Transcribed from the 1919 John Lane edition by Jane Duff and
David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

THE TOYS OF PEACE
AND OTHER PAPERS

TO
THE 22nd ROYAL FUSILIERS

Note

Thanks are due to the Editors of the Morning Post, the
Westminster Gazette, and the Bystander for their
amiability in allowing tales that appeared in these journals to
be reproduced in the present volume.

R. R.

Contents

p. ixHECTOR
HUGH MUNRO

“When peace comes,” wrote an officer of the 22nd
Royal Fusiliers, the regiment in which Munro was a private and in
which he rose to the rank of lance-sergeant, “Saki will
give us the most wonderful of all the books about the
war.”  But that book of the war will not be written;
for Munro has died for King and country.  In this volume are
his last tales.  And it is because these tales, brilliant
and elusive as butterflies, hide, rather than reveal, the
character of the man who wrote them, give but a suggestion of his
tenderness and simplicity, of his iron will, of his splendour in
the grip of war, that it is my duty to write these pages about
him, now that he lies in the kind earth of France.  It is
but to do what his choice of a pen-name makes me sure he himself
would have done for a friend.

“Yon rising Moon that looks for us again,
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter, rising, look for us!
Through this same Garden—and for one in vain.

“And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass
Among the Guests, star-scattered on the grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty glass.”

p. xThe first
time that Munro used the name of Saki was, I believe, in 1890,
when he published in the Westminster Gazette the second of
the political satires, which were afterwards collected in a
volume, called Alice in Westminster.  It was, I
think, because the wistful philosophy of FitzGerald appealed to
him, as it did to so many of his contemporaries, that he chose a
pen-name from his verses.  He loved the fleeting beauty of
life.  “There is one thing I care for and that is
youth,” he once said.  And he always remained
youthful.  It was perfectly natural for him, although he was
then a man of forty, to celebrate the coming in of a new year by
seizing the hands of strangers and flying round in a great
here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush at Oxford Circus, and, later
in the year, to dance in the moonlight round a bonfire in the
country, invoking Apollo with entreaties for sunshine to waken
the flowers.  His last tale, For the Duration of the
War, written when he was at the front, shows that his spirit
remained youthful to the end.  But if he gloried in the
beauty of life, he was conscious of its sadness.  Have we
any book in which the joy and pain of life are so intimately
blended as they are in The Unbearable Bassington? 
Munro himself laughed when he was looking through a collection of
criticisms of that novel, some of p. xiwhich emphasised its gaiety and
others its poignancy, and remarked that they would bewilder the
people who read them.

It is not my present purpose to write a biography of my
friend.  That is a task which must be discharged later, and
an account of his life will be given in the first volume of the
collected edition of his works, which it is proposed to publish
after the war.  Nevertheless, before writing of the
transformation wrought in him by the war, it may be well to give
a brief outline of his career.

Munro was born in 1870 in Burmah, where his father, the late
Colonel C. A. Munro, was stationed.  At his christening he
was named Hector Hugh.  He belonged to a family with
traditions of the two services.  His paternal grandfather
had been in the army, and his mother was a daughter of
Rear-Admiral Mercer.  Mrs. Munro died when her children were
very young, and Hector, his elder brother and his sister were
brought up by their father’s sisters, two maiden ladies,
who were devoted to the children, but had old-fashioned Scottish
ideas of discipline.  Their home was near Barnstaple, a
lonely house in a garden shut in by high stone walls with meadows
beyond.  The three children had no companions, and were
thrown on their own resources for amusement.  One of their
diversions was to p.
xiiproduce a newspaper.  All through his childhood
Hector professed violent Tory opinions, and at a very early age
he began to take an interest in politics and to read any books or
papers dealing with them that came his way.  He loved, above
all, the woodlands and the wild things in them, especially the
birds.  His delicate health caused his aunts somewhat to
temper their severity in his case, but I fancy they must have had
some difficulty in curbing his high spirits; for he was a
thoroughly human boy and up to every sort of prank.  He was
sent for a time to a private school at Exmouth, and when he left
it did lessons at home with his sister’s governess. 
Later he was sent to Bedford College.

When school-days were over and Colonel Munro had returned to
England for good, Hector and his sister were taken abroad by
their father.  They lived in Normandy and then in Dresden,
where the first German words that Hector learnt were the names of
birds, sometimes picked up from strangers in the zoological
gardens.  Then came a strenuous series of visits to German
and Austrian cities, which Colonel Munro arranged as much for the
education as the pleasure of his son and daughter.  Museums
and picture-galleries were visited everywhere.  Hector
amused himself by counting up the number of St. Sebastians in
each gallery and making bets p. xiiiwith his sister as to which would
have the most.  Berlin won with eighteen.  The
impression made on Munro by this tour is to be seen in his books,
and in the present volume there are two tales, The
Interlopers and The Wolves of Cernogratz, which seem
to have been inspired by the memory of some romantic castle in
the heart of Europe.  A short play, Karl Ludwig’s
Window, which will be published later, is based on an idea
given by a visit to a castle near Prague.

After a long visit to Davos, Colonel Munro returned with his
family to England and settled in North Devon, where he devoted
himself during the next two years to directing the studies of his
son and daughter.  Then came another long visit to Davos,
after which Hector left England and joined the Burmese Mounted
Police.  He once told me of the feeling of loneliness he
experienced when he first arrived in Burmah, using almost the
same words in which he described Bassington’s sense of
isolation in the colony to which he was sent.  That account
of the young Englishman looking enviously at a native boy and
girl, racing wildly along in the joy of youth and companionship,
is one of the rare instances of autobiography in Munro’s
works.  He was unable to support the Burmese climate and,
after having fever seven times in eleven months, p. xivwas forced
to return to England.  He remained at home for a year and
hunted regularly with his sister during the winter.  He then
came to London with the intention of making a literary career for
himself.  His talent was recognised by Sir Francis Gould, to
whom a friend had given him an introduction, and he soon began to
write for the Westminster Gazette.  Two years after
he settled in London the publication of the political satires,
based on Alice in Wonderland, brought him into prominence
as a wit and a writer to be counted with.  Mr. Balfour was
his chief butt in these pieces.  He was still, as he always
remained, a Conservative, but he held at the time that Mr.
Balfour’s leadership was a weakness to the party.

In 1902 Munro went to the Balkans for the Morning Post,
and later he became the correspondent of that paper in St.
Petersburg, where he was during the revolution of 1905.

He left St. Petersburg to represent the Morning Post in
Paris, and returned to London in 1908, where the agreeable life
of a man of letters with a brilliant reputation awaited
him.  He had a lodging in Mortimer Street and lived
exceedingly simply.  It was his custom to pass the morning
in a dressing-gown writing.  His writing-pad was usually
propped up with a book to make it slant and he wrote slowly p. xvin a very
clear hand, rarely erasing a word or making a correction. 
His air and the movement of his hand gave one the impression that
he was drawing and not writing.  He almost always lunched at
a Lyons bread-shop, partly because it was economical and partly
because, as he said, he got exactly the sort of luncheon he
liked.  He cared nothing for money.  He had to earn his
living, but he was content as long as he had enough money to
supply his needs.  When a friend once suggested a profitable
field for his writings, he dismissed the idea by saying that he
was not interested in the public for which it was proposed that
he should write.  He loved his art, and, by refusing to
adopt a style that might have appealed to wider circles, he made
himself a place in our literature which, in the opinion of many,
will be lasting.  Almost every day he played cards, either
in the late afternoon or in the evening, at the Cocoa Tree
Club.  The sight of the wealth of others did not excite his
envy.  I remember his coming home from a ball and relating
that he had sat at supper next a millionairess, whose doctor had
prescribed a diet of milk-puddings.  “I had a hearty
supper,” he said gleefully, “and for all her millions
she was unable to eat anything.”

Munro was exceedingly generous.  He would share his last
sovereign with a friend, and nothing p. xvipleased him better than to entertain
his friends at dinner in a club or restaurant.  Nothing
angered him more than meanness in others.  I remember the
indignation with which he spoke of a rich woman who had refused
to give adequate help to a poor person, who stood in need of
it.

This even life in town, occasionally varied by a visit to a
country house, was rudely disturbed by the shock of war. 
Munro was in the House of Commons when Sir Edward Grey made his
statement on the position that this country was to take up. 
He told me that the strain of listening to that speech was so
great that he found himself in a sweat.  He described the
slowness with which the Minister developed his argument and the
way in which he stopped to put on his eye-glasses to read a
memorandum and then took them off to continue, holding the House
in suspense.  That night we dined at a chop-house in the
Strand with two friends.  On our way Munro insisted on
walking at a tremendous pace, and at dinner, when he ordered
cheese and the waiter asked whether he wanted butter, he said
peremptorily: “Cheese, no butter; there’s a war
on.”  A day or two later he was condemning himself for
the slackness of the years in London and hiring a horse to take
exercise, to which he was little addicted, in the Park.  He
was determined to fight.  p. xviiNothing else was to have been
expected of the man who wrote When William Came, a novel
in which he used his supreme gift of irony to rouse his
fellow-countrymen from their torpor and to stir them to take
measures for the defence of the country.  Punch
declared that there had been no such conversational fireworks
since Wilde, in reviewing this book, but Munro was more gratified
by a word of encouragement sent him by Lord Roberts, after he had
read the book, than by all the praise of the critics.  He
was over military age and he was not robust.  In the first
weeks of the war there seemed little chance of his being able to
become a soldier.  “And I have always looked forward
to the romance of a European war,” he said.

There still hangs in his room in Mortimer Street an old
Flemish picture, which he had picked up somewhere, of horsemen in
doublets and plumed hats, fighting beneath the walls of a
city.  It was, I think, the only painting in his
possession.  Perhaps it was this picture that represented to
him the romance of which he spoke; but he did not hide from
himself the terrible side of war.  Happily thoughts about
war can be given in his own words.  The following piece
appeared in the first edition of the Morning Post of April
23, 1915, under the title, An Old Love—

p.
xviii“‘I know nothing about war,’ a boy
of nineteen said to me two days ago, ‘except, of course,
that I’ve heard of its horrors; yet, somehow, in spite of
the horrors, there seems to be something in it different to
anything else in the world, something a little bit
finer.’

“He spoke wistfully, as one who feared that to him war
would always be an unreal, distant, second-hand thing, to be read
about in special editions, and peeped at through the medium of
cinematograph shows.  He felt that the thing that was a
little bit finer than anything else in the world would never come
into his life.

“Nearly every red-blooded human boy has had war, in some
shape or form, for his first love; if his blood has remained red
and he has kept some of his boyishness in after life, that first
love will never have been forgotten.  No one could really
forget those wonderful leaden cavalry soldiers; the horses were
as sleek and prancing as though they had never left the
parade-ground, and the uniforms were correspondingly spick and
span, but the amount of campaigning and fighting they got through
was prodigious.  There are other unforgettable memories for
those who had brothers to play with and fight with, of sieges and
ambushes and pitched encounters, of the slaying of an entire
garrison without p.
xixquarter, or of chivalrous, punctilious courtesy to a
defeated enemy.  Then there was the slow unfolding of the
long romance of actual war, particularly of European war,
ghastly, devastating, heartrending in its effect, and yet somehow
captivating to the imagination.  The Thirty Years’ War
was one of the most hideously cruel wars ever waged, but, in
conjunction with the subsequent campaigns of the Great Louis, it
throws a glamour over the scene of the present struggle. 
The thrill that those far-off things call forth in us may be
ethically indefensible, but it comes in the first place from
something too deep to be driven out; the magic region of the Low
Countries is beckoning to us again, as it beckoned to our
forefathers, who went campaigning there almost from force of
habit.

“One must admit that we have in these Islands a variant
from the red-blooded type.  One or two young men have
assured me that they are not in the least interested in the
war—‘I’m not at all patriotic, you know,’
they announce, as one might announce that one was not a vegetable
or did not use a safety-razor.  There are others whom I have
met within the recent harrowing days who had no place for the war
crisis in their thoughts and conversations; they would talk by
the hour about chamber-music, Greek folk-dances, Florentine art,
and the difficulty of p. xxgetting genuine old oak furniture,
but the national honour and the national danger were topics that
bored them.  One felt that the war would affect them chiefly
as involving a possible shortage in the supply of eau-de-Cologne
or by debarring them from visiting some favourite art treasure at
a Munich gallery.  It is inconceivable that these persons
were ever boys, they have certainly not grown up into men; one
cannot call them womanish—the women of our race are made of
different stuff.  They belong to no sex and it seems a pity
that they should belong to any nation; other nations probably
have similar encumbrances, but we seem to have more of them than
we either desire or deserve.

“There are other men among us who are patriotic, one
supposes, but with a patriotism that one cannot understand; it
must be judged by a standard that we should never care to set
up.  It seems to place a huckstering interpretation on
honour, to display sacred things in a shop window, marked in
plain figures.  ‘If we remained neutral,’ as a
leading London morning paper once pleaded, ‘we should be,
from the commercial point of view, in precisely the same position
as the United States.  We should be able to trade with all
the belligerents (so far as war allows of trade with them); we
should be able to capture the bulk of their trade in neutral p. xximarkets; we
should keep our expenditure down; we should keep out of debt; we
should have healthy finances.’

“A question was buzzing in my head by the time I had
finished reading those alluring arguments:

“Some men of noble stock were made;
Some glory in the murder-blade:
Some praise a science or an art,
But I like honourable trade.

“The poet has given a satiric meaning to the last word
but one in those lines; perhaps that is why they flashed so
readily to the mind.

“One remembers with some feeling of relief the spectacle
last August of boys and youths marching and shouting through the
streets in semi-disciplined mobs, waving the flags of France and
Britain.  There is perhaps nothing very patriotic in
shouting and flag-waving, but it is the only way these youngsters
had of showing their feelings.”

When at last Munro managed to enlist in the 2nd King
Edward’s Horse, he was supremely happy.  He put on a
trooper’s uniform with the exaltation of a novice assuming
the religious habit.  But after a few months he found that
he was not strong enough for life in a cavalry regiment and he
arranged to exchange into the 22nd Royal Fusiliers.  He p. xxiichafed at
the long months of training in England and longed to get to the
front, but military discipline was to him something sacred and,
whether in England or in France, he did his utmost to conform
himself to it and to force others to do the same.  One of
his comrades told me that at the front they would sometimes put
their packs on a passing lorry; it was against orders, and Munro
refused to lighten the strain of a long march in this way,
although the straps of the pack galled his shoulders.

Twice he was offered a commission, but he refused to take
one.  He distrusted his ability to be a good officer and
also he desired to go on fighting side by side with his comrades,
one of whom, now an officer and a prisoner in Germany, had been
his friend before the war.  I was told by a man of his
company that one day a General was conducted along the trenches
by the Colonel commanding the regiment and recognised Munro, whom
he had met at dinner-parties in London.  “What on
earth are you doing here?” he asked, and said that he had a
job to be done at the rear which would be the very thing for
him.  Munro excused himself from accepting it.  Another
opportunity of less arduous work was offered him.  Men who
could speak German were ordered to report: interpreters were
wanted to deal with prisoners.  Munro reported, p. xxiiibut
urged that it had taken him two years to get out to the front and
that he desired to remain there.  He was allowed to do as he
wished.  And his gaiety never left him.  Those who were
with him speak of the tales with which he amused them.  He
even founded a club in one place at which they were stationed,
and called it the Back Kitchen Club, because the members met in
the kitchen of a peasant’s cottage.

When he came home on leave, it was evident that the strain of
military life was telling on him.  He was thin and his face
was haggard.  But the spiritual change wrought in him by the
war was greater than the physical.  He told me that he could
never come back to the old life in London.  And he wrote
asking me to find out from a person in Russia whether it would be
possible to acquire land in Siberia to till and to hunt, and
whether a couple of Yakutsk lads could be got as servants. 
It was the love of the woodlands and the wild things in them,
that he had felt as a child, returning.  The dross had been
burnt up in the flame of war.

Munro fell in the Beaumont-Hamel action in November
1916.  On the 12th he and his comrades were at
Beldancourt.  At one o’clock in the morning of the
14th they went to Mailly.  As the men were crossing
No-Man’s-Land to occupy trenches evacuated p. xxivby the
enemy, Munro was shot through the head.

“Poor Saki!  What an admiration we all had for
him,” wrote the officer in command of the 22nd Royal
Fusiliers.  “I always quoted him as one of the heroes
of the war.  I saw daily the appalling discomforts he so
cheerfully endured.  He flatly refused to take a commission
or in any way to allow me to try to make him more
comfortable.  General Vaughan told him that a brain like his
was wasted as a private soldier.  He just smiled.  He
was absolutely splendid.  What courage!  The men simply
loved him.”

Rothay
Reynolds,

September 1918.

p. 3THE TOYS
OF PEACE

“Harvey,” said Eleanor Bope, handing her brother a
cutting from a London morning paper of the 19th of March,
“just read this about children’s toys, please; it
exactly carries out some of our ideas about influence and
upbringing.”

“In the view of the National Peace Council,” ran
the extract, “there are grave objections to presenting our
boys with regiments of fighting men, batteries of guns, and
squadrons of ‘Dreadnoughts.’  Boys, the Council
admits, naturally love fighting and all the panoply of war . . .
but that is no reason for encouraging, and perhaps giving
permanent form to, their primitive instincts.  At the
Children’s Welfare Exhibition, which opens at Olympia in
three weeks’ time, the Peace Council will make an
alternative suggestion to parents in the shape of an exhibition
of ‘peace toys.’  In front of a
specially-painted representation of the Peace Palace at The Hague
will be grouped, not miniature soldiers but miniature civilians,
not guns but ploughs and the tools of industry . . .  It is
hoped that manufacturers may take a hint from the exhibit, which
will bear fruit in the toy shops.”

“The idea is certainly an interesting and very
well-meaning one,” said Harvey; “whether it would
succeed well in practice—”

“We must try,” interrupted his sister; “you
are coming down to us at Easter, and you always bring the boys
some toys, so that will be an excellent opportunity for you to
inaugurate the new experiment.  Go about in the shops and
buy any little toys and models that have special bearing on
civilian life in its more peaceful aspects.  Of course you
must explain the toys to the children and interest them in the
new idea.  I regret to say that the ‘Siege of
Adrianople’ toy, that their Aunt Susan sent them,
didn’t need any explanation; they knew all the uniforms and
flags, and even the names of the respective commanders, and when
I heard them one day using what seemed to be the most
objectionable language they said it was Bulgarian words of
command; of course it may have been, but at any rate I
took the toy away from them.  Now I shall expect your Easter
gifts to give quite a new impulse and direction to the
children’s minds; Eric is not eleven yet, and Bertie is
only nine-and-a-half, so they are really at a most impressionable
age.”

“There is primitive instinct to be taken into
consideration, you know,” said Harvey doubtfully,
“and hereditary tendencies as well.  One of their
great-uncles fought in the most intolerant fashion at
Inkerman—he was specially mentioned in dispatches, I
believe—and their great-grandfather smashed all his Whig
neighbours’ hot houses when the great Reform Bill was
passed.  Still, as you say, they are at an impressionable
age.  I will do my best.”

On Easter Saturday Harvey Bope unpacked a large,
promising-looking red cardboard box under the expectant eyes of
his nephews.  “Your uncle has brought you the newest
thing in toys,” Eleanor had said impressively, and youthful
anticipation had been anxiously divided between Albanian soldiery
and a Somali camel-corps.  Eric was hotly in favour of the
latter contingency.  “There would be Arabs on
horseback,” he whispered; “the Albanians have got
jolly uniforms, and they fight all day long, and all night, too,
when there’s a moon, but the country’s rocky, so
they’ve got no cavalry.”

A quantity of crinkly paper shavings was the first thing that
met the view when the lid was removed; the most exiting toys
always began like that.  Harvey pushed back the top layer
and drew forth a square, rather featureless building.

“It’s a fort!” exclaimed Bertie.

“It isn’t, it’s the palace of the Mpret of
Albania,” said Eric, immensely proud of his knowledge of
the exotic title; “it’s got no windows, you see, so
that passers-by can’t fire in at the Royal
Family.”

“It’s a municipal dust-bin,” said Harvey
hurriedly; “you see all the refuse and litter of a town is
collected there, instead of lying about and injuring the health
of the citizens.”

In an awful silence he disinterred a little lead figure of a
man in black clothes.

“That,” he said, “is a distinguished
civilian, John Stuart Mill.  He was an authority on
political economy.”

“Why?” asked Bertie.

“Well, he wanted to be; he thought it was a useful thing
to be.”

Bertie gave an expressive grunt, which conveyed his opinion
that there was no accounting for tastes.

Another square building came out, this time with windows and
chimneys.

“A model of the Manchester branch of the Young
Women’s Christian Association,” said Harvey.

“Are there any lions?” asked Eric hopefully. 
He had been reading Roman history and thought that where you
found Christians you might reasonably expect to find a few
lions.

“There are no lions,” said Harvey. 
“Here is another civilian, Robert Raikes, the founder of
Sunday schools, and here is a model of a municipal
wash-house.  These little round things are loaves baked in a
sanitary bakehouse.  That lead figure is a sanitary
inspector, this one is a district councillor, and this one is an
official of the Local Government Board.”

“What does he do?” asked Eric wearily.

“He sees to things connected with his Department,”
said Harvey.  “This box with a slit in it is a
ballot-box.  Votes are put into it at election
times.”

“What is put into it at other times?” asked
Bertie.

“Nothing.  And here are some tools of industry, a
wheelbarrow and a hoe, and I think these are meant for
hop-poles.  This is a model beehive, and that is a
ventilator, for ventilating sewers.  This seems to be
another municipal dust-bin—no, it is a model of a school of
art and public library.  This little lead figure is Mrs.
Hemans, a poetess, and this is Rowland Hill, who introduced the
system of penny postage.  This is Sir John Herschel, the
eminent astrologer.”

“Are we to play with these civilian figures?”
asked Eric.

“Of course,” said Harvey, “these are toys;
they are meant to be played with.”

“But how?”

It was rather a poser.  “You might make two of them
contest a seat in Parliament,” said Harvey, “an have
an election—”

“With rotten eggs, and free fights, and ever so many
broken heads!” exclaimed Eric.

“And noses all bleeding and everybody drunk as can
be,” echoed Bertie, who had carefully studied one of
Hogarth’s pictures.

“Nothing of the kind,” said Harvey, “nothing
in the least like that.  Votes will be put in the
ballot-box, and the Mayor will count them—and he will say
which has received the most votes, and then the two candidates
will thank him for presiding, and each will say that the contest
has been conducted throughout in the pleasantest and most
straightforward fashion, and they part with expressions of mutual
esteem.  There’s a jolly game for you boys to
play.  I never had such toys when I was young.”

“I don’t think we’ll play with them just
now,” said Eric, with an entire absence of the enthusiasm
that his uncle had shown; “I think perhaps we ought to do a
little of our holiday task.  It’s history this time;
we’ve got to learn up something about the Bourbon period in
France.”

“The Bourbon period,” said Harvey, with some
disapproval in his voice.

“We’ve got to know something about Louis the
Fourteenth,” continued Eric; “I’ve learnt the
names of all the principal battles already.”

This would never do.  “There were, of course, some
battles fought during his reign,” said Harvey, “but I
fancy the accounts of them were much exaggerated; news was very
unreliable in those days, and there were practically no war
correspondents, so generals and commanders could magnify every
little skirmish they engaged in till they reached the proportions
of decisive battles.  Louis was really famous, now, as a
landscape gardener; the way he laid out Versailles was so much
admired that it was copied all over Europe.”

“Do you know anything about Madame Du Barry?”
asked Eric; “didn’t she have her head chopped
off?”

“She was another great lover of gardening,” said
Harvey, evasively; “in fact, I believe the well known rose
Du Barry was named after her, and now I think you had better play
for a little and leave your lessons till later.”

Harvey retreated to the library and spent some thirty or forty
minutes in wondering whether it would be possible to compile a
history, for use in elementary schools, in which there should be
no prominent mention of battles, massacres, murderous intrigues,
and violent deaths.  The York and Lancaster period and the
Napoleonic era would, he admitted to himself, present
considerable difficulties, and the Thirty Years’ War would
entail something of a gap if you left it out altogether. 
Still, it would be something gained if, at a highly
impressionable age, children could be got to fix their attention
on the invention of calico printing instead of the Spanish Armada
or the Battle of Waterloo.

It was time, he thought, to go back to the boys’ room,
and see how they were getting on with their peace toys.  As
he stood outside the door he could hear Eric’s voice raised
in command; Bertie chimed in now and again with a helpful
suggestion.

“That is Louis the Fourteenth,” Eric was saying,
“that one in knee-breeches, that Uncle said invented Sunday
schools.  It isn’t a bit like him, but it’ll
have to do.”

“We’ll give him a purple coat from my paintbox by
and by,” said Bertie.

“Yes, an’ red heels.  That is Madame de
Maintenon, that one he called Mrs. Hemans.  She begs Louis
not to go on this expedition, but he turns a deaf ear.  He
takes Marshal Saxe with him, and we must pretend that they have
thousands of men with them.  The watchword is Qui
vive? and the answer is L’état c’est
moi—that was one of his favourite remarks, you
know.  They land at Manchester in the dead of the night, and
a Jacobite conspirator gives them the keys of the
fortress.”

Peeping in through the doorway Harvey observed that the
municipal dust-bin had been pierced with holes to accommodate the
muzzles of imaginary cannon, and now represented the principal
fortified position in Manchester; John Stuart Mill had been
dipped in red ink, and apparently stood for Marshal Saxe.

“Louis orders his troops to surround the Young
Women’s Christian Association and seize the lot of
them.  ‘Once back at the Louvre and the girls are
mine,’ he exclaims.  We must use Mrs. Hemans again for
one of the girls; she says ‘Never,’ and stabs Marshal
Saxe to the heart.”

“He bleeds dreadfully,” exclaimed Bertie,
splashing red ink liberally over the façade of the
Association building.

“The soldiers rush in and avenge his death with the
utmost savagery.  A hundred girls are
killed”—here Bertie emptied the remainder of the red
ink over the devoted building—“and the surviving five
hundred are dragged off to the French ships.  ‘I have
lost a Marshal,’ says Louis, ‘but I do not go back
empty-handed.’”

Harvey stole away from the room, and sought out his
sister.

“Eleanor,” he said, “the
experiment—”

“Yes?”

“Has failed.  We have begun too late.”

p.
13LOUISE

“The tea will be quite cold, you’d better ring for
some more,” said the Dowager Lady Beanford.

Susan Lady Beanford was a vigorous old woman who had coquetted
with imaginary ill-health for the greater part of a lifetime;
Clovis Sangrail irreverently declared that she had caught a chill
at the Coronation of Queen Victoria and had never let it go
again.  Her sister, Jane Thropplestance, who was some years
her junior, was chiefly remarkable for being the most
absent-minded woman in Middlesex.

“I’ve really been unusually clever this
afternoon,” she remarked gaily, as she rang for the
tea.  “I’ve called on all the people I meant to
call on; and I’ve done all the shopping that I set out to
do.  I even remembered to try and match that silk for you at
Harrod’s, but I’d forgotten to bring the pattern with
me, so it was no use.  I really think that was the only
important thing I forgot during the whole afternoon.  Quite
wonderful for me, isn’t it?”

“What have you done with Louise?” asked her
sister.  “Didn’t you take her out with
you?  You said you were going to.”

“Good gracious,” exclaimed Jane, “what have
I done with Louise?  I must have left her
somewhere.”

“But where?”

“That’s just it.  Where have I left
her?  I can’t remember if the Carrywoods were at home
or if I just left cards.  If there were at home I may have
left Louise there to play bridge.  I’ll go and
telephone to Lord Carrywood and find out.”

“Is that you, Lord Carrywood?” she queried over
the telephone; “it’s me, Jane Thropplestance.  I
want to know, have you seen Louise?”

“‘Louise,’” came the answer,
“it’s been my fate to see it three times.  At
first, I must admit, I wasn’t impressed by it, but the
music grows on one after a bit.  Still, I don’t think
I want to see it again just at present.  Were you going to
offer me a seat in your box?”

“Not the opera ‘Louise’—my niece,
Louise Thropplestance.  I thought I might have left her at
your house.”

“You left cards on us this afternoon, I understand, but
I don’t think you left a niece.  The footman would
have been sure to have mentioned it if you had.  Is it going
to be a fashion to leave nieces on people as well as cards? 
I hope not; some of these houses in Berkeley-square have
practically no accommodation for that sort of thing.”

“She’s not at the Carrywoods’,”
announced Jane, returning to her tea; “now I come to think
of it, perhaps I left her at the silk counter at
Selfridge’s.  I may have told her to wait there a
moment while I went to look at the silks in a better light, and I
may easily have forgotten about her when I found I hadn’t
your pattern with me.  In that case she’s still
sitting there.  She wouldn’t move unless she was told
to; Louise has no initiative.”

“You said you tried to match the silk at
Harrod’s,” interjected the dowager.

“Did I?  Perhaps it was Harrod’s.  I
really don’t remember.  It was one of those places
where every one is so kind and sympathetic and devoted that one
almost hates to take even a reel of cotton away from such
pleasant surroundings.”

“I think you might have taken Louise away.  I
don’t like the idea of her being there among a lot of
strangers.  Supposing some unprincipled person was to get
into conversation with her.”

“Impossible.  Louise has no conversation. 
I’ve never discovered a single topic on which she’d
anything to say beyond ‘Do you think so?  I dare say
you’re right.’  I really thought her reticence
about the fall of the Ribot Ministry was ridiculous, considering
how much her dear mother used to visit Paris.  This bread
and butter is cut far too thin; it crumbles away long before you
can get it to your mouth.  One feels so absurd, snapping at
one’s food in mid-air, like a trout leaping at
may-fly.”

“I am rather surprised,” said the dowager,
“that you can sit there making a hearty tea when
you’ve just lost a favourite niece.”

“You talk as if I’d lost her in a churchyard
sense, instead of having temporarily mislaid her.  I’m
sure to remember presently where I left her.”

“You didn’t visit any place of devotion, did
you?  If you’ve left her mooning about Westminster
Abbey or St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, without being able to
give any satisfactory reason why she’s there, she’ll
be seized under the Cat and Mouse Act and sent to Reginald
McKenna.”

“That would be extremely awkward,” said Jane,
meeting an irresolute piece of bread and butter halfway;
“we hardly know the McKennas, and it would be very tiresome
having to telephone to some unsympathetic private secretary,
describing Louise to him and asking to have her sent back in time
for dinner.  Fortunately, I didn’t go to any place of
devotion, though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army
procession.  It was quite interesting to be at close
quarters with them, they’re so absolutely different to what
they used to be when I first remember them in the
’eighties.  They used to go about then unkempt and
dishevelled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now
they’re spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like
a geranium bed with religious convictions.  Laura Kettleway
was going on about them in the lift of the Dover Street Tube the
other day, saying what a lot of good work they did, and what a
loss it would have been if they’d never existed. 
‘If they had never existed,’ I said, ‘Granville
Barker would have been certain to have invented something that
looked exactly like them.’  If you say things like
that, quite loud, in a Tube lift, they always sound like
epigrams.”

“I think you ought to do something about Louise,”
said the dowager.

“I’m trying to think whether she was with me when
I called on Ada Spelvexit.  I rather enjoyed myself
there.  Ada was trying, as usual, to ram that odious
Koriatoffski woman down my throat, knowing perfectly well that I
detest her, and in an unguarded moment she said:
‘She’s leaving her present house and going to Lower
Seymour Street.’  ‘I dare say she will, if she
stays there long enough,’ I said.  Ada didn’t
see it for about three minutes, and then she was positively
uncivil.  No, I am certain I didn’t leave Louise
there.”

“If you could manage to remember where you did
leave her, it would be more to the point than these negative
assurances,” said Lady Beanford; “so far, all we know
is that she is not at the Carrywoods’, or Ada
Spelvexit’s, or Westminster Abbey.”

“That narrows the search down a bit,” said Jane
hopefully; “I rather fancy she must have been with me when
I went to Mornay’s.  I know I went to Mornay’s,
because I remember meeting that delightful Malcolm
What’s-his-name there—you know whom I mean. 
That’s the great advantage of people having unusual first
names, you needn’t try and remember what their other name
is.  Of course I know one or two other Malcolms, but none
that could possibly be described as delightful.  He gave me
two tickets for the Happy Sunday Evenings in Sloane Square. 
I’ve probably left them at Mornay’s, but still it was
awfully kind of him to give them to me.”

“Do you think you left Louise there?”

“I might telephone and ask.  Oh, Robert, before you
clear the tea-things away I wish you’d ring up
Mornay’s, in Regent Street, and ask if I left two theatre
tickets and one niece in their shop this afternoon.”

“A niece, ma’am?” asked the footman.

“Yes, Miss Louise didn’t come home with me, and
I’m not sure where I left her.”

“Miss Louise has been upstairs all the afternoon,
ma’am, reading to the second kitchenmaid, who has the
neuralgia.  I took up tea to Miss Louise at a quarter to
five o’clock, ma’am.”

“Of course, how silly of me.  I remember now, I
asked her to read the Faerie Queene to poor Emma, to try
to send her to sleep.  I always get some one to read the
Faerie Queene to me when I have neuralgia, and it usually
sends me to sleep.  Louise doesn’t seem to have been
successful, but one can’t say she hasn’t tried. 
I expect after the first hour or so the kitchenmaid would rather
have been left alone with her neuralgia, but of course Louise
wouldn’t leave off till some one told her to.  Anyhow,
you can ring up Mornay’s, Robert, and ask whether I left
two theatre tickets there.  Except for your silk, Susan,
those seem to be the only things I’ve forgotten this
afternoon.  Quite wonderful for me.”

p.
21TEA

James Cushat-Prinkly was a young man who had always had a
settled conviction that one of these days he would marry; up to
the age of thirty-four he had done nothing to justify that
conviction.  He liked and admired a great many women
collectively and dispassionately without singling out one for
especial matrimonial consideration, just as one might admire the
Alps without feeling that one wanted any particular peak as
one’s own private property.  His lack of initiative in
this matter aroused a certain amount of impatience among the
sentimentally-minded women-folk of his home circle; his mother,
his sisters, an aunt-in-residence, and two or three intimate
matronly friends regarded his dilatory approach to the married
state with a disapproval that was far from being
inarticulate.  His most innocent flirtations were watched
with the straining eagerness which a group of unexercised
terriers concentrates on the slightest movements of a human being
who may be reasonably considered likely to take them for a
walk.  No decent-souled mortal can long resist the pleading
of several pairs of walk-beseeching dog-eyes; James
Cushat-Prinkly was not sufficiently obstinate or indifferent to
home influences to disregard the obviously expressed wish of his
family that he should become enamoured of some nice marriageable
girl, and when his Uncle Jules departed this life and bequeathed
him a comfortable little legacy it really seemed the correct
thing to do to set about discovering some one to share it with
him.  The process of discovery was carried on more by the
force of suggestion and the weight of public opinion than by any
initiative of his own; a clear working majority of his female
relatives and the aforesaid matronly friends had pitched on Joan
Sebastable as the most suitable young woman in his range of
acquaintance to whom he might propose marriage, and James became
gradually accustomed to the idea that he and Joan would go
together through the prescribed stages of congratulations,
present-receiving, Norwegian or Mediterranean hotels, and
eventual domesticity.  It was necessary, however to ask the
lady what she thought about the matter; the family had so far
conducted and directed the flirtation with ability and
discretion, but the actual proposal would have to be an
individual effort.

Cushat-Prinkly walked across the Park towards the Sebastable
residence in a frame of mind that was moderately
complacent.  As the thing was going to be done he was glad
to feel that he was going to get it settled and off his mind that
afternoon.  Proposing marriage, even to a nice girl like
Joan, was a rather irksome business, but one could not have a
honeymoon in Minorca and a subsequent life of married happiness
without such preliminary.  He wondered what Minorca was
really like as a place to stop in; in his mind’s eye it was
an island in perpetual half-mourning, with black or white Minorca
hens running all over it.  Probably it would not be a bit
like that when one came to examine it.  People who had been
in Russia had told him that they did not remember having seen any
Muscovy ducks there, so it was possible that there would be no
Minorca fowls on the island.

His Mediterranean musings were interrupted by the sound of a
clock striking the half-hour.  Half-past four.  A frown
of dissatisfaction settled on his face.  He would arrive at
the Sebastable mansion just at the hour of afternoon tea. 
Joan would be seated at a low table, spread with an array of
silver kettles and cream-jugs and delicate porcelain tea-cups,
behind which her voice would tinkle pleasantly in a series of
little friendly questions about weak or strong tea, how much, if
any, sugar, milk, cream, and so forth.  “Is it one
lump?  I forgot.  You do take milk, don’t
you?  Would you like some more hot water, if it’s too
strong?”

Cushat-Prinkly had read of such things in scores of novels,
and hundreds of actual experiences had told him that they were
true to life.  Thousands of women, at this solemn afternoon
hour, were sitting behind dainty porcelain and silver fittings,
with their voices tinkling pleasantly in a cascade of solicitous
little questions.  Cushat-Prinkly detested the whole system
of afternoon tea.  According to his theory of life a woman
should lie on a divan or couch, talking with incomparable charm
or looking unutterable thoughts, or merely silent as a thing to
be looked on, and from behind a silken curtain a small Nubian
page should silently bring in a tray with cups and dainties, to
be accepted silently, as a matter of course, without drawn-out
chatter about cream and sugar and hot water.  If one’s
soul was really enslaved at one’s mistress’s feet how
could one talk coherently about weakened tea? 
Cushat-Prinkly had never expounded his views on the subject to
his mother; all her life she had been accustomed to tinkle
pleasantly at tea-time behind dainty porcelain and silver, and if
he had spoken to her about divans and Nubian pages she would have
urged him to take a week’s holiday at the seaside. 
Now, as he passed through a tangle of small streets that led
indirectly to the elegant Mayfair terrace for which he was bound,
a horror at the idea of confronting Joan Sebastable at her
tea-table seized on him.  A momentary deliverance presented
itself; on one floor of a narrow little house at the noisier end
of Esquimault Street lived Rhoda Ellam, a sort of remote cousin,
who made a living by creating hats out of costly materials. 
The hats really looked as if they had come from Paris; the
cheques she got for them unfortunately never looked as if they
were going to Paris.  However, Rhoda appeared to find life
amusing and to have a fairly good time in spite of her straitened
circumstances.  Cushat-Prinkly decided to climb up to her
floor and defer by half-an-hour or so the important business
which lay before him; by spinning out his visit he could contrive
to reach the Sebastable mansion after the last vestiges of dainty
porcelain had been cleared away.

Rhoda welcomed him into a room that seemed to do duty as
workshop, sitting-room, and kitchen combined, and to be
wonderfully clean and comfortable at the same time.

“I’m having a picnic meal,” she
announced.  “There’s caviare in that jar at your
elbow.  Begin on that brown bread-and-butter while I cut
some more.  Find yourself a cup; the teapot is behind
you.  Now tell me about hundreds of things.”

She made no other allusion to food, but talked amusingly and
made her visitor talk amusingly too.  At the same time she
cut the bread-and-butter with a masterly skill and produced red
pepper and sliced lemon, where so many women would merely have
produced reasons and regrets for not having any. 
Cushat-Prinkly found that he was enjoying an excellent tea
without having to answer as many questions about it as a Minister
for Agriculture might be called on to reply to during an outbreak
of cattle plague.

“And now tell me why you have come to see me,”
said Rhoda suddenly.  “You arouse not merely my
curiosity but my business instincts.  I hope you’ve
come about hats.  I heard that you had come into a legacy
the other day, and, of course, it struck me that it would be a
beautiful and desirable thing for you to celebrate the event by
buying brilliantly expensive hats for all your sisters. 
They may not have said anything about it, but I feel sure the
same idea has occurred to them.  Of course, with Goodwood on
us, I am rather rushed just now, but in my business we’re
accustomed to that; we live in a series of rushes—like the
infant Moses.”

“I didn’t come about hats,” said her
visitor.  “In fact, I don’t think I really came
about anything.  I was passing and I just thought I’d
look in and see you.  Since I’ve been sitting talking
to you, however, a rather important idea has occurred to
me.  If you’ll forget Goodwood for a moment and listen
to me, I’ll tell you what it is.”

Some forty minutes later James Cushat-Prinkly returned to the
bosom of his family, bearing an important piece of news.

“I’m engaged to be married,” he
announced.

A rapturous outbreak of congratulation and self-applause broke
out.

“Ah, we knew!  We saw it coming!  We foretold
it weeks ago!”

“I’ll bet you didn’t,” said
Cushat-Prinkly.  “If any one had told me at lunch-time
to-day that I was going to ask Rhoda Ellam to marry me and that
she was going to accept me I would have laughed at the
idea.”

The romantic suddenness of the affair in some measure
compensated James’s women-folk for the ruthless negation of
all their patient effort and skilled diplomacy.  It was
rather trying to have to deflect their enthusiasm at a
moment’s notice from Joan Sebastable to Rhoda Ellam; but,
after all, it was James’s wife who was in question, and his
tastes had some claim to be considered.

On a September afternoon of the same year, after the honeymoon
in Minorca had ended, Cushat-Prinkly came into the drawing-room
of his new house in Granchester Square.  Rhoda was seated at
a low table, behind a service of dainty porcelain and gleaming
silver.  There was a pleasant tinkling note in her voice as
she handed him a cup.

“You like it weaker than that, don’t you? 
Shall I put some more hot water to it?  No?”

p. 29THE
DISAPPEARANCE OF CRISPINA UMBERLEIGH

In a first-class carriage of a train speeding Balkanward
across the flat, green Hungarian plain two Britons sat in
friendly, fitful converse.  They had first foregathered in
the cold grey dawn at the frontier line, where the presiding
eagle takes on an extra head and Teuton lands pass from
Hohenzollern to Habsburg keeping—and where a probing
official beak requires to delve in polite and perhaps
perfunctory, but always tiresome, manner into the baggage of
sleep-hungry passengers.  After a day’s break of their
journey at Vienna the travellers had again foregathered at the
trainside and paid one another the compliment of settling
instinctively into the same carriage.  The elder of the two
had the appearance and manner of a diplomat; in point of fact he
was the well-connected foster-brother of a wine business. 
The other was certainly a journalist.  Neither man was
talkative and each was grateful to the other for not being
talkative.  That is why from time to time they talked.

One topic of conversation naturally thrust itself forward in
front of all others.  In Vienna the previous day they had
learned of the mysterious vanishing of a world-famous picture
from the walls of the Louvre.

“A dramatic disappearance of that sort is sure to
produce a crop of imitations,” said the Journalist.

“It has had a lot of anticipations, for the matter of
that,” said the Wine-brother.

“Oh, of course there have been thefts from the Louvre
before.”

“I was thinking of the spiriting away of human beings
rather than pictures.  In particular I was thinking of the
case of my aunt, Crispina Umberleigh.”

“I remember hearing something of the affair,” said
the Journalist, “but I was away from England at the
time.  I never quite knew what was supposed to have
happened.”

“You may hear what really happened if you will respect
it as a confidence,” said the Wine Merchant. 
“In the first place I may say that the disappearance of
Mrs. Umberleigh was not regarded by the family entirely as a
bereavement.  My uncle, Edward Umberleigh, was not by any
means a weak-kneed individual, in fact in the world of politics
he had to be reckoned with more or less as a strong man, but he
was unmistakably dominated by Crispina; indeed I never met any
human being who was not frozen into subjection when brought into
prolonged contact with her.  Some people are born to
command; Crispina Mrs. Umberleigh was born to legislate, codify,
administrate, censor, license, ban, execute, and sit in judgement
generally.  If she was not born with that destiny she
adopted it at an early age.  From the kitchen regions
upwards every one in the household came under her despotic sway
and stayed there with the submissiveness of molluscs involved in
a glacial epoch.  As a nephew on a footing of only
occasional visits she affected me merely as an epidemic,
disagreeable while it lasted, but without any permanent effect;
but her own sons and daughters stood in mortal awe of her; their
studies, friendships, diet, amusements, religious observances,
and way of doing their hair were all regulated and ordained
according to the august lady’s will and pleasure. 
This will help you to understand the sensation of stupefaction
which was caused in the family when she unobtrusively and
inexplicably vanished.  It was as though St. Paul’s
Cathedral or the Piccadilly Hotel had disappeared in the night,
leaving nothing but an open space to mark where it had
stood.  As far as was known nothing was troubling her; in
fact there was much before her to make life particularly well
worth living.  The youngest boy had come back from school
with an unsatisfactory report, and she was to have sat in
judgement on him the very afternoon of the day she
disappeared—if it had been he who had vanished in a hurry
one could have supplied the motive.  Then she was in the
middle of a newspaper correspondence with a rural dean in which
she had already proved him guilty of heresy, inconsistency, and
unworthy quibbling, and no ordinary consideration would have
induced her to discontinue the controversy.  Of course the
matter was put in the hands of the police, but as far as possible
it was kept out of the papers, and the generally accepted
explanation of her withdrawal from her social circle was that she
had gone into a nursing home.”

“And what was the immediate effect on the home
circle?” asked the Journalist.

“All the girls bought themselves bicycles; the feminine
cycling craze was still in existence, and Crispina had rigidly
vetoed any participation in it among the members of her
household.  The youngest boy let himself go to such an
extent during his next term that it had to be his last as far as
that particular establishment was concerned.  The elder boys
propounded a theory that their mother might be wandering
somewhere abroad, and searched for her assiduously, chiefly, it
must be admitted, in a class of Montmartre resort where it was
extremely improbable that she would be found.”

“And all this while couldn’t your uncle get hold
of the least clue?”

“As a matter of fact he had received some information,
though of course I did not know of it at the time.  He got a
message one day telling him that his wife had been kidnapped and
smuggled out of the country; she was said to be hidden away, in
one of the islands off the coast of Norway I think it was, in
comfortable surroundings and well cared for.  And with the
information came a demand for money; a lump sum of £2000
was to be paid yearly.  Failing this she would be
immediately restored to her family.”

The Journalist was silent for a moment, and them began to
laugh quietly.

“It was certainly an inverted form of holding to
ransom,” he said.

“If you had known my aunt,” said the Wine
Merchant, “you would have wondered that they didn’t
put the figure higher.”

“I realise the temptation.  Did your uncle succumb
to it?”

“Well, you see, he had to think of others as well as
himself.  For the family to have gone back into the Crispina
thraldom after having tasted the delights of liberty would have
been a tragedy, and there were even wider considerations to be
taken into account.  Since his bereavement he had
unconsciously taken up a far bolder and more initiatory line in
public affairs, and his popularity and influence had increased
correspondingly.  From being merely a strong man in the
political world he began to be spoken of as the strong
man.  All this he knew would be jeopardised if he once more
dropped into the social position of the husband of Mrs.
Umberleigh.  He was a rich man, and the £2000 a year,
though not exactly a fleabite, did not seem an extravagant price
to pay for the boarding-out of Crispina.  Of course, he had
severe qualms of conscience about the arrangement.  Later
on, when he took me into his confidence, he told me that in
paying the ransom, or hush-money as I should have called it, he
was partly influenced by the fear that if he refused it the
kidnappers might have vented their rage and disappointment on
their captive.  It was better, he said, to think of her
being well cared for as a highly-valued paying-guest in one of
the Lofoden Islands than to have her struggling miserably home in
a maimed and mutilated condition.  Anyway he paid the yearly
instalment as punctually as one pays a fire insurance, and with
equal promptitude there would come an acknowledgment of the money
and a brief statement to the effect that Crispina was in good
health and fairly cheerful spirits.  One report even
mentioned that she was busying herself with a scheme for proposed
reforms in Church management to be pressed on the local
pastorate.  Another spoke of a rheumatic attack and a
journey to a ‘cure’ on the mainland, and on that
occasion an additional eighty pounds was demanded and
conceded.  Of course it was to the interest of the
kidnappers to keep their charge in good health, but the secrecy
with which they managed to shroud their arrangements argued a
really wonderful organisation.  If my uncle was paying a
rather high price, at least he could console himself with the
reflection that he was paying specialists’ fees.”

“Meanwhile had the police given up all attempts to track
the missing lady?” asked the Journalist.

“Not entirely; they came to my uncle from time to time
to report on clues which they thought might yield some
elucidation as to her fate or whereabouts, but I think they had
their suspicions that he was possessed of more information than
he had put at their disposal.  And then, after a
disappearance of more than eight years, Crispina returned with
dramatic suddenness to the home she had left so
mysteriously.”

“She had given her captors the slip?”

“She had never been captured.  Her wandering away
had been caused by a sudden and complete loss of memory. 
She usually dressed rather in the style of a superior kind of
charwoman, and it was not so very surprising that she should have
imagined that she was one; and still less that people should
accept her statement and help her to get work.  She had
wandered as far afield as Birmingham, and found fairly steady
employment there, her energy and enthusiasm in putting
people’s rooms in order counterbalancing her obstinate and
domineering characteristics.  It was the shock of being
patronisingly addressed as ‘my good woman’ by a
curate, who was disputing with her where the stove should be
placed in a parish concert hall that led to the sudden
restoration of her memory.  ‘I think you forget who
you are speaking to,’ she observed crushingly, which was
rather unduly severe, considering she had only just remembered it
herself.”

“But,” exclaimed the Journalist, “the
Lofoden Island people!  Who had they got hold of?”

“A purely mythical prisoner.  It was an attempt in
the first place by some one who knew something of the domestic
situation, probably a discharged valet, to bluff a lump sum out
of Edward Umberleigh before the missing woman turned up; the
subsequent yearly instalments were an unlooked-for increment to
the original haul.

“Crispina found that the eight years’ interregnum
had materially weakened her ascendancy over her now grown-up
offspring.  Her husband, however, never accomplished
anything great in the political world after her return; the
strain of trying to account satisfactorily for an unspecified
expenditure of sixteen thousand pounds spread over eight years
sufficiently occupied his mental energies.  Here is Belgrad
and another custom house.”

p. 39THE
WOLVES OF CERNOGRATZ

“Are there any old legends attached to the
castle?” asked Conrad of his sister.  Conrad was a
prosperous Hamburg merchant, but he was the one
poetically-dispositioned member of an eminently practical
family.

The Baroness Gruebel shrugged her plump shoulders.

“There are always legends hanging about these old
places.  They are not difficult to invent and they cost
nothing.  In this case there is a story that when any one
dies in the castle all the dogs in the village and the wild
beasts in forest howl the night long.  It would not be
pleasant to listen to, would it?”

“It would be weird and romantic,” said the Hamburg
merchant.

“Anyhow, it isn’t true,” said the Baroness
complacently; “since we bought the place we have had proof
that nothing of the sort happens.  When the old
mother-in-law died last springtime we all listened, but there was
no howling.  It is just a story that lends dignity to the
place without costing anything.”

“The story is not as you have told it,” said
Amalie, the grey old governess.  Every one turned and looked
at her in astonishment.  She was wont to sit silent and prim
and faded in her place at table, never speaking unless some one
spoke to her, and there were few who troubled themselves to make
conversation with her.  To-day a sudden volubility had
descended on her; she continued to talk, rapidly and nervously,
looking straight in front of her and seeming to address no one in
particular.

“It is not when any one dies in the castle that
the howling is heard.  It was when one of the Cernogratz
family died here that the wolves came from far and near and
howled at the edge of the forest just before the death
hour.  There were only a few couple of wolves that had their
lairs in this part of the forest, but at such a time the keepers
say there would be scores of them, gliding about in the shadows
and howling in chorus, and the dogs of the castle and the village
and all the farms round would bay and howl in fear and anger at
the wolf chorus, and as the soul of the dying one left its body a
tree would crash down in the park.  That is what happened
when a Cernogratz died in his family castle.  But for a
stranger dying here, of course no wolf would howl and no tree
would fall.  Oh, no.”

There was a note of defiance, almost of contempt, in her voice
as she said the last words.  The well-fed, much-too-well
dressed Baroness stared angrily at the dowdy old woman who had
come forth from her usual and seemly position of effacement to
speak so disrespectfully.

“You seem to know quite a lot about the von Cernogratz
legends, Fraulein Schmidt,” she said sharply; “I did
not know that family histories were among the subjects you are
supposed to be proficient in.”

The answer to her taunt was even more unexpected and
astonishing than the conversational outbreak which had provoked
it.

“I am a von Cernogratz myself,” said the old
woman, “that is why I know the family history.”

“You a von Cernogratz?  You!” came in an
incredulous chorus.

“When we became very poor,” she explained,
“and I had to go out and give teaching lessons, I took
another name; I thought it would be more in keeping.  But my
grandfather spent much of his time as a boy in this castle, and
my father used to tell me many stories about it, and, of course,
I knew all the family legends and stories.  When one has
nothing left to one but memories, one guards and dusts them with
especial care.  I little thought when I took service with
you that I should one day come with you to the old home of my
family.  I could wish it had been anywhere else.”

There was silence when she finished speaking, and then the
Baroness turned the conversation to a less embarrassing topic
than family histories.  But afterwards, when the old
governess had slipped away quietly to her duties, there arose a
clamour of derision and disbelief.

“It was an impertinence,” snapped out the Baron,
his protruding eyes taking on a scandalised expression;
“fancy the woman talking like that at our table.  She
almost told us we were nobodies, and I don’t believe a word
of it.  She is just Schmidt and nothing more.  She has
been talking to some of the peasants about the old Cernogratz
family, and raked up their history and their stories.”

“She wants to make herself out of some
consequence,” said the Baroness; “she knows she will
soon be past work and she wants to appeal to our
sympathies.  Her grandfather, indeed!”

The Baroness had the usual number of grandfathers, but she
never, never boasted about them.

“I dare say her grandfather was a pantry boy or
something of the sort in the castle,” sniggered the Baron;
“that part of the story may be true.”

The merchant from Hamburg said nothing; he had seen tears in
the old woman’s eyes when she spoke of guarding her
memories—or, being of an imaginative disposition, he
thought he had.

“I shall give her notice to go as soon as the New Year
festivities are over,” said the Baroness; “till then
I shall be too busy to manage without her.”

But she had to manage without her all the same, for in the
cold biting weather after Christmas, the old governess fell ill
and kept to her room.

“It is most provoking,” said the Baroness, as her
guests sat round the fire on one of the last evenings of the
dying year; “all the time that she has been with us I
cannot remember that she was ever seriously ill, too ill to go
about and do her work, I mean.  And now, when I have the
house full, and she could be useful in so many ways, she goes and
breaks down.  One is sorry for her, of course, she looks so
withered and shrunken, but it is intensely annoying all the
same.”

“Most annoying,” agreed the banker’s wife,
sympathetically; “it is the intense cold, I expect, it
breaks the old people up.  It has been unusually cold this
year.”

“The frost is the sharpest that has been known in
December for many years,” said the Baron.

“And, of course, she is quite old,” said the
Baroness; “I wish I had given her notice some weeks ago,
then she would have left before this happened to her.  Why,
Wappi, what is the matter with you?”

The small, woolly lapdog had leapt suddenly down from its
cushion and crept shivering under the sofa.  At the same
moment an outburst of angry barking came from the dogs in the
castle-yard, and other dogs could be heard yapping and barking in
the distance.

“What is disturbing the animals?” asked the
Baron.

And then the humans, listening intently, heard the sound that
had roused the dogs to their demonstrations of fear and rage;
heard a long-drawn whining howl, rising and falling, seeming at
one moment leagues away, at others sweeping across the snow until
it appeared to come from the foot of the castle walls.  All
the starved, cold misery of a frozen world, all the relentless
hunger-fury of the wild, blended with other forlorn and haunting
melodies to which one could give no name, seemed concentrated in
that wailing cry.

“Wolves!” cried the Baron.

Their music broke forth in one raging burst, seeming to come
from everywhere.

“Hundreds of wolves,” said the Hamburg merchant,
who was a man of strong imagination.

Moved by some impulse which she could not have explained, the
Baroness left her guests and made her way to the narrow,
cheerless room where the old governess lay watching the hours of
the dying year slip by.  In spite of the biting cold of the
winter night, the window stood open.  With a scandalised
exclamation on her lips, the Baroness rushed forward to close
it.

“Leave it open,” said the old woman in a voice
that for all its weakness carried an air of command such as the
Baroness had never heard before from her lips.

“But you will die of cold!” she expostulated.

“I am dying in any case,” said the voice,
“and I want to hear their music.  They have come from
far and wide to sing the death-music of my family.  It is
beautiful that they have come; I am the last von Cernogratz that
will die in our old castle, and they have come to sing to
me.  Hark, how loud they are calling!”

The cry of the wolves rose on the still winter air and floated
round the castle walls in long-drawn piercing wails; the old
woman lay back on her couch with a look of long-delayed happiness
on her face.

“Go away,” she said to the Baroness; “I am
not lonely any more.  I am one of a great old family . . .
”

“I think she is dying,” said the Baroness when she
had rejoined her guests; “I suppose we must send for a
doctor.  And that terrible howling!  Not for much money
would I have such death-music.”

“That music is not to be bought for any amount of
money,” said Conrad.

“Hark!  What is that other sound?” asked the
Baron, as a noise of splitting and crashing was heard.

It was a tree falling in the park.

There was a moment of constrained silence, and then the
banker’s wife spoke.

“It is the intense cold that is splitting the
trees.  It is also the cold that has brought the wolves out
in such numbers.  It is many years since we have had such a
cold winter.”

The Baroness eagerly agreed that the cold was responsible for
these things.  It was the cold of the open window, too,
which caused the heart failure that made the doctor’s
ministrations unnecessary for the old Fraulein.  But the
notice in the newspapers looked very well—

“On December 29th, at Schloss Cernogratz,
Amalie von Cernogratz, for many years the valued friend of Baron
and Baroness Gruebel.”

p.
49LOUIS

“It would be jolly to spend Easter in Vienna this
year,” said Strudwarden, “and look up some of my old
friends there.  It’s about the jolliest place I know
of to be at for Easter—”

“I thought we had made up our minds to spend Easter at
Brighton,” interrupted Lena Strudwarden, with an air of
aggrieved surprise.

“You mean that you had made up your mind that we should
spend Easter there,” said her husband; “we spent last
Easter there, and Whitsuntide as well, and the year before that
we were at Worthing, and Brighton again before that.  I
think it would be just as well to have a real change of scene
while we are about it.”

“The journey to Vienna would be very expensive,”
said Lena.

“You are not often concerned about economy,” said
Strudwarden, “and in any case the trip of Vienna
won’t cost a bit more than the rather meaningless luncheon
parties we usually give to quite meaningless acquaintances at
Brighton.  To escape from all that set would be a holiday in
itself.”

Strudwarden spoke feelingly; Lena Strudwarden maintained an
equally feeling silence on that particular subject.  The set
that she gathered round her at Brighton and other South Coast
resorts was composed of individuals who might be dull and
meaningless in themselves, but who understood the art of
flattering Mrs. Strudwarden.  She had no intention of
foregoing their society and their homage and flinging herself
among unappreciative strangers in a foreign capital.

“You must go to Vienna alone if you are bent on
going,” she said; “I couldn’t leave Louis
behind, and a dog is always a fearful nuisance in a foreign
hotel, besides all the fuss and separation of the quarantine
restrictions when one comes back.  Louis would die if he was
parted from me for even a week.  You don’t know what
that would mean to me.”

Lena stooped down and kissed the nose of the diminutive brown
Pomeranian that lay, snug and irresponsive, beneath a shawl on
her lap.

“Look here,” said Strudwarden, “this eternal
Louis business is getting to be a ridiculous nuisance. 
Nothing can be done, no plans can be made, without some veto
connected with that animal’s whims or convenience being
imposed.  If you were a priest in attendance on some African
fetish you couldn’t set up a more elaborate code of
restrictions.  I believe you’d ask the Government to
put off a General Election if you thought it would interfere with
Louis’s comfort in any way.”

By way of answer to this tirade Mrs. Strudwarden stooped down
again and kissed the irresponsive brown nose.  It was the
action of a woman with a beautifully meek nature, who would,
however, send the whole world to the stake sooner than yield an
inch where she knew herself to be in the right.

“It isn’t as if you were in the least bit fond of
animals,” went on Strudwarden, with growing irritation;
“when we are down at Kerryfield you won’t stir a step
to take the house dogs out, even if they’re dying for a
run, and I don’t think you’ve been in the stables
twice in your life.  You laugh at what you call the fuss
that’s being made over the extermination of plumage birds,
and you are quite indignant with me if I interfere on behalf of
an ill-treated, over-driven animal on the road.  And yet you
insist on every one’s plans being made subservient to the
convenience of that stupid little morsel of fur and
selfishness.”

“You are prejudiced against my little Louis,” said
Lena, with a world of tender regret in her voice.

“I’ve never had the chance of being anything else
but prejudiced against him,” said Strudwarden; “I
know what a jolly responsive companion a doggie can be, but
I’ve never been allowed to put a finger near Louis. 
You say he snaps at any one except you and your maid, and you
snatched him away from old Lady Peterby the other day, when she
wanted to pet him, for fear he would bury his teeth in her. 
All that I ever see of him is the top of his unhealthy-looking
little nose, peeping out from his basket or from your muff, and I
occasionally hear his wheezy little bark when you take him for a
walk up and down the corridor.  You can’t expect one
to get extravagantly fond of a dog of that sort.  One might
as well work up an affection for the cuckoo in a
cuckoo-clock.”

“He loves me,” said Lena, rising from the table,
and bearing the shawl-swathed Louis in her arms.  “He
loves only me, and perhaps that is why I love him so much in
return.  I don’t care what you say against him, I am
not going to be separated from him.  If you insist on going
to Vienna you must go alone, as far as I am concerned.  I
think it would be much more sensible if you were to come to
Brighton with Louis and me, but of course you must please
yourself.”

“You must get rid of that dog,” said
Strudwarden’s sister when Lena had left the room; “it
must be helped to some sudden and merciful end.  Lena is
merely making use of it as an instrument for getting her own way
on dozens of occasions when she would otherwise be obliged to
yield gracefully to your wishes or to the general
convenience.  I am convinced that she doesn’t care a
brass button about the animal itself.  When her friends are
buzzing round her at Brighton or anywhere else and the dog would
be in the way, it has to spend whole days alone with the maid,
but if you want Lena to go with you anywhere where she
doesn’t want to go instantly she trots out the excuse that
she couldn’t be separated from her dog.  Have you ever
come into a room unobserved and heard Lena talking to her beloved
pet?  I never have.  I believe she only fusses over it
when there’s some one present to notice her.”

“I don’t mind admitting,” said Strudwarden,
“that I’ve dwelt more than once lately on the
possibility of some fatal accident putting an end to
Louis’s existence.  It’s not very easy, though,
to arrange a fatality for a creature that spends most of its time
in a muff or asleep in a toy kennel.  I don’t think
poison would be any good; it’s obviously horribly over-fed,
for I’ve seen Lena offer it dainties at table sometimes,
but it never seems to eat them.”

“Lena will be away at church on Wednesday
morning,” said Elsie Strudwarden reflectively; “she
can’t take Louis with her there, and she is going on to the
Dellings for lunch.  That will give you several hours in
which to carry out your purpose.  The maid will be flirting
with the chauffeur most of the time, and, anyhow, I can manage to
keep her out of the way on some pretext or other.”

“That leaves the field clear,” said Strudwarden,
“but unfortunately my brain is equally a blank as far as
any lethal project is concerned.  The little beast is so
monstrously inactive; I can’t pretend that it leapt into
the bath and drowned itself, or that it took on the
butcher’s mastiff in unequal combat and got chewed
up.  In what possible guise could death come to a confirmed
basket-dweller?  It would be too suspicious if we invented a
Suffragette raid and pretended that they invaded Lena’s
boudoir and threw a brick at him.  We should have to do a
lot of other damage as well, which would be rather a nuisance,
and the servants would think it odd that they had seen nothing of
the invaders.”

“I have an idea,” said Elsie; “get a box
with an air-tight lid, and bore a small hole in it, just big
enough to let in an indiarubber tube.  Pop Louis, kennel and
all, into the box, shut it down, and put the other end of the
tube over the gas-bracket.  There you have a perfect lethal
chamber.  You can stand the kennel at the open window
afterwards, to get rid of the smell of gas, and all that Lena
will find when she comes home late in the afternoon will be a
placidly defunct Louis.”

“Novels have been written about women like you,”
said Strudwarden; “you have a perfectly criminal
mind.  Let’s come and look for a box.”

Two mornings later the conspirators stood gazing guiltily at a
stout square box, connected with the gas-bracket by a length of
indiarubber tubing.

“Not a sound,” said Elsie; “he never
stirred; it must have been quite painless.  All the same I
feel rather horrid now it’s done.”

“The ghastly part has to come,” said Strudwarden,
turning off the gas.  “We’ll lift the lid
slowly, and let the gas out by degrees.  Swing the door to
and fro to send a draught through the room.”

Some minutes later, when the fumes had rushed off, he stooped
down and lifted out the little kennel with its grim burden. 
Elsie gave an exclamation of terror.  Louis sat at the door
of his dwelling, head erect and ears pricked, as coldly and
defiantly inert as when they had put him into his execution
chamber.  Strudwarden dropped the kennel with a jerk, and
stared for a long moment at the miracle-dog; then he went into a
peal of chattering laughter.

It was certainly a wonderful imitation of a truculent-looking
toy Pomeranian, and the apparatus that gave forth a wheezy bark
when you pressed it had materially helped the imposition that
Lena, and Lena’s maid, had foisted on the household. 
For a woman who disliked animals, but liked getting her own way
under a halo of unselfishness, Mrs. Strudwarden had managed
rather well.

“Louis is dead,” was the curt information that
greeted Lena on her return from her luncheon party.

“Louis dead!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, he flew at the butcher-boy and bit him, and he bit
me, too, when I tried to get him off, so I had to have him
destroyed.  You warned me that he snapped, but you
didn’t tell me that he was downright dangerous.  I
shall have to pay the boy something heavy by way of compensation,
so you will have to go without those buckles that you wanted to
have for Easter; also I shall have to go to Vienna to consult Dr.
Schroeder, who is a specialist on dog-bites, and you will have to
come too.  I have sent what remains of Louis to Rowland Ward
to be stuffed; that will be my Easter gift to you instead of the
buckles.  For Heaven’s sake, Lena, weep, if you really
feel it so much; anything would be better than standing there
staring as if you thought I had lost my reason.”

Lena Strudwarden did not weep, but her attempt at laughing was
an unmistakable failure.

p. 59THE
GUESTS

“The landscape seen from our windows is certainly
charming,” said Annabel; “those cherry orchards and
green meadows, and the river winding along the valley, and the
church tower peeping out among the elms, they all make a most
effective picture.  There’s something dreadfully
sleepy and languorous about it, though; stagnation seems to be
the dominant note.  Nothing ever happens here; seedtime and
harvest, an occasional outbreak of measles or a mildly
destructive thunderstorm, and a little election excitement about
once in five years, that is all that we have to modify the
monotony of our existence.  Rather dreadful, isn’t
it?”

“On the contrary,” said Matilda, “I find it
soothing and restful; but then, you see, I’ve lived in
countries where things do happen, ever so many at a time, when
you’re not ready for them happening all at once.”

“That, of course, makes a difference,” said
Annabel.

“I have never forgotten,” said Matilda, “the
occasion when the Bishop of Bequar paid us an unexpected visit;
he was on his way to lay the foundation-stone of a mission-house
or something of the sort.”

“I thought that out there you were always prepared for
emergency guests turning up,” said Annabel.

“I was quite prepared for half a dozen Bishops,”
said Matilda, “but it was rather disconcerting to find out
after a little conversation that this particular one was a
distant cousin of mine, belonging to a branch of the family that
had quarrelled bitterly and offensively with our branch about a
Crown Derby dessert service; they got it, and we ought to have
got it, in some legacy, or else we got it and they thought they
ought to have it, I forget which; anyhow, I know they behaved
disgracefully.  Now here was one of them turning up in the
odour of sanctity, so to speak, and claiming the traditional
hospitality of the East.”

“It was rather trying, but you could have left your
husband to do most of the entertaining.”

“My husband was fifty miles up-country, talking sense,
or what he imagined to be sense, to a village community that
fancied one of their leading men was a were-tiger.”

“A what tiger?”

“A were-tiger; you’ve heard of were-wolves,
haven’t you, a mixture of wolf and human being and
demon?  Well, in those parts they have were-tigers, or think
they have, and I must say that in this case, so far as sworn and
uncontested evidence went, they had every ground for thinking
so.  However, as we gave up witchcraft prosecutions about
three hundred years ago, we don’t like to have other people
keeping on our discarded practices; it doesn’t seem
respectful to our mental and moral position.”

“I hope you weren’t unkind to the Bishop,”
said Annabel.

“Well, of course he was my guest, so I had to be
outwardly polite to him, but he was tactless enough to rake up
the incidents of the old quarrel, and to try to make out that
there was something to be said for the way his side of the family
had behaved; even if there was, which I don’t for a moment
admit, my house was not the place in which to say it.  I
didn’t argue the matter, but I gave my cook a holiday to go
and visit his aged parents some ninety miles away.  The
emergency cook was not a specialist in curries, in fact, I
don’t think cooking in any shape or form could have been
one of his strong points.  I believe he originally came to
us in the guise of a gardener, but as we never pretended to have
anything that could be considered a garden he was utilised as
assistant goat-herd, in which capacity, I understand, he gave
every satisfaction.  When the Bishop heard that I had sent
away the cook on a special and unnecessary holiday he saw the
inwardness of the manœuvre, and from that moment we were
scarcely on speaking terms.  If you have ever had a Bishop
with whom you were not on speaking terms staying in your house,
you will appreciate the situation.”

Annabel confessed that her life-story had never included such
a disturbing experience.

“Then,” continued Matilda, “to make matters
more complicated, the Gwadlipichee overflowed its banks, a thing
it did every now and then when the rains were unduly prolonged,
and the lower part of the house and all the out-buildings were
submerged.  We managed to get the ponies loose in time, and
the syce swam the whole lot of them off to the nearest rising
ground.  A goat or two, the chief goat-herd, the chief
goat-herd’s wife, and several of their babies came to
anchorage in the verandah.  All the rest of the available
space was filled up with wet, bedraggled-looking hens and
chickens; one never really knows how many fowls one possesses
till the servants’ quarters are flooded out.  Of
course, I had been through something of the sort in previous
floods, but never before had I had a houseful of goats and babies
and half-drowned hens, supplemented by a Bishop with whom I was
hardly on speaking terms.”

“It must have been a trying experience,” commented
Annabel.

“More embarrassments were to follow.  I
wasn’t going to let a mere ordinary flood wash out the
memory of that Crown Derby dessert service, and I intimated to
the Bishop that his large bedroom, with a writing table in it,
and his small bath-room, with a sufficiency of cold-water jars in
it, was his share of the premises, and that space was rather
congested under the existing circumstances.  However, at
about three o’clock in the afternoon, when he had awakened
from his midday sleep, he made a sudden incursion into the room
that was normally the drawing-room, but was now dining-room,
store-house, saddle-room, and half a dozen other temporary
premises as well.  From the condition of my guest’s
costume he seemed to think it might also serve as his
dressing-room.

“’I’m afraid there is nowhere for you to
sit,’ I said coldly; ‘the verandah is full of
goats.’

“’There is a goat in my bedroom,’ he
observed with equal coldness, and more than a suspicion of
sardonic reproach.

“’Really,’ I said, ‘another
survivor?  I thought all the other goats were done
for.’

“‘This particular goat is quite done for,’
he said, ‘it is being devoured by a leopard at the present
moment.  That is why I left the room; some animals resent
being watched while they are eating.’

“The leopard, of course, was easily explained; it had
been hanging round the goat sheds when the flood came, and had
clambered up by the outside staircase leading to the
Bishop’s bath-room, thoughtfully bringing a goat with
it.  Probably it found the bath-room too damp and shut-in
for its taste, and transferred its banqueting operations to the
bedroom while the Bishop was having his nap.”

“What a frightful situation!” exclaimed Annabel;
“fancy having a ravening leopard in the house, with a flood
all round you.”

“Not in the least ravening,” said Matilda;
“it was full of goat, had any amount of water at its
disposal if it felt thirsty, and probably had no more immediate
wish than a desire for uninterrupted sleep.  Still, I think
any one will admit that it was an embarrassing predicament to
have your only available guest-room occupied by a leopard, the
verandah choked up with goats and babies and wet hens, and a
Bishop with whom you were scarcely on speaking terms planted down
in your own sitting-room.  I really don’t know how I
got through those crawling hours, and of course mealtimes only
made matters worse.  The emergency cook had every excuse for
sending in watery soup and sloppy rice, and as neither the chief
goat-herd nor his wife were expert divers, the cellar could not
be reached.  Fortunately the Gwadlipichee subsides as
rapidly as it rises, and just before dawn the syce came splashing
back, with the ponies only fetlock deep in water.  Then
there arose some awkwardness from the fact that the Bishop wished
to leave sooner than the leopard did, and as the latter was
ensconced in the midst of the former’s personal possessions
there was an obvious difficulty in altering the order of
departure.  I pointed out to the Bishop that a
leopard’s habits and tastes are not those of an otter, and
that it naturally preferred walking to wading; and that in any
case a meal of an entire goat, washed down with tub-water,
justified a certain amount of repose; if I had had guns fired to
frighten the animal away, as the Bishop suggested, it would
probably merely have left the bedroom to come into the already
over-crowded drawing-room.  Altogether it was rather a
relief when they both left.  Now, perhaps, you can
understand my appreciation of a sleepy countryside where things
don’t happen.”

p. 67THE
PENANCE

Octavian Ruttle was one of those lively cheerful individuals
on whom amiability had set its unmistakable stamp, and, like most
of his kind, his soul’s peace depended in large measure on
the unstinted approval of his fellows.  In hunting to death
a small tabby cat he had done a thing of which he scarcely
approved himself, and he was glad when the gardener had hidden
the body in its hastily dug grave under a lone oak-tree in the
meadow, the same tree that the hunted quarry had climbed as a
last effort towards safety.  It had been a distasteful and
seemingly ruthless deed, but circumstances had demanded the doing
of it.  Octavian kept chickens; at least he kept some of
them; others vanished from his keeping, leaving only a few
bloodstained feathers to mark the manner of their going. 
The tabby cat from the large grey house that stood with its back
to the meadow had been detected in many furtive visits to the
hen-coups, and after due negotiation with those in authority at
the grey house a sentence of death had been agreed on. 
“The children will mind, but they need not know,” had
been the last word on the matter.

The children in question were a standing puzzle to Octavian;
in the course of a few months he considered that he should have
known their names, ages, the dates of their birthdays, and have
been introduced to their favourite toys.  They remained
however, as non-committal as the long blank wall that shut them
off from the meadow, a wall over which their three heads
sometimes appeared at odd moments.  They had parents in
India—that much Octavian had learned in the neighbourhood;
the children, beyond grouping themselves garment-wise into sexes,
a girl and two boys, carried their life-story no further on his
behoof.  And now it seemed he was engaged in something which
touched them closely, but must be hidden from their
knowledge.

The poor helpless chickens had gone one by one to their doom,
so it was meet that their destroyer should come to a violent end;
yet Octavian felt some qualms when his share of the violence was
ended.  The little cat, headed off from its wonted tracks of
safety, had raced unfriended from shelter to shelter, and its end
had been rather piteous.  Octavian walked through the long
grass of the meadow with a step less jaunty than usual.  And
as he passed beneath the shadow of the high blank wall he glanced
up and became aware that his hunting had had undesired
witnesses.  Three white set faces were looking down at him,
and if ever an artist wanted a threefold study of cold human
hate, impotent yet unyielding, raging yet masked in stillness, he
would have found it in the triple gaze that met Octavian’s
eye.

“I’m sorry, but it had to be done,” said
Octavian, with genuine apology in his voice.

“Beast!”

The answer came from three throats with startling
intensity.

Octavian felt that the blank wall would not be more impervious
to his explanations than the bunch of human hostility that peered
over its coping; he wisely decided to withhold his peace
overtures till a more hopeful occasion.

Two days later he ransacked the best sweet shop in the
neighbouring market town for a box of chocolates that by its size
and contents should fitly atone for the dismal deed done under
the oak tree in the meadow.  The two first specimens that
were shown him he hastily rejected; one had a group of chickens
pictured on its lid, the other bore the portrait of a tabby
kitten.  A third sample was more simply bedecked with a
spray of painted poppies, and Octavian hailed the flowers of
forgetfulness as a happy omen.  He felt distinctly more at
ease with his surroundings when the imposing package had been
sent across to the grey house, and a message returned to say that
it had been duly given to the children.  The next morning he
sauntered with purposeful steps past the long blank wall on his
way to the chicken-run and piggery that stood at the bottom of
the meadow.  The three children were perched at their
accustomed look-out, and their range of sight did not seem to
concern itself with Octavian’s presence.  As he became
depressingly aware of the aloofness of their gaze he also noted a
strange variegation in the herbage at his feet; the greensward
for a considerable space around was strewn and speckled with a
chocolate-coloured hail, enlivened here and there with gay
tinsel-like wrappings or the glistening mauve of crystallised
violets.  It was as though the fairy paradise of a
greedyminded child had taken shape and substance in the
vegetation of the meadow.  Octavian’s bloodmoney had
been flung back at him in scorn.

To increase his discomfiture the march of events tended to
shift the blame of ravaged chicken-coops from the supposed
culprit who had already paid full forfeit; the young chicks were
still carried off, and it seemed highly probable that the cat had
only haunted the chicken-run to prey on the rats which harboured
there.  Through the flowing channels of servant talk the
children learned of this belated revision of verdict, and
Octavian one day picked up a sheet of copy-book paper on which
was painstakingly written: “Beast.  Rats eated your
chickens.”  More ardently than ever did he wish for an
opportunity for sloughing off the disgrace that enwrapped him,
and earning some happier nickname from his three unsparing
judges.

And one day a chance inspiration came to him.  Olivia,
his two-year-old daughter, was accustomed to spend the hour from
high noon till one o’clock with her father while the
nursemaid gobbled and digested her dinner and novelette. 
About the same time the blank wall was usually enlivened by the
presence of its three small wardens.  Octavian, with seeming
carelessness of purpose, brought Olivia well within hail of the
watchers and noted with hidden delight the growing interest that
dawned in that hitherto sternly hostile quarter.  His little
Olivia, with her sleepy placid ways, was going to succeed where
he, with his anxious well-meant overtures, had so signally
failed.  He brought her a large yellow dahlia, which she
grasped tightly in one hand and regarded with a stare of
benevolent boredom, such as one might bestow on amateur classical
dancing performed in aid of a deserving charity.  Then he
turned shyly to the group perched on the wall and asked with
affected carelessness, “Do you like flowers?” 
Three solemn nods rewarded his venture.

“Which sorts do you like best?” he asked, this
time with a distinct betrayal of eagerness in his voice.

“Those with all the colours, over there.” 
Three chubby arms pointed to a distant tangle of sweet-pea. 
Child-like, they had asked for what lay farthest from hand, but
Octavian trotted off gleefully to obey their welcome
behest.  He pulled and plucked with unsparing hand, and
brought every variety of tint that he could see into his bunch
that was rapidly becoming a bundle.  Then he turned to
retrace his steps, and found the blank wall blanker and more
deserted than ever, while the foreground was void of all trace of
Olivia.  Far down the meadow three children were pushing a
go-cart at the utmost speed they could muster in the direction of
the piggeries; it was Olivia’s go-cart and Olivia sat in
it, somewhat bumped and shaken by the pace at which she was being
driven, but apparently retaining her wonted composure of
mind.  Octavian stared for a moment at the rapidly moving
group, and then started in hot pursuit, shedding as he ran sprays
of blossom from the mass of sweet-pea that he still clutched in
his hands.  Fast as he ran the children had reached the
piggery before he could overtake them, and he arrived just in
time to see Olivia, wondering but unprotesting, hauled and pushed
up to the roof of the nearest sty.  They were old buildings
in some need of repair, and the rickety roof would certainly not
have borne Octavian’s weight if he had attempted to follow
his daughter and her captors on their new vantage ground.

“What are you going to do with her?” he
panted.  There was no mistaking the grim trend of mischief
in those flushed by sternly composed young faces.

“Hang her in chains over a slow fire,” said one of
the boys.  Evidently they had been reading English
history.

“Frow her down the pigs will d’vour her, every bit
’cept the palms of her hands,” said the other
boy.  It was also evident that they had studied Biblical
history.

The last proposal was the one which most alarmed Octavian,
since it might be carried into effect at a moment’s notice;
there had been cases, he remembered, of pigs eating babies.

“You surely wouldn’t treat my poor little Olivia
in that way?” he pleaded.

“You killed our little cat,” came in stern
reminder from three throats.

“I’m sorry I did,” said Octavian, and if
there is a standard measurement in truths Octavian’s
statement was assuredly a large nine.

“We shall be very sorry when we’ve killed
Olivia,” said the girl, “but we can’t be sorry
till we’ve done it.”

The inexorable child-logic rose like an unyielding rampart
before Octavian’s scared pleadings.  Before he could
think of any fresh line of appeal his energies were called out in
another direction.  Olivia had slid off the roof and fallen
with a soft, unctuous splash into a morass of muck and decaying
straw.  Octavian scrambled hastily over the pigsty wall to
her rescue, and at once found himself in a quagmire that engulfed
his feet.  Olivia, after the first shock of surprise at her
sudden drop through the air, had been mildly pleased at finding
herself in close and unstinted contact with the sticky element
that oozed around her, but as she began to sink gently into the
bed of slime a feeling dawned on her that she was not after all
very happy, and she began to cry in the tentative fashion of the
normally good child.  Octavian, battling with the quagmire,
which seemed to have learned the rare art of giving way at all
points without yielding an inch, saw his daughter slowly
disappearing in the engulfing slush, her smeared face further
distorted with the contortions of whimpering wonder, while from
their perch on the pigsty roof the three children looked down
with the cold unpitying detachment of the Parcæ
Sisters.

“I can’t reach her in time,” gasped
Octavian, “she’ll be choked in the muck. 
Won’t you help her?”

“No one helped our cat,” came the inevitable
reminder.

“I’ll do anything to show you how sorry I am about
that,” cried Octavian, with a further desperate flounder,
which carried him scarcely two inches forward.

“Will you stand in a white sheet by the
grave?”

“Yes,” screamed Octavian.

“Holding a candle?”

“An’ saying ‘I’m a miserable
Beast’?”

Octavian agreed to both suggestions.

“For a long, long time?”

“For half an hour,” said Octavian.  There was
an anxious ring in his voice as he named the time-limit; was
there not the precedent of a German king who did open-air penance
for several days and nights at Christmas-time clad only in his
shirt?  Fortunately the children did not appear to have read
German history, and half an hour seemed long and goodly in their
eyes.

“All right,” came with threefold solemnity from
the roof, and a moment later a short ladder had been laboriously
pushed across to Octavian, who lost no time in propping it
against the low pigsty wall.  Scrambling gingerly along its
rungs he was able to lean across the morass that separated him
from his slowly foundering offspring and extract her like an
unwilling cork from it’s slushy embrace.  A few
minutes later he was listening to the shrill and repeated
assurances of the nursemaid that her previous experience of
filthy spectacles had been on a notably smaller scale.

That same evening when twilight was deepening into darkness
Octavian took up his position as penitent under the lone
oak-tree, having first carefully undressed the part.  Clad
in a zephyr shirt, which on this occasion thoroughly merited its
name, he held in one hand a lighted candle and in the other a
watch, into which the soul of a dead plumber seemed to have
passed.  A box of matches lay at his feet and was resorted
to on the fairly frequent occasions when the candle succumbed to
the night breezes.  The house loomed inscrutable in the
middle distance, but as Octavian conscientiously repeated the
formula of his penance he felt certain that three pairs of solemn
eyes were watching his moth-shared vigil.

And the next morning his eyes were gladdened by a sheet of
copy-book paper lying beside the blank wall, on which was written
the message “Un-Beast.”

p. 79THE
PHANTOM LUNCHEON

“The Smithly-Dubbs are in Town,” said Sir
James.  “I wish you would show them some
attention.  Ask them to lunch with you at the Ritz or
somewhere.”

“From the little I’ve seen of the Smithly-Dubbs I
don’t thing I want to cultivate their acquaintance,”
said Lady Drakmanton.

“They always work for us at election times,” said
her husband; “I don’t suppose they influence very
many votes, but they have an uncle who is on one of my ward
committees, and another uncle speaks sometimes at some of our
less important meetings.  Those sort of people expect some
return in the shape of hospitality.”

“Expect it!” exclaimed Lady Drakmanton; “the
Misses Smithly-Dubb do more than that; they almost demand
it.  They belong to my club, and hang about the lobby just
about lunch-time, all three of them, with their tongues hanging
out of their mouths and the six-course look in their eyes. 
If I were to breathe the word ‘lunch’ they would
hustle me into a taxi and scream ‘Ritz’ or
‘Dieudonne’s’ to the driver before I knew what
was happening.”

“All the same, I think you ought to ask them to a meal
of some sort,” persisted Sir James.

“I consider that showing hospitality to the
Smithly-Dubbs is carrying Free Food principles to a regrettable
extreme,” said Lady Drakmanton; “I’ve
entertained the Joneses and the Browns and the Snapheimers and
the Lubrikoffs, and heaps of others whose names I forget, but I
don’t see why I should inflict the society of the Misses
Smithly-Dubb on myself for a solid hour.  Imagine it, sixty
minutes, more or less, of unrelenting gobble and gabble. 
Why can’t you take them on, Milly?” she asked,
turning hopefully to her sister.

“I don’t know them,” said Milly hastily.

“All the better; you can pass yourself off as me. 
People say that we are so alike that they can hardly tell us
apart, and I’ve only spoken to these tiresome young women
about twice in my life, at committee-rooms, and bowed to them in
the club.  Any of the club page-boys will point them out to
you; they’re always to be found lolling about the hall just
before lunch-time.”

“My dear Betty, don’t be absurd,” protested
Milly; “I’ve got some people lunching with me at the
Carlton to-morrow, and I’m leaving Town the day
afterwards.”

“What time is your lunch to-morrow?” asked Lady
Drakmanton reflectively.

“Two o’clock,” said Milly.

“Good,” said her sister; “the Smithly-Dubbs
shall lunch with me to-morrow.  It shall be rather an
amusing lunch-party.  At least, I shall be
amused.”

The last two remarks she made to herself.  Other people
did not always appreciate her ideas of humour.  Sir James
never did.

The next day Lady Drakmanton made some marked variations in
her usual toilet effects.  She dressed her hair in an
unaccustomed manner, and put on a hat that added to the
transformation of her appearance.  When she had made one or
two minor alterations she was sufficiently unlike her usual smart
self to produce some hesitation in the greeting which the Misses
Smithly-Dubb bestowed on her in the club-lobby.  She
responded, however, with a readiness which set their doubts at
rest.

“What is the Carlton like for lunching in?” she
asked breezily.

The restaurant received an enthusiastic recommendation from
the three sisters.

“Let’s go and lunch there, shall we?” she
suggested, and in a few minutes’ time the Smithly-Dubb mind
was contemplating at close quarters a happy vista of baked meats
and approved vintage.

“Are you going to start with caviare?  I am,”
confided Lady Drakmanton, and the Smithly-Dubbs started with
caviare.  The subsequent dishes were chosen in the same
ambitious spirit, and by the time they had arrived at the wild
duck course it was beginning to be a rather expensive lunch.

The conversation hardly kept pace with the brilliancy of the
menu.  Repeated references on the part of the guests to the
local political conditions and prospects in Sir James’s
constituency were met with vague “ahs” and
“indeeds” from Lady Drakmanton, who might have been
expected to be specially interested.

“I think when the Insurance Act is a little better
understood it will lose some of its present unpopularity,”
hazarded Cecilia Smithly-Dubb.

“Will it?  I dare say.  I’m afraid
politics don’t interest me very much,” said Lady
Drakmanton.

The three Miss Smithly-Dubbs put down their cups of Turkish
coffee and stared.  Then they broke into protesting
giggles.

“Of course, you’re joking,” they said.

“Not me,” was the disconcerting answer; “I
can’t make head or tail of these bothering old
politics.  Never could, and never want to.  I’ve
quite enough to do to manage my own affairs, and that’s a
fact.”

“But,” exclaimed Amanda Smithly-Dubb, with a
squeal of bewilderment breaking into her voice, “I was told
you spoke so informingly about the Insurance Act at one of our
social evenings.”

It was Lady Drakmanton who stared now.  “Do you
know,” she said, with a scared look around her,
“rather a dreadful thing is happening.  I’m
suffering from a complete loss of memory.  I can’t
even think who I am.  I remember meeting you somewhere, and
I remember you asking me to come and lunch with you here, and
that I accepted your kind invitation.  Beyond that my mind
is a positive blank.”

The scared look was transferred with intensified poignancy to
the faces of her companions.

“You asked us to lunch,” they
exclaimed hurriedly.  That seemed a more immediately
important point to clear up than the question of identity.

“Oh, no,” said the vanishing hostess,
“that I do remember about.  You insisted on my
coming here because the feeding was so good, and I must say it
comes up to all you said about it.  A very nice lunch
it’s been.  What I’m worrying about is who on
earth am I?  I haven’t the faintest notion?”

“You are Lady Drakmanton,” exclaimed the three
sisters in chorus.

“Now, don’t make fun of me,” she replied,
crossly, “I happen to know her quite well by sight, and she
isn’t a bit like me.  And it’s an odd thing you
should have mentioned her, for it so happens she’s just
come into the room.  That lady in black, with the yellow
plume in her hat, there over by the door.”

The Smithly-Dubbs looked in the indicated direction, and the
uneasiness in their eyes deepened into horror.  In outward
appearance the lady who had just entered the room certainly came
rather nearer to their recollection of their Member’s wife
than the individual who was sitting at table with them.

“Who are you, then, if that is Lady
Drakmanton?” they asked in panic-stricken bewilderment.

“That is just what I don’t know,” was the
answer; “and you don’t seem to know much better than
I do.”

“You came up to us in the club—”

“In what club?”

“The New Didactic, in Calais Street.”

“The New Didactic!” exclaimed Lady Drakmanton with
an air of returning illumination; “thank you so much. 
Of course, I remember now who I am.  I’m Ellen Niggle,
of the Ladies’ Brasspolishing Guild.  The Club employs
me to come now and then and see to the polishing of the brass
fittings.  That’s how I came to know Lady Drakmanton
by sight; she’s very often in the Club.  And you are
the ladies who so kindly asked me out to lunch.  Funny how
it should all have slipped my memory, all of a sudden.  The
unaccustomed good food and wine must have been too much for me;
for the moment I really couldn’t call to mind who I
was.  Good gracious,” she broke off suddenly,
“it’s ten past two; I should be at a polishing job in
Whitehall.  I must scuttle off like a giddy rabbit. 
Thanking you ever so.”

She left the room with a scuttle sufficiently suggestive of
the animal she had mentioned, but the giddiness was all on the
side of her involuntary hostesses.  The restaurant seemed to
be spinning round them; and the bill when it appeared did nothing
to restore their composure.  They were as nearly in tears as
it is permissible to be during the luncheon hour in a really good
restaurant.  Financially speaking, they were well able to
afford the luxury of an elaborate lunch, but their ideas on the
subject of entertaining differed very sharply, according to the
circumstances of whether they were dispensing or receiving
hospitality.  To have fed themselves liberally at their own
expense was, perhaps, an extravagance to be deplored, but, at any
rate, they had had something for their money; to have drawn an
unknown and socially unremunerative Ellen Niggle into the net of
their hospitality was a catastrophe that they could not
contemplate with any degree of calmness.

The Smithly-Dubbs never quite recovered from their unnerving
experience.  They have given up politics and taken to doing
good.

p. 87A
BREAD AND BUTTER MISS

“Starling Chatter and Oakhill have both dropped back in
the betting,” said Bertie van Tahn, throwing the morning
paper across the breakfast table.

“That leaves Nursery Tea practically favourite,”
said Odo Finsberry.

“Nursery Tea and Pipeclay are at the top of the betting
at present,” said Bertie, “but that French horse, Le
Five O’Clock, seems to be fancied as much as
anything.  Then there is Whitebait, and the Polish horse
with a name like some one trying to stifle a sneeze in church;
they both seem to have a lot of support.”

“It’s the most open Derby there’s been for
years,” said Odo.

“It’s simply no good trying to pick the winner on
form,” said Bertie; “one must just trust to luck and
inspiration.”

“The question is whether to trust to one’s own
inspiration, or somebody else’s.  Sporting
Swank gives Count Palatine to win, and Le Five O’Clock
for a place.”

“Count Palatine—that adds another to our list of
perplexities.  Good morning, Sir Lulworth; have you a fancy
for the Derby by any chance?”

“I don’t usually take much interest in turf
matters,” said Sir Lulworth, who had just made his
appearance, “but I always like to have a bet on the Guineas
and the Derby.  This year, I confess, it’s rather
difficult to pick out anything that seems markedly better than
anything else.  What do you think of Snow
Bunting?”

“Snow Bunting?” said Odo, with a groan,
“there’s another of them.  Surely, Snow Bunting
has no earthly chance?”

“My housekeeper’s nephew, who is a shoeing-smith
in the mounted section of the Church Lads’ Brigade, and an
authority on horseflesh, expects him to be among the first
three.”

“The nephews of housekeepers are invariably
optimists,” said Bertie; “it’s a kind of
natural reaction against the professional pessimism of their
aunts.”

“We don’t seem to get much further in our search
for the probable winner,” said Mrs. de Claux; “the
more I listen to you experts the more hopelessly befogged I
get.”

“It’s all very well to blame us,” said
Bertie to his hostess; “you haven’t produced anything
in the way of an inspiration.”

“My inspiration consisted in asking you down for Derby
week,” retorted Mrs. de Claux; “I thought you and Odo
between you might throw some light on the question of the
moment.”

Further recriminations were cut short by the arrival of Lola
Pevensey, who floated into the room with an air of gracious
apology.

“So sorry to be so late,” she observed, making a
rapid tour of inspection of the breakfast dishes.

“Did you have a good night?” asked her hostess
with perfunctory solicitude.

“Quite, thank you,” said Lola; “I dreamt a
most remarkable dream.”

A flutter, indicative of general boredom; went round the
table.  Other people’s dreams are about as universally
interesting as accounts of other people’s gardens, or
chickens, or children.

“I dreamt about the winner of the Derby,” said
Lola.

A swift reaction of attentive interest set in.

“Do tell us what you dreamt,” came in a
chorus.

“The really remarkable thing about it is that I’ve
dreamt it two nights running,” said Lola, finally deciding
between the allurements of sausages and kedgeree; “that is
why I thought it worth mentioning.  You know, when I dream
things two or three nights in succession, it always means
something; I have special powers in that way.  For instance,
I once dreamed three times that a winged lion was flying through
the sky and one of his wings dropped off, and he came to the
ground with a crash; just afterwards the Campanile at Venice fell
down.  The winged lion is the symbol of Venice, you
know,” she added for the enlightenment of those who might
not be versed in Italian heraldry.  “Then,” she
continued, “just before the murder of the King and Queen of
Servia I had a vivid dream of two crowned figures walking into a
slaughter-house by the banks of a big river, which I took to be
the Danube; and only the other day—”

“Do tell us what you’ve dreamt about the
Derby,” interrupted Odo impatiently.

“Well, I saw the finish of the race as clearly as
anything; and one horse won easily, almost in a canter, and
everybody cried out ‘Bread and Butter wins!  Good old
Bread and Butter.’  I heard the name distinctly, and
I’ve had the same dream two nights running.”

“Bread and Butter,” said Mrs. de Claux,
“now, whatever horse can that point to?  Why—of
course; Nursery Tea!”

She looked round with the triumphant smile of a successful
unraveller of mystery.

“How about Le Five O’Clock?” interposed Sir
Lulworth.

“It would fit either of them equally well,” said
Odo; “can you remember any details about the jockey’s
colours?  That might help us.”

“I seem to remember a glimpse of lemon sleeves or cap,
but I can’t be sure,” said Lola, after due
reflection.

“There isn’t a lemon jacket or cap in the
race,” said Bertie, referring to a list of starters and
jockeys; “can’t you remember anything about the
appearance of the horse?  If it were a thick-set animal,
this bread and butter would typify Nursery Tea; and if it were
thin, of course, it would mean Le Five O’Clock.”

“That seems sound enough,” said Mrs. de Claux;
“do think, Lola dear, whether the horse in your dream was
thin or stoutly built.”

“I can’t remember that it was one or the
other,” said Lola; “one wouldn’t notice such a
detail in the excitement of a finish.”

“But this was a symbolic animal,” said Sir
Lulworth; “if it were to typify thick or thin bread and
butter surely it ought to have been either as bulky and tubby as
a shire cart-horse; or as thin as a heraldic leopard.”

“I’m afraid you are rather a careless
dreamer,” said Bertie resentfully.

“Of course, at the moment of dreaming I thought I was
witnessing a real race, not the portent of one,” said Lola;
“otherwise I should have particularly noticed all helpful
details.”

“The Derby isn’t run till to-morrow,” said
Mrs. de Claux; “do you think you are likely to have the
same dream again to-night?  If so; you can fix your
attention on the important detail of the animal’s
appearance.”

“I’m afraid I shan’t sleep at all
to-night,” said Lola pathetically; “every fifth night
I suffer from insomnia, and it’s due to-night.”

“It’s most provoking,” said Bertie;
“of course, we can back both horses, but it would be much
more satisfactory to have all our money on the winner. 
Can’t you take a sleeping-draught, or something?”

“Oakleaves, soaked in warm water and put under the bed,
are recommended by some,” said Mrs. de Claux.

“A glass of Benedictine, with a drop of
eau-de-Cologne—” said Sir Lulworth.

“I have tried every known remedy,” said Lola, with
dignity; “I’ve been a martyr to insomnia for
years.”

“But now we are being martyrs to it,” said Odo
sulkily; “I particularly want to land a big coup over this
race.”

“I don’t have insomnia for my own
amusement,” snapped Lola.

“Let us hope for the best,” said Mrs. de Claux
soothingly; “to-night may prove an exception to the
fifth-night rule.”

But when breakfast time came round again Lola reported a blank
night as far as visions were concerned.

“I don’t suppose I had as much as ten
minutes’ sleep, and, certainly, no dreams.”

“I’m so sorry, for your sake in the first place,
and ours as well,” said her hostess; “do you think
you could induce a short nap after breakfast?  It would be
so good for you—and you might dream something. 
There would still be time for us to get our bets on.”

“I’ll try if you like,” said Lola; “it
sounds rather like a small child being sent to bed in
disgrace.”

“I’ll come and read the Encyclopædia
Britannica to you if you think it will make you sleep any
sooner,” said Bertie obligingly.

Rain was falling too steadily to permit of outdoor amusement,
and the party suffered considerably during the next two hours
from the absolute quiet that was enforced all over the house in
order to give Lola every chance of achieving slumber.  Even
the click of billiard balls was considered a possible factor of
disturbance, and the canaries were carried down to the
gardener’s lodge, while the cuckoo clock in the hall was
muffled under several layers of rugs.  A notice,
“Please do not Knock or Ring,” was posted on the
front door at Bertie’s suggestion, and guests and servants
spoke in tragic whispers as though the dread presence of death or
sickness had invaded the house.  The precautions proved of
no avail: Lola added a sleepless morning to a wakeful night, and
the bets of the party had to be impartially divided between
Nursery Tea and the French Colt.

“So provoking to have to split out bets,” said
Mrs. de Claux, as her guests gathered in the hall later in the
day, waiting for the result of the race.

“I did my best for you,” said Lola, feeling that
she was not getting her due share of gratitude; “I told you
what I had seen in my dreams, a brown horse, called Bread and
Butter, winning easily from all the rest.”

“What?” screamed Bertie, jumping up from his sea,
“a brown horse!  Miserable woman, you never
said a word about it’s being a brown horse.”

“Didn’t I?” faltered Lola; “I thought
I told you it was a brown horse.  It was certainly brown in
both dreams.  But I don’t see what the colour has got
to do with it.  Nursery Tea and Le Five O’Clock are
both chestnuts.”

“Merciful Heaven!  Doesn’t brown bread and
butter with a sprinkling of lemon in the colours suggest anything
to you?” raged Bertie.

A slow, cumulative groan broke from the assembly as the
meaning of his words gradually dawned on his hearers.

For the second time that day Lola retired to the seclusion of
her room; she could not face the universal looks of reproach
directed at her when Whitebait was announced winner at the
comfortable price of fourteen to one.

p.
97BERTIE’S CHRISTMAS EVE

It was Christmas Eve, and the family circle of Luke Steffink,
Esq., was aglow with the amiability and random mirth which the
occasion demanded.  A long and lavish dinner had been
partaken of, waits had been round and sung carols; the
house-party had regaled itself with more caroling on its own
account, and there had been romping which, even in a pulpit
reference, could not have been condemned as ragging.  In the
midst of the general glow, however, there was one black unkindled
cinder.

Bertie Steffink, nephew of the aforementioned Luke, had early
in life adopted the profession of ne’er-do-weel; his father
had been something of the kind before him.  At the age of
eighteen Bertie had commenced that round of visits to our
Colonial possessions, so seemly and desirable in the case of a
Prince of the Blood, so suggestive of insincerity in a young man
of the middle-class.  He had gone to grow tea in Ceylon and
fruit in British Columbia, and to help sheep to grow wool in
Australia.  At the age of twenty he had just returned from
some similar errand in Canada, from which it may be gathered that
the trial he gave to these various experiments was of the summary
drum-head nature.  Luke Steffink, who fulfilled the troubled
role of guardian and deputy-parent to Bertie, deplored the
persistent manifestation of the homing instinct on his
nephew’s part, and his solemn thanks earlier in the day for
the blessing of reporting a united family had no reference to
Bertie’s return.

Arrangements had been promptly made for packing the youth off
to a distant corner of Rhodesia, whence return would be a
difficult matter; the journey to this uninviting destination was
imminent, in fact a more careful and willing traveller would have
already begun to think about his packing.  Hence Bertie was
in no mood to share in the festive spirit which displayed itself
around him, and resentment smouldered within him at the eager,
self-absorbed discussion of social plans for the coming months
which he heard on all sides.  Beyond depressing his uncle
and the family circle generally by singing “Say au revoir,
and not good-bye,” he had taken no part in the
evening’s conviviality.

Eleven o’clock had struck some half-hour ago, and the
elder Steffinks began to throw out suggestions leading up to that
process which they called retiring for the night.

“Come, Teddie, it’s time you were in your little
bed, you know,” said Luke Steffink to his thirteen-year-old
son.

“That’s where we all ought to be,” said Mrs.
Steffink.

“There wouldn’t be room,” said Bertie.

The remark was considered to border on the scandalous;
everybody ate raisins and almonds with the nervous industry of
sheep feeding during threatening weather.

“In Russia,” said Horace Bordenby, who was staying
in the house as a Christmas guest, “I’ve read that
the peasants believe that if you go into a cow-house or stable at
midnight on Christmas Eve you will hear the animals talk. 
They’re supposed to have the gift of speech at that one
moment of the year.”

“Oh, do let’s all go down to the
cow-house and listen to what they’ve got to say!”
exclaimed Beryl, to whom anything was thrilling and amusing if
you did it in a troop.

Mrs. Steffink made a laughing protest, but gave a virtual
consent by saying, “We must all wrap up well,
then.”  The idea seemed a scatterbrained one to her,
and almost heathenish, but if afforded an opportunity for
“throwing the young people together,” and as such she
welcomed it.  Mr. Horace Bordenby was a young man with quite
substantial prospects, and he had danced with Beryl at a local
subscription ball a sufficient number of times to warrant the
authorised inquiry on the part of the neighbours whether
“there was anything in it.”  Though Mrs.
Steffink would not have put it in so many words, she shared the
idea of the Russian peasantry that on this night the beast might
speak.

The cow-house stood at the junction of the garden with a small
paddock, an isolated survival, in a suburban neighbourhood; of
what had once been a small farm.  Luke Steffink was
complacently proud of his cow-house and his two cows; he felt
that they gave him a stamp of solidity which no number of
Wyandottes or Orpingtons could impart.  They even seemed to
link him in a sort of inconsequent way with those patriarchs who
derived importance from their floating capital of flocks and
herbs, he-asses and she-asses.  It had been an anxious and
momentous occasion when he had had to decide definitely between
“the Byre” and “the Ranch” for the naming
of his villa residence.  A December midnight was hardly the
moment he would have chosen for showing his farm-building to
visitors, but since it was a fine night, and the young people
were anxious for an excuse for a mild frolic, Luke consented to
chaperon the expedition.  The servants had long since gone
to bed, so the house was left in charge of Bertie, who scornfully
declined to stir out on the pretext of listening to bovine
conversation.

“We must go quietly,” said Luke, as he headed the
procession of giggling young folk, brought up in the rear by the
shawled and hooded figure of Mrs. Steffink; “I’ve
always laid stress on keeping this a quiet and orderly
neighbourhood.”

It was a few minutes to midnight when the party reached the
cow-house and made its way in by the light of Luke’s stable
lantern.  For a moment every one stood in silence, almost
with a feeling of being in church.

“Daisy—the one lying down—is by a shorthorn
bull out of a Guernsey cow,” announced Luke in a hushed
voice, which was in keeping with the foregoing impression.

“Is she?” said Bordenby, rather as if he had
expected her to be by Rembrandt.

“Myrtle is—”

Myrtle’s family history was cut short by a little scream
from the women of the party.

The cow-house door had closed noiselessly behind them and the
key had turned gratingly in the lock; then they heard
Bertie’s voice pleasantly wishing them good-night and his
footsteps retreating along the garden path.

Luke Steffink strode to the window; it was a small square
opening of the old-fashioned sort, with iron bars let into the
stonework.

“Unlock the door this instant,” he shouted, with
as much air of menacing authority as a hen might assume when
screaming through the bars of a coop at a marauding hawk. 
In reply to his summons the hall-door closed with a defiant
bang.

A neighbouring clock struck the hour of midnight.  If the
cows had received the gift of human speech at that moment they
would not have been able to make themselves heard.  Seven or
eight other voices were engaged in describing Bertie’s
present conduct and his general character at a high pressure of
excitement and indignation.

In the course of half an hour or so everything that it was
permissible to say about Bertie had been said some dozens of
times, and other topics began to come to the front—the
extreme mustiness of the cow-house, the possibility of it
catching fire, and the probability of it being a Rowton House for
the vagrant rats of the neighbourhood.  And still no sign of
deliverance came to the unwilling vigil-keepers.

Towards one o’clock the sound of rather boisterous and
undisciplined carol-singing approached rapidly, and came to a
sudden anchorage, apparently just outside the garden-gate. 
A motor-load of youthful “bloods,” in a high state of
conviviality, had made a temporary halt for repairs; the
stoppage, however, did not extend to the vocal efforts of the
party, and the watchers in the cow-shed were treated to a highly
unauthorised rendering of “Good King Wenceslas,” in
which the adjective “good” appeared to be very
carelessly applied.

The noise had the effect of bringing Bertie out into the
garden, but he utterly ignored the pale, angry faces peering out
at the cow-house window, and concentrated his attention on the
revellers outside the gate.

“Wassail, you chaps!” he shouted.

“Wassail, old sport!” they shouted back;
“we’d jolly well drink y’r health, only
we’ve nothing to drink it in.”

“Come and wassail inside,” said Bertie hospitably;
“I’m all alone, and there’s heap’s of
‘wet’.”

They were total strangers, but his touch of kindness made them
instantly his kin.  In another moment the unauthorised
version of King Wenceslas, which, like many other scandals, grew
worse on repetition, went echoing up the garden path; two of the
revellers gave an impromptu performance on the way by executing
the staircase waltz up the terraces of what Luke Steffink,
hitherto with some justification, called his rock-garden. 
The rock part of it was still there when the waltz had been
accorded its third encore.  Luke, more than ever like a
cooped hen behind the cow-house bars, was in a position to
realise the feelings of concert-goers unable to countermand the
call for an encore which they neither desire or deserve.

The hall door closed with a bang on Bertie’s guests, and
the sounds of merriment became faint and muffled to the weary
watchers at the other end of the garden.  Presently two
ominous pops, in quick succession, made themselves distinctly
heard.

“They’ve got at the champagne!” exclaimed
Mrs. Steffink.

“Perhaps it’s the sparkling Moselle,” said
Luke hopefully.

Three or four more pops were heard.

“The champagne and the sparkling Moselle,”
said Mrs. Steffink.

Luke uncorked an expletive which, like brandy in a temperance
household, was only used on rare emergencies.  Mr. Horace
Bordenby had been making use of similar expressions under his
breath for a considerable time past.  The experiment of
“throwing the young people together” had been
prolonged beyond a point when it was likely to produce any
romantic result.

Some forty minutes later the hall door opened and disgorged a
crowd that had thrown off any restraint of shyness that might
have influenced its earlier actions.  Its vocal efforts in
the direction of carol singing were now supplemented by
instrumental music; a Christmas-tree that had been prepared for
the children of the gardener and other household retainers had
yielded a rich spoil of tin trumpets, rattles, and drums. 
The life-story of King Wenceslas had been dropped, Luke was
thankful to notice, but it was intensely irritating for the
chilled prisoners in the cow-house to be told that it was a hot
time in the old town to-night, together with some accurate but
entirely superfluous information as to the imminence of Christmas
morning.  Judging by the protests which began to be shouted
from the upper windows of neighbouring houses the sentiments
prevailing in the cow-house were heartily echoed in other
quarters.

The revellers found their car, and, what was more remarkable,
managed to drive off in it, with a parting fanfare of tin
trumpets.  The lively beat of a drum disclosed the fact that
the master of the revels remained on the scene.

“Bertie!” came in an angry, imploring chorus of
shouts and screams from the cow-house window.

“Hullo,” cried the owner of the name, turning his
rather errant steps in the direction of the summons; “are
you people still there?  Must have heard everything cows got
to say by this time.  If you haven’t, no use
waiting.  After all, it’s a Russian legend, and
Russian Chrismush Eve not due for ’nother fortnight. 
Better come out.”

After one or two ineffectual attempts he managed to pitch the
key of the cow-house door in through the window.  Then,
lifting his voice in the strains of “I’m afraid to go
home in the dark,” with a lusty drum accompaniment, he led
the way back to the house.  The hurried procession of the
released that followed in his steps came in for a good deal of
the adverse comment that his exuberant display had evoked.

It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent.  To
quote his own words, he had a rotten Christmas.

p.
107FOREWARNED

Alethia Debchance sat in a corner of an otherwise empty
railway carriage, more or less at ease as regarded body, but in
some trepidation as to mind.  She had embarked on a social
adventure of no little magnitude as compared with the accustomed
seclusion and stagnation of her past life.  At the age of
twenty-eight she could look back on nothing more eventful than
the daily round of her existence in her aunt’s house at
Webblehinton, a hamlet four and a half miles distant from a
country town and about a quarter of a century removed from modern
times.  Their neighbours had been elderly and few, not much
given to social intercourse, but helpful or politely sympathetic
in times of illness.  Newspapers of the ordinary kind were a
rarity; those that Alethia saw regularly were devoted exclusively
either to religion or to poultry, and the world of politics was
to her an unheeded unexplored region.  Her ideas on life in
general had been acquired through the medium of popular
respectable novel-writers, and modified or emphasised by such
knowledge as her aunt, the vicar, and her aunt’s
housekeeper had put at her disposal.  And now, in her
twenty-ninth year, her aunt’s death had left her, well
provided for as regards income, but somewhat isolated in the
matter of kith and kin and human companionship.  She had
some cousins who were on terms of friendly, though infrequent,
correspondence with her, but as they lived permanently in Ceylon,
a locality about which she knew little, beyond the assurance
contained in the missionary hymn that the human element there was
vile, they were not of much immediate use to her.  Other
cousins she also possessed, more distant as regards relationship,
but not quite so geographically remote, seeing that they lived
somewhere in the Midlands.  She could hardly remember ever
having met them, but once or twice in the course of the last
three or four years they had expressed a polite wish that she
should pay them a visit; they had probably not been unduly
depressed by the fact that her aunt’s failing health had
prevented her from accepting their invitation.  The note of
condolence that had arrived on the occasion of her aunt’s
death had included a vague hope that Alethia would find time in
the near future to spend a few days with her cousins, and after
much deliberation and many hesitations she had written to propose
herself as a guest for a definite date some weeks ahead. 
The family, she reflected with relief, was not a large one; the
two daughters were married and away, there was only old Mrs.
Bludward and her son Robert at home.  Mrs. Bludward was
something of an invalid, and Robert was a young man who had been
at Oxford and was going into Parliament.  Further than that
Alethia’s information did not go; her imagination, founded
on her extensive knowledge of the people one met in novels, had
to supply the gaps.  The mother was not difficult to place;
she would either be an ultra-amiable old lady, bearing her feeble
health with uncomplaining fortitude, and having a kind word for
the gardener’s boy and a sunny smile for the chance
visitor, or else she would be cold and peevish, with eyes that
pierced you like a gimlet, and an unreasoning idolatry of her
son.  Alethia’s imagination rather inclined her to the
latter view.  Robert was more of a problem.  There were
three dominant types of manhood to be taken into consideration in
working out his classification; there was Hugo, who was strong,
good, and beautiful, a rare type and not very often met with;
there was Sir Jasper, who was utterly vile and absolutely
unscrupulous, and there was Nevil, who was not really bad at
heart, but had a weak mouth and usually required the life-work of
two good women to keep him from ultimate disaster.  It was
probable, Alethia considered, that Robert came into the last
category, in which case she was certain to enjoy the
companionship of one or two excellent women, and might possibly
catch glimpses of undesirable adventuresses or come face to face
with reckless admiration-seeking married women.  It was
altogether an exciting prospect, this sudden venture into an
unexplored world of unknown human beings, and Alethia rather
wished that she could have taken the vicar with her; she was not,
however, rich or important enough to travel with a chaplain, as
the Marquis of Moystoncleugh always did in the novel she had just
been reading, so she recognised that such a proceeding was out of
the question.

The train which carried Alethia towards her destination was a
local one, with the wayside station habit strongly
developed.  At most of the stations no one seemed to want to
get into the train or to leave it, but at one there were several
market folk on the platform, and two men, of the farmer or small
cattle-dealer class, entered Alethia’s carriage. 
Apparently they had just foregathered, after a day’s
business, and their conversation consisted of a rapid exchange of
short friendly inquiries as to health, family, stock, and so
forth, and some grumbling remarks on the weather.  Suddenly,
however, their talk took a dramatically interesting turn, and
Alethia listened with wide-eyed attention.

“What do you think of Mister Robert Bludward,
eh?”

There was a certain scornful ring in his question.

“Robert Bludward?  An out-an’-out rotter,
that’s what he is.  Ought to be ashamed to look any
decent man in the face.  Send him to Parliament to represent
us—not much!  He’d rob a poor man of his last
shilling, he would.”

“Ah, that he would.  Tells a pack of lies to get
our votes, that’s all that he’s after, damn
him.  Did you see the way the Argus showed him up
this week?  Properly exposed him, hip and thigh, I tell
you.”

And so on they ran, in their withering indictment.  There
could be no doubt that it was Alethia’s cousin and
prospective host to whom they were referring; the allusion to a
Parliamentary candidature settled that.  What could Robert
Bludward have done, what manner of man could he be, that people
should speak of him with such obvious reprobation?

“He was hissed down at Shoalford yesterday,” said
one of the speakers.

Hissed!  Had it come to that?  There was something
dramatically biblical in the idea of Robert Bludward’s
neighbours and acquaintances hissing him for very scorn. 
Lord Hereward Stranglath had been hissed, now Alethia came to
think of it, in the eighth chapter of Matterby Towers,
while in the act of opening a Wesleyan bazaar, because he was
suspected (unjustly as it turned out afterwards) of having beaten
the German governess to death.  And in Tainted
Guineas Roper Squenderby had been deservedly hissed, on the
steps of the Jockey Club, for having handed a rival owner a
forged telegram, containing false news of his mother’s
death, just before the start for an important race, thereby
ensuring the withdrawal of his rival’s horse.  In
placid Saxon-blooded England people did not demonstrate their
feelings lightly and without some strong compelling cause. 
What manner of evildoer was Robert Bludward?

The train stopped at another small station, and the two men
got out.  One of them left behind him a copy of the
Argus, the local paper to which he had made
reference.  Alethia pounced on it, in the expectation of
finding a cultured literary endorsement of the censure which
these rough farming men had expressed in their homely, honest
way.  She had not far to look; “Mr. Robert Bludward,
Swanker,” was the title of one of the principal articles in
the paper.  She did not exactly know what a swanker was,
probably it referred to some unspeakable form of cruelty, but she
read enough in the first few sentences of the article to discover
that her cousin Robert, the man at whose house she was about to
stay, was an unscrupulous, unprincipled character, of a low order
of intelligence, yet cunning withal, and that he and his
associates were responsible for most of the misery, disease,
poverty, and ignorance with which the country was afflicted;
never, except in one or two of the denunciatory Psalms, which she
had always supposed to have be written in a spirit of exaggerated
Oriental imagery, had she read such an indictment of a human
being.  And this monster was going to meet her at Derrelton
Station in a few short minutes.  She would know him at once;
he would have the dark beetling brows, the quick, furtive glance,
the sneering, unsavoury smile that always characterised the Sir
Jaspers of this world.  It was too late to escape; she must
force herself to meet him with outward calm.

It was a considerable shock to her to find that Robert was
fair, with a snub nose, merry eye, and rather a schoolboy
manner.  “A serpent in duckling’s
plumage,” was her private comment; merciful chance had
revealed him to her in his true colours.

As they drove away from the station a dissipated-looking man
of the labouring class waved his hat in friendly salute. 
“Good luck to you, Mr. Bludward,” he shouted;
“you’ll come out on top!  We’ll break old
Chobham’s neck for him.”

“Who was that man?” asked Alethia quickly.

“Oh, one of my supporters,” laughed Robert;
“a bit of a poacher and a bit of a pub-loafer, but
he’s on the right side.”

So these were the sort of associates that Robert Bludward
consorted with, thought Alethia.

“Who is the person he referred to as old Chobham?”
she asked.

“Sir John Chobham, the man who is opposing me,”
answered Robert; “that is his house away there among the
trees on the right.”

So there was an upright man, possibly a very Hugo in
character, who was thwarting and defying the evildoer in his
nefarious career, and there was a dastardly plot afoot to break
his neck!  Possibly the attempt would be made within the
next few hours.  He must certainly be warned.  Alethia
remembered how Lady Sylvia Broomgate, in Nightshade Court,
had pretended to be bolted with by her horse up to the front door
of a threatened county magnate, and had whispered a warning in
his ear which saved him from being the victim of foul
murder.  She wondered if there was a quiet pony in the
stables on which she would be allowed to ride out alone. 
The chances were that she would be watched.  Robert would
come spurring after her and seize her bridle just as she was
turning in at Sir John’s gates.

A group of men that they passed in a village street gave them
no very friendly looks, and Alethia thought she heard a furtive
hiss; a moment later they came upon an errand boy riding a
bicycle.  He had the frank open countenance, neatly brushed
hair and tidy clothes that betoken a clear conscience and a good
mother.  He stared straight at the occupants of the car,
and, after he had passed them, sang in his clear, boyish
voice:

“We’ll hang Bobby Bludward on the sour apple
tree.”

Robert merely laughed.  That was how he took the scorn
and condemnation of his fellow-men.  He had goaded them to
desperation with his shameless depravity till they spoke openly
of putting him to a violent death, and he laughed.

Mrs. Bludward proved to be of the type that Alethia had
suspected, thin-lipped, cold-eyed, and obviously devoted to her
worthless son.  From her no help was to be expected. 
Alethia locked her door that night, and placed such ramparts of
furniture against it that the maid had great difficulty in
breaking in with the early tea in the morning.

After breakfast Alethia, on the pretext of going to look at an
outlying rose-garden, slipped away to the village through which
they had passed on the previous evening.  She remembered
that Robert had pointed out to her a public reading-room, and
here she considered it possible that she might meet Sir John
Chobham, or some one who knew him well and would carry a message
to him.  The room was empty when she entered it; a
Graphic twelve days old, a yet older copy of Punch,
and one or two local papers lay upon the central table; the other
tables were stacked for the most part with chess and
draughts-boards, and wooden boxes of chessmen and dominoes. 
Listlessly she picked up one of the papers, the Sentinel,
and glanced at its contents.  Suddenly she started, and
began to read with breathless attention a prominently printed
article, headed “A Little Limelight on Sir John
Chobham.”  The colour ebbed away from her face, a look
of frightened despair crept into her eyes.  Never, in any
novel that she had read, had a defenceless young woman been
confronted with a situation like this.  Sir John, the Hugo
of her imagination, was, if anything, rather more depraved and
despicable than Robert Bludward.  He was mean, evasive,
callously indifferent to his country’s interests, a cheat,
a man who habitually broke his word, and who was responsible,
with his associates, for most of the poverty, misery, crime, and
national degradation with which the country was afflicted. 
He was also a candidate for Parliament, it seemed, and as there
was only one seat in this particular locality, it was obvious
that the success of either Robert or Sir John would mean a check
to the ambitions of the other, hence, no doubt, the rivalry and
enmity between these otherwise kindred souls.  One was
seeking to have his enemy done to death, the other was apparently
trying to stir up his supporters to an act of “Lynch
law”.  All this in order that there might be an
unopposed election, that one or other of the candidates might go
into Parliament with honeyed eloquence on his lips and blood on
his heart.  Were men really so vile?

“I must go back to Webblehinton at once,” Alethia
informed her astonished hostess at lunch time; “I have had
a telegram.  A friend is very seriously ill and I have been
sent for.”

It was dreadful to have to concoct lies, but it would be more
dreadful to have to spend another night under that roof.

Alethia reads novels now with even greater appreciation than
before.  She has been herself in the world outside
Webblehinton, the world where the great dramas of sin and
villainy are played unceasingly.  She had come unscathed
through it, but what might have happened if she had gone
unsuspectingly to visit Sir John Chobham and warn him of his
danger?  What indeed!  She had been saved by the
fearless outspokenness of the local Press.

p. 119THE
INTERLOPERS

In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of
the Karpathians, a man stood one winter night watching and
listening, as though he waited for some beast of the woods to
come within the range of his vision, and, later, of his
rifle.  But the game for whose presence he kept so keen an
outlook was none that figured in the sportsman’s calendar
as lawful and proper for the chase; Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled
the dark forest in quest of a human enemy.

The forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well
stocked with game; the narrow strip of precipitous woodland that
lay on its outskirt was not remarkable for the game it harboured
or the shooting it afforded, but it was the most jealously
guarded of all its owner’s territorial possessions.  A
famous law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested it
from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty
landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the
judgment of the Courts, and a long series of poaching affrays and
similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the
families for three generations.  The neighbour feud had
grown into a personal one since Ulrich had come to be head of his
family; if there was a man in the world whom he detested and
wished ill to it was Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the quarrel
and the tireless game-snatcher and raider of the disputed
border-forest.  The feud might, perhaps, have died down or
been compromised if the personal ill-will of the two men had not
stood in the way; as boys they had thirsted for one
another’s blood, as men each prayed that misfortune might
fall on the other, and this wind-scourged winter night Ulrich had
banded together his foresters to watch the dark forest, not in
quest of four-footed quarry, but to keep a look-out for the
prowling thieves whom he suspected of being afoot from across the
land boundary.  The roebuck, which usually kept in the
sheltered hollows during a storm-wind, were running like driven
things to-night, and there was movement and unrest among the
creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours. 
Assuredly there was a disturbing element in the forest, and
Ulrich could guess the quarter from whence it came.

He strayed away by himself from the watchers whom he had
placed in ambush on the crest of the hill, and wandered far down
the steep slopes amid the wild tangle of undergrowth, peering
through the tree trunks and listening through the whistling and
skirling of the wind and the restless beating of the branches for
sight and sound of the marauders.  If only on this wild
night, in this dark, lone spot, he might come across Georg
Znaeym, man to man, with none to witness—that was the wish
that was uppermost in his thoughts.  And as he stepped round
the trunk of a huge beech he came face to face with the man he
sought.

The two enemies stood glaring at one another for a long silent
moment.  Each had a rifle in his hand, each had hate in his
heart and murder uppermost in his mind.  The chance had come
to give full play to the passions of a lifetime.  But a man
who has been brought up under the code of a restraining
civilisation cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down his
neighbour in cold blood and without word spoken, except for an
offence against his hearth and honour.  And before the
moment of hesitation had given way to action a deed of
Nature’s own violence overwhelmed them both.  A fierce
shriek of the storm had been answered by a splitting crash over
their heads, and ere they could leap aside a mass of falling
beech tree had thundered down on them.  Ulrich von Gradwitz
found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him
and the other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of
forked branches, while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen
mass.  His heavy shooting-boots had saved his feet from
being crushed to pieces, but if his fractures were not as serious
as they might have been, at least it was evident that he could
not move from his present position till some one came to release
him.  The descending twig had slashed the skin of his face,
and he had to wink away some drops of blood from his eyelashes
before he could take in a general view of the disaster.  At
his side, so near that under ordinary circumstances he could
almost have touched him, lay Georg Znaeym, alive and struggling,
but obviously as helplessly pinioned down as himself.  All
round them lay a thick-strewn wreckage of splintered branches and
broken twigs.

Relief at being alive and exasperation at his captive plight
brought a strange medley of pious thank-offerings and sharp
curses to Ulrich’s lips.  Georg, who was nearly
blinded with the blood which trickled across his eyes, stopped
his struggling for a moment to listen, and then gave a short,
snarling laugh.

“So you’re not killed, as you ought to be, but
you’re caught, anyway,” he cried; “caught
fast.  Ho, what a jest, Ulrich von Gradwitz snared in his
stolen forest.  There’s real justice for
you!”

And he laughed again, mockingly and savagely.

“I’m caught in my own forest-land,” retorted
Ulrich.  “When my men come to release us you will
wish, perhaps, that you were in a better plight than caught
poaching on a neighbour’s land, shame on you.”

Georg was silent for a moment; then he answered quietly:

“Are you sure that your men will find much to
release?  I have men, too, in the forest to-night, close
behind me, and they will be here first and do the
releasing.  When they drag me out from under these damned
branches it won’t need much clumsiness on their part to
roll this mass of trunk right over on the top of you.  Your
men will find you dead under a fallen beech tree.  For
form’s sake I shall send my condolences to your
family.”

“It is a useful hint,” said Ulrich fiercely. 
“My men had orders to follow in ten minutes time, seven of
which must have gone by already, and when they get me out—I
will remember the hint.  Only as you will have met your
death poaching on my lands I don’t think I can decently
send any message of condolence to your family.”

“Good,” snarled Georg, “good.  We fight
this quarrel out to the death, you and I and our foresters, with
no cursed interlopers to come between us.  Death and
damnation to you, Ulrich von Gradwitz.”

“The same to you, Georg Znaeym, forest-thief,
game-snatcher.”

Both men spoke with the bitterness of possible defeat before
them, for each knew that it might be long before his men would
seek him out or find him; it was a bare matter of chance which
party would arrive first on the scene.

Both had now given up the useless struggle to free themselves
from the mass of wood that held them down; Ulrich limited his
endeavours to an effort to bring his one partially free arm near
enough to his outer coat-pocket to draw out his wine-flask. 
Even when he had accomplished that operation it was long before
he could manage the unscrewing of the stopper or get any of the
liquid down his throat.  But what a Heaven-sent draught it
seemed!  It was an open winter, and little snow had fallen
as yet, hence the captives suffered less from the cold than might
have been the case at that season of the year; nevertheless, the
wine was warming and reviving to the wounded man, and he looked
across with something like a throb of pity to where his enemy
lay, just keeping the groans of pain and weariness from crossing
his lips.

“Could you reach this flask if I threw it over to
you?” asked Ulrich suddenly; “there is good wine in
it, and one may as well be as comfortable as one can.  Let
us drink, even if to-night one of us dies.”

“No, I can scarcely see anything; there is so much blood
caked round my eyes,” said Georg, “and in any case I
don’t drink wine with an enemy.”

Ulrich was silent for a few minutes, and lay listening to the
weary screeching of the wind.  An idea was slowly forming
and growing in his brain, an idea that gained strength every time
that he looked across at the man who was fighting so grimly
against pain and exhaustion.  In the pain and languor that
Ulrich himself was feeling the old fierce hatred seemed to be
dying down.

“Neighbour,” he said presently, “do as you
please if your men come first.  It was a fair compact. 
But as for me, I’ve changed my mind.  If my men are
the first to come you shall be the first to be helped, as though
you were my guest.  We have quarrelled like devils all our
lives over this stupid strip of forest, where the trees
can’t even stand upright in a breath of wind.  Lying
here to-night thinking I’ve come to think we’ve been
rather fools; there are better things in life than getting the
better of a boundary dispute.  Neighbour, if you will help
me to bury the old quarrel I—I will ask you to be my
friend.”

Georg Znaeym was silent for so long that Ulrich thought,
perhaps, he had fainted with the pain of his injuries.  Then
he spoke slowly and in jerks.

“How the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode
into the market-square together.  No one living can remember
seeing a Znaeym and a von Gradwitz talking to one another in
friendship.  And what peace there would be among the
forester folk if we ended our feud to-night.  And if we
choose to make peace among our people there is none other to
interfere, no interlopers from outside . . . You would come and
keep the Sylvester night beneath my roof, and I would come and
feast on some high day at your castle . . . I would never fire a
shot on your land, save when you invited me as a guest; and you
should come and shoot with me down in the marshes where the
wildfowl are.  In all the countryside there are none that
could hinder if we willed to make peace.  I never thought to
have wanted to do other than hate you all my life, but I think I
have changed my mind about things too, this last half-hour. 
And you offered me your wine-flask . . .  Ulrich von
Gradwitz, I will be your friend.”

For a space both men were silent, turning over in their minds
the wonderful changes that this dramatic reconciliation would
bring about.  In the cold, gloomy forest, with the wind
tearing in fitful gusts through the naked branches and whistling
round the tree-trunks, they lay and waited for the help that
would now bring release and succour to both parties.  And
each prayed a private prayer that his men might be the first to
arrive, so that he might be the first to show honourable
attention to the enemy that had become a friend.

Presently, as the wind dropped for a moment, Ulrich broke
silence.

“Let’s shout for help,” he said, “in this lull our voices may carry a little way.”

“They won’t carry far through the trees and
undergrowth,” said Georg, “but we can try. 
Together, then.”

The two raised their voices in a prolonged hunting call.

“Together again,” said Ulrich a few minutes later,
after listening in vain for an answering halloo.

“I heard nothing but the pestilential wind,” said
Georg hoarsely.

There was silence again for some minutes, and then Ulrich gave
a joyful cry.

“I can see figures coming through the wood.  They
are following in the way I came down the hillside.”

Both men raised their voices in as loud a shout as they could
muster.

“They hear us!  They’ve stopped.  Now
they see us.  They’re running down the hill towards
us,” cried Ulrich.

“How many of them are there?” asked Georg.

“I can’t see distinctly,” said Ulrich;
“nine or ten,”

“Then they are yours,” said Georg; “I had
only seven out with me.”

“They are making all the speed they can, brave
lads,” said Ulrich gladly.

“Are they your men?” asked Georg.  “Are
they your men?” he repeated impatiently as Ulrich did not
answer.

“No,” said Ulrich with a laugh, the idiotic
chattering laugh of a man unstrung with hideous fear.

“Who are they?” asked Georg quickly, straining his
eyes to see what the other would gladly not have seen.

“Wolves.”

p.
129QUAIL SEED

“The outlook is not encouraging for us smaller
businesses,” said Mr. Scarrick to the artist and his
sister, who had taken rooms over his suburban grocery
store.  “These big concerns are offering all sorts of
attractions to the shopping public which we couldn’t afford
to imitate, even on a small scale—reading-rooms and
play-rooms and gramophones and Heaven knows what.  People
don’t care to buy half a pound of sugar nowadays unless
they can listen to Harry Lauder and have the latest Australian
cricket scores ticked off before their eyes.  With the big
Christmas stock we’ve got in we ought to keep half a dozen
assistants hard at work, but as it is my nephew Jimmy and myself
can pretty well attend to it ourselves.  It’s a nice
stock of goods, too, if I could only run it off in a few weeks
time, but there’s no chance of that—not unless the
London line was to get snowed up for a fortnight before
Christmas.  I did have a sort of idea of engaging Miss
Luffcombe to give recitations during afternoons; she made a great
hit at the Post Office entertainment with her rendering of
‘Little Beatrice’s Resolve’.”

“Anything less likely to make your shop a fashionable
shopping centre I can’t imagine,” said the artist,
with a very genuine shudder; “if I were trying to decide
between the merits of Carlsbad plums and confected figs as a
winter dessert it would infuriate me to have my train of thought
entangled with little Beatrice’s resolve to be an Angel of
Light or a girl scout.  No,” he continued, “the
desire to get something thrown in for nothing is a ruling passion
with the feminine shopper, but you can’t afford to pander
effectively to it.  Why not appeal to another instinct;
which dominates not only the woman shopper but the male
shopper—in fact, the entire human race?”

“What is that instinct, sir?” said the grocer.

* * * * *

Mrs. Greyes and Miss Fritten had missed the 2.18 to Town, and
as there was not another train till 3.12 they thought that they
might as well make their grocery purchases at
Scarrick’s.  It would not be sensational, they agreed,
but it would still be shopping.

For some minutes they had the shop almost to themselves, as
far as customers were concerned, but while they were debating the
respective virtues and blemishes of two competing brands of
anchovy paste they were startled by an order, given across the
counter, for six pomegranates and a packet of quail seed. 
Neither commodity was in general demand in that
neighbourhood.  Equally unusual was the style and appearance
of the customer; about sixteen years old, with dark olive skin,
large dusky eyes, and thick, low-growing, blue-black hair, he
might have made his living as an artist’s model.  As a
matter of fact he did.  The bowl of beaten brass that he
produced for the reception of his purchases was distinctly the
most astonishing variation on the string bag or marketing basket
of suburban civilisation that his fellow-shoppers had ever
seen.  He threw a gold piece, apparently of some exotic
currency, across the counter, and did not seem disposed to wait
for any change that might be forthcoming.

“The wine and figs were not paid for yesterday,”
he said; “keep what is over of the money for our future
purchases.”

“A very strange-looking boy?” said Mrs. Greyes
interrogatively to the grocer as soon as his customer had
left.

“A foreigner, I believe,” said Mr. Scarrick, with
a shortness that was entirely out of keeping with his usually
communicative manner.

“I wish for a pound and a half of the best coffee you
have,” said an authoritative voice a moment or two
later.  The speaker was a tall, authoritative-looking man of
rather outlandish aspect, remarkable among other things for a
full black beard, worn in a style more in vogue in early Assyria
than in a London suburb of the present day.

“Has a dark-faced boy been here buying
pomegranates?” he asked suddenly, as the coffee was being
weighed out to him.

The two ladies almost jumped on hearing the grocer reply with
an unblushing negative.

“We have a few pomegranates in stock,” he
continued, “but there has been no demand for
them.”

“My servant will fetch the coffee as usual,” said
the purchaser, producing a coin from a wonderful metal-work
purse.  As an apparent afterthought he fired out the
question: “Have you, perhaps, any quail seed?”

“No,” said the grocer, without hesitation,
“we don’t stock it.”

“What will he deny next?” asked Mrs. Greyes under
her breath.  What made it seem so much worse was the fact
that Mr. Scarrick had quite recently presided at a lecture on
Savonarola.

Turning up the deep astrachan collar of his long coat, the
stranger swept out of the shop, with the air, Miss Fritten
afterwards described it, of a Satrap proroguing a
Sanhedrim.  Whether such a pleasant function ever fell to a
Satrap’s lot she was not quite certain, but the simile
faithfully conveyed her meaning to a large circle of
acquaintances.

“Don’t let’s bother about the 3.12,”
said Mrs. Greyes; “let’s go and talk this over at
Laura Lipping’s.  It’s her day.”

When the dark-faced boy arrived at the shop next day with his
brass marketing bowl there was quite a fair gathering of
customers, most of whom seemed to be spinning out their
purchasing operations with the air of people who had very little
to do with their time.  In a voice that was heard all over
the shop, perhaps because everybody was intently listening, he
asked for a pound of honey and a packet of quail seed.

“More quail seed!” said Miss Fritten. 
“Those quails must be voracious, or else it isn’t
quail seed at all.”

“I believe it’s opium, and the bearded man is a
detective,” said Mrs. Greyes brilliantly.

“I don’t,” said Laura Lipping;
“I’m sure it’s something to do with the
Portuguese Throne.”

“More likely to be a Persian intrigue on behalf of the
ex-Shah,” said Miss Fritten; “the bearded man belongs
to the Government Party.  The quail-seed is a countersign,
of course; Persia is almost next door to Palestine, and quails
come into the Old Testament, you know.”

“Only as a miracle,” said her well-informed
younger sister; “I’ve thought all along it was part
of a love intrigue.”

The boy who had so much interest and speculation centred on
him was on the point of departing with his purchases when he was
waylaid by Jimmy, the nephew-apprentice, who, from his post at
the cheese and bacon counter, commanded a good view of the
street.

“We have some very fine Jaffa oranges,” he said
hurriedly, pointing to a corner where they were stored, behind a
high rampart of biscuit tins.  There was evidently more in
the remark than met the ear.  The boy flew at the oranges
with the enthusiasm of a ferret finding a rabbit family at home
after a long day of fruitless subterranean research.  Almost
at the same moment the bearded stranger stalked into the shop,
and flung an order for a pound of dates and a tin of the best
Smyrna halva across the counter.  The most adventurous
housewife in the locality had never heard of halva, but Mr.
Scarrick was apparently able to produce the best Smyrna variety
of it without a moment’s hesitation.

“We might be living in the Arabian Nights,” said
Miss Fritten, excitedly.

“Hush!  Listen,” beseeched Mrs. Greyes.

“Has the dark-faced boy, of whom I spoke yesterday, been
here to-day?” asked the stranger.

“We’ve had rather more people than usual in the
shop to-day,” said Mr. Scarrick, “but I can’t
recall a boy such as you describe.”

Mrs. Greyes and Miss Fritten looked round triumphantly at
their friends.  It was, of course, deplorable that any one
should treat the truth as an article temporarily and excusably
out of stock, but they felt gratified that the vivid accounts
they had given of Mr. Scarrick’s traffic in falsehoods
should receive confirmation at first hand.

“I shall never again be able to believe what he tells me
about the absence of colouring matter in the jam,”
whispered an aunt of Mrs. Greyes tragically.

The mysterious stranger took his departure; Laura Lipping
distinctly saw a snarl of baffled rage reveal itself behind his
heavy moustache and upturned astrachan collar.  After a
cautious interval the seeker after oranges emerged from behind
the biscuit tins, having apparently failed to find any individual
orange that satisfied his requirements.  He, too, took his
departure, and the shop was slowly emptied of its parcel and
gossip laden customers.  It was Emily Yorling’s
“day”, and most of the shoppers made their way to her
drawing-room.  To go direct from a shopping expedition to a
tea party was what was known locally as “living in a
whirl”.

Two extra assistants had been engaged for the following
afternoon, and their services were in brisk demand; the shop was
crowded.  People bought and bought, and never seemed to get
to the end of their lists.  Mr. Scarrick had never had so
little difficulty in persuading customers to embark on new
experiences in grocery wares.  Even those women whose
purchases were of modest proportions dawdled over them as though
they had brutal, drunken husbands to go home to.  The
afternoon had dragged uneventfully on, and there was a distinct
buzz of unpent excitement when a dark-eyed boy carrying a brass
bowl entered the shop.  The excitement seemed to have
communicated itself to Mr. Scarrick; abruptly deserting a lady
who was making insincere inquiries about the home life of the
Bombay duck, he intercepted the newcomer on his way to the
accustomed counter and informed him, amid a deathlike hush, that
he had run out of quail seed.

The boy looked nervously round the shop, and turned
hesitatingly to go.  He was again intercepted, this time by
the nephew, who darted out from behind his counter and said
something about a better line of oranges.  The boy’s
hesitation vanished; he almost scuttled into the obscurity of the
orange corner.  There was an expectant turn of public
attention towards the door, and the tall, bearded stranger made a
really effective entrance.  The aunt of Mrs. Greyes declared
afterwards that she found herself sub-consciously repeating
“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold”
under her breath, and she was generally believed.

The newcomer, too, was stopped before he reached the counter,
but not by Mr. Scarrick or his assistant.  A heavily veiled
lady, whom no one had hitherto noticed, rose languidly from a
seat and greeted him in a clear, penetrating voice.

“Your Excellency does his shopping himself?” she
said.

“I order the things myself,” he explained;
“I find it difficult to make my servants
understand.”

In a lower, but still perfectly audible, voice the veiled lady
gave him a piece of casual information.

“They have some excellent Jaffa oranges
here.”  Then with a tinkling laugh she passed out of
the shop.

The man glared all round the shop, and then, fixing his eyes
instinctively on the barrier of biscuit tins, demanded loudly of
the grocer: “You have, perhaps, some good Jaffa
oranges?”

Every one expected an instant denial on the part of Mr.
Scarrick of any such possession.  Before he could answer,
however, the boy had broken forth from his sanctuary. 
Holding his empty brass bowl before him he passed out into the
street.  His face was variously described afterwards as
masked with studied indifference, overspread with ghastly pallor,
and blazing with defiance.  Some said that his teeth
chattered, others that he went out whistling the Persian National
Hymn.  There was no mistaking, however, the effect produced
by the encounter on the man who had seemed to force it.  If
a rabid dog or a rattlesnake had suddenly thrust its
companionship on him he could scarcely have displayed a greater
access of terror.  His air of authority and assertiveness
had gone, his masterful stride had given way to a furtive pacing
to and fro, as of an animal seeking an outlet for escape. 
In a dazed perfunctory manner, always with his eyes turning to
watch the shop entrance, he gave a few random orders, which the
grocer made a show of entering in his book.  Now and then he
walked out into the street, looked anxiously in all directions,
and hurried back to keep up his pretence of shopping.  From
one of these sorties he did not return; he had dashed away into
the dusk, and neither he nor the dark-faced boy nor the veiled
lady were seen again by the expectant crowds that continued to
throng the Scarrick establishment for days to come.

* * * * *

“I can never thank you and your sister
sufficiently,” said the grocer.

“We enjoyed the fun of it,” said the artist
modestly, “and as for the model, it was a welcome variation
on posing for hours for ‘The Lost Hylas’.”

“At any rate,” said the grocer, “I insist on
paying for the hire of the black beard.”

p.
141CANOSSA

Demosthenes Platterbaff, the eminent Unrest Inducer, stood on
his trial for a serious offence, and the eyes of the political
world were focussed on the jury.  The offence, it should be
stated, was serious for the Government rather than for the
prisoner.  He had blown up the Albert Hall on the eve of the
great Liberal Federation Tango Tea, the occasion on which the
Chancellor of the Exchequer was expected to propound his new
theory: “Do partridges spread infectious
diseases?”  Platterbaff had chosen his time well; the
Tango Tea had been hurriedly postponed, but there were other
political fixtures which could not be put off under any
circumstances.  The day after the trial there was to be a
by-election at Nemesis-on-Hand, and it had been openly announced
in the division that if Platterbaff were languishing in gaol on
polling day the Government candidate would be “outed”
to a certainty.  Unfortunately, there could be no doubt or
misconception as to Platterbaff’s guilt.  He had not
only pleaded guilty, but had expressed his intention of repeating
his escapade in other directions as soon as circumstances
permitted; throughout the trial he was busy examining a small
model of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester.  The jury could
not possibly find that the prisoner had not deliberately and
intentionally blown up the Albert Hall; the question was: Could
they find any extenuating circumstances which would permit of an
acquittal?  Of course any sentence which the law might feel
compelled to inflict would be followed by an immediate pardon,
but it was highly desirable, from the Government’s point of
view, that the necessity for such an exercise of clemency should
not arise.  A headlong pardon, on the eve of a bye-election,
with threats of a heavy voting defection if it were withheld or
even delayed, would not necessarily be a surrender, but it would
look like one.  Opponents would be only too ready to
attribute ungenerous motives.  Hence the anxiety in the
crowded Court, and in the little groups gathered round the
tape-machines in Whitehall and Downing Street and other affected
centres.

The jury returned from considering their verdict; there was a
flutter, an excited murmur, a deathlike hush.  The foreman
delivered his message:

“The jury find the prisoner guilty of blowing up the
Albert Hall.  The jury wish to add a rider drawing attention
to the fact that a by-election is pending in the Parliamentary
division of Nemesis-on-Hand.”

“That, of course,” said the Government Prosecutor,
springing to his feet, “is equivalent to an
acquittal?”

“I hardly think so,” said the Judge, coldly;
“I feel obliged to sentence the prisoner to a week’s
imprisonment.”

“And may the Lord have mercy on the poll,” a
Junior Counsel exclaimed irreverently.

It was a scandalous sentence, but then the Judge was not on
the Ministerial side in politics.

The verdict and sentence were made known to the public at
twenty minutes past five in the afternoon; at half-past five a
dense crowd was massed outside the Prime Minister’s
residence lustily singing, to the air of
“Trelawney”:

“And should our Hero rot in gaol,
   For e’en a single day,
There’s Fifteen Hundred Voting Men
   Will vote the other way.”

“Fifteen hundred,” said the Prime Minister, with a
shudder; “it’s too horrible to think of.  Our
majority last time was only a thousand and seven.”

“The poll opens at eight to-morrow morning,” said
the Chief Organiser; “we must have him out by 7
a.m.”

“Seven-thirty,” amended the Prime Minister;
“we must avoid any appearance of precipitancy.”

“Not later than seven-thirty, then,” said the
Chief Organiser; “I have promised the agent down there that
he shall be able to display posters announcing ‘Platterbaff
is Out,’ before the poll opens.  He said it was our
only chance of getting a telegram ‘Radprop is In’
to-night.”

At half-past seven the next morning the Prime Minister and the
Chief Organiser sat at breakfast, making a perfunctory meal, and
awaiting the return of the Home Secretary, who had gone in person
to superintend the releasing of Platterbaff.  Despite the
earliness of the hour a small crowd had gathered in the street
outside, and the horrible menacing Trelawney refrain of the
“Fifteen Hundred Voting Men” came in a steady,
monotonous chant.

“They will cheer presently when they hear the
news,” said the Prime Minister hopefully;
“hark!  They are booing some one now!  That must
be McKenna.”

The Home Secretary entered the room a moment later, disaster
written on his face.

“He won’t go!” he exclaimed.

“Won’t go?  Won’t leave
gaol?”

“He won’t go unless he has a brass band.  He
says he never has left prison without a brass band to play him
out, and he’s not going to go without one now.”

“But surely that sort of thing is provided by his
supporters and admirers?” said the Prime Minister;
“we can hardly be supposed to supply a released prisoner
with a brass band.  How on earth could we defend it on the
Estimates?”

“His supporters say it is up to us to provide the
music,” said the Home Secretary; “they say we put him
in prison, and it’s our affair to see that he leaves it in
a respectable manner.  Anyway, he won’t go unless he
has a band.”

The telephone squealed shrilly; it was a trunk call from
Nemesis.

“Poll opens in five minutes.  Is Platterbaff out
yet?  In Heaven’s name, why—”

The Chief Organiser rang off.

“This is not a moment for standing on dignity,” he
observed bluntly; “musicians must be supplied at
once.  Platterbaff must have his band.”

“Where are you going to find the musicians?” asked
the Home Secretary wearily; “we can’t employ a
military band, in fact, I don’t think he’d have one
if we offered it, and there ain’t any others. 
There’s a musicians’ strike on, I suppose you
know.”

“Can’t you get a strike permit?” asked the
Organiser.

“I’ll try,” said the Home Secretary, and
went to the telephone.

Eight o’clock struck.  The crowd outside chanted
with an increasing volume of sound:

“Will vote the other way.”

A telegram was brought in.  It was from the central
committee rooms at Nemesis.  “Losing twenty votes per
minute,” was its brief message.

Ten o’clock struck.  The Prime Minister, the Home
Secretary, the Chief Organiser, and several earnest helpful
friends were gathered in the inner gateway of the prison, talking
volubly to Demosthenes Platterbaff, who stood with folded arms
and squarely planted feet, silent in their midst. 
Golden-tongued legislators whose eloquence had swayed the Marconi
Inquiry Committee, or at any rate the greater part of it,
expended their arts of oratory in vain on this stubborn
unyielding man.  Without a band he would not go; and they
had no band.

A quarter past ten, half-past.  A constant stream of
telegraph boys poured in through the prison gates.

“Yamley’s factory hands just voted you can guess
how,” ran a despairing message, and the others were all of
the same tenour.  Nemesis was going the way of Reading.

“Have you any band instruments of an easy nature to
play?” demanded the Chief Organiser of the Prison Governor;
“drums, cymbals, those sort of things?”

“The warders have a private band of their own,”
said the Governor, “but of course I couldn’t allow
the men themselves—”

“Lend us the instruments,” said the Chief
Organiser.

One of the earnest helpful friends was a skilled performer on
the cornet, the Cabinet Ministers were able to clash cymbals more
or less in tune, and the Chief Organiser has some knowledge of
the drum.

“What tune would you prefer?” he asked
Platterbaff.

“The popular song of the moment,” replied the
Agitator after a moment’s reflection.

It was a tune they had all heard hundreds of times, so there
was no difficulty in turning out a passable imitation of
it.  To the improvised strains of “I didn’t want
to do it” the prisoner strode forth to freedom.  The
word of the song had reference, it was understood, to the
incarcerating Government and not to the destroyer of the Albert
Hall.

The seat was lost, after all, by a narrow majority.  The
local Trade Unionists took offence at the fact of Cabinet
Ministers having personally acted as strike-breakers, and even
the release of Platterbaff failed to pacify them.

The seat was lost, but Ministers had scored a moral
victory.  They had shown that they knew when and how to
yield.

p. 149THE
THREAT

Sir Lulworth Quayne sat in the lounge of his favourite
restaurant, the Gallus Bankiva, discussing the weaknesses of the
world with his nephew, who had lately returned from a
much-enlivened exile in the wilds of Mexico.  It was that
blessed season of the year when the asparagus and the
plover’s egg are abroad in the land, and the oyster has not
yet withdrawn into it’s summer entrenchments, and Sir
Lulworth and his nephew were in that enlightened after-dinner
mood when politics are seen in their right perspective, even the
politics of Mexico.

“Most of the revolutions that take place in this country
nowadays,” said Sir Lulworth, “are the product of
moments of legislative panic.  Take, for instance, one of
the most dramatic reforms that has been carried through
Parliament in the lifetime of this generation.  It happened
shortly after the coal strike, of unblessed memory.  To you,
who have been plunged up to the neck in events of a more tangled
and tumbled description, the things I am going to tell you of may
seem of secondary interest, but after all we had to live in the
midst of them.”

Sir Lulworth interrupted himself for a moment to say a few
kind words to the liqueur brandy he had just tasted, and them
resumed his narrative.

“Whether one sympathises with the agitation for female
suffrage or not one has to admit that its promoters showed
tireless energy and considerable enterprise in devising and
putting into action new methods for accomplishing their
ends.  As a rule they were a nuisance and a weariness to the
flesh, but there were times when they verged on the
picturesque.  There was the famous occasion when they
enlivened and diversified the customary pageantry of the Royal
progress to open Parliament by letting loose thousands of
parrots, which had been carefully trained to scream ‘Votes
for women,’ and which circled round his Majesty’s
coach in a clamorous cloud of green, and grey and scarlet. 
It was really rather a striking episode from the spectacular
point of view; unfortunately, however, for its devisers, the
secret of their intentions had not been well kept, and their
opponents let loose at the same moment a rival swarm of parrots,
which screeched ‘I don’t think’ and
other hostile cries, thereby robbing the demonstration of the
unanimity which alone could have made it politically
impressive.  In the process of recapture the birds learned a
quantity of additional language which unfitted them for further
service in the Suffragette cause; some of the green ones were
secured by ardent Home Rule propagandists and trained to disturb
the serenity of Orange meetings by pessimistic reflections on Sir
Edward Carson’s destination in the life to come.  In
fact, the bird in politics is a factor that seems to have come to
stay; quite recently, at a political gathering held in a
dimly-lighted place of worship, the congregation gave a
respectful hearing for nearly ten minutes to a jackdaw from
Wapping, under the impression that they were listening to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was late in arriving.”

“But the Suffragettes,” interrupted the nephew;
“what did they do next?”

“After the bird fiasco,” said Sir Lulworth,
“the militant section made a demonstration of a more
aggressive nature; they assembled in force on the opening day of
the Royal Academy Exhibition and destroyed some three or four
hundred of the pictures.  This proved an even worse failure
than the parrot business; every one agreed that there were always
far too many pictures in the Academy Exhibition, and the drastic
weeding out of a few hundred canvases was regarded as a positive
improvement.  Moreover, from the artists’ point of
view it was realised that the outrage constituted a sort of
compensation for those whose works were persistently
‘skied’, since out of sight meant also out of
reach.  Altogether it was one of the most successful and
popular exhibitions that the Academy had held for many
years.  Then the fair agitators fell back on some of their
earlier methods; they wrote sweetly argumentative plays to prove
that they ought to have the vote, they smashed windows to show
that they must have the vote, and they kicked Cabinet Ministers
to demonstrate that they’d better have the vote, and still
the coldly reasoned or unreasoned reply was that they’d
better not.  Their plight might have been summed up in a
perversion of Gilbert’s lines—

“Twenty voteless millions we,
   Voteless all against our will,
Twenty years hence we shall be
   Twenty voteless millions still.”

And of course the great idea for their master-stroke of
strategy came from a masculine source.  Lena Dubarri, who
was the captain-general of their thinking department, met Waldo
Orpington in the Mall one afternoon, just at a time when the
fortunes of the Cause were at their lowest ebb.  Waldo
Orpington is a frivolous little fool who chirrups at drawing-room
concerts and can recognise bits from different composers without
referring to the programme, but all the same he occasionally has
ideas.  He didn’t care a twopenny fiddlestring about
the Cause, but he rather enjoyed the idea of having his finger in
the political pie.  Also it is possible, though I should
think highly improbable, that he admired Lena Dubarri. 
Anyhow, when Lena gave a rather gloomy account of the existing
state of things in the Suffragette World, Waldo was not merely
sympathetic but ready with a practical suggestion.  Turning
his gaze westward along the Mall, towards the setting sun and
Buckingham Palace, he was silent for a moment, and then said
significantly, ‘You have expended your energies and
enterprise on labours of destruction; why has it never occurred
to you to attempt something far more terrific?’

“‘What do you mean?’ she asked him
eagerly.

“‘Create.’

“‘Do you mean create disturbances? 
We’ve been doing nothing else for months,’ she
said.

“Waldo shook his head, and continued to look westward
along the Mall.  He’s rather good at acting in an
amateur sort of fashion.  Lena followed his gaze, and then
turned to him with a puzzled look of inquiry.

“‘Exactly,’ said Waldo, in answer to her
look.

“‘But—how can we create?’ she asked;
‘it’s been done already.’

“‘Do it again,’ said Waldo,
‘and again and again—’

“Before he could finish the sentence she had kissed
him.  She declared afterwards that he was the first man she
had ever kissed, and he declared that she was the first woman who
had ever kissed him in the Mall, so they both secured a record of
a kind.

“Within the next day or two a new departure was
noticeable in Suffragette tactics.  They gave up worrying
Ministers and Parliament and took to worrying their own
sympathisers and supporters—for funds.  The ballot-box
was temporarily forgotten in the cult of the
collecting-box.  The daughters of the horseleech were not
more persistent in their demands, the financiers of the tottering
ancien régime were not more desperate in their
expedients for raising money than the Suffragist workers of all
sections at this juncture, and in one way and another, by fair
means and normal, they really got together a very useful
sum.  What they were going to do with it no one seemed to
know, not even those who were most active in collecting
work.  The secret on this occasion had been well kept. 
Certain transactions that leaked out from time to time only added
to the mystery of the situation.

“‘Don’t you long to know what we are going
to do with our treasure hoard?’ Lena asked the Prime
Minister one day when she happened to sit next to him at a whist
drive at the Chinese Embassy.

“‘I was hoping you were going to try a little
personal bribery,’ he responded banteringly, but some
genuine anxiety and curiosity lay behind the lightness of his
chaff; ‘of course I know,’ he added, ‘that you
have been buying up building sites in commanding situations in
and around the Metropolis.  Two or three, I’m told,
are on the road to Brighton, and another near Ascot.  You
don’t mean to fortify them, do you?’

“‘Something more insidious than that,’ she
said; ‘you could prevent us from building forts; you
can’t prevent us from erecting an exact replica of the
Victoria Memorial on each of those sites.  They’re all
private property, with no building restrictions
attached.’

“‘Which memorial?’ he asked; ‘not the
one in front of Buckingham Palace?  Surely not that
one?’

“‘That one,’ she said.

“‘My dear lady,’ he cried, ‘you
can’t be serious.  It is a beautiful and imposing work
of art—at any rate one is getting accustomed to it, and
even if one doesn’t happen to admire it one can always look
in another direction.  But imagine what life would be like
if one saw that erection confronting one wherever one went. 
Imagine the effect on people with tired, harassed nerves who saw
it three times on the way to Brighton and three times on the way
back.  Imagine seeing it dominate the landscape at Ascot,
and trying to keep your eye off it on the Sandwich golf
links.  What have your countrymen done to deserve such a
thing?’

“‘They have refused us the vote,’ said Lena
bitterly.

“The Prime Minister always declared himself an opponent
of anything savouring of panic legislation, but he brought a Bill
into Parliament forthwith and successfully appealed to both
Houses to pass it through all its stages within the week. 
And that is how we got one of the most glorious measures of the
century.”

“A measure conferring the vote on women?” asked
the nephew.

“Oh dear, no.  An Act which made it a penal offence
to erect commemorative statuary anywhere within three miles of a
public highway.”

p.
157EXCEPTING MRS. PENTHERBY

It was Reggie Bruttle’s own idea for converting what had
threatened to be an albino elephant into a beast of burden that
should help him along the stony road of his finances. 
“The Limes,” which had come to him by inheritance
without any accompanying provision for its upkeep, was one of
those pretentious, unaccommodating mansions which none but a man
of wealth could afford to live in, and which not one wealthy man
in a hundred would choose on its merits.  It might easily
languish in the estate market for years, set round with
noticeboards proclaiming it, in the eyes of a sceptical world, to
be an eminently desirable residence.

Reggie’s scheme was to turn it into the headquarters of
a prolonged country-house party, in session during the months
from October till the end of March—a party consisting of
young or youngish people of both sexes, too poor to be able to do
much hunting or shooting on a serious scale, but keen on getting
their fill of golf, bridge, dancing, and occasional
theatre-going.  No one was to be on the footing of a paying
guest, but every one was to rank as a paying host; a committee
would look after the catering and expenditure, and an informal
sub-committee would make itself useful in helping forward the
amusement side of the scheme.

As it was only an experiment, there was to be a general
agreement on the part of those involved in it to be as lenient
and mutually helpful to one another as possible.  Already a
promising nucleus, including one or two young married couples,
had been got together, and the thing seemed to be fairly
launched.

“With good management and a little unobtrusive hard
work, I think the thing ought to be a success,” said
Reggie, and Reggie was one of those people who are painstaking
first and optimistic afterwards.

“There is one rock on which you will unfailingly come to
grief, manage you never so wisely,” said Major Dagberry,
cheerfully; “the women will quarrel.  Mind you,”
continued this prophet of disaster, “I don’t say that
some of the men won’t quarrel too, probably they will; but
the women are bound to.  You can’t prevent it;
it’s in the nature of the sex.  The hand that rocks
the cradle rocks the world, in a volcanic sense.  A woman
will endure discomforts, and make sacrifices, and go without
things to an heroic extent, but the one luxury she will not go
without is her quarrels.  No matter where she may be, or how
transient her appearance on a scene, she will instal her feminine
feuds as assuredly as a Frenchman would concoct soup in the waste
of the Arctic regions.  At the commencement of a sea voyage,
before the male traveller knows half a dozen of his fellow
passengers by sight, the average woman will have started a couple
of enmities, and laid in material for one or two
more—provided, of course, that there are sufficient women
aboard to permit quarrelling in the plural.  If
there’s no one else she will quarrel with the
stewardess.  This experiment of yours is to run for six
months; in less than five weeks there will be war to the knife
declaring itself in half a dozen different directions.”

“Oh, come, there are only eight women in the party; they
won’t pick quarrels quite so soon as that,” protested
Reggie.

“They won’t all originate quarrels,
perhaps,” conceded the Major, “but they will all take
sides, and just as Christmas is upon you, with its conventions of
peace and good will, you will find yourself in for a glacial
epoch of cold, unforgiving hostility, with an occasional Etna
flare of open warfare.  You can’t help it, old boy;
but, at any rate, you can’t say you were not
warned.”

The first five weeks of the venture falsified Major
Dagberry’s prediction and justified Reggie’s
optimism.  There were, of course, occasional small
bickerings, and the existence of certain jealousies might be
detected below the surface of everyday intercourse; but, on the
whole, the women-folk got on remarkably well together. 
There was, however, a notable exception.  It had not taken
five weeks for Mrs. Pentherby to get herself cordially disliked
by the members of her own sex; five days had been amply
sufficient.  Most of the women declared that they had
detested her the moment they set eyes on her; but that was
probably an afterthought.

With the menfolk she got on well enough, without being of the
type of woman who can only bask in male society; neither was she
lacking in the general qualities which make an individual useful
and desirable as a member of a co-operative community.  She
did not try to “get the better of” her fellow-hosts
by snatching little advantages or cleverly evading her just
contributions; she was not inclined to be boring or snobbish in
the way of personal reminiscence.  She played a fair game of
bridge, and her card-room manners were irreproachable.  But
wherever she came in contact with her own sex the light of battle
kindled at once; her talent of arousing animosity seemed to
border on positive genius.

Whether the object of her attentions was thick-skinned or
sensitive, quick-tempered or good-natured, Mrs. Pentherby managed
to achieve the same effect.  She exposed little weaknesses,
she prodded sore places, she snubbed enthusiasms, she was
generally right in a matter of argument, or, if wrong, she
somehow contrived to make her adversary appear foolish and
opinionated.  She did, and said, horrible things in a
matter-of-fact innocent way, and she did, and said,
matter-of-fact innocent things in a horrible way.  In short,
the unanimous feminine verdict on her was that she was
objectionable.

There was no question of taking sides, as the Major had
anticipated; in fact, dislike of Mrs. Pentherby was almost a bond
of union between the other women, and more than one threatening
disagreement had been rapidly dissipated by her obvious and
malicious attempts to inflame and extend it; and the most
irritating thing about her was her successful assumption of
unruffled composure at moments when the tempers of her
adversaries were with difficulty kept under control.  She
made her most scathing remarks in the tone of a tube conductor
announcing that the next station is Brompton Road—the
measured, listless tone of one who knows he is right, but is
utterly indifferent to the fact that he proclaims.

On one occasion Mrs. Val Gwepton, who was not blessed with the
most reposeful of temperaments, fairly let herself go, and gave
Mrs. Pentherby a vivid and truthful résumé
of her opinion of her.  The object of this unpent storm of
accumulated animosity waited patiently for a lull, and then
remarked quietly to the angry little woman—

“And now, my dear Mrs. Gwepton, let me tell you
something that I’ve been wanting to say for the last two or
three minutes, only you wouldn’t give me a chance;
you’ve got a hairpin dropping out on the left side. 
You thin-haired women always find it difficult to keep your
hairpins in.”

“What can one do with a woman like that?” Mrs. Val
demanded afterwards of a sympathising audience.

Of course, Reggie received numerous hints as to the
unpopularity of this jarring personality.  His sister-in-law
openly tackled him on the subject of her many enormities. 
Reggie listened with the attenuated regret that one bestows on an
earthquake disaster in Bolivia or a crop failure in Eastern
Turkestan, events which seem so distant that one can almost
persuade oneself they haven’t happened.

“That woman has got some hold over him,” opined
his sister-in-law, darkly; “either she is helping him to
finance the show, and presumes on the fact, or else, which Heaven
forbid, he’s got some queer infatuation for her.  Men
do take the most extraordinary fancies.”

Matters never came exactly to a crisis.  Mrs. Pentherby,
as a source of personal offence, spread herself over so wide an
area that no one woman of the party felt impelled to rise up and
declare that she absolutely refused to stay another week in the
same house with her.  What is everybody’s tragedy is
nobody’s tragedy.  There was ever a certain
consolation in comparing notes as to specific acts of
offence.  Reggie’s sister-in-law had the added
interest of trying to discover the secret bond which blunted his
condemnation of Mrs. Pentherby’s long catalogue of
misdeeds.  There was little to go on from his manner towards
her in public, but he remained obstinately unimpressed by
anything that was said against her in private.

With the one exception of Mrs. Pentherby’s unpopularity,
the house-party scheme was a success on its first trial, and
there was no difficulty about reconstructing it on the same lines
for another winter session.  It so happened that most of the
women of the party, and two or three of the men, would not be
available on this occasion, but Reggie had laid his plans well
ahead and booked plenty of “fresh blood” for the
departure.  It would be, if any thing, rather a larger party
than before.

“I’m so sorry I can’t join this
winter,” said Reggie’s sister-in-law, “but we
must go to our cousins in Ireland; we’ve put them off so
often.  What a shame!  You’ll have none of the
same women this time.”

“Excepting Mrs. Pentherby,” said Reggie,
demurely.

“Mrs. Pentherby!  Surely, Reggie,
you’re not going to be so idiotic as to have that woman
again!  She’ll set all the women’s backs up just
as she did this time.  What is this mysterious hold
she’s go over you?”

“She’s invaluable,” said Reggie;
“she’s my official quarreller.”

“Your—what did you say?” gasped his
sister-in-law.

“I introduced her into the house-party for the express
purpose of concentrating the feuds and quarrelling that would
otherwise have broken out in all directions among the
womenkind.  I didn’t need the advice and warning of
sundry friends to foresee that we shouldn’t get through six
months of close companionship without a certain amount of pecking
and sparring, so I thought the best thing was to localise and
sterilise it in one process.  Of course, I made it well
worth the lady’s while, and as she didn’t know any of
you from Adam, and you don’t even know her real name, she
didn’t mind getting herself disliked in a useful
cause.”

“You mean to say she was in the know all the
time?”

“Of course she was, and so were one or two of the men,
so she was able to have a good laugh with us behind the scenes
when she’d done anything particularly outrageous.  And
she really enjoyed herself.  You see, she’s in the
position of poor relation in a rather pugnacious family, and her
life has been largely spent in smoothing over other
people’s quarrels.  You can imagine the welcome relief
of being able to go about saying and doing perfectly exasperating
things to a whole houseful of women—and all in the cause of
peace.”

“I think you are the most odious person in the whole
world,” said Reggie’s sister-in-law.  Which was
not strictly true; more than anybody, more than ever she disliked
Mrs. Pentherby.  It was impossible to calculate how many
quarrels that woman had done her out of.

p.
167MARK

Augustus Mellowkent was a novelist with a future; that is to
say, a limited but increasing number of people read his books,
and there seemed good reason to suppose that if he steadily
continued to turn out novels year by year a progressively
increasing circle of readers would acquire the Mellowkent habit,
and demand his works from the libraries and bookstalls.  At
the instigation of his publisher he had discarded the baptismal
Augustus and taken the front name of Mark.

“Women like a name that suggests some one strong and
silent, able but unwilling to answer questions.  Augustus
merely suggests idle splendour, but such a name as Mark
Mellowkent, besides being alliterative, conjures up a vision of
some one strong and beautiful and good, a sort of blend of
Georges Carpentier and the Reverend
What’s-his-name.”

One morning in December Augustus sat in his writing-room, at
work on the third chapter of his eighth novel.  He had
described at some length, for the benefit of those who could not
imagine it, what a rectory garden looks like in July; he was now
engaged in describing at greater length the feelings of a young
girl, daughter of a long line of rectors and archdeacons, when
she discovers for the first time that the postman is
attractive.

“Their eyes met, for a brief moment, as he handed her
two circulars and the fat wrapper-bound bulk of the East Essex
News.  Their eyes met, for the merest fraction of a
second, yet nothing could ever be quite the same again. 
Cost what it might she felt that she must speak, must break the
intolerable, unreal silence that had fallen on them. 
‘How is your mother’s rheumatism?’ she
said.”

The author’s labours were cut short by the sudden
intrusion of a maidservant.

“A gentleman to see you, sir,” said the maid,
handing a card with the name Caiaphas Dwelf inscribed on it;
“says it’s important.”

Mellowkent hesitated and yielded; the importance of the
visitor’s mission was probably illusory, but he had never
met any one with the name Caiaphas before.  It would be at
least a new experience.

Mr. Dwelf was a man of indefinite age; his high, narrow
forehead, cold grey eyes, and determined manner bespoke an
unflinching purpose.  He had a large book under his arm, and
there seemed every probability that he had left a package of
similar volumes in the hall.  He took a seat before it had
been offered him, placed the book on the table, and began to
address Mellowkent in the manner of an “open
letter.”

“You are a literary man, the author of several
well-known books—”

“I am engaged on a book at the present
moment—rather busily engaged,” said Mellowkent,
pointedly.

“Exactly,” said the intruder; “time with you
is a commodity of considerable importance.  Minutes, even,
have their value.”

“They have,” agreed Mellowkent, looking at his
watch.

“That,” said Caiaphas, “is why this book
that I am introducing to your notice is not a book that you can
afford to be without.  Right Here is indispensable
for the writing man; it is no ordinary encyclopædia, or I
should not trouble to show it to you.  It is an
inexhaustible mine of concise information—”

“On a shelf at my elbow,” said the author,
“I have a row of reference books that supply me with all
the information I am likely to require.”

“Here,” persisted the would-be salesman,
“you have it all in one compact volume.  No matter
what the subject may be which you wish to look up, or the fact
you desire to verify, Right Here gives you all that you
want to know in the briefest and most enlightening form. 
Historical reference, for instance; career of John Huss, let us
say.  Here we are: ‘Huss, John, celebrated religious
reformer.  Born 1369, burned at Constance 1415.  The
Emperor Sigismund universally blamed.’”

“If he had been burnt in these days every one would have
suspected the Suffragettes,” observed Mellowkent.

“Poultry-keeping, now,” resumed Caiaphas,
“that’s a subject that might crop up in a novel
dealing with English country life.  Here we have all about
it: ‘The Leghorn as egg-producer.  Lack of maternal
instinct in the Minorca.  Gapes in chickens, its cause and
cure.  Ducklings for the early market, how
fattened.’  There, you see, there it all is, nothing
lacking.”

“Except the maternal instinct in the Minorca, and that
you could hardly be expected to supply.”

“Sporting records, that’s important, too; now how
many men, sporting men even, are there who can say off-hand what
horse won the Derby in any particular year?  Now it’s
just a little thing of that sort—”

“My dear sir,” interrupted Mellowkent,
“there are at least four men in my club who can not only
tell me what horse won in any given year, but what horse ought to
have won and why it didn’t.  If your book could supply
a method for protecting one from information of that sort it
would do more than anything you have yet claimed for
it.”

“Geography,” said Caiaphas, imperturbably;
“that’s a thing that a busy man, writing at high
pressure, may easily make a slip over.  Only the other day a
well-known author made the Volga flow into the Black Sea instead
of the Caspian; now, with this book—”

“On a polished rose-wood stand behind you there reposes
a reliable and up-to-date atlas,” said Mellowkent;
“and now I must really ask you to be going.”

“An atlas,” said Caiaphas, “gives merely the
chart of the river’s course, and indicates the principal
towns that it passes.  Now Right Here gives you the
scenery, traffic, ferry-boat charges, the prevalent types of
fish, boatmen’s slang terms, and hours of sailing of the
principal river steamers.  If gives you—”

Mellowkent sat and watched the hard-featured, resolute,
pitiless salesman, as he sat doggedly in the chair wherein he had
installed himself, unflinchingly extolling the merits of his
undesired wares.  A spirit of wistful emulation took
possession of the author; why could he not live up to the cold
stern name he had adopted?  Why must he sit here weakly and
listen to this weary, unconvincing tirade, why could he not be
Mark Mellowkent for a few brief moments, and meet this man on
level terms?

A sudden inspiration flashed across his.

“Have you read my last book, The Cageless
Linnet?” he asked.

“I don’t read novels,” said Caiaphas
tersely.

“Oh, but you ought to read this one, every one ought
to,” exclaimed Mellowkent, fishing the book down from a
shelf; “published at six shillings, you can have it at
four-and-six.  There is a bit in chapter five that I feel
sure you would like, where Emma is alone in the birch copse
waiting for Harold Huntingdon—that is the man her family
want her to marry.  She really wants to marry him, too, but
she does not discover that till chapter fifteen.  Listen:
‘Far as the eye could stretch rolled the mauve and purple
billows of heather, lit up here and there with the glowing yellow
of gorse and broom, and edged round with the delicate greys and
silver and green of the young birch trees.  Tiny blue and
brown butterflies fluttered above the fronds of heather,
revelling in the sunlight, and overhead the larks were singing as
only larks can sing.  It was a day when all
Nature—”

“In Right Here you have full information on all
branches of Nature study,” broke in the bookagent, with a
tired note sounding in his voice for the first time;
“forestry, insect life, bird migration, reclamation of
waste lands.  As I was saying, no man who has to deal with
the varied interests of life—”

“I wonder if you would care for one of my earlier books,
The Reluctance of Lady Cullumpton,” said Mellowkent,
hunting again through the bookshelf; “some people consider
it my best novel.  Ah, here it is.  I see there are one
or two spots on the cover, so I won’t ask more than
three-and-ninepence for it.  Do let me read you how it
opens:

“‘Beatrice Lady Cullumpton entered the long,
dimly-lit drawing-room, her eyes blazing with a hope that she
guessed to be groundless, her lips trembling with a fear that she
could not disguise.  In her hand she carried a small fan, a
fragile toy of lace and satinwood.  Something snapped as she
entered the room; she had crushed the fan into a dozen
pieces.’

“There, what do you think of that for an opening? 
It tells you at once that there’s something
afoot.”

“I don’t read novels,” said Caiaphas
sullenly.

“But just think what a resource they are,”
exclaimed the author, “on long winter evenings, or perhaps
when you are laid up with a strained ankle—a thing that
might happen to any one; or if you were staying in a house-party
with persistent wet weather and a stupid hostess and insufferably
dull fellow-guests, you would just make an excuse that you had
letters to write, go to your room, light a cigarette, and for
three-and-ninepence you could plunge into the society of Beatrice
Lady Cullumpton and her set.  No one ought to travel without
one or two of my novels in their luggage as a stand-by.  A
friend of mine said only the other day that he would as soon
think of going into the tropics without quinine as of going on a
visit without a couple of Mark Mellowkents in his kit-bag. 
Perhaps sensation is more in your line.  I wonder if
I’ve got a copy of The Python’s
Kiss.”

Caiaphas did not wait to be tempted with selections from that
thrilling work of fiction.  With a muttered remark about
having no time to waste on monkey-talk, he gathered up his
slighted volume and departed.  He made no audible reply to
Mellowkent’s cheerful “Good morning,” but the
latter fancied that a look of respectful hatred flickered in the
cold grey eyes.

p. 175THE
HEDGEHOG

A “Mixed Double” of young people were contesting a
game of lawn tennis at the Rectory garden party; for the past
five-and-twenty years at least mixed doubles of young people had
done exactly the same thing on exactly the same spot at about the
same time of year.  The young people changed and made way
for others in the course of time, but very little else seemed to
alter.  The present players were sufficiently conscious of
the social nature of the occasion to be concerned about their
clothes and appearance, and sufficiently sport-loving to be keen
on the game.  Both their efforts and their appearance came
under the fourfold scrutiny of a quartet of ladies sitting as
official spectators on a bench immediately commanding the
court.  It was one of the accepted conditions of the Rectory
garden party that four ladies, who usually knew very little about
tennis and a great deal about the players, should sit at that
particular spot and watch the game.  It had also come to be
almost a tradition that two ladies should be amiable, and that
the other two should be Mrs. Dole and Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.

“What a singularly unbecoming way Eva Jonelet has taken
to doing her hair in,” said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard;
“it’s ugly hair at the best of times, but she
needn’t make it look ridiculous as well.  Some one
ought to tell her.”

Eva Jonelet’s hair might have escaped Mrs.
Hatch-Mallard’s condemnation if she could have forgotten
the more glaring fact that Eva was Mrs. Dole’s favourite
niece.  It would, perhaps, have been a more comfortable
arrangement if Mrs. Hatch-Mallard and Mrs. Dole could have been
asked to the Rectory on separate occasions, but there was only
one garden party in the course of the year, and neither lady
could have been omitted from the list of invitations without
hopelessly wrecking the social peace of the parish.

“How pretty the yew trees look at this time of
year,” interposed a lady with a soft, silvery voice that
suggested a chinchilla muff painted by Whistler.

“What do you mean by this time of year?” demanded
Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.  “Yew trees look beautiful at all
times of the year.  That is their great charm.”

“Yew trees never look anything but hideous under any
circumstances or at any time of year,” said Mrs. Dole, with
the slow, emphatic relish of one who contradicts for the pleasure
of the thing.  “They are only fit for graveyards and
cemeteries.”

Mrs. Hatch-Mallard gave a sardonic snort, which, being
translated, meant that there were some people who were better
fitted for cemeteries than for garden parties.

“What is the score, please?” asked the lady with
the chinchilla voice.

The desired information was given her by a young gentleman in
spotless white flannels, whose general toilet effect suggested
solicitude rather than anxiety.

“What an odious young cub Bertie Dykson has
become!” pronounced Mrs. Dole, remembering suddenly that
Bertie was a favourite with Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.  “The
young men of to-day are not what they used to be twenty years
ago.”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard;
“twenty years ago Bertie Dykson was just two years old, and
you must expect some difference in appearance and manner and
conversation between those two periods.”

“Do you know,” said Mrs. Dole, confidentially,
“I shouldn’t be surprised if that was intended to be
clever.”

“Have you any one interesting coming to stay with you,
Mrs. Norbury?” asked the chinchilla voice, hastily;
“you generally have a house party at this time of
year.”

“I’ve got a most interesting woman coming,”
said Mrs. Norbury, who had been mutely struggling for some chance
to turn the conversation into a safe channel; “an old
acquaintance of mine, Ada Bleek—”

“What an ugly name,” said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.

“She’s descended from the de la Bliques, an old
Huguenot family of Touraine, you know.”

“There weren’t any Huguenots in Touraine,”
said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard, who thought she might safely dispute any
fact that was three hundred years old.

“Well, anyhow, she’s coming to stay with
me,” continued Mrs. Norbury, bringing her story quickly
down to the present day, “she arrives this evening, and
she’s highly clairvoyante, a seventh daughter of a seventh
daughter, you now, and all that sort of thing.”

“How very interesting,” said the chinchilla voice;
“Exwood is just the right place for her to come to,
isn’t it?  There are supposed to be several ghosts
there.”

“That is why she was so anxious to come,” said
Mrs. Norbury; “she put off another engagement in order to
accept my invitation.  She’s had visions and dreams,
and all those sort of things, that have come true in a most
marvellous manner, but she’s never actually seen a ghost,
and she’s longing to have that experience.  She
belongs to that Research Society, you know.”

“I expect she’ll see the unhappy Lady Cullumpton,
the most famous of all the Exwood ghosts,” said Mrs. Dole;
“my ancestor, you know, Sir Gervase Cullumpton, murdered
his young bride in a fit of jealousy while they were on a visit
to Exwood.  He strangled her in the stables with a stirrup
leather, just after they had come in from riding, and she is seen
sometimes at dusk going about the lawns and the stable yard, in a
long green habit, moaning and trying to get the thong from round
her throat.  I shall be most interested to hear if your
friend sees—”

“I don’t know why she should be expected to see a
trashy, traditional apparition like the so-called Cullumpton
ghost, that is only vouched for by housemaids and tipsy
stable-boys, when my uncle, who was the owner of Exwood,
committed suicide there under the most tragical circumstances,
and most certainly haunts the place.”

“Mrs. Hatch-Mallard has evidently never read
Popple’s County History,” said Mrs. Dole
icily, “or she would know that the Cullumpton ghost has a
wealth of evidence behind it—”

“Oh, Popple!” exclaimed Mrs. Hatch-Mallard
scornfully; “any rubbishy old story is good enough for
him.  Popple, indeed!  Now my uncle’s ghost was
seen by a Rural Dean, who was also a Justice of the Peace. 
I should think that would be good enough testimony for any
one.  Mrs. Norbury, I shall take it as a deliberate personal
affront if your clairvoyante friend sees any other ghost except
that of my uncle.”

“I daresay she won’t see anything at all; she
never has yet, you know,” said Mrs. Norbury hopefully.

“It was a most unfortunate topic for me to have
broached,” she lamented afterwards to the owner of the
chinchilla voice; “Exwood belongs to Mrs. Hatch-Mallard,
and we’ve only got it on a short lease.  A nephew of
hers has been wanting to live there for some time, and if we
offend her in any way she’ll refuse to renew the
lease.  I sometimes think these garden-parties are a
mistake.”

The Norburys played bridge for the next three nights till
nearly one o’clock; they did not care for the game, but it
reduced the time at their guest’s disposal for undesirable
ghostly visitations.

“Miss Bleek is not likely to be in a frame of mind to
see ghosts,” said Hugo Norbury, “if she goes to bed
with her brain awhirl with royal spades and no trumps and grand
slams.”

“I’ve talked to her for hours about Mrs.
Hatch-Mallard’s uncle,” said his wife, “and
pointed out the exact spot where he killed himself, and invented
all sorts of impressive details, and I’ve found an old
portrait of Lord John Russell and put it in her room, and told
her that it’s supposed to be a picture of the uncle in
middle age.  If Ada does see a ghost at all it certainly
ought to be old Hatch-Mallard’s.  At any rate,
we’ve done our best.”

The precautions were in vain.  On the third morning of
her stay Ada Bleek came down late to breakfast, her eyes looking
very tired, but ablaze with excitement, her hair done anyhow, and
a large brown volume hugged under her arm.

“At last I’ve seen something supernatural!”
she exclaimed, and gave Mrs. Norbury a fervent kiss, as though in
gratitude for the opportunity afforded her.

“A ghost!” cried Mrs. Norbury, “not
really!”

“Really and unmistakably!”

“Was it an oldish man in the dress of about fifty years
ago?” asked Mrs. Norbury hopefully.

“Nothing of the sort,” said Ada; “it was a
white hedgehog.”

“A white hedgehog!” exclaimed both the Norburys,
in tones of disconcerted astonishment.

“A huge white hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes,”
said Ada; “I was lying half asleep in bed when suddenly I
felt a sensation as of something sinister and unaccountable
passing through the room.  I sat up and looked round, and
there, under the window, I saw an evil, creeping thing, a sort of
monstrous hedgehog, of a dirty white colour, with black,
loathsome claws that clicked and scraped along the floor, and
narrow, yellow eyes of indescribable evil.  It slithered
along for a yard or two, always looking at me with its cruel,
hideous eyes, then, when it reached the second window, which was
open it clambered up the sill and vanished.  I got up at
once and went to the window; there wasn’t a sign of it
anywhere.  Of course, I knew it must be something from
another world, but it was not till I turned up Popple’s
chapter on local traditions that I realised what I had
seen.”

She turned eagerly to the large brown volume and read:
“’Nicholas Herison, an old miser, was hung at
Batchford in 1763 for the murder of a farm lad who had
accidentally discovered his secret hoard.  His ghost is
supposed to traverse the countryside, appearing sometimes as a
white owl, sometimes as a huge white hedgehog.”

“I expect you read the Popple story overnight, and that
made you think you saw a hedgehog when you were only half
awake,” said Mrs. Norbury, hazarding a conjecture that
probably came very near the truth.

Ada scouted the possibility of such a solution of her
apparition.

“This must be hushed up,” said Mrs. Norbury
quickly; “the servants—”

“Hushed up!” exclaimed Ada, indignantly;
“I’m writing a long report on it for the Research
Society.”

It was then that Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of
brilliant resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of
his life.

“It was very wicked of us, Miss Bleek,” he said,
“but it would be a shame to let it go further.  That
white hedgehog is an old joke of ours; stuffed albino hedgehog,
you know, that my father brought home from Jamaica, where they
grow to enormous size.  We hide it in the room with a string
on it, run one end of the string through the window; then we pull
if from below and it comes scraping along the floor, just as
you’ve described, and finally jerks out of the
window.  Taken in heaps of people; they all read up Popple
and think it’s old Harry Nicholson’s ghost; we always
stop them from writing to the papers about it, though.  That
would be carrying matters too far.”

Mrs. Hatch-Mallard renewed the lease in due course, but Ada
Bleek has never renewed her friendship.

p. 185THE
MAPPINED LIFE

“These Mappin Terraces at the Zoological Gardens are a
great improvement on the old style of wild-beast cage,”
said Mrs. James Gurtleberry, putting down an illustrated paper;
“they give one the illusion of seeing the animals in their
natural surroundings.  I wonder how much of the illusion is
passed on to the animals?”

“That would depend on the animal,” said her niece;
“a jungle-fowl, for instance, would no doubt think its
lawful jungle surroundings were faithfully reproduced if you gave
it a sufficiency of wives, a goodly variety of seed food and
ants’ eggs, a commodious bank of loose earth to dust itself
in, a convenient roosting tree, and a rival or two to make
matters interesting.  Of course there ought to be
jungle-cats and birds of prey and other agencies of sudden death
to add to the illusion of liberty, but the bird’s own
imagination is capable of inventing those—look how a
domestic fowl will squawk an alarm note if a rook or wood pigeon
passes over its run when it has chickens.”

“You think, then, they really do have a sort of
illusion, if you give them space enough—”

“In a few cases only.  Nothing will make me believe
that an acre or so of concrete enclosure will make up to a wolf
or a tiger-cat for the range of night prowling that would belong
to it in a wild state.  Think of the dictionary of sound and
scent and recollection that unfolds before a real wild beast as
it comes out from its lair every evening, with the knowledge that
in a few minutes it will be hieing along to some distant hunting
ground where all the joy and fury of the chase awaits it; think
of the crowded sensations of the brain when every rustle, every
cry, every bent twig, and every whiff across the nostrils means
something, something to do with life and death and dinner. 
Imagine the satisfaction of stealing down to your own particular
drinking spot, choosing your own particular tree to scrape your
claws on, finding your own particular bed of dried grass to roll
on.  Then, in the place of all that, put a concrete
promenade, which will be of exactly the same dimensions whether
you race or crawl across it, coated with stale, unvarying scents
and surrounded with cries and noises that have ceased to have the
least meaning or interest.  As a substitute for a narrow
cage the new enclosures are excellent, but I should think they
are a poor imitation of a life of liberty.”

“It’s rather depressing to think that,” said
Mrs. Gurtleberry; “they look so spacious and so natural,
but I suppose a good deal of what seems natural to us would be
meaningless to a wild animal.”

“That is where our superior powers of self-deception
come in,” said the niece; “we are able to live our
unreal, stupid little lives on our particular Mappin terrace, and
persuade ourselves that we really are untrammelled men and women
leading a reasonable existence in a reasonable sphere.”

“But good gracious,” exclaimed the aunt, bouncing
into an attitude of scandalised defence, “we are leading
reasonable existences!  What on earth do you mean by
trammels?  We are merely trammelled by the ordinary decent
conventions of civilised society.”

“We are trammelled,” said the niece, calmly and
pitilessly, “by restrictions of income and opportunity, and
above all by lack of initiative.  To some people a
restricted income doesn’t matter a bit, in fact it often
seems to help as a means for getting a lot of reality out of
life; I am sure there are men and women who do their shopping in
little back streets of Paris, buying four carrots and a shred of
beef for their daily sustenance, who lead a perfectly real and
eventful existence.  Lack of initiative is the thing that
really cripples one, and that is where you and I and Uncle James
are so hopelessly shut in.  We are just so many animals
stuck down on a Mappin terrace, with this difference in our
disfavour, that the animals are there to be looked at, while
nobody wants to look at us.  As a matter of fact there would
be nothing to look at.  We get colds in winter and hay fever
in summer, and if a wasp happens to sting one of us, well, that
is the wasp’s initiative, not ours; all we do is to wait
for the swelling to go down.  Whenever we do climb into
local fame and notice, it is by indirect methods; if it happens
to be a good flowering year for magnolias the neighbourhood
observes: ‘Have you seen the Gurtleberry’s
magnolia?  It is a perfect mass of flowers,’ and we go
about telling people that there are fifty-seven blossoms as
against thirty-nine the previous year.”

“In Coronation year there were as many as sixty,”
put in the aunt, “your uncle has kept a record for the last
eight years.”

“Doesn’t it ever strike you,” continued the
niece relentlessly, “that if we moved away from here or
were blotted out of existence our local claim to fame would pass
on automatically to whoever happened to take the house and
garden?  People would say to one another, ‘Have you
seen the Smith-Jenkins’ magnolia?  It is a perfect
mass of flowers,’ or else ‘Smith-Jenkins tells me
there won’t be a single blossom on their magnolia this
year; the east winds have turned all the buds black.’ 
Now if, when we had gone, people still associated our names with
the magnolia tree, no matter who temporarily possessed it, if
they said, ‘Ah, that’s the tree on which the
Gurtleberrys hung their cook because she sent up the wrong kind
of sauce with the asparagus,’ that would be something
really due to our own initiative, apart from anything east winds
or magnolia vitality might have to say in the matter.”

“We should never do such a thing,” said the
aunt.

The niece gave a reluctant sigh.

“I can’t imagine it,” she admitted. 
“Of course,” she continued, “there are heaps of
ways of leading a real existence without committing sensational
deeds of violence.  It’s the dreadful little everyday
acts of pretended importance that give the Mappin stamp to our
life.  It would be entertaining, if it wasn’t so
pathetically tragic, to hear Uncle James fuss in here in the
morning and announce, ‘I must just go down into the town
and find out what the men there are saying about Mexico. 
Matters are beginning to look serious there.’  Then he
patters away into the town, and talks in a highly serious voice
to the tobacconist, incidentally buying an ounce of tobacco;
perhaps he meets one or two others of the world’s thinkers
and talks to them in a highly serious voice, then he patters back
here and announces with increased importance, ‘I’ve
just been talking to some men in the town about the condition of
affairs in Mexico.  They agree with the view that I have
formed, that things there will have to get worse before they get
better.’  Of course nobody in the town cared in the
least little bit what his views about Mexico were or whether he
had any.  The tobacconist wasn’t even fluttered at his
buying the ounce of tobacco; he knows that he purchases the same
quantity of the same sort of tobacco every week.  Uncle
James might just as well have lain on his back in the garden and
chattered to the lilac tree about the habits of
caterpillars.”

“I really will not listen to such things about your
uncle,” protested Mrs. James Gurtleberry angrily.

“My own case is just as bad and just as tragic,”
said the niece, dispassionately; “nearly everything about
me is conventional make-believe.  I’m not a good
dancer, and no one could honestly call me good-looking, but when
I go to one of our dull little local dances I’m
conventionally supposed to ‘have a heavenly time,’ to
attract the ardent homage of the local cavaliers, and to go home
with my head awhirl with pleasurable recollections.  As a
matter of fact, I’ve merely put in some hours of
indifferent dancing, drunk some badly-made claret cup, and
listened to an enormous amount of laborious light
conversation.  A moonlight hen-stealing raid with the
merry-eyed curate would be infinitely more exciting; imagine the
pleasure of carrying off all those white minorcas that the
Chibfords are always bragging about.  When we had disposed
of them we could give the proceeds to a charity, so there would
be nothing really wrong about it.  But nothing of that sort
lies within the Mappined limits of my life.  One of these
days somebody dull and decorous and undistinguished will
‘make himself agreeable’ to me at a tennis party, as
the saying is, and all the dull old gossips of the neighbourhood
will begin to ask when we are to be engaged, and at last we shall
be engaged, and people will give us butter-dishes and
blotting-cases and framed pictures of young women feeding
swans.  Hullo, Uncle, are you going out?”

“I’m just going down to the town,” announced
Mr. James Gurtleberry, with an air of some importance: “I
want to hear what people are saying about Albania.  Affairs
there are beginning to take on a very serious look. 
It’s my opinion that we haven’t seen the worst of
things yet.”

In this he was probably right, but there was nothing in the
immediate or prospective condition of Albania to warrant Mrs.
Gurtleberry in bursting into tears.

p.
193FATE

Rex Dillot was nearly twenty-four, almost good-looking and
quite penniless.  His mother was supposed to make him some
sort of an allowance out of what her creditors allowed her, and
Rex occasionally strayed into the ranks of those who earn fitful
salaries as secretaries or companions to people who are unable to
cope unaided with their correspondence or their leisure. 
For a few months he had been assistant editor and business
manager of a paper devoted to fancy mice, but the devotion had
been all on one side, and the paper disappeared with a certain
abruptness from club reading-rooms and other haunts where it had
made a gratuitous appearance.  Still, Rex lived with some
air of comfort and well-being, as one can live if one is born
with a genius for that sort of thing, and a kindly Providence
usually arranged that his week-end invitations coincided with the
dates on which his one white dinner-waistcoat was in a
laundry-returned condition of dazzling cleanness.  He played
most games badly, and was shrewd enough to recognise the fact,
but he had developed a marvellously accurate judgement in
estimating the play and chances of other people, whether in a
golf match, billiard handicap, or croquet tournament.  By
dint of parading his opinion of such and such a player’s
superiority with a sufficient degree of youthful assertiveness he
usually succeeded in provoking a wager at liberal odds, and he
looked to his week-end winnings to carry him through the
financial embarrassments of his mid-week existence.  The
trouble was, as he confided to Clovis Sangrail, that he never had
enough available or even prospective cash at his command to
enable him to fix the wager at a figure really worth winning.

“Some day,” he said, “I shall come across a
really safe thing, a bet that simply can’t go astray, and
then I shall put it up for all I’m worth, or rather for a
good deal more than I’m worth if you sold me up to the last
button.”

“It would be awkward if it didn’t happen to come
off,” said Clovis.

“It would be more than awkward,” said Rex;
“it would be a tragedy.  All the same, it would be
extremely amusing to bring it off.  Fancy awaking in the
morning with about three hundred pounds standing to one’s
credit.  I should go and clear out my hostess’s
pigeon-loft before breakfast out of sheer good-temper.”

“Your hostess of the moment mightn’t have a
pigeon-loft,” said Clovis.

“I always choose hostesses that have,” said Rex;
“a pigeon-loft is indicative of a careless, extravagant,
genial disposition, such as I like to see around me.  People
who strew corn broadcast for a lot of feathered inanities that
just sit about cooing and giving each other the glad eye in a
Louis Quatorze manner are pretty certain to do you
well.”

“Young Strinnit is coming down this afternoon,”
said Clovis reflectively; “I dare say you won’t find
it difficult to get him to back himself at billiards.  He
plays a pretty useful game, but he’s not quite as good as
he fancies he is.”

“I know one member of the party who can walk round
him,” said Rex softly, an alert look coming into his eyes;
“that cadaverous-looking Major who arrived last
night.  I’ve seen him play at St. Moritz.  If I
could get Strinnit to lay odds on himself against the Major the
money would be safe in my pocket.  This looks like the good
thing I’ve been watching and praying for.”

“Don’t be rash,” counselled Clovis,
“Strinnit may play up to his self-imagined form once in a
blue moon.”

“I intend to be rash,” said Rex quietly, and the
look on his face corroborated his words.

“Are you all going to flock to the billiard-room?”
asked Teresa Thundleford, after dinner, with an air of some
disapproval and a good deal of annoyance.  “I
can’t see what particular amusement you find in watching
two men prodding little ivory balls about on a table.”

“Oh, well,” said her hostess, “it’s a
way of passing the time, you know.”

“A very poor way, to my mind,” said Mrs.
Thundleford; “now I was going to have shown all of you the
photographs I took in Venice last summer.”

“You showed them to us last night,” said Mrs.
Cuvering hastily.

“Those were the ones I took in Florence.  These are
quite a different lot.”

“Oh, well, some time to-morrow we can look at
them.  You can leave them down in the drawing-room, and then
every one can have a look.”

“I should prefer to show them when you are all gathered
together, as I have quite a lot of explanatory remarks to make,
about Venetian art and architecture, on the same lines as my
remarks last night on the Florentine galleries.  Also, there
are some verses of mine that I should like to read you, on the
rebuilding of the Campanile.  But, of course, if you all
prefer to watch Major Latton and Mr. Strinnit knocking balls
about on a table—”

“They are both supposed to be first-rate players,”
said the hostess.

“I have yet to learn that my verses and my art
causerie are of second-rate quality,” said Mrs.
Thundleford with acerbity.  “However, as you all seem
bent on watching a silly game, there’s no more to be
said.  I shall go upstairs and finish some writing. 
Later on, perhaps, I will come down and join you.”

To one, at least, of the onlookers the game was anything but
silly.  It was absorbing, exciting, exasperating,
nerve-stretching, and finally it grew to be tragic.  The
Major with the St. Moritz reputation was playing a long way below
his form, young Strinnit was playing slightly above his, and had
all the luck of the game as well.  From the very start the
balls seemed possessed by a demon of contrariness; they trundled
about complacently for one player, they would go nowhere for the
other.

“A hundred and seventy, seventy-four,” sang out
the youth who was marking.  In a game of two hundred and
fifty up it was an enormous lead to hold.  Clovis watched
the flush of excitement die away from Dillot’s face, and a
hard white look take its place.

“How much have you go on?” whispered Clovis. 
The other whispered the sum through dry, shaking lips.  It
was more than he or any one connected with him could pay; he had
done what he had said he would do.  He had been rash.

“Two hundred and six, ninety-eight.”

Rex heard a clock strike ten somewhere in the hall, then
another somewhere else, and another, and another; the house
seemed full of striking clocks.  Then in the distance the
stable clock chimed in.  In another hour they would all be
striking eleven, and he would be listening to them as a disgraced
outcast, unable to pay, even in part, the wager he had
challenged.

“Two hundred and eighteen, a hundred and
three.”  The game was as good as over.  Rex was
as good as done for.  He longed desperately for the ceiling
to fall in, for the house to catch fire, for anything to happen
that would put an end to that horrible rolling to and fro of red
and white ivory that was jostling him nearer and nearer to his
doom.

“Two hundred and twenty-eight, a hundred and
seven.”

Rex opened his cigarette-case; it was empty.  That at
least gave him a pretext to slip away from the room for the
purpose of refilling it; he would spare himself the drawn-out
torture of watching that hopeless game played out to the bitter
end.  He backed away from the circle of absorbed watchers
and made his way up a short stairway to a long, silent corridor
of bedrooms, each with a guests’ name written in a little
square on the door.  In the hush that reigned in this part
of the house he could still hear the hateful click-click of the
balls; if he waited for a few minutes longer he would hear the
little outbreak of clapping and buzz of congratulation that would
hail Strinnit’s victory.  On the alert tension of his
nerves there broke another sound, the aggressive, wrath-inducing
breathing of one who sleeps in heavy after-dinner slumber. 
The sound came from a room just at his elbow; the card on the
door bore the announcement “Mrs. Thundleford.” 
The door was just slightly ajar; Rex pushed it open an inch or
two more and looked in.  The august Teresa had fallen asleep
over an illustrated guide to Florentine art-galleries; at her
side, somewhat dangerously near the edge of the table, was a
reading-lamp.  If Fate had been decently kind to him,
thought Rex, bitterly, that lamp would have been knocked over by
the sleeper and would have given them something to think of
besides billiard matches.

There are occasions when one must take one’s Fate in
one’s hands.  Rex took the lamp in his.

“Two hundred and thirty-seven, one hundred and
fifteen.”  Strinnit was at the table, and the balls
lay in good position for him; he had a choice of two fairly easy
shots, a choice which he was never to decide.  A sudden
hurricane of shrieks and a rush of stumbling feet sent every one
flocking to the door.  The Dillot boy crashed into the room,
carrying in his arms the vociferous and somewhat dishevelled
Teresa Thundleford; her clothing was certainly not a mass of
flames, as the more excitable members of the party afterwards
declared, but the edge of her skirt and part of the table-cover
in which she had been hastily wrapped were alight in a
flickering, half-hearted manner.  Rex flung his struggling
burden on the billiard table, and for one breathless minute the
work of beating out the sparks with rugs and cushions and playing
on them with soda-water syphons engrossed the energies of the
entire company.

“It was lucky I was passing when it happened,”
panted Rex; “some one had better see to the room, I think
the carpet is alight.”

As a matter of fact the promptitude and energy of the rescuer
had prevented any great damage being done, either to the victim
or her surroundings.  The billiard table had suffered most,
and had to be laid up for repairs; perhaps it was not the best
place to have chosen for the scene of salvage operations; but
then, as Clovis remarked, when one is rushing about with a
blazing woman in one’s arms one can’t stop to think
out exactly where one is going to put her.

p. 201THE
BULL

Tom Yorkfield had always regarded his half-brother, Laurence,
with a lazy instinct of dislike, toned down, as years went on, to
a tolerant feeling of indifference.  There was nothing very
tangible to dislike him for; he was just a blood-relation, with
whom Tom had no single taste or interest in common, and with
whom, at the same time, he had had no occasion for quarrel. 
Laurence had left the farm early in life, and had lived for a few
years on a small sum of money left him by his mother; he had
taken up painting as a profession, and was reported to be doing
fairly well at it, well enough, at any rate, to keep body and
soul together.  He specialised in painting animals, and he
was successful in finding a certain number of people to buy his
pictures.  Tom felt a comforting sense of assured
superiority in contrasting his position with that of his
half-brother; Laurence was an artist-chap, just that and nothing
more, though you might make it sound more important by calling
him an animal painter; Tom was a farmer, not in a very big way,
it was true, but the Helsery farm had been in the family for some
generations, and it had a good reputation for the stock raised on
it.  Tom had done his best, with the little capital at his
command, to maintain and improve the standard of his small herd
of cattle, and in Clover Fairy he had bred a bull which was
something rather better than any that his immediate neighbours
could show.  It would not have made a sensation in the
judging-ring at an important cattle show, but it was as vigorous,
shapely, and healthy a young animal as any small practical farmer
could wish to possess.  At the King’s Head on market
days Clover Fairy was very highly spoken of, and Yorkfield used
to declare that he would not part with him for a hundred pounds;
a hundred pounds is a lot of money in the small farming line, and
probably anything over eighty would have tempted him.

It was with some especial pleasure that Tom took advantage of
one of Laurence’s rare visits to the farm to lead him down
to the enclosure where Clover Fairy kept solitary state—the
grass widower of a grazing harem.  Tom felt some of his old
dislike for his half-brother reviving; the artist was becoming
more languid in his manner, more unsuitably turned-out in attire,
and he seemed inclined to impart a slightly patronising tone to
his conversation.  He took no heed of a flourishing potato
crop, but waxed enthusiastic over a clump of yellow-flowering
weed that stood in a corner by a gateway, which was rather
galling to the owner of a really very well weeded farm; again,
when he might have been duly complimentary about a group of fat,
black-faced lambs, that simply cried aloud for admiration, he
became eloquent over the foliage tints of an oak copse on the
hill opposite.  But now he was being taken to inspect the
crowning pride and glory of Helsery; however grudging he might be
in his praises, however backward and niggardly with his
congratulations, he would have to see and acknowledge the many
excellences of that redoubtable animal.  Some weeks ago,
while on a business journey to Taunton, Tom had been invited by
his half-brother to visit a studio in that town, where Laurence
was exhibiting one of his pictures, a large canvas representing a
bull standing knee-deep in some marshy ground; it had been good
of its kind, no doubt, and Laurence had seemed inordinately
pleased with it; “the best thing I’ve done
yet,” he had said over and over again, and Tom had
generously agreed that it was fairly life-like.  Now, the
man of pigments was going to be shown a real picture, a living
model of strength and comeliness, a thing to feast the eyes on, a
picture that exhibited new pose and action with every shifting
minute, instead of standing glued into one unvarying attitude
between the four walls of a frame.  Tom unfastened a stout
wooden door and led the way into a straw-bedded yard.

“Is he quiet?” asked the artist, as a young bull
with a curly red coat came inquiringly towards them.

“He’s playful at times,” said Tom, leaving
his half-brother to wonder whether the bull’s ideas of play
were of the catch-as-catch-can order.  Laurence made one or
two perfunctory comments on the animal’s appearance and
asked a question or so as to his age and such-like details; then
he coolly turned the talk into another channel.

“Do you remember the picture I showed you at
Taunton?” he asked.

“Yes,” grunted Tom; “a white-faced bull
standing in some slush.  Don’t admire those Herefords
much myself; bulky-looking brutes, don’t seem to have much
life in them.  Daresay they’re easier to paint that
way; now, this young beggar is on the move all the time,
aren’t you, Fairy?”

“I’ve sold that picture,” said Laurence,
with considerable complacency in his voice.

“Have you?” said Tom; “glad to hear it,
I’m sure.  Hope you’re pleased with what
you’ve got for it.”

“I got three hundred pounds for it,” said
Laurence.

Tom turned towards him with a slowly rising flush of anger in
his face.  Three hundred pounds!  Under the most
favourable market conditions that he could imagine his prized
Clover Fairy would hardly fetch a hundred, yet here was a piece
of varnished canvas, painted by his half-brother, selling for
three times that sum.  It was a cruel insult that went home
with all the more force because it emphasised the triumph of the
patronising, self-satisfied Laurence.  The young farmer had
meant to put his relative just a little out of conceit with
himself by displaying the jewel of his possessions, and now the
tables were turned, and his valued beast was made to look cheap
and insignificant beside the price paid for a mere picture. 
It was so monstrously unjust; the painting would never be
anything more than a dexterous piece of counterfeit life, while
Clover Fairy was the real thing, a monarch in his little world, a
personality in the countryside.  After he was dead, even, he
would still be something of a personality; his descendants would
graze in those valley meadows and hillside pastures, they would
fill stall and byre and milking-shed, their good red coats would
speckle the landscape and crowd the market-place; men would note
a promising heifer or a well-proportioned steer, and say:
“Ah, that one comes of good old Clover Fairy’s
stock.”  All that time the picture would be hanging,
lifeless and unchanging, beneath its dust and varnish, a chattel
that ceased to mean anything if you chose to turn it with its
back to the wall.  These thoughts chased themselves angrily
through Tom Yorkfield’s mind, but he could not put them
into words.  When he gave tongue to his feelings he put
matters bluntly and harshly.

“Some soft-witted fools may like to throw away three
hundred pounds on a bit of paintwork; can’t say as I envy
them their taste.  I’d rather have the real thing than
a picture of it.”

He nodded towards the young bull, that was alternately staring
at them with nose held high and lowering its horns with a
half-playful, half-impatient shake of the head.

Laurence laughed a laugh of irritating, indulgent
amusement.

“I don’t think the purchaser of my bit of
paintwork, as you call it, need worry about having thrown his
money away.  As I get to be better known and recognised my
pictures will go up in value.  That particular one will
probably fetch four hundred in a sale-room five or six years
hence; pictures aren’t a bad investment if you know enough
to pick out the work of the right men.  Now you can’t
say your precious bull is going to get more valuable the longer
you keep him; he’ll have his little day, and then, if you
go on keeping him, he’ll come down at last to a few
shillingsworth of hoofs and hide, just at a time, perhaps, when
my bull is being bought for a big sum for some important picture
gallery.”

It was too much.  The united force of truth and slander
and insult put over heavy a strain on Tom Yorkfield’s
powers of restraint.  In his right hand he held a useful oak
cudgel, with his left he made a grab at the loose collar of
Laurence’s canary-coloured silk shirt.  Laurence was
not a fighting man; the fear of physical violence threw him off
his balance as completely as overmastering indignation had thrown
Tom off his, and thus it came to pass that Clover Fairy was
regaled with the unprecedented sight of a human being scudding
and squawking across the enclosure, like the hen that would
persist in trying to establish a nesting-place in the
manger.  In another crowded happy moment the bull was trying
to jerk Laurence over his left shoulder, to prod him in the ribs
while still in the air, and to kneel on him when he reached the
ground.  It was only the vigorous intervention of Tom that
induced him to relinquish the last item of his programme.

Tom devotedly and ungrudgingly nursed his half brother to a
complete recovery from his injuries, which consisted of nothing
more serious than a dislocated shoulder, a broken rib or two, and
a little nervous prostration.  After all, there was no
further occasion for rancour in the young farmer’s mind;
Laurence’s bull might sell for three hundred, or for six
hundred, and be admired by thousands in some big picture gallery,
but it would never toss a man over one shoulder and catch him a
jab in the ribs before he had fallen on the other side. 
That was Clover Fairy’s noteworthy achievement, which could
never be taken away from him.

Laurence continues to be popular as an animal artist, but his
subjects are always kittens or fawns or lambkins—never
bulls.

p.
209MORLVERA

The Olympic Toy Emporium occupied a conspicuous frontage in an
important West End street.  It was happily named Toy
Emporium, because one would never have dreamed of according it
the familiar and yet pulse-quickening name of toyshop. 
There was an air of cold splendour and elaborate failure about
the wares that were set out in its ample windows; they were the
sort of toys that a tired shop-assistant displays and explains at
Christmas time to exclamatory parents and bored, silent
children.  The animal toys looked more like natural history
models than the comfortable, sympathetic companions that one
would wish, at a certain age, to take to bed with one, and to
smuggle into the bath-room.  The mechanical toys incessantly
did things that no one could want a toy to do more than a half a
dozen times in its lifetime; it was a merciful reflection that in
any right-minded nursery the lifetime would certainly be
short.

Prominent among the elegantly-dressed dolls that filled an
entire section of the window frontage was a large hobble-skirted
lady in a confection of peach-coloured velvet, elaborately set
off with leopard skin accessories, if one may use such a
conveniently comprehensive word in describing an intricate
feminine toilette.  She lacked nothing that is to be found
in a carefully detailed fashion-plate—in fact, she might be
said to have something more than the average fashion-plate female
possesses; in place of a vacant, expressionless stare she had
character in her face.  It must be admitted that it was bad
character, cold, hostile, inquisitorial, with a sinister lowering
of one eyebrow and a merciless hardness about the corners of the
mouth.  One might have imagined histories about her by the
hour, histories in which unworthy ambition, the desire for money,
and an entire absence of all decent feeling would play a
conspicuous part.

As a matter of fact, she was not without her judges and
biographers, even in this shop-window stage of her career. 
Emmeline, aged ten, and Bert, aged seven, had halted on the way
from their obscure back street to the minnow-stocked water of St.
James’s Park, and were critically examining the
hobble-skirted doll, and dissecting her character in no very
tolerant spirit.  There is probably a latent enmity between
the necessarily under-clad and the unnecessarily overdressed, but
a little kindness and good fellowship on the part of the latter
will often change the sentiment to admiring devotion; if the lady
in peach-coloured velvet and leopard skin had worn a pleasant
expression in addition to her other elaborate furnishings,
Emmeline at least might have respected and even loved her. 
As it was, she gave her a horrible reputation, based chiefly on a
secondhand knowledge of gilded depravity derived from the
conversation of those who were skilled in the art of novelette
reading; Bert filled in a few damaging details from his own
limited imagination.

“She’s a bad lot, that one is,” declared
Emmeline, after a long unfriendly stare; “’er
’usbind ’ates ’er.”

“’E knocks ’er abart,” said Bert, with
enthusiasm.

“No, ’e don’t, cos ’e’s dead;
she poisoned ’im slow and gradual, so that nobody
didn’t know.  Now she wants to marry a lord, with
’eaps and ’eaps of money.  ’E’s got
a wife already, but she’s going to poison ’er,
too.”

“She’s a bad lot,” said Bert with growing
hostility.

“’Er mother ’ates her, and she’s
afraid of ’er, too, cos she’s got a serkestic tongue;
always talking serkesms, she is.  She’s greedy, too;
if there’s fish going, she eats ’er own share and
’er little girl’s as well, though the little girl is
dellikit.”

“She ’ad a little boy once,” said Bert,
“but she pushed ’im into the water when nobody
wasn’t looking.”

“No she didn’t,” said Emmeline, “she
sent ’im away to be kep’ by poor people, so ’er
’usbind wouldn’t know where ’e was.  They
ill-treat ’im somethink cruel.”

“Wot’s ’er nime?” asked Bert, thinking
that it was time that so interesting a personality should be
labelled.

“’Er nime?” said Emmeline, thinking hard,
“’er nime’s Morlvera.”  It was as
near as she could get to the name of an adventuress who figured
prominently in a cinema drama.  There was silence for a
moment while the possibilities of the name were turned over in
the children’s minds.

“Those clothes she’s got on ain’t paid for,
and never won’t be,” said Emmeline; “she thinks
she’ll get the rich lord to pay for ’em, but ’e
won’t.  ’E’s given ’er jools,
’underds of pounds’ worth.”

“’E won’t pay for the clothes,” said
Bert, with conviction.  Evidently there was some limit to
the weak good nature of wealthy lords.

At that moment a motor carriage with liveried servants drew up
at the emporium entrance; a large lady, with a penetrating and
rather hurried manner of talking, stepped out, followed slowly
and sulkily by a small boy, who had a very black scowl on his
face and a very white sailor suit over the rest of him.  The
lady was continuing an argument which had probably commenced in
Portman Square.

“Now, Victor, you are to come in and buy a nice doll for
your cousin Bertha.  She gave you a beautiful box of
soldiers on your birthday, and you must give her a present on
hers.”

“Bertha is a fat little fool,” said Victor, in a
voice that was as loud as his mother’s and had more
assurance in it.

“Victor, you are not to say such things.  Bertha is
not a fool, and she is not in the least fat.  You are to
come in and choose a doll for her.”

The couple passed into the shop, out of view and hearing of
the two back-street children.

“My, he is in a wicked temper,” exclaimed
Emmeline, but both she and Bert were inclined to side with him
against the absent Bertha, who was doubtless as fat and foolish
as he had described her to be.

“I want to see some dolls,” said the mother of
Victor to the nearest assistant; “it’s for a little
girl of eleven.”

“A fat little girl of eleven,” added Victor by way
of supplementary information.

“Victor, if you say such rude things about your cousin,
you shall go to bed the moment we get home, without having any
tea.”

“This is one of the newest things we have in
dolls,” said the assistant, removing a hobble-skirted
figure in peach-coloured velvet from the window; “leopard
skin toque and stole, the latest fashion.  You won’t
get anything newer than that anywhere.  It’s an
exclusive design.”

“Look!” whispered Emmeline outside;
“they’ve bin and took Morlvera.”

There was a mingling of excitement and a certain sense of
bereavement in her mind; she would have liked to gaze at that
embodiment of overdressed depravity for just a little longer.

“I ’spect she’s going away in a kerridge to
marry the rich lord,” hazarded Bert.

“She’s up to no good,” said Emmeline
vaguely.

Inside the shop the purchase of the doll had been decided
on.

“It’s a beautiful doll, and Bertha will be
delighted with it,” asserted the mother of Victor
loudly.

“Oh, very well,” said Victor sulkily; “you
needn’t have it stuck into a box and wait an hour while
it’s being done up into a parcel.  I’ll take it
as it is, and we can go round to Manchester Square and give it to
Bertha, and get the thing done with.  That will save me the
trouble of writing: ‘For dear Bertha, with Victor’s
love,’ on a bit of paper.”

“Very well,” said his mother, “we can go to
Manchester Square on our way home.  You must wish her many
happy returns of to-morrow, and give her the doll.”

“I won’t let the little beast kiss me,”
stipulated Victor.

His mother said nothing; Victor had not been half as
troublesome as she had anticipated.  When he chose he could
really be dreadfully naughty.

Emmeline and Bert were just moving away from the window when
Morlvera made her exit from the shop, very carefully in
Victor’s arms.  A look of sinister triumph seemed to
glow in her hard, inquisitorial face.  As for Victor, a
certain scornful serenity had replaced the earlier scowls; he had
evidently accepted defeat with a contemptuous good grace.

The tall lady gave a direction to the footman and settled
herself in the carriage.  The little figure in the white
sailor suit clambered in beside her, still carefully holding the
elegantly garbed doll.

The car had to be backed a few yards in the process of
turning.  Very stealthily, very gently, very mercilessly
Victor sent Morlvera flying over his shoulder, so that she fell
into the road just behind the retrogressing wheel.  With a
soft, pleasant-sounding scrunch the car went over the prostrate
form, then it moved forward again with another scrunch.  The
carriage moved off and left Bert and Emmeline gazing in scared
delight at a sorry mess of petrol-smeared velvet, sawdust, and
leopard skin, which was all that remained of the hateful
Morlvera.  They gave a shrill cheer, and then raced away
shuddering from the scene of so much rapidly enacted tragedy.

Later that afternoon, when they were engaged in the pursuit of
minnows by the waterside in St. James’s Park, Emmeline said
in a solemn undertone to Bert—

“I’ve bin finking.  Do you know oo ’e
was?  ’E was ’er little boy wot she’d sent
away to live wiv poor folks.  ’E come back and done
that.”

p.
217SHOCK TACTICS

On a late spring afternoon Ella McCarthy sat on a
green-painted chair in Kensington Gardens, staring listlessly at
an uninteresting stretch of park landscape, that blossomed
suddenly into tropical radiance as an expected figure appeared in
the middle distance.

“Hullo, Bertie!” she exclaimed sedately, when the
figure arrived at the painted chair that was the nearest
neighbour to her own, and dropped into it eagerly, yet with a
certain due regard for the set of its trousers;
“hasn’t it been a perfect spring
afternoon?”

The statement was a distinct untruth as far as Ella’s
own feelings were concerned; until the arrival of Bertie the
afternoon had been anything but perfect.

Bertie made a suitable reply, in which a questioning note
seemed to hover.

“Thank you ever so much for those lovely
handkerchiefs,” said Ella, answering the unspoken question;
“they were just what I’ve been wanting. 
There’s only one thing spoilt my pleasure in your
gift,” she added, with a pout.

“What was that?” asked Bertie anxiously, fearful
that perhaps he had chosen a size of handkerchief that was not
within the correct feminine limit.

“I should have liked to have written and thanked you for
them as soon as I got them,” said Ella, and Bertie’s
sky clouded at once.

“You know what mother is,” he protested;
“she opens all my letters, and if she found I’d been
giving presents to any one there’d have been something to
talk about for the next fortnight.”

“Surely, at the age of twenty—” began
Ella.

“I’m not twenty till September,” interrupted
Bertie.

“At the age of nineteen years and eight months,”
persisted Ella, “you might be allowed to keep your
correspondence private to yourself.”

“I ought to be, but things aren’t always what they
ought to be.  Mother opens every letter that comes into the
house, whoever it’s for.  My sisters and I have made
rows about it time and again, but she goes on doing
it.”

“I’d find some way to stop her if I were in your
place,” said Ella valiantly, and Bertie felt that the
glamour of his anxiously deliberated present had faded away in
the disagreeable restriction that hedged round its
acknowledgment.

“Is anything the matter?” asked Bertie’s
friend Clovis when they met that evening at the
swimming-bath.

“Why do you ask?” said Bertie.

“When you wear a look of tragic gloom in a
swimming-bath,” said Clovis, “it’s especially
noticeable from the fact that you’re wearing very little
else.  Didn’t she like the handkerchiefs?”

Bertie explained the situation.

“It is rather galling, you know,” he added,
“when a girl has a lot of things she wants to write to you
and can’t send a letter except by some roundabout,
underhand way.”

“One never realises one’s blessings while one
enjoys them,” said Clovis; “now I have to spend a
considerable amount of ingenuity inventing excuses for not having
written to people.”

“It’s not a joking matter,” said Bertie
resentfully: “you wouldn’t find it funny if your
mother opened all your letters.”

“The funny thing to me is that you should let her do
it.”

“I can’t stop it.  I’ve argued about
it—”

“You haven’t used the right kind of argument, I
expect.  Now, if every time one of your letters was opened
you lay on your back on the dining-table during dinner and had a
fit, or roused the entire family in the middle of the night to
hear you recite one of Blake’s ‘Poems of
Innocence,’ you would get a far more respectful hearing for
future protests.  People yield more consideration to a
mutilated mealtime or a broken night’s rest, than ever they
would to a broken heart.”

“Oh, dry up,” said Bertie crossly, inconsistently
splashing Clovis from head to foot as he plunged into the
water.

It was a day or two after the conversation in the
swimming-bath that a letter addressed to Bertie Heasant slid into
the letter-box at his home, and thence into the hands of his
mother.  Mrs. Heasant was one of those empty-minded
individuals to whom other people’s affairs are perpetually
interesting.  The more private they are intended to be the
more acute is the interest they arouse.  She would have
opened this particular letter in any case; the fact that it was
marked “private,” and diffused a delicate but
penetrating aroma merely caused her to open it with headlong
haste rather than matter-of-course deliberation.  The
harvest of sensation that rewarded her was beyond all
expectations.

“Bertie, carissimo,” it began,
“I wonder if you will have the nerve to do it: it will take
some nerve, too.  Don’t forget the jewels.  They
are a detail, but details interest me.

“Yours as ever,
“Clotilde.”

“Your mother must not know of my existence.  If
questioned swear you never heard of me.”

For years Mrs. Heasant had searched Bertie’s
correspondence diligently for traces of possible dissipation or
youthful entanglements, and at last the suspicions that had
stimulated her inquisitorial zeal were justified by this one
splendid haul.  That any one wearing the exotic name
“Clotilde” should write to Bertie under the
incriminating announcement “as ever” was sufficiently
electrifying, without the astounding allusion to the
jewels.  Mrs. Heasant could recall novels and dramas wherein
jewels played an exciting and commanding role, and here, under
her own roof, before her very eyes as it were, her own son was
carrying on an intrigue in which jewels were merely an
interesting detail.  Bertie was not due home for another
hour, but his sisters were available for the immediate
unburdening of a scandal-laden mind.

“Bertie is in the toils of an adventuress,” she
screamed; “her name is Clotilde,” she added, as if
she thought they had better know the worst at once.  There
are occasions when more harm than good is done by shielding young
girls from a knowledge of the more deplorable realities of
life.

By the time Bertie arrived his mother had discussed every
possible and improbable conjecture as to his guilty secret; the
girls limited themselves to the opinion that their brother had
been weak rather than wicked.

“Who is Clotilde?” was the question that
confronted Bertie almost before he had got into the hall. 
His denial of any knowledge of such a person was met with an
outburst of bitter laughter.

“How well you have learned your lesson!” exclaimed
Mrs. Heasant.  But satire gave way to furious indignation
when she realised that Bertie did not intend to throw any further
light on her discovery.

“You shan’t have any dinner till you’ve
confessed everything,” she stormed.

Bertie’s reply took the form of hastily collecting
material for an impromptu banquet from the larder and locking
himself into his bedroom.  His mother made frequent visits
to the locked door and shouted a succession of interrogations
with the persistence of one who thinks that if you ask a question
often enough an answer will eventually result.  Bertie did
nothing to encourage the supposition.  An hour had passed in
fruitless one-sided palaver when another letter addressed to
Bertie and marked “private” made its appearance in
the letter-box.  Mrs. Heasant pounced on it with the
enthusiasm of a cat that has missed its mouse and to whom a
second has been unexpectedly vouchsafed.  If she hoped for
further disclosures assuredly she was not disappointed.

“So you have really done it!” the
letter abruptly commenced; “Poor Dagmar.  Now she is
done for I almost pity her.  You did it very well, you
wicked boy, the servants all think it was suicide, and there will
be no fuss.  Better not touch the jewels till after the
inquest.

“Clotilde.”

Anything that Mrs. Heasant had previously done in the way of
outcry was easily surpassed as she raced upstairs and beat
frantically at her son’s door.

“Miserable boy, what have you done to Dagmar?”

“It’s Dagmar now, is it?” he snapped;
“it will be Geraldine next.”

“That it should come to this, after all my efforts to
keep you at home of an evening,” sobbed Mrs. Heasant;
“it’s no use you trying to hide things from me;
Clotilde’s letter betrays everything.”

“Does it betray who she is?” asked Bertie;
“I’ve heard so much about her, I should like to know
something about her home-life.  Seriously, if you go on like
this I shall fetch a doctor; I’ve often enough been
preached at about nothing, but I’ve never had an imaginary
harem dragged into the discussion.”

“Are these letters imaginary?” screamed Mrs.
Heasant; “what about the jewels, and Dagmar, and the theory
of suicide?”

No solution of these problems was forthcoming through the
bedroom door, but the last post of the evening produced another
letter for Bertie, and its contents brought Mrs. Heasant that
enlightenment which had already dawned on her son.

“Dear
Bertie,” it ran; “I hope I haven’t
distracted your brain with the spoof letters I’ve been
sending in the name of a fictitious Clotilde.  You told me
the other day that the servants, or somebody at your home,
tampered with your letters, so I thought I would give any one
that opened them something exciting to read.  The shock
might do them good.

“Yours,
“Clovis Sangrail.”

Mrs. Heasant knew Clovis slightly, and was rather afraid of
him.  It was not difficult to read between the lines of his
successful hoax.  In a chastened mood she rapped once more
at Bertie’s door.

“A letter from Mr. Sangrail.  It’s all been a
stupid hoax.  He wrote those other letters.  Why, where
are you going?”

Bertie had opened the door; he had on his hat and
overcoat.

“I’m going for a doctor to come and see if
anything’s the matter with you.  Of course it was all
a hoax, but no person in his right mind could have believed all
that rubbish about murder and suicide and jewels. 
You’ve been making enough noise to bring the house down for
the last hour or two.”

“But what was I to think of those letters?”
whimpered Mrs. Heasant.

“I should have known what to think of them,” said
Bertie; “if you choose to excite yourself over other
people’s correspondence it’s your own fault. 
Anyhow, I’m going for a doctor.”

It was Bertie’s great opportunity, and he knew it. 
His mother was conscious of the fact that she would look rather
ridiculous if the story got about.  She was willing to pay
hush-money.

“I’ll never open your letters again,” she
promised.  And Clovis has no more devoted slave than Bertie
Heasant.

p. 227THE
SEVEN CREAM JUGS

“I suppose we shall never see Wilfred Pigeoncote here
now that he has become heir to the baronetcy and to a lot of
money,” observed Mrs. Peter Pigeoncote regretfully to her
husband.

“Well, we can hardly expect to,” he replied,
“seeing that we always choked him off from coming to see us
when he was a prospective nobody.  I don’t think
I’ve set eyes on him since he was a boy of
twelve.”

“There was a reason for not wanting to encourage his
acquaintanceship,” said Mrs. Peter.  “With that
notorious failing of his he was not the sort of person one wanted
in one’s house.”

“Well, the failing still exists, doesn’t
it?” said her husband; “or do you suppose a reform of
character is entailed along with the estate?”

“Oh, of course, there is still that drawback,”
admitted the wife, “but one would like to make the
acquaintance of the future head of the family, if only out of
mere curiosity.  Besides, cynicism apart, his being rich
will make a difference in the way people will look at his
failing.  When a man is absolutely wealthy, not merely
well-to-do, all suspicion of sordid motive naturally disappears;
the thing becomes merely a tiresome malady.”

Wilfrid Pigeoncote had suddenly become heir to his uncle, Sir
Wilfrid Pigeoncote, on the death of his cousin, Major Wilfrid
Pigeoncote, who had succumbed to the after-effects of a polo
accident.  (A Wilfrid Pigeoncote had covered himself with
honours in the course of Marlborough’s campaigns, and the
name Wilfrid had been a baptismal weakness in the family ever
since.)  The new heir to the family dignity and estates was
a young man of about five-and-twenty, who was known more by
reputation than by person to a wide circle of cousins and
kinsfolk.  And the reputation was an unpleasant one. 
The numerous other Wilfrids in the family were distinguished one
from another chiefly by the names of their residences or
professions, as Wilfrid of Hubbledown, and young Wilfrid the
Gunner, but this particular scion was known by the ignominious
and expressive label of Wilfrid the Snatcher.  From his late
schooldays onward he had been possessed by an acute and obstinate
form of kleptomania; he had the acquisitive instinct of the
collector without any of the collector’s
discrimination.  Anything that was smaller and more portable
than a sideboard, and above the value of ninepence, had an
irresistible attraction for him, provided that it fulfilled the
necessary condition of belonging to some one else.  On the
rare occasions when he was included in a country-house party, it
was usual and almost necessary for his host, or some member of
the family, to make a friendly inquisition through his baggage on
the eve of his departure, to see if he had packed up “by
mistake” any one else’s property.  The search
usually produced a large and varied yield.

“This is funny,” said Peter Pigeoncote to his
wife, some half-hour after their conversation;
“here’s a telegram from Wilfrid, saying he’s
passing through here in his motor, and would like to stop and pay
us his respects.  Can stay for the night if it doesn’t
inconvenience us.  Signed ‘Wilfrid
Pigeoncote.’  Must be the Snatcher; none of the others
have a motor.  I suppose he’s bringing us a present
for the silver wedding.”

“Good gracious!” said Mrs. Peter, as a thought
struck her; “this is rather an awkward time to have a
person with his failing in the house.  All those silver
presents set out in the drawing-room, and others coming by every
post; I hardly know what we’ve got and what are still to
come.  We can’t lock them all up; he’s sure to
want to see them.”

“We must keep a sharp look-out, that’s all,”
said Peter reassuringly.

“But these practised kleptomaniacs are so clever,”
said his wife, apprehensively, “and it will be so awkward
if he suspects that we are watching him.”

Awkwardness was indeed the prevailing note that evening when
the passing traveller was being entertained.  The talk
flitted nervously and hurriedly from one impersonal topic to
another.  The guest had none of the furtive, half-apologetic
air that his cousins had rather expected to find; he was polite,
well-assured, and, perhaps, just a little inclined to “put
on side”.  His hosts, on the other hand, wore an
uneasy manner that might have been the hallmark of conscious
depravity.  In the drawing-room, after dinner, their
nervousness and awkwardness increased.

“Oh, we haven’t shown you the silver-wedding
presents,” said Mrs. Peter, suddenly, as though struck by a
brilliant idea for entertaining the guest; “here they all
are.  Such nice, useful gifts.  A few duplicates, of
course.”

“Seven cream jugs,” put in Peter.

“Yes, isn’t it annoying,” went on Mrs.
Peter; “seven of them.  We feel that we must live on
cream for the rest of our lives.  Of course, some of them
can be changed.”

Wilfrid occupied himself chiefly with such of the gifts as
were of antique interest, carrying one or two of them over to the
lamp to examine their marks.  The anxiety of his hosts at
these moments resembled the solicitude of a cat whose newly born
kittens are being handed round for inspection.

“Let me see; did you give me back the mustard-pot? 
This is its place here,” piped Mrs. Peter.

“Sorry.  I put it down by the claret-jug,”
said Wilfrid, busy with another object.

“Oh, just let me have the sugar-sifter again,”
asked Mrs. Peter, dogged determination showing through her
nervousness; “I must label it who it comes from before I
forget.”

Vigilance was not completely crowned with a sense of
victory.  After they had said “Good-night” to
their visitor, Mrs. Peter expressed her conviction that he had
taken something.

“I fancy, by his manner, that there was something
up,” corroborated her husband; “do you miss
anything?”

Mrs. Peters hastily counted the array of gifts.

“I can only make it thirty-four, and I think it should
be thirty-five,” she announced; “I can’t
remember if thirty-five includes the Archdeacon’s
cruet-stand that hasn’t arrived yet.”

“How on earth are we to know?” said Peter. 
“The mean pig hasn’t brought us a present, and
I’m hanged if he shall carry one off.”

“To-morrow, when he’s having his bath,” said
Mrs. Peter excitedly, “he’s sure to leave his keys
somewhere, and we can go through his portmanteau. 
It’s the only thing to do.”

On the morrow an alert watch was kept by the conspirators
behind half-closed doors, and when Wilfrid, clad in a gorgeous
bath-robe, had made his way to the bath-room, there was a swift
and furtive rush by two excited individuals towards the principal
guest-chamber.  Mrs. Peter kept guard outside, while her
husband first made a hurried and successful search for the keys,
and then plunged at the portmanteau with the air of a
disagreeably conscientious Customs official.  The quest was
a brief one; a silver cream jug lay embedded in the folds of some
zephyr shirts.

“The cunning brute,” said Mrs. Peters; “he
took a cream jug because there were so many; he thought one
wouldn’t be missed.  Quick, fly down with it and put
it back among the others.”

Wilfrid was late in coming down to breakfast, and his manner
showed plainly that something was amiss.

“It’s an unpleasant thing to have to say,”
he blurted out presently, “but I’m afraid you must
have a thief among your servants.  Something’s been
taken out of my portmanteau.  It was a little present from
my mother and myself for your silver wedding.  I should have
given it to you last night after dinner, only it happened to be a
cream jug, and you seemed annoyed at having so many duplicates,
so I felt rather awkward about giving you another.  I
thought I’d get it changed for something else, and now
it’s gone.”

“Did you say it was from your mother and
yourself?” asked Mr. and Mrs. Peter almost in unison. 
The Snatcher had been an orphan these many years.

“Yes, my mother’s at Cairo just now, and she wrote
to me at Dresden to try and get you something quaint and pretty
in the old silver line, and I pitched on this cream
jug.”

Both the Pigeoncotes had turned deadly pale.  The mention
of Dresden had thrown a sudden light on the situation.  It
was Wilfrid the Attache, a very superior young man, who rarely
came within their social horizon, whom they had been entertaining
unawares in the supposed character of Wilfrid the Snatcher. 
Lady Ernestine Pigeoncote, his mother, moved in circles which
were entirely beyond their compass or ambitions, and the son
would probably one day be an Ambassador.  And they had
rifled and despoiled his portmanteau!  Husband and wife
looked blankly and desperately at one another.  It was Mrs.
Peter who arrived first at an inspiration.

“How dreadful to think there are thieves in the
house!  We keep the drawing-room locked up at night, of
course, but anything might be carried off while we are at
breakfast.”

She rose and went out hurriedly, as though to assure herself
that the drawing-room was not being stripped of its silverware,
and returned a moment later, bearing a cream jug in her
hands.

“There are eight cream jugs now, instead of
seven,” she cried; “this one wasn’t there
before.  What a curious trick of memory, Mr. Wilfrid! 
You must have slipped downstairs with it last night and put it
there before we locked up, and forgotten all about having done it
in the morning.”

“One’s mind often plays one little tricks like
that,” said Mr. Peter, with desperate heartiness. 
“Only the other day I went into the town to pay a bill, and
went in again next day, having clean forgotten that
I’d—”

“It is certainly the jug I bought for you,” said
Wilfrid, looking closely at it; “it was in my portmanteau
when I got my bath-robe out this morning, before going to my
bath, and it was not there when I unlocked the portmanteau on my
return.  Some one had taken it while I was away from the
room.”

The Pigeoncotes had turned paler than ever.  Mrs. Peter
had a final inspiration.

“Get me my smelling-salts, dear,” she said to her
husband; “I think they’re in the
dressing-room.”

Peter dashed out of the room with glad relief; he had lived so
long during the last few minutes that a golden wedding seemed
within measurable distance.

Mrs. Peter turned to her guest with confidential coyness.

“A diplomat like you will know how to treat this as if
it hadn’t happened.  Peter’s little weakness; it
runs in the family.”

“Good Lord!  Do you mean to say he’s a
kleptomaniac, like Cousin Snatcher?”

“Oh, not exactly,” said Mrs. Peter, anxious to
whitewash her husband a little greyer than she was painting
him.  “He would never touch anything he found lying
about, but he can’t resist making a raid on things that are
locked up.  The doctors have a special name for it.  He
must have pounced on your portmanteau the moment you went to your
bath, and taken the first thing he came across.  Of course,
he had no motive for taking a cream jug; we’ve already got
seven, as you know—not, of course, that we
don’t value the kind of gift you and your mother—hush
here’s Peter coming.”

Mrs. Peter broke off in some confusion, and tripped out to
meet her husband in the hall.

“It’s all right,” she whispered to him;
“I’ve explained everything.  Don’t say
anything more about it.”

“Brave little woman,” said Peter, with a gasp of
relief; “I could never have done it.”

* * * * *

Diplomatic reticence does not necessarily extend to family
affairs.  Peter Pigeoncote was never able to understand why
Mrs. Consuelo van Bullyon, who stayed with them in the spring,
always carried two very obvious jewel-cases with her to the
bath-room, explaining them to any one she chanced to meet in the
corridor as her manicure and face-massage set.

p. 237THE
OCCASIONAL GARDEN

“Don’t talk to me about town gardens,” said
Elinor Rapsley; “which means, of course, that I want you to
listen to me for an hour or so while I talk about nothing
else.  ‘What a nice-sized garden you’ve
got,’ people said to us when we first moved here. 
What I suppose they meant to say was what a nice-sized site for a
garden we’d got.  As a matter of fact, the size is all
against it; it’s too large to be ignored altogether and
treated as a yard, and it’s too small to keep giraffes
in.  You see, if we could keep giraffes or reindeer or some
other species of browsing animal there we could explain the
general absence of vegetation by a reference to the fauna of the
garden: ‘You can’t have wapiti and Darwin
tulips, you know, so we didn’t put down any bulbs last
year.’  As it is, we haven’t got the wapiti, and
the Darwin tulips haven’t survived the fact that most of
the cats of the neighbourhood hold a parliament in the centre of
the tulip bed; that rather forlorn looking strip that we intended
to be a border of alternating geranium and spiræa has been
utilised by the cat-parliament as a division lobby.  Snap
divisions seem to have been rather frequent of late, far more
frequent than the geranium blooms are likely to be.  I
shouldn’t object so much to ordinary cats, but I do
complain of having a congress of vegetarian cats in my garden;
they must be vegetarians, my dear, because, whatever ravages they
may commit among the sweet pea seedlings, they never seem to
touch the sparrows; there are always just as many adult sparrows
in the garden on Saturday as there were on Monday, not to mention
newly-fledged additions.  There seems to have been an
irreconcilable difference of opinion between sparrows and
Providence since the beginning of time as to whether a crocus
looks best standing upright with its roots in the earth or in a
recumbent posture with its stem neatly severed; the sparrows
always have the last word in the matter, at least in our garden
they do.  I fancy that Providence must have originally
intended to bring in an amending Act, or whatever it’s
called, providing either for a less destructive sparrow or a more
indestructible crocus.  The one consoling point about our
garden is that it’s not visible from the drawing-room or
the smoking-room, so unless people are dinning or lunching with
us they can’t spy out the nakedness of the land.  That
is why I am so furious with Gwenda Pottingdon, who has
practically forced herself on me for lunch on Wednesday next; she
heard me offer the Paulcote girl lunch if she was up shopping on
that day, and, of course, she asked if she might come too. 
She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless
borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably
over-cultivated garden.  I’m sick of being told that
it’s the envy of the neighbourhood; it’s like
everything else that belongs to her—her car, her
dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no
one else ever had anything like them.  When her eldest child
was confirmed it was such a sensational event, according to her
account of it, that one almost expected questions to be asked
about it in the House of Commons, and now she’s coming on
purpose to stare at my few miserable pansies and the gaps in my
sweet-pea border, and to give me a glowing, full-length
description of the rare and sumptuous blooms in her
rose-garden.”

“My dear Elinor,” said the Baroness, “you
would save yourself all this heart-burning and a lot of
gardener’s bills, not to mention sparrow anxieties, simply
by paying an annual subscription to the O.O.S.A.”

“Never heard of it,” said Elinor; “what is
it?”

“The Occasional-Oasis Supply Association,” said
the Baroness; “it exists to meet cases exactly like yours,
cases of backyards that are of no practical use for gardening
purposes, but are required to blossom into decorative scenic
backgrounds at stated intervals, when a luncheon or dinner-party
is contemplated.  Supposing, for instance, you have people
coming to lunch at one-thirty; you just ring up the Association
at about ten o’clock the same morning, and say ‘lunch
garden’.  That is all the trouble you have to
take.  By twelve forty-five your yard is carpeted with a
strip of velvety turf, with a hedge of lilac or red may, or
whatever happens to be in season, as a background, one or two
cherry trees in blossom, and clumps of heavily-flowered
rhododendrons filling in the odd corners; in the foreground you
have a blaze of carnations or Shirley poppies, or tiger lilies in
full bloom.  As soon as the lunch is over and your guests
have departed the garden departs also, and all the cats in
Christendom can sit in council in your yard without causing you a
moment’s anxiety.  If you have a bishop or an
antiquary or something of that sort coming to lunch you just
mention the fact when you are ordering the garden, and you get an
old-world pleasaunce, with clipped yew hedges and a sun-dial and
hollyhocks, and perhaps a mulberry tree, and borders of
sweet-williams and Canterbury bells, and an old-fashioned beehive
or two tucked away in a corner.  Those are the ordinary
lines of supply that the Oasis Association undertakes, but by
paying a few guineas a year extra you are entitled to its
emergency E.O.N. service.”

“What on earth is an E.O.N. service?”

“It’s just a conventional signal to indicate
special cases like the incursion of Gwenda Pottingdon.  It
means you’ve got some one coming to lunch or dinner whose
garden is alleged to be ‘the envy of the
neighbourhood.’”

“Yes,” exclaimed Elinor, with some excitement,
“and what happens then?”

“Something that sounds like a miracle out of the Arabian
Nights.  Your backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate
and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus,
dazzling banks of azaleas, marble-basined fountains, in which
chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic
water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster
terraces.  The whole effect rather suggests the idea that
Providence and Norman Wilkinson have dropped mutual jealousies
and collaborated to produce a background for an open-air Russian
Ballet; in point of fact, it is merely the background to your
luncheon party.  If there is any kick left in Gwenda
Pottingdon, or whoever your E.O.N. guest of the moment may be,
just mention carelessly that your climbing putella is the only
one in England, since the one at Chatsworth died last
winter.  There isn’t such a thing as a climbing
putella, but Gwenda Pottingdon and her kind don’t usually
know one flower from another without prompting.”

“Quick,” said Elinor, “the address of the
Association.”

Gwenda Pottingdon did not enjoy her lunch.  It was a
simple yet elegant meal, excellently cooked and daintily served,
but the piquant sauce of her own conversation was notably
lacking.  She had prepared a long succession of eulogistic
comments on the wonders of her town garden, with its unrivalled
effects of horticultural magnificence, and, behold, her theme was
shut in on every side by the luxuriant hedge of Siberian berberis
that formed a glowing background to Elinor’s bewildering
fragment of fairyland.  The pomegranate and lemon trees, the
terraced fountain, where golden carp slithered and wriggled amid
the roots of gorgeous-hued irises, the banked masses of exotic
blooms, the pagoda-like enclosure, where Japanese sand-badgers
disported themselves, all these contributed to take away
Gwenda’s appetite and moderate her desire to talk about
gardening matters.

“I can’t say I admire the climbing putella,”
she observed shortly, “and anyway it’s not the only
one of its kind in England; I happen to know of one in
Hampshire.  How gardening is going out of fashion; I suppose
people haven’t the time for it nowadays.”

Altogether it was quite one of Elinor’s most successful
luncheon parties.

It was distinctly an unforeseen catastrophe that Gwenda should
have burst in on the household four days later at lunch-time and
made her way unbidden into the dining-room.

“I thought I must tell you that my Elaine has had a
water-colour sketch accepted by the Latent Talent Art Guild;
it’s to be exhibited at their summer exhibition at the
Hackney Gallery.  It will be the sensation of the moment in
the art world—Hullo, what on earth has happened to your
garden?  It’s not there!”

“Suffragettes,” said Elinor promptly;
“didn’t you hear about it?  They broke in and
made hay of the whole thing in about ten minutes.  I was so
heart-broken at the havoc that I had the whole place cleared out;
I shall have it laid out again on rather more elaborate
lines.”

“That,” she said to the Baroness afterwards
“is what I call having an emergency brain.”

p. 245THE
SHEEP

The enemy had declared “no trumps.”  Rupert
played out his ace and king of clubs and cleared the adversary of
that suit; then the Sheep, whom the Fates had inflicted on him
for a partner, took the third round with the queen of clubs, and,
having no other club to lead back, opened another suit.  The
enemy won the remainder of the tricks—and the rubber.

“I had four more clubs to play; we only wanted the odd
trick to win the rubber,” said Rupert.

“But I hadn’t another club to lead you,”
exclaimed the Sheep, with his ready, defensive smile.

“It didn’t occur to you to throw your queen away
on my king and leave me with the command of the suit,” said
Rupert, with polite bitterness.

“I suppose I ought to have—I wasn’t certain
what to do.  I’m awfully sorry,” said the
Sheep.

Being awfully and uselessly sorry formed a large part of his
occupation in life.  If a similar situation had arisen in a
subsequent hand he would have blundered just as certainly, and he
would have been just as irritatingly apologetic.

Rupert stared gloomily across at him as he sat smiling and
fumbling with his cards.  Many men who have good brains for
business do not possess the rudiments of a card-brain, and Rupert
would not have judged and condemned his prospective
brother-in-law on the evidence of his bridge play alone. 
The tragic part of it was that he smiled and fumbled through life
just as fatuously and apologetically as he did at the
card-table.  And behind the defensive smile and the
well-worn expressions of regret there shone a scarcely believable
but quite obvious self-satisfaction.  Every sheep of the
pasture probably imagines that in an emergency it could become
terrible as an army with banners—one has only to watch how
they stamp their feet and stiffen their necks when a minor object
of suspicion comes into view and behaves meekly.  And
probably the majority of human sheep see themselves in
imagination taking great parts in the world’s more
impressive dramas, forming swift, unerring decisions in moments
of crisis, cowing mutinies, allaying panics, brave, strong,
simple, but, in spite of their natural modesty, always slightly
spectacular.

“Why in the name of all that is unnecessary and perverse
should Kathleen choose this man for her future husband?”
was the question that Rupert asked himself ruefully.  There
was young Malcolm Athling, as nice-looking, decent, level-headed
a fellow as any one could wish to meet, obviously her very
devoted admirer, and yet she must throw herself away on this
pale-eyed, weak-mouthed embodiment of self-approving
ineptitude.  If it had been merely Kathleen’s own
affair Rupert would have shrugged his shoulders and
philosophically hoped that she might make the best of an
undeniably bad bargain.  But Rupert had no heir; his own boy
lay underground somewhere on the Indian frontier, in goodly
company.  And the property would pass in due course to
Kathleen and Kathleen’s husband.  The Sheep would live
there in the beloved old home, rearing up other little Sheep,
fatuous and rabbit-faced and self-satisfied like himself, to
dwell in the land and possess it.  It was not a soothing
prospect.

Towards dusk on the afternoon following the bridge experience
Rupert and the Sheep made their way homeward after a day’s
mixed shooting.  The Sheep’s cartridge bag was nearly
empty, but his game bag showed no signs of over-crowding. 
The birds he had shot at had seemed for the most part as
impervious to death or damage as the hero of a melodrama. 
And for each failure to drop his bird he had some explanation or
apology ready on his lips.  Now he was striding along in
front of his host, chattering happily over his shoulder, but
obviously on the look-out for some belated rabbit or woodpigeon
that might haply be secured as an eleventh-hour addition to his
bag.  As they passed the edge of a small copse a large bird
rose from the ground and flew slowly towards the trees, offering
an easy shot to the oncoming sportsmen.  The Sheep banged
forth with both barrels, and gave an exultant cry.

“Horray!  I’ve shot a thundering big
hawk!”

“To be exact, you’ve shot a honey-buzzard. 
That is the hen bird of one of the few pairs of honey-buzzards
breeding in the United Kingdom.  We’ve kept them under
the strictest preservation for the last four years; every
game-keeper and village gun loafer for twenty miles round has
been warned and bribed and threatened to respect their sanctity,
and egg-snatching agents have been carefully guarded against
during the breeding season.  Hundreds of lovers of rare
birds have delighted in seeing their snap-shotted portraits in
Country Life, and now you’ve reduced the hen bird to
a lump of broken feathers.”

Rupert spoke quietly and evenly, but for a moment or two a
gleam of positive hatred shone in his eyes.

“I say, I’m so sorry,” said the Sheep, with
his apologetic smile.  “Of course I remember hearing
about the buzzards, but somehow I didn’t connect this bird
with them.  And it was such an east shot—”

“Yes,” said Rupert; “that was the
trouble.”

Kathleen found him in the gun-room smoothing out the feathers
of the dead bird.  She had already been told of the
catastrophe.

“What a horrid misfortune,” she said
sympathetically.

“It was my dear Robbie who first discovered them, the
last time he was home on leave.  Don’t you remember
how excited he was about them?  Let’s go and have some
tea.”

Both bridge and shooting were given a rest for the next two or
three weeks.  Death, who enters into no compacts with party
whips, had forced a Parliamentary vacancy on the neighbourhood at
the least convenient season, and the local partisans on either
side found themselves immersed in the discomforts of a mid-winter
election.  Rupert took his politics seriously and
keenly.  He belonged to that type of strangely but rather
happily constituted individuals which these islands seem to
produce in a fair plenty; men and women who for no personal
profit or gain go forth from their comfortable firesides or club
card-rooms to hunt to and fro in the mud and rain and wind for
the capture or tracking of a stray vote here and there on their
party’s behalf—not because they think they ought to,
but because they want to.  And his energies were welcome
enough on this occasion, for the seat was a closely disputed
possession, and its loss or retention would count for much in the
present position of the Parliamentary game.  With Kathleen
to help him, he had worked his corner of the constituency with
tireless, well-directed zeal, taking his share of the dull
routine work as well as of the livelier episodes.  The
talking part of the campaign wound up on the eve of the poll with
a meeting in a centre where more undecided votes were supposed to
be concentrated than anywhere else in the division.  A good
final meeting here would mean everything.  And the speakers,
local and imported, left nothing undone to improve the
occasion.  Rupert was down for the unimportant task of
moving the complimentary vote to the chairman which should close
the proceedings.

“I’m so hoarse,” he protested, when the
moment arrived; “I don’t believe I can make my voice
heard beyond the platform.”

“Let me do it,” said the Sheep; “I’m
rather good at that sort of thing.”

The chairman was popular with all parties, and the
Sheep’s opening words of complimentary recognition received
a round of applause.  The orator smiled expansively on his
listeners and seized the opportunity to add a few words of
political wisdom on his own account.  People looked at the
clock or began to grope for umbrellas and discarded
neckwraps.  Then, in the midst of a string of meaningless
platitudes, the Sheep delivered himself of one of those
blundering remarks which travel from one end of a constituency to
the other in half an hour, and are seized on by the other side as
being more potent on their behalf than a ton of election
literature.  There was a general shuffling and muttering
across the length and breadth of the hall, and a few hisses made
themselves heard.  The Sheep tried to whittle down his
remark, and the chairman unhesitatingly threw him over in his
speech of thanks, but the damage was done.

“I’m afraid I lost touch with the audience rather
over that remark,” said the Sheep afterwards, with his
apologetic smile abnormally developed.

“You lost us the election,” said the chairman, and
he proved a true prophet.

A month or so of winter sport seemed a desirable pick-me-up
after the strenuous work and crowning discomfiture of the
election.  Rupert and Kathleen hied them away to a small
Alpine resort that was just coming into prominence, and thither
the Sheep followed them in due course, in his role of
husband-elect.  The wedding had been fixed for the end of
March.

It was a winter of early and unseasonable thaws, and the far
end of the local lake, at a spot where swift currents flowed into
it, was decorated with notices, written in three languages,
warning skaters not to venture over certain unsafe patches. 
The folly of approaching too near these danger spots seemed to
have a natural fascination for the Sheep.

“I don’t see what possible danger there can
be,” he protested, with his inevitable smile, when Rupert
beckoned him away from the proscribed area; “the milk that
I put out on my window-sill last night was frozen an inch
deep.”

“It hadn’t got a strong current flowing through
it,” said Rupert; “in any case, there is not much
sense in hovering round a doubtful piece of ice when there are
acres of good ice to skate over.  The secretary of the
ice-committee has warned you once already.”

A few minutes later Rupert heard a loud squeal of fear, and
saw a dark spot blotting the smoothness of the lake’s
frozen surface.  The Sheep was struggling helplessly in an
ice-hole of his own making.  Rupert gave one loud curse, and
then dashed full tilt for the shore; outside a low stable
building on the lake’s edge he remembered having seen a
ladder.  If he could slide it across the ice-hole before the
Sheep went under the rescue would be comparatively simple
work.  Other skaters were dashing up from a distance, and,
with the ladder’s help, they could get him out of his
death-trap without having to trust themselves on the margin of
rotten ice.  Rupert sprang on to the surface of lumpy,
frozen snow, and staggered to where the ladder lay.  He had
already lifted it when the rattle of a chain and a furious
outburst of growls burst on his hearing, and he was dashed to the
ground by a mass of white and tawny fur.  A sturdy young
yard-dog, frantic with the pleasure of performing his first piece
of active guardian service, was ramping and snarling over him,
rendering the task of regaining his feet or securing the ladder a
matter of considerable difficulty.  When he had at last
succeeded in both efforts he was just by a hair’s-breadth
too late to be of any use.  The Sheep had definitely
disappeared under the ice-rift.

Kathleen Athling and her husband stay the greater part of the
year with Rupert, and a small Robbie stands in some danger of
being idolised by a devoted uncle.  But for twelve months of
the year Rupert’s most inseparable and valued companion is
a sturdy tawny and white yard-dog.

p. 255THE
OVERSIGHT

“It’s like a Chinese puzzle,” said Lady
Prowche resentfully, staring at a scribbled list of names that
spread over two or three loose sheets of notepaper on her
writing-table.  Most of the names had a pencil mark running
through them.

“What is like a Chinese puzzle?” asked Lena
Luddleford briskly; she rather prided herself on being able to
grapple with the minor problems of life.

“Getting people suitably sorted together.  Sir
Richard likes me to have a house party about this time of year,
and gives me a free hand as to whom I should invite; all he asks
is that it should be a peaceable party, with no friction or
unpleasantness.”

“That seems reasonable enough,” said Lena.

“Not only reasonable, my dear, but necessary.  Sir
Richard has his literary work to think of; you can’t expect
a man to concentrate on the tribal disputes of Central Asian
clansmen when he’s got social feuds blazing under his own
roof.”

“But why should they blaze?  Why should there be
feuds at all within the compass of a house party?”

“Exactly; why should they blaze or why should they
exist?” echoed Lady Prowche; “the point is that they
always do.  We have been unlucky; persistently unlucky, now
that I come to look back on things.  We have always got
people of violently opposed views under one roof, and the result
has been not merely unpleasantness but explosion.”

“Do you mean people who disagree on matters of political
opinion and religious views?” asked Lena.

“No, not that.  The broader lines of political or
religious difference don’t matter.  You can have
Church of England and Unitarian and Buddhist under the same roof
without courting disaster; the only Buddhist I ever had down here
quarrelled with everybody, but that was on account of his
naturally squabblesome temperament; it had nothing to do with his
religion.  And I’ve always found that people can
differ profoundly about politics and meet on perfectly good terms
at breakfast.  Now, Miss Larbor Jones, who was staying here
last year, worships Lloyd George as a sort of wingless angel,
while Mrs. Walters, who was down here at the same time, privately
considers him to be—an antelope, let us say.”

“An antelope?”

“Well, not an antelope exactly, but something with horns
and hoofs and tail.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Still, that didn’t prevent them from being the
chummiest of mortals on the tennis court and in the
billiard-room.  They did quarrel finally, about a lead in a
doubled hand of no-trumps, but that of course is a thing that no
account of judicious guest-grouping could prevent.  Mrs.
Walters had got king, knave, ten, and seven of
clubs—”

“You were saying that there were other lines of
demarcation that caused the bother,” interrupted Lena.

“Exactly.  It is the minor differences and
side-issues that give so much trouble,” said Lady Prowche;
“not to my dying day shall I forget last year’s
upheaval over the Suffragette question.  Laura Henniseed
left the house in a state of speechless indignation, but before
she had reached that state she had used language that would not
have been tolerated in the Austrian Reichsrath.  Intensive
bear-gardening was Sir Richard’s description of the whole
affair, and I don’t think he exaggerated.”

“Of course the Suffragette question is a burning one,
and lets loose the most dreadful ill-feeling,” said Lena;
“but one can generally find out beforehand what
people’s opinions—”

“My dear, the year before it was worse.  It was
Christian Science.  Selina Goobie is a sort of High
Priestess of the Cult, and she put down all opposition with a
high hand.  Then one evening, after dinner, Clovis Sangrail
put a wasp down her back, to see if her theory about the
non-existence of pain could be depended on in an emergency. 
The wasp was small, but very efficient, and it had been soured in
temper by being kept in a paper cage all the afternoon. 
Wasps don’t stand confinement well, at least this one
didn’t.  I don’t think I ever realised till that
moment what the word ‘invective’ could be made to
mean.  I sometimes wake in the night and think I still hear
Selina describing Clovis’s conduct and general
character.  That was the year that Sir Richard was writing
his volume on ‘Domestic Life in Tartary.’  The
critics all blamed it for a lack of concentration.”

“He’s engaged on a very important work this year,
isn’t he?” asked Lena.

“‘Land-tenure in Turkestan,’” said
Lady Prowche; “he is just at work on the final chapters and
they require all the concentration he can give them.  That
is why I am so very anxious not to have any unfortunate
disturbance this year.  I have taken every precaution I can
think of to bring non-conflicting and harmonious elements
together; the only two people I am not quite easy about are the
Atkinson man and Marcus Popham.  They are the two who will
be down here longest together, and if they are going to fall foul
of one another about any burning question, well, there will be
more unpleasantness.”

“Can’t you find out anything about them? 
About their opinions, I mean.”

“Anything?  My dear Lena, there’s scarcely
anything that I haven’t found out about them. 
They’re both of them moderate Liberal, Evangelical, mildly
opposed to female suffrage, they approve of the Falconer Report,
and the Stewards’ decision about Craganour.  Thank
goodness in this country we don’t fly into violent passions
about Wagner and Brahms and things of that sort.  There is
only one thorny subject that I haven’t been able to make
sure about, the only stone that I have left unturned.  Are
they unanimously anti-vivisectionist or do they both uphold the
necessity for scientific experiment?  There has been a lot
of correspondence on the subject in our local newspapers of late,
and the vicar is certain to preach a sermon about it; vicars are
dreadfully provocative at times.  Now, if you could only
find out for me whether these two men are divergently for or
against—”

“I!” exclaimed Lena; “how am I to find
out?  I don’t know either of them to speak
to.”

“Still you might discover, in some roundabout way. 
Write to them, under as assumed name of course, for subscriptions
to one or other cause—or, better still, send a stamped
type-written reply postcard, with a request for a declaration for
or against vivisection; people who would hesitate to commit
themselves to a subscription will cheerfully write Yes or No on a
prepaid postcard.  If you can’t manage it that way,
try and meet them at some one’s house and get into argument
on the subject.  I think Milly occasionally has one or other
of them at her at-homes; you might have the luck to meet both of
them there the same evening.  Only it must be done
soon.  My invitations ought to go out by Wednesday or
Thursday at the latest, and to-day is Friday.

“Milly’s at-homes are not very amusing, as a
rule,” said Lena, “and one never gets a chance of
talking uninterruptedly to any one for a couple of minutes at a
time; Milly is one of those restless hostesses who always seem to
be trying to see how you look in different parts of the room, in
fresh grouping effects.  Even if I got to speak to Popham or
Atkinson I couldn’t plunge into a topic like vivisection
straight away.  No, I think the postcard scheme would be
more hopeful and decidedly less tiresome.  How would it be
best to word them?”

“Oh, something like this: ‘Are you in favour of
experiments on living animals for the purpose of scientific
research—Yes or No?’  That is quite simple and
unmistakable.  If they don’t answer it will at least
be an indication that they are indifferent about the subject, and
that is all I want to know.”

“All right,” said Lena, “I’ll get my
brother-in-law to let me have them addressed to his office, and
he can telephone the result of the plebiscite direct to
you.”

“Thank you ever so much,” said Lady Prowche
gratefully, “and be sure to get the cards sent off as soon
as possible.”

On the following Tuesday the voice of an office clerk,
speaking through the telephone, informed Lady Prowche that the
postcard poll showed unanimous hostility to experiments on living
animals.

Lady Prowche thanked the office clerk, and in a louder and
more fervent voice she thanked Heaven.  The two invitations,
already sealed and addressed, were immediately dispatched; in due
course they were both accepted.  The house party of the
halcyon hours, as the prospective hostess called it, was
auspiciously launched.

Lena Luddleford was not included among the guests, having
previously committed herself to another invitation.  At the
opening day of a cricket festival, however, she ran across Lady
Prowche, who had motored over from the other side of the
county.  She wore the air of one who is not interested in
cricket and not particularly interested in life.  She shook
hands limply with Lena, and remarked that it was a beastly
day.

“The party, how has it gone off?” asked Lena
quickly.

“Don’t speak of it!” was the tragical
answer; “why do I always have such rotten luck?”

“But what has happened?”

“It has been awful.  Hyænas could not have
behaved with greater savagery.  Sir Richard said so, and he
has been in countries where hyænas live, so he ought to
know.  They actually came to blows!”

“Blows?”

“Blows and curses.  It really might have been a
scene from one of Hogarth’s pictures.  I never felt so
humiliated in my life.  What the servants must have
thought!”

“But who were the offenders?”

“Oh, naturally the very two that we took all the trouble
about.”

“I thought they agreed on every subject that one could
violently disagree about—religion, politics, vivisection,
the Derby decision, the Falconer Report; what else was there left
to quarrel about?”

“My dear, we were fools not to have thought of it. 
One of them was Pro-Greek and the other Pro-Bulgar.”

p.
265HYACINTH

“The new fashion of introducing the candidate’s
children into an election contest is a pretty one,” said
Mrs. Panstreppon; “it takes away something from the
acerbity of party warfare, and it makes an interesting experience
for children to look back on in after years.  Still, if you
will listen to my advice, Matilda, you will not take Hyacinth
with you down to Luffbridge on election day.”

“Not take Hyacinth!” exclaimed his mother;
“but why not?  Jutterly is bringing his three
children, and they are going to drive a pair of Nubian donkeys
about the town, to emphasise the fact that their father has been
appointed Colonial Secretary.  We are making the demand for
a strong Navy a special feature in our campaign, and it
will be particularly appropriate to have Hyacinth dressed in his
sailor suit.  He’ll look heavenly.”

“The question is, not how he’ll look, but how
he’ll behave.  He’s a delightful child, of
course, but there is a strain of unbridled pugnacity in him that
breaks out at times in a really alarming fashion.  You may
have forgotten the affair of the little Gaffin children; I
haven’t.”

“I was in India at the time, and I’ve only a vague
recollection of what happened; he was very naughty, I
know.”

“He was in his goat-carriage, and met the Gaffins in
their perambulator, and he drove the goat full tilt at them and
sent the perambulator spinning.  Little Jacky Gaffin was
pinned down under the wreckage, and while the nurse had her hands
full with the goat Hyacinth was laying into Jacky’s legs
with his belt like a small fury.”

“I’m not defending him,” said Matilda,
“but they must have done something to annoy him.”

“Nothing intentionally, but some one had unfortunately
told him that they were half French—their mother was a
Duboc, you know—and he had been having a history lesson
that morning, and had just heard of the final loss of Calais by
the English, and was furious about it.  He said he’d
teach the little toads to go snatching towns from us, but we
didn’t know at the time that he was referring to the
Gaffins.  I told him afterwards that all bad feeling between
the two nations had died out long ago, and that anyhow the
Gaffins were only half French, and he said that it was only the
French half of Jacky that he had been hitting; the rest had been
buried under the perambulator.  If the loss of Calais
unloosed such fury in him, I tremble to think what the possible
loss of the election might entail.”

“All that happened when he was eight; he’s older
now and knows better.”

“Children with Hyacinth’s temperament don’t
know better as they grow older; they merely know more.”

“Nonsense.  He will enjoy the fun of the election,
and in any case he’ll be tired out by the time the poll is
declared, and the new sailor suit that I’ve had made for
him is just in the right shade of blue for our election colours,
and it will exactly match the blue of his eyes.  He will be
a perfectly charming note of colour.”

“There is such a thing as letting one’s
æsthetic sense override one’s moral sense,”
said Mrs. Panstreppon.  “I believe you would have
condoned the South Sea Bubble and the persecution of the
Albigenses if they had been carried out in effective colour
schemes.  However, if anything unfortunate should happen
down at Luffbridge, don’t say it wasn’t foreseen by
one member of the family.”

The election was keenly but decorously contested.  The
newly-appointed Colonial Secretary was personally popular, while
the Government to which he adhered was distinctly unpopular, and
there was some expectancy that the majority of four hundred,
obtained at the last election, would be altogether wiped
out.  Both sides were hopeful, but neither could feel
confident.  The children were a great success; the little
Jutterlys drove their chubby donkeys solemnly up and down the
main streets, displaying posters which advocated the claims of
their father on the broad general grounds that he was their
father, while as for Hyacinth, his conduct might have served as a
model for any seraph-child that had strayed unwittingly on to the
scene of an electoral contest.  Of his own accord, and under
the delighted eyes of half a dozen camera operators, he had gone
up to the Jutterly children and presented them with a packet of
butterscotch; “we needn’t be enemies because
we’re wearing the opposite colours,” he said with
engaging friendliness, and the occupants of the donkey-cart
accepted his offering with polite solemnity.  The grown-up
members of both political camps were delighted at the
incident—with the exception of Mrs. Panstreppon, who
shuddered.

“Never was Clytemnestra’s kiss sweeter than on the
night she slew me,” she quoted, but made the quotation to
herself.

The last hour of the poll was a period of unremitting labour
for both parties; it was generally estimated that not more than a
dozen votes separated the candidates, and every effort was made
to bring up obstinately wavering electors.  It was with a
feeling of relaxation and relief that every one heard the clocks
strike the hour for the close of the poll.  Exclamations
broke out from the tired workers, and corks flew out from
bottles.

“Well, if we haven’t won; we’ve done our
level best.”  “It has been a clean straight
fight, with no rancour.”  “The children were
quite a charming feature, weren’t they?”

The children?  It suddenly occurred to everybody that
they had seen nothing of the children for the last hour. 
What had become of the three little Jutterlys and their
donkey-cart, and, for the matter of that, what had become of
Hyacinth.  Hurried, anxious embassies went backwards and
forwards between the respective party headquarters and the
various committee-rooms, but there was blank ignorance everywhere
as to the whereabouts of the children.  Every one had been
too busy in the closing moments of the poll to bestow a thought
on them.  Then there came a telephone call at the Unionist
Women’s Committee-rooms, and the voice of Hyacinth was
heard demanding when the poll would be declared.

“Where are you, and where are the Jutterly
children?” asked his mother.

“I’ve just finished having high-tea at a
pastry-cook’s,” came the answer, “and they let
me telephone.  I’ve had a poached egg and a sausage
roll and four meringues.”

“You’ll be ill.  Are the little Jutterlys
with you?”

“Rather not.  They’re in a
pigstye.”

“A pigstye?  Why?  What pigstye?”

“Near the Crawleigh Road.  I met them driving about
a back road, and told them they were to have tea with me, and put
their donkeys in a yard that I knew of.  Then I took them to
see an old sow that had got ten little pigs.  I got the sow
into the outer stye by giving her bits of bread, while the
Jutterlys went in to look at the litter, then I bolted the door
and left them there.”

“You wicked boy, do you mean to say you’ve left
those poor children there alone in the pigstye?”

“They’re not alone, they’ve got ten little
pigs in with them; they’re jolly well crowded.  They
were pretty mad at being shut in, but not half as mad as the old
sow is at being shut out from her young ones.  If she gets
in while they’re there she’ll bite them into
mincemeat.  I can get them out by letting a short ladder
down through the top window, and that’s what I’m
going to do if we win.  If their blighted father gets
in, I’m just going to open the door for the sow, and let
her do what she dashed well likes to them.  That’s why
I want to know when the poll will be declared.”

Here the narrator rang off.  A wild stampede and a
frantic sending-off of messengers took place at the other end of
the telephone.  Nearly all the workers on either side had
disappeared to their various club-rooms and public-house bars to
await the declaration of the poll, but enough local information
could be secured to determine the scene of Hyacinth’s
exploit.  Mr. John Ball had a stable yard down near the
Crawleigh Road, up a short lane, and his sow was known to have a
litter of ten young ones.  Thither went in headlong haste
both the candidates, Hyacinth’s mother, his aunt (Mrs.
Panstreppon), and two or three hurriedly-summoned friends. 
The two Nubian donkeys, contentedly munching at bundles of hay,
met their gaze as they entered the yard.  The hoarse savage
grunting of an enraged animal and the shriller note of thirteen
young voices, three of them human, guided them to the stye, in
the outer yard of which a huge Yorkshire sow kept up a ceaseless
raging patrol before a closed door.  Reclining on the broad
ledge of an open window, from which point of vantage he could
reach down and shoot the bolt of the door, was Hyacinth, his blue
sailor-suit somewhat the worse of wear, and his angel smile
exchanged for a look of demoniacal determination.

“If any of you come a step nearer,” he shouted,
“the sow will be inside in half a jiffy.”

A storm of threatening, arguing, entreating expostulation
broke from the baffled rescue party, but it made no more
impression on Hyacinth than the squealing tempest that raged
within the stye.

“If Jutterly heads the poll I’m going to let the
sow in.  I’ll teach the blighters to win elections
from us.”

“He means it,” said Mrs. Panstreppon; “I
feared the worst when I saw that butterscotch
incident.”

“It’s all right, my little man,” said
Jutterly, with the duplicity to which even a Colonial Secretary
can sometimes stoop, “your father has been elected by a
large majority.”

“Liar!” retorted Hyacinth, with the directness of
speech that is not merely excusable, but almost obligatory, in
the political profession; “the votes aren’t counted
yet.  You won’t gammon me as to the result,
either.  A boy that I’ve palled with is going to fire
a gun when the poll is declared; two shots if we’ve won,
one shot if we haven’t.”

The situation began to look critical.  “Drug the
sow,” whispered Hyacinth’s father.

Some one went off in the motor to the nearest chemist’s
shop and returned presently with two large pieces of bread,
liberally dosed with narcotic.  The bread was thrown deftly
and unostentatiously into the stye, but Hyacinth saw through the
manœuvre.  He set up a piercing imitation of a small
pig in Purgatory, and the infuriated mother ramped round and
round the stye; the pieces of bread were trampled into slush.

At any moment now the poll might be declared.  Jutterly
flew back to the Town Hall, where the votes were being
counted.  His agent met him with a smile of hope.

“You’re eleven ahead at present, and only about
eighty more to be counted; you’re just going to squeak
through.”

“I mustn’t squeak through,” exclaimed
Jutterly, hoarsely.  “You must object to every
doubtful vote on our side that can possibly be disallowed. 
I must not have the majority.”

Then was seen the unprecedented sight of a party agent
challenging the votes on his own side with a captiousness that
his opponents would have hesitated to display.  One or two
votes that would have certainly passed muster under ordinary
circumstances were disallowed, but even so Jutterly was six ahead
with only thirty more to be counted.

To the watchers by the stye the moments seemed
intolerable.  As a last resort some one had been sent for a
gun with which to shoot the sow, though Hyacinth would probably
draw the bolt the moment such a weapon was brought into the
yard.  Nearly all the men were away from their homes,
however, on election night, and the messenger had evidently gone
far afield in his search.  It must be a matter of minutes
now to the declaration of the poll.

A sudden roar of shouting and cheering was heard from the
direction of the Town Hall.  Hyacinth’s father
clutched a pitchfork and prepared to dash into the stye in the
forlorn hope of being in time.

A shot rang out in the evening air.  Hyacinth stooped
down from his perch and put his finger on the bolt.  The sow
pressed furiously against the door.

“Bang,” came another shot.

Hyacinth wriggled back, and sent a short ladder down through
the window of the inner stye.

“Now you can come up, you unclean little
blighters,” he sang out; “my daddy’s got in,
not yours.  Hurry up, I can’t keep the sow waiting
much longer.  And don’t you jolly well come butting
into any election again where I’m on the job.”

In the reaction that set in after the deliverance furious
recrimination were indulged in by the lately opposed candidates,
their women folk, agents, and party helpers.  A recount was
demanded, but failed to establish the fact that the Colonial
Secretary had obtained a majority.  Altogether the election
left a legacy of soreness behind it, apart from any that was
experienced by Hyacinth in person.

“It is the last time I shall let him go to an
election,” exclaimed his mother.

“There I think you are going to extremes,” said
Mrs. Panstreppon; “if there should be a general election in
Mexico I think you might safely let him go there, but I doubt
whether our English politics are suited to the rough and tumble
of an angel-child.”

p. 277THE
IMAGE OF THE LOST SOUL

There were a number of carved stone figures placed at
intervals along the parapets of the old Cathedral; some of them
represented angels, others kings and bishops, and nearly all were
in attitudes of pious exaltation and composure.  But one
figure, low down on the cold north side of the building, had
neither crown, mitre, not nimbus, and its face was hard and
bitter and downcast; it must be a demon, declared the fat blue
pigeons that roosted and sunned themselves all day on the ledges
of the parapet; but the old belfry jackdaw, who was an authority
on ecclesiastical architecture, said it was a lost soul. 
And there the matter rested.

One autumn day there fluttered on to the Cathedral roof a
slender, sweet-voiced bird that had wandered away from the bare
fields and thinning hedgerows in search of a winter
roosting-place.  It tried to rest its tired feet under the
shade of a great angel-wing or to nestle in the sculptured folds
of a kingly robe, but the fat pigeons hustled it away from
wherever it settled, and the noisy sparrow-folk drove it off the
ledges.  No respectable bird sang with so much feeling, they
cheeped one to another, and the wanderer had to move on.

Only the effigy of the Lost Soul offered a place of
refuge.  The pigeons did not consider it safe to perch on a
projection that leaned so much out of the perpendicular, and was,
besides, too much in the shadow.  The figure did not cross
its hands in the pious attitude of the other graven dignitaries,
but its arms were folded as in defiance and their angle made a
snug resting-place for the little bird.  Every evening it
crept trustfully into its corner against the stone breast of the
image, and the darkling eyes seemed to keep watch over its
slumbers.  The lonely bird grew to love its lonely
protector, and during the day it would sit from time to time on
some rainshoot or other abutment and trill forth its sweetest
music in grateful thanks for its nightly shelter.  And, it
may have been the work of wind and weather, or some other
influence, but the wild drawn face seemed gradually to lose some
of its hardness and unhappiness.  Every day, through the
long monotonous hours, the song of his little guest would come up
in snatches to the lonely watcher, and at evening, when the
vesper-bell was ringing and the great grey bats slid out of their
hiding-places in the belfry roof, the bright-eyed bird would
return, twitter a few sleepy notes, and nestle into the arms that
were waiting for him.  Those were happy days for the Dark
Image.  Only the great bell of the Cathedral rang out daily
its mocking message, “After joy . . . sorrow.”

The folk in the verger’s lodge noticed a little brown
bird flitting about the Cathedral precincts, and admired its
beautiful singing.  “But it is a pity,” said
they, “that all that warbling should be lost and wasted far
out of hearing up on the parapet.”  They were poor,
but they understood the principles of political economy.  So
they caught the bird and put it in a little wicker cage outside
the lodge door.

That night the little songster was missing from its accustomed
haunt, and the Dark Image knew more than ever the bitterness of
loneliness.  Perhaps his little friend had been killed by a
prowling cat or hurt by a stone.  Perhaps . . . perhaps he
had flown elsewhere.  But when morning came there floated up
to him, through the noise and bustle of the Cathedral world, a
faint heart-aching message from the prisoner in the wicker cage
far below.  And every day, at high noon, when the fat
pigeons were stupefied into silence after their midday meal and
the sparrows were washing themselves in the street-puddles, the
song of the little bird came up to the parapets—a song of
hunger and longing and hopelessness, a cry that could never be
answered.  The pigeons remarked, between mealtimes, that the
figure leaned forward more than ever out of the
perpendicular.

One day no song came up from the little wicker cage.  It
was the coldest day of the winter, and the pigeons and sparrows
on the Cathedral roof looked anxiously on all sides for the
scraps of food which they were dependent on in hard weather.

“Have the lodge-folk thrown out anything on to the
dust-heap?” inquired one pigeon of another which was
peering over the edge of the north parapet.

“Only a little dead bird,” was the answer.

There was a crackling sound in the night on the Cathedral roof
and a noise as of falling masonry.  The belfry jackdaw said
the frost was affecting the fabric, and as he had experienced
many frosts it must have been so.  In the morning it was
seen that the Figure of the Lost Soul had toppled from its
cornice and lay now in a broken mass on the dust-heap outside the
verger’s lodge.

“It is just as well,” cooed the fat pigeons, after
they had peered at the matter for some minutes; “now we
shall have a nice angel put up there.  Certainly they will
put an angel there.”

“After joy . . . sorrow,” rang out the great
bell.

p. 281THE
PURPLE OF THE BALKAN KINGS

Luitpold Wolkenstein, financier and diplomat on a small,
obtrusive, self-important scale, sat in his favoured cafe in the
world-wise Habsburg capital, confronted with the Neue Freie
Presse and the cup of cream-topped coffee and attendant glass
of water that a sleek-headed piccolo had just brought him. 
For years longer than a dog’s lifetime sleek-headed
piccolos had placed the Neue Freie Presse and a cup of
cream-topped coffee on his table; for years he had sat at the
same spot, under the dust-coated, stuffed eagle, that had once
been a living, soaring bird on the Styrian mountains, and was now
made monstrous and symbolical with a second head grafted on to
its neck and a gilt crown planted on either dusty skull. 
To-day Luitpold Wolkenstein read no more than the first article
in his paper, but read it again and again.

“The Turkish fortress of Kirk Kilisseh has fallen . .
.  The Serbs, it is officially announced, have taken
Kumanovo . . .  The fortress of Kirk Kilisseh lost, Kumanovo
taken by the Serbs, these are tiding for Constantinople
resembling something out of Shakspeare’s tragedies of the
kings . . .  The neighbourhood of Adrianople and the Eastern
region, where the great battle is now in progress, will not
reveal merely the future of Turkey, but also what position and
what influence the Balkan States are to have in the
world.”

For years longer than a dog’s lifetime Luitpold
Wolkenstein had disposed of the pretensions and strivings of the
Balkan States over the cup of cream-topped coffee that
sleek-headed piccolos had brought him.  Never travelling
further eastward than the horse-fair at Temesvar, never inviting
personal risk in an encounter with anything more potentially
desperate than a hare or partridge, he had constituted himself
the critical appraiser and arbiter of the military and national
prowess of the small countries that fringed the Dual Monarchy on
its Danube border.  And his judgment had been one of
unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning
respect for the big battalions and full purses.  Over the
whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled
histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words “the
Great Powers”—even more imposing in their Teutonic
rendering, “Die Grossmächte.”

Worshipping power and force and money-mastery as an elderly
nerve-ridden woman might worship youthful physical energy, the
comfortable, plump-bodied cafe-oracle had jested and gibed at the
ambitions of the Balkan kinglets and their peoples, had unloosed
against them that battery of strange lip-sounds that a Viennese
employs almost as an auxiliary language to express the thoughts
when his thoughts are not complimentary.  British travellers
had visited the Balkan lands and reported high things of the
Bulgarians and their future, Russian officers had taken peeps at
their army and confessed “this is a thing to be reckoned
with, and it is not we who have created it, they have done it by
themselves.”  But over his cups of coffee and his
hour-long games of dominoes the oracle had laughed and wagged his
head and distilled the worldly wisdom of his castle.  The
Grossmächte had not succeeded in stifling the roll of the
war-drum, that was true; the big battalions of the Ottoman Empire
would have to do some talking, and then the big purses and big
threatenings of the Powers would speak and the last word would be
with them.  In imagination Luitpold heard the onward tramp
of the red-fezzed bayonet bearers echoing through the Balkan
passes, saw the little sheepskin-clad mannikins driven back to
their villages, saw the augustly chiding spokesman of the Powers
dictating, adjusting, restoring, settling things once again in
their allotted places, sweeping up the dust of conflict, and now
his ears had to listen to the war-drum rolling in quite another
direction, had to listen to the tramp of battalions that were
bigger and bolder and better skilled in war-craft than he had
deemed possible in that quarter; his eyes had to read in the
columns of his accustomed newspaper a warning to the
Grossmächte that they had something new to learn, something
new to reckon with, much that was time-honoured to
relinquish.  “The Great Powers will have not little
difficulty in persuading the Balkan States of the inviolability
of the principle that Europe cannot permit any fresh partition of
territory in the East without her approval.  Even now, while
the campaign is still undecided, there are rumours of a project
of fiscal unity, extending over the entire Balkan lands, and
further of a constitutional union in imitation of the German
Empire.  That is perhaps only a political straw blown by the
storm, but it is not possible to dismiss the reflection that the
Balkan States leagued together command a military strength with
which the Great Powers will have to reckon . . .  The people
who have poured out their blood on the battlefields and
sacrificed the available armed men of an entire generation in
order to encompass a union with their kinsfolk will not remain
any longer in an attitude of dependence on the Great Powers or on
Russia, but will go their own ways . . .  The blood that has
been poured forth to-day gives for the first time a genuine tone
to the purple of the Balkan Kings.  The Great Powers cannot
overlook the fact that a people that has tasted victory will not
let itself be driven back again within its former limits. 
Turkey has lost to-day not only Kirk Kilisseh and Kumanovo, but
Macedonia also.”

Luitpold Wolkenstein drank his coffee, but the flavour had
somehow gone out of it.  His world, his pompous, imposing,
dictating world, had suddenly rolled up into narrower
dimensions.  The big purses and the big threats had been
pushed unceremoniously on one side; a force that he could not
fathom, could not comprehend, had made itself rudely felt. 
The august Cæsars of Mammon and armament had looked down
frowningly on the combat, and those about to die had not saluted,
had no intention of saluting.  A lesson was being imposed on
unwilling learners, a lesson of respect for certain fundamental
principles, and it was not the small struggling States who were
being taught the lesson.

Luitpold Wolkenstein did not wait for the quorum of domino
players to arrive.  They would all have read the article in
the Freie Presse.  And there are moments when an
oracle finds its greatest salvation in withdrawing itself from
the area of human questioning.

p. 287THE
CUPBOARD OF THE YESTERDAYS

“War is a cruelly destructive thing,” said the
Wanderer, dropping his newspaper to the floor and staring
reflectively into space.

“Ah, yes, indeed,” said the Merchant, responding
readily to what seemed like a safe platitude; “when one
thinks of the loss of life and limb, the desolated homesteads,
the ruined—”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything of the sort,”
said the Wanderer; “I was thinking of the tendency that
modern war has to destroy and banish the very elements of
picturesqueness and excitement that are its chief excuse and
charm.  It is like a fire that flares up brilliantly for a
while and then leaves everything blacker and bleaker than
before.  After every important war in South-East Europe in
recent times there has been a shrinking of the area of
chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of frontier lines,
an intrusion of civilised monotony.  And imagine what may
happen at the conclusion of this war if the Turk should really be
driven out of Europe.”

“Well, it would be a gain to the cause of good
government, I suppose,” said the Merchant.

“But have you counted the loss?” said the
other.  “The Balkans have long been the last surviving
shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground
for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of
exercise.  In old bygone days we had the wars in the Low
Countries always at our doors, as it were; there was no need to
go far afield into malaria-stricken wilds if one wanted a life of
boot and saddle and licence to kill and be killed.  Those
who wished to see life had a decent opportunity for seeing death
at the same time.”

“It is scarcely right to talk of killing and bloodshed
in that way,” said the Merchant reprovingly; “one
must remember that all men are brothers.”

“One must also remember that a large percentage of them
are younger brothers; instead of going into bankruptcy, which is
the usual tendency of the younger brother nowadays, they gave
their families a fair chance of going into mourning.  Every
bullet finds a billet, according to a rather optimistic proverb,
and you must admit that nowadays it is becoming increasingly
difficult to find billets for a lot of young gentlemen who would
have adorned, and probably thoroughly enjoyed, one of the
old-time happy-go-lucky wars.  But that is not exactly the
burden of my complaint.  The Balkan lands are especially
interesting to us in these rapidly-moving days because they
afford us the last remaining glimpse of a vanishing period of
European history.  When I was a child one of the earliest
events of the outside world that forced itself coherently under
my notice was a war in the Balkans; I remember a sunburnt,
soldierly man putting little pin-flags in a war-map, red flags
for the Turkish forces and yellow flags for the Russians. 
It seemed a magical region, with its mountain passes and frozen
rivers and grim battlefields, its drifting snows, and prowling
wolves; there was a great stretch of water that bore the sinister
but engaging name of the Black Sea—nothing that I ever
learned before or after in a geography lesson made the same
impression on me as that strange-named inland sea, and I
don’t think its magic has ever faded out of my
imagination.  And there was a battle called Plevna that went
on and on with varying fortunes for what seemed like a great part
of a lifetime; I remember the day of wrath and mourning when the
little red flag had to be taken away from Plevna—like other
maturer judges, I was backing the wrong horse, at any rate the
losing horse.  And now to-day we are putting little
pin-flags again into maps of the Balkan region, and the passions
are being turned loose once more in their playground.”

“The war will be localised,” said the Merchant
vaguely; “at least every one hopes so.”

“It couldn’t wish for a better locality,”
said the Wanderer; “there is a charm about those countries
that you find nowhere else in Europe, the charm of uncertainty
and landslide, and the little dramatic happenings that make all
the difference between the ordinary and the desirable.”

“Life is held very cheap in those parts,” said the
Merchant.

“To a certain extent, yes,” said the
Wanderer.  “I remember a man at Sofia who used to
teach me Bulgarian in a rather inefficient manner, interspersed
with a lot of quite wearisome gossip.  I never knew what his
personal history was, but that was only because I didn’t
listen; he told it to me many times.  After I left Bulgaria
he used to send me Sofia newspapers from time to time.  I
felt that he would be rather tiresome if I ever went there
again.  And then I heard afterwards that some men came in
one day from Heaven knows where, just as things do happen in the
Balkans, and murdered him in the open street, and went away as
quietly as they had come.  You will not understand it, but
to me there was something rather piquant in the idea of such a
thing happening to such a man; after his dullness and his
long-winded small-talk it seemed a sort of brilliant esprit
d’esalier on his part to meet with an end of such
ruthlessly planned and executed violence.”

The Merchant shook his head; the piquancy of the incident was
not within striking distance of his comprehension.

“I should have been shocked at hearing such a thing
about any one I had known,” he said.

“The present war,” continued his companion,
without stopping to discuss two hopelessly divergent points of
view, “may be the beginning of the end of much that has
hitherto survived the resistless creeping-in of
civilisation.  If the Balkan lands are to be finally
parcelled out between the competing Christian Kingdoms and the
haphazard rule of the Turk banished to beyond the Sea of Marmora,
the old order, or disorder if you like, will have received its
death-blow.  Something of its spirit will linger perhaps for
a while in the old charmed regions where it bore sway; the Greek
villagers will doubtless be restless and turbulent and unhappy
where the Bulgars rule, and the Bulgars will certainly be
restless and turbulent and unhappy under Greek administration,
and the rival flocks of the Exarchate and Patriarchate will make
themselves intensely disagreeable to one another wherever the
opportunity offers; the habits of a lifetime, of several
lifetimes, are not laid aside all at once.  And the
Albanians, of course, we shall have with us still, a troubled
Moslem pool left by the receding wave of Islam in Europe. 
But the old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have
gone; the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly
settle down over the time-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak of Novi
Bazar, the Muersteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet
of Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and
places, that we have known so long as part and parcel of the
Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard of
yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa League and the wars of the
Guises.

“They were the heritage that history handed down to us,
spoiled and diminished no doubt, in comparison with yet earlier
days that we never knew, but still something to thrill and
enliven one little corner of our Continent, something to help us
to conjure up in our imagination the days when the Turk was
thundering at the gates of Vienna.  And what shall we have
to hand down to our children?  Think of what their news from
the Balkans will be in the course of another ten or fifteen
years.  Socialist Congress at Uskub, election riot at
Monastir, great dock strike at Salonika, visit of the Y.M.C.A. to
Varna.  Varna—on the coast of that enchanted
sea!  They will drive out to some suburb to tea, and write
home about it as the Bexhill of the East.

“War is a wickedly destructive thing.”

“Still, you must admit—” began the
Merchant.  But the Wanderer was not in the mood to admit
anything.  He rose impatiently and walked to where the
tape-machine was busy with the news from Adrianople.

p. 295FOR
THE DURATION OF THE WAR

The Rev. Wilfrid Gaspilton, in one of those clerical
migrations inconsequent-seeming to the lay mind, had removed from
the moderately fashionable parish of St. Luke’s,
Kensingate, to the immoderately rural parish of St. Chuddocks,
somewhere in Yondershire.  There were doubtless substantial
advantages connected with the move, but there were certainly some
very obvious drawbacks.  Neither the migratory clergyman nor
his wife were able to adapt themselves naturally and comfortably
to the conditions of country life.  Beryl, Mrs. Gaspilton,
had always looked indulgently on the country as a place where
people of irreproachable income and hospitable instincts
cultivated tennis-lawns and rose-gardens and Jacobean
pleasaunces, wherein selected gatherings of interested week-end
guests might disport themselves.  Mrs. Gaspilton considered
herself as distinctly an interesting personality, and from a
limited standpoint she was doubtless right.  She had
indolent dark eyes and a comfortable chin, which belied the
slightly plaintive inflection which she threw into her voice at
suitable intervals.  She was tolerably well satisfied with
the smaller advantages of life, but she regretted that Fate had
not seen its way to reserve for her some of the ampler successes
for which she felt herself well qualified.  She would have
liked to be the centre of a literary, slightly political salon,
where discerning satellites might have recognised the breadth of
her outlook on human affairs and the undoubted smallness of her
feet.  As it was, Destiny had chosen for her that she should
be the wife of a rector, and had now further decreed that a
country rectory should be the background to her existence. 
She rapidly made up her mind that her surroundings did not call
for exploration; Noah had predicted the Flood, but no one
expected him to swim about in it.  Digging in a wet garden
or trudging through muddy lanes were exertions which she did not
propose to undertake.  As long as the garden produced
asparagus and carnations at pleasingly frequent intervals Mrs.
Gaspilton was content to approve of its expense and otherwise
ignore its existence.  She would fold herself up, so to
speak, in an elegant, indolent little world of her own, enjoying
the minor recreations of being gently rude to the doctor’s
wife and continuing the leisurely production of her one literary
effort, The Forbidden Horsepond, a translation of Baptiste
Leopoy’s L’Abreuvoir interdit.  It was a
labour which had already been so long drawn-out that it seemed
probable that Baptiste Lepoy would drop out of vogue before her
translation of his temporarily famous novel was finished. 
However, the languid prosecution of the work had invested Mrs.
Gaspilton with a certain literary dignity, even in Kensingate
circles, and would place her on a pinnacle in St. Chuddocks,
where hardly any one read French, and assuredly no one had heard
of L’Abreuvoir interdit.

The Rector’s wife might be content to turn her back
complacently on the country; it was the Rector’s tragedy
that the country turned its back on him.  With the best
intention in the world and the immortal example of Gilbert White
before him, the Rev. Wilfrid found himself as bored and ill at
ease in his new surroundings as Charles II would have been at a
modern Wesleyan Conference.  The birds that hopped across
his lawn hopped across it as though it were their lawn, and not
his, and gave him plainly to understand that in their eyes he was
infinitely less interesting than a garden worm or the rectory
cat.  The hedgeside and meadow flowers were equally
uninspiring; the lesser celandine seemed particularly unworthy of
the attention that English poets had bestowed on it, and the
Rector knew that he would be utterly miserable if left alone for
a quarter of an hour in its company.  With the human
inhabitants of his parish he was no better off; to know them was
merely to know their ailments, and the ailments were almost
invariably rheumatism.  Some, of course, had other bodily
infirmities, but they always had rheumatism as well.  The
Rector had not yet grasped the fact that in rural cottage life
not to have rheumatism is as glaring an omission as not to have
been presented at Court would be in more ambitious circles. 
And with all this death of local interest there was Beryl
shutting herself off with her ridiculous labours on The
Forbidden Horsepond.

“I don’t see why you should suppose that any one
wants to read Baptiste Lepoy in English,” the Reverend
Wilfrid remarked to his wife one morning, finding her surrounded
with her usual elegant litter of dictionaries, fountain pens, and
scribbling paper; “hardly any one bothers to read him now
in France.”

“My dear,” said Beryl, with an intonation of
gentle weariness, “haven’t two or three leading
London publishers told me they wondered no one had ever
translated L’Abreuvoir interdit, and begged
me—”

“Publishers always clamour for the books that no one has
ever written, and turn a cold shoulder on them as soon as
they’re written.  If St. Paul were living now they
would pester him to write an Epistle to the Esquimaux, but no
London publisher would dream of reading his Epistle to the
Ephesians.”

“Is there any asparagus in the garden?” asked
Beryl; “because I’ve told cook—”

“Not anywhere in the garden,” snapped the Rector,
“but there’s no doubt plenty in the asparagus-bed,
which is the usual place for it.”

And he walked away into the region of fruit trees and
vegetable beds to exchange irritation for boredom.  It was
there, among the gooseberry bushes and beneath the medlar trees,
that the temptation to the perpetration of a great literary fraud
came to him.

Some weeks later the Bi-Monthly Review gave to the
world, under the guarantee of the Rev. Wilfrid Gaspilton, some
fragments of Persian verse, alleged to have been unearthed and
translated by a nephew who was at present campaigning somewhere
in the Tigris valley.  The Rev. Wilfrid possessed a host of
nephews, and it was of course, quite possible that one or more of
them might be in military employ in Mesopotamia, though no one
could call to mind any particular nephew who could have been
suspected of being a Persian scholar.

The verses were attributed to one Ghurab, a hunter, or,
according to other accounts, warden of the royal fishponds, who
lived, in some unspecified century, in the neighbourhood of
Karmanshah.  They breathed a spirit of comfortable,
even-tempered satire and philosophy, disclosing a mockery that
did not trouble to be bitter, a joy in life that was not
passionate to the verge of being troublesome.

“A Mouse that prayed for Allah’s
aid
   Blasphemed when no such aid befell:
A Cat, who feasted on that mouse,
   Thought Allah managed vastly well.

Pray not for aid to One who made
   A set of never-changing Laws,
But in your need remember well
   He gave you speed, or guile—or claws.

Some laud a life of mild content:
   Content may fall, as well as Pride.
The Frog who hugged his lowly Ditch
   Was much disgruntled when it dried.

‘You are not on the Road to Hell,’
   You tell me with fanatic glee:
Vain boaster, what shall that avail
   If Hell is on the road to thee?

A Poet praised the Evening Star,
   Another praised the Parrot’s hue:
A Merchant praised his merchandise,
   And he, at least, praised what he knew.”

It was this verse which gave the critics and commentators some
clue as to the probable date of the composition; the parrot, they
reminded the public, was in high vogue as a type of elegance in
the days of Hafiz of Shiraz; in the quatrains of Omar it makes no
appearance.

The next verse, it was pointed out, would apply to the
political conditions of the present day as strikingly as to the
region and era for which it was written—

“A Sultan dreamed day-long of Peace,
   The while his Rivals’ armies grew:
They changed his Day-dreams into sleep
   —The Peace, methinks, he never
knew.”

Woman appeared little, and wine not at all in the verse of the
hunter-poet, but there was at least one contribution to the
love-philosophy of the East—

“O Moon-faced Charmer, and
Star-drownèd Eyes,
   And cheeks of soft delight, exhaling musk,
They tell me that thy charm will fade; ah well,
   The Rose itself grows hue-less in the
Dusk.”

Finally, there was a recognition of the Inevitable, a chill
breath blowing across the poet’s comfortable estimate of
life—

“There is a sadness in each Dawn,
   A sadness that you cannot rede:
The joyous Day brings in its train
   The Feast, the Loved One, and the Steed.

Ah, there shall come a Dawn at last
   That brings no life-stir to your ken,
A long, cold Dawn without a Day,
   And ye shall rede its sadness then.”

The verses of Ghurab came on the public at a moment when a
comfortable, slightly quizzical philosophy was certain to be
welcome, and their reception was enthusiastic.  Elderly
colonels, who had outlived the love of truth, wrote to the papers
to say that they had been familiar with the works of Ghurab in
Afghanistan, and Aden, and other suitable localities a quarter of
a century ago.  A Ghurab-of-Karmanshah Club sprang into
existence, the members of which alluded to each other as Brother
Ghurabians on the slightest provocation.  And to the flood
of inquiries, criticisms, and requests for information, which
naturally poured in on the discoverer, or rather the discloser,
of this long-hidden poet, the Rev. Wilfrid made one effectual
reply: Military considerations forbade any disclosures which
might throw unnecessary light on his nephew’s
movements.

After the war the Rector’s position will be one of
unthinkable embarrassment, but for the moment, at any rate, he
has driven The Forbidden Horsepond out of the field.