Beasts and Super-Beasts
Wilfrid, whose task was rendered even more arduous by the incessant, if
not very effectual, attacks of the captured maidens’ small brother. The
governess, fives-bat in hand, sat negligently on the stone balustrade,
presiding over the scene with the cold impartiality of a Goddess of
Battles. A furious and repeated chorus of “I’ll tell muvver” rose from
the lodge-children, but the lodge-mother, who was hard of hearing, was
for the moment immersed in the preoccupation of her washtub.
After an apprehensive glance in the direction of the lodge (the good
woman was gifted with the highly militant temper which is sometimes the
privilege of deafness) Mrs. Quabarl flew indignantly to the rescue of the
struggling captives.
“Wilfrid! Claude! Let those children go at once. Miss Hope, what on
earth is the meaning of this scene?”
“Early Roman history; the Sabine Women, don’t you know? It’s the
Schartz-Metterklume method to make children understand history by acting
it themselves; fixes it in their memory, you know. Of course, if, thanks
to your interference, your boys go through life thinking that the Sabine
women ultimately escaped, I really cannot be held responsible.”
“You may be very clever and modern, Miss Hope,” said Mrs. Quabarl firmly,
“but I should like you to leave here by the next train. Your luggage
will be sent after you as soon as it arrives.”
“I’m not certain exactly where I shall be for the next few days,” said
the dismissed instructress of youth; “you might keep my luggage till I
wire my address. There are only a couple of trunks and some golf-clubs
and a leopard cub.”
“A leopard cub!” gasped Mrs. Quabarl. Even in her departure this
extraordinary person seemed destined to leave a trail of embarrassment
behind her.
“Well, it’s rather left off being a cub; it’s more than half-grown, you
know. A fowl every day and a rabbit on Sundays is what it usually gets.
Raw beef makes it too excitable. Don’t trouble about getting the car for
me, I’m rather inclined for a walk.”
And Lady Carlotta strode out of the Quabarl horizon.
The advent of the genuine Miss Hope, who had made a mistake as to the day
on which she was due to arrive, caused a turmoil which that good lady was
quite unused to inspiring. Obviously the Quabarl family had been
woefully befooled, but a certain amount of relief came with the
knowledge.
“How tiresome for you, dear Carlotta,” said her hostess, when the overdue
guest ultimately arrived; “how very tiresome losing your train and having
to stop overnight in a strange place.”
“Oh dear, no,” said Lady Carlotta; “not at all tiresome—for me.”
THE SEVENTH PULLET
“It’s not the daily grind that I complain of,” said Blenkinthrope
resentfully; “it’s the dull grey sameness of my life outside of office
hours. Nothing of interest comes my way, nothing remarkable or out of
the common. Even the little things that I do try to find some interest
in don’t seem to interest other people. Things in my garden, for
instance.”
“The potato that weighed just over two pounds,” said his friend Gorworth.
“Did I tell you about that?” said Blenkinthrope; “I was telling the
others in the train this morning. I forgot if I’d told you.”
“To be exact you told me that it weighed just under two pounds, but I
took into account the fact that abnormal vegetables and freshwater fish
have an after-life, in which growth is not arrested.”
“You’re just like the others,” said Blenkinthrope sadly, “you only make
fun of it.”
“The fault is with the potato, not with us,” said Gorworth; “we are not
in the least interested in it because it is not in the least interesting.
The men you go up in the train with every day are just in the same case
as yourself; their lives are commonplace and not very interesting to
themselves, and they certainly are not going to wax enthusiastic over the
commonplace events in other men’s lives. Tell them something startling,
dramatic, piquant that has happened to yourself or to someone in your
family, and you will capture their interest at once. They will talk
about you with a certain personal pride to all their acquaintances. ‘Man
I know intimately, fellow called Blenkinthrope, lives down my way, had
two of his fingers clawed clean off by a lobster he was carrying home to
supper. Doctor says entire hand may have to come off.’ Now that is
conversation of a very high order. But imagine walking into a tennis
club with the remark: ‘I know a man who has grown a potato weighing two
and a quarter pounds.’”
“But hang it all, my dear fellow,” said Blenkinthrope impatiently,
“haven’t I just told you that nothing of a remarkable nature ever happens
to me?”
“Invent something,” said Gorworth. Since winning a prize for excellence
in Scriptural knowledge at a preparatory school he had felt licensed to
be a little more unscrupulous than the circle he moved in. Much might
surely be excused to one who in early life could give a list of seventeen
trees mentioned in the Old Testament.
“What sort of thing?” asked Blenkinthrope, somewhat snappishly.
“A snake got into your hen-run yesterday morning and killed six out of
seven pullets, first mesmerising them with its eyes and then biting them
as they stood helpless. The seventh pullet was one of that French sort,
with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the mesmeric snare, and
just flew at what it could see of the snake and pecked it to pieces.”
“Thank you,” said Blenkinthrope stiffly; “it’s a very clever invention.
If such a thing had really happened in my poultry-run I admit I should
have been proud and interested to tell people about it. But I’d rather
stick to fact, even if it is plain fact.” All the same his mind dwelt
wistfully on the story of the Seventh Pullet. He could picture himself
telling it in the train amid the absorbed interest of his
fellow-passengers. Unconsciously all sorts of little details and
improvements began to suggest themselves.
Wistfulness was still his dominant mood when he took his seat in the
railway carriage the next morning. Opposite him sat Stevenham, who had
attained to a recognised brevet of importance through the fact of an
uncle having dropped dead in the act of voting at a Parliamentary
election. That had happened three years ago, but Stevenham was still
deferred to on all questions of home and foreign politics.
“Hullo, how’s the giant mushroom, or whatever it was?” was all the notice
Blenkinthrope got from his fellow travellers.
Young Duckby, whom he mildly disliked, speedily monopolised the general
attention by an account of a domestic bereavement.
“Had four young pigeons carried off last night by a whacking big rat.
Oh, a monster he must have been; you could tell by the size of the hole
he made breaking into the loft.”
No moderate-sized rat ever seemed to carry out any predatory operations
in these regions; they were all enormous in their enormity.
“Pretty hard lines that,” continued Duckby, seeing that he had secured
the attention and respect of the company; “four squeakers carried off at
one swoop. You’d find it rather hard to match that in the way of
unlooked-for bad luck.”
“I had six pullets out of a pen of seven killed by a snake yesterday
afternoon,” said Blenkinthrope, in a voice which he hardly recognised as
his own.
“By a snake?” came in excited chorus.
“It fascinated them with its deadly, glittering eyes, one after the
other, and struck them down while they stood helpless. A bedridden
neighbour, who wasn’t able to call for assistance, witnessed it all from
her bedroom window.”
“Well, I never!” broke in the chorus, with variations.
“The interesting part of it is about the seventh pullet, the one that
didn’t get killed,” resumed Blenkinthrope, slowly lighting a cigarette.
His diffidence had left him, and he was beginning to realise how safe and
easy depravity can seem once one has the courage to begin. “The six dead
birds were Minorcas; the seventh was a Houdan with a mop of feathers all
over its eyes. It could hardly see the snake at all, so of course it
wasn’t mesmerised like the others. It just could see something wriggling
on the ground, and went for it and pecked it to death.”
“Well, I’m blessed!” exclaimed the chorus.
In the course of the next few days Blenkinthrope discovered how little
the loss of one’s self-respect affects one when one has gained the esteem
of the world. His story found its way into one of the poultry papers,
and was copied thence into a daily news-sheet as a matter of general
interest. A lady wrote from the North of Scotland recounting a similar
episode which she had witnessed as occurring between a stoat and a blind
grouse. Somehow a lie seems so much less reprehensible when one can call
it a lee.
For awhile the adapter of the Seventh Pullet story enjoyed to the full
his altered standing as a person of consequence, one who had had some
share in the strange events of his times. Then he was thrust once again
into the cold grey background by the sudden blossoming into importance of
Smith-Paddon, a daily fellow-traveller, whose little girl had been
knocked down and nearly hurt by a car belonging to a musical-comedy
actress. The actress was not in the car at the time, but she was in
numerous photographs which appeared in the illustrated papers of Zoto
Dobreen inquiring after the well-being of Maisie, daughter of Edmund
Smith-Paddon, Esq. With this new human interest to absorb them the
travelling companions were almost rude when Blenkinthrope tried to
explain his contrivance for keeping vipers and peregrine falcons out of
his chicken-run.
Gorworth, to whom he unburdened himself in private, gave him the same
counsel as heretofore.
“Invent something.”
“Yes, but what?”
The ready affirmative coupled with the question betrayed a significant
shifting of the ethical standpoint.
It was a few days later that Blenkinthrope revealed a chapter of family
history to the customary gathering in the railway carriage.
“Curious thing happened to my aunt, the one who lives in Paris,” he
began. He had several aunts, but they were all geographically
distributed over Greater London.
“She was sitting on a seat in the Bois the other afternoon, after
lunching at the Roumanian Legation.”
Whatever the story gained in picturesqueness from the dragging-in of
diplomatic “atmosphere,” it ceased from that moment to command any
acceptance as a record of current events. Gorworth had warned his
neophyte that this would be the case, but the traditional enthusiasm of
the neophyte had triumphed over discretion.
“She was feeling rather drowsy, the effect probably of the champagne,
which she’s not in the habit of taking in the middle of the day.”
A subdued murmur of admiration went round the company. Blenkinthrope’s
aunts were not used to taking champagne in the middle of the year,
regarding it exclusively as a Christmas and New Year accessory.
“Presently a rather portly gentleman passed by her seat and paused an
instant to light a cigar. At that moment a youngish man came up behind
him, drew the blade from a swordstick, and stabbed him half a dozen times
through and through. ‘Scoundrel,’ he cried to his victim, ‘you do not
know me. My name is Henri Leturc.’ The elder man wiped away some of the
blood that was spattering his clothes, turned to his assailant, and said:
‘And since when has an attempted assassination been considered an
introduction?’ Then he finished lighting his cigar and walked away. My
aunt had intended screaming for the police, but seeing the indifference
with which the principal in the affair treated the matter she felt that
it would be an impertinence on her part to interfere. Of course I need
hardly say she put the whole thing down to the effects of a warm, drowsy