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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Toys of Peace by H.H. Munro ("Saki")
+#3 in our series by H.H. Munro ("Saki")
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+The Toys of Peace
+
+by H.H. Munro ("Saki")
+
+October, 1998  [Etext #1477]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Toys of Peace by H.H. Munro ("Saki")
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+This etext was prepared from the 1919 John Lane edition by Jane
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+
+
+
+
+
+The Toys of Peace
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+The Toys of Peace
+Louise
+Tea
+The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh
+The Wolves of Cernogratz
+Louis
+The Guests
+The Penance
+The Phantom Luncheon
+A Bread and Butter Miss
+Bertie's Christmas Eve
+Forewarned
+The Interlopers
+Quail Seed
+Canossa
+The Threat
+Excepting Mrs. Pentherby
+Mark
+The Hedgehog
+The Mappined Life
+Fate
+The Bull
+Morlvera
+Shock Tactics
+The Seven Cream Jugs
+The Occasional Garden
+The Sheep
+The Oversight
+Hyacinth
+The Image of the Lost Soul
+The Purple of the Balkan Kings
+The Cupboard of the Yesterdays
+For the Duration of the War
+
+
+
+
+THE 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 Henry 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 backed
+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'etat 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
+dustbin 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 facade 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."
+
+
+
+LOUISE
+
+
+
+"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."
+
+
+
+TEA
+
+
+
+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, 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?"
+
+
+
+THE 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 pounds 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 pounds 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."
+
+
+
+THE WOLVES OF CERNOGRATZ
+
+
+
+"Are they 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 drying
+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."
+
+
+
+LOUIS
+
+
+
+"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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 goatherd, 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 manoeuvre, 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."
+
+
+
+THE 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 lifestory 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 sweetpea.  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 Parcae 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."
+
+
+
+THE 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.
+
+
+
+A 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 Encyclopaedia 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.
+
+
+
+BERTIE'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.
+
+
+
+FOREWARNED
+
+
+
+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 week
+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 a 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 early 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 wineflask
+. . .  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; 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."
+
+
+
+QUAIL 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 think, 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."
+
+
+
+CANOSSA
+
+
+
+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 death-like 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 was 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
+regime 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."
+
+
+
+EXCEPTING 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 womenfolk 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 resume 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 given 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.
+
+
+
+MARK
+
+
+
+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 engage 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
+encyclopaedia, 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 beat 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.
+
+
+
+FATE
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 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.
+
+
+
+MORLVERA
+
+
+
+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 life-time; 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
+over-dressed, 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."
+
+
+
+SHOCK TATICS
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+THE 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's he 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 spiraea 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."
+
+
+
+THE 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 curse 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 actice 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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.  Hyaenas could not have behaved with greater
+savagery.  Sir Richard said so, and he has been in countries where
+hyaenas 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."
+
+
+
+HYACINTH
+
+
+
+"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 aesthetic 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 manoeuvre.  He set up a
+piercing imitation of a small pit 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."
+
+
+
+THE IMAGE OF THE LOST SOLE
+
+
+
+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 dustheap 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 Grossmachte."
+
+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 Grossmachte 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 Grossmachte 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 Caesars 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.
+
+
+
+THE 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 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.
+
+
+
+FOR 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-drowned 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Toys of Peace by H.H. Munro ("Saki")
+
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