a very lovable
character,” said the governess imperturbably.

“_My dear_ Miss Hope!  I trust you are exaggerating,” exclaimed the
Quabarls in unison.

“One must in justice admit that there is some provocation,” continued the
romancer.  “Mrs. Teep is quite the most irritating bridge-player that I
have ever sat down with; her leads and declarations would condone a
certain amount of brutality in her partner, but to souse her with the
contents of the only soda-water syphon in the house on a Sunday
afternoon, when one couldn’t get another, argues an indifference to the
comfort of others which I cannot altogether overlook.  You may think me
hasty in my judgments, but it was practically on account of the syphon
incident that I left.”

“We will talk of this some other time,” said Mrs. Quabarl hastily.

“I shall never allude to it again,” said the governess with decision.

Mr. Quabarl made a welcome diversion by asking what studies the new
instructress proposed to inaugurate on the morrow.

“History to begin with,” she informed him.

“Ah, history,” he observed sagely; “now in teaching them history you must
take care to interest them in what they learn.  You must make them feel
that they are being introduced to the life-stories of men and women who
really lived—”

“I’ve told her all that,” interposed Mrs. Quabarl.

“I teach history on the Schartz-Metterklume method,” said the governess
loftily.

“Ah, yes,” said her listeners, thinking it expedient to assume an
acquaintance at least with the name.

                                * * * * *

“What are you children doing out here?” demanded Mrs. Quabarl the next
morning, on finding Irene sitting rather glumly at the head of the
stairs, while her sister was perched in an attitude of depressed
discomfort on the window-seat behind her, with a wolf-skin rug almost
covering her.

“We are having a history lesson,” came the unexpected reply.  “I am
supposed to be Rome, and Viola up there is the she-wolf; not a real wolf,
but the figure of one that the Romans used to set store by—I forget why.
Claude and Wilfrid have gone to fetch the shabby women.”

“The shabby women?”

“Yes, they’ve got to carry them off.  They didn’t want to, but Miss Hope
got one of father’s fives-bats and said she’d give them a number nine
spanking if they didn’t, so they’ve gone to do it.”

A loud, angry screaming from the direction of the lawn drew Mrs. Quabarl
thither in hot haste, fearful lest the threatened castigation might even
now be in process of infliction.  The outcry, however, came principally
from the two small daughters of the lodge-keeper, who were being hauled
and pushed towards the house by the panting and dishevelled Claude and
Wilfrid, whose task was rendered even more arduous by the incessant, if
not very effectual, attacks of the captured maidens’ small brother.  The
governess, fives-bat in hand, sat negligently on the stone balustrade,
presiding over the scene with the cold impartiality of a Goddess of
Battles.  A furious and repeated chorus of “I’ll tell muvver” rose from
the lodge-children, but the lodge-mother, who was hard of hearing, was
for the moment immersed in the preoccupation of her washtub.

After an apprehensive glance in the direction of the lodge (the good
woman was gifted with the highly militant temper which is sometimes the
privilege of deafness) Mrs. Quabarl flew indignantly to the rescue of the
struggling captives.

“Wilfrid!  Claude!  Let those children go at once.  Miss Hope, what on
earth is the meaning of this scene?”

“Early Roman history; the Sabine Women, don’t you know?  It’s the
Schartz-Metterklume method to make children understand history by acting
it themselves; fixes it in their memory, you know.  Of course, if, thanks
to your interference, your boys go through life thinking that the Sabine
women ultimately escaped, I really cannot be held responsible.”

“You may be very clever and modern, Miss Hope,” said Mrs. Quabarl firmly,
“but I should like you to leave here by the next train.  Your luggage
will be sent after you as soon as it arrives.”

“I’m not certain exactly where I shall be for the next few days,” said
the dismissed instructress of youth; “you might keep my luggage till I
wire my address.  There are only a couple of trunks and some golf-clubs
and a leopard cub.”

“A leopard cub!” gasped Mrs. Quabarl.  Even in her departure this
extraordinary person seemed destined to leave a trail of embarrassment
behind her.

“Well, it’s rather left off being a cub; it’s more than half-grown, you
know.  A fowl every day and a rabbit on Sundays is what it usually gets.
Raw beef makes it too excitable.  Don’t trouble about getting the car for
me, I’m rather inclined for a walk.”

And Lady Carlotta strode out of the Quabarl horizon.

The advent of the genuine Miss Hope, who had made a mistake as to the day
on which she was due to arrive, caused a turmoil which that good lady was
quite unused to inspiring.  Obviously the Quabarl family had been
woefully befooled, but a certain amount of relief came with the
knowledge.

“How tiresome for you, dear Carlotta,” said her hostess, when the overdue
guest ultimately arrived; “how very tiresome losing your train and having
to stop overnight in a strange place.”

“Oh dear, no,” said Lady Carlotta; “not at all tiresome—for me.”




THE SEVENTH PULLET


“It’s not the daily grind that I complain of,” said Blenkinthrope
resentfully; “it’s the dull grey sameness of my life outside of office
hours.  Nothing of interest comes my way, nothing remarkable or out of
the common.  Even the little things that I do try to find some interest
in don’t seem to interest other people.  Things in my garden, for
instance.”

“The potato that weighed just over two pounds,” said his friend Gorworth.

“Did I tell you about that?” said Blenkinthrope; “I was telling the
others in the train this morning.  I forgot if I’d told you.”

“To be exact you told me that it weighed just under two pounds, but I
took into account the fact that abnormal vegetables and freshwater fish
have an after-life, in which growth is not arrested.”

“You’re just like the others,” said Blenkinthrope sadly, “you only make
fun of it.”

“The fault is with the potato, not with us,” said Gorworth; “we are not
in the least interested in it because it is not in the least interesting.
The men you go up in the train with every day are just in the same case
as yourself; their lives are commonplace and not very interesting to
themselves, and they certainly are not going to wax enthusiastic over the
commonplace events in other men’s lives.  Tell them something startling,
dramatic, piquant that has happened to yourself or to someone in your
family, and you will capture their interest at once.  They will talk
about you with a certain personal pride to all their acquaintances.  ‘Man
I know intimately, fellow called Blenkinthrope, lives down my way, had
two of his fingers clawed clean off by a lobster he was carrying home to
supper.  Doctor says entire hand may have to come off.’  Now that is
conversation of a very high order.  But imagine walking into a tennis
club with the remark: ‘I know a man who has grown a potato weighing two
and a quarter pounds.’”

“But hang it all, my dear fellow,” said Blenkinthrope impatiently,
“haven’t I just told you that nothing of a remarkable nature ever happens
to me?”

“Invent something,” said Gorworth.  Since winning a prize for excellence
in Scriptural knowledge at a preparatory school he had felt licensed to
be a little more unscrupulous than the circle he moved in.  Much might
surely be excused to one who in early life could give a list of seventeen
trees mentioned in the Old Testament.

“What sort of thing?” asked Blenkinthrope, somewhat snappishly.

“A snake got into your hen-run yesterday morning and killed six out of
seven pullets, first mesmerising them with its eyes and then biting them
as they stood helpless.  The seventh pullet was one of that French sort,
with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the mesmeric snare, and
just flew at what it could see of the snake and pecked it to pieces.”

“Thank you,” said Blenkinthrope stiffly; “it’s a very clever invention.
If such a thing had really happened in my poultry-run I admit I should
have been proud and interested to tell people about it.  But I’d rather
stick to fact, even if it is plain fact.”  All the same his mind dwelt
wistfully on the story of the Seventh Pullet.  He could picture himself
telling it in the train amid the absorbed interest of his
fellow-passengers.  Unconsciously all sorts of little details and
improvements began to suggest themselves.

Wistfulness was still his dominant mood when he took his seat in the
railway carriage the next morning.  Opposite him sat Stevenham, who had
attained to a recognised brevet of importance through the fact of an
uncle having dropped dead in the act of voting at a Parliamentary
election.  That had happened three years ago, but Stevenham was still
deferred to on all questions of home and foreign politics.

“Hullo, how’s the giant mushroom, or whatever it was?” was all the notice
Blenkinthrope got from his fellow travellers.

Young Duckby, whom he mildly disliked, speedily monopolised the general
attention by an account of a domestic bereavement.

“Had four young pigeons carried off last night by a whacking big rat.
Oh, a monster he must have been; you could tell by the size of the hole
he made breaking into the loft.”

No moderate-sized rat ever seemed to carry out any predatory operations
in these regions; they were all enormous in their enormity.

“Pretty hard lines that,” continued Duckby, seeing that he had secured
the attention and respect of the company; “four squeakers carried off at
one swoop.  You’d find it rather hard to match that in the way of
unlooked-for bad luck.”

“I had six pullets out of a pen of seven killed by a snake yesterday
afternoon,” said Blenkinthrope, in a voice which he hardly recognised as
his own.

“By a snake?” came in excited chorus.

“It fascinated them with its deadly, glittering eyes, one after the
other, and struck them down while they stood helpless.  A bedridden
neighbour, who wasn’t able to call for assistance, witnessed it all from
her bedroom window.”

“Well, I never!” broke in the chorus, with variations.

“The interesting part of it is about the seventh pullet, the one that
didn’t get killed,” resumed Blenkinthrope, slowly lighting a cigarette.
His diffidence had left him, and he was beginning to realise how safe and
easy depravity can seem once one has the courage to begin.  “The six dead
birds were Minorcas; the seventh was a Houdan with a mop of feathers all
over its eyes.  It could hardly see the snake at all, so of course it
wasn’t mesmerised like the others.  It just could see something wriggling
on the ground, and went for it and pecked it to death.”

“Well, I’m blessed!” exclaimed the chorus.

In the course of the next few days Blenkinthrope discovered how little
the loss of one’s self-respect affects one when one has gained the esteem
of the world.  His story found its way into one of the poultry papers,
and was copied thence into a daily news-sheet as a matter of general
interest.  A lady wrote from the North of Scotland recounting a similar
episode which she had witnessed as occurring between a stoat and a blind
grouse.  Somehow a lie seems so much less reprehensible when one can call
it a lee.

For awhile the adapter of the Seventh Pullet story enjoyed to the full
his altered standing as a person of consequence, one who had had some
share in the strange events of his times.  Then he was thrust once again
into the cold grey background by the sudden blossoming into importance of
Smith-Paddon, a daily fellow-traveller, whose little girl had been
knocked down and nearly hurt by a car belonging to a musical-comedy
actress.  The actress was not in the car at the time, but she was in
numerous photographs which appeared in the illustrated papers of Zoto
Dobreen inquiring after the well-being of Maisie, daughter of Edmund
Smith-Paddon, Esq.  With this new human interest to absorb them the
travelling companions were almost rude when Blenkinthrope tried to
explain his contrivance for keeping vipers and peregrine falcons out of
his chicken-run.

Gorworth, to whom he unburdened himself in private, gave him the same
counsel as heretofore.

“Invent something.”

“Yes, but what?”

The ready affirmative coupled with the question betrayed a significant
shifting of the ethical standpoint.

It was a few days later that Blenkinthrope revealed a chapter of family
history to the customary gathering in the railway carriage.

“Curious thing happened to my aunt, the one who lives in Paris,” he
began.  He had several aunts, but they were all geographically
distributed over Greater London.

“She was sitting on a seat in the Bois the other afternoon, after
lunching at the Roumanian Legation.”

Whatever the story gained in picturesqueness from the dragging-in of
diplomatic “atmosphere,” it ceased from that moment to command any
acceptance as a record of current events.  Gorworth had warned his
neophyte that this would be the case, but the traditional enthusiasm of
the neophyte had triumphed over discretion.

“She was feeling rather drowsy, the effect probably of the champagne,
which she’s not in the habit of taking in the middle of the day.”

A subdued murmur of admiration went round the company.  Blenkinthrope’s
aunts were not used to taking champagne in the middle of the year,
regarding it exclusively as a Christmas and New Year accessory.

“Presently a rather portly gentleman passed by her seat and paused an
instant to light a cigar.  At that moment a youngish man came up behind
him, drew the blade from a swordstick, and stabbed him half a dozen times
through and through.  ‘Scoundrel,’ he cried to his victim, ‘you do not
know me.  My name is Henri Leturc.’  The elder man wiped away some of the
blood that was spattering his clothes, turned to his assailant, and said:
‘And since when has an attempted assassination been considered an
introduction?’  Then he finished lighting his cigar and walked away.  My
aunt had intended screaming for the police, but seeing the indifference
with which the principal in the affair treated the matter she felt that
it would be an impertinence on her part to interfere.  Of course I need
hardly say she put the whole thing down to the effects of a warm, drowsy
afternoon and the Legation champagne.  Now comes the astonishing part of
my story.  A fortnight later a bank manager was stabbed to death with a
swordstick in that very part of the Bois.  His assassin was the son of a
charwoman formerly working at the bank, who had been dismissed from her
job by the manager on account of chronic intemperance.  His name was
Henri Leturc.”

From that moment Blenkinthrope was tacitly accepted as the Munchausen of
the party.  No effort was spared to draw him out from day to day in the
exercise of testing their powers of credulity, and Blenkinthrope, in the
false security of an assured and receptive audience, waxed industrious
and ingenious in supplying the demand for marvels.  Duckby’s satirical
story of a tame otter that had a tank in the garden to swim in, and
whined restlessly whenever the water-rate was overdue, was scarcely an
unfair parody of some of Blenkinthrope’s wilder efforts.  And then one
day came Nemesis.

Returning to his villa one evening Blenkinthrope found his wife sitting
in front of a pack of cards, which she was scrutinising with unusual
concentration.

“The same old patience-game?” he asked carelessly.

“No, dear; this is the Death’s Head patience, the most difficult of them
all.  I’ve never got it to work out, and somehow I should be rather
frightened if I did.  Mother only got it out once in her life; she was
afraid of it, too.  Her great-aunt had done it once and fallen dead from
excitement the next moment, and mother always had a feeling that she
would die if she ever got it out.  She died the same night that she did
it.  She was in bad health at the time, certainly, but it was a strange
coincidence.”

“Don’t do it if it frightens you,” was Blenkinthrope’s practical comment
as he left the room.  A few minutes later his wife called to him.

“John, it gave me such a turn, I nearly got it out.  Only the five of
diamonds held me up at the end.  I really thought I’d done it.”

“Why, you can do it,” said Blenkinthrope, who had come back to the room;
“if you shift the eight of clubs on to that open nine the five can be
moved on to the six.”

His wife made the suggested move with hasty, trembling fingers, and piled
the outstanding cards on to their respective packs.  Then she followed
the example of her mother and great-grand-aunt.

Blenkinthrope had been genuinely fond of his wife, but in the midst of
his bereavement one dominant thought obtruded itself.  Something
sensational and real had at last come into his life; no longer was it a
grey, colourless record.  The headlines which might appropriately
describe his domestic tragedy kept shaping themselves in his brain.
“Inherited presentiment comes true.”  “The Death’s Head patience:
Card-game that justified its sinister name in three generations.”  He
wrote out a full story of the fatal occurrence for the _Essex Vedette_,
the editor of which was a friend of his, and to another friend he gave a
condensed account, to be taken up to the office of one of the halfpenny
dailies.  But in both cases his reputation as a romancer stood fatally in
the way of the fulfilment of his ambitions.  “Not the right thing to be
Munchausening in a time of sorrow” agreed his friends among themselves,
and a brief note of regret at the “sudden death of the wife of our
respected neighbour, Mr. John Blenkinthrope, from heart failure,”
appearing in the news column of the local paper was the forlorn outcome
of his visions of widespread publicity.

Blenkinthrope shrank from the society of his erstwhile travelling
companions and took to travelling townwards by an earlier train.  He
sometimes tries to enlist the sympathy and attention of a chance
acquaintance in details of the whistling prowess of his best canary or
the dimensions of his largest beetroot; he scarcely recognises himself as
the man who was once spoken about and pointed out as the owner of the
Seventh Pullet.




THE BLIND SPOT


“You’ve just come back from Adelaide’s funeral, haven’t you?” said Sir
Lulworth to his nephew; “I suppose it was very like most other funerals?”

“I’ll tell you all about it at lunch,” said Egbert.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort.  It wouldn’t be respectful either to your
great-aunt’s memory or to the lunch.  We begin with Spanish olives, then
a borshch, then more olives and a bird of some kind, and a rather
enticing Rhenish wine, not at all expensive as wines go in this country,
but still quite laudable in its way.  Now there’s absolutely nothing in
that menu that harmonises in the least with the subject of your
great-aunt Adelaide or her funeral.  She was a charming woman, and quite
as intelligent as she had any need to be, but somehow she always reminded
me of an English cook’s idea of a Madras curry.”

“She used to say you were frivolous,” said Egbert.  Something in his tone
suggested that he rather endorsed the verdict.

“I believe I once considerably scandalised her by declaring that clear
soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.  She
had very little sense of proportion.  By the way, she made you her
principal heir, didn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Egbert, “and executor as well.  It’s in that connection that
I particularly want to speak to you.”

“Business is not my strong point at any time,” said Sir Lulworth, “and
certainly not when we’re on the immediate threshold of lunch.”

“It isn’t exactly business,” explained Egbert, as he followed his uncle
into the dining-room.

“It’s something rather serious.  Very serious.”

“Then we can’t possibly speak about it now,” said Sir Lulworth; “no one
could talk seriously during a borshch.  A beautifully constructed
borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to
banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.  Later on, when we
arrive at the second stage of olives, I shall be quite ready to discuss
that new book on Borrow, or, if you prefer it, the present situation in
the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg.  But I absolutely decline to talk anything
approaching business till we have finished with the bird.”

For the greater part of the meal Egbert sat in an abstracted silence, the
silence of a man whose mind is focussed on one topic.  When the coffee
stage had been reached he launched himself suddenly athwart his uncle’s
reminiscences of the Court of Luxemburg.

“I think I told you that great-aunt Adelaide had made me her executor.
There wasn’t very much to be done in the way of legal matters, but I had
to go through her papers.”

“That would be a fairly heavy task in itself.  I should imagine there
were reams of family letters.”

“Stacks of them, and most of them highly uninteresting.  There was one
packet, however, which I thought might repay a careful perusal.  It was a
bundle of correspondence from her brother Peter.”

“The Canon of tragic memory,” said Lulworth.

“Exactly, of tragic memory, as you say; a tragedy that has never been
fathomed.”

“Probably the simplest explanation was the correct one,” said Sir
Lulworth; “he slipped on the stone staircase and fractured his skull in
falling.”

Egbert shook his head.  “The medical evidence all went to prove that the
blow on the head was struck by some one coming up behind him.  A wound
caused by violent contact with the steps could not possibly have been
inflicted at that angle of the skull.  They experimented with a dummy
figure falling in every conceivable position.”

“But the motive?” exclaimed Sir Lulworth; “no one had any interest in
doing away with him, and the number of people who destroy Canons of the
Established Church for the mere fun of killing must be extremely limited.
Of course there are individuals of weak mental balance who do that sort
of thing, but they seldom conceal their handiwork; they are more
generally inclined to parade it.”

“His cook was under suspicion,” said Egbert shortly.

“I know he was,” said Sir Lulworth, “simply because he was about the only
person on the premises at the time of the tragedy.  But could anything be
sillier than trying to fasten a charge of murder on to Sebastien?  He had
nothing to gain, in fact, a good deal to lose, from the death of his
employer.  The Canon was paying him quite as good wages as I was able to
offer him when I took him over into my service.  I have since raised them
to something a little more in accordance with his real worth, but at the
time he was glad to find a new place without troubling about an increase
of wages.  People were fighting rather shy of him, and he had no friends
in this country.  No; if anyone in the world was interested in the
prolonged life and unimpaired digestion of the Canon it would certainly
be Sebastien.”

“People don’t always weigh the consequences of their rash acts,” said
Egbert, “otherwise there would be very few murders committed.  Sebastien
is a man of hot temper.”

“He is a southerner,” admitted Sir Lulworth; “to be geographically exact
I believe he hails from the French slopes of the Pyrenees.  I took that
into consideration when he nearly killed the gardener’s boy the other day
for bringing him a spurious substitute for sorrel.  One must always make
allowances for origin and locality and early environment; ‘Tell me your
longitude and I’ll know what latitude to allow you,’ is my motto.”

“There, you see,” said Egbert, “he nearly killed the gardener’s boy.”

“My dear Egbert, between nearly killing a gardener’s boy and altogether
killing a Canon there is a wide difference.  No doubt you have often felt
a temporary desire to kill a gardener’s boy; you have never given way to
it, and I respect you for your self-control.  But I don’t suppose you
have ever wanted to kill an octogenarian Canon.  Besides, as far as we
know, there had never been any quarrel or disagreement between the two
men.  The evidence at the inquest brought that out very clearly.”

“Ah!” said Egbert, with the air of a man coming at last into a deferred
inheritance of conversational importance, “that is precisely what I want
to speak to you about.”

He pushed away his coffee cup and drew a pocket-book from his inner
breast-pocket.  From the depths of the pocket-book he produced an
envelope, and from the envelope he extracted a letter, closely written in
a small, neat handwriting.

“One of the Canon’s numerous letters to Aunt Adelaide,” he explained,
“written a few days before his death.  Her memory was already failing
when she received it, and I daresay she forgot the contents as soon as
she had read it; otherwise, in the light of what subsequently happened,
we should have heard something of this letter before now.  If it had been
produced at the inquest I fancy it would have made some difference in the
course of affairs.  The evidence, as you remarked just now, choked off
suspicion against Sebastien by disclosing an utter absence of anything
that could be considered a motive or provocation for the crime, if crime
there was.”

“Oh, read the letter,” said Sir Lulworth impatiently.

“It’s a long rambling affair, like most of his letters in his later
years,” said Egbert.  “I’ll read the part that bears immediately on the
mystery.

“‘I very much fear I shall have to get rid of Sebastien.  He cooks
divinely, but he has the temper of a fiend or an anthropoid ape, and I am
really in bodily fear of him.  We had a dispute the other day as to the
correct sort of lunch to be served on Ash Wednesday, and I got so
irritated and annoyed at his conceit and obstinacy that at last I threw a
cupful of coffee in his face and called him at the same time an impudent
jackanapes.  Very little of the coffee went actually in his face, but I
have never seen a human being show such deplorable lack of self-control.
I laughed at the threat of killing me that he spluttered out in his rage,
and thought the whole thing would blow over, but I have several times
since caught him scowling and muttering in a highly unpleasant fashion,
and lately I have fancied that he was dogging my footsteps about the
grounds, particularly when I walk of an evening in the Italian Garden.’

“It was on the steps in the Italian Garden that the body was found,”
commented Egbert, and resumed reading.

“‘I daresay the danger is imaginary; but I shall feel more at ease when
he has quitted my service.’”

Egbert paused for a moment at the conclusion of the extract; then, as his
uncle made no remark, he added: “If lack of motive was the only factor
that saved Sebastien from prosecution I fancy this letter will put a
different complexion on matters.”

“Have you shown it to anyone else?” asked Sir Lulworth, reaching out his
hand for the incriminating piece of paper.

“No,” said Egbert, handing it across the table, “I thought I would tell
you about it first.  Heavens, what are you doing?”

Egbert’s voice rose almost to a scream.  Sir Lulworth had flung the paper
well and truly into the glowing centre of the grate.  The small, neat
handwriting shrivelled into black flaky nothingness.

“What on earth did you do that for?” gasped Egbert.  “That letter was our
one piece of evidence to connect Sebastien with the crime.”

“That is why I destroyed it,” said Sir Lulworth.

“But why should you want to shield him?” cried Egbert; “the man is a
common murderer.”

“A common murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon cook.”




DUSK


Norman Gortsby sat on a bench in the Park, with his back to a strip of
bush-planted sward, fenced by the park railings, and the Row fronting him
across a wide stretch of carriage drive.  Hyde Park Corner, with its
rattle and hoot of traffic, lay immediately to his right.  It was some
thirty minutes past six on an early March evening, and dusk had fallen
heavily over the scene, dusk mitigated by some faint moonlight and many
street lamps.  There was a wide emptiness over road and sidewalk, and yet
there were many unconsidered figures moving silently through the
half-light, or dotted unobtrusively on bench and chair, scarcely to be
distinguished from the shadowed gloom in which they sat.

The scene pleased Gortsby and harmonised with his present mood.  Dusk, to
his mind, was the hour of the defeated.  Men and women, who had fought
and lost, who hid their fallen fortunes and dead hopes as far as possible
from the scrutiny of the curious, came forth in this hour of gloaming,
when their shabby clothes and bowed shoulders and unhappy eyes might pass
unnoticed, or, at any rate, unrecognised.

    A king that is conquered must see strange looks,
    So bitter a thing is the heart of man.

The wanderers in the dusk did not choose to have strange looks fasten on
them, therefore they came out in this bat-fashion, taking their pleasure
sadly in a pleasure-ground that had emptied of its rightful occupants.
Beyond the sheltering screen of bushes and palings came a realm of
brilliant lights and noisy, rushing traffic.  A blazing, many-tiered
stretch of windows shone through the dusk and almost dispersed it,
marking the haunts of those other people, who held their own in life’s
struggle, or at any rate had not had to admit failure.  So Gortsby’s
imagination pictured things as he sat on his bench in the almost deserted
walk.  He was in the mood to count himself among the defeated.  Money
troubles did not press on him; had he so wished he could have strolled
into the thoroughfares of light and noise, and taken his place among the
jostling ranks of those who enjoyed prosperity or struggled for it.  He
had failed in a more subtle ambition, and for the moment he was heartsore
and disillusionised, and not disinclined to take a certain cynical
pleasure in observing and labelling his fellow wanderers as they went
their ways in the dark stretches between the lamp-lights.

On the bench by his side sat an elderly gentleman with a drooping air of
defiance that was probably the remaining vestige of self-respect in an
individual who had ceased to defy successfully anybody or anything.  His
clothes could scarcely be called shabby, at least they passed muster in
the half-light, but one’s imagination could not have pictured the wearer
embarking on the purchase of a half-crown box of chocolates or laying out
ninepence on a carnation buttonhole.  He belonged unmistakably to that
forlorn orchestra to whose piping no one dances; he was one of the
world’s lamenters who induce no responsive weeping.  As he rose to go
Gortsby imagined him returning to a home circle where he was snubbed and
of no account, or to some bleak lodging where his ability to pay a weekly
bill was the beginning and end of the interest he inspired.  His
retreating figure vanished slowly into the shadows, and his place on the
bench was taken almost immediately by a young man, fairly well dressed
but scarcely more cheerful of mien than his predecessor.  As if to
emphasise the fact that the world went badly with him the new-corner
unburdened himself of an angry and very audible expletive as he flung
himself into the seat.

“You don’t seem in a very good temper,” said Gortsby, judging that he was
expected to take due notice of the demonstration.

The young man turned to him with a look of disarming frankness which put
him instantly on his guard.

“You wouldn’t be in a good temper if you were in the fix I’m in,” he
said; “I’ve done the silliest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“Yes?” said Gortsby dispassionately.

“Came up this afternoon, meaning to stay at the Patagonian Hotel in
Berkshire Square,” continued the young man; “when I got there I found it
had been pulled down some weeks ago and a cinema theatre run up on the
site.  The taxi driver recommended me to another hotel some way off and I
went there.  I just sent a letter to my people, giving them the address,
and then I went out to buy some soap—I’d forgotten to pack any and I hate
using hotel soap.  Then I strolled about a bit, had a drink at a bar and
looked at the shops, and when I came to turn my steps back to the hotel I
suddenly realised that I didn’t remember its name or even what street it
was in.  There’s a nice predicament for a fellow who hasn’t any friends
or connections in London!  Of course I can wire to my people for the
address, but they won’t have got my letter till to-morrow; meantime I’m
without any money, came out with about a shilling on me, which went in
buying the soap and getting the drink, and here I am, wandering about
with twopence in my pocket and nowhere to go for the night.”

There was an eloquent pause after the story had been told.  “I suppose
you think I’ve spun you rather an impossible yarn,” said the young man
presently, with a suggestion of resentment in his voice.

“Not at all impossible,” said Gortsby judicially; “I remember doing
exactly the same thing once in a foreign capital, and on that occasion
there were two of us, which made it more remarkable.  Luckily we
remembered that the hotel was on a sort of canal, and when we struck the
canal we were able to find our way back to the hotel.”

The youth brightened at the reminiscence.  “In a foreign city I wouldn’t
mind so much,” he said; “one could go to one’s Consul and get the
requisite help from him.  Here in one’s own land one is far more derelict
if one gets into a fix.  Unless I can find some decent chap to swallow my
story and lend me some money I seem likely to spend the night on the
Embankment.  I’m glad, anyhow, that you don’t think the story
outrageously improbable.”

He threw a good deal of warmth into the last remark, as though perhaps to
indicate his hope that Gortsby did not fall far short of the requisite
decency.

“Of course,” said Gortsby slowly, “the weak point of your story is that
you can’t produce the soap.”

The young man sat forward hurriedly, felt rapidly in the pockets of his
overcoat, and then jumped to his feet.

“I must have lost it,” he muttered angrily.

“To lose an hotel and a cake of soap on one afternoon suggests wilful
carelessness,” said Gortsby, but the young man scarcely waited to hear
the end of the remark.  He flitted away down the path, his head held
high, with an air of somewhat jaded jauntiness.

“It was a pity,” mused Gortsby; “the going out to get one’s own soap was
the one convincing touch in the whole story, and yet it was just that
little detail that brought him to grief.  If he had had the brilliant
forethought to provide himself with a cake of soap, wrapped and sealed
with all the solicitude of the chemist’s counter, he would have been a
genius in his particular line.  In his particular line genius certainly
consists of an infinite capacity for taking precautions.”

With that reflection Gortsby rose to go; as he did so an exclamation of
concern escaped him.  Lying on the ground by the side of the bench was a
small oval packet, wrapped and sealed with the solicitude of a chemist’s
counter.  It could be nothing else but a cake of soap, and it had
evidently fallen out of the youth’s overcoat pocket when he flung himself
down on the seat.  In another moment Gortsby was scudding along the
dusk-shrouded path in anxious quest for a youthful figure in a light
overcoat.  He had nearly given up the search when he caught sight of the
object of his pursuit standing irresolutely on the border of the carriage
drive, evidently uncertain whether to strike across the Park or make for
the bustling pavements of Knightsbridge.  He turned round sharply with an
air of defensive hostility when he found Gortsby hailing him.

“The important witness to the genuineness of your story has turned up,”
said Gortsby, holding out the cake of soap; “it must have slid out of
your overcoat pocket when you sat down on the seat.  I saw it on the
ground after you left.  You must excuse my disbelief, but appearances
were really rather against you, and now, as I appealed to the testimony
of the soap I think I ought to abide by its verdict.  If the loan of a
sovereign is any good to you—”

The young man hastily removed all doubt on the subject by pocketing the
coin.

“Here is my card with my address,” continued Gortsby; “any day this week
will do for returning the money, and here is the soap—don’t lose it again
it’s been a good friend to you.”

“Lucky thing your finding it,” said the youth, and then, with a catch in
his voice, he blurted out a word or two of thanks and fled headlong in
the direction of Knightsbridge.

“Poor boy, he as nearly as possible broke down,” said Gortsby to himself.
“I don’t wonder either; the relief from his quandary must have been
acute.  It’s a lesson to me not to be too clever in judging by
circumstances.”

As Gortsby retraced his steps past the seat where the little drama had
taken place he saw an elderly gentleman poking and peering beneath it and
on all sides of it, and recognised his earlier fellow occupant.

“Have you lost anything, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, a cake of soap.”




A TOUCH OF REALISM


“I hope you’ve come full of suggestions for Christmas,” said Lady Blonze
to her latest arrived guest; “the old-fashioned Christmas and the
up-to-date Christmas are both so played out.  I want to have something
really original this year.”

“I was staying with the Mathesons last month,” said Blanche Boveal
eagerly, “and we had such a good idea.  Every one in the house-party had
to be a character and behave consistently all the time, and at the end of
the visit one had to guess what every one’s character was.  The one who
was voted to have acted his or her character best got a prize.”

“It sounds amusing,” said Lady Blonze.

“I was St. Francis of Assisi,” continued Blanche; “we hadn’t got to keep
to our right sexes.  I kept getting up in the middle of a meal, and
throwing out food to the birds; you see, the chief thing that one
remembers of St. Francis is that he was fond of the birds.  Every one was
so stupid about it, and thought that I was the old man who feeds the
sparrows in the Tuileries Gardens.  Then Colonel Pentley was the Jolly
Miller on the banks of Dee.”

“How on earth did he do that?” asked Bertie van Tahn.

“‘He laughed and sang from morn till night,’” explained Blanche.

“How dreadful for the rest of you,” said Bertie; “and anyway he wasn’t on
the banks of Dee.”

“One had to imagine that,” said Blanche.

“If you could imagine all that you might as well imagine cattle on the
further bank and keep on calling them home, Mary-fashion, across the
sands of Dee.  Or you might change the river to the Yarrow and imagine it
was on the top of you, and say you were Willie, or whoever it was,
drowned in Yarrow.”

“Of course it’s easy to make fun of it,” said Blanche sharply, “but it
was extremely interesting and amusing.  The prize was rather a fiasco,
though.  You see, Millie Matheson said her character was Lady Bountiful,
and as she was our hostess of course we all had to vote that she had
carried out her character better than anyone.  Otherwise I ought to have
got the prize.”

“It’s quite an idea for a Christmas party,” said Lady Blonze; “we must
certainly do it here.”

Sir Nicholas was not so enthusiastic.  “Are you quite sure, my dear, that
you’re wise in doing this thing?” he said to his wife when they were
alone together.  “It might do very well at the Mathesons, where they had
rather a staid, elderly house-party, but here it will be a different
matter.  There is the Durmot flapper, for instance, who simply stops at
nothing, and you know what Van Tahn is like.  Then there is Cyril
Skatterly; he has madness on one side of his family and a Hungarian
grandmother on the other.”

“I don’t see what they could do that would matter,” said Lady Blonze.

“It’s the unknown that is to be dreaded,” said Sir Nicholas.  “If
Skatterly took it into his head to represent a Bull of Bashan, well, I’d
rather not be here.”

“Of course we shan’t allow any Bible characters.  Besides, I don’t know
what the Bulls of Bashan really did that was so very dreadful; they just
came round and gaped, as far as I remember.”

“My dear, you don’t know what Skatterly’s Hungarian imagination mightn’t
read into the part; it would be small satisfaction to say to him
afterwards: ‘You’ve behaved as no Bull of Bashan would have behaved.’”

“Oh, you’re an alarmist,” said Lady Blonze; “I particularly want to have
this idea carried out.  It will be sure to be talked about a lot.”

“That is quite possible,” said Sir Nicholas.

                                * * * * *

Dinner that evening was not a particularly lively affair; the strain of
trying to impersonate a self-imposed character or to glean hints of
identity from other people’s conduct acted as a check on the natural
festivity of such a gathering.  There was a general feeling of gratitude
and acquiescence when good-natured Rachel Klammerstein suggested that
there should be an hour or two’s respite from “the game” while they all
listened to a little piano-playing after dinner.  Rachel’s love of piano
music was not indiscriminate, and concentrated itself chiefly on
selections rendered by her idolised offspring, Moritz and Augusta, who,
to do them justice, played remarkably well.

The Klammersteins were deservedly popular as Christmas guests; they gave
expensive gifts lavishly on Christmas Day and New Year, and Mrs.
Klammerstein had already dropped hints of her intention to present the
prize for the best enacted character in the game competition.  Every one
had brightened at this prospect; if it had fallen to Lady Blonze, as
hostess, to provide the prize, she would have considered that a little
souvenir of some twenty or twenty-five shillings’ value would meet the
case, whereas coming from a Klammerstein source it would certainly run to
several guineas.

The close time for impersonation efforts came to an end with the final
withdrawal of Moritz and Augusta from the piano.  Blanche Boveal retired
early, leaving the room in a series of laboured leaps that she hoped
might be recognised as a tolerable imitation of Pavlova.  Vera Durmot,
the sixteen-year-old flapper, expressed her confident opinion that the
performance was intended to typify Mark Twain’s famous jumping frog, and
her diagnosis of the case found general acceptance.  Another guest to set
an example of early bed-going was Waldo Plubley, who conducted his life
on a minutely regulated system of time-tables and hygienic routine.
Waldo was a plump, indolent young man of seven-and-twenty, whose mother
had early in his life decided for him that he was unusually delicate, and
by dint of much coddling and home-keeping had succeeded in making him
physically soft and mentally peevish.  Nine hours’ unbroken sleep,
preceded by elaborate breathing exercises and other hygienic ritual, was
among the indispensable regulations which Waldo imposed on himself, and
there were innumerable small observances which he exacted from those who
were in any way obliged to minister to his requirements; a special teapot
for the decoction of his early tea was always solemnly handed over to the
bedroom staff of any house in which he happened to be staying.  No one
had ever quite mastered the mechanism of this precious vessel, but Bertie
van Tahn was responsible for the legend that its spout had to be kept
facing north during the process of infusion.

On this particular night the irreducible nine hours were severely
mutilated by the sudden and by no means noiseless incursion of a
pyjama-clad figure into Waldo’s room at an hour midway between midnight
and dawn.

“What is the matter?  What are you looking for?” asked the awakened and
astonished Waldo, slowly recognising Van Tahn, who appeared to be
searching hastily for something he had lost.

“Looking for sheep,” was the reply.

“Sheep?” exclaimed Waldo.

“Yes, sheep.  You don’t suppose I’m looking for giraffes, do you?”

“I don’t see why you should expect to find either in my room,” retorted
Waldo furiously.

“I can’t argue the matter at this hour of the night,” said Bertie, and
began hastily rummaging in the chest of drawers.  Shirts and underwear
went flying on to the floor.

“There are no sheep here, I tell you,” screamed Waldo.

“I’ve only got your word for it,” said Bertie, whisking most of the
bedclothes on to the floor; “if you weren’t concealing something you
wouldn’t be so agitated.”

Waldo was by this time convinced that Van Tahn was raving mad, and made
an anxious effort to humour him.

“Go back to bed like a dear fellow,” he pleaded, “and your sheep will
turn up all right in the morning.”

“I daresay,” said Bertie gloomily, “without their tails.  Nice fool I
shall look with a lot of Manx sheep.”

And by way of emphasising his annoyance at the prospect he sent Waldo’s
pillows flying to the top of the wardrobe.

“But _why_ no tails?” asked Waldo, whose teeth were chattering with fear
and rage and lowered temperature.

“My dear boy, have you never heard the ballad of Little Bo-Peep?” said
Bertie with a chuckle.  “It’s my character in the Game, you know.  If I
didn’t go hunting about for my lost sheep no one would be able to guess
who I was; and now go to sleepy weeps like a good child or I shall be
cross with you.”

“I leave you to imagine,” wrote Waldo in the course of a long letter to
his mother, “how much sleep I was able to recover that night, and you
know how essential nine uninterrupted hours of slumber are to my health.”

On the other hand he was able to devote some wakeful hours to exercises
in breathing wrath and fury against Bertie van Tahn.

Breakfast at Blonzecourt was a scattered meal, on the “come when you
please” principle, but the house-party was supposed to gather in full
strength at lunch.  On the day after the “Game” had been started there
were, however, some notable absentees.  Waldo Plubley, for instance, was
reported to be nursing a headache.  A large breakfast and an “A.B.C.” had
been taken up to his room, but he had made no appearance in the flesh.

“I expect he’s playing up to some character,” said Vera Durmot; “isn’t
there a thing of Molière’s, ‘_Le Malade Imaginaire_’?  I expect he’s
that.”

Eight or nine lists came out, and were duly pencilled with the
suggestion.

“And where are the Klammersteins?” asked Lady Blonze; “they’re usually so
punctual.”

“Another character pose, perhaps,” said Bertie van Tahn; “‘the Lost Ten
Tribes.’”

“But there are only three of them.  Besides, they’ll want their lunch.
Hasn’t anyone seen anything of them?”

“Didn’t you take them out in your car?” asked Blanche Boveal, addressing
herself to Cyril Skatterly.

“Yes, took them out to Slogberry Moor immediately after breakfast.  Miss
Durmot came too.”

“I saw you and Vera come back,” said Lady Blonze, “but I didn’t see the
Klammersteins.  Did you put them down in the village?”

“No,” said Skatterly shortly.

“But where are they?  Where did you leave them?”

“We left them on Slogberry Moor,” said Vera calmly.

“On Slogberry Moor?  Why, it’s more than thirty miles away!  How are they
going to get back?”

“We didn’t stop to consider that,” said Skatterly; “we asked them to get
out for a moment, on the pretence that the car had stuck, and then we
dashed off full speed and left them there.”

“But how dare you do such a thing?  It’s most inhuman!  Why, it’s been
snowing for the last hour.”

“I expect there’ll be a cottage or farmhouse somewhere if they walk a
mile or two.”

“But why on earth have you done it?”

The question came in a chorus of indignant bewilderment.

“_That_ would be telling what our characters are meant to be,” said Vera.

“Didn’t I warn you?” said Sir Nicholas tragically to his wife.

“It’s something to do with Spanish history; we don’t mind giving you that
clue,” said Skatterly, helping himself cheerfully to salad, and then
Bertie van Tahn broke forth into peals of joyous laughter.

“I’ve got it!  Ferdinand and Isabella deporting the Jews!  Oh, lovely!
Those two have certainly won the prize; we shan’t get anything to beat
that for thoroughness.”

Lady Blonze’s Christmas party was talked about and written about to an
extent that she had not anticipated in her most ambitious moments.  The
letters from Waldo’s mother would alone have made it memorable.




COUSIN TERESA


Basset Harrowcluff returned to the home of his fathers, after an absence
of four years, distinctly well pleased with himself.  He was only
thirty-one, but he had put in some useful service in an out-of-the-way,
though not unimportant, corner of the world.  He had quieted a province,
kept open a trade route, enforced the tradition of respect which is worth
the ransom of many kings in out-of-the-way regions, and done the whole
business on rather less expenditure than would be requisite for
organising a charity in the home country.  In Whitehall and places where
they think, they doubtless thought well of him.  It was not
inconceivable, his father allowed himself to imagine, that Basset’s name
might figure in the next list of Honours.

Basset was inclined to be rather contemptuous of his half-brother, Lucas,
whom he found feverishly engrossed in the same medley of elaborate
futilities that had claimed his whole time and energies, such as they
were, four years ago, and almost as far back before that as he could
remember.  It was the contempt of the man of action for the man of
activities, and it was probably reciprocated.  Lucas was an over-well
nourished individual, some nine years Basset’s senior, with a colouring
that would have been accepted as a sign of intensive culture in an
asparagus, but probably meant in this case mere abstention from exercise.
His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality that
was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive.  There was certainly
no Semitic blood in Lucas’s parentage, but his appearance contrived to
convey at least a suggestion of Jewish extraction.  Clovis Sangrail, who
knew most of his associates by sight, said it was undoubtedly a case of
protective mimicry.

Two days after Basset’s return, Lucas frisked in to lunch in a state of
twittering excitement that could not be restrained even for the immediate
consideration of soup, but had to be verbally discharged in spluttering
competition with mouthfuls of vermicelli.

“I’ve got hold of an idea for something immense,” he babbled, “something
that is simply It.”

Basset gave a short laugh that would have done equally well as a snort,
if one had wanted to make the exchange.  His half-brother was in the
habit of discovering futilities that were “simply It” at frequently
recurring intervals.  The discovery generally meant that he flew up to
town, preceded by glowingly-worded telegrams, to see some one connected
with the stage or the publishing world, got together one or two momentous
luncheon parties, flitted in and out of “Gambrinus” for one or two
evenings, and returned home with an air of subdued importance and the
asparagus tint slightly intensified.  The great idea was generally
forgotten a few weeks later in the excitement of some new discovery.

“The inspiration came to me whilst I was dressing,” announced Lucas; “it
will be _the_ thing in the next music-hall _revue_.  All London will go
mad over it.  It’s just a couplet; of course there will be other words,
but they won’t matter.  Listen:

    Cousin Teresa takes out Cæsar,
    Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi.

A lifting, catchy sort of refrain, you see, and big-drum business on the
two syllables of bor-zoi.  It’s immense.  And I’ve thought out all the
business of it; the singer will sing the first verse alone, then during
the second verse Cousin Teresa will walk through, followed by four wooden
dogs on wheels; Cæsar will be an Irish terrier, Fido a black poodle, Jock
a fox-terrier, and the borzoi, of course, will be a borzoi.  During the
third verse Cousin Teresa will come on alone, and the dogs will be drawn
across by themselves from the opposite wing; then Cousin Teresa will
catch on to the singer and go off-stage in one direction, while the dogs’
procession goes off in the other, crossing en route, which is always very
effective.  There’ll be a lot of applause there, and for the fourth verse
Cousin Teresa will come on in sables and the dogs will all have coats on.
Then I’ve got a great idea for the fifth verse; each of the dogs will be
led on by a Nut, and Cousin Teresa will come on from the opposite side,
crossing en route, always effective, and then she turns round and leads
the whole lot of them off on a string, and all the time every one singing
like mad:

    Cousin Teresa takes out Cæsar
    Fido, Jock, and the big borzoi.

Tum-Tum!  Drum business on the two last syllables.  I’m so excited, I
shan’t sleep a wink to-night.  I’m off to-morrow by the ten-fifteen.
I’ve wired to Hermanova to lunch with me.”

If any of the rest of the family felt any excitement over the creation of
Cousin Teresa, they were signally successful in concealing the fact.

“Poor Lucas does take his silly little ideas seriously,” said Colonel
Harrowcluff afterwards in the smoking-room.

“Yes,” said his younger son, in a slightly less tolerant tone, “in a day
or two he’ll come back and tell us that his sensational masterpiece is
above the heads of the public, and in about three weeks’ time he’ll be
wild with enthusiasm over a scheme to dramatise the poems of Herrick or
something equally promising.”

And then an extraordinary thing befell.  In defiance of all precedent
Lucas’s glowing anticipations were justified and endorsed by the course
of events.  If Cousin Teresa was above the heads of the public, the
public heroically adapted itself to her altitude.  Introduced as an
experiment at a dull moment in a new _revue_, the success of the item was
unmistakable; the calls were so insistent and uproarious that even Lucas’
ample devisings of additional “business” scarcely sufficed to keep pace
with the demand.  Packed houses on successive evenings confirmed the
verdict of the first night audience, stalls and boxes filled
significantly just before the turn came on, and emptied significantly
after the last _encore_ had been given.  The manager tearfully
acknowledged that Cousin Teresa was It.  Stage hands and supers and
programme sellers acknowledged it to one another without the least
reservation.  The name of the _revue_ dwindled to secondary importance,
and vast letters of electric blue blazoned the words “Cousin Teresa” from
the front of the great palace of pleasure.  And, of course, the magic of
the famous refrain laid its spell all over the Metropolis.  Restaurant
proprietors were obliged to provide the members of their orchestras with
painted wooden dogs on wheels, in order that the much-demanded and always
conceded melody should be rendered with the necessary spectacular
effects, and the crash of bottles and forks on the tables at the mention
of the big borzoi usually drowned the sincerest efforts of drum or
cymbals.  Nowhere and at no time could one get away from the double thump
that brought up the rear of the refrain; revellers reeling home at night
banged it on doors and hoardings, milkmen clashed their cans to its
cadence, messenger boys hit smaller messenger boys resounding double
smacks on the same principle.  And the more thoughtful circles of the
great city were not deaf to the claims and significance of the popular
melody.  An enterprising and emancipated preacher discoursed from his
pulpit on the inner meaning of “Cousin Teresa,” and Lucas Harrowcluff was
invited to lecture on the subject of his great achievement to members of
the Young Mens’ Endeavour League, the Nine Arts Club, and other learned
and willing-to-learn bodies.  In Society it seemed to be the one thing
people really cared to talk about; men and women of middle age and
average education might be seen together in corners earnestly discussing,
not the question whether Servia should have an outlet on the Adriatic, or
the possibilities of a British success in international polo contests,
but the more absorbing topic of the problematic Aztec or Nilotic origin
of the Teresa _motiv_.

“Politics and patriotism are so boring and so out of date,” said a
revered lady who had some pretensions to oracular utterance; “we are too
cosmopolitan nowadays to be really moved by them.  That is why one
welcomes an intelligible production like ‘Cousin Teresa,’ that has a
genuine message for one.  One can’t understand the message all at once,
of course, but one felt from the very first that it was there.  I’ve been
to see it eighteen times and I’m going again to-morrow and on Thursday.
One can’t see it often enough.”

                                * * * * *

“It would be rather a popular move if we gave this Harrowcluff person a
knighthood or something of the sort,” said the Minister reflectively.

“Which Harrowcluff?” asked his secretary.

“Which?  There is only one, isn’t there?” said the Minister; “the ‘Cousin
Teresa’ man, of course.  I think every one would be pleased if we
knighted him.  Yes, you can put him down on the list of certainties—under
the letter L.”

“The letter L,” said the secretary, who was new to his job; “does that
stand for Liberalism or liberality?”

Most of the recipients of Ministerial favour were expected to qualify in
both of those subjects.

“Literature,” explained the Minister.

And thus, after a fashion, Colonel Harrowcluff’s expectation of seeing
his son’s name in the list of Honours was gratified.




THE YARKAND MANNER


Sir Lulworth Quayne was making a leisurely progress through the
Zoological Society’s Gardens in company with his nephew, recently
returned from Mexico.  The latter was interested in comparing and
contrasting allied types of animals occurring in the North American and
Old World fauna.

“One of the most remarkable things in the wanderings of species,” he
observed, “is the sudden impulse to trek and migrate that breaks out now
and again, for no apparent reason, in communities of hitherto
stay-at-home animals.”

“In human affairs the same phenomenon is occasionally noticeable,” said
Sir Lulworth; “perhaps the most striking instance of it occurred in this
country while you were away in the wilds of Mexico.  I mean the wander
fever which suddenly displayed itself in the managing and editorial
staffs of certain London newspapers.  It began with the stampede of the
entire staff of one of our most brilliant and enterprising weeklies to
the banks of the Seine and the heights of Montmartre.  The migration was
a brief one, but it heralded an era of restlessness in the Press world
which lent quite a new meaning to the phrase ‘newspaper circulation.’
Other editorial staffs were not slow to imitate the example that had been
set them.  Paris soon dropped out of fashion as being too near home;
Nürnberg, Seville, and Salonica became more favoured as planting-out
grounds for the personnel of not only weekly but daily papers as well.
The localities were perhaps not always well chosen; the fact of a leading
organ of Evangelical thought being edited for two successive fortnights
from Trouville and Monte Carlo was generally admitted to have been a
mistake.  And even when enterprising and adventurous editors took
themselves and their staffs further afield there were some unavoidable
clashings.  For instance, the _Scrutator_, _Sporting Bluff_, and _The
Damsels’ Own Paper_ all pitched on Khartoum for the same week.  It was,
perhaps, a desire to out-distance all possible competition that
influenced the management of the _Daily Intelligencer_, one of the most
solid and respected organs of Liberal opinion, in its decision to
transfer its offices for three or four weeks from Fleet Street to Eastern
Turkestan, allowing, of course, a necessary margin of time for the
journey there and back.  This was, in many respects, the most remarkable
of all the Press stampedes that were experienced at this time.  There was
no make-believe about the undertaking; proprietor, manager, editor,
sub-editors, leader-writers, principal reporters, and so forth, all took
part in what was popularly alluded to as the _Drang nach Osten_; an
intelligent and efficient office-boy was all that was left in the
deserted hive of editorial industry.”

“That was doing things rather thoroughly, wasn’t it?” said the nephew.

“Well, you see,” said Sir Lulworth, “the migration idea was falling
somewhat into disrepute from the half-hearted manner in which it was
occasionally carried out.  You were not impressed by the information that
such and such a paper was being edited and brought out at Lisbon or
Innsbruck if you chanced to see the principal leader-writer or the art
editor lunching as usual at their accustomed restaurants.  The _Daily
Intelligencer_ was determined to give no loophole for cavil at the
genuineness of its pilgrimage, and it must be admitted that to a certain
extent the arrangements made for transmitting copy and carrying on the
usual features of the paper during the long outward journey worked
smoothly and well.  The series of articles which commenced at Baku on
‘What Cobdenism might do for the camel industry’ ranks among the best of
the recent contributions to Free Trade literature, while the views on
foreign policy enunciated ‘from a roof in Yarkand’ showed at least as
much grasp of the international situation as those that had germinated
within half a mile of Downing Street.  Quite in keeping, too, with the
older and better traditions of British journalism was the manner of the
home-coming; no bombast, no personal advertisement, no flamboyant
interviews.  Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers’ Club was
courteously declined.  Indeed, it began to be felt that the
self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being carried to a pedantic
length.  Foreman compositors, advertisement clerks, and other members of
the non-editorial staff, who had, of course, taken no part in the great
trek, found it as impossible to get into direct communication with the
editor and his satellites now that they had returned as when they had
been excusably inaccessible in Central Asia.  The sulky, overworked
office-boy, who was the one connecting link between the editorial brain
and the business departments of the paper, sardonically explained the new
aloofness as the ‘Yarkand manner.’  Most of the reporters and sub-editors
seemed to have been dismissed in autocratic fashion since their return
and new ones engaged by letter; to these the editor and his immediate
associates remained an unseen presence, issuing its instructions solely
through the medium of curt typewritten notes.  Something mystic and
Tibetan and forbidden had replaced the human bustle and democratic
simplicity of pre-migration days, and the same experience was encountered
by those who made social overtures to the returned wanderers.  The most
brilliant hostess of Twentieth Century London flung the pearl of her
hospitality into the unresponsive trough of the editorial letter-box; it
seemed as if nothing short of a Royal command would drag the
hermit-souled _revenants_ from their self-imposed seclusion.  People
began to talk unkindly of the effect of high altitudes and Eastern
atmosphere on minds and temperaments unused to such luxuries.  The
Yarkand manner was not popular.”

“And the contents of the paper,” said the nephew, “did they show the
influence of the new style?”

“Ah!” said Sir Lulworth, “that was the exciting thing.  In home affairs,
social questions, and the ordinary events of the day not much change was
noticeable.  A certain Oriental carelessness seemed to have crept into
the editorial department, and perhaps a note of lassitude not unnatural
in the work of men who had returned from what had been a fairly arduous
journey.  The aforetime standard of excellence was scarcely maintained,
but at any rate the general lines of policy and outlook were not departed
from.  It was in the realm of foreign affairs that a startling change
took place.  Blunt, forcible, outspoken articles appeared, couched in
language which nearly turned the autumn manœuvres of six important Powers
into mobilisations.  Whatever else the _Daily Intelligencer_ had learned
in the East, it had not acquired the art of diplomatic ambiguity.  The
man in the street enjoyed the articles and bought the paper as he had
never bought it before; the men in Downing Street took a different view.
The Foreign Secretary, hitherto accounted a rather reticent man, became
positively garrulous in the course of perpetually disavowing the
sentiments expressed in the _Daily Intelligencer’s_ leaders; and then one
day the Government came to the conclusion that something definite and
drastic must be done.  A deputation, consisting of the Prime Minister,
the Foreign Secretary, four leading financiers, and a well-known
Nonconformist divine, made its way to the offices of the paper.  At the
door leading to the editorial department the way was barred by a nervous
but defiant office-boy.

“‘You can’t see the editor nor any of the staff,’ he announced.

“‘We insist on seeing the editor or some responsible person,’ said the
Prime Minister, and the deputation forced its way in.  The boy had spoken
truly; there was no one to be seen.  In the whole suite of rooms there
was no sign of human life.

“‘Where is the editor?’  ‘Or the foreign editor?’  ‘Or the chief
leader-writer?  Or anybody?’

“In answer to the shower of questions the boy unlocked a drawer and
produced a strange-looking envelope, which bore a Khokand postmark, and a
date of some seven or eight months back.  It contained a scrap of paper
on which was written the following message:

    “‘Entire party captured by brigand tribe on homeward journey.
    Quarter of million demanded as ransom, but would probably take less.
    Inform Government, relations, and friends.’

“There followed the signatures of the principal members of the party and
instructions as to how and where the money was to be paid.

“The letter had been directed to the office-boy-in-charge, who had
quietly suppressed it.  No one is a hero to one’s own office-boy, and he
evidently considered that a quarter of a million was an unwarrantable
outlay for such a doubtfully advantageous object as the repatriation of
an errant newspaper staff.  So he drew the editorial and other salaries,
forged what signatures were necessary, engaged new reporters, did what
sub-editing he could, and made as much use as possible of the large
accumulation of special articles that was held in reserve for
emergencies.  The articles on foreign affairs were entirely his own
composition.

“Of course the whole thing had to be kept as quiet as possible; an
interim staff, pledged to secrecy, was appointed to keep the paper going
till the pining captives could be sought out, ransomed, and brought home,
in twos and threes to escape notice, and gradually things were put back
on their old footing.  The articles on foreign affairs reverted to the
wonted traditions of the paper.”

“But,” interposed the nephew, “how on earth did the boy account to the
relatives all those months for the non-appearance—”

“That,” said Sir Lulworth, “was the most brilliant stroke of all.  To the
wife or nearest relative of each of the missing men he forwarded a
letter, copying the handwriting of the supposed writer as well as he
could, and making excuses about vile pens and ink; in each letter he told
the same story, varying only the locality, to the effect that the writer,
alone of the whole party, was unable to tear himself away from the wild
liberty and allurements of Eastern life, and was going to spend several
months roaming in some selected region.  Many of the wives started off
immediately in pursuit of their errant husbands, and it took the
Government a considerable time and much trouble to reclaim them from
their fruitless quests along the banks of the Oxus, the Gobi Desert, the
Orenburg steppe, and other outlandish places.  One of them, I believe, is
still lost somewhere in the Tigris Valley.”

“And the boy?”

“Is still in journalism.”




THE BYZANTINE OMELETTE


Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a
Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.  The particular member of that wealthy
family whom she had married was rich, even as his relatives counted
riches.  Sophie had very advanced and decided views as to the
distribution of money: it was a pleasing and fortunate circumstance that
she also had the money.  When she inveighed eloquently against the evils
of capitalism at drawing-room meetings and Fabian conferences she was
conscious of a comfortable feeling that the system, with all its
inequalities and iniquities, would probably last her time.  It is one of
the consolations of middle-aged reformers that the good they inculcate
must live after them if it is to live at all.

On a certain spring evening, somewhere towards the dinner-hour, Sophie
sat tranquilly between her mirror and her maid, undergoing the process of
having her hair built into an elaborate reflection of the prevailing
fashion.  She was hedged round with a great peace, the peace of one who
has attained a desired end with much effort and perseverance, and who has
found it still eminently desirable in its attainment.  The Duke of Syria
had consented to come beneath her roof as a guest, was even now installed
beneath her roof, and would shortly be sitting at her dining-table.  As a
good Socialist, Sophie disapproved of social distinctions, and derided
the idea of a princely caste, but if there were to be these artificial
gradations of rank and dignity she was pleased and anxious to have an
exalted specimen of an exalted order included in her house-party.  She
was broad-minded enough to love the sinner while hating the sin—not that
she entertained any warm feeling of personal affection for the Duke of
Syria, who was a comparative stranger, but still, as Duke of Syria, he
was very, very welcome beneath her roof.  She could not have explained
why, but no one was likely to ask her for an explanation, and most
hostesses envied her.

“You must surpass yourself to-night, Richardson,” she said complacently
to her maid; “I must be looking my very best.  We must all surpass
ourselves.”

The maid said nothing, but from the concentrated look in her eyes and the
deft play of her fingers it was evident that she was beset with the
ambition to surpass herself.

A knock came at the door, a quiet but peremptory knock, as of some one
who would not be denied.

“Go and see who it is,” said Sophie; “it may be something about the
wine.”

Richardson held a hurried conference with an invisible messenger at the
door; when she returned there was noticeable a curious listlessness in
place of her hitherto alert manner.

“What is it?” asked Sophie.

“The household servants have ‘downed tools,’ madame,” said Richardson.

“Downed tools!” exclaimed Sophie; “do you mean to say they’ve gone on
strike?”

“Yes, madame,” said Richardson, adding the information: “It’s Gaspare
that the trouble is about.”

“Gaspare?” said Sophie wanderingly; “the emergency chef!  The omelette
specialist!”

“Yes, madame.  Before he became an omelette specialist he was a valet,
and he was one of the strike-breakers in the great strike at Lord
Grimford’s two years ago.  As soon as the household staff here learned
that you had engaged him they resolved to ‘down tools’ as a protest.
They haven’t got any grievance against you personally, but they demand
that Gaspare should be immediately dismissed.”

“But,” protested Sophie, “he is the only man in England who understands
how to make a Byzantine omelette.  I engaged him specially for the Duke
of Syria’s visit, and it would be impossible to replace him at short
notice.  I should have to send to Paris, and the Duke loves Byzantine
omelettes.  It was the one thing we talked about coming from the
station.”

“He was one of the strike-breakers at Lord Grimford’s,” reiterated
Richardson.

“This is too awful,” said Sophie; “a strike of servants at a moment like
this, with the Duke of Syria staying in the house.  Something must be
done immediately.  Quick, finish my hair and I’ll go and see what I can
do to bring them round.”

“I can’t finish your hair, madame,” said Richardson quietly, but with
immense decision.  “I belong to the union and I can’t do another
half-minute’s work till the strike is settled.  I’m sorry to be
disobliging.”

“But this is inhuman!” exclaimed Sophie tragically; “I’ve always been a
model mistress and I’ve refused to employ any but union servants, and
this is the result.  I can’t finish my hair myself; I don’t know how to.
What am I to do?  It’s wicked!”

“Wicked is the word,” said Richardson; “I’m a good Conservative and I’ve
no patience with this Socialist foolery, asking your pardon.  It’s
tyranny, that’s what it is, all along the line, but I’ve my living to
make, same as other people, and I’ve got to belong to the union.  I
couldn’t touch another hair-pin without a strike permit, not if you was
to double my wages.”

The door burst open and Catherine Malsom raged into the room.

“Here’s a nice affair,” she screamed, “a strike of household servants
without a moment’s warning, and I’m left like this!  I can’t appear in
public in this condition.”

After a very hasty scrutiny Sophie assured her that she could not.

“Have they all struck?” she asked her maid.

“Not the kitchen staff,” said Richardson, “they belong to a different
union.”

“Dinner at least will be assured,” said Sophie, “that is something to be
thankful for.”

“Dinner!” snorted Catherine, “what on earth is the good of dinner when
none of us will be able to appear at it?  Look at your hair—and look at
me! or rather, don’t.”

“I know it’s difficult to manage without a maid; can’t your husband be
any help to you?” asked Sophie despairingly.

“Henry?  He’s in worse case than any of us.  His man is the only person
who really understands that ridiculous new-fangled Turkish bath that he
insists on taking with him everywhere.”

“Surely he could do without a Turkish bath for one evening,” said Sophie;
“I can’t appear without hair, but a Turkish bath is a luxury.”

“My good woman,” said Catherine, speaking with a fearful intensity,
“Henry was in the bath when the strike started.  In it, do you
understand?  He’s there now.”

“Can’t he get out?”

“He doesn’t know how to.  Every time he pulls the lever marked ‘release’
he only releases hot steam.  There are two kinds of steam in the bath,
‘bearable’ and ‘scarcely bearable’; he has released them both.  By this
time I’m probably a widow.”

“I simply can’t send away Gaspare,” wailed Sophie; “I should never be
able to secure another omelette specialist.”

“Any difficulty that I may experience in securing another husband is of
course a trifle beneath anyone’s consideration,” said Catherine bitterly.

Sophie capitulated.  “Go,” she said to Richardson, “and tell the Strike
Committee, or whoever are directing this affair, that Gaspare is herewith
dismissed.  And ask Gaspare to see me presently in the library, when I
will pay him what is due to him and make what excuses I can; and then fly
back and finish my hair.”

Some half an hour later Sophie marshalled her guests in the Grand Salon
preparatory to the formal march to the dining-room.  Except that Henry
Malsom was of the ripe raspberry tint that one sometimes sees at private
theatricals representing the human complexion, there was little outward
sign among those assembled of the crisis that had just been encountered
and surmounted.  But the tension had been too stupefying while it lasted
not to leave some mental effects behind it.  Sophie talked at random to
her illustrious guest, and found her eyes straying with increasing
frequency towards the great doors through which would presently come the
blessed announcement that dinner was served.  Now and again she glanced
mirror-ward at the reflection of her wonderfully coiffed hair, as an
insurance underwriter might gaze thankfully at an overdue vessel that had
ridden safely into harbour in the wake of a devastating hurricane.  Then
the doors opened and the welcome figure of the butler entered the room.
But he made no general announcement of a banquet in readiness, and the
doors closed behind him; his message was for Sophie alone.

“There is no dinner, madame,” he said gravely; “the kitchen staff have
‘downed tools.’  Gaspare belongs to the Union of Cooks and Kitchen
Employees, and as soon as they heard of his summary dismissal at a
moment’s notice they struck work.  They demand his instant reinstatement
and an apology to the union.  I may add, madame, that they are very firm;
I’ve been obliged even to hand back the dinner rolls that were already on
the table.”

After the lapse of eighteen months Sophie Chattel-Monkheim is beginning
to go about again among her old haunts and associates, but she still has
to be very careful.  The doctors will not let her attend anything at all
exciting, such as a drawing-room meeting or a Fabian conference; it is
doubtful, indeed, whether she wants to.




THE FEAST OF NEMESIS


“It’s a good thing that Saint Valentine’s Day has dropped out of vogue,”
said Mrs. Thackenbury; “what with Christmas and New Year and Easter, not
to speak of birthdays, there are quite enough remembrance days as it is.
I tried to save myself trouble at Christmas by just sending flowers to
all my friends, but it wouldn’t work; Gertrude has eleven hot-houses and
about thirty gardeners, so it would have been ridiculous to send flowers
to her, and Milly has just started a florist’s shop, so it was equally
out of the question there.  The stress of having to decide in a hurry
what to give to Gertrude and Milly just when I thought I’d got the whole
question nicely off my mind completely ruined my Christmas, and then the
awful monotony of the letters of thanks: ‘Thank you so much for your
lovely flowers.  It was so good of you to think of me.’  Of course in the
majority of cases I hadn’t thought about the recipients at all; their
names were down in my list of ‘people who must not be left out.’  If I
trusted to remembering them there would be some awful sins of omission.”

“The trouble is,” said Clovis to his aunt, “all these days of intrusive
remembrance harp so persistently on one aspect of human nature and
entirely ignore the other; that is why they become so perfunctory and
artificial.  At Christmas and New Year you are emboldened and encouraged
by convention to send gushing messages of optimistic goodwill and servile
affection to people whom you would scarcely ask to lunch unless some one
else had failed you at the last moment; if you are supping at a
restaurant on New Year’s Eve you are permitted and expected to join hands
and sing ‘For Auld Lang Syne’ with strangers whom you have never seen
before and never want to see again.  But no licence is allowed in the
opposite direction.”

“Opposite direction; what opposite direction?” queried Mrs. Thackenbury.

“There is no outlet for demonstrating your feelings towards people whom
you simply loathe.  That is really the crying need of our modern
civilisation.  Just think how jolly it would be if a recognised day were
set apart for the paying off of old scores and grudges, a day when one
could lay oneself out to be gracefully vindictive to a carefully
treasured list of ‘people who must not be let off.’  I remember when I
was at a private school we had one day, the last Monday of the term I
think it was, consecrated to the settlement of feuds and grudges; of
course we did not appreciate it as much as it deserved, because, after
all, any day of the term could be used for that purpose.  Still, if one
had chastised a smaller boy for being cheeky weeks before, one was always
permitted on that day to recall the episode to his memory by chastising
him again.  That is what the French call reconstructing the crime.”

“I should call it reconstructing the punishment,” said Mrs. Thackenbury;
“and, anyhow, I don’t see how you could introduce a system of primitive
schoolboy vengeance into civilised adult life.  We haven’t outgrown our
passions, but we are supposed to have learned how to keep them within
strictly decorous limits.”

“Of course the thing would have to be done furtively and politely,” said
Clovis; “the charm of it would be that it would never be perfunctory like
the other thing.  Now, for instance, you say to yourself: ‘I must show
the Webleys some attention at Christmas, they were kind to dear Bertie at
Bournemouth,’ and you send them a calendar, and daily for six days after
Christmas the male Webley asks the female Webley if she has remembered to
thank you for the calendar you sent them.  Well, transplant that idea to
the other and more human side of your nature, and say to yourself: ‘Next
Thursday is Nemesis Day; what on earth can I do to those odious people
next door who made such an absurd fuss when Ping Yang bit their youngest
child?’  Then you’d get up awfully early on the allotted day and climb
over into their garden and dig for truffles on their tennis court with a
good gardening fork, choosing, of course, that part of the court that was
screened from observation by the laurel bushes.  You wouldn’t find any
truffles but you would find a great peace, such as no amount of
present-giving could ever bestow.”

“I shouldn’t,” said Mrs. Thackenbury, though her air of protest sounded a
bit forced; “I should feel rather a worm for doing such a thing.”

“You exaggerate the power of upheaval which a worm would be able to bring
into play in the limited time available,” said Clovis; “if you put in a
strenuous ten minutes with a really useful fork, the result ought to
suggest the operations of an unusually masterful mole or a badger in a
hurry.”

“They might guess I had done it,” said Mrs. Thackenbury.

“Of course they would,” said Clovis; “that would be half the satisfaction
of the thing, just as you like people at Christmas to know what presents
or cards you’ve sent them.  The thing would be much easier to manage, of
course, when you were on outwardly friendly terms with the object of your
dislike.  That greedy little Agnes Blaik, for instance, who thinks of
nothing but her food, it would be quite simple to ask her to a picnic in
some wild woodland spot and lose her just before lunch was served; when
you found her again every morsel of food could have been eaten up.”

“It would require no ordinary human strategy to lose Agnes Blaik when
luncheon was imminent: in fact, I don’t believe it could be done.”

“Then have all the other guests, people whom you dislike, and lose the
luncheon.  It could have been sent by accident in the wrong direction.”

“It would be a ghastly picnic,” said Mrs. Thackenbury.

“For them, but not for you,” said Clovis; “you would have had an early
and comforting lunch before you started, and you could improve the
occasion by mentioning in detail the items of the missing banquet—the
lobster Newburg and the egg mayonnaise, and the curry that was to have
been heated in a chafing-dish.  Agnes Blaik would be delirious long
before you got to the list of wines, and in the long interval of waiting,
before they had quite abandoned hope of the lunch turning up, you could
induce them to play silly games, such as that idiotic one of ‘the Lord
Mayor’s dinner-party,’ in which every one has to choose the name of a
dish and do something futile when it is called out.  In this case they
would probably burst into tears when their dish is mentioned.  It would
be a heavenly picnic.”

Mrs. Thackenbury was silent for a moment; she was probably making a
mental list of the people she would like to invite to the Duke Humphrey
picnic.  Presently she asked: “And that odious young man, Waldo Plubley,
who is always coddling himself—have you thought of anything that one
could do to him?”  Evidently she was beginning to see the possibilities
of Nemesis Day.

“If there was anything like a general observance of the festival,” said
Clovis, “Waldo would be in such demand that you would have to bespeak him
weeks beforehand, and even then, if there were an east wind blowing or a
cloud or two in the sky he might be too careful of his precious self to
come out.  It would be rather jolly if you could lure him into a hammock
in the orchard, just near the spot where there is a wasps’ nest every
summer.  A comfortable hammock on a warm afternoon would appeal to his
indolent tastes, and then

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