 CHAPTER XIV. A PERFECTLY GLORIUS AFTERNOON. It was one of the last days of July, cooled and freshened by a touch of rain, and dropping back again to a languorous warmth. London looked at its summer best, rainwashed and sunlit, with the maximum of coming and going in its more fashionable streets. Sicily-Yoville sat in a screened alcove of the Anchorage restaurant, a feeding-ground which had lately sprung into favour. Opposite her sat Ronnie, confronting the ruins of what had been a dish of prawns in aspic. Cool and clean and fresh-coloured. He was good to look on in the eyes of his companion, and yet, perhaps, there was a ruffle in her soul that called for some answering disturbance on the part of that superbly tranquil young man, and certainly called in vain. Sicily had set up for herself a fetish of onyx with eyes of jade, and doubtless hunger at times with an unreasonable but perfectly natural hunger for something of flesh and blood. It was the religion of her life to know exactly what she wanted, and to see that she got it. But there was no possible guarantee against her occasionally experiencing a desire for something else. It is the golden rule of all religions that no one should really live up to their precepts. When a man observes the principle of his religion too exactly, he is in immediate danger of founding a new sect. "'Today is going to be your day of triumph,' said Sicily to the young man, who was wondering at the moment whether he would care to embark on an artichoke. "'I believe I am more nervous than you are,' she added, and yet I rather hate the idea of your scoring a great success.' "'Why?' asked Ronnie, diverting his mind for a moment from the artichoke question and its ramifications of source-en-ondes or vénègres. "'I like you as you are,' said Sicily, just a nice-looking boy to flatter and spoil and pretend to be fond of. You've got a charming young body, and you've no soul, and that's such a fascinating combination. If you had a soul you would either dislike or worship me, and I'd much rather have things as they are. And now you're going to go step beyond that, and other people will applaud you and say that you are wonderful, and invite you to eat with them, and motor with them, and yacht with them. Soon as that begins to happen, Ronnie, a lot of other things will come to an end. Of course I've always known that you don't really care for me, but as soon as the world knows it, you're irrevocably damaged as a plaything. That is the great secret that binds us together, the knowledge that we have no real affection for one another, and this afternoon everyone will know that you're a great artist, and no great artist was ever a great lover. "'I shall be difficult to replace, anyway,' said Ronnie, but what he imagined was a becoming modesty. There are lots of boys standing around ready to be fed and flattered and put on an imaginary pedestal. Most of them more or less good-looking and well-turned-out and amusing to talk to. "'Oh, I dare say I could find a success of your vacated niche,' said Sicily, "'one thing I'm determined on, though, he shan't be a musician. It's so unsatisfactory to have to share a grand passion with a grand piano. He shall be a delightful young barbarian who would think Saint-Saëns was a derby winner or a claret.' "'Don't be in too much of a hurry to replace me,' said Ronnie, who did not care to have his successor too seriously discussed. I may not score the success you expect this afternoon.' "'My dear boy, a minor crowned head from across the sea is coming to hear you play, and that alone will count as a success with most of your listeners. Also, I have secured a real duchess for you, which is rather an achievement in the London of today.' "'An English duchess?' asked Ronnie, who early in life learnt to apply the Merchandise Marks Act to ducal titles. "'English? Oh, certainly, as far as the title goes, she was born under the constellation of the star-spangled banner. I don't suppose the duke approves of her being here, lending her countenance to the fater comply. But when you've got Republican blood in your veins, a Kaiser is quite as attractive a lodestar as a king. Rather, more so. "'And Cannon Mouse-Pace is coming?' continued Sicily, referring to a closely written list of guests. The excellent Vom Tolbe has been attending his church lately, and the Cannon is longing to meet her. She is just the sort of person he adores. I fancy he sincerely realises how difficult it will be for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, and he tries to make up for it by being as nice as possible to them in this world.' Ronnie held out his hand for the list. "'I think you know most of the others,' said Sicily, passing it to him. "'Loidnen von Gabelroth,' read out Ronnie, who is he?' "'In one of the Huizar regiments quartered here, a friend of the Grafins. Ugly but amiable, and I'm told a good cross-country rider. I suppose Murray will be disgusted at meeting the outland-visible sign under his roof. But these encounters are inevitable as long as he is in London.' "'I didn't know Murray was coming,' said Ronnie. "'I believe he's going to look in on us,' said Sicily. "'It's just as well, you know, otherwise we should have Joan asking in her loudest voice when he was going to be back in England again. I haven't asked her, but she overheard the Grafins arranging to come and hear you play, and I fancy that will be quite enough.' "'Now how about some Turkish coffee?' said Ronnie, who had decided against the artichoke. "'Turkish coffee, certainly, and a cigarette, and a moment's peace before the serious business of the afternoon,' claims us. "'Talking about peace, do you know, Ronnie, it has just occurred to me that we have left out one of the most important things in our affair. We have never had a quarrel.' "'I hate quarrels,' said Ronnie. "'They're so domesticated.' "'That's the first time I've ever heard you talk about your home,' said Sicily. "'I fancy it would apply to most homes,' said Ronnie. "'The last boyfriend I had used to quarrel furious with me at least once a week,' said Sicily, reflectively. But then he had dark, slumberous eyes that lit up magnificently when he was angry, so it would have been a sheer waste of God's good gifts not to have sent him into a passion now and then. "'With your excursions into the past and future, you are making me feel dreadfully like an instalment of a serial novel,' protested Ronnie. "'We have now got to synopsis of earlier chapters.' "'It shan't be teased,' said Sicily. "'We will live in the present and go no further into the future than to make arrangements for Tuesday's dinner-party. I've asked the duchess. She would never have forgiven me if she had found out that I had a crowned head dining with me and hadn't asked her to meet him.' A sudden hush descended on the company gathered in the great drawing-room at Berkshire Street, as Ronnie took his seat at the piano. The voice of Cannon Mouse-Pace outlasted the others for a moment or so, and then subsided into a regretful but gracious silence. For the next nine or ten minutes, Ronnie held possession of the crowded room, attends slender figure with cold green eyes aflame in a sudden fire and smooth burnished head bent low over the keyboard that yielded a disciplined riot of melody under his strong, deft fingers. The world-weary land-graph forgot for the moment the regrettable trend of his subjects towards parliamentary socialism. The excellent Caifin von Tobbe forgot all that the Cannon had been saying to her for the last ten minutes, forgot the depressing certainty that he would have a great deal more that he wanted to say in the immediate future over and above the thirty-five minutes or so of discourse that she would contract to listen to next Sunday. And Cicely listened with the wistful equivocal triumph of one whose goose has turned out to be a swan, and who realizes with secret concern that she has only planned the role of goose-girl for herself. The last cords died away, the fire faded out of the jade-colored eyes, and Ronnie became once more a well-groomed youth in a drawing-room full of well-dressed people. But around him rose an explosive clamour of applause and congratulation, the sincere tribute of appreciation and the equally hearty expression of imitative homage. It's a great gift, a great gift, chanted Cannon Mousespace. You must put it to a great use. A talent is vouched safe to us for a purpose. You must fulfil the purpose. Talent, such as yours, is a responsibility. You must meet that responsibility. The dictionary of the English language was an inexhaustible quarry from which the Cannon, her hewn, and fashion for himself a great reputation. Your most common play with me, a Schlaßenberg, said the kindly face to Landgraf, whom the world adored and thought it in about equal proportions. At Christmas, yes, this will be a good time. We still keep the Christfest at Schlaßenberg, d'Or de Sosie keep telling our schoolchildren that it is only a Christ's myth. Never mind, I will have the vice president of our land dark to listen to you. He is Sotsie, but we are good friends outside the Parliament House. You shall play to him, my good friend, and convince him that there is a God in heaven. You will grom, yes? It was beautiful, said the graphene simply. It made me cry. Go back to the piano again, please, at once. Perhaps the near neighbourhood of the Cannon inspired this command, but the graphene had been genuinely charmed. She adored good music, and she was unaffectedly fond of good looking boys. Ronny went back to the piano and tasted the matured pleasure of a repeated success. Any measure of nervousness that he may have felt at first had completely passed away. He was sure of his audience, and he played as though they did not exist. A renewed clamour of excited approval attended the conclusion of his performance. It's a triumph, a perfectly glorious triumph, exclaimed the Duchess of Drescher, turning to Joville, who sat silent among his wife's guests. Isn't it just glorious? she demanded, with heavy insistent intonation of the word. Is it? said Joville. Well, isn't it? she cried with a rising inflection. Isn't it just perfectly glorious? I don't know, confessed Joville, because he glory hasn't come very much my way lately. Then, before he exactly realised what he was doing, he raised his voice and quoted loudly for the benefit of half the room. Other Romans shall arise, heedless of a soldier's name. Sounds not deeds shall win the prize. Harmony the path to fame. There was a sort of shiver of surprised silence at Joville's end of the room. Hell! the word rang out in a strong young voice. Hell! and it's true that's the worst of it. It is damn true! Joville turned, with some dozen others, to see who was responsible for this vigour of the expressed statement. Tony Luton confronted him. An angry scowl on his face, a blaze in his heavy-lidded eyes. The boy was without a conscience, almost without a soul as priests and parson's reconciles, but there was a slumbering devil-god within him. And Joville's taunting words had broken the slumber. Life had been for Tony a hard school, in which right and wrong, high endeavour, and good resolve were untought subjects. But there was a sterling something in him. Just that something that helped poor street-scavenged men to die brave-fronted deaths in the trenches of Salamanca, that fired a handful of apprentice-boys to shut the gates of Derry and stare unflinchingly at grim liga and starvation. It was just that nameless something that was lacking in the young musician who stood at the further end of the room, bathed in a flood of compliment and congratulation, enjoying the honey-drops of his triumph. Luton pushed his way through the crowd and left the room, without troubling to take leave of his hostess. What a strange young man! exclaimed the duchess. Now, do take me into the next room. She went on almost in the same breath. I am just dying for some iced coffee. Joville escorted her through the throng of Ronnie-worshippers to the desired haven of refreshment. Marvelous! Mrs. Menteath Mendeltham was exclaiming in ringing trumpet tones. Of course I always knew he could play, but this is not mere piano-playing. It is tone-mastery. It is sound-magic. Mrs. Joville has introduced us to a new star in the musical firmament. Do you know, I feel this afternoon just like Cortez in the poem, gazing at the newly discovered sea? Silent upon a peek in Daryon! quoted a penetrating voice that could only belong to Joan Marle. I say, can any one picture Mrs. Menteath Mendeltham silent on any peek or under any circumstances? If any one had that measure of imagination, no one acknowledged the fact. A great gift and a great responsibility! Cannon Mousepace was assuring the graffine. The power of evoking sublime melody is akin to the power of awakening thoughts. A musician can appeal to dormant consciousness as a preacher can appeal to dormant conscience. It is a responsibility, an instrument for good or evil. Our young friend here, we may be sure, will use it as an instrument for good. He has, I feel certain, a sense of his responsibility. He is a nice boy, said the graffine simply. He has such pretty hair. In one of the window-resetters, Rhapsody Pantrill was talking vaguely but beautifully to a small audience on the subject of chromatic chords. She had the advantage of knowing what she was talking about, an advantage that her listeners did not in the least chair. All through his playing there ran a tone note of malachite green, she declared recklessly, feeling safe from immediate contradiction, malachite green, my colour, the colour of striving. Having satisfied the ruling passion that demanded gentle and dexterous self-advertisement, she realised that the Augusta Smith in her craved refreshment, and moved with one of her over-ordered mares towards the haven where peaches and iced coffee might be considered a certainty. The refreshment alcove, which was really a good-sized room, a sort of chapel of ease to the larger drawing-room, was already packed with a crowd who felt that they could best discuss Ronny's triumph between mouthfuls of fruit salad and iced draughts of hot-cup. So brief is human glory that two or three independent souls had even now drifted from the theme of the moment on to other, more personally interesting topics. Iced mulberry salad, my dear, it's a speciality de la maison, so to speak. They say the roving husband brought the recipe from Astrakhan, or Sebel, or some such outlandish place. I wish my husband would roam about a bit and bring back strange pellet of dishes. No such luck, he's got asthma and has to keep on a gravel soil with a south aspect, and all sorts of other restrictions. I don't think you're to be pitted in the least. The husband with asthma is like a captive golf ball. You can always put your hand on him when you want him. All the hangings, violet, the palm, all the furniture, rosewood, nothing is to be played in it except Mozart. Mozart only. Some of my friends wanted me to have a replica of the Mozart statue at Vienna, put up in a corner of the room with flowers all the way round it, but I really couldn't. I couldn't. One is so tired of it. One sees it everywhere. I couldn't do it. I'm like that, you know. Yes, I've secured the hero of the hour, Ronnie Storr. Oh yes, rather, he's going to join our yachting trip, third week of August. We're going as far afield as Fulmay in the Adriatic. Or is it the Aegean? Won't it be jolly? Oh no, we're not asking Mrs. Joville. It's quite a small lot, you know. At least it's a small party. The excellent Fontalb took her departure, bearing off with her the land-golf, who had already settled the date and duration of Ronnie's Christmas visit. It will be dull, you know, he warned the prospective guest. Our land-target will not be sitting, and what is a bell-garden without the bells? However, we have some vile shrine in our woods. We can show you some spot in that way. Ronnie instantly saw himself in a well-fitting shooting costume, with a Tyrellese hat placed at a very careful angle on his head. But he confessed that the other details of boar hunting were rather beyond him. With the departure of the Fontalb party, Cannon Mousepace gravitated decently, but persistently, towards a corner where the duchess, still at concert pitch, was alternatively praising Ronnie's performance and the mulberry salad. Joan Mardall, who formed one of the group, was not openly praising anyone, but she was paying a silent tribute to the salad. We were just talking about Ronnie Storr's music cannon, said the duchess. I consider it just perfectly glorious. It's a great talent, isn't it, Cannon? Put in Joan briskly, and of course it's a responsibility as well, don't you think? Music can be such an influence, just as eloquence can. Don't you agree with me? The quarry of the English language was, of course, a public property, but it was disconcerting to have one's own particular barrel-load of sentence-building material carried off before one's eyes. The cannon's impressive homily on Ronnie's gift and its possibilities had to be hastily whittled down to a weakly acquiescent, quite so, quite so. Have you tasted this ice mulberry salad, Cannon? Asked the duchess. It's perfectly luscious. Just hurry along and get some before it's all gone. And her grace hurried along in an opposite direction to thank Sicily for past favours, and to express lively gratitude for the Tuesday to come. The guests departed, with a rather irritating slowness, for which perhaps the excellence of Sicily's bouffet arrangements was partly responsible. The great drawing-room seemed to grow larger and more oppressive as the human wave receded, and the hostess fled at last with some relief to the narrower limits of her writing-room, and the sedative influences of a cigarette. She was inclined to be sorry for herself. The triumph of the afternoon had turned out much as she had predicted at lunch-time. Her idol of Onyx had not been swept from its pedestal, but the pedestal itself had an air of being packed up, ready for transport to some other temple. Ronnie would be flattered and spoiled by half a hundred people, just because he could conjure sounds out of a keyboard. And Sicily felt no great incentive to go on flattering and spoiling him herself. And Ronnie would acquiesce in his dismissal with the good grace born of indifference, the surest guarantor of perfect manners. Already he had social engagements for the coming months in which she had no share. The drifting apart would be mutual. He had been an intelligent and amusing companion, and he had played the game as she had wished it to be played, without the fatigue of keeping up pretenses which neither of them could have believed in. Let us have a wonderfully good time together, had been the single stipulation in their unwritten treaty of comradeship, and they had had the good time. Their whole-hearted pursuit of material happiness would go on as keenly as before, but they would hunt in different company. That was all. Yes, that was all. Sicily found the effect of her cigarette less sedative than she was disposed to exact. It might be necessary to change the brand. Some ten or eleven days later, Yovill read an announcement in the papers that, in spite of handsome offers of increased salary, Mr. Tony Luton, the original singer of the popular ditty Eccleston Square, had terminated his engagement with messes Isaac Groverner and Leon Harbhart of the Caravansery Theatre, and signed on as a deck-hand in the Canadian Marine. Perhaps, after all, there had been some shade of glory amid the trumpet triumph of that July afternoon. Reading by Andy Minter When William came, by Sarky Chapter 15 The Intelligent Anticipator of Wants Two of Yovill's London clubs, the two that he had been accustomed to frequent, had closed their doors after the catastrophe. One of them had perished from off the face of the earth. Its fittings had been sold, and its papers lay stored in some solicitor's office, a tit-bit of material for the pain of some future historian. The other had transplanted itself to Delhi, whether it had removed its early Georgian furniture and its traditions, and sought to reproduce its St. James's Street atmosphere as nearly as the conditions of a tropic Asiatic city would permit. They remained the cartwheel, a considerably newer institution which had sprung into existence somewhere about the time of Yovill's last sojourn in England. He had joined it on the solicitation of a friend who was interested in the venture, and his bankers had paid his subscription during his absence. As he had never been inside its doors, there could be no depressing comparisons to make between its present state and the four-time glories, and Yovill turned into its portals one afternoon with the adventurous detachment of a man who breaks new ground and challenges new experiences. He entered with a diffident sense of intrusion, conscious that his standing as a member might not be recognized by the keepers of the doors. In a moment, however, he realized that a rajah's escort of elephants might almost have marched through the entrance hall and vestibule without challenge. The general atmosphere of the scene suggested a blend of the railway station at Cologne, the Hotel Bristol in any European capital, and the second act in most musical comedies. A score of brilliant and brilliant-in pages decorated the foreground, while he braided-looking gentlemen, wearing tartan waistcoats of the clans of their adoption, flitted restlessly between the tape-machines and telephone boxes. The army of occupation had obviously established a firm footing in hospitable premises. A kaleidoscopic pattern of uniforms, sky blue indigo and bottle green, relieved the civilian attire of the groups that clustered in lounge and card-rooms and corridors. Yeovil rapidly came to the conclusion that the joys of membership were not for him. He had turned to go after a very cursory inspection of the premises and their human occupants when he was hailed by a young man, dressed with strenuous neatness, whom he remembered having met in past days at the houses of one or two common friends. Hubert Hurlton's parents had brought him into the world, and some twenty-one years later had put him into a motor business. Having taken these pardonable liberties, they had completely exhausted their ideas of what to do with him, and Hubert seemed unlikely to develop any ideas of his own on the subject. The motor business elected to conduct itself without his connivance. Journalism, the stage, tomato culture, without capital, and other professions that could be entered on at short notice, were submitted to his consideration by nimble minded relations and friends. He listened to their suggestions with polite indifference, being rude only to a cousin who demonstrated how he might achieve a settled income from two hundred to a thousand pounds a year by the propagation of mushrooms in a London basement. While his walk in life was still an undetermined promenade, his parents died, leaving him with a carefully invested income of thirty-seven pounds a year. At that point of his career, Yovil's knowledge of him stopped short. The journey to Siberia had taken him beyond the range of Hurlton's domestic vicissitudes. The young man greeted him in a decidedly friendly manner. I didn't know you were a member here, he exclaimed. It's the first time I've ever been in the club, said Yovil, and I fancy it will be the last. There's rather too much of the fighting machine in evidence here. One doesn't want a perpetual reminder of what has happened, staring one in the face. We tried at first to keep the alien element out, said Hurlton apologetically, but we couldn't have carried on the club if we'd stuck to that line. You see, we'd lost more than two thirds of our old members, so we couldn't afford to be exclusive. As a matter of fact, the whole thing was decided over our heads. A new syndicate took over the concern, and a new committee was installed with a good many foreigners on it, and it's horrid having these uniforms flaunting all over the place, but what is one to do? Yovil said nothing, with the air of a man who could have said a great deal. I suppose you wonder why I remain a member under those conditions, continued Hurlton. Well, as far as I'm concerned, a place like this is a necessity for me. In fact, it's my profession, my source of income. I was good at bridge as all that, asked Yovil. I'm a fairly successful player myself, but I should be sorry to have to live on my winnings year in, year out. I don't play cards, said Hurlton, at least not for serious stakes. My winnings all losing wouldn't come to a tenner in an average year. No, I live by commissions, by introducing likely buyers to would-be sellers. Sell out of what? asked Yovil. Anything, everything. Horses, yachts, old masters, plates, shooting, poultry farms, weekend cottages, motorcars, almost anything you can think of. Look! And he produced from his breast pocket a bulky notebook, illusionarily inscribed engagements. Here, he explained, tapping the book, I've got a double entry of every likely client that I know, with a note of the things he may have to sell and the things he may want to buy. When it's something that he has for sale, there are cross-references to likely purchases of that particular line of article. I don't limit myself to things that I actually know people to be in want of. I go further than that and have theories, carefully indexed theories, as to the things that people might want to buy. And at the right moment, if I can get the opportunity, I mention the article that's in my mind's eye to the possible purchaser, who has also been in my mind's eye, and I frequently bring off a sale. I started a chance acquaintance on a career of print buying the other day, merely by telling him of a couple of good prints I know of, that were to be had at a quite reasonable price. He's a man with more money than he knows what to do with, and he has laid out quite a lot on old prints since his first purchase. Most of his collection he's got through me, and of course I net a commission on each transaction. So you see, old man, how useful, not to say necessary, a club with a large membership is to me. The more mixed and socially chaotic it is, the more serviceable it is. Of course, said Joville, and I suppose, as a matter of fact, a good many of your clients belong to the conquering race. Well, you see there, the people who have got the money, said Hurlton. I don't mean to say that the invading Germans are usually people of wealth, but while they live over here, they escape the crushing taxation that falls on the British war and subject. They serve their country as soldiers, and we have to serve it in garrison money, ship money and so forth, besides the ordinary taxes of the state. The German shoulders the rifle, the Englishman has to shoulder everything else. That's what will help more than anything towards the gradual Germanising of our big towns. The comparatively lightly taxed German workmen over here will have a much bigger spending power and purchasing power than his heavily taxed English neighbour. The public houses, bars, eating houses, places of amusement and so forth will come to cater more and more for money yielding German patronage. The stream of British emigration will swell rather than diminish, and the stream of Teuton immigration will be equally persistent and progressive. Yes, the military service ordinance was a cunning stroke on the part of that old Fox von Qual. As a civilian statesman, he's far and away cleverer than Bismock was. He smothers with a feather-bed where Bismock would have tried to smash with a snedgehammer. Have you got me down on your list of noteworthy people? asked Joville, turning the drift of the conversation back to the personal topic. Certainly I have, said Hurlton, turning the pages of his pocket directory to the letter Y. As soon as I knew you were back in England, I made several entries concerning you. In the first place it was possible that you might have a volume on Siberian travel and natural history notes to publish, and I've cross-referenced you to a publisher I know who rather wants books of that sort on his list. I made down your advance, and I have no intentions in that direction, said Joville, in some amusement. Just as well, said Hurlton cheerfully, scribbling a hieroglyphic in his book, that branch of business is rather outside my line. Too little in it, and the gratitude of author and publisher for being introduced to one another is usually short-lived. A more serious entry was the item that if you were wintering in England, you would be looking out for a hunter or two. You used to hunt with the East Wessex, I remember. I've got just a very animal that will suit that country, ready waiting for you. A beautiful, clean jumper. I put it over a fence or two myself, and you and I ride much the same weight. The stiffish price is being asked for it, but I've got the letters D-O after your name. In Heaven's name, said Joville, now openly grinning. Before I die of curiosity, tell me what D-O stands for. It means someone who doesn't object to pay a good price for anything that really suits him. There are some people, of course, who won't consider a thing, unless they can get it for about a third of what they imagine to be its market value. I've got another suggestion down against you and my book. You may not be staying in the country at all. You may be clearing out and disgust at existing conditions. In that case, you would be selling a lot of things that you wouldn't want to cart away with you. That involves another set of entries and a whole lot of cross-references. I'm afraid I've given you a lot of trouble, said Joville dryly. Not at all, said Hurlton. But it would simplify matters if we take it for granted that you're going to stay here for this winter anyhow, and are looking out for hunters. Can you lunch with me here on Wednesday and come and look at the animal afterwards? It's only thirty-five minutes by train. It will take us longer if we motor. There is a two-fifty-three from Charing Cross that we could catch comfortably. If you're going to persuade me to hunt in the East Wessex country this season, said Joville, you must find me a convenient hunting-box somewhere down there. I have found it, cried Hurlton, whipping out a styler-graph, and hastily scribbling an order to view on a card. Central as possible for all the meats, grand stabbling, accommodation, excellent water supply, big bathroom, game larder, cellarage, a bakehouse if you want to bake your own bread, any land with it, not enough to be a nuisance, an acre or two of paddock and about the same of garden, your fond of wild things, a wood comes down to the edge of the garden, a wood that harbours owls and buzzards and kestrels. Have you got all those details in your book? asked Joville, wood adjoining property, O-B-K. I keep those details in my head, said Hurlton, but they're quite reliable. I shall insist on something substantial off the rent if there are no buzzards. Said Joville, now that you've mentioned them they seem an indispensable accessory to any decent hunting-box. Look, he exclaimed, catching sight of a plump, middle-aged individual crossing the vestibule with an air of restrained importance. There goes the delectable pythomy. Does he come on your books at all? I should say, exclaimed Hurlton fervently, the delectable pythomy nourishes expectations of a barony or vicounty at an early date. Most of his life has been spent in streets and squares, with occasional migrations to the esplanades of fashionable watering-places, or the graveled walks of country-house gardens, now that no bless is about to impose its obligations on him quite a new catalogue of wants has sprung into his mind. There are things that a plain esquire may leave undone without causing scandalised remark, but a fiercer light beats on a baron, trigger-pulling is one of the obligations. Up to the present, Pythobis never hit a partridge in anger, but this year he's commissioned me to rent him a deer forest. Some pedigree hairy foods for his home farm was another commission, and a dozen and a half swans for a swannery. The swannery, I may say, was my idea. I said once in his hearing that it gave a baronial air to an estate. You see, I knew a man who'd got a lot of surplus swan stock for sale. Now Pythobis wants a heronery as well. I've put him in communication with a client of mine who suffers from superfluous herons, but of course I can't guarantee that the bird's nesting arrangements will fall in with his territorial requirement. I'm getting him some carp, too, of quite respectable age for a carp pond. I thought he'd look so well for his lady-wife to be discovered by interviewers, feeding the carp with her own fair hands, and I put the same idea into Pythobis' mind. I had no idea that so many things were necessary to endorse a patent of nobility, said Yovil. If there should be any miscarriage in the bestowal of the honour, at least Pythobis will have absolved himself from any charge of contributory negligence. Shall we say Wednesday, here, one o'clock, lunch first, and go down and look at the horse afterwards, said Hurleton, returning to the matter in mind? Yovil hesitated. Then he nodded his head. There's no harm in going to look at the animal. He said, End of Chapter 15, Chapter 16 of When William Came by Sarky This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information, or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox.org. Reading by Andy Minter When William Came by Sarky Chapter 16 Sunrise Mrs. Kerrick sat at a little teakwood table in the veranda of a low-pitched teak-built house that stood on the steep slope of a brown hillside. Her youngest child, with the grave natural dignity of nine-year-old girlhood, maintained a correct but observant silence, looking carefully yet unobtrusively after the wants of the one guest, and checking from time to time the incursions of ubiquitous ants that were obstinately disposed to treat the tablecloth as a foraging ground. The wayfaring visitor, who was experiencing a British blend of eastern hospitality, was a French naturalist, travelling thus far afield in quest of feathered specimens to enrich the aviaries of a bird-collecting Balkan king. On the previous evening, while shrugging his shoulders and unloosing his vocabulary over the meagre accommodation afforded by the native rest-house, he had been enchanted by receiving an invitation to transfer his quarters to the house on the hillside, where he found not only a pleasant-voice hostess and some drinkable wine, but three brown-skinned English youngsters who were able to give him a massive intelligent first-hand information about the bird-life of the region. And now, at the early morning breakfast, ere the sun was showing over the rim of the brown-baked hills, he was learning something of the life of the little community he had chanced on. I was in these pots many years ago, explained the hostess, when my husband was alive and had an appointment out here. It is a healthy hill district, and I had pleasant memories of the place. So, when it became necessary—well, desirable, let us say—to leave our English home and find a new one, it occurred to me to bring my boys and my little girl here. My eldest girl is at school in Paris. Labour is cheap here, and I try my hand at farming in a small way. Of course, it is very different work to just super-intending the dairy and poultry-yard arrangements of an English country estate. There are so many things—insect, ravages, bird depredations, and so on—that one only knows on a small scale in England that happen here in wholesale fashion, not to mention droughts and torrential rains and other tropical visitations. And then the domestic animals are so disconcertingly different from the ones one has been used to. Humped cattle never seem to behave in the way that straight-backed cattle would. And goats and geese and chickens are not a bit the same here that they are in Europe. And, of course, the farm's servants are utterly unlike the same class in England. One has to unlearn a great deal of what one thought one knew about stock-keeping and agriculture, and take notes of the native ways of doing things. They are primitive and un-enterprising, of course, but they have an accumulated store of experience behind them, and one has to tread wearily in initiating improvements. The Frenchman looked round at the brown, sun-scorched hills, with the dusty, empty road showing here and there in the middle distance, and other brown, sun-scorched hills rounding off the scene. He looked at the lizards on the verandah walls, at the jars for keeping the water-cool, at the numberless little insect-bored holes in the furniture, at the heat-drawn lines on his hostess's comely face. Notwithstanding his present wanderings, he had a Frenchman's strong homing instinct, and he marvelled to hear this lady, who should have been a lively and popular figure in the social circle of some English county-town, talking serenely of the ways of hunt, cattle, and native servants. And your children? How do they like the change? he asked. It's healthy up here among the hills, said the mother, also looking round at the landscape, and thinking doubtless of a very different scene. They have an outdoor life and plenty of liberty, they have their ponies to ride, and there is a lake up above us that's a fine place for them to bathe and boat in. The three boys are there now, having their morning swim. The oldest is sixteen, and he's allowed to have a gun, and there's some good wildfowl shooting to be had in the reed-beds at the further end of the lake. I think that part of the joy of his shooting expeditions lies in the fact that many of the darkened plover that he comes across belong to the same species that frequent our English moors and rivers. It was the first hint that she had given of a wistful sense of exile, the yearning for other skies, the message that a dead bird's plumage could bring across rolling seas and scorching plains. And the education of your boys? How do you manage for that? asked the visitor. There's a young cuter living out in these wilds, said Mrs. Kerrick. He was assistant master at a private school in Scotland, but it had to be given up when things changed. So many of the boys left the country. He came out to an uncle who has a small estate, eight miles from here, and three days in the week he rides over to teach my boys, and three days he goes to another family living in the opposite direction. Today he's due to come here. It's a great boon to have such an opportunity for getting the boys educated, but of course it helps him to earn a living. And the society of the place? asked the Frenchman. His hostess laughed. I must admit that it has to be looked for with a strong pair of field glasses, she said. It's almost as difficult to get a good bridge for together as it would have been to get up a tennis tournament or a subscription dance in our particular corner of England. One has to ignore distances and forget fatigue if one wants to be gregarious, even on a limited scale. There are one or two officials who are our chief social mainstays, but the difficulty is to muster the few available souls under the same roof at the same moment. A road will be impassable in one quarter, a pony will be lame in another, a stress of work will prevent someone else from coming, and another may be down with a touch of fever. When my little girl gave a birthday party here, her only little girl guest had to come twelve miles to attend it. The forest officer happened to drop in on us that evening, so we felt quite festive. The Frenchman's eyes grew round in wonder. He had once thought that the capital city of a Balkan kingdom was the uttermost limit of social desolation, viewed from a Parisian standpoint, and there at any rate one could get Café Chanson, tennis, picnic parties, and occasional theatre performance by a foreign troupe. Now and then a travelling circus not to speak of court and diplomatic functions of a more or less sociable character. Here it seems one went on a day's journey to reach an evening's entertainment, and the chance arrival of a tired official took on the nature of a festivity. He looked round again at the rolling stretches of Brown Hills. Before he had regarded them merely as the background to this little shut-away world. Now he saw that they were the foreground as well. They were everything. There was nothing else. And again his glance travelled to the face of his hostess, with its bright, pleasant eyes and smiling mouth. After you live here with your children, he said, in here, in this wilderness, you leave England, you leave everything for this. His hostess rose and took him over to the far side of the veranda. The beginnings of a garden were spread out before them, with young fruit-trees and flowering shrubs and bushes of pale pink roses. Exuberant tropical growths were interspersed with carefully tended vestiges of plants that had evidently been brought in from a more temperate climate, and had not borne the transition well. Bushes and trees and shrubs spread away for some distance to where the ground rose in a small hillock, and then fell abruptly into bare hillside. In all this garden that you see, said the Englishwoman, there is one tree that is sacred. A tree, said the Frenchman, a tree that we could not grow in England. The Frenchman followed the direction of her eyes, and saw a tall, bare pole at the summit of the hillock. At the same moment the sun came over the hill-tops in a deep orange glow, and a new light stole like magic over the brown landscape. And as if they had timed their arrival to the exact moment of sunburst, three brown-faced boys appeared under the straight bare pole. A cord shivered and flapped, and something ran swiftly up into the air, and swung out in the breeze that blew across the hills, a blue flag with red and white crosses. The three boys bared their heads, and the small girl on the veranda steps stood rigidly to attention. Far away, down the hill, a young man cantering into view round the corner of a dusty road, removed his hat in loyal salutation. That is why we live out here, said the Englishwoman quietly. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of When William Came by Sarky This is a Librebox recording. All Librebox recordings are in the public domain. For further information, or to volunteer, please go to Librebox.org. When William Came by Sarky Chapter 17 The Event of the Season In the first swelter-room of the new Osmanly Bards in Cork Street, four or five recumbent individuals in a state of moist nudity and self-respecting inertia were smoking cigarettes or making occasional pretence of reading damp newspapers. A glass wall with a glass door shut them off from the yet more torrid regions of the further swelter chambers. Another glass partition disclosed the dimly lit vault where other patrons of the establishment had arrived at the stage of being pounded and kneaded and sluiced by oriental-looking attendants. The splashing and trickling of taps, the flip-flap of wet slippers on a wet floor, and the low murmur of conversation filtered through glass doors made an appropriately drowsy accompaniment to the scene. A newcomer fluttered into the room, beamed at one of the occupants, and settled himself with an air of elaborate linger in a long canvas chair. Cornelia and Valpy was a fair young man, with perpetual surprise impinged on his countenance, and a chin that seemed to have retired from competition with the rest of his features. The beam of recognition that he had given to his friend or acquaintance subsided into a subdued but lingering simper. What's the matter? Drawled his neighbour lazily, dropping the end of a cigarette into a small bowl of water, and helping himself from a silver case on the table at his side. Matter! said Cornelian, opening wide a pair of eyes in which unhealthy intelligence seemed to struggle in undetermined battle with utter security. Why should you suppose that anything is the matter? When you wear a look of idiotic complacency in a Turkish bath, said the other, it is the more noticeable from the fact that you're wearing nothing else. Were you at the Shalem House dance last night? asked Cornelian, by way of explaining his air of complacent retrospection. No, said the other, but I feel as if I had been. I've been reading columns about it in the dawn. The last event of the season, said Cornelian, and quite one of the most amusing and lively functions that there have been. So the dawn said, but then, as Shalem practically owns and controls that paper, its favourable opinion might be taken for granted. The whole idea of the level was quite original, said Cornelian, who was not going to have his personal narrative of the event forestalled by anything that a newspaper reporter might have given to the public. A certain number of guests went as famous personages in the world's history, and each one was accompanied by another guest typifying the prevailing characteristic of that personage. One man went as Julius Caesar, for instance, and had a girl typifying ambition as his shadow. Another went as Louis XI, and his companion personified superstition. Your shadow had to be some one of the opposite sex, you see, and every alternate dance throughout the evening you dance with your shadow partner. Quite a clever idea. Young Garth von Schneidelstein is supposed to have invented it. New York will be deeply beholden to him, said the other. Shadow dances with all manner of eccentric variations will be the rage there for the next eighteen months. Some of the costumes were really sumptuous, continued Cornelian. The Duchess of Drescher was magnificent as a Halibia. You never saw so many jewels on one person, only, of course, she didn't look dark enough for the character. She had Billy Khan set for her shadow, representing unspeakable depravity. Oh, on earth did he manage that. Oh, a blend of beardsly and backs, as far as get-up and costume, and, of course, his own personality counted for a good deal. Quite one of the successes of the evening was Leighton von Gableraught as George Washington, with Joan Mardal as his shadow, typifying inconvenient candour. He put her down officially as truthfulness, but everyone had heard the other version. Good for Gableraught, though he does belong to the invading horde. It's not often that anyone scores off Joan. Another blaze of magnificence was the loud-voiced Bessemer woman, as the goddess Juno, with peacock-tails and opals all over her. She had Ronnie Storr to represent green-eyed jealousy. Talking of Ronnie Storr and of jealousy, you will naturally wonder who Mrs. Yoville went with. I forget what her costume was, but she'd got that dark-headed youth with her, that she's been trotting round everywhere with the last few days. Cornelian's neighbour kicked him furtively on the shin, and frowned in the direction of a dark-haired youth, reclining in an adjacent chair. The youth in question rose from his seat and stalked into the further swelter-room. So clever of him to go into the furnace-room, said the unabashed Cornelian. Now, if he turns scarlet all over, we shall never know how much is embarrassment, and how much is due to the process of being boiled. Now Yoville hasn't done badly by the exchange. She's better looking than Ronnie. I see that Pitha bewent as Frederick the Great, said Cornelian's neighbour, fingering a sheet of the dawn. Isn't that exactly what one would have expected Pitha be to do, said Cornelian. He's so desperately anxious to announce to all whom it may concern that he has written a life of that hero. He had an uninspiring-looking woman with him, supposed to represent military genius. The spirit of advertisement would have been more appropriate, said the other. The opening scene of the revel was rather effective, continued Cornelian. All the shadow-people reclined in the dimly-lit centre of the ballroom in an indistinguishable mass, and the human characters marched round the illuminated sides of the room to solemn processional music. Every now and then a shadow would detach itself from the mass, hail its partner by name, and glide out to join him or her in the procession. Then, when the last shadows had found their mates and everyone was partnered, the lights were turned up in a blaze, the orchestra crushed out a whirl of non-descript dance music, and people just let themselves go. It was pandemonium. Afterwards, everyone strutted about for half an hour or so, showing themselves off. Then the legitimate programme of dances began. There were some rather amusing incidents throughout the evening. One set of lances was danced entirely by the seven deadly sins and their human exemplars. Of course, seven couples were not sufficient to make up the set, so they had to bring in an eighth sin. I forget what it was. You know, the sins of patriotism would have been rather appropriate, considering who were giving the dance, said the other. Hush! exclaimed Cornelian nervously. You don't know who may overhear you in a place like this. You'll get yourself into trouble. Wasn't there some rather daring new dance of the bunny-hug variety? Asked the indiscreet one. The cubby-cuddle, said Cornelian. Three or four adventurous couples danced it towards the end of the evening. The dawn says that without being strikingly new, it was strikingly modern. The best description I can give of it, said Cornelian, is summed up in the comment of the Grafin Von Toll when she saw it being danced. If they really love each other, I suppose it does not matter. By the way, he added, with apparent indifference, is there any detailed account of my costume in the dawn? His companion laughed cynically, as if you hadn't read everything that the dawn and the other morning papers have to say about the ball hours ago. The naked truth should be avoided in a Turkish bath, said Cornelian, kindly assume that I've only had time to glance at the weather forecast and the news from China. Oh, very well! said the other. Your costume isn't described. You simply come amid a host of others as Mr. Cornelian Valpy, resplendent as the Emperor Nero, with him Miss Kate Lerrer, typifying in sensate vanity. Many hard things have been said of Nero, but his unkindest critics have never accused him of resembling you in feature. Until some very clear evidence is produced, I shall choose to believe it. Cornelian was proof against these shafts. Leaning back gracefully in his chair, he launched forth into that detailed description of his last night's attire, which the dawn had so unaccountably failed to supply. I wore a tunic of white Nepalese silk, with a collar of pearls, real pearls. Round my waist I had a girdle of twisted serpents in beaten gold, studded all over with amethysts. My sandals were of gold, laced with scarlet thread, and I had seven bracelets of gold on each arm. Round my head I had a wreath of gold and laurel leaves, set with scarlet berries, and hanging over my left shoulder was a silk robe of mulberry purple, broided with the signs of the zodiac in gold and scarlet. I had it made specially for the occasion. At my side I had an ivory sheath dagger, with a green jade handle, hung in a green cordova leather. At this point in the recycle his companion rose softly, flung his cigarette end into the little water-bowl, and passed into the further swelter room. Cornelian Valpy was left, still clothed in the look of ineffable complacency, still engaged in all probability in reclothing himself in the finery of the previous evening. End of Chapter 17 Chapter 18 of When William Came by Sarky Chapter 18 The Dead Who Do Not Understand The pale light of a November afternoon faded rapidly into the dusk of a November evening. Far over the countryside, housewives put up their cottage shutters, lit their lamps, and made the customer a remark that the days were drawing in. In barnyards and poultry-runs the greediest pullets made a final tour of inspection, picking up the stray remaining morsels of the evening meal. And then, with much scrambling and squawking, sought the places on the roosting pole that they thought should belong to them. Laborers, working in yard and field, began to turn their thoughts homeward—or tavernward, as the case might be—and through the cold, squelching slush of a waterlogged meadow, a weary, bedraggled, but unbeaten fox, stiffly picked his way, climbed a high, bramble-grown bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching tangle of woods. The pack of fierce-mouthed things that had rattled him from copse and gorse cover, along fallow and plough, hedgerow and wooded lane, for nigh on an hour, and had pressed hard on his life for the last few minutes, receded suddenly into the background of his experiences. The cold, wet meadow, the thick mask of woods, and the oncoming dusk had stayed the chase, and the fox had outstayed it. In a short time he would fall mechanically to licking off some of the mud that caked on his weary pads. In a shorter time horsemen and hounds would have drawn off kennel-wood and home-wood. Yovill rode through the deepening twilight, relying chiefly on his horse to find its way in the network of hedge-bordered lanes that presumably led to a high road or to some human habitation. He was desperately tired after his day's hunting, a legacy of weakness that the fever had bequeathed to him, but even though he could scarcely sit upright in his saddle, his mind dwelt complacently on the day's sport, and looked forward to the snug, cheery comfort that awaited him at his hunting-box. There was a charm, too, even for a tired man in the eerie stillness of the lone twilight land through which he was passing, a grey, shadow-hung land which seemed to have been emptied of all things that belonged to the daytime, and filled with a lurking, moving life of which one knew nothing beyond the sense that it was there, there and very near. If there had been wood-gods and wicked-eyed fawns in the sunlit groves and hillsides of old Hellas, surely there were watchful living things of kindred mould in this dusk-hidden wilderness of fields and hedge and coppice. It was Yovill's third or fourth day with the hounds, without taking into account a couple of mornings cub-hunting. Already he felt that he had been doing nothing different from this all his life. His foreign travels, his illness, his recent weeks in London, they were part of a tapestry background that had very slight and distant connection with his present existence. Of the future he tried to think with greater energy and determination. For this winter at any rate he would hunt and do a little shooting, entertain a few of his neighbours, and make friends with any congenial fellow sportsman who might be within reach. Next year things would be different. He would have had time to look around him, to regain something of his a four-time vigor of mind and body. Next year, when the hunting season was over, he would set about finding out whether there was any noble game for him to take a hand in. He would enter into correspondence with old friends who had gone out into the tropics on the backwoods. He would do something. So he told himself. But he knew thoroughly well that he had found his level. He had ceased to struggle against the fascination of his present surroundings. The slow, quiet comfort and interest of country life appealed with innovating force to the man whom death had half conquered. The pleasures of the chase, well provided for in every detail, and dovetailed in with the assured luxury of a well-ordered, well-staffed establishment, were exactly what he wanted, and exactly what his life down here afforded him. He was experiencing, too, that passionate recurring devotion to an old-loved scene that comes at times to men who have travelled far and willingly up and down the world. He was very much at home, the alien standard floating over Buckingham Palace, the crown of Charlemagne on public buildings and official documents, the grey ships of war riding in Plymouth Bay and Southampton water, with a flag at their stern that older generations of Britons had never looked on, these things seemed far away and inconsequent amid the hedgerows and woods and fallows of the East Wessex country. Horse and houndcraft, harvest, game-broods, the planting and felling of timber, the rearing and selling of stock, the letting of grasslands, the care of fisheries, the upkeep of markets and fares, they were the things that immediately mattered. And Yeovil saw himself, in moments of disgust and self-accusation, settling down into this life of rustic littleness, concerned over the late nesting of a partridge, or the defective draining of a loose-box, hugely busy over affairs that a gardener's boy might grapple with, ignoring the struggle cry that went up low and bitter and wistful from a dethroned, dispossessed race, in whose glories he had gloried, in whose struggle he lent no hand. In what way, he asked himself in such moments, would his life be better than the life of that parody of manhood who upholstered his rooms with art hangings and rosewood furniture and babbled over the effect. The lanes seemed interminable, and without aim or object, except to bisect one another, gates and gaps disclosed nothing in the way of a landmark, and the night began to draw down in increasing shades of darkness. Presently, however, the tired horse quickened its pace, swung round a sharp corner into a broader roadway, and stopped with an air of thankful expectancy at the low doorway of a wayside inn. A cheerful glow of light streamed from the windows and door, and a brighter glare came from the other side of the road, where a large motor-car was being got ready for an immediate start. Yeovil tumbled stiffly out of his saddle, and in answer to the loud rattle of his hunting-crop on the open door, the innkeeper and two or three hangers on hurried out to attend to the wants of man and beast. Flowered and watered for the horse, and something hot for himself were Yeovil's first concern. And then he began to clamour for geographical information. He was rather dismayed to find that the cumulative opinions of those whom he consulted, and of several others who joined unbidden in the discussion, placed his destination at nothing nearer than nine miles. Nine miles of dark and hilly country road for a tired man on a tired horse assumed enormous, far-stretching proportions. And although he dimly remembered that he had asked a guest to dimmer for that evening, he began to wonder whether the wayside inn possessed anything indurable in the way of a bedroom. The landlord interrupted his desperate speculations with a really brilliant effort of suggestion. There was a gentleman in the bar, he said, who was going in a motor-car in the direction for which Yeovil was bound, and who would no doubt be willing to drop him at his destination. The gentleman had also been out with the hounds. Yeovil's horse could be stabled at the inn and fetched home by groom next morning. A hurried embassy to the bar parlor resulted in the news that the motorist would be delighted to be of assistance to a fellow sportsman. Yeovil gratefully accepted the chance that had so obligingly come his way, and hastened to superintend the housing of his horse in its night's quarters. When he had duly seen to the tired animal's comfort and foddering, he returned to the roadway, where a young man in hunting-garb and a liveraged chauffeur were standing by the side of the waiting-car. I am so pleased to be of some use to you, Mr. Yeovil, said the car-owner, with a polite bow, and Yeovil recognized the young Leutnant von Gablerout, who had been present at the musical afternoon at Berkshire Street. He had doubtless seen him at the meet that morning, but in his hunting-kit he had escaped his observation. I too have been out with the hounds, the young man continued. I have left my horse at the Crow and Scepter in Dalford. You are living at Black Dean, are you not? I can take you right past your door. It is all on my way. Yeovil hung back for a moment, overwhelmed with vexation and embarrassment, but it was too late to cancel the arrangement that he had unwittingly entered into, and he was constrained to put himself under obligation to the young officer with the best grace he could muster. After all, he reflected, he had met him under his own roof as his wife's guest. He paid his reckoning to my host, tipped the stable lad who had helped him with his horse, and took his place beside von Gablerout in the car. As they glided along the dark roadway, and the young German reeled off a string of comments on the incidents of the day's sport, Yeovil lay back amid his comfortable raps, and weighed the measure of his humiliation. It was Sicily's gospel that one should know what one wanted in life, and take good care that one got what one wanted. Could he apply that test of achievement to his own life? Was this what he really wanted to be doing, pursuing his uneventful way as a country squire, sharing even his sports and pastimes with men of the nation that had conquered and enslaved his fatherland? The cast lackened its pace somewhat as they went through a small hamlet, past a school-house, past a rural police station with the new monogram over its notice board, past a church with a little tree-grown graveyard. There, in a corner, among wild rose-bushes and tall ews, lay some of Yeovil's own kinsfolk, who had lived in these parts and hunted and found life pleasant in the days that were not so very long ago. Whenever he went past that quiet little gathering place of the dead, Yeovil was wont to raise his hat in mute affectionate salutation to those who were now only memories in his family. Tonight he somehow omitted the salute, and turned his head the other way. It was as though the dead of his race saw and wondered. Three or four months ago the thing he was doing would have seemed an impossibility. Now it was actually happening. He was listening to the gay, courteous, tactful chatter of his young companion, laughing now and then at some joking remark, answering some question of interest, learning something of hunting ways and traditions in von Gibelroth's own country. And when the car turned in at the gate of the hunting lodge and drew up at the steps, the laws of hospitality demanded that Yeovil should ask his benefactor of the road to come in for a few minutes and drink something a little better than the wayside in had been able to supply. The young officer spent the best part of a half hour in Yeovil's snugory, examining and discussing the trophies of rifle and collecting-gun that covered the walls. He had a good knowledge of woodcraft, and the beasts and birds of Siberian forests and North African deserts were to him new pages in a familiar book. Yeovil found himself discussing eagerly with his chance-guest on the European distribution and local variation of such-and-such a species, recounting peculiarities in its habits and incidents of its pursuit and capture. If the cold, observant eyes of Lady Shalem could have rested on the scene, she would have her hailed it as another root-fibre thrown out by the feta compli. Yeovil closed the hall-door on his departing visitor, and closed his mind on the crowd of angry and accusing thoughts that were waiting to intrude themselves. His valet had already got his bath in readiness, and in a few minutes the tired huntsman was forgetting weariness and the consciousness of outside things in the languorous abandonment that steam and hot water induce. Brain and limbs seemed to lay themselves down in a contented, waking sleep. The world that was beyond the bathroom walls dropped away into a far unreal distance. Only somewhere through the steam-clouds pierced a hasty consciousness that a dinner well-chosen was being cooked, and would presently be well served, and right well appreciated. That was a lure to drag the bathre away from the nirvana land of warmth and steam. The stimulating after-effect of the bath took its due effect, and Yeovil felt that he was now much less tired and enormously hungry. A cheery fire burned in his dressing-room, and a lively black kitten helped him to dress, and incidentally helped him to require a new tassel to the cord of his dressing-gown. As he finished his toilet and the kitchen finished its sixth and most notable attack on the tassel, a ring was heard at the front door, and a moment later a loud, hearty and unmistakably hungry voice resounded in the hall. It belonged to the local doctor, who had also taken part in the day's run, and had been bidden to enliven the evening meal, with the entertainment of his inexhaustible store of sporting and social reminiscences. He knew the countryside and the countryfolk inside out, and he was a living, unwritten chronicle of the East Wessex Hunt. His conversation seemed exactly the right accompaniment to the meal. His stories brought glimpses of wet hedgerows, stiff plowlands, leafy spinnies, and muddy brooks, in among the rich old Worcester and Georgian silvers of the dinner-service, the glow and crattle of the wood-fire, the pleasant succession of well-cooked dishes and mellow wines. The world narrowed itself down again to a warm, drowsy-scented dining-room, with the productive hinterland of kitchen and cellar beyond it, and beyond that an important outer world of loose-box and harness-room and stable-yard, further again a dark, hushed region, where pheasants roosted and owls flitted, and foxes prowled. Yeovil sat and listened to story after story of the men and women and horses of the neighborhood. Even the foxes seemed to have a personality, some of them, and a personal history. It was a little like Hans Anderson, he decided, and a little like the reminiscences of an Irish RM, and perhaps just a little like some of the more probable adventures of Baron Munchhausen. The newer stories were evidently true to the smallest detail. The earlier ones had altered somewhat in repetition, as plants and animals vary under domestication. And all the time there was one topic that was never touched on. Of half the families mentioned it was necessary to add the qualifying information that they used to live, at such and such a place. The countryside knew them no longer. Their properties were for sale, or had already passed into the hands of strangers. But neither man cared to allude to the grinning shadow that sat at the feast, and sent an icy chill now and again through the cheeriest jest and most jovial story. The brisk run with the hounds that day had stirred and warmed their pulses. It was an evening for comfortable forgetting. Later that night, in the stillness of his bedroom, with the dwindling noises of a retiring household, dropping off one by one into ordered silence, a door shutting here, a fire being raked out there, the thoughts that had been held away came crowding in. The body was tired, but the brain was not, and Yeovil lay awake with his thoughts for company. The world grew suddenly wide again, filled with the significance of things that mattered, held by the actions of men that mattered. Hunting-box and stable and gun-room dwindled to a mere pin-point in the universe, there were other larger, more absorbing things on which the mind dwelt. There was the grey cold sea outside Dover and Portsmouth and Cork, where the great grey ships of war rocked and swung with the tides, where the sailors sang in dogrel English that bitter-sounding adaptation, Germania rules to waves, where the flag of a world power floated for the world to see. And in oven-like cities of India there were men who looked out at the white sun-glare, the heat-baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, who listened to the unceasing chorus of harsh-throated grows, the strident creaking of cartwheels, the buzz and drone of insects' worms, and the rattle-call of the tree-lizards. Men whose thoughts went hungrily to the cool grey skies and wet turf, and moist plowlands of an English hunting-country. Men whose memories listened yearningly to the music of a deep-throated hound, and the call of a game-bird in the stubble. Yeovil had secured for himself the enjoyment of the things for which these men hungered. He had known what he wanted in life, slowly and with hesitation, yet nevertheless surely, he had arrived at the achievement of his unconfessed desires. Here, installed under his own roof-tree, with as good horse-flesh in his stable as man could desire, with sport lying almost at his door, with his wife ready to come down and help him entertain his neighbours, Murray Yeovil had found the life that he wanted, and was accursed in his own eyes. He argued with himself, and palliated and explained, but he knew why he had turned his eyes away that evening from the little graveyard under the trees. One cannot explain things to the dead. End of Chapter 18. Chapter 19 of When William Came by Sarky This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information, or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox.org. Reading by Andy Minter. When William Came by Sarky Chapter 19. The Little Foxes Take us, the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. On a warm and sunny May afternoon, some ten months since Yeovil's return from his Siberian wanderings and sickness, Sicily sat at a small table in the open-air restaurant in Hyde Park, finishing her after lunch and coffee, and listening to the meritorious performance of the orchestra. Opposite her sat Larry Meadowfield, absorbed for the moment in the slow enjoyment of a cigarette, which also was not without its short-lived merits. Larry was a well-dressed youngster who was, in Sicily's opinion, distinctly good to look on, an opinion which the boy himself obviously shared. He had the healthy, well-cared appearance of a country-dweller who has turned into a town dandy without suffering in the process. His blue-black hair, growing very low down on a broad forehead, was brushed back in a smoothness that gave his head the appearance of a rain-polished slow. His eyebrows were two dark smudges, and his large, violet-gray eyes expressed the restful good temper of an animal whose immediate requirements have been satisfied. The lunch had been an excellent one, and it was jolly to feed out of doors in the warm spring air. The only drawback to the arrangement being the absence of mirrors. However, if he could not look at himself, a great many people could look at him. Sicily listened to the orchestra as it jerked and strutted through a fantastic dance-measure, and as she listened, she looked appreciatively at the boy on the other side of the table, whose soul for the moment seemed to be in his cigarette. Her scheme of life, knowing just what you wanted and taking good care that you got it, was justifying itself by results. Ronnie, grown tiresome with success, had not been difficult to replace, and no one in her world had the satisfaction of being able to condole with her on the undesirable experience of a long interregnum. To fem in in acquaintances with fewer advantages of purse and brains and looks, she might figure as that jovial woman, but never had she given them the justification to allude to her as poor Sicily jovial. And Murray, dear old soul, had cooled down as she had hoped and wished, from his white heat of disgust at the things that she had preferred herself to accept philosophically. A new chapter of their married life and man and woman friendship had opened. Many a rare gallop they had had together that winter, many a cheery dinner-gathering and long bridge-evening in the cosy hunting lodge. Though he still hated the new London and held himself aloof from most of her town-set, yet he had not shown himself rigidly intolerant of the sprinkling of Teuton sportsmen who hunted and shot down in his part of the country. The orchestra finished its clicking and caracoling and was accorded a short clatter of applause. The dance macabre, said Sicily to her companion, one of Saint-Saëns's best-known pieces. Is it, said Larry, indifferently? I'll take your word for it, afraid I don't know much about music. You dear boy, that's just what I like in you, said Sicily. You're such a delicious young barbarian. Am I, said Larry? I dare say I suppose you know. Larry's father had been a brilliantly clever man, who had married a brilliantly handsome woman. The fates had not the least intention that Larry should take after both parents. The fashion of having one lunch in the open air has quite caught on this season, said Sicily. One sees everybody here on a fine day. There's Lady Balequist over there. She used to be Lady Shalem, you know, before her husband got the earldom. To be more correct, before she got it for him, I suppose she's all gogged to see the greater review. It was, in fact, precisely the absorbing topic of the forthcoming Boy Scout march past that was engaging the countess of Balequist's earnest attention at the moment. It's going to be an historical occasion, she was saying to Sir Leonard Pythobee, whose services to literature had up to the present received only a half-measure of recognition. If it miscarries, it will be a serious setback for the Feta Conte. If it is a success, it will be the biggest step forward in the path of reconciliation between the two races that has yet been taken. It will mean that the younger generation is on our side. Not all, of course, but some. That is all we can expect at present, and that will be enough to work on. Supposing the scouts hang back and don't turn up in any numbers, said Sir Leonard anxiously. That, of course, is the danger, said Lady Balequist quietly. Probably two-thirds of the available strength will hold back, but a third or even a sixth would be enough. It would redeem the parade from the calamity of Fiasco, and it would be a nucleus to work on for the future. That is what we want, a good start, a preliminary rally. It is the first step that counts. That is why today's event is of such importance. Oh, of course, of course, the first step on the road. Ascented Sir Leonard. I can assure you, continued Lady Balequist, that nothing has been left undone to rally the scouts to the new order of things. Special privileges have been showered on them. Alone among all the cadet corps they have been allowed to retain their organisation. A decoration of merit has been instituted for them. A large hostelry and gymnasium has been provided for them in Westminster. His Majesty's youngest son is to be their scout master-in-chief. A great athletic meeting is to be held for them each year, with valuable prizes. Three or four hundred of them are to be taken every summer, free of charge for a holiday in the Bavarian Highlands and the Baltic Seaboard. Besides this, the parent of every scout who obtains a medal for efficiency is to be exempted from part of the new war taxation that the people are finding so burdensome. One certainly cannot say that they have not had attractions held out to them, said Sir Leonard. It is a special effort, said Lady Balequist. It is worth making an effort for. They are going to be the janissaries of the Empire, the younger generation knocking at the doors of progress, and thrusting the bars and bolts of old racial prejudices. I tell you, Sir Leonard, it will be an historic moment when the first corps of those little khaki-clad boys swings through the gates of the park. The winter they come, asked the baronet, catching something of his companion zeal. The first detachment is due to arrive at three, said Lady Balequist, referring to a small timetable of the afternoon's proceedings, three punctually, and the others will follow in rapid succession. The emperor and suite will arrive at two-fifty and take up their positions at the saluting base, over there where the big flag-staff has been set up. The boys will come in by Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch and the Albert Gate, according to their districts, and form in one big column over there where the little flags are pegged out. Then the young prince will inspect them and lead them past his majesty. Who will be with the imperial party? asked Sir Leonard. Oh! it is to be an important occasion. Everything will be done to emphasise the significance of the occasion, said Lady Balequist, again consulting her programme. The king of Wurttemberg and the two of the Bavarian royal princes, an Abyssinian envoy who is over here, he will lend a touch of picturesque barbarism to the scene, the general commanding the London District and a whole lot of other military big-wigs, and the Austrian, Italian and Romanian military attaches. She reeled off the imposing list of notables with an air of quiet satisfaction. Sir Leonard made mental notes of personages to whom he might send presentation copies of his new work. Frederick William, the great elector of popular biography, as a souvenir of today's auspicious event. Oh! it's nearly a quarter to three now, he said. Let us get a good position before the crowd gets thicker. Come along to my car. It is just opposite to the saluting base, said her ladyship, and have a pleased past that will let us through. Well ask Mrs. Joville and her young friend to join us. Larry excused himself from joining the party. He had a barbarian's reluctance to assisting at an imperial triumph. I think I'll push off to the swimming-bath, he said to Sicily. See you again about tea time. Sicily walked with Lady Balequist and the literary baronet towards the crowd of spectators, which were steadily growing in dimensions. A newsboy ran in front of them, displaying a poster with the intelligence, Essex wickets fall rapidly. Assemblance of county crickets still survived under the new order of things. Near the saluting base some thirty or forty motor-cars were drawn up in line, and Sicily and her companions exchanged greetings with many of the occupants. A lovely day for the review, isn't it? said the Grefin von Tobbe, breaking off her conversation with the heir Ribbinoch, the little Pomeranian banker who was sitting by her side. They haven't you brought, Mr. Meadowfield? Such a nice boy! I wanted him to come and sit in my carriage and talk to me. He doesn't talk, you know? said Sicily. He's only brilliant to look at. Well, I could have looked at him, said the Grefin. There are thousands of other boys to look at presently, said Sicily, laughing at the old woman's frankness. Well, do you think so? It'll be thousands, asked the Grefin, with an anxious lowering of the voice. Really, thousands? Hundreds, perhaps, though it's some uncertainty. Everyone is not saving. Hundreds anyway, said Sicily. The Grefin turned to the little banker and spoke to him rapidly and earnestly in German. It is most important that we shall consolidate our position in this country. We must coax the younger generation over by degrees. We must disarm their hostility. We cannot afford to be always on the watch in this quarter. It is a sort of weakness, and we cannot afford to be weak. This small upheaval in southeastern Europe is becoming a serious menace. Have you seen today's telegrams from my Gram? They are bad reading. There is no computing the extent of this movement. It is directed against us, said the banker. Agreed, said the Grefin. It is in the nature of things that it must be against us. Let us have no illusions. Within the next ten years, sooner perhaps, we shall be faced with a crisis which will be only a beginning. We shall need all our strength. That is why we cannot afford to be weak over here. Today is an important day. I confess, I am anxious. Hock, the kettle-druns, exclaimed the commanding voice of Lady Balequist, his majesty is coming. Quick, bundle into the car. The crowd behind the police kept lines, surged expectantly into closer formation. Spectators hurried up from sidewalks, and stood craning their necks above the shoulders of earlier arrivals. Through the archway at Hyde Park Corner came a resplendent cavalcade with a swirl of colour, and rhythmic movement, and a crash of exultant music. Life-guards with gleaming helmets, a detachment of Wurtemberg lances with a flutter of black and yellow penins, a rich medley of staff uniforms, a prancing array of princely horsemen, the imperial standard, and the king of Prussia, Great Britain, and Ireland, Emperor of the West. It was the most imposing display that Londoners had seen since the catastrophe. Slowly, grandly, with thunder of music and beat of hooves, the procession passed through the crowd, across the sward towards the saluting base. Slowly the eagle-standard, charged with the leopards, lion and harp of the conquered kingdoms, rose mast-high on the flag-staff, and fluttered in the breeze. Slowly, and with military precision, the troops and suite took up their position round the central figure of the great pageant. Trumpets and kettle-drums suddenly ceased their music, and in a moment there rose in their stead an eager buzz of comment from the nearest spectators. How well the young prince looks in his scout-uniform! The king of Wurtemberg is much younger man than I thought he was. Is that a Prussian or Bavarian uniform there on the right, the man on the back-horse? Neither it's Austrian, the Austrian military attaché. It is one stop-all talking to his majesty. He organised the boy-scouts in Germany, you know. His majesty is looking very pleased. He has reason to be pleased. This is a great event in the history of the two countries. It marks a new epoch. Oh, do you see the Abyssinian envoy? What a picturesque figure he makes! How well he sits his horse! That is the grand Duke of Barton's nephew talking to the king of Wurtemberg now. On the buzz and chatter of the spectators fell suddenly three sound-strokes, distant, measured, sinister, the clang of a clock striking three. Three o'clock and not a boy scout within sight or hearing, exclaimed the loud ringing voice of Joan Marle. One can usually hear their drums and trumpets a couple of miles away. There is the traffic to get through, said Sir Leonard Pithaby in an equally high-pitched voice. And, of course, he added vaguely, it takes some time to get the various units together. One must give them a few minutes' grace. Lady Baalquist said nothing, but her restful, watchful eyes were turned first to Hyde Park Corner, and then in the direction of the Marble Arch, back again to Hyde Park Corner. Only the dark lines of the waiting crowd met her view, with the yellow newspaper placards flitting in and out, announcing to an indifferent public the fate of Essex wickets. As far as her searching eyes could travel, the green stretch of tree and sword remained unbroken, saved by casual loiterers. No small brown columns appeared. No drumbeat came throbbing up from the distance. The little flags pegged out to mark the positions of the awaited scout-cours, fluttered in meaningless isolation on the empty parade-ground. His Majesty was talking unconcernedly with one of his officers. The foreign attachés looked steadily between their charge's ears, as though nothing in particular was hanging in the balance. The Abyssinian envoy displayed an untroubled serenity, which was probably genuine. Elsewhere among the suite was a perceptible fidget, the more obvious because it was elaborately cloaked. Among the privileged onlookers drawn up near the saluting-point, the fidgeting was more unrestrained. Six minutes past three, and not a sign of them, exclaimed Joan Marle, with the explosive articulation of one who cannot any longer hold back a truce. Hark! said some one, I hear trumpets. There was an instant concentration of listening, a straining of eyes. It was only the toot of a passing motor-car. Even Salenad Pithaby, with the eye of faith, could not locate as much as a cloud of dust on the park horizon. And now another sound was heard, a sound difficult to define, without beginning, without dimension, the growing murmur of a crowd waking to a slowly dawning sensation. Have you still been, would strike up an air? said the Grefin Vontoll, fretfully. It is stupid waiting here in silence. Joan fingered her watch, but she made no further remark. She realized that no amount of malicious comment could be so dramatically effective now, as the slow slipping away of the intolerable seconds. The murmur from the crowd grew in volume. Some satirical wits started whistling an imitation of an advancing fife-and-drum band. Others took it up, when the air resounded with the shrill music of a phantom army on the march. The mock throbbing of drum and squealing of fife, Rose and Fell above the packed masses of spectators. But no answering echo came from beyond the distant trees. Like mushrooms in the night, a mustre of uniform police and plain-clothed detectives sprang into evidence on all sides. Whatever happened, there must be no disloyal demonstration. The whistlers and mockers were pointedly invited to keep silence. A one or two addresses were taken. Under the trees, well at the back of the crowd, a young man stood, watching the long stretch of road along which the scouts should come. Something had drawn him there, against his will to witness the imperial triumph, to watch the writing of yet another chapter in the history of his country's submission to an accepted fact. And now a dull flush crept into his grey face, a look that was partly newborn hope and resurrected pride, partly remorse and shame, burned in his eyes. Shame, a choking, searing shame of self-reproach that cannot be reasoned away, was dominant in his heart. He had laid down his arms. There were others who had never hoisted the flag of surrender. He had given up the fight and joined the ranks of the hopelessly subservient. In thousands of English homes throughout the land, there were young hearts that had not forgotten and not compounded, would not yield. The younger generation had barred the door. And in the pleasant May sunshine the eagle standard floated and flapped, the black and yellow penins shifted restlessly. Emperor and princes, generals and guards, sat stiffly in their saddles, and waited. And waited. End of Chapter 19 and of When William Came by Sarkie Read by Andy Minter