 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redman. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short Stories by Sarky. Sredney Vashhtar. Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years. The doctor was silky and defeat, and counted for little, but his opinion was endorsed by Mrs. Dorop, who counted for nearly everything. Mrs. Dorop was Conradin's cousin and guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and real. The other two-fifths in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing were summed up in himself and his imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearism necessary things, such as illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dullness. Without his imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago. Mrs. Dorop would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him for his good was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity which she was perfectly able to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from the likelihood that they would be displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked out, an unclean thing which should find no entrance. In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction. The few fruit trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of their kind blooming in an arid waste. It would probably have been difficult to find a market gardener who would have offered ten shillings for their entire yearly produce. In a forgotten corner, however, almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused toolshed of respectable proportions, and within its walls Conradin found a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral. He had peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly from fragments of history, and partly from his own brain, but it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood. In one corner lived a ragged plumaged hooten hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet. Further back in the gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars. This was the abode of a large polecat ferret, which a friendly butcher boy had once smuggled cage and all into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted horde of small silver. Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe-sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession. Its very presence in the toolshed was a secret and fearful joy to be kept scrupulously from the knowledge of the woman, as he privately dubbed his cousin. And one day, out of heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The woman indulged in religion once a week at a church nearby and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien right in the house of Riman. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the toolshed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt's redney vastar the great ferret. Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the woman's religion, which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction. And on great festivals powdered nutmeg was strewn in front of his hutch, an important feature of the offering being that the nutmeg had to be stolen. These festivals were of irregular occurrence, and were chiefly appointed to celebrate some passing event. On one occasion, when Mrs. Dorop suffered from acute toothache for three days, Conradin kept up the festival during the entire three days, and almost succeeded in persuading himself that redney vastar was personally responsible for the toothache. If the malady had lasted for another day, the supply of nutmeg would have given out. The wooden hen was never drawn into the cult of redney vastar. Conradin had long ago settled that she was an ana-baptist. He did not pretend to have the remotest knowledge as to what an ana-baptist was, but he privately hoped that it was dashing and not very respectable. Mrs. Dorop was the ground plan on which he based and detested all respectability. After a while, Conradin's absorption in the toolshed began to attract the notice of his guardian. It is not good for him to be pottering down there in all weathers, she promptly decided, and at breakfast one morning she announced that the wooden hen had been sold and taken away overnight. With her short-sighted eyes she peered at Conradin, waiting for an outbreak of rage and sorrow, which she was ready to rebuke with a flow of excellent precepts and reasoning. But Conradin said nothing. There was nothing to be said. Something perhaps in his white-set face gave her a moment to requam, for at tea that afternoon there was toast on the table, a delicacy which she usually banned on the ground that it was bad for him, also because the making of it gave trouble, a deadly offence in the middle-class feminine eye. I thought you liked toast, she exclaimed with an injured air, observing that he did not touch it. Sometimes, said Conradin, in the shed that evening there was an innovation in the worship of the hutch-glaude. Conradin had been wont to chant his praises. Tonight he asked a boon. Do one thing for me, Sredney Vashhtar. The thing was not specified. As Sredney Vashhtar was a god he must be supposed to know. And choking back a sob as he looked at that other empty corner, Conradin went back to the world he so hated. And every night in the welcome darkness of his bedroom, and every evening in the dusk of the tool shed, Conradin's bitter litany went up. Do one thing for me, Sredney Vashhtar. Mrs. Durop noticed that the visits to the shed did not cease, and one day she made a further journey of inspection. What are you keeping in that locked hutch? she asked. I believe it's guinea pigs. I'll have them all cleared away. Conradin shut his lips tight, but the woman ransacked his bedroom till she found the carefully hidden key, and forthwith marched down to the shed to complete her discovery. It was a cold afternoon, and Conradin had been bitten to keep to the house. From the furthest window at the dining-room the door of the shed could just be seen beyond to the corner of the shrubbery, and there Conradin stationed himself. He saw the woman enter, and then he imagined her opening the door of the sacred hutch and peering down with her short-sighted eyes into the thick straw bed where his god lay hidden. Perhaps she would prod at the straw in her clumsy impatience, and Conradin fervently breathed his prayer for the last time, but he knew as he prayed that he did not believe. He knew that the woman would come out presently with that pursed smile he loathed so well on her face, and that in an hour or two the gardener would carry away his wonderful god, a god no longer, but a simple brown ferret in a hutch. And he knew that the woman would triumph always as she triumphed now, and that he would grow ever more sickly under her pestering and domineering and superior wisdom, till one day nothing would matter much more with him, and the doctor would be proved right. And in the sting and misery of his defeat he began to chant loudly and defiantly the hymn of his threatened idol. Sredny Vastar went forth. His thoughts were red thoughts, and his teeth were white. His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death. Sredny Vastar the beautiful. And then of a sudden he stopped his chanting, and drew closer to the window-pane. The door of the shed still stood ajar as it had been left, and the minutes were slipping by. They were long minutes, but they slipped by nevertheless. He watched the starlings running and flying in little parties across the lawn. He counted them over and over again, with one eye always on that swinging door. A sour-faced maid came in to lay the table for tea, and still Conradine stood and waited and watched. Hope had crept by inches into his heart, and now a look of triumph began to blaze in his eyes that had only known the wistful patience of defeat. Under his breath, with a furtive exultation, he began once again the peon of victory and devastation. And presently his eyes were rewarded. Out through that doorway came a long, low, yellow and brown beast, with eyes a blink at the waning daylight, and dark wet stains around the fur of jaws and throat. Conradine dropped on his knees. The great pole-cat ferret made its way down to a small brook at the foot of the garden, drank for a moment, then crossed a little plank bridge, and was lost to sight in the bushes. Such was the passing of Sredny Vastra. Tea is ready, said the sour-faced maid. Where is the mistress? She went down to the shed some time ago, said Conradine. And while the maid went to summon her mistress to tea, Conradine fished a toasting fork out of the sideboard drawer, and proceeded to toast himself a piece of bread. And during the toasting of it, and the buttering of it with much butter, and the slow enjoyment of eating it, Conradine listened to the noises and silences which fell in quick spasms beyond the dining-room door. The loud foolish screaming of the maid, the answering chorus of wondering ejaculations from the kitchen-region, the scuttering footsteps and hurried embassies for outside help, and then, after a lull, the scared sobbings at the shuffling tread of those who bore a heavy burden into the house. Whoever will break it to the poor child! I couldn't for the life of me!" exclaimed a shrill voice. And while they debated the matter among themselves, Conradine made himself another piece of toast. End of Sretny Vastar A chapter in acclimatization. His baptismal register spoke of him pessimistically as John Henry, but he had left that behind with the other maladies of infancy, and his friends knew him under the front name of Adrian. His mother lived in Bethnal Green, which was not altogether his fault. One can discourage too much history in one's family, but one cannot always prevent geography. And, after all, the Bethnal Green habit has this virtue that it is seldom transmitted to the next generation. Adrian lived in a room-lit which came under the auspicious constellation of W. How he lived was, to a great extent, a mystery even to himself. His struggle for existence probably coincided in many material details with the rather dramatic accounts he gave of it to sympathetic acquaintances. All that is definitely known is that he now and then emerged from the struggle to dine at the writs or carton, correctly garbed, and with a correctly critical appetite. On these occasions he was usually the guest of Lucas Croyton, an amiable worldling, who had three thousand a year and a taster introducing impossible people to irreproachable cookery. Like most men who combine three thousand a year with an uncertain digestion, Lucas was a socialist, and he argued that you cannot hope to elevate the masses until you have brought plover's eggs into their lives and taught them to appreciate the difference between Coupes-Jacques and Massé-Douard de Fruits. His friends pointed out that it was a doubtful kindness to initiate a boy from behind a drapery counter into the blessedness of the higher catering, to which Lucas invariably replied that all kindnesses were doubtful, which was perhaps true. It was after one of his Adrian evenings that Lucas met his aunt, Mrs. Mebele, at a fashionable tea-shop where the lamp of family life is still kept burning and you meet relatives who might otherwise have slipped your memory. Who was that good-looking boy who was dining with you last night, she asked? He looked much too nice to be thrown away upon you. Susan Mebele was a charming woman, but she was also an aunt. Who are his people, she continued, when the protégé's name, Revised Version, had been given her? His mother lives at Beth. Lucas checked himself on the threshold of what was perhaps a social indiscretion. Beth? Where is it? It sounds like Asia Minor. Is she mixed up with consular people? Oh no! Her work lies among the poor. This was a sideslip into truth. The mother of Adrian was employed in a laundry. I see, said Mrs. Mebele, mission work of some sort, and meanwhile the boy has no one to look after him. It's obviously my duty to see that he doesn't come to harm. Bring him to call on me. My dear Aunt Susan, expostulated Lucas, I really know very little about him. He may not be at all nice, you know, on further acquaintance. He has delightful hair and a weak mouth. I shall take him with me to Hamburg or Cairo. It's the maddest thing I ever heard of, said Lucas angrily. Well, there is a strong strain of madness in our family. If you haven't noticed it yourself, all your friends must have. One is so dreadfully under everybody's eyes at Hamburg, at least you might give him a preliminary trial at Etreta, and be surrounded by Americans trying to talk French. No, thank you. I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English. Tomorrow at five you can bring your young friend to call on me. And Lucas, realizing that Susan Mebley was a woman as well as an aunt, saw that she would have to be allowed to have her own way. Adrian was duly carried abroad under the Mebley wing, but as a reluctant concession to sanity, Hamburg and other inconveniently fashionable resorts were given a wide berth, and the Mebley establishment planted itself down in the best hotel at Dolodorf, an alpine townlet somewhere at the back of the Angadin. It was the usual kind of resort with the usual type of visitors that one finds over the greater part of Switzerland during the summer season, but to Adrian it was all unusual. The mountaineer, the certainty of regular and abundant meals, and in particular the social atmosphere affected him much as the indiscriminating fervour of a forcing house might affect a weed that had strayed within its limits. He had been brought up in a world where breakages were regarded as crimes and expiated as such. It was something new and altogether exhilarating to find that you were considered rather amusing if you smashed things in the right manner and at the recognized hours. Susan Mebley had expressed the intention of showing Adrian a bit of the world. The particular bit of the world represented by Dolodorf began to be shown a good deal of Adrian. Lucas got occasional glimpses of the alpine surgeon, not from his aunt or Adrian, but from the industrious pen of Clovis, who was also moving as a satellite in the Mebley constellation. The entertainment which Susan got up last night ended in disaster. I thought it would. The Grubmire child, a particularly loathsome five-year-old, had appeared as bubbles during the early part of the evening and been put to bed during the interval. Adrian watched his opportunity and kidnapped it when the nurse was downstairs and introduced it during the second half of the entertainment, thinly disguised as a performing pig. It certainly looked very like a pig and grunted and slobbered just like the real article. No one knew exactly what it was, but everyone said it was awfully clever, especially the Grubmires. At the third curtain Adrian pinched it too hard and it yelled, Mama, I am supposed to be good at descriptions, but don't ask me to describe the slings and doings of the Grubmires at that moment. It was like one of the angriest arms set to Strauss's music. We have moved to a hotel higher up the valley. Clovis's next letter arrived five days later and was written from the Hotel Steinbock. We left the Hotel Victoria this morning. It was fairly comfortable and quiet. At least there was an air of repose about it when we arrived. Before we had been in residence twenty-four hours most of the repose had vanished like a dutiful brim, as Adrian expressed it. However nothing unduly outrageous happened till last night when Adrian had a fit of insomnia and amused himself by unscrewing and transposing all the bedroom numbers on his floor. He transferred the bathroom label to the adjoining bedroom door, which happened to be that of Frau Hofrath Schilling, and this morning from seven o'clock onwards the old lady had a stream of involuntary visitors. She was too horrified and scandalized it seems to get up and lock her door. The would-be bathers flew back in confusion to their rooms, and of course the change of numbers led them astray again, and the corridor gradually filled with panic-stricken scantily robed humans, dashing wildly about like rabbits in a ferret-infested warren. It took nearly an hour before the guests were all sorted into their respective rooms, and the Frau Hofrath's condition was still causing some anxiety when we left. Susan is beginning to look a little worried. She can't very well turn the boy adrift, as he hasn't got any money, and she can't send him to his people as she doesn't know where they are. Adrian says his mother moves about a good deal, and he's lost her address. Probably if the truth were known he's had a row at home. So many boys nowadays seem to think that quarrelling with one's family is a recognized occupation. Lucas's next communication from the travellers took the form of a telegram from Mrs. Mebley herself. It was sent reply prepaid, and consisted of a single sentence, in Heaven's name where is Beth? End of Adrian. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redman. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short Stories by Sarkie. The Chaplet. A strange stillness hung over the restaurant. It was one of those rare moments when the orchestra was not discoursing the strains of the ice-cream sailor waltz. Did I ever tell you, asked Clovis of his friend, the tragedy of music at mealtimes? It was a gala evening at the Grand Sibiris Hotel, and a special dinner was being served in the Amethyst dining-hall. The Amethyst dining-hall had almost a European reputation, especially with that section of Europe which is historically identified with the Jordan Valley. Its cooking was beyond reproach, and its orchestra was sufficiently highly salaried to be above criticism. Dither came in shoals, the intensely musical, and the almost intensely musical, who are very many, and in still greater numbers the merely musical who know how Tchaikovsky's name is pronounced and can recognize several of Chopin's nocturnes if you give them due warning. These eat in the nervous detached manner of Roebuck feeding in the open, and keep anxious ears cocked towards the orchestra for the first hint of a recognizable melody. Ah, yes, Pagliacci, they murmur as the opening strains follow hot upon the soup, and if no contradiction is forthcoming from any better informed quarter, they break forth into subdued humming by way of supplementing the efforts of the musicians. Sometimes the melody starts on level terms with the soup, in which case the banqueters contrive somehow to hum between the spoonfuls. The facial expression of enthusiasts who are punctuating potage-sage-ma with Pagliacci is not beautiful, but it should be seen by those who are bent on observing all sides of life. One cannot discard the unpleasant things of this world merely by looking the other way. In addition to the aforementioned types, the restaurant was patronized by a fair sprinkling of the absolutely non-musical. Their presence in the dining-hall could only be explained on the supposition that they had come there to dine. The earlier stages of the dinner had worn off. The wine-lists had been consulted by some with the blank embarrassment of a schoolboy suddenly called on to locate a minor prophet in the tangled hinterland of the Old Testament, by others with the severe scrutiny which suggests that they have visited most of the higher-priced wines in their own homes and probed their family weaknesses. The diners who chose their wine in the latter fashion always gave their orders in a penetrating voice with a plentiful garnishing of stage directions. By insisting on having your model pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine. Standing aside from the revelers in the shadow of a massive pillar was an interested spectator who was assuredly of the feast and yet not in it. Monsieur Aristide Socor was the chef of the Grand Sibiris Hotel and if he had an equal in his profession he had never acknowledged the fact. In his own domain he was a potentate, hedged around with the cold brutality that genius expects rather than excuses in her children. He never forgave and those who served him were careful that there should be little to forgive. In the outer world, the world which devoured his creations, he was an influence. How profound or how shallow an influence he never attempted to guess. It is the penalty and the safeguard of genius that it computes itself by Troy weight in a world that measures by valga hundred weights. Once in a way the great man would be seized with a desire to watch the effect of his master efforts just as the guiding brain of crooks might wish at a supreme moment to intrude into the firing line of an artillery duel and such an occasion was the present. For the first time in the history of the Grand Sibiris Hotel he was presenting to its guests the dish which he had brought to that pitch of perfection which almost a monstrous candle. Canada à la mode d'emblève In thin gilt lettering on the creamy white of the menu how little those words conveyed to the bulk of the imperfectly educated diners. And yet how much specialized effort had been lavished, how much carefully treasured law had been un garnered before those six words could be written. In the departement of Dersèvre ducklings had lived peculiar and beautiful lives and died in the odour of satiety to furnish the main theme of the dish. Champignons which even a purist for Saxon English would have hesitated to address as mushrooms had contributed their languorous atrophid bodies to the garnishing and a sauce devised in the twilight rain of the fifteenth Louis had been summoned back from the imperishable past to take its part in the wonderful confection. Thus far had human effort laboured to achieve the desired result. The rest had been left to a human genius, the genius of Aristides Okor. And now the moment had arrived for the serving of the great dish, the dish which world-weary grand dukes and market-obsessed money-magnets counted among their happiest memories. And at the same moment something else happened. The leader of the highly salaried orchestra placed his violin caressingly against his chin, lowered his eyelids and floated into a sea of melody. Hark! said most of the diners, he is playing the chaplet. They knew it was the chaplet because they had heard it played at luncheon and afternoon tea and at supper the night before and had not had time to forget. Yes, he is playing the chaplet. They reassured one another. The general voice was unanimous on the subject. The orchestra had already played it eleven times that day, four times by desire and seven times from force of habit, but the familiar strains were greeted with the rapture due to a revelation. A murmur of much humming rose from half the tables in the room, and some of the more over-raught listeners laid down knife and fork in order to be able to burst in with loud clappings at the earliest permissible moment. And the canatar à la mode d'emblève. In stupefied, sickened wonder, Aristide watched them grow cold and total neglect, or suffer the almost worse indignity of perfunctory pecking and listless munching, while the banqueters lavish their approval and applause on the music-makers. Carves' liver and bacon with parsley sauce could hardly have figured more ignominiously in the evening's entertainment. And while the master of culinary art leaned back against the sheltering pillar, choking with a horrible brain-searing rage that could find no outlet for its agony, the orchestra leader was bowing his acknowledgments of the hand-clappings that rose in a storm around him. Turning to his colleagues, he nodded the signal for an encore. But before the violin had been lifted anew into position, there came from the shadow of the pillar an explosive negative. No, no, you do not play that again! The musician turned in furious astonishment. Had he taken warning from the look in the other man's eyes, he might have acted differently. But the admiring plaudits were ringing in his ears, and he snarled out sharply. That is for me to decide. No, you play that never again! shouted the chef, and the next moment he had flung himself violently upon the loathed being who had supplanted him in the world's esteem. A large metal terrine filled to the brim with steaming soup had just been placed on the side-table in readiness for a late party of diners. Before the waiting staff or the guests had time to realize what was happening, Aristeed had dragged his struggling victim up to the table and plunged his head deep down into the almost boiling contents of the terrine. At the further end of the room the diners were still spasmodically applauding in view of an encore. Whether the leader of the orchestra died from drowning by soup, or from the shock to his professional vanity, or was scolded to death, the doctors were never wholly able to agree. Monsieur Aristeed Socor, who now lives in complete retirement, always inclined to the drowning theory. End of the Chaplet. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redmond. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short Stories by Sarky The Quest An unwonted peace hung over the villa Elsinore. Broken, however, at frequent intervals by clamorous lamentations, suggestive of bewildered bereavement. The mumbis had lost their infant child, hence the peace which its absence entailed. They were looking for it in wild, undisciplined fashion, giving tongue the whole time, which accounted for the outcry which swept through house and garden whenever they returned to try the home cupboards anew. Clovis, who was temporarily and unwillingly a paying guest at the villa, had been dozing in a hammock at the far end of the garden when Mrs. Mombe had broken the news to him. We've lost, baby," she screamed. Do you mean that it's dead or stampeded or that you staked it at cards and lost it that way? Asked Clovis lazily. He was toddling about quite happily on the lawn, said Mrs. Mombe tearfully, and Arnold had just come in, and I was asking him what sort of sauce he would like with the asparagus. I hope, he said, allon days, interrupted Clovis with a show of quickened interest, because if there's anything I hate, and all of a sudden I missed, baby," continued Mrs. Mombe in a shriller tone. We've hunted high and low in house and garden and outside the gates, and he's nowhere to be seen. Is he anywhere to be heard? asked Clovis. If not, he must be at least two miles away. But where and how? asked the distracted mother. Perhaps an eagle or a wild beast has carried him off, suggested Clovis. There aren't eagles and wild beasts in Surrey, said Mrs. Mombe, but a note of horror had crept into her voice. They escape now and then from travelling shows. Sometimes I think they let them get loose for the sake of the advertisement. Think what a sensational headline it would make in the local papers. Infant son of prominent nonconformist devoured by spotted hyena. Your husband isn't a prominent nonconformist, but his mother came of Wesleyan stock, and you must allow the newspaper some latitude. But we should have found his remains," sobbed Mrs. Mombe. If the hyena was really hungry and not merely toying with his food, there wouldn't be much in the way of remains. It would be like the small boy and apple story. There ain't going to be no core. Mrs. Mombe turned away hastily to seek comfort and counsel in some other direction. With the selfish absorption of young motherhood, she entirely disregarded Clovis's obvious anxiety about the asparagus source. Before she had gone a yard, however, the click of the side gate caused her to pull up sharp. Miss Gilpit from the villa Peterhof had come over to hear details of the bereavement. Clovis was already rather bored with the story, but Mrs. Mombe was equipped with that merciless faculty which finds as much joy in the 90th time of telling as in the first. Arnold had just come in. He was complaining of rheumatism. There are so many things to complain of in this household that it would never have occurred to me to complain of rheumatism. murmured Clovis. He was complaining of rheumatism, continued Mrs. Mombe, trying to throw a chilling inflection into a voice that was already doing a good deal of sobbing and talking at high pressure as well. She was again interrupted. There is no such thing as rheumatism, said Miss Gilpit. She said it with the conscious air of defiance that a waiter adopts in announcing that the cheapest priced claret in the wine-list is no more. She did not proceed, however, to offer the alternative of some more expensive melody, but denied the existence of them all. Mrs. Mombe's temper began to shine out through her grief. I suppose you'll say next that Baby hasn't really disappeared. He has disappeared, conceded Miss Gilpit, but only because you haven't sufficient faith to find him. It's only lack of faith on your part that prevents him from being restored to you safe and well. But if he's been eaten in the meantime by a hyena and partly digested, said Clovis, who clung affectionately to his wild beast theory, surely some ill effects would be noticeable. Miss Gilpit was rather staggered by this complication of the question. I feel sure that a hyena has not eaten him," she said lamely. The hyena may be equally certain that it has. You see, it may have just as much faith as you have, and more special knowledge as to the present whereabouts of the baby. Mrs. Mombe was in tears again. If you have faith," she sobbed, struck by a happy inspiration, won't you find our little Eric for us? I am sure you have powers that are denied to us. Rosemarie Gilpit was thoroughly sincere in her adherence to Christian science principles. Whether she understood or correctly expounded them, the learned in such matters may best decide. In the present case she was undoubtedly confronted with a great opportunity, and as she started forth on her vague search, she strenuously summoned to her aid every scrap of faith that she possessed. She passed out into the bare and open high road, followed by Mrs. Mombe's warning, it's no use going there, we've searched there a dozen times. But Rosemarie's ears were already deaf to all things, save self-congratulation. For sitting in the middle of the highway, playing contentedly with the dust and some faded butter-cups, was a white, pinniford baby with a mop of toe-coloured hair tied over one temple with a pale blue ribbon. Taking first the usual feminine precaution of looking to see that no motor-car was on the distant horizon, Rosemarie dashed at the child and bore it, despite its vigorous opposition, in through the portals of Elsinore. The child's furious screams had already announced the fact of its discovery, and the almost hysterical parents raced down the lawn to meet their restored offspring. The aesthetic value of the scene was marred in some degree by Rosemarie's difficulty in holding the struggling infant, which was borne wrong end foremost towards the agitated bosom of its family. Our own little Eric come back to us, cried the Mombe's in unison, as the child had rammed its fists tightly into its eye sockets, and nothing could be seen of its face but a widely gaping mouth. The recognition was in itself almost an act of faith. Is he glad to get back to daddy and mummy again? crooned Mrs. Mombe. The preference which the child was showing for its dust and butter-cup distractions was so marked that the question struck Clevis as being unnecessarily tactless. Give him a ride on the roly-poly, suggested the father brilliantly, as the howls continued with no sign of early abatement. In a moment the child had been placed astride the big garden-roller, and a preliminary tug was given to set it in motion. From the hollow depths of the cylinder came an ear-splitting roar, drowning even the vocal efforts of the squalling baby, and immediately afterwards there crept forth a white pinafore-infant with a mop of toe-coloured hair tied over one temple with a pale blue ribbon. There was no mistaking either the features or the lung-power of the new arrival. Our own little Eric! screamed Mrs. Mombe, pouncing on him and nearly smothering him with kisses. Did he hide in the roly-poly to give us all a big fright? This was the obvious explanation of the child's sudden disappearance and equally abrupt discovery. There remained, however, the problem of the interloping baby, which now sat whimpering on the lawn in a disfavour as chilling as its previous popularity had been unwelcome. The Mombe's glared at it as though it had wormed its way into their short-lived affections by heartless and unworthy pretenses. Miss Gilpit's face took on an ashen tinge as she stared helplessly at the bunched-up figure that had been such a gladsome sight to her eyes a few moments ago. When love is over, how little of love even the lover understands! quoted Clovis to himself. Rosemary was the first to break the silence. If that is Eric you have in your arms, who is that? That, I think, is for you to explain," said Mrs. Mombe stifly. Obviously, said Clovis, it's a duplicate, Eric, that your powers of faith called into being. The question is, what are you going to do with him? The ashen pallor deepened in Rosemary's cheeks. Mrs. Mombe clutched the genuine Eric closer to her side as though she feared that her uncanny neighbour might out of sheer peak turn him into a bowl of goldfish. I found him sitting in the middle of the road, said Rosemary weakly. You can't take him back and leave him there, said Clovis. The highway is meant for traffic, not to be used as a lumber-room for disused miracles. Rosemary wept. The proverb, weep and you weep alone, broke down as badly on application as most of its kind. Both babies were wailing lugubriously, and the parent Mombe's had scarcely recovered from their earlier lacrimose condition. Clovis alone maintained an unruffled cheerfulness. Must I keep him always? asked Rosemary dolefully. Not always, said Clovis consolingly, he can go into the navy when he's thirteen. Rosemary wept afresh. Of course, added Clovis, there may be no end of a bother about his birth certificate. You'll have to explain matters to the admiralty and their dreadfully hidebound. It was rather a relief when a breathless nursemaid from the Villa Charlottenburg over the way came running across the lawn to claim little Percy, who had slipped out of the front gate and disappeared like a twinkling from the high-road. And even then Clovis found it necessary to go in person to the kitchen to make sure about the asparagus source. End of The Quest This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redman. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short Stories by Sarky Ratislav The Greyfin's two elder sons had made deplorable marriages. It was, observed Clovis, a family habit. The youngest boy, Ratislav, who was the black sheep of a rather greyish family, had as yet made no marriage at all. There is certainly this much to be said for viciousness, said the Greyfin. It keeps boys out of mischief. Does it? asked the baroness Sophie, not by way of questioning the statement, but with a painstaking effort to talk intelligently. It was the one matter in which she attempted to override the decrees of Providence which had obviously never intended that she should talk otherwise than inanely. I don't know why I shouldn't talk cleverly, she would complain. My mother was considered a brilliant conversationalist. These things have a way of skipping one generation, said the Greyfin. That seems so unjust, said Sophie. One doesn't object to one's mother having outshone one as a clever talker, but I must admit that I should be rather annoyed if my daughters talked brilliantly. Well, none of them do, said the Greyfin consolingly. I don't know about that, said the baroness, promptly veering round in defence of her offspring. Elsa said something quite clever on Thursday about the Triple Alliance, something about it being like a paper umbrella that was all right as long as you didn't take it out in the rain. It's not everyone who could say that. Everyone has said it, at least everyone that I know, but then I know very few people. I don't think you're particularly agreeable today. I never am. Haven't you noticed that women with a really perfect profile like mine are seldom even moderately agreeable? I don't think your profile is so perfect as all that, said the baroness. It would be surprising if it wasn't. My mother was one of the most noted classical beauties of her day. These things sometimes skip a generation, you know, put in the baroness with the breathless haste of one to whom repartee comes as rarely as the finding of a gold-handled umbrella. My dear Sophie, said the Greyfin sweetly, that isn't in the least bit clever, but you do try so hard that I suppose I wouldn't to discourage you. Tell me something. Has it ever occurred to you that Elsa would do very well for Ratislav? It's time he married somebody, and why not Elsa? Elsa, marry that dreadful boy, gasped the baroness. Beggars can't be choosers, observed the Greyfin. Elsa isn't a beggar, not financially, or I shouldn't have suggested the match, but she's getting on, you know, and has no pretensions to brains or looks or anything of that sort. You seem to forget that she's my daughter. That shows my generosity. But seriously, I don't see what there is against Ratislav. He has no debts, at least nothing worth speaking about. But think of his reputation, if half the things they say about him are true, probably three-quarters of them are. But what of it? You don't want an archangel for a son-in-law? I don't want Ratislav. My poor Elsa would be miserable with him. A little misery wouldn't matter very much with her. It would go so well with the way she does her hair, and if she couldn't get on with Ratislav, she could always go and do good among the poor. The Baroness picked up a framed photograph from the table. He certainly is very handsome, she said doubtfully, adding even more doubtfully. I daresay Elsa might reform him. The Grafin had the presence of mind to laugh in the right key. Three weeks later the Grafin bore down upon the Baroness Sophie and a foreign book-seller's shop in the Graben, where she was, possibly, buying books of devotion, though it was the wrong counter for them. I've just left the dear children at the Rodenstalls. Was the Grafin's greeting? Were they looking very happy? asked the Baroness. Ratislav was wearing some new English clothes, so of course he was quite happy. I overheard him telling Tony a rather amusing story about a nun and a mousetrap, which went bare repetition. Elsa was telling everyone else a witticism about the Triple Alliance being like a paper umbrella, which seems to bear repetition with Christian fortitude. Did they seem much wrapped up in each other? To be candid, Elsa looked as if she were wrapped up in a horse-rug, and why let her wear saffron colour? I always think it goes with her complexion. Unfortunately it doesn't. It stays with it. Don't forget your lunching with me on Thursday. The Baroness was late for her luncheon engagement the following Thursday. Imagine what has happened! She screamed as she burst into the room. Something remarkable to make you late for a meal, said the Grafin. Elsa has run away with the Rodenshnall chauffeur. Colossal! Such a thing as that no one in our family has ever done, gasped the Baroness. Perhaps he didn't appeal to them in the same way, suggested the Grafin judicially. The Baroness began to feel that she was not getting the astonishment and sympathy to which her catastrophe entitled her. At any rate, she snapped, now she can't marry Ratislav. She couldn't in any case, said the Grafin. He left suddenly for a broad last night. For a broad? Where? For Mexico, I believe. Mexico? But what for? Why Mexico? The English have a proverb. Conscience makes cowboys of us all. I didn't know Ratislav had a conscience. My dear Sophie, he hasn't. It's other people's consciences that send one abroad in a hurry. Let's go and eat. End of Ratislav. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redman. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short stories by Sarky. The Easter Egg. It was distinctly hard lines for Lady Barbara, who came of good fighting stock and was one of the bravest women of her generation, that her son should be so undisguisedly a coward. Whatever good qualities Lester Slagby may have possessed, and he was in some respects charming, courage could certainly never be imputed to him. As a child he had suffered from childish timidity, as a boy from unboyish funk, and as a youth he had exchanged unreasoning fears for others which were more formidable from the fact of having a carefully thought-out basis. He was frankly afraid of animals, nervous with firearms, and never crossed the channel without mentally comparing the numerical proportion of lifebelts to passengers. On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck. Lady Barbara no longer pretended not to see her son's prevailing weakness. With her usual courage she faced the knowledge of its squarely, and, motherlike, loved him nonetheless. Continental travel, anywhere away from the great tourist tracks, was a favoured hobby with Lady Barbara, and Lester joined her as often as possible. Eastertide usually found her, at noble time, an upland township in one of those small princetums that make inconspicuous freckles on the map of Central Europe. A long-standing acquaintancehip with the reigning family made her a personage of due importance in the eyes of her old friend, the burgamaster, and she was anxiously consulted by that worthy on the momentous occasion when the prince made known his intention of coming in person to open a sanatorium outside the town. All the usual items in a programme of welcome, some of them fatuous and commonplace, others quaint and charming, had been arranged for, but the burgamaster hoped that the resourceful English lady might have something new and tasteful to suggest in the way of loyal greeting. The prince was known to the outside world, if at all, as an old-fashioned reactionary, combating modern progress as it were with a wooden sword. To his own people he was known as a kindly old gentleman, with a certain endearing stateliness which had nothing of standoffishness about it. Noble time was anxious to do its best. Lady Barbara discussed the matter with Leicester and one or two acquaintances in her little hotel, but ideas were difficult to come by. Might I suggest something to the Grenadige Frau, asked a sallow, high-cheeked-boned lady to whom the English woman had spoken once or twice, and whom she had set down in her mind as probably a southern slav. Might I suggest something for the reception-fest? she went on with a certain shy eagerness. Our little child here, our baby, we will dress him in a little white coat with small wings as an Easter angel, and he will carry a large white Easter egg, and inside shall be a basket of plover eggs of which the prince is so fond, and he shall give it to his highness as Easter offering. It is so pretty an idea. We have seen it none once in Styria. Lady Barbara looked dubiously at the proposed Easter angel, a fair wooden-faced child of about four years old. She had noticed it the day before in the hotel, and wondered rather how such a toe-headed child could belong to such a dark visage couple as the woman and her husband. Probably she thought an adopted baby, especially as the couple were not young. Of course Nadish Afrao will escort the little child up to the prince, pursued the woman, but he will be quite good and do as he is told. We have some plover's eggs shall come fresh from Veen," said the husband. The small child and Lady Barbara seemed equally unenthusiastic about the pretty idea. Lester was openly discouraging, but when the burgamaster heard of it he was enchanted. The combination of sentiment and plover's eggs appealed strongly to his teutonic mind. On the eventful day the Easter angel, really quite prettily and quaintly dressed, was a centre of kindly interest to the gala-crowed marshal to receive his highness. The mother was unobtrusive and less fussy than most parents would have been under the circumstances, merely stipulating that she should place the Easter egg herself in the arms that had been carefully schooled how to hold the precious burden. Then Lady Barbara moved forward, the child marching stolidly and with grim determination at her side. It had been promised cakes and sweeties galore if it gave the egg well and truly to the kind old gentleman who was waiting to receive it. Lester had tried to convey to it privately that horrible snackings would attend any failure in its share of the proceedings, but it is doubtful if his German caused more than an immediate distress. Lady Barbara had thoughtfully provided herself with an emergency supply of chocolate sweet-meats. Children may sometimes be time-servers, but they do not encourage long accounts. As they approached nearer to the princely dais, Lady Barbara stood discreetly aside and the stolid-faced infant walked forward alone with staggering but steadfast gate encouraged by a murmur of elderly approval. Lester, standing in the front row of the onlookers, turned to scan the crowd for the beaming faces of the happy parents. In a side-road which led to the railway station he saw a cab entering the cab with every appearance of furtive haste with a dark-visaged couple who had been so plausibly eager for the pretty idea, the sharpened instinct of cowardice lit up the situation to him in one swift flash. The blood roared and surged to his head as though thousands of flood-gates had been opened in his veins and arteries, and his brain was the common sluice in which all the torrents met. He saw nothing but a blur around him. Then the blood ebbed away in quick waves till his very heart seemed drained and empty, and he stood nervously, helplessly, donely watching the child, bearing its accursed burden with slow, relentless steps nearer and nearer to the group that waited sheep-like to receive him. A fascinated curiosity compelled Lester to turn his head towards the fugitives. The cab had started at hot pace in the direction of the station. The next moment Lester was running, running faster than any of those present had ever seen a man run, and he was not running away. For that stray fraction of his life some unwanted impulse beset him, some hint of the stock he came from, and he ran unflinchingly towards danger. He stooped and clutched at the Easter egg as one tries to scoop up the ball in rugby football. What he meant to do with it he had not considered, the thing was to get it. But the child had been promised cakes and sweetmeats if it safely gave the egg into the hands of the kindly old gentleman. It uttered no scream, but it held to its charge with limpid grip. Lester sank to his knees tugging savagely at the tightly clasped burden, and angry cries rose from the scandalised onlookers. A questioning, threatening ring formed round him, then shrank back in recoil as he shrieked out one hideous word. Lady Barbara heard the word and saw the crowd race away like scattered sheep, saw the prince forcibly hustled away by his attendants. Also she saw her son lying prone in an agony of overmastering terror, his spasm of daring shattered by the child's unexpected resistance, still clutching frantically, as though for safety, at that white satin jugor, unable to crawl even from its deadly neighbourhood, able only to scream and scream and scream. In her brain she was dimly conscious of balancing or striving to balance the abject shame which had him now enthralled against the one compelling act of courage which had flung him grandly and madly onto the point of danger. It was only for the fraction of a minute that she stood watching the two entangled figures, the infant with its woodenly obstinate face and body tense with dogged resistance, and the boy limp and already nearly dead with a terror that almost stifled his screams, and over them the long gala streamers flapping gaily in the sunshine. She never forgot the scene, but then it was the last she ever saw. Lady Barbara carries her scarred face with its sightless eyes as bravely as ever in the world, but at Easter-tide her friends are careful to keep from Harria's any mention of the children's Easter symbol. End of The Easter Egg This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redman. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short Stories by Sarky Phil Boyd's Tudge. The Story of a Mouse that Helped I Want to Marry Your Daughter said Mark Spaley with faltering eagerness. I am only an artist with an income of two hundred a year, and she is the daughter of an enormously wealthy man, so I suppose you will think my offer a piece of presumption. Duncan Dullamy, the great company-inflator, showed no outward sign of displeasure. As a matter of fact, he was secretly relieved at the prospect of finding even a two hundred a year husband for his daughter Leonore. A crisis was rapidly rushing upon him, from which he knew he would emerge with neither money nor credit. All his recent ventures had fallen flat, and flattest of all had gone the wonderful new breakfast-food Pippenta on the advertisement of which he had sunk such huge sums. It could scarcely be called a drug in the market. People bought drugs, but no one bought Pippenta. Would you marry Leonore if she were a poor man's daughter? asked the man of Phantom Wealth. Yes, said Mark, wisely avoiding the error of over-protestation, and to his astonishment Leonore's father not only gave his consent, but suggested a fairly early date for the wedding. I wish I could show my gratitude in some way," said Mark, with genuine emotion. I'm afraid it's rather like the mouse proposing to help the lion. Get people to buy that beastly muck," said Dullamy nodding savagely at a poster of the despised Pippenta, and you all have done more than any of my agents have been able to accomplish. It wants a better name," said Mark reflectively, and something distinctive in the poster-line. Anyway, I'll have a shot at it. Three weeks later the world was advised of the coming of a new breakfast-food heralded under the resounding name of Philboyd Studge. Spaley put forth no pictures of massive babies springing up with fungus-like rapidity under its forcing influence, or of representatives of the leading nations of the world scrambling with fatuous eagerness for its possession. One huge somber poster depicted the damned in hell suffering a new torment from their inability to get at the Philboyd Studge, which elegant young fiends held in transparent bowls just beyond their reach. The scene was rendered even more gruesome by a subtle suggestion of the features of leading men and women of the day in the portrayal of the lost souls. Prominent individuals of both political parties, society hostesses, well-known dramatic authors and novelists, and distinguished aeroplaneists were dimly recognizable in that doomed throng. Noted lights of the musical comedy stage flickered wonly in the shades of the inferno, smiling still from force of habit, but with the fearsome smiling rage of baffled effort. The poster bore no fulsome allusions to the merits of the new breakfast-food, but a single grim statement ran in bold letters along its base. They cannot buy it now. Spaley had grasped the fact that people will do things from a sense of duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure. There are thousands of respectable middle-class men who, if you found them unexpectedly in a Turkish bath, would explain in all sincerity that a doctor had ordered them to take Turkish baths. If you told them in return that you went there because you liked it, they would stare in pained wonder at the frivolity of your motive. In the same way, whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, everyone assumes that it has been carried out under orders, from somewhere or another. No one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then. And so it was with the new breakfast-food. No one would have eaten Philboyd's starch as a pleasure, but the grim austerity of its advertisement drove housewives in shoals to the grossest shops to clamour for an immediate supply. In small kitchens, solemn pigtail daughters helped depressed mothers to perform the primitive ritual of its preparation. On the breakfast-tables of cheerless parlours it was partaken of in silence. Once the women-folk discovered that it was thoroughly unpalatable, their zeal enforcing it on their households knew no bounds. You haven't eaten your Philboyd's starch! Would be screamed at the appetiteless clerk as he hurried weirdly from the breakfast-table, and his evening-meal would be prefaced by a warmed-up mess which would be explained as your Philboyd's starch that you didn't eat this morning. Those strange fanatics who ostentatiously mortify themselves inwardly and outwardly with health biscuits and health garments battened aggressively on the new food. Ernest spectacled young men devoured it on the steps of the National Liberal Club. A bishop who did not believe in a future state preached against the poster, and a peer's daughter died from eating too much of the compound. A further advertisement was obtained when an infantry regiment mutinied and shot its officers rather than eat the nauseous mess. Fortunately Lord Birrell of Blatherstone, who was war-minister at the moment, saved the situation by his happy epigram that discipline to be effective must be optional. Philboyd's starch had become a household word, but Dullamy wisely realised that it was not necessarily the last word in breakfast dietary. Its supremacy would be challenged as soon as some yet more unpalatable food should be put on the market. There might even be a reaction in favour of something tasty and appetising, and the puritan austerity of the moment might be banished from domestic cookery. At an opportune moment, therefore, he sold out his interests in the article which had brought him in colossal wealth at a critical juncture and placed his financial reputation beyond the reach of Cavill. As for Leonore, who was now an heiress on a far greater scale than ever before, he naturally found her something a vast deal higher in the husband market than a two-hundred-a-year poster designer. Mark Spaley, the brain-mouse who had helped the financial lion with such under-war effect, was left to curse the day he produced the wonder-working poster. After all, said Clovis, meeting him shortly afterwards at his club, you have this doubtful consolation that is not in mortals to countermand success. End of Phil Boyd's Studge, the story of a mouse that helped. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redman. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short Stories by Sarkie The Music on the Hill Sylvia Seltan at her breakfast in the morning-room at Yesney with a pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a fervent iron-side might have permitted himself on the morrow of Worcester fight. She was scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belonged to that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by circumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupied with a series of small struggles, usually with the odds likely against her, and usually she had just managed to come through winning. And now she felt that she had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. To have married Mortimer Seltan, dead Mortimer, as his more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women, was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through. Yesterday she had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from town and its group of satellite watering-places and settling him down, in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm which was his country-house. You will never get Mortimer to go, his mother had said carpingly, but if he once goes he'll stay. Yesny throws almost as much a spell over him as town does. One can understand what holds him to town, but Yesny and the Dowager had shrugged her shoulders. There was a somber, almost savage wildness about Yesny that was certainly not likely to appeal to town-bread tastes, and Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more silver than leafy Kensington. She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it over much. Distrust of town life had been a new thing with her, born of her marriage with Mortimer, and she had watched with satisfaction the gradual fading of what she called the German street look in his eyes as the woods and heather of Yesny had closed in on them yesterday. Her willpower and strategy had prevailed. Mortimer would stay. Outside the morning-room windows was a triangular slope of turf, which the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected fuchsia bushes, a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous cooms overgrown with oak and ewe. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled complacently as she gazed with a school of art appreciation at the landscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered. It is very wild, she said to Mortimer, who had joined her. One could almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan had never quite died out. The worship of Pan never has died out, said Mortimer. Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the nature-god to whom all must come back at last. He has been called the father of all the gods, but most of his children have been still-born. Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way, and did not like to hear her beliefs spoken of as mere after-growths, but it was at least something new and hopeful to hear dead Mortimer speak with such energy and conviction on any subject. You don't really believe in Pan, she asked incredulously. I've been a fool in most things, said Mortimer quietly, but I'm not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here, and if you're wise you won't disbelieve in him too boastfully while you're in his country. It was not till a week later when Sylvia had exhausted the attractions of the woodland walks round Yesney that she ventured on a tour of inspection of the farm-buildings. A farm-yard suggested in her mind a scene of cheerful bustle, with churns and flails and smiling dairy-maids, and teams of horses drinking knee-deep in duck-crowded ponds. As she wandered among the gaunt-grey buildings of Yesney manor farm, her first impression was one of crushing stillness and desolation, as though she had happened on some lone deserted homestead long given over to owls and cobwebs. Then came a sense of furtive, watchful hostility, the same shadow of unseen things that seemed to lurk in the wooded coons and coppices. From behind heavy doors and shuttered windows came the restless stamp of hoof or rasp of chain-halter, and at times a muffled bellow from some stalled beast. From a distant corner a shaggy dog watched her with intent unfriendly eyes. As she drew near it slipped quietly into its kennel, and slipped out again as noiselessly when she had passed by. A few hens, questing for food under a rick, stole away under a gate at her approach. Sylvia felt that if she had come across any human beings in this wilderness of barn and buyer, they would have fled wraith-like from her gaze. At last, turning a corner quickly, she came upon a living thing that did not fly from her. A stretch in a pool of mud was an enormous sow, gigantic beyond the town-woman's wildest computation of swine-flesh, and speedily alert to resent and, if necessary, repel the unwentied intrusion. It was Sylvia's turn to make an unobtrusive retreat. As she threaded her way past rickyards and cowsheds and long blank walls, she started suddenly, at a strange sound, the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal. Jan, the only boy employed on the farm, a toe-headed, whisen-faced yokel, was visibly at work on a potato-clearing halfway up the nearest hillside, and Mortimer, when questioned, knew of no other probable or possible begetter of the hidden mockery that had ambushed Sylvia's retreat. The memory of that untraceable echo was added to her other impressions of a furtive sinister something that hung around Yesney. Of Mortimer she saw very little. Farm and woods and trout streams seemed to swallow him up from dawn till dusk. Once, following the direction she had seen him take in the morning, she came to an open space in a nut-copse, further shuttied by huge yew-trees, in the centre of which stood a stone pedestal, surmounted by a small bronze figure of a youthful pan. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship, but her attention was chiefly held by the fact that a newly cut bunch of grapes had been placed as an offering at its feet. Grapes were none too plentiful at the manor-house, and Sylvia snatched the bunch angrily from the pedestal. Contemptuous annoyance dominated her thoughts as she strolled slowly homeward, and then gave way to a sharp feeling of something that was very near-fried. Across her thick tangle of undergrowth a boy's face was scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes. It was a lonely pathway. All pathways round Yesney were lonely for the matter of that, and she sped forward without waiting to give a closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition. It was not till she had reached the house that she discovered that she had dropped the bunch of grapes in her flight. I saw a youth in the wood today, she told Mortimer that evening. Brown face turned rather handsome, but a scoundrel to look at. A gypsy lad, I suppose. A reasonable theory, said Mortimer. Only there aren't any gypsies in these parts at present. Then who was he? asked Sylvia. And as Mortimer appeared to have no theory of his own, she passed on to recount her finding of the votive offering. I suppose it was your doing, she observed. It's a harmless piece of lunacy, but people would think you dreadfully silly if they knew of it. Did you meddle with it in any way? asked Mortimer. I threw the grapes away. It seemed so silly, said Sylvia, watching Mortimer's impassive face for a sign of annoyance. I don't think you were wise to do that, he said reflectively. I've heard it said that the wood-guards are rather horrible to those who molest them. Horrible perhaps to those that believe in them, but you see I don't, retorted Sylvia. All the same, said Mortimer in his even dispassionate tone, I should avoid the woods and orchards, if I were you, and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm. It was all nonsense, of course, but in that lonely wood-guards spot nonsense seemed able to rear a bastard brood of uneasiness. Mortimer, said Sylvia suddenly, I think we will go back to town sometime soon. Her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed. It had carried her on to ground that she was already anxious to quit. I don't think you will ever go back to town, said Mortimer. He seemed to be paraphrasing his mother's prediction as to himself. Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt that the course of her next afternoon's ramble took her instinctively clear of the network of woods. As to the horned cattle Mortimer's warning was scarcely needed, for she had always regarded them as of doubtful neutrality at the best. Her imagination unsext the most matronly dairy-cows and turned them into bulls liable to see red at any moment. The ram who fed in the narrow paddock below the orchards, she had adjudged after ample and cautious probation to be of docile temper. Today, however, she decided to leave his docility untested, for the usually tranquil beast was roaming with every sign of restlessness from corner to corner of his meadow. A low, fitful piping as of some reedy flute was coming from the depth of a neighbouring cop's and there seemed to be some subtle connection between the animal's restless pacing and the wild music from the wood. Sylvia turned her steps in an upward direction and climbed the heather-clad slopes that stretched in rolling shoulders high above Yesny. She had left the piping-notes behind her, but across the wooded cooms at her feet the wind brought her another kind of music, the straining bay of hounds in full chase. Yesny was just on the outskirts of the Devon and Somerset country and the hunted deer sometimes came that way. Sylvia could presently see a dark body, breasting hill after hill, and sinking again and again out of sight as he crossed the cooms, while behind him steadily swelled that relentless chorus and she grew tense with the excited sympathy that one feels for any hunted thing in whose capture one is not directly interested. And at last he broke through the outermost line of oak's grub and fern and stood panting in the open, a fat September stag carrying a well furnished head. His obvious course was to drop down to the brown pools of Undercum and thence make his way towards the red deer's favoured sanctuary, the Sea. To Sylvia's surprise, however, he turned his head to the upland slope and came lumbering resolutely onward over the heather. It will be dreadful, she thought, the hounds will pull him down under my very eyes. But the music of the pack seemed to have died away for a moment and in its place she heard again that wild piping which rose now on this side, now on that, as though urging the failing stag to a final effort. Sylvia stood well aside from his path, half-hidden in a thick growth of wertel bushes and watched him swing stiffly upward, his flanks dark with sweat, the coarse hair on his neck showing light by contrast. The pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet and at the same moment the Great Beast slewed round and bore directly down upon her. In an instant her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger. The thick heather roots mocked her scrambling efforts at flight and she looked frantically downward for a glimpse of oncoming hounds. The huge antler spikes were within a few yards of her and in a flash of numbing fear she remembered Mortimer's warning to beware of horned beasts on the farm and then with a quick throb of joy she saw that she was not alone. A human figure stood a few paces aside knee deep in the wertel bushes. Drive it off! she shrieked. But the figure made no answering movement. The antlers drove straight at her breast. The acrid smell of the hunted animal was in her nostrils but her eyes were filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death and in her ears rang the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal, end of the music on the hill. This recording is in the public domain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. This reading is by Graham Redman. The Chronicles of Clovis. Short Stories by Sarky. The Story of St. Vespelius. Tell me a story. Said the Baroness, staring out despairingly at the rain. It was that light, apologetic sort of rain that looks as if it was going to leave off every minute and goes on for the greater part of the afternoon. What sort of story? Asked Clovis, giving his croquet mallet a valedictory chauvin to retirement. One just true enough to be interesting and not true enough to be tiresome, said the Baroness. Clovis rearranged several cushions to his personal solace and satisfaction. He knew that the Baroness liked her guests to be comfortable and he thought it right to respect her wishes in that particular. Have I ever told you the story of St. Vespelius? He asked. You've told me stories about grand dukes and lion tamers and financiers widows and a postmaster in Herzegovina, said the Baroness, and about an Italian jockey and an amateur governess who went to Warsaw and several about your mother, but certainly never anything about a saint. This story happened a long while ago, he said. In those uncomfortable piebald times when a third of the people were pagan and a third Christian and the biggest third of all just followed whichever religion the court happened to profess, there was a certain king called Krikos who had a fearful temper and no immediate successor in his own family. His married sister, however, had provided him with a large stock of nephews from which to select his heir, and the most eligible and royally approved of all these nephews was the sixteen-year-old Vespelius. He was the best-looking and the best horseman and javelin-thrower and had that priceless princely gift of being able to walk past a supplicant with an heir of not having seen him but would certainly have given something if he had. My mother has that gift to a certain extent. She can go smilingly and financially unscathed through a charity bazaar and meet the organisers next day with the solicitors, had I but known you were in need of funds, heir that is really rather a triumph in audacity. Now Krikos was a pagan of the first water and kept the worship of the sacred serpents who lived in a hallowed grove on a hill near the royal palace up to a high pitch of enthusiasm. The common people were allowed to please themselves within certain discrete limits in the matter of private religion, but any official in the service of the court who went over to the new cult was looked down on, literally as well as metaphorically, the looking down being done from the gallery that ran round the royal bear-pit. Consequently there was considerable scandal and consternation when the youthful vespaleous appeared one day at a court-function with a rosary tucked into his belt and announced in reply to angry questionings that he had decided to adopt Christianity or at any rate to give it a trial. If it had been any of the other nephews the king would possibly have ordered something drastic in the way of scourging and banishment and in the case of the favoured vespaleous he determined to look on the whole thing much as a modern father might regard the announced intention of his son to adopt the stage as a profession. He sent accordingly for the royal librarian. The royal library in those days was not a very extensive affair and the keeper of the king's books had a great deal of leisure on his hands. Consequently he was in frequent demand for the settlement of other people's affairs when these strayed beyond normal limits and got temporarily unmanageable. You must reason with Prince Vespaleous," said the king, and impress on him the error of his ways. We cannot have the air to the throne setting such a dangerous example. But where shall I find the necessary arguments?" asked the librarian. I give you free leave to pick and choose your arguments in the royal woods and coppices, said the king. If you cannot get together some cutting observations and stinging retorts suitable to the occasion you are a person of very poor resource. So the librarian went into the woods and gathered a good list election of highly argumentative rods and switches and then proceeded to reason with Vespaleous on the folly and iniquity and above all the unseemliness of his conduct. His reasoning left a deep impression on the young prince, an impression which lasted for many weeks, during which time nothing more was heard about the unfortunate lapse into Christianity. Then a further scandal of the same nature agitated the court. At a time when he should have been engaged in audibly invoking the gracious protection and patronage of the holy serpents, Vespaleous was heard singing a chant in honour of St. Odilo of Cluny. The king was furious at this new outbreak and began to take a gloomy view of the situation. Vespaleous was evidently going to show a dangerous obstinacy in persisting in his heresy, and yet there was nothing in his appearance to justify such perverseness. He had not the pale eye of the fanatic or the mystic look of the dreamer. On the contrary, he was quite the best-looking boy at court. He had an elegant, well-knit figure, a healthy complexion, eyes the colour of very ripe mulberries, and dark hair smooth and very well cared for. It sounds like a description of what you imagine yourself to have been like at the age of sixteen," said the Baroness. My mother has probably been showing you some of my early photographs," said Clavis. Having turned the sarcasm into a compliment, he resumed his story. The king had Vespaleous shut up in a dark tower for three days, with nothing but bread and water to live on, the squealing and fluttering of bats to listen to, and drifting clouds to watch through one little window slit. The anti-pagan section of the community began to talk portentously of the boy martyr. The martyrdom was mitigated as far as the food was concerned by the carelessness of the tower warden, who once or twice left a portion of his own supper of broiled meat and fruit and wine by mistake in the prince's cell. After the punishment was over, Vespaleous was closely watched for any further symptom of religious perversity, for the king was determined to stand no more opposition on so important a matter, even from a favourite nephew. If there was any more of this nonsense, he said, the succession to the throne would have to be altered. For a time all went well. The festival of summer sports was approaching, and the young Vespaleous was too engrossed in wrestling and foot-running and javelin-throwing competitions to bother himself with the strife of conflicting religious systems. Then, however, came the great culminating feature of the summer festival, the ceremonial dance round the grove of the sacred serpents, and Vespaleous, as we should say, sat it out. The affront to the state religion was too public and ostentatious to be overlooked, even if the king had been so minded, and he was not in the least so minded. For a day and a half he sat apart and brooded, and every one thought he was debating within himself the question of the young prince's death or pardon. As a matter of fact he was merely thinking out the manner of the boy's death. As the thing had to be done, and was bound to attract an enormous amount of public attention in any case, it was as well to make it as spectacular and impressive as possible. Apart from his unfortunate taste in religions, said the king, and his obstinacy in adhering to it, he is a sweet and pleasant youth. Therefore it is meat and fitting that he should be done to death by the winged envoys of sweetness. Your majesty means? said the royal librarian. I mean, said the king, that he shall be stung to death by bees. By the royal bees, of course. A most elegant death, said the librarian. Elegant and spectacular and decidedly painful, said the king, it fulfills all the conditions that could be wished for. The king himself thought out all the details of the execution ceremony. Vespaleous was to be stripped of his clothes, his hands were to be bound behind him, and he was then to be slung in a recumbent position immediately above three of the largest of the royal beehives, so that the least movement of his body would bring him in jarring contact with them. The rest could be safely left to the bees. The death-throws, the king computed, might last anything from fifteen to forty minutes, though there was division of opinion and considerable wagering among the other nephews, as to whether death might not be almost instantaneous, or, on the other hand, whether it might not be deferred for a couple of hours. Anyway, they all agreed, it was vastly preferable to being thrown down into an evil-smelling bear-pit, and being clawed and mauled to death by imperfectly carnivorous animals. It so happened, however, that the keeper of the royal hives had leanings towards Christianity himself, and moreover, like most of the court officials, he was very much attached to Vespaleous. On the eve of the execution, therefore, he busied himself with removing the stings from all the royal bees. It was a long and delicate operation, but he was an expert bee-master, and by working hard nearly all night he succeeded in disarming all, or almost all, of the hive inmates. I didn't know you could take the sting from a live bee," said the baroness incredulously. Every profession has its secrets, replied Clevis. If it hadn't, it wouldn't be a profession. Well, the moment for the execution arrived. The king and court took their places, and accommodation was found for as many of the populace as wished to witness the unusual spectacle. Fortunately, the royal bee-yard was of considerable dimensions, and was commanded, moreover, by the terraces that ran round the royal gardens. With a little squeezing and the erection of a few platforms, room was found for everybody. Vespaleous was carried into the open space in front of the hives, blushing and slightly embarrassed, but not at all displeased at the attention which was being centred on him. He seems to have resembled you in more things than in appearance," said the baroness. Don't interrupt at a critical point in the story, said Clevis. As soon as he had been carefully adjusted in the prescribed position over the hives, and almost before the jailers had time to retire to a safe distance, Vespaleous gave a lusty and well-aimed kick which sent all three hives toppling one over another. The next moment he was wrapped from head to foot in bees. Each individual insect nursed the dreadful and humiliating knowledge that in this supreme hour of catastrophe it could not sting, but each felt that he ought to pretend to. Vespaleous squealed and wriggled with laughter, for he was being tickled nearly to death, and now and again he gave a furious kick and used a bad word as one of the few bees that had escaped disarmament got its protest home. But the spectators saw with amazement that he showed no signs of approaching death agony, and as the bees dropped wearily away in clusters from his body his flesh was seen to be as white and smooth as before the ordeal with a shiny glaze from the honey smear of innumerable bee-feet, and here and there a small red spot where one of the rare stings had left its mark. It was obvious that a miracle had been performed in his favour, and one loud murmur of astonishment or exultation rose from the on-looking crowd. The king gave orders for Vespaleous to be taken down to await further orders and stalked silently back to his midday meal, at which he was careful to eat heartily and drink copiously as though nothing unusual had happened. After dinner he sent for the royal librarian. What is the meaning of this fiasco? he demanded. Your Majesty," said that official, either there is something radically wrong with the bees, there is nothing wrong with my bees," said the king haughtily, they are the best bees, or else," said the librarian, there is something irremediably right about Prince Vespaleous. If Vespaleous is right, I must be wrong," said the king. The librarian was silent for a moment, hasty speech has been the downfall of many, ill-considered silence was the undoing of the luckless court-functionary. Forgetting the restraint due to his dignity and the golden rule which imposes repose of mind and body after a heavy meal, the king rushed upon the keeper of the royal books and hit him repeatedly and promiscuously over the head with an ivory chess-board, a pewter wine-flagon and a brass candlestick. He knocked him violently and often against an iron torch sconce and kicked him thrice round the banqueting chamber with rapid energetic kicks. Finally he dragged him down a long passage by the hair of his head and flung him out of a window into the courtyard below. Was he much hurt? asked the baroness. More hurt than surprised, said Clovis. You see, the king was notorious for his violent temper. However, this was the first time he had let himself go so unrestrainedly on the top of a heavy meal. The librarian lingered for many days. In fact, for all I know, he may have ultimately recovered. But Krikos died that same evening. Vespelius had hardly finished getting the honey-stains off his body before a hurried deputation came to put the coronation oil on his head. And what with the publicly-witness miracle and the accession of a Christian sovereign, it was not surprising that there was a general scramble of converts to the new religion. A hastily consecrated bishop was overworked with a rush of baptisms in the hastily improvised cathedral of St. Odilo, and the boy Marta that might have been was transposed in the popular imagination into a royal boy saint whose fame attracted throngs of curious and devout sightseers to the capital. Vespelius, who was busily engaged in organizing the games and poetic contests that were to mark the commencement of his reign, had no time to give heed to the religious fervour which was effervescing round his personality. The first indication he had of the existing state of affairs was when the Court Chamberlain, a recent and very ardent addition to the Christian community, brought for his approval the outlines of a projected ceremonial cutting-down of the idolatrous serpent-grove. Your Majesty will be graciously pleased to cut down the first tree with a specially consecrated axe," said the obsequious official. I'll cut off your head first with any axe that comes handy," said Vespelius indignantly. Do you suppose that I'm going to begin my reign by mortally affronting the sacred serpents? It would be most unlucky. But your Majesty's Christian principles," exclaimed the bewildered Chamberlain. I never had any," said Vespelius. I used to pretend to be a Christian convert just to annoy Krikos. He used to fly into such delicious tempers, and it was rather fun being whipped and scolded and shut up in a tower all for nothing. But as to turning Christian in real earnest like you people seem to do, I couldn't think of such a thing. And the holy and esteemed serpents have always helped me when I've prayed to them for success in my running and wrestling and hunting, and it was through their distinguished intercession that the bees were not able to hurt me with their stings. It would be black in gratitude to turn against their worship at the very outset of my reign. I hate you for suggesting it. The Chamberlain wrung his hands despairingly. But your Majesty," he wailed, the people are reverencing you as a saint, and the nobles are being Christianized in batches, and neighboring potentates of that faith are sending special envoys to welcome you as a brother. There is some talk of making you the patron saint of beehives, and a certain shade of honey-yellow has been christened vespaleousian gold at the Emperor's Court. You can't surely go back on all this. I don't mind being reverenced and greeted and honored," said Vespaleous. I don't even mind being sainted in moderation, as long as I'm not expected to be saintly as well. But I wish you clearly and finally to understand that I will not give up the worship of the august and auspicious serpents. There was a world of unspoken bear-pit in the way he uttered those last words, and the mulberry dark eyes flashed dangerously. A new reign," said the chamberlain to himself, but the same old temper. Finally, as a state necessity, the matter of the religions was compromised. At stated intervals the King appeared before his subjects in the National Cathedral in the character of Saint Vespaleous, and the idolatrous grove was gradually pruned and lopped away till nothing remained of it. But the sacred and esteemed serpents were removed to a private shrubbery in the royal gardens, where Vespaleous the Pagan and certain members of his household divulcly and decently worshipped them. That, possibly, is the reason why the boy-king's success in sports and hunting never deserted him to the end of his days. And that is also the reason why, in spite of the popular veneration for his sanctity, he never received official canonization. It has stopped raining," said the baroness. End of The Story of Saint Vespaleous. This recording is in the public.