Beasts and Super-Beasts
business correspondence to get through, too. Besides, I don’t know what
it was that the Froplinsons sent us.”
“A William the Conqueror calendar,” said Janetta, “with a quotation of
one of his great thoughts for every day in the year.”
“Impossible,” said Egbert; “he didn’t have three hundred and sixty-five
thoughts in the whole of his life, or, if he did, he kept them to
himself. He was a man of action, not of introspection.”
“Well, it was William Wordsworth, then,” said Janetta; “I know William
came into it somewhere.”
“That sounds more probable,” said Egbert; “well, let’s collaborate on
this letter of thanks and get it done. I’ll dictate, and you can
scribble it down. ‘Dear Mrs. Froplinson—thank you and your husband so
much for the very pretty calendar you sent us. It was very good of you
to think of us.’”
“You can’t possibly say that,” said Janetta, laying down her pen.
“It’s what I always do say, and what every one says to me,” protested
Egbert.
“We sent them something on the twenty-second,” said Janetta, “so they
simply _had_ to think of us. There was no getting away from it.”
“What did we send them?” asked Egbert gloomily.
“Bridge-markers,” said Janetta, “in a cardboard case, with some inanity
about ‘digging for fortune with a royal spade’ emblazoned on the cover.
The moment I saw it in the shop I said to myself ‘Froplinsons’ and to the
attendant ‘How much?’ When he said ‘Ninepence,’ I gave him their
address, jabbed our card in, paid tenpence or elevenpence to cover the
postage, and thanked heaven. With less sincerity and infinitely more
trouble they eventually thanked me.”
“The Froplinsons don’t play bridge,” said Egbert.
“One is not supposed to notice social deformities of that sort,” said
Janetta; “it wouldn’t be polite. Besides, what trouble did they take to
find out whether we read Wordsworth with gladness? For all they knew or
cared we might be frantically embedded in the belief that all poetry
begins and ends with John Masefield, and it might infuriate or depress us
to have a daily sample of Wordsworthian products flung at us.”
“Well, let’s get on with the letter of thanks,” said Egbert.
“Proceed,” said Janetta.
“‘How clever of you to guess that Wordsworth is our favourite poet,’”
dictated Egbert.
Again Janetta laid down her pen.
“Do you realise what that means?” she asked; “a Wordsworth booklet next
Christmas, and another calendar the Christmas after, with the same
problem of having to write suitable letters of thankfulness. No, the
best thing to do is to drop all further allusion to the calendar and
switch off on to some other topic.”
“But what other topic?”
“Oh, something like this: ‘What do you think of the New Year Honours
List? A friend of ours made such a clever remark when he read it.’ Then
you can stick in any remark that comes into your head; it needn’t be
clever. The Froplinsons won’t know whether it is or isn’t.”
“We don’t even know on which side they are in politics,” objected Egbert;
“and anyhow you can’t suddenly dismiss the subject of the calendar.
Surely there must be some intelligent remark that can be made about it.”
“Well, we can’t think of one,” said Janetta wearily; “the fact is, we’ve
both written ourselves out. Heavens! I’ve just remembered Mrs. Stephen
Ludberry. I haven’t thanked her for what she sent.”
“What did she send?”
“I forget; I think it was a calendar.”
There was a long silence, the forlorn silence of those who are bereft of
hope and have almost ceased to care.
Presently Egbert started from his seat with an air of resolution. The
light of battle was in his eyes.
“Let me come to the writing-table,” he exclaimed.
“Gladly,” said Janetta. “Are you going to write to Mrs. Ludberry or the
Froplinsons?”
“To neither,” said Egbert, drawing a stack of notepaper towards him; “I’m
going to write to the editor of every enlightened and influential
newspaper in the Kingdom, I’m going to suggest that there should be a
sort of epistolary Truce of God during the festivities of Christmas and
New Year. From the twenty-fourth of December to the third or fourth of
January it shall be considered an offence against good sense and good
feeling to write or expect any letter or communication that does not deal
with the necessary events of the moment. Answers to invitations,
arrangements about trains, renewal of club subscriptions, and, of course,
all the ordinary everyday affairs of business, sickness, engaging new
cooks, and so forth, these will be dealt with in the usual manner as
something inevitable, a legitimate part of our daily life. But all the
devastating accretions of correspondence, incident to the festive season,
these should be swept away to give the season a chance of being really
festive, a time of untroubled, unpunctuated peace and good will.”
“But you would have to make some acknowledgment of presents received,”
objected Janetta; “otherwise people would never know whether they had
arrived safely.”
“Of course, I have thought of that,” said Egbert; “every present that was
sent off would be accompanied by a ticket bearing the date of dispatch
and the signature of the sender, and some conventional hieroglyphic to
show that it was intended to be a Christmas or New Year gift; there would
be a counterfoil with space for the recipient’s name and the date of
arrival, and all you would have to do would be to sign and date the
counterfoil, add a conventional hieroglyphic indicating heartfelt thanks
and gratified surprise, put the thing into an envelope and post it.”
“It sounds delightfully simple,” said Janetta wistfully, “but people
would consider it too cut-and-dried, too perfunctory.”
“It is not a bit more perfunctory than the present system,” said Egbert;
“I have only the same conventional language of gratitude at my disposal
with which to thank dear old Colonel Chuttle for his perfectly delicious
Stilton, which we shall devour to the last morsel, and the Froplinsons
for their calendar, which we shall never look at. Colonel Chuttle knows
that we are grateful for the Stilton, without having to be told so, and
the Froplinsons know that we are bored with their calendar, whatever we
may say to the contrary, just as we know that they are bored with the
bridge-markers in spite of their written assurance that they thanked us
for our charming little gift. What is more, the Colonel knows that even
if we had taken a sudden aversion to Stilton or been forbidden it by the
doctor, we should still have written a letter of hearty thanks around it.
So you see the present system of acknowledgment is just as perfunctory
and conventional as the counterfoil business would be, only ten times
more tiresome and brain-racking.”
“Your plan would certainly bring the ideal of a Happy Christmas a step
nearer realisation,” said Janetta.
“There are exceptions, of course,” said Egbert, “people who really try to
infuse a breath of reality into their letters of acknowledgment. Aunt
Susan, for instance, who writes: ‘Thank you very much for the ham; not
such a good flavour as the one you sent last year, which itself was not a
particularly good one. Hams are not what they used to be.’ It would be
a pity to be deprived of her Christmas comments, but that loss would be
swallowed up in the general gain.”
“Meanwhile,” said Janetta, “what am I to say to the Froplinsons?”
THE NAME-DAY
Adventures, according to the proverb, are to the adventurous. Quite as
often they are to the non-adventurous, to the retiring, to the
constitutionally timid. John James Abbleway had been endowed by Nature
with the sort of disposition that instinctively avoids Carlist intrigues,
slum crusades, the tracking of wounded wild beasts, and the moving of
hostile amendments at political meetings. If a mad dog or a Mad Mullah
had come his way he would have surrendered the way without hesitation.
At school he had unwillingly acquired a thorough knowledge of the German
tongue out of deference to the plainly-expressed wishes of a
foreign-languages master, who, though he taught modern subjects, employed
old-fashioned methods in driving his lessons home. It was this enforced
familiarity with an important commercial language which thrust Abbleway
in later years into strange lands where adventures were less easy to
guard against than in the ordered atmosphere of an English country town.
The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic
business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there,
continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of
commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even
misadventure, jostling at his elbow. After two and a half years of
exile, however, John James Abbleway had embarked on only one hazardous
undertaking, and that was of a nature which would assuredly have
overtaken him sooner or later if he had been leading a sheltered,
stay-at-home existence at Dorking or Huntingdon. He fell placidly in
love with a placidly lovable English girl, the sister of one of his
commercial colleagues, who was improving her mind by a short trip to
foreign parts, and in due course he was formally accepted as the young
man she was engaged to. The further step by which she was to become Mrs.
John Abbleway was to take place a twelvemonth hence in a town in the
English midlands, by which time the firm that employed John James would
have no further need for his presence in the Austrian capital.
It was early in April, two months after the installation of Abbleway as
the young man Miss Penning was engaged to, when he received a letter from
her, written from Venice. She was still peregrinating under the wing of
her brother, and as the latter’s business arrangements would take him
across to Fiume for a day or two, she had conceived the idea that it
would be rather jolly if John could obtain leave of absence and run down
to the Adriatic coast to meet them. She had looked up the route on the
map, and the journey did not appear likely to be expensive. Between the
lines of her communication there lay a hint that if he really cared for
her—
Abbleway obtained leave of absence and added a journey to Fiume to his
life’s adventures. He left Vienna on a cold, cheerless day. The flower
shops were full of spring blooms, and the weekly organs of illustrated
humour were full of spring topics, but the skies were heavy with clouds
that looked like cotton-wool that has been kept over long in a shop
window.
“Snow comes,” said the train official to the station officials; and they
agreed that snow was about to come. And it came, rapidly, plenteously.
The train had not been more than an hour on its journey when the
cotton-wool clouds commenced to dissolve in a blinding downpour of
snowflakes. The forest trees on either side of the line were speedily
coated with a heavy white mantle, the telegraph wires became thick
glistening ropes, the line itself was buried more and more completely
under a carpeting of snow, through which the not very powerful engine
ploughed its way with increasing difficulty. The Vienna-Fiume line is
scarcely the best equipped of the Austrian State railways, and Abbleway
began to have serious fears for a breakdown. The train had slowed down
to a painful and precarious crawl and presently came to a halt at a spot
where the drifting snow had accumulated in a formidable barrier. The
engine made a special effort and broke through the obstruction, but in
the course of another twenty minutes it was again held up. The process
of breaking through was renewed, and the train doggedly resumed its way,
encountering and surmounting fresh hindrances at frequent intervals.
After a standstill of unusually long duration in a particularly deep