Chapter one of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer,
please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came
By Saki, Chapter one, The Singing Bird and the Barometer Cicily Yoville sat
in a low swing chair, alternately looking at herself in a mirror and at
the other occupant of the room in the flesh. Both prospects gave her undisguised
satisfaction without being vain. She was duly appreciative of good looks, whether in
herself or in another, and the reflection that she saw in the mirror and
the young man whom she saw seated at the piano, would have come with
credit out of a more severe critical inspection. Probably she looked longer and with
greater appreciation at the piano player than at her own image. Her good looks
were an inherited possession that had been with her more or less all her life,
while Ronnie Stare was a comparatively new acquisition, discovered and achieved, so
to speak, by her own enterprise, selected by her own good taste.
Fate had given her adorable eyelashes and an excellent profile. Ronnie was an indulgence
she had bestowed on herself. Cicily had long ago planned out for herself a
complete philosophy of life, and had resolutely set to work to carry her philosophy
into practice. When love is over, how little of love even the lover
understands, She quoted to herself from one of her favorite poets, and transposed
the saying into while life is with us, how little of life even the
materialist understands. Most people that she knew took endless pines and precautions to preserve
and prolong their lives and keep their powers of enjoyment unimpaired. Few, very
few seemed to make any intelligent effort at understanding what they really wanted in the
way of enjoying their lives, or to ascertain what were the best means for
satisfying those wants. Fewer still bent their whole energies to the one paramount aim
of getting what they wanted in the fullest possible measure. Her scheme of life
was not a wholly selfish one. No one could understand what she wanted as
well as she did herself. Therefore, she felt that she was the best
person to pursue her own ends and cater for her own wants. To have
others thinking and acting for one merely meant that one had to be perpetually grateful
for a lot of well meant and usually unsatisfactory services. It was like the
case of a rich man giving a community a free library, when probably the
community only wanted free fishing or reduced tram fares. Cicily studied her own wis
and wishes, experimented in the best method of carrying them into effect, compared
the accumulated results of her experiments, and gradually arrived at a very clear idea
of what she wanted in life and how best to achieve it. She was,
not, by disposition, a self centered soul. Therefore, she did
not make the mistake of supposing that one can live successfully and gracefully in a
crowded world without taking due notice of other human elements around one. She was
instinctively far more thoughtful for others than many a person who is genuinely but unseeingly
addicted to unselfishness. Also, she kept in her armory the weapon which can
be so mightily effective if used sparingly by a really sincere individual. The knowledge
of when to be a humbug. Ambition entered to a certain extent into her
life and governed it, perhaps rather more than she knew. She desired to
escape from the doom of being an an entity, but the escape would have
to be effected in her own way and in her own time. To be
governed by ambition was only a shade or two better than being governed by convention.
The drawing room in which she and Ronnie were sitting was of such proportions
that one hardly knew whether it was intended to be one room or several,
and it had the merit of being moderately cool. At two o'clock on a
particularly hot to Lye afternoon, in the coolest of its many alcoves, servants
had noiselessly set out and improvised luncheon table, attempting array of carriare, crab
and mushroom salads, cold asparagus, slender hot bottles, and high stemmed wine
goblets peeped out from amid a setting of Charlotte clem roses. Cicily rose from
her seat and went over to the piano. Come she said, touching the
young man lightly with a fingertip on top of his very sleek, copper hued
head. We're going to have picnic lunch up here today. It's so much
cooler than any of the downstairs rooms, and we sha'n't be that with the
servants trotting in and out all the time. Rather a good idea of mine,
wasn't it, Ronnie, after looking anxiously to see that the word picnic
did not portend tongue, sandwiches and biscuits, gave the idea his blessing.
What is young Store's profession, someone had once asked concerning him. He has
a great many friends who have independent incomes, had been the answer. The
meal was begun in appreciative silence. A picnic in which three kinds of red
pepper were available for the caviare demanded a certain amount of respectful attention. My
heart ought to be like a singing bird to day, i suppose, said
Cecily. Presently, because your good man is coming home, asked Ronnie.
Cecily nodded. He's expected sometime this afternoon, though I'm rather vague as to
which train he arrives by. Rather stifling day for railway traveling. And is
your heart doing the singing bird business? Asked Ronnie. There depends, said
Cecily. If I may choose the bird a missle thrush would do. Perhaps
it sings loudest and stormy. Whether I believe Ronnie disposed of two or three
stems of asparagus before making any comment on this remark? Is there going to
be stormy? Whether, he asked? The domestic barometers sit rather that way,
said Cecily. You see, Mary has been away for ever so long,
and of course there'll be lots of things he won't be used to,
and I'm afraid matters may be rather strained and uncomfortable for a time. Do
you mean that he will object to me, asked Ronnie. Not in the
least, said Cecily. He's quite broad minded on most subjects, and he
realizes this is an age in which sensible people know thoroughly well what they want
and are determined to get what they want. It pleases me to see a
lot of you, and to spoil you, and to pay you extravagant compliments
about your good looks and your music, and to imagine at times that I'm
in danger of getting fond of you. I don't see any harm in it,
and I don't suppose Mary will either. In fact, I shouldn't be
surprised if he takes rather a liking to you. No, it's the general
situation that will trouble and exasperate him. He's not had time to get accustomed
to the fate a compli like we have. It will break on him with
horrible saddenness. He was somewhere in Russia when the war broke out, wasn't
he said Ronnie, Somewhere in the wilds of eastern Siberia, shooting and bird
collecting, miles away from a railway or telegraph line. And if it all
over before he knew anything about it didn't last very long, when you come
to think of it. He would due home somewhere about that time, And
when the weeks slipped by without my hearing from him, I quite thought he'd
been captured in the Baltic or somewhere on the way back. It turned out
he was down with marsh fever and some out of the way spot, and
everything was over and finished with before he got back to civilization and newspapers.
It must have been a bit of a shock, said Ronnie. Busy with
a well devised salad. Still I don't see why there should be domestic storms
when he comes back, You're heart are responsible for the catastrophe that has happened,
No, said Cecily. But he'll come back naturally, feeling sore and
savage with everything he sees around him, and he won't realize just at once
that we've been through all at ourselves and have reached the stage of sullen acquiescence
in what can't be helped. He won't understand, for instance, how we
can be enthusiastic and excited over Galla Musselford's debut and things of that sort.
He'll think we're a set of calloush bevelers fiddling while Rome is burning. In
this case, said Ronnie, Rome isn't burning, it's burnt. All that
remains to be done is to rebuild it when possible, exactly, And he'll
say we're not doing much to helping at that. But protested Ronie, the
whole thing has only just happened. Rome wasn't built in a day, and
we can't rebuild our room in the day. I know, said Cecily,
But so many of our friends, and especially Murray's friends, have taken the
thing in a tragical fashion and cleared off to the colonies or shut themselves up
in their country houses, as though there was a sort of moral leprosy of
infecting London. I don't see what good that does, said Ronnie. It
doesn't know a good, but it's what a lot of them have done because
they felt like doing it, and Murray will feel like doing it too,
and that's where I foresee trouble and disagreement. Ronnie shrugged his shoulders. I
would take things tragically if I saw the good of it, he said.
As matters stand, it's too late in the day and too early to be
anything but philosophical about what one can't hel help for the present. We've just
got to make the best of things. Besides, you can't very well turn
down Gaula at the last moment. I'm not going to turn down Gaula or
anybody, said Cecily. With a decision. I think it would be silly,
and silliness doesn't appeal to me. That is why I foresee storms on
the domestic horizon. After all, Gaula has her career to think of,
do you know, she added, with a change of tone, I rather
wish you'd fall in love with Gaula. It would make me horribly jealous,
and a little jealousy is such a good tonic for any woman who knows how
to dress well. Also, Ronnie, it would prove that you are capable
of falling in love with some one of which i've grave doubts up to the
present. Love is one of the few things in which the make believe is
superior to the genuine, said Ronnie. It'd lasts longer, and you get
more fun out of it, and it's easier to replace when you've done with
it. Still, it's rather like playing with colored paper instead of playing with
fire, objected Cecily. A footman came round the corner with the trained silence
that tactfully contrives to make itself felt A mister Luton to see you, madam,
he announced. Shall I say you're in mister Luton? Oh? Yes,
said Cecily. He'll probably have something to tell us about Gaula's concert,
she added, turning to Ronnie. Tony Luton was a young man who had
sprung from the people and had taken care that there should be no recoil.
He was scarcely twenty years of age, but a tightly packed chronicle of vicissitudes
lay behind his sprightly insucian appearance. Since his fifteenth year he had lived heaven
knew how, getting sometimes a minor engagement at some minor music hall, sometimes
a temporary job as a secretary valid companion to a roving invalid, dining now
and then on other's eggs and asparagus at one of the smarter West End restaurants,
at other times devouring a kipper or a sausage in some stuffy edge where
road eating house, always seemingly amused by life, and always amusing. It
is possible that somewhere in such heart as he possessed, there lurked a rankling
bitterness against the hard things of life, or a scrap of gratitude towards the
one or two friends who had helped him disinterestedly. But his most intimates associates
could not have guessed at the existence of such feelings. Tony Luton was just
a merry eyed, dancing fawn whom fate had surrounded with streets instead of woods,
And it would have been in the highest degree and artistic to have sounded
him for a heart or a heartache. The Dancing of the Fawn took one
day a livelier and more assured turn. The joyousness became more real, and
the worst of the vicissitudes seemed suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with
mediocre but marketable abilities, supplied Tony with a song for which he obtained a
trial performance at an East End hall, dressed as a jockey for no particular
reason except that the costume suited him. He sang. They quaffed the Gay
Bubbli in Eccleston Square to an appreciative audience, which included the manager of a
famous West End theater of varieties. Tony and his song won the magisterial favor
and were immediately transplanted to the West End house, where they scored a success
of which the drooping music hall industry was at the moment badly in need.
It was just after the great catastrophe, and men of the London world were
in no humor to think they had witnessed the inconceivable befall them. They had
nothing but political ruin to stare at, and they were anxious to look the
other way. The words of Tony's song were more or less meaningless, though
he sang them remarkably well. But the tune, with its air of slyness
and furtive joyousness, appealed in some unaccountable manner to people who were furtively unhappy
and who were trying to appear stoically cheerful. What must be must be,
and it's a poor heart that never rejoices were the popular expressions of the London
public at that moment, and the men who had to cater for that public
were thankful when they were able to stumble across anything that fitted in with the
prevailing mood. For the first time in his life, Tony Luton discovered that
agents and managers were a leisured class, and that office boys had manners.
He entered Cecily's drawing room with the air of one to whom assurance of manner
had become a sheathed weapon, a court accessory rather than a trade implement.
He was more quietly dressed than the usual run of music hall successes. He
had looked critically at life from too many angles not to know that though clothes
cannot make a man, they can certainly damn him. Thank you, I
have lunched already, he said, in answer to a question from Sicily.
Thank you, he said again in a cheerful affirmative, as the question of
hawk in at all Ice gold Goblet was propounded to him. I've come to
tell you the latest about the gaul A muscle for the evening, he continued.
Old Lawrence is putting his back into it, and it's rarely going to
be rather a big affair. She's going to out Russian the Russians. Of
course, she hasn't their technique nor a tenth of their training, but she's
having tons of advertisement. The name Gauler is almost an advertisement in itself.
And then there's the fact that she's the daughter of a peer. She has
temperament, said cecily, with the decision of one who makes a vague statement
in a good cause, So Lawrence says, observed Tony, he discovers temperament
in every one that he intends to boomb. He told me that I had
temperament to the finger tips, and I was too polite to contradict him.
But I haven't told you the really important thing about the muscle for debut.
It's a profound secret. More or less, so you might us promise not
to breathe a word about it till half past four, when it will appear
in all the six o'clock newspapers. Tony paused for dramatic effect while he drained
his goblet, and then made his announcement. Majesty is going to be present
informally and unofficially, but still present in the flesh, a sort of casual
dropping in, carefully heralded by unconfirmed rumor a week ahead heavens, exclaimed Cecily
in genuine excitement. What a bold stroke Lady Shalem has worked that. I
bet I suppose we will go down all write. Trust Laurence to see to
that, said Tony. He knows how to fill his house with the right
sort of people, and he's not the one to risk of fiasco. He
knows what he's about. I tell you it's going to be a big evening,
I say, exclaimed Ronny. Suddenly give a supper party here for Gaula
on the night and ask the Shalemb woman and all her crowd. It'd be
awful fun Cecily caught at the suggestion with Sam in the usiasm. She did
not particularly care for Lady Shayalamb, but she thought it would be just as
well to care for her as far as outward appearances went grace. Lady Shayalam
was a woman who had blossomed into sudden importance by constituting herself a sort of
foster mother to the fate a compli. At a moment when London was denuded
of most of its aforetime social leaders, she had seen her opportunity and made
the most of it. She had not contented herself with vowing to the inevitable.
She had stretched out her hand to it and forced herself to smile graciously
at it, and her polite attentions had been reciprocated. Lady shaylamb, without
being a beauty or a wit or a grand lady in the traditional sense of
the word, was in a fair way to becoming a power in the land.
Others more capable and with stronger claims to social recognition would doubtless overshadow her
and displace her in due course, But for the moment she was a person
whose good graces counted for something, and Cecily was quite alive to the advantage
of being in those good graces. It would be rather fun, she said,
running over in her mind the possibilities of the suggested supper party. It
would be jolly useful. But in Ronnie eagerly, you could get all sorts
of interesting people together and it would be an excellent advertisement for Gaula. Ronnie
approved of supper parties on principle, but he was also thinking of the advantage
which might accrue to the drawing Room concert which Cecily had projected, with himself
as the chief performer, if he could be brought into contact with a wider
circle of music patrons. I know it would be useful, said Cecily.
It would be almost historical. There's no knowing who might not come to it,
and things are dreadfully slack in the entertaining line just now. The ambitious
note in her character was making itself felt at that moment. Let's go down
to the library and work out a list of people to invite, said Ronnie.
A servant entered the room and made a brief announcement. A mister Yeovil
has arrived, Madam Bother, said Ronnie sulkily. Now you'll cool off about
that supper party and turn down Gauler and the rest of us. It was
certainly true that the supper had already seemed a more difficult proposition in Cecily's eyes,
than it had a moment or two a go. You'll not forget my
only daughter, Ian, though Sophia has crossed the sea, quoted Tony,
with mocking laughter in his voice and eyes. Cecily went down to greet her
husband. She felt that she was probably very glad that he was at home
once more. She was angry with herself for not feeling great a certainty on
the point. Even the well beloved, however, can select the wrong moment
for return. If Cecily Yovill's heart was like a singing bird, it was
of a kind that has frequent lapses into silence. Of chapter one chapter two
of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox
recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please
go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Imenta, When William Came by
Saki, Chapter two, The Homecoming, Murray Yeovil got out of the boat
train at Victoria Station and stood waiting in an attitude something between listlessness and impatience,
while a porter dragged his light traveling kit out of the railway carriage and
went in search of his heavier baggage with a hand truck. Yeovil was a
gray faced young man with restless eyes and a rather wistful mouth, and an
air of lassitude that was evidently only a temporary characteristic. The hot, dusty
station, with its blended crowds of dawdling and scurrying people, its little streams
of suburban passengers pouring out every now and then from this or that platform,
like ants swarming across a garden path, made a wearisome climax to what had
been a rather wearisome journey. Yeovil glanced quickly, almost furtively, around him
in all directions, with the air of a man who is constrained by morbid
curiosity to look for things that he would rather not see. The announcements placed
in German alternatively with English, over the booking office, left luggage office,
refreshment buffets, and so forth. The crowned eagle and monogram displayed on the
post boxes caught his eye in quick succession. He turned to help the porter
to shepherd his belongings on to the truck, and followed him to the outer
yard of the station, where a string of taxi cabs was being slowly absorbed
by an outpouring crowd of others. Portmanteau raps and a trunk or two,
much belabeled and travel worn, were stowed into a taxi, and Yovil turned
to give the direction to the driver. Twenty eight Berkshire Street baksheus trash achtroshradsich,
echoed the man, a bulky spectacled individual of unmistakable Teuton type twenty eight
Berkshire Street, repeated Yeovil and got into the cab, leaving the driver to
retranslate the direction into his own language. A succession of cabs leaving the station
blocked the roadway for a moment or two, and Jovil had leisure to observe
the fact that Victoria Strasa was lettered side by side with the familiar English name
of the street. A notice directing the public to the neighboring swimming baths was
also written up in both languages. London had become a bilingual city. Even
as warsaw, the cab threaded its way swiftly along Buckingham Palace Road towards the
mall. As they passed along front of the Palace, the traveler turned his
head resolutely away that he might not see the alien uniforms at the gate and
the eagle standard flapping in the sunlight. The taxi driver, who seemed to
have combative instincts, slowed down as he was turning into the mall and pointed
to the white pile of memorial statuary in front of the palace gates. Grossmutterdenkmle
Yah. He announced and resumed his journey. Arrived at his destination, the
Oval stood on the steps of his house and pressed the bell with an odd
sense of forlornness, as though he were a stranger drifting from nowhere into a
land that had no cognisance of him. A moment later he was standing in
his own hall, the object of respectful solicitude and detention. Sprucely garbed and
groomed lackeys busied themselves with his battered travel soiled baggage. The door closed on
the guttural voiced taxi driver and the glaring jewel sunshine. The wearisome journey was
over, Poor dear, how dreadfully pulled down you look, said Cecily,
when the first greetings had been exchanged. It's been a slow business getting well,
said Yovil. I'm only three quarter away there. Yet he looked at
his reflection in a mirror and laughed ruefully. You should have seen what I
looked like five or six weeks ago, he added. You ought to have
let me come out and nurse you, said Cecily. You know I wanted
to. Oh they nursed me well enough, said Yovil. And it would
have been a shame dragging you out there. A small finished health resort out
of the season is not a very amusing place, and he would have been
worse for anyone who didn't talk Russian. You must have been buried alive there,
said Cecily, with commiseration in her voice. I wanted to be buried
alive, said Yovil. The news from the outer world was not of a
kind that helped to despondent valid towards convalescence. They spoke to me as little
as possible about what was happening, And I was grateful for your letters,
because they also told me very little. When one is abroad among foreigners,
one's country's misfortunes cause one and acuter more personal distress than they would at home.
Even Well, you're at home now anyway, said Cecily, And you
can jog along the road to complete recovery at your own pace. A little
quiet shooting this autumn, and a little hunting, just enough to keep you
fit and not to overtire you. You mustn't overtax your strength. I am
getting my strength back, all right, said yo Will. This journey hasn't
tired me half as much as one might have expected. It's the awful drag
of listlessness, mental and physical that is the worst after effect of these marsh
fevers. And they drain the energy out of you in bucketfuls, and it
trickles back again in teaspoonfuls. And just now, untiring energy is what I
shall need, even more than strength. I don't want to degenerate into a
slacker. Look here, Mary said Cecily. After we've had dinner together to
night, I'm going to do a seemingly unwifely thing. I'm going to go
out and leave you alone with an old friend. Doctor Holham is coming in
to drink coffee and smoke with you. I arranged this because I knew it
was what you would like. Men can talk these things over best by themselves,
and Harlem can tell you everything that's happened since you went away. It
will be a dreary story, I'm afraid, but you will want to hear
it. All. It was a nightmare time, but now one sees it
in a calmer perspective. I feel in a nightmare still, said Jovil.
We all felt like that, said Cecily, rather with the air of an
elder person who tells a child that it will understand things better when it grows
up. Time is always something for narcotic you know, things seem absolutely unbearable,
then bit by bit we find out that we're bearing them. And now,
dear, I'll fill up your notification paper and leave you to superintend your
unpacking. Robert will give you any help you want. What's the notification paper,
asked Yovil. Oh, A stupid form to be filled up when any
one arrives to say where they've come from and their business, and their nationality
in religion and all that sort of thing. We rather more bureaucratic than we
used to be, you know. Yovil said nothing, but into the sallow
grayness of his face there crept a dark flush that faded presently and left his
color more gray and bloodless than before. The journey seemed suddenly to have recommenced.
He was under his own roof. His servants were waiting on him,
His familiar possessions were in evidence around him, but the sense of being at
home had vanished. It was as though he had arrived at some wayside hotel
and been asked to register his name and status and destination. Other things of
disgust and irritation he had foreseen in the London coming to the alterations on stamps
and coinage, the intrusive Teuton element, the alien uniforms cropping up everywhere,
the new orientation of social life. Such things he was prepared for, but
this personal evidence of his subject state came on him unawares at a moment when
he had so to speak, laid his armor aside sicily spoke lightly of the
hateful formality that had been forced on them. Would he too come to regard
things in the same acquiescence spirit. End of chapter two Chapter three of When
William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are
in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to
LibriVox or reading by and Iminta. When William Came By Saki chapter three,
The Metskis Are. I was in the early stages of my fever when I
got the first inkling of what was going on, said Jobil to the doctor,
as they sat over their coffee in the recess of the big smoking room,
just able to potter about of it in the daytime, fighting against depression
and inertia feverish the evening came on and delirious in the light. My game
tracker and my attendant were both Buriats and spoke very little Russian, and that
was the only language we had in common to converse him. In matters concerning
food and sport, we soon got to understand each other, but on other
subjects we were not easily able to exchange ideas. One day, my tracker
had been to a distant trading store to get some things of which we were
in need. The store was eighty miles from the nearest point of railroad,
eighty miles of terribly bad roads, but it was in its way a center
and transmitter of news from the outside world. The tracker brought back with him
vague tidings of a conflict of some sort between the metskids Are and the Angliskids
Are, and kept repeating the Russian word for defeat. The anglizkids are I
recognized, of course, as the king of England, But my brain was
too sick and dull to read any further meaning into the man's reiterated gabble.
I grew so ill just then that I had to give up the struggle against
fever and make my way as best I could towards the nearest point where nursing
and doctoring could be had. It was one evening in a lonely rest hut
on the edge of a huge forest, as I was waiting for my boy
to bring the meal for which I was feverishly impatient, and which I knew
I should loathe. As soon as it was brought and the nation of the
word Metsky flashed on me. I had thought of it as referring to some
Oriental potentate, some rebellious rajah perhaps, who was giving trouble and whose followers
had possibly discomfited an isolated British force in some out of the way corner of
our empire. And all of a sudden I knew that nemetskisar German Emperor,
had been the name that the man had been trying to convey to me.
I shouted for the tracker and put him through a breathless cross examination. He
confirmed what my fears had told me. The Metzkidsar was a big European ruler.
He had been in conflict with the Anglisky Tzar, and the latter had
been defeated swept away. The man spoke the word that he used for ships
and made an energetic pantomime to express the sinking of a fleet. Harland.
There was nothing for it but to hope that this was a false, groundless
rumor that had somehow crept to the confines of civilization. In my saner balanced
moments, it was possible to disbelieve it. But if you have ever suffered
from delirium, you will know what raging torments of agony I went through in
the nights, and my brain fought and re fought that rumored disaster. The
doctor gave a murmur of sympathetic understanding, then continued Jovil. I reached the
small Siberian town towards which I had been struggling. There was a little colony
of Russians there, traders, officials, a doctoral tunes of army officers.
I put up at the primitive hotel restaurant, which was the general gathering place
of the community. I knew quickly that the news was true. Russians are
the most tactful of any European race that I've ever met. They did not
stare with insolent or pity and curiosity, but there was something changed in their
attitude which told me that the traveling Britain was no longer in their eyes the
interesting, respect commanding personality that he had been in past days. I ran
to my own room, where the samovar was bubbling its familiar tune, and
a smiling red shirted Russian boy was helping my buriat's servant to unpack my wardrobe,
and I asked for any back numbers of newspapers that could be supplied at
a moment's notice. I was given a bundle of well thumbed cheats, odd
pieces of the Novovrim, the Mosko of Evvadonski, one or two complete numbers
of local papers published at perm and a mosque. I don't read Russian well,
though I speak it fairly readily, but from the fragments of disconnected telegrams
that I pieced together, I gathered enough information to acquaint me with the extent
of the tragedy that had been worked out in a few crowding hours in the
corner of northwestern Europe. I searched frantically for telegrams of later dates that would
put a better complexion on the matter, there would retrieve something from the ruin.
Presently, I came across a page of the illustrated supplement that the Novorimya
publishes once a week. There was a photograph of a long fronted building with
a flag flying over it, labeled the new standard floating over Buckingham Palace.
The picture was not much more than a smudge, but the flag, possibly
touched up, was unmistakable. It was the Eagle of the Nimetskid Tzar.
I have a vivid recollection of that plainly furnished little room, with the inevitable
guilt icon in one corner, and the samovar hissing and girdling on the table,
and the thrumming music of a bala liika orchestra coming up from the restaurant
below. The next gooherent thing I can remember was weeks and weeks later,
discussing in an impersonal, detached manner whether I was strong enough to stand the
fatigue of the long railway journey to Finland. Since then, Hallm, I've
been encouraged to keep my mind as much off the war and public of airs
as possible, and I've been glad to do so. I knew the worst,
and there was no particular use in deepening my despondency by dragging out the
details. But now I'm more or less alive man again. I want to
fit in the gaps in my knowledge of what happened. You know how much
I know and how little those fragments of Russian newspapers were about all the information
that I had. I don't even know clearly how the whole thing started.
Yeovil settled himself back in his chair with the air of a man who has
done some necessary talking and now assumes the role of listener. It started,
said the doctor, but the wholly unimportant disagreement about some frontier business in East
Africa. There was a slight attack of nerves in the stock markets. Then
the whole thing seemed an a fair way to being settled. Then the negotiations
of de Fair began to drag, and duly there was a flatter of nervousness
in the money world. And then one morning the papers reported a highly menacing
speech by one of the German ministers, and the situation began to look black.
Indeed, he would be disavowed, everyone said over here. But in
less than twenty four hours, those who knew anything knew that the crisis was
on us. Only that knowledge came too late. War between two such civilized
and enlightened nations as an impossibility, one of our leaders of public opinion had
declared around the Saturday. On the following Friday, the war had indeed become
an impossibility because he could no longer carry it on. It burst on us
with calculated suddenness, and we were just not enough everywhere where the pressure came.
Our ships were good against their ships. Our seamen were better than their
seamen, but our ships were not able to cope with their ships, plus
their superiority an aircraft. Our trade men were good against their trained men,
but they could not be in several cases at once, and the enemy could.
Our half trained men and our untrained men could not master the signs of
war at a moment's notice, and a moment's notice was all they got.
The enemy were a nation apprentice in arms. We were not even the idle
apprentice. We had not deemed apprenticeship worth a while. There was courage enough
for anning loose in the land, but it was like unharness electricity. They
controlled no forces. It struck no blues. There was no time for the
heroism and their devotion which had drawn out struggle however hopeless can produce. The
war was over almost as soon as it had begun. After the reverses were
hung with lightning rapidity in the first three days of warfare. The newspapers made
no effort to pretend that the situation could be retrieved. Editors and public alike
recognized that these were blows over the heart, and that it was a matter
of moment before we were counted out. One might liken the whole affair to
a snap checkmate early in a game of chess. One side had thought out
the wooves and brought their requisite pieces into blay. The other side was hampered
and helpless, but its resources unavailable, It striated to discount it in advance
that in a nut show is the last three of the war. Yoval was
silent for a moment or two, and then he asked, and the sequel
the peace. Their collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were
hardly prepared for the consequences of their victory. No one had quite realized what
one disastrous campaign would mean for an either nation with a closely packed population.
The conquerors were in a position to dictate what terms they pleased, and it
was not wonderful that their ideas of a grandisement expanded in the hour of intoxication.
There was no European combination did to see them nay, and certainly no
one power was going to be rush enough to step in to contest the terms
of the treaty that they imposed on the conquered. The annexation had probably never
been a dream before the war. After the war, it suddenly became temptingly
practical. Varum Nicht became the theme of leader writers and the German press.
They pointed out that person defeated and humiliated but with enormous powers of recuperation would
be a dangerous and inevitable enemy for the German of tomorrow. But Britain,
incorporated within the Holland zal And Empire, would merely be a disaffected province without
a navy to make its disaffection, a serious menace and a great tax paying
capabilities which would be available for relieving the burdens of the other imperial states.
Wherefore why not annex the varon Nicht party prevailed Our king as un retired with
his court to Delhi as Emperor in the East, with most of its overseas
dominions still subject is a sway. The British childs came under the German crown,
as Reich's land was sort of Alsace Lorraine washed by the North Sea instead
of the Rhine. We still retain or Parliament, but it a clipped and
prune down shadow of its former self, with most of its functions in beans.
When elections were held, it was difficult to get decent candidates to come
forward or to get people to vote. It makes one smile bitterly to think
that a year or two ago we were seriously squabbling as to who should have
votes. A course, the old party divisions are more or less crumbled away.
The Liberals naturally under the blackest of clouds for having steered the country to
disaster, not a dodom justice. It was no more therefore than the fault
of any other party in a democracy. Such as ours. Was the government
of the Damers more or less reflect the ideas and temperament of the Niche in
all vital matters, and the British nation in those days could not have been
persuaded of the urgent need for military apprenticeship, or of the deadly nature of
its danger. It was willing now and the end be half frightened and to
have half measures, but one might better say quarter measures taken to reassure it,
and the governments of the day were willing to take them. But any
political party or group of statesmen that had said that danger is enormous and immediate,
the sacrifices and burdens must be enormous and immediate. But a met with
certain defeated the Poles. Still, of course, the Liberals, as the
party that held office for nearly a decade, incurred the odium of a people
maddened by defeat and humiliation. One minister, who had less responsibility for military
organization than perhaps any of them, was attacked and nearly killed at Newcastle.
Another was hiding for three days on Exmore and escaped in disc And the Conservatives
they are also under eclipse, but it's more or less voluntary in their case,
but gear narrations they had taken their standards supporters of throne and constitution,
and when they suddenly found a constitution gone and the throne filled by an alien
dynasty, no political orientation had vanished, and in much the same position as
the Jacobites occupied after the hadoberi ennaxation. Many of the leading Tory families have
emigrated to the British lands beyond the seas. Others are shut up in their
country houses, retrenching their expenses, sending their ecres and investing their money abroad.
The lab of Action again are almost in as bad odor as the Liberals,
because of having hobnob too effusively and ostentatiously. But the German Democratic parties
on the evil of the war, exploiting an evangel of universal brotherhood which did
not blunt a single Tuton Bennet. When the hour came, I suppose in
time party division will reascet themselves in some form or other. There will be
a socialist party in the mercantile and manufacturing interests will evolve a sort of bourgeoisie
party, and the different religious bodies will try to get themselves represented. The
Oval made a movement of impatience. All these things that you forecast, he
said, must take time, considerable time. Is this nightmare then, to
go on for ever? There's not a nightmare, unfortunately, said the doctor.
It is our reality. But surely a nation such as ours, a
verrile, highly civilized nation with an age long tradition of mastery behind it,
cannot be held under for ever by a few thousand bearded and machine guns.
We must surely rise up one day and drive them out, dear man,
said the doctor. We might, of course, at some given moment overpower
the garrison that is maintained here and seize the forts. Perhaps we might be
able to mind the harbors. But what then, in a fortnight or so
we could be starved into unconditional submission. Remember our the advantages of isolated position
that told in our favor while we had the sea dominion tell against us.
Now that the sea dominion is in other hands, the enemy would not need
to mobilize a single army corps or to bring a single battleship into action.
A fleet of nimble cruisers and destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to
shut out our food supplies. Are you trying to tell me that this is
a final overthrow, said Jovil in a shaking voice. Are we to remain
a subject race like the Poles? Let us hope for a better fate,
said the doctor. Our opportunity may come if the master power is ever involved
in an unsuccessful naval war with some other nation, or perhaps in some time
of European crisis, when everything hung in the balance. Our latent hostility might
have to be squared by a concession of independence. That's what we have to
hope for and watch for. Mania the hand the conquerors have to count on
time and tact to weaken and finally obliterate the old feelings of nationality. The
middle aged of to day will grow old and acquiescent in the changed state of
things. The young generations will grow up never having known anything different. It's
a far cried Delhi, as the old Indian proverb says, and the strange
half European, half Asiatic caught out there will see more and more a thing
exotic and unreal. The King across the water was a rallying cry once upon
a time in our history, when a king on the farther side of the
Indian ocean is a shadowy competitor for one who alternates between potsdam and windsor.
I want you to tell me everything, said Yeovil, after another pause.
Tell me, hollm, how far has this obliterating process of time and tact
gone? Seems to be pretty fairly started already. I bought a newspaper as
soon as I landed, and I read it in the train coming up,
and I read things that puzzled and disgusted me. There were announcements of concerts
and plays, and first nights and private views. There were even small dances.
There are advertisements of houseboats and weekend cottages, and string bands for garden
parties. It struck me that it was rather like merrymaking with a dead body
lying in the house. You will, said the doctor. You must bear
in mind, do things first, the necessity for the life of the country
going on as if nothing had happened. It's true that many thousands of our
working men and women have emigrated, and thousands of our upper and middle class
too. They were the people who were not tied down by business or who
could afford to cut those ties. But those represent comparatively a few out of
the many. The great businesses, and the small businesses must go on.
People must be fed and clothed, and housed and medically treated, And there
a thousand and one wants, a necessity is supplied. Look at me,
for instance, however much I loathed coming under a foreign domination and paying taxes
to an Earnian government, I can't abandon me practice and my patience and set
up a new in Toronto or Allahabaden. If I could, some other doctor
would have to take my place here high or that other doctor must have our
servants and motors, and food and furniture, and newspapers. Even our sport.
The golf links and the hunting fields have been well night deserted since the
war. Will they are beginning to get back their motors because outdoor sports has
become a necessity, and of very rational necessity, with numbers of men who
have to work otherwise in unnatural and exacting conditions. That is one factor of
the situation. The other affects London more especially, But through London it influences
the rest of the country to a certain extent. You'll see you around you
here much that will strike you as indications of halfness, indifference to the calamity
that has befallen our nation. Well, you must remember that many things in
modern life, especially in the big cities, are not national but international.
In the world of music and arts and drama, for instance, the foreign
names a legion they confront with with every return. Some of our British defaultees
of such answer are more a clim atties to the ways of Munich and Mosque
than they're familiar with the life, say of Sterning or York. For years
they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and jargon of the nationalized
culture. Even those of them who never left our shores, they would take
pains to be intimately familiar with the domestic affairs and views of some Galician gipsy
dramatists, and gravably caught and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and cookery.
But they would shudder at ye kin John Peel as a piece of uncost
barbarity. You cannot expect a world of that sort to be permanently concerned or
downcast because the crown of Charlemagne takes its place now on top of the royal
box in the theaters, or don't they head of programs at State concerts and
Lin't are the Jews. There are many in land, or at least in
London, said Yobel. There are even more of them now than there used
to be, said hollm And to a great extent a disliker of je was
myself. But I'll be fair to them and admit that those of them who
were in any genuine sense British should remain British. And I stuck by us
loyally in our misfortune, all honor to them. Were are the others,
the men who, by temperament and everything else, were farm of Teuton,
or Polish or Latin than they were British. It was not to be expected
that they would be outbroken, because London had suddenly lost its place among the
political capitals of the world and become a cosmopolitan city. They had appreciated the
free and easy liberty of the old days under British for all, but there
was a stiff insularity in the ruling race that they chafed against. Now.
Putting aside some petty government restrictions that Teutonic bureaucracy has brought in, were as
rarely in their eyes, more license and social adaptability in London than before it
has taken on some of the aspects of a no man's land, and the
Jew, if he likes nay, almost consider himself as of the dominant race.
But inu rate is ubiquitous pleasure of the caffeine capaine boulevard, kind a
sort of thing that gave Berlin the aspect of the gay's capital in Europe within
the last decade. That is the insidious leaven that will help to d nationalized
London. Berlin will probably climb back to some of its old austerity and simplicity,
a world ruling city with the great sense of its position and its responsibilities,
while London will become more and more the center of what these people understand
by life. Y Oval made a movement of impatience and disgust. I know,
I know, said the doctor sympathetically. Life and enjoyment mean to una
howl of the wolf in a forest, the call of a wild swan on
the frozen Tumberus, the smell of a wood fire in some little inn among
the mountains. There's more music to you in the quick thud thud of hoofs
on deser mud, as a free stepping horses laid up toar a tent door,
and in all the dronings and flourishing that highly paide orchestra can relout to
an expensively fed audience. But the tastes of modern London, as we see
them, crystallize around us li in a very different direction. People of the
world that I am speaking of, our dominant world at the present moment,
heard together as close effect to the square yard as possible, doing nothing worth
doing, and saying nothing worth saying, but doing and saying it over over
again, listening to the same melodies, watching the same artists, echoing the
same catchwords, hardering the same dishes, in the same restaurants, suffering each
other's cigarette smoke and perfumes, and conversation feverishly, anxiously, making arrangements to
meet each other again to morrow, next week, and the week after next,
and repeat the same gregarious experience. If they would have not heard it
together in a corner of western London, watching each other with restless intelligent eyes,
they'd be heard it together at Brighton or deep doing the same thing.
Well, you will find that life of that sort goes forward just as usual,
only it's even more prominent and noticeable now because there's less public life of
other kinds. Yovil said something which was possibly the burry At word for the
near the world outside. In the neighboring square, a band had been playing
at intervals during the evening. Now it struck up an air that Yovil had
already heard whistle several times since his landing, an air with a captivating suggestion
of slyness and furtive joyousness running through it. He rose and walked across the
window, opening it a little wider. He listened till the last notes had
died away. What is that you they've just paid, he asked. You're
here at Darfen enough, said the doctor. A Frenchman writing in matt Earlia
the day called it the national anthem of the Feta Comfy. End of chapter
three, Chapter four of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox
recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or
to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Iminta,
When William Came By Saki, Chapter four esist verboten. Yeoville wakened next morning
to the pleasant sensation of being in a household very elaborate machinery for the smooth
achievements of one's daily life was noiselessly and unceasingly at work. Fever and the
long weariness of convalescence in indifferently comfortable surroundings had given luxury a new value in
his eyes. Money had not always been plentiful with him in his younger days.
In his twenty eighth year, he had inherited a fairly substantial fortune,
and he had married a wealthy woman a few months later. It was characteristic
of the man and his breed that the chief use to which he put his
newly acquired wealth had been in seizing the opportunity which it gave him for indulging
in unlimited travel in wild, out of the way regions where the comforts of
life were meagerly represented. Cicily occasionally accompanied him to the threshold of his expeditions,
such as Cairo or Saint Petersburg or Constantinople, but her own tastes in
the matter of roving were more or less condensed. Within an area that comprised
Cannes, Homburg, the Scottish Highlands and the Norwegian boards. Things outlandish and
barbaric appeal to her, chiefly when presented under artistic but highly civilized stage management
on the boards of Covent Garden, And if she wanted to look at wolves
or sandgrouse, she preferred doing so in the company of an intelligent fellow of
the Zoological Society on some fine Sunday afternoon in Regent's Park. It was one
of the bonds of union and good fellowship between her husband and herself that each
understood and sympathized with the other's tastes, without in the least wanting to share
them. They went their own ways and were pleased and comrade like when the
ways happened to run together for a span, without self reproach or heart searching
when the ways diverged. Moreover, they had separate and adequate banking accounts,
which constitute, if not the keys of the matrimonial heaven, at least the
oil that lubricates them. Jovil found Cicily and breakfast waiting for him in the
cool breakfast room, and enjoyoid with the appreciation of a recent invalid the comfort
and resources of a meal that had not to be ordered or thought about in
advance, but seemed as though it were there fore ordained from the beginning of
time. In its smallest detail, each desire of the breakfasting mind seemed to
have its realization in some dish, lurking unobtrusively in hidden corners until asked for.
Did one want grilled mushrooms English fashion? They were there, black and
moist and sizzling and extremely edible. Did one design mushrooms alarous? They appeared
blanched and cool and toothsome under their white blanketing of sauce. At one's bidding
was a service of coffee, prepared with rather more foresight and circumspection than would
go to the preparation of a revolution in a South American republic. The exotic
blooms that reigned in profusion over the other parts of the house more scrupulously banished
from the breakfast room, bowls of wild thyme and other flowering weeds of the
meadow and hedgerow gave it an atmosphere of country freshness that was in keeping with
the morning meal. You look dreadfully tired, still, said Cecily critically.
Otherwise I would recommend a ride in the park before he gets too hot.
There's a new cob in the stable that you'll just love. But he's rather
lively, and you'd better content yourself for the present with some more sedate exercise
than he's likely to give you. He's apt to try and jump out of
his skin when the flies tease him. The park's rather jolly for a walk
just now, I think that will be about my form after my long journey,
said Jovil, and ours strove before lunch under the trees, Na or
not fatigue me unduly. In the afternoon, I'll look at one or two
people. Don't count on finding too many of your old set, said Cecily,
rather hurriedly. I dare say some of them will find their way back
sometime, But at present there's been rather an exodus the breeds, said Yeovil,
Are they here? No? The breeds are in Scotland at their place
in Sutherlandshire. They don't come south now. And the Ricards are farming somewhere
in East Africa, the whole lot of them. Valor has got an appointment
of some sort in the Straits settlement and has taken his family with him.
The Collards are down at their mother's place in Norfolk. A German banker has
bought their house in Manchester Square, and hebways, asked Yovil. Dick headways
in India, said Cecily, But his mother lives in Paris. Poor Hugo,
you know, was killed in the war. My friends, the Allenson's
are in Paris too. It's rather clearance, isn't it. However, there
are some left, and I expect others will come back in time. Pitherby's
here. He's one of those who are trying to make the best of things
under the new regime, would be, said Yeovil shortly. It's a difficult
question, said Cecily, whether one should stay at home and face the music
or go away and live a transplanted life under the British flag. Either attitude
might be dictated by patriotism. It's one thing to face the music, it's
another that dance to it, said Yovil. Cecily poured out some more coffee
for herself and change the conversation. You'll be into lunch. I suppose the
clubs are not very attractive just now, I believe, and the restaurants are
mostly hot. In the middle of the day. Ronnie's store is coming in.
He's here pretty often these days. A rather good looking young animal and
with something midway between talent and genius in the piano playing line, not long
haired and semitic, or check or anything of that sort, I suppose,
asked Yovil. Cecily laughed at the vision of Ronnie conjured up her husband's words.
No, beautifully groomed and clipped and Anglo saxon. I expect you'll like
him. He plays bridge almost as well as he plays the piano. I
suppose you wonder at anyone who can play bridge well wanting to play the piano.
I'm not quite so intolerant as all that, said, Yeovil. Anyhow,
I promised to like Ronnie. Is anyone else coming to lunch? Joan
Mardle will probably drop in. In fact, I'm afraid she's a certainty.
She invited herself in that way of hers that brooks of no refusal. On
the other hand, as a mitigating circumstance, there will be a pont d'asperge
omelet such as few kitchens could turn out. So don't be late. Yeovil
set out for his morning walk with the curious sensation of one who starts on
a voyage of discovery in a land that is well known to him. He
turned into the park at Hyde Park Corner and made his way along the familiar
paths and alleys that bordered the row. The familiarity vanished when he left the
region of fenced in lawns and rhododendron bushes and came to the open space that
stretched away beyond the bandstand. The bandstand was still there, and a military
band in sky blue Saxon uniform was executing the first item in the forenoon program
of music. Around it, instead of the serried rows of green chairs that
Yo who remembered, was spread out an acre or so of small round tables,
most of which had their quota of customers engaged in a steady consumption of
larger beer, coffee, lemonade, and syrups. Further in the background,
but well within ear shot of the band, a gaily painted pagoda restaurant sheltered
a number of more commodious tables under its awnings and gave a hint of convenient
indoor accommodation for wet or windy weather. Movable screens of trellis, trained foliage
and climbing roses formed little hedges by means of which any particular table could be
shut off from its neighbors, if semi privacy were desired. One or two
decorative advertisements of popularized brands of champagne and rhine wines adorned the outside walls of
the building, and under the central gable of its upper story was a flamboyant
portrait of a stern faced man whose image and superscription might also be found on
the newer coinage of the land. A mass of bunting hung in folds round
the flagpole on the gable, and blew out now and then on the favoring
breeze a long three colored strip black, white and scarlet. And over the
whole scene the elm trees towered with an absurd sardonic air of nothing having changed
around their roots. The oval stood for a minute or two, taking in
every detail of the unfamiliar spectacle. They have certainly accomplished something that we never
attempted, he muttered to himself. Then he turned on his heel and made
his way to the shady walk that ran alongside the row. At first sight,
little was changed in the aspect of the well known exercising ground. One
or two riding masters cantered up and down, as of yore, with their
attendant broods of anxious faced young girls and awkwardly bumping women pupils, while horsey
looking men put marketable animals through their paces or drew up to the rails for
long conversations with horsey looking friends on foot. Sportingly attired young women sitting astride
of their horses careered by at intervals, as though an extremely game fox were
leading hounds a merry chase a short way ahead of them. It all seemed
much as usual. Presently, from the middle distance, a bright patch of
color set in a whirl of dust, drew rapidly nearer and resolved itself into
a group of cavalry officers, extending their charges in a smart gallop. They
were well mounted and sat their horses to perfection, and they made a brave
show as they raced past Jovil with a clink and clatter and rhythmic thud of
hoofs, and became once more a patch of color in a whirl of dust.
An answering glow of color seemed to have burnt itself into the gray face
of the young man who had seen them pass without appearing to look at them.
The stinging rush of blood accompanied by a choking catch in the throat,
and a hot, white blindness across the eyes. The weakness of fever broke
down at times the rampart of outward indifference that a man of Yoville's temperament builds
coldly round his heart strings. The row and its riders had become suddenly detestable
to the wanderer. He would not run the risk of seeing that insolently joyous
cavalcade come galloping past again. Beyond a narrow stretch of tree shaded grass lay
the placid, sunlit water of the Serpentine, and Jovill made a short cut
across the turf to reach its graveled bank. Cornch WHU read either English or
German, asked a policeman who confronted him as he stepped off the turf.
Yovil stared at the man, and then turned to look at a small,
neatly printed notice to which the official was imperiously pointing. In two languages.
He was made known that it was forbidden and verboten, punishable and strarafbar to
walk on the grass three shilling fine, said the policeman, extending his hand
for the money. Do I pay you? Asked Jovil, feeling almost inclined
to laugh. I'm rather a stranger to the new order of things. You
pay me, said the policeman, and you receive acquittance for the sum paid.
And he proceeded to tear a counterfoil receipt for a three shilling fine from
a small pocket book. May I ask, said Yovil, as he handed
over the sun demanded and received his acquittance. What the red and white band
on your sleeve stands for bilingual? Said the constable, with an air of
importance. Preference is given to members of the force who qualify both languages.
Nearly all the police engaged on park duty here bilingual. About as many foreigners
as English used the parks nowadays. In fact, on a fine Sunday afternoon,
you will find three foreigners to every two English. The park's habit is
more continental than British. I take it. And are there many Germans in
the police force, asked Yuval. Well, yes, a good few there
had to be, said the constable. There were such a lot of resignations
when the change came, and they had to be filled up somehow. Lots
of men what used to be in the force immigrated or found work of some
other kind. But everybody couldn't take that line. Wives and children had to
be thought of. Tis every head of a family that can chuck up a
job on the chance of finding another Starvation's been a lot of a good many
that what went out. Those of us that stayed on got better pay,
and we did before. But then, of course the duties are much more
multitudinous they must be, said Yovil, fingering his three filling state document.
Hi the way, he asked, are all the green plots in park out
of bounds for human feet? Every whay where you see the notices, said
the policeman, And that's about three quarters of the whole grass space. There's
been a lot of new gravel walks opened up in all directions. People don't
want to walk on the grass when they've got clean paths to walk on.
And with this parting reproof, the bilingual constable strode heavily away his loss of
consideration and self esteem as a unito a sometime ruling race, evidently compensated for
to some extent by his enhanced importance as an official. Are women and children,
thought Yovil as he looked after the retreating figure. Yes, that's one
side of the problem, the children that have to be fed and schooled,
the women folk that have to be cared for, an old mother, perhaps
in the home that cannot be broken up, the old case of giving hostages.
He followed the path alongside the Serpentine, passing under the archway of the
bridge, and continuing his walk into Kensington Gardens. In another moment, he
was within view of the Peter Pan's statue and at once observed that it had
companions. On one side was a group representing a scene from one of the
Grim Fairy stories. On the other was Alice in conversation with Griffin and mock
Turtle, the episode looking distressingly stiff and meaningless in its sculptured form. Two
other spaces had been cleared in the neighboring turf, evidently for the reception of
further statue groups, which Yeoville mentally assigned to Strowel Peter and Little Lord Fauntleroy
German middle class taste, he commented, but in this matter he certainly gave
them a lead. I suppose the idea is that childish fancy is dead,
and it is only decent to erect some sort of memorial to it. The
day was growing hotter, and the park had ceased to seem a desirable place
to loiter in. Jovial turned his steps homeward, passing on his way the
van stand with its surrounding acreage of tables. It was now nearly one o'clock
and luncheon parties were beginning to assemble under the awnings of the restaurant. Lighter
refreshments in the shape of sausages and potato salads were being carried out by scurrying
waiters to the drinkers of larger beer at small tables. A park orchestra in
brilliant trappings had taken the place of the military band. As Yeovial passed,
the musicians launched out into the tune which the doctor had truly predicted he would
hear to repletion before he had been many days in London, the national anthem
of the Fitter compli end of chapter four, Chapter five of When William Came
By Sarkie. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot
org. Reading by and Imenta, When William Came By Sarkie, Chapter five,
La detre Cuisine. Joan Mardle had reached forty in the leisurely, untroubled
fashion of a woman who intends to be comely and attractive. At fifty,
she cultivated a jovial, almost joyous manner, with the top dressing of hearty
goodwill and good nature, which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances. On getting to
know her better, they hastily rearmed themselves. Someone had once aptly described her
as a hedgehog with the protective mimicry of a puff ball. If there was
an awkward remark to be made at an inconvenient moment before undesired listeners, Joan
invariably made it, and when the occasion did not present itself, she was
usually capable of creating it. She was not without a certain popularity, the
sort of popularity that a dashing highwaymen sometimes achieved among those who were not in
the habit of traveling on his particular highway. A great aunt on her mother's
side of the family had married so often that Joan imagined herself justified in claiming
cousinship with a large circle of disconnected houses and treating them all on a relationship
footing which theoretical kinship enabled her to extract luncheons and other accommodations under the plea
of keeping the lamp of family life aglow, I felt I simply had to
come to day, She chuckled at Yeovil. I was just dying to see
the return. Of course, I know perfectly well that neither of you want
me when you haven't seen each other for so long, and must have heaps
and heaps to say to one another. But I thought I would risk the
odio of being the third person on an occasion when two a company and three
are a nuisance. Wasn't it brave of me? She spoke, in the
full knowledge of the fact that the luncheon party would not in any case have
been restricted to Yeovil and his wife, Having seen Ronnie arrive in the hall
as she was being shown upstairs. Ronnie's store is coming, I believe,
said Cecily. So you're not breaking into a tete a tete Ronnie. I
don't count him, said Joan Gaily. He's just a boy who looks nice
and meets asparagus. I hear he's getting to play the piamo rarely well such
a pity, he will grow fat. Musicians always do, and it will
ruin him. I speak feelingly because I'm gravitating towards plantnus myself. The divine
architect turns us out fearfully and wonderfully built, and there is as charming to
the eye. And then he adds another chin and two or three extra inches
round the waist, and the effect is ruined. Fortunately, you can always
find another Ronnie when this one grows fat and uninteresting. The supply of boys
who look nice and eat asparagus is unlimited. Hell alone, mister store.
We were all talking about you. Nothing very damaging, I hope, said
Ronnie, who had just entered the room. No, we were merely deciding
that, whatever you may do with your life, your chin must remain single.
When one's chin begins to lead a double life, one's own opportunities for
depravity are insensibly narrowed. You needn't tell me that you haven't any hankerings afterpravity.
People with your colored eyes and hair are always depraved. Let me introduce
you to my husband, Ronnie, said Cecily, and then let's go and
begin lunch. You two must almost feel as if you were honeymooning again,
said Joan as they sat down. You must have quite forgotten each other's tastes
and peculiarities since you last met. Old Emily Fromley was talking about you yesterday
when I mentioned that Mary was expected home. Curious sort of marriage tie,
she said, in that stupid staring way of hers. When husband and wife
spend most of their time in different consonans, I don't call it marriage at
all, nonsense, I said, it's the best way of doing things.
The ovals will be a united and devoted couple long after heaps of their married
contemporaries have trundled through the divorce court. I forgot at the moment that her
youngest girl had divorced her husband last year, and that her second girl is
rumored to be contemplating a similar step. One can't remember everything. Joan Mardle
was remarkable for being able to remember the smallest details in the family lives of
two or three hundred acquaintances. From personal matters, she went with a bound
to the political or small talk of the moment. The official declaration as to
the House of Lords is out at last, she said, I bought a
paper just before coming here, but I left it in the tube. All
existing titles at elapse if three successive holders, including the present ones, failed
to take the oath of allegiance. Have any taken it up to the present,
asked Yobil. Only about nineteen so far, and none of them representing
very leading families. Of course, others will come in gradually as the change
of dynasty becomes more and more an accepted fact. And of course there will
be lots of new creations to fill up the gaps. I here for certain
that Fitherby is to get a title of some sort in recognition of his literary
labors. He has written a short history of the House of Hohensalend for use
in schools, you know, and he is bringing out a popular life of
Frederick the Great, at least he hopes it will be popular. I didn't
know that writing was much in his nine, said Yobil me on the occasional
editing of a company prospectus. I understand, and that his historical researches are
given every satisfaction in exalted Quarters, said Joan. Something may be lacking in
the style, perhaps, but the August approval can make good that defect.
With the style of Baron Fitherby has such a kind heart and kind hearts and
more than coronets we'll know. But the two go quite well together. And
the dear man is not content with his services to literature. He's blossoming forth
as a liberal patron of the arts. He's taken quite a lot of tickets
for dear Gauler's debut. Half the second row the chest circle. Do you
mean garlum musselford, asked Yobil, catching at the name. What on earth
is she having a debut about? What? Cried Joan in loud voiced amazement,
haven't you heard? Hasn't Cicily told you? How funny that you shouldn't
have heard? Why it's going to be one of the events of the season.
Everybody's talking about it. She's going to do suggestion dancing at the caravans
or a theater. Lord heavens, what is suggestion dancing, asked Yobil.
Oh, something quite new, explained Joan. At any rate, the name
is quite new, and Gaula is new as far as the public had concerned.
And that's enough to establish the novelty of the thing. Amongst other things,
she does a dance suggesting the life of a fern, I saw one
of the rehearsals, and to me it would equally well have suggested the life
of John Wesley. However, it is probably the fault of my imagination.
I've either got too much or too little. Anyhow, it's ununderstood thing that
she's to take Landon by storm. When I last saw Gaula muscle Vord,
observed Yeovil, she was rather serious flapper who thought the world was in urgent
need of regeneration, and was not certain whether she would regenerate it or take
up miniature painting. I forget which she attempted. Ultimately, she is quite
serious about her art, put in itsily. She has studied a good deal
abroad and worked hard at mastering the technique of her profession. She's not at
mere Amata with the hankering after the footlights. I fancy she will do well.
But what do her people say about it, asked Yovil, who they're
simply furious about it, answered Joan. The idea of a daughter of the
House of Muscleford prancing and twisting about the stage for Prussian officers and Hamburg Jews,
to Gazette, is a dreadful cup of humiliation for them. It's unfortunate,
of course that they should feel so cutely about it, but still one
can understand their point of view. I don't see what other point of view
they could possibly take, said Yobil sharply. If Galla thinks that the necessities
of art or her own inclinations demand that she should dance in public, why
can't she do it in Paris or even Vienna. Anywhere would be better,
one would think, than in London under the present conditions. He had given
Joan the indication that she was looking for as to his attitude towards the fate
of Compli. Without asking a question. She had discovered that husband and wife
were divided on the fundamental issue that underlay all others. At the present moment,
Cecily was weaving social schemes for the future. Yeovil had come home in
a frame of mind that threatened the destruction of those schemes, or at any
rate, a serious hindrance to their execution. The situation presented itself to Joan's
mind with an alluring piquanci your giving a grand supper party for Gauler on the
night of her Debutan Chiu, She asked Cicily several people spoke to me about
it, so I suppose it must be true. Tony Luton and Young Store
had taken care to spread the news of the projected supper function in order to
insure against a change of plans on Sicily's part. Gauler is a great friend
of mine, said Cecily, trying to talk as if the conversation had taken
a perfectly indifferent turn. Also, I think she deserves a little encouragement after
the hard work she's been through. I thought it would be doing her a
kindness to arrange a supper party for her. On the first night. There
was a moment's silence. Jovill said nothing, and Joan understood the value of
being occasionally tongue tied. The whole question is continued Cecily, as the silence
became oppressive. Whether one is to mope and hold aloof from the national life
or take our share in it. The life has got to go on,
whether we participate in it or not. It seems to me to be more
patriotic to come down into the dust of the marketplace than to withdraw one's self
beyond walls or beyond the seas. Of course, the industrial life of the
country has to go on, said Yovil. No one could criticize Gaula if
she interested herself in organizing cottage industries or anything of that sort in which she
would be helping her own people. That one could understand. But I don't
think that a cosmopolitan can sound the music hall business calls for personal sacrifices from
young women of good family at a moment like the present. It's just at
a moment like the present, that the people want something to interest them and
take them out of themselves, said Cicily argumentatively. What has happened has happened,
and we can't undo it or escape the consequences. What we can do,
or attempt to do, is to make things less dreary and make people
less unhappy, in a word more contented, said Yeovil. If I were
a German statesman, that is the end I would labor for and encourage others
to labor for, to make the people forget that they were discontented. All
this work of recalvinizing the social side of London life may be sometime in the
phrase that by a poor Laurid Pruf. I don't think there's any use in
discussing the matter further, said Cecily. I can see that grand supper party
not coming off, said Joan provocatively. Ronnie looked anxiously at Cicily. You
can see it coming on if you're gifted with the prophetic vision of a reliable
kind, said Cicily. Of course, as Mary doesn't take kindly to the
idea of Gaula's enterprise, I won't have the party here. I'll give it
at a restaurant. That's all. I can see Mary's point of view and
sympathize with it, but I'm not going to throw Gaula over. There was
another pause of uncomfortably protracted duration. I say this is a top hole omelet,
said Ronnie. It was his only contribution to the conversation, but it
was a valuable one. End of chapter five Chapter six of When William Came
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Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee. Chapter six. Hervon Quarle,
her von Karl sat at his favorite table in the Brandenburg Cafe, the
new building that made such an imposing show and did such thriving business at the
lower end of what most of its patrons called the Dragenish Thrauser. Though the
establishment was new, it had already achieved its unwritten code of customs and the
sanctity of hevon Quarle's special reserved table had acquired the authority of a tradition.
A set of chessmen, a copy of the Quite Saitung and the Times,
and a slim necked bottle of Rhenish wine ice school from the cellar were always
to be found there early in the forenoon, and the honored guest for whom
these preparations were made usually arrived on the scene shortly after eleven o'clock. For
an hour or so he would read and silently digest the contents of his two
newspapers, and then, at the first sign of flagging interest on his part,
another of the cafe's regular customers would march across the floor, exchange a
word or two on the affairs of the day, and bebidden with a wave
of the hand. Into the opposite seat, a waiter would instantly place the
chessboard with its marshaled ranks of combatants in the required position, and the contest
would begin here. Von Qual was a heavily built man of mature middle age,
of the blonde North German type, with the facial aspect that suggested stupidity
and brutality. The stupidity of his mien masked a nobility and a shrewdness that
was distinctly above the average, and the suggestion of brutality was belied by the
fact that von Qual was as kind hearted a man as one could meet with
in a day's journey. Early in life, almost before he was in his
teens, Fritz von Pal had made up his mind to accept the world as
it was, and to that philosophical resolution, steadfast he adhered to. He
attributed his excellent digestion and his unruffled happiness. Perhaps he confused cause and effect.
The excellent digestion may have been responsible for at least some of the philosophical
serenity. He was a bachelor of the type that is called confirmed, and
which might better be labeled consecrated. From his early youth onward to his present
age, he had never had the faintest flickering intention of marriage, children and
animals he adored. Women and plants he accounted somewhat of a nuisance. A
world without women and roses and asparagus would, he admitted, be robbed of
much of its charm. But with all their charm, these things were tarsome
and thorny and capricious, always wanting to climb or creep in places where they
were not wanted, and resolutely drooping and fading away when they were desired to
flourish. Animals, on the other hand, accepted the world as it was
and made the best of it. And children, at least nice children,
uncontent aminated by grown up influences, lived in worlds of their own making.
Von Val held no acknowledged official position in the country of his residence, but
it was an open secret that those responsible for the real direction of affairs sought
his counsel on nearly every step that they meditated, and that his counsel was
very rarely disregarded. Some of the shrewdest and most successful enactments of the ruling
power were believed to have originated in the brain cells of the bovine fronted schamgast
of the Brandenburg Cafe. Around the wood paneled walls of the cafe were set
at intervals well mounted heads of boar, elk, stag, roebuck, and
other game beasts of a northern forest, while in between were carved armorial escutcheons
of the principal cities of the lately expanded realm Magdeburg, Manchester, Hamburg,
Bremen, Bristol, and so forth. Below these came shelves, on which
stood a wonderful array of stone beer mugs, each decorated with some fantastic device
or motto, and most of them pertaining individually and sacredly to some regular and
unfailing customer. In one particular corner of the highest shelf, greatly at his
ease and in no wise to be disturbed, slept vhoton the huge gray house
cat, dreaming doubtless of certain nimble and audacious mice down in the cellar three
floors below, whose nimbleness and audacity were as precious to him as the forwardness
of the birds is to a skilled gun on a grouse moor. Once every
day, Foton came marching in stately fashion across the polished floor, halted midway
to resume an unfinished toilet operation, and then proceeded to pay his leisurely respects
to his friend von Quar. The latter was said to be prouder of this
daily demonstration of esteem than of his many coveted orders of merit. Several of
his friends and acquaintances shared with him the distinction of having achieved the black Eagle,
but not one of them had ever succeeded in obtain the slightest recognition of
their existence from Votan. The daily greeting had been exchanged, and the proud
gray beast had marched away to the music of a slumbrous purr. The kreuz
Zeitung and the Times underwent a final scrutiny and were pushed aside, and von
far gazed aimlessly out of the July sunshine bathing the walls and windows of the
Piccadilly Hotel. Er Rebinoch, the plump little Pomeranian banker, stepped across the
floor almost as noiselessly as Voton had done, though with considerably less grace,
and some half a minute later was engaged in sliding pawns and knights and bishops
to and fro on the chessboard in a series of lightning moves. Bewildering to
look on. Neither he nor his opponent played with the skill that they severally
brought to bear on banking and stake craft, nor did they conduct their game
with the politeness that they punctiliously observed in other affairs of life. A running
fire of contemptuous remarks and aggressive that are accompanied each move, and the mere
record of the conversation would have given an uninitiated onlooker the puzzling impression that an
easy and crushing victory was assured to both players. He has puzzled two men.
He doesn't know what to do. He thinks he would have moved there?
Does he much good that you'll do him? Never have I seen such
a mess as he is in. He cannot do anything. He is absolutely
helpless. Oh you'll take my bishop? Do you much? I care for
that? Nothing? See? I give you a check? H No,
he isn't a fright. He doesn't know where to go. What a mess
is it? So the game proceeded with a brisk exchange of pieces and incivilities,
and the fluctuation of fortunes, till the little banker lost his queen as
a result of an incautious move, and after several woebegone contortions of his shoulders
and hands declined further contest a sleek hair Piccolo rushed forward to remove the board
and the erstwhile combatants resumed the courteous dignity that they discarded in their chess playing
moments. If your sins are Gamania today, asked Harry Ebenoch, as soon
as the boy had receded to a respectful distance, No, said von Quar.
Anniversy to Gammania. A count on you to tell me if there is
anything noteworthy in it. It has an article today headed occupation or assimilation,
said the banker. It is of some importance and very written. It is
very pessimistic. Catholic papers are always pessimistic about things of this world, said
von Quar, just as they are unduly optimistic of all things of the next
world. What line does it take? It's thus that our conquest of written
can only result in a temporary patient whether notice to quit. Always hanging over
our heads is that we can never hope to assimilate the people of these islands
in our empire as a sort of married time saxony of Bavaria or the teaching
of history is against it. Saxony in Bavaria are part of the Empire because
of their past history. England is being bound into the Empire in spite of
her past history, and so forth. The writer of the article has not
studied history very deeply, said von qual. The impossible thing that he speaks
off has been done before, done in these very islands too. The Norman
conquest became an assimilation in comparatively fuel generation. Ah. In those days,
yes, said the banker, But the conditions were altogether different. There was
not a rapid transmission of news in the means of keeping the public mind instructed
in what was happening. In fact, one can scarcely say that the public
man was there to instruct. There was not the same bond of brotherhood between
men of the same nation that exists now. Northumberland was almost as fall into
Devon or Kent as Normandy was in the church. In those dates was a
great international factor in the crusades, bound men together fighting under one leader for
a common cause. Also, there was not a great national past to be
forgotten is in this case. There are many factors certainly that are against us,
conceded the statesman. But you must also take into account of those that
will help us. In most cases in recent history, where the conquered have
stood out against all attempts at dissimulation, there has been a religious difference to
enter the racial one Lake Poland, for instance, and the Catholic parts of
Ireland. If the Bretons ever seriously begin to assert their nationality as against the
Fridge, it will be because he have remained more Catholic in practice and sentiment
of their neighbors. Here there is no such complication. We are, in
the bout a Protestant nation with a Catholic minority, and the same may be
said of the British. Then in modern days there is the alchemy of sport
and the drama to bring men of different races amicably together. One or two
sportsmen like Germans in a London football team will do more to break down racial
antagonism than anything the governments or councils can effect. As for the state,
it had long been international in his tendencies. You can see that every day
the banker nodded his head. London is not our greatest difficulty, continued vonk
Val. You must remember the steady influx of Germans since the War Old districts
are changing the complexion of their inhabitants, and in some streets you might almost
fancy yourself in a German town. We can scarcely hope to make much impression
on the country districts and the provincial towns at present. But you must remember
the thousands and thousands of the more virile and restless old men have emigrated,
and thousands more will follow their example. We shall fill up their places with
our own surplus population, as the Teuton race is colonized England in the old
pre Christian days. Let is better is it not to people the fat meadows
of the Thames Valley and the healthy downs and uplands of Sussex and the Berkshire,
than to go hunting the elbow room among the flies and fevers of the
tropics. We have somewhere to go to now, better than the scrub and
the belts and the thorn jungles. Of course, of course, assented her
Raybinoch. But why this desirable process of infiltration and assimilation goes on? How
are you going to provide against the hostility of a concarnation. A people is
a right tradition behind them, and a ruling instinct strongly developed. What sees
her eyes closed and hands folded while you carry on the process of Germanization?
What will keep them quiet? The hopelessness of the situation. For Saint Jury's
Boyton has ruled the seas and been able to dictator half the world in consequence,
then she let slip the mastery of the seas of something too costly own
earth to keep up, something which allows too much jealousy and uneasiness in others.
And now the Seese rule her avo you wave that breaks on her shore
rattles the keys of her prison. I'm no fire e to her, I
binock, but I confess that when I am at Dover or Southampton and see
those dark blots on the sea, and those great specks in the sky,
our battleships and cruises and the aircraft, and realize what they mean to us,
our heartbeats just a little quaker. If every German was flung out of
England tomorrow, in three weeks time, we shall be coming in again on
our own terms. With our sea scouts and the air scouts spread in organized
network around, not a shipload of food staff could reach the country. They
know that they can calculate how many days of independence since starvation they could endure,
and they will make no attempt to bring about such a certain fiasco.
Brave men fight for it for lown hope, but the babies do not fight
for an issue they know to be hopeless, so said Herr Rebinock. As
things are at present, they can do nothing from within, absolutely nothing be
away all that before. But as the Germania points out, there is another
Briton beyond the seas. Supposing the Court a Deli were to engineer league in
league, a league with whom interrupted the statesman Russia, we could watch and
ruled. We are rather nearer to its western frontier and Delis, and we
could sortle its multi trade at five thousand notice Swan Sat Holland or not inclined
to provoke our hostility. They would have everything to lose by such a course.
There are other forces in the world that might be reined against us,
argued the banker, The United States, Japan, Italy, They all have
navies. Does the teaching of history show you that it is a strong power,
armed and ready, that has to suffer from the hostility of the world,
asked von quar As far as the sentiment goes, perhaps, but not
in practice. The danger has always been for the weak, dismembered nation.
Think you, for a moment, as the enfeebled, scattered British embower oversees
no undefended territories that our attemptation to earn neighbors as you pan, nothing to
glean. Where we have harvested are the known North American positions which might slip
into other keeping as Russia herself. No traditional temptations beyond the Oxus find you.
We are not making the misdag Napoleon made any forced all Europe to before
him or against him. We reaten no world aggressions. We all satisfied where
he was insatiable. We have cast down one overshadowing power from the face of
the world because it stood in our way. But we have made no attempt
to spread our branches all over the space that he's cover'd. We have not
tried to set up a tributary Canadian Republic or to partitions out Africa. We
have dreamed no dream of making ourselves lords of Hindustan. On the contrary,
we have given proof of our friendly intentions towards our neighbors. We backed France
up the aster day in her squabble with Swain over the Moroccan boundaries, and
proclaimed our opinion that the Republic houses indisputable omission on the North African coast,
as we have in the North Sea. That is not the action or the
language of aggression. No, continued Banquar, after a moment's silence. The
world may fear us and dislike us, but for the present, at any
rate, there will be no leagues against us. No, there is one
rock on which our attempt, at our simulation will found her or fine firm
anchorage, And that is the use of the country. The generation that is
at the threshold. Now it is them that we must capture. We must
teach them to learn and coax them to forget. In course of time,
Anglo Saxon may blend with German, as the Elder Saxons and the Bavarians and
the Shavians have blended with the Prussians into a loyal united people under the Septo
of the Horns Lands. Then we should be doubly strong Roman Carthage rolled into
one, an empire of the West greater than Shalla Mine ever knew. Then
we could look slav and Latin and asiatic in the face, and keep our
place as a central dominant force of their civilized world. The speaker paused for
a moment and drank a deep draft of wine, as though he were invoking
the prosperity of that future world power. Then he resumed in a more level
tone. On the other hand, the younger generation of Britons may grow up
in hereditary hatred, repulsing all our overtures, forgetting nothing and forgiving nothing.
Wait and watching for the time when some weakness assails us, when some crisis
entangles us, when we cannot be everywhere at once, then our work will
be imperialed, perhaps and done. There lies the danger. There lies the
hope the younger generation. There is another danger, said the banker, after
he had pondered over Bonquarle's remarks for a moment or two, amid the incense
clouds of a fat cigar, A danger, as at I foresee in the
immediate future. Perhaps not so much a danger as an element of exasperation,
which may ultimately defeat your plans. The law as to military service will have
to be promulgated shortly, ones that cannot fail to be bitterly unpopular. The
people of these islands will have to be brought into line with the rest of
the Empire in the matter of military training and military service. Now will they
like that we're not the enforcing of such a measure infuriatum against us? Remember,
they have made great sacrifices to avoid the burton of military service. Do
your got exclaimed her v unclar whn't you say you have made sacrifices on their
altar? End of chapter six Chapter seven of When William Came by Sarkee.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading
by and imentor When William Came by Sarkee Chapter seven the lure Sicily had successfully
insisted did on having her own way concerning the projected supper party. Yovil had
said nothing further in opposition to it, whatever his feelings on the subject might
be. Having gained her point, however, she was anxious to give her
husband the impression of having been consulted, and to put her victory as far
as possible on the footing of a compromise. It was also rather a relief
to be able to discuss the matter out of range of Jones's disconcerting tongue and
observant eyes. I hope you're not really annoyed about this silly supper party,
she said, on the morning before the much talked of first night, and
had pledged myself to give it, so I couldn't back out without seeming mean
to Gaula. And in any case it would have been impolitic to cry off.
Why impolitic, asked Yovil coldly. It would give a fence in quarters
where I don't want to give a fence, said Cecily, In quarters where
the fate of Conti is an object of solicitude, said Yeovil. Look here,
said Cecily, in her most disarming manner. It's just as well to
be perfectly frank about the whole matter. If one wants to live in the
London of the present day, one must make up one's mind to accept the
fatter compli with as good a grace as possible. I do want to live
in London, and I don't want to change my way of living and start
under different conditions in some other place. I can't face the prospect of tearing
up my life by the roots. I feel certain I shouldn't bear transplanting.
I can't imagine myself recreating my circle of interests in some foreign town or colonial
center, or even in a country town in England, India. I couldn't
stand. London is not merely a home to me. It's a world,
and it happens to be just the world that suits me, and that I'm
suited to. The German occupation or whatever one likes to call it, is
a calamity, but it's not like a molten deluge from Vesuvius that needs send
us all all scuttling away from another Pompeii. Of course, she added,
there are things that jarre horribly on one, even when one has got more
or less accustomed to them. But one must just learn to be philosophical and
bear them, supposing they're not bearable, said Yeovil. During the few days
that I've been in the land, I've seen things that I cannot imagine will
ever be bearable. That is because they're new to you, said Cecily.
I don't wish that they should ever come to seem bearable, retorted Yovil.
I've been bred and reared as a unit of a ruling race. I don't
want to find myself settling down resignedly as a member of an enslaved one.
There's no need to make things out worse than they are protested Cecily. We've
had a military disaster on a big scale, and there's been a great political
dislocation in consequence. But there's no reason why everything shouldn't right itself in time,
as it has done after other similar disasters in the history of nations.
We are not scattered to the winds or wiped off the face of the earth.
We are still an important racial unit, our racial unit in a foreign
empire, commented Yeovil. We may arrive at the position of being the dominant
factor in that empire, said Cecily, impressing our national characteristics on it and
perhaps dictating its dynastic future and a whole trend of its policy. Such things
have happened in history. Or we may become strong enough to throw off the
foreign connection at a moment when it can be done effectually and advantageously. But
meanwhile, it is necessary to preserve our industrial life and our social life,
and for that reason we must accommodate ourselves to present circumstances, however distasteful they
may be. Immigration to some colonial wilderness, or holding ourselves rigidly aloof from
the life of the capital won't help matters, really, Bury. If you
will think things over a bit, you will see that the course I am
following is the one dictated by sane patriotism, whom the gods wish to render
harmless. They first a fit with sanity, said Yovil bitterly. You may
be content to wait for a hundred years or so for this national revival to
creep and crawl us back into a semblance of independence and world importance. I'm
afraid I haven't the patience or the philosophy to sit down comfortably and wait for
a change of fortune that won't come in my time, if it comes at
all. Cecily changed the drift of the conversation. She had only introduced the
argument for the purpose of defining her point of view and accustoming Yovil to it.
As one leads a nervous horse up to an unfamiliar barrier that he is
required eventually to jump. In any case, she said, from the immediately
practical standpoint, in England is the best place for you till you've shaken off
all traces of that fever. Pass the time away somehow till the hunting begins,
and then go down to the East Wessex country. They're looking out for
a new master after this season, and if you were strong enough you might
take it on for a while. You could go to Norway for fishing in
the summer and hunt the East Wessex in the winter. I'll come down and
do a bit of hunting two and we'll have house parties and get a little
golf in between miles. It will be like old times. Yeovil looked at
his wife and laughed her was an old fellow who used to hunt his hounds
regularly throughout the fiercest times of the Great Civil War. There's a picture of
him by Caton Woodville. I think, leading his pack between King Charles his
army and the parliament forces, just as some battle was going to begin.
I've often thought that the King must have disliked him rather more than he disliked
the men who were in arms against him. They at lea cared one way
or the other. I fancy that old chat would have a great many imitators
nowadays, though when it comes to question of sport against soldiering. I don't
know whether anyone has said it, but one might almost assert that the German
victory was one on the golf links of Bittan. I don't see why you
should saddle one particular form of sport with the special responsibility protested Cicily. Of
course, not, said Jovil, except that it absorbed perhaps more of the
energy and attention of the leisured class than other sports did. And in this
country the leisured class was the only bulwark we had against sufficial indifference. The
working classes had a big share of the apathy, and indirectly a greater share
of the responsibility, because the voting power was in their hands. They had
not the leisure, however, to sit down and think clearly what the danger
was. Their own industrial warfare was more real to them than anything that was
threatening from the nation that they only knew from samples of German clerks and German
waiters. In any case, said Cecily. As regards the hunting, there
is no civil war or national war raging just now, and there is no
immediate likelihood of one. A good many hunting seasons will have to come and
go before we can think of a war of independence as even a distant possibility,
and in the meantime, hunting and horse breeding and country sports generally are
the things most likely to keep Englishmen together on the land. That's why so
many men who hate the German occupation are trying to keep field sports alive and
in the right hands. However, I won't go on arguing you and I
always think things out for ourselves and decide for ourselves, which is much the
best in the long run. Cecily slipped away to her writing room to make
final arrangements over the telephone for the all important supper party, leaving Yeovil's turn
over in his mind the suggestion that she had thrown out. It was an
obvious lure, a lure to draw him away from the fret and fury that
possessed him so inconveniently, but its obvious nature did not detract from its effectiveness.
Yeovil had pleasant recollections of the East Wessex, a cheery little hunt that
afforded good sport in an unpretentious manner, A joyous thread of life running through
a rather sleepy countryside, like a merry brook careering through a placid valley for
a man coming slowly and yet eagerly backed to the activities of life from the
weariness of a long fever. The prospect of a leisurely season with the East
Wessex was singularly attractive, and side by side with its attractiveness, there was
a tempting argument in favor of yielding to its attractions. Among the small squires
and yeoman farmers, doctors, country tradesmen, auction years and so forth,
who would gather at the covert side and at the hunt breakfasts, there might
be a local nucleus of revolt against the enslavement of the land, a discouraged
and leaderless band waiting for some one to mold their resistance into effective shape and
keep their loyalty to the old dynasty in the old national cause steadily burning.
Yovil could see himself taking up that position, stimulating the spirit of hostility to
the fatal compli organizing stubborn opposition to every germanizing influence that was brought into play,
schooling the youth of the countryside to look steadily deliwood. That was the
bait that Yovil threw out to his conscience, while slowly considering the other bait
that was appealing so strongly to his senses. The dry, warm scent of
the stable, the nip of the morning air, the pleasant squelch squelch of
the saddle leather, the moist, earthy fragrance of the autumn woods and wet
fallows, the cold white mists of winter days, the whimper of hounds,
and the hot, restless pushing of the pack through ditch and hedgerow and undergrowth.
The birds that flew up and clucked and chattered as you passed, The
hearty greeting and pleasant gossip in farmhouse kitchens and market day bar parlors. All
these remembered delights of the chase marshaled themselves in the brain and made a cumulative
appeal that came with special intensity to a man who was a little tired of
his wanderings, more than a little drawn away from the jarring centers of life.
The hot London sunshine, baking the sook grind walls, and the ugly,
incessant hoot and grunt of the motor traffic gave an added charm to the
vision of hill and hollow and copse that flickered in Jovill's mind. Slowly,
with the sensuous lingering over detail, his imagination carried him down to a small,
sleepy yet with all pleasantly bustling market town, and placed him unerringly in
a wide, straw littered yard, half full of men and quarter full of
horses, with a bob tailed sheep dog or two, trying not to get
in everybody's way, but insisting on being in the thicker things. The horses
gradually detached themselves from the proud of unimportant men, and came one by one
into momentary prominence, to be discussed and appraised for their good points and bad
points, and finally to be bid for. And always there was one horse
that detached itself conspicuously from the rest the ideal hunter, or at any rate,
Yeoville's ideal of the ideal hunter. Mentally, it was put through its
paces before him, its pedigree and brief history recounted to him. Mentally,
he saw a stable lad put it over a jump or two, with credit
to all concerned, and inevitably he saw himself outbidding less discerning rivals, and
securing the desired piece of horse flesh to be the chief glory and mainstay of
his hunting stable, to carry him well and truly and cleverly through many a
joyous long to be remembered run. That scene had been one of the recurring
half waking dreams of his long days of weakness in the far away finished nursing
home, a dream sometimes of tantalizing mockery, sometimes of pleasure, in the
foretaste of a joy to come. And now it need scarcely be a dream
any longer. He had only to go down at the right moment and take
an actual part in his oft rehearsed vision. Everything would be there exactly as
his imagination had placed it, even down to the bob tailed sheep dogs.
The horse of his imagining would be there waiting for him, or, if
not absolutely the ideal animal, something very like it. He might even go
beyond the limits of his dream and pick up a couple of desirable animals.
Nor would probably be fewer purchasers for good class hunters in these days than of
yore. And with the coming of this reflection, his dream faded suddenly,
and his mind came back with a throb of pain to the things he had
for the moment forgotten. The weary hateful things that were symbolized for him by
the standard that floated yellow and black over the frontage of Buckingham Palace. Jovial
wandered down to his snuggery, a mood of listless dejectioning him. He fidgeted
aimlessly with one or two books and papers, filled the pipe, and half
filled the waste paper basket with torn circulars and accumulating writing table litter. Then
he lit the pipe and settled down in his most comfortable armchair with an old
notebook in his hand. It was a sort of disjointed diary, running fitfully
through the winter months of some past years, and recording noteworthy days with the
East Wessex and over the telephone. Cecily talked and arranged and consulted with men
and women to whom the joys of a good gallop or the love of a
stricken fatherland were as letters in an unknown alphabet. End of chapter seven Chapter
eight of When William Came by Sake. This is a libri box recording.
All LibriVox audings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer,
please go to librovox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William came
by Sarkee Chapter eight. The first night, huge posters outside the Caravansary Theater
of Varieties announced the first performance of the uniquely interesting Suggestion Dances, interpreted by
the Honorable Gaula musselford An impressionist portrait of a rather severe looking young woman gave
the public some idea of what the dancers might be like in appearance, and
the further information was added that her performance was the greatest dramatic event of the
season. Yet another piece of information was conveyed to the public a few minutes
after the doors had opened, in the shape of large notices bearing the brief
announcement house full for the first night function. Most of the had been reserved
for specially invited guests or else bespoken by those who considered it due to their
own importance to be visible on such an occasion. Even at the commencement of
the ordinary program of the evening, Gaula was not due to appear till late
in the list. The theater was crowded with the throng of chattering, expectant
human beings. It seemed as though everyone had come early to see everyone else
arrive. As a matter of fact, it was the rumor heralded arrival of
one personage in particular, that had drawn people early to their seats and given
a double edge to the expectancy of the moment. At first sight and first
hearing. The bulk of the audience seemed to comprise representatives of the chief European
races in well distributed proportions, but if one gave it closer consideration, it
could be seen that the distribution was geographically rather than ethnographically diversified. Men and
women there were from Paris, Munich, Rome, Moscow and Vienna, from
Sweden and Holland, and divers other cities and countries, but in the majority
of cases the Jordan Valley had supplied their forefathers with the common cradle ground.
The lack of a fire burning on a national altar seemed to have drawn them
by universal impulse to the congenial flare of the footlights, Whether as artists,
producers, impresarios, critics, agents, go betweens, or merely as highly
intelligent and fearsomely well informed spectators, they were prominent in the chief seats.
They were represented more sparsely, but still in fair numbers in the cheaper places,
and everywhere there were voluble lymphatic, sanguine or skeptical, prodigal of word
and gesture, with eyes that seemed to miss nothing and acknowledge nothing, and
a general restless dread of not being seen and noticed. Of the theater going
London public. There was also a fair muster, more particularly centered in the
less expensive parts of the house, while in boxes, stalls and circles a
sprinkling of military uniform gave an unfamiliar tone to the scene in the eyes of
those who had not previously witnessed a first night performance under the new conditions.
Yeoville, while standing aloof from his wife's participation in this social event, had
made private arrangements for being a personal spectator of the scene. As one of
the ticket buying public. He had secured a seat in the back rove,
a low price gallery, whence he might watch, observant and unobserved the much
talked of debut of Gaula Musselford and the writing of a new chapter in the
history of the Fete compli. Around him, he noticed an incessant undercurrent of
jangling laughter, an unending give and take of meaningless mirthless jest and catchword.
He had noticed the same thing in streets and public places since his arrival in
London, a noisy, empty interchange of chaff and laughter that he had been
at a loss to account for. The Londoner is not well adapted for the
irresponsible noisiness of jesting tongue that bubbles up naturally in a Southern race. And
the effort to be volatile was the more noticeable because it so obviously was an
effort. Turning over the pages of a book that told the story of Bulgarian
social life in the days of Turkish rule, the oval had that morning come
across a passage that seemed to throw some light on the thing that had puzzled
him. Bondage has this one advantage. It makes a nation merry where far
reaching ambition has no scope for its development. The community squanders its energy on
the trivial and personal cares of its daily life, and seeks relief and recreation
in simple and easily obtained material enjoyment. The writer was a man who had
known bondage, so he spoke at any rate with authority of the London of
the moment. It could not, however, be said with any truth that
it was merry, but merely that its inhabitants made desperate endeavor not to appear
crushed under their catastrophe. Surrounded as he was now with a babble of tongues
and shrill mechanical party, Jovill's mind went back to the book and its account
of a theater audience in the Turkish days of Bulgaria, with its light and
laughing crowd of critics and spectators. Bulgaria, the thought of that determined little
nation came to him with a sharp sense of irony. There was a people
who had not thought it beneath the dignity of their manhood to learn the trade
and discipline of arms. They had their reward torn and exhausted, and debt
encumbered from their campaigns. They were masters in their own house. The Bulgarian
flag threw over the Bulgarian mountains, and Yeovil stole a glance at the crown
of Charlemagne set over the royal box in a capacious box immediately opposite the one
set aside for royalty. But Lady Shalam sat in well considered prominence, confident
that every press critic and reporter would note her presence, and that one or
two of them would describe or misdescribe her toilet. Already, quite a considerable
section of the audience knew her by name, and the frequency with which she
graciously nodded towards various quarters of the house suggested the presence of a great many
personal acquaintances. She had attained to that desirable feminine altitude of person position when
people who go about everywhere know you well by sight and have never met your
dress before. Lady Shaylam was a woman of commanding presence, of that type
which suggests to consciousness that the command may not necessarily be obeyed. She had
observant eyes and a well managed voice. Her successes in life had been worked
for, but they were also, to some considerable extent the result of accident.
Her public history went back to the time when, in the person of
her husband, mister Conrad Daught, she had contested too hopeless and very expensive
parliamentary elections on behalf of her party. On each occasion, the declaration of
the poll had shown a heavy though reduced majority on the wrong side. But
she might have perpetrated an apt misquotation of the French monarch's traditional message. After
the defeat of Pavia and assured the world all is lost save honors. The
forthcoming honors list had duly proclaimed the fact that Conrad d'ort esquire had entered Parliament
by another door, as Baron Shalamb of Wireskilne in the County of Suffolk.
Success had crowned the lady's efforts as far as the achievement of the title went,
but her social ambitions seemed unlikely to make further headway. The new baron
and his wife. Their title and money, notwithstanding, did not go down
in their particular segment of county's society, and in London there were other titles
and incomes to compete with. People were willing to worship the Golden Calf,
but allowed themselves a choice of altars. No one could justly say that the
Shalambs were either oppressively vulgar or insufferably bumptuous. Probably the chief reason for their
lack of popularity was their intense and obvious desire to be popular. They kept
open house in such an insistently open manner that they created a social draft.
The people who accepted their invitations for the second or third time were not the
sort of people whose names gave importance to a dinner party or a house gathering.
Failure in a thinly disguised form attended the assiduous efforts of the Shalembs to
play a leading role in the world that they had climbed into. The Baron
began to observe to his acquaintances that gadding about and entertaining on a big scale
was not much in his line. A quiet after dinner pipe and talk with
some brother legislator was his ideal way of spending an evening. Then came the
great catastrophe involving the old order of society in the national overthrow. Lady Shalem,
after a decent interval of patriotic mourning, began to look around her and
take stock of her chances and opportunities. Under the new regime. It was
easier to achieve distinction as a titled oasis in the social desert that London had
become than it had been to obtain recognition as a new growth in a rather
overcrowded field. The observant eyes and agile brain quickly noted this circumstance, and
her ladyship set to work to adapt herself to the altered conditions that governed her
world. Lord Shalem was one of the few peers who kissed the hand of
the new sovereign. His wife was one of the few hostesses who attempted to
throw a semblance of gaiety and lavish elegance over the travesty of a London season
following the year of the disaster. The world of tradesmen and purveyors and caterers,
and the thousands who were dependent on them for employment, privately blessed the
example set by Shalem House, whatever their feelings might be towards the fate.
Compli and the august newcomer, who had added an old Saxon kingdom and some
of its accretions to the Teutonic realm of Charlemagne, was duly beholden to an
acquired subject who was willing to forget the bitterness of defeat eat and to help
others to forget it. Also, among other acts of imperial recognition, an
earldom was being held in readiness for the baron, who had known how to
accept accomplished facts with a good grace. One of the wits of the Coquetrice
Club had asserted that the new Earl would take us supporters for his coat of
arms. A lion and a unicorn oubliers. In the box with Lady Shalam
was the Griffin von Tolb, a well dressed woman of some fifty six years,
comfortable and placid in appearance, yet alert withal rather suggesting a thoroughly wide
awake dormouse. Rich, amiable, and intelligent were the adjectives which would have
best described her character and her life story. In her own rather difficult social
circle at Paderborne, she had earned for herself the reputation of being one of
the most tactful and discerning hostesses in Germany, and it was generally suspected that
she had come over and taken up her residence in London in response to a
wish expressed in High Quarters. The lavish hospitality which she dispensed at her house
in Barcley Square was a considerable reinforcement to the stricken social life of the metropolis.
In a neighboring box, Cicily Yoville presided over a large and lively party,
which of course included Ronnie Store, who was for once in a way
in a chattering mood, and also included an American dowager who had never been
known to be in anything else. A tone of literary distinction was imparted to
the group by the presence of Augustus Smith, better known under her pen name
of Rhapsody Pantril, author of a play that had a limited but well advertised
success in Sheffield and the United States of America. Author also of a book
of reminiscences entitled Things I Cannot Forget. She had beautiful eyes, a knowledge
of how to dress, and a pleasant disposition, cankered just a little by
perpetual dread of the non recognition of her genius. As the woman Augustus Myth,
she probably would have been unreservedly happy. As the superwoman Rhapsody Pantril,
she lived within the border line of discontent. Her most ordinary remarks were framed
with the view of arresting attention. Some one once said of her that she
ordered a sack of potatoes with the air of one who is making inquiry for
a love filter. Do you see what color the curtain is, she asked
Cecily, throwing a note of intense meaning into her question. Cecily turned quickly
and looked at the drop curtain. Rather a nice blue, she said,
Alexandrine blue, my color, the color of hope, said rhapsody. Impressively.
He goes well with the general color scheme, said Cecily, feeling that
she was hardly rising to the occasion. Say is it really true that his
majesty is coming, asked the lively American Dowager. I put on my newest
frock and my best diamonds on purpose, and should be modified to death if
he doesn't see them there, pouted Ronnie. I felt certain you'd put them
on for me. Why no, I should have put on rubies and orange
opals for you. People with our color of hair always like barbaric display.
They don't, said Ronnie. They have chaste, cold tastes. You're absolutely
mistaken. Well, I think I ought to know, protested the Dowger.
I've lived longer in the world than you have. Anyway, yes, said
Ronnie with devastating truthfulness. But my hair has been this color longer than yours
has. Peace was restored by the opportune arrival of a middle aged man of
blond North German type with an expression of brutality on his rather stupid face,
who sat in the front of the box for a few minutes on a visit
of ceremony to sicily. His appearance caused a slight buzz of recognition among the
audience, and if Yoval had cared to make inquiry of his neighbors, he
might have learned that this decorated and obviously important personage was the redoubtable von Caval,
artificer and shaper of much of the state craft for which other men got
the public credit. The orchestra played a selection from The Gondola Girl, which
was the leading musical comedy of the moment. Most of the audience, those
in the more expensive seats at any rate, heard the same airs two or
three times daily at restaurant lanches, teas, dinners and suppers, and occasionally
in the park. They were justified therefore in treating the music as a background
to slightly louder conversation than they had hitherto indulged in. The music came to
an end. Episode number two in the evening's entertainment was signaled. The curtain
of Alexandrine Blue rolled heavily upward, and a troop of performing wolves was presented
to the public. Yeoville had encountered wolves in North Africa deserts and in Siberian
forest and wold. He had seen them at twilight, stealing like dark shadows
across the snow, and heard their long whimpering howl in the darkness amid the
pines. He could well understand how a magic law had grown up round them
through the ages among peoples of four continents, how their name had passed into
a hundred strange sayings and inspired a hundred traditions. And now he saw them
ride round the stage on tricycles, with grotesque ruffles round their necks and clown
caps on their heads, their eyes blinking miserably in the blaze of the footlights.
In response to the applause of the house, a stout, atrociously smiling
man in evening dress came forward and bowed. He had had nothing to do
either with the capture or the training of the animals, having brought them ready
for use from a continental emporium where wild beasts were prepared for the music hall
market. But he continued bowing and smiling till the curtain fell. Two American
musicians, with comic tendencies denoted by the elaborate rags and tatters of their costumes,
succeeded the wolves. Their musical performance was not without merit, but their
comic business seemed to have been invented long ago by some man who had patented
a monopoly of all music, hall humor, and forthwith retired from the trade.
Some day Yovil reflected the rights of the monopoly might expire a new business
become available for the knock about profession. The audience brightened considerably when item number
five of the program was signaled. The orchestra struck up a rollicking measure,
and Tony Luton made his entrance amid a rousing storm of applause. He was
dressed as an errand boy of some west end shop, with a livery and
a box tricycle, as spruce and decorative as the most ambitious errand boy could
see himself in his most ambitious dreams. His song was a lively and very
audacious chronicle of life behind the scenes in a big retail establishment, and sparkled
with allusions which might fitly have been described as suggestive. At any rate,
they appeared to suggest meanings to the audience quite as clearly as Gaula Musseleford's dances
were likely to do, even with the aid in her case of long explanations
on the programs. When the final verse seemed about to reach an unpardonable climax,
a stage policeman opportunely appeared and moved the lively songster on for obstructing the
imaginary traffic of an imaginary Bond Street. The house received the new number with
genial enthusiasm and mingled its applause with demands for an earlier favorite. The orchestra
struck up the familiar air, and in a few moments the smart errand boy
transformed now into a smart jockey, was singing. They quaffed the gay Bubbley
in Eccleston Square to an audience that hummed and nodded its unstinted approval. The
next number but one was the Gaulla Musseleford debut, and the house settled itself
down to yawn and fidget and chatter for ten or twelve minutes, while the
troop of talented Japanese jugg theers performed artistic and quite uninteresting marvels with fans and
butterflies and lacquer boxes. The interval of waiting was not destined, however,
to be without its interest. In its way, it provided the one really
important and dramatic moment of the evening, one or two uniforms and eving toilettes
had already made their appearance in the Imperial Box now, though was observable in
that quarter a slight commotion, an unobtrusive reshuffling and reseating, and then every
eye in the suddenly quiet, semi darkened house focused itself on one figure.
There was no public demonstration from the newly loyal it had been particularly wished that
there should be none, but a ripple of whisper went through the vast audience
from end to end. Majesty had arrived. The Japanese Marvel workers went through
their display with even less attention than before. Lady Shalam, sitting well in
front of her box, lowered her observant eyes to her program and her massive
bangles. The evidence of her triumph did not need staring. At end of
chapter eight chapter nine of When William Came By Sakie. This is a LibriVox
recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or
to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When
William Came By Sakie Chapter nine, an evening to be remembered. To the
uninitiated or unappreciative, the dancing of Gaula Musselvord did not seem widely different from
much that had been exhibited aforetime by exponents of the posturing school. She was
not naturally graceful of movement. She had not undergone years of arduous tutelage.
She had not the instinct for sheered joyous energy of action that is stored in
some natures. Out of these unpromising negative qualities, she had produced a style
of dancing that might best be labeled a conscientious departure from accepted methods. The
highly imaginative titles that she had bestowed on her dances, The Life of a
Fern, The Sole Dream of a Topaz, and so forth, at least
gave her audience and her critics something to talk about. In themselves, they
meant absolutely nothing, but they induced discussion, and that to Gaula meant a
great deal. It was a season of dearth and emptiness in the footlights and
box office world, and her performance received a welcome that would scarcely have befallen
it in a more crowded and prosperous day. Her success, indeed had been
waiting for her ready maid as far as the managerial profession was concerned, and
nothing had been left undone in the way of advertisement to secure for it the
appearance at any rate of popular favor and loud above the interested applause of those
who had personal or business motives for reclaiming a success swelled the exaggerated enthusiasm of
the fairly numerous art satellites, who are unstinted in their praise of anything that
they are certain they cannot understand, whatever might be the subsequent verdict of the
theater filling public. The majority of the favored first night audience was determined to
set the seal of its approval on the suggestion dances, and a steady roll
of applause greeted the conclusion of each item. The dancer gravely bowed her thanks
in marked contradistinction to the gentleman who had presented the performing wolves. She did
not permit herself the luxury of a smile. It teaches us a great deal,
said Rhapsody Pantrill, vaguely but impressively, after the Fern dance had been
given and applauded at any rate. We know now that a fern takes life
very seriously, broke in Joan Mardle, who had somehow wriggled herself into Sicily's
box. As Yovil, from the back of his gallery watched Gaula running and
ricocheting about the stage, looking rather like a wagtail in energetic pursuit of invisible
gnats and midges, he wondered how many of the middle aged women who were
eagerly applauding her would have taken the least notice of similar gymnastics on the part
of their offspring in nursery or garden, beyond perhaps asking them not to make
so much noise. And a bitterer Tinge came to his thoughts as he saw
the bouquets being handed up, thoughts of the brave old dowager down at Torywood,
the woman who had worked and wrought so hard and so unsparingly in her
day for the well being of the state, the state that had fallen helpless
into alien hands before her tired eyes. Her eldest son lived invalid wise in
the south of France. Her second son lay fathoms deep in the sea with
the hulk of a broken battleship for a burial vault. And now the granddaughter
was standing here in the limelight, bowing her thanks for the patronage and favor
meted out to her by this cosmopolitan company, with its lavish sprinkling of the
uniforms of an alien army. Prominent among the flowers at her feet was one
large golden petalled bouquet of gorgeous blooms, tied with a broad streamer of golden
ribband. The tribute rendered by Caesar to the things that were Caesar's. The
new chapter of the Fata comply had been written that night, and written well.
The audience poured slowly out with the triumphant music of Jancovius's Kaiser Wilhelm March,
played by the orchestra, as a happy inspiration peeling in its ears.
It has been a great evening, a most successful evening, said Lady Shaylamb
to her van Quar, whom she was conveying in her electric broom, to
sicily Yeovil's supper party. An important evening, she added, choosing her adjectives
with deliberation. It should give pleasure in high quarters, should it not,
And she turned her observant eyes on the impassive face of her companion. Gracious
lady, he replied with deliberation and meaning, it has given pleasure. It
is an evening to be remembered. The gracious lady suppressed a sigh of satisfaction.
Memory in high places was the thing fruitful and precious, beyond computation.
Cicily's party at the Porphiry restaurant had grown to imposing dimensions. Every one whom
she asked had come, and so had Johan Mardle. Lady Shalam had suggested
several names at the last moment, and there was quite a strong infusion of
the Teutonic military and official world. It was just as well, Cicily reflected
that the upper was being given at a restaurant and not in Barkshire Street.
Quite left all times, purred the beaming proprietor in Cicily's ear. As the
staircase and cloak rooms filled up with a jostling, laughing throng, the guests
settled themselves at four tables, taking their places where chance or fancy led them,
latecomers having to fit in wherever they could find room. A babel of
tongues in various languages reigned round the tables, amid which the rattle of knives
and forks and plates, and the popping of corks made a subdued hubbub Galla
musselford the motive for all this sound and movement, this chatter of guests and
scurrying of waiters, sat motionless in the fatigued, self conscious silence of a
great artist who has delivered a great message. Do sit at Lady Peach's table
like a dear boy, cicily begged of Tony Luton, who had come in
late. She and Gerald Droughtley have got together in spite of all my efforts,
and they're both so dull. Try and laven things up a bit.
A loud barking sound, as of fur seels calling across Arctic ice, came
from another table, where missus Menteith Mendelssohn, one of the Mendelssohn's of inver
Gordon, as she was wont to describe herself, was proclaiming the glories and
subtleties of Gaula's achievement. It was a revelation, she shouted. I sat
there and saw a whole new scheme of thought unfold itself before my eyes.
One could not define it. It was thought translated into action. The best
art cannot be defined. One has sat there and knew that one was seeing
something one had never seen before, and yet one felt that one had seen
it in one's brain all one's life. That was what was so wonderful.
Ye, yes, please, She broke off sharply as a fat quail in
aspect was presented to her by a questioning waiter. The voice of mister Morleverer
Moore came across the table like another seal, barking at a greater distance.
A roland, he observed with studied emphasis, has been called Le prince de
jactifinopine. Missus Muscleford deserves to be described as the Queen of unexpected movement.
Oh I said you heard that, exclaimed missus Menteith Mendelssohn to as wide an
audience as she could achieve. A rostunt has been called. Tell them what
you said, mister Moore. She broke off, suddenly, mistrusting her ability
to handle a French sentence. At the top of her voice, mister Moore
repeated his remark. Pass it on to the next table, commanded missus Menteith
Mendelssohn. It's too good to be lost. At the next table, however,
a grave impressive voice was dwelling at length on a topic remote from the
event of the evening. Lady Peach considered that all social gatherings, of whatever
nature we were intended for the recital of minor domestic tragedies. She lost no
time in regaling the company around her with the detailed history of an interrupted weekend
in a Norfolk cottage, the most charming and delightful old world spot that you
can imagine, clean and quite comfortable, just a nice distance from the sea
and within easy walk of the broads, the very place for the children.
We'd brought everything for a four day's stay and meant to have a really delightful
time. And then on Sunday morning we found that someone had left the spring
head where our only supply of drinking water came from, uncovered, and a
dead bird was floating in it. It had fallen in somehow and got drowned.
Of course, we couldn't use the water that a dead body had been
floating in, and there was no other supply for miles around, so we
had to come away then and there, Now, what do you say to
that, ah? That a linnet should dye in the spring, quoted Tony
Luton with intense feeling. There was an immediate outburst of hilarity where Lady Peach
had confidently looked for expressions of concern and sympathy. Isn't Tony just perfectly cute,
Isn't he? Exclaimed a young American woman with an enthusiasm to which Lady
Peach entirely failed to respond. She had intended following up her story with the
account of another tragedy of similar nature which had befallen her three years ago.
In argylesher, and now the opportunity had gone, she turned bossuely to the
consolations of a tongue salad. At the center table, the excellent von Tolb
led a chorus of congratulation and compliment, to which Gaula listened with an air
of polite detachment. Much as the Sheikh Islam might receive the homage of a
Wesleyan conference. To a close observer, it would have seemed probable that her
attitude of fatigued indifference to the flat remarks that were showered on her had been
as carefully studied and rehearsed as any of her postures on the stage. It
is something that one will appearciate more and more fully every time one sees it.
One cannot see it too often. I could have sat and watch it
for ours. You know, I'm looking forward to tomorrow evening when i can
see it again. I knew it was going to be good, but I
had no idea, so chimed the chorus between mouthfuls of quail and bites of
asparagus. Weren't the performing wolves wonderful? Exclaimed Joan in her fresh, joyous
voice that rang round the room like the laughter of a woodpecker. If there
is one thing that disturbs the complacency of a great artist of the halls,
it is the consciousness of sharing his or her triumphs with performing birds and animals.
But of course, Joan was not to be expected to know that.
She pursued her subject with the assurance of one who has hit on a particularly
acceptable topic. It must have taken in them years of training and concentration to
master those tricycles, she continued in high pitched soliloquy. The nice thing about
them is that they don't realize a bit how clever an educational they are.
It would be dreadful to have them putting on airs, wouldn't it? And
yet I suppose the knowledge of being able to jump through a hoop better than
any other wolf would just have her certain amount of side. Fortunately, at
this moment, a young Italian journalist at another table rose from his seat and
delivered a two minutation in praise of the heroine of the evening. He spoke
in rapid, nervous French with a North Italian accent, but much of what
he said could be understood by the majority of those present, and the applause
was unanimous. At any rate, he'd been brief, and it was permissible
to suppose that he had been witty. It was the opening for which mister
gerald Drowley had been watching and waiting. The moment that the Italian enthusiast had
dropped back into his seat amid a rattle of handclapping and rapping of forks and
knives on the tables, Drily sprang to his feet, pushed his chair well
away as for a long separation, and begged to endorse what had been so
atty and gracefully, and might he add truly said by the previous speaker,
This was only the prelude to the real burden of his message. With the
dexterity that comes of practice, he managed in a couple of hurried sentences to
divert the course of his remarks to his own personality and career, and to
inform his listeners that he was an actor of some note and experience, and
had had the honor of acting under and here followed a string of names of
eminent actor managers of the day. He thought he might be pardoned for mentioning
the fact that his performance of Peterkin in the Broken Nutshell had one the unstinted
approval of the dramatic critics of the provincial press. Towards the end of what
was a long speech, and which seemed even longer to its hearers, he
reverted to the subject of Gaula's dancing and bestowed on it such loudatory remarks as
he had left over. Drawing his chair once again into his immediate neighborhood,
he sat down a glow, with the satisfied consciousness of a good work worthily
performed. I once acted the small part in some theatricals, got up for
a charity, announced Joan in a ringing confidential voice. The Clapham Courier said
that all the minor parts were very creditably sustained. Though to its very words,
I felt I must tell you that, and also say how much I
enjoyed miss Musselford's dancing. Tony Luton cheered wildly. Death's a Cleveret's speech so
far. He proclaimed he had been asked to liven things up at his table,
and was doing his best to achieve that result. But mister Gerald drowly
joined Lady Peach in the unfavorable opinion she had formed of that irrepressible youth Ronnie,
on whom Cecily kept a solicit As I showed no sign of any intention
of falling in love with Gaula. He was more profitably engaged in paying court
to the Gryffin von Tolb, whose hospitable mansion in Belgrave Square invested her with
a special interest. In his eyes. As a professional prince charming, he
had every inducement to encourage the cult of fairy Godmother. Yes, yes,
I read, I will come and hear you play as I did a promise,
said the Gryffin, And you must come and dine with me one night
and play to me afterwards. That is a promise. Also, yes,
that is very nice of you to come and see a task an old woman.
I am passionately fond of music. If I have honest I would tell
you also that I am very fond of good looking boys. But this is
not the age of honesty, so I must leave you to guess that.
Come on Thursday next week you can. That is nice. A heavy reigning
prince dining pis me that night, poor man. He wants cheering up the
art of being a reigning prince is not a very pleasing one nowadays. He
has made it a boast all his life that he is liberal and his subjects
conservative. Now as that is changed, No, not all. He is
still liberal, but his subjects, unfortunately I become socialists. You must play
your best for him. Are there many socialists over there in Germany? I
mean, asked Ronnie, who was rather out of his depth where politics were
concerned. You bile, said the Griffin, with emphasis if quiver, I
don't know whether it comes from better education than verse digestions. I suppose.
I'm sure digestion has a good deal to do with it. In my husband's
family, for example, his generation had excellent digestions, as I wasn't a
case of socialism or suicide among them. The younger generation have no digestions worth
speaking of. And I have been two suicides and three socialists within the last
six years. Now I must really be going. I'm not a badly known
let outs don't suit my bay of life. Ronnie bent low over the Gryffin's
hand and kissed it, partly because she was the kind of woman who naturally
invoked such homage, but chiefly because he knew that the gesture showed off his
smooth, burnished head to advantage. The observant eyes of Lady Shalem had noted
the animated conversation between the Gryffin and Ronnie, and she has overheard fragments of
the invitation that had been accorded to the latter. Take as the little foxes,
the little foxes that spoil the vines, she quoted to herself. Not
that that music boy would do much in the destructive line, but the principle
is good. End of chapter nine, Chapter ten of When Will You Came?
By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain for further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot
org. Reading by and imentor When William Came by Saki Chapter ten, Some
Reflections and Ta Daum cicily awoke on the morning after the memorable evening with the
satisfactory feeling of victory achieved tempered by a troubled sense of having achieved it in
the face of a reasonably grounded opposition. She had burned her boats and was
glad of it, but the reek of their burning drifted rather unpleasantly across the
jubilant incense swinging of her Tadum service last night had marked an immense step forward
in her social career. Without running after the patronage of influential personages, she
had seen it quietly and actfully put at her service. People such as the
Gryffin von Tolb were going to be a power in the London world for a
very long time to come. Her Von Karl, with all his useful qualities
of brain and temperament, might conceivably fall out of favor in some unexpected turn
of the political wheel, and the Shalembs would probably have their little day and
then a long afternoon of diminishing social importance, the placid dormouse like Gryffin would
outlast them all. She had the qualities which make either for contented mediocrity or
else for very durable success, according as circumstances may dictate. She was one
of those characters that can neither thrust themselves to the front, nor have any
wish to do so, but being there, no ordinary power can thrust them
away. With the Gryffin, as her friend, Cecily found herself in altogether
a different position from that involved by the mere interested patronage of Lady Shalamb.
A vista of social succes Sessoud opened up to her, and she did not
mean it to be just the ordinary success of a popular and influential hostess moving
in an important circle. That people with naturally bad manners should have to be
polite and considerate in their dealings with her, That people who usually held themselves
aloof should have to be gracious and damiable, That the self assured should have
to be just a little humble and anxious. Where she was concerned, these
things, of course, she intended to happen. She was a woman,
But she told herself she intended a great deal more than that, when she
traced the pattern for her scheme of social influence. In her heart, she
detested the German occupation as a hateful necessity. But while her heart registered the
hatefulness, the brain recognized the necessity. The great fighting machines that the Germans
had built up and maintained on land, on sea, and in air were
three solid, crushing facts that demonstrated the hopelessness of any immediate thought of revolt.
Twenty years hence, when the present generation was older and greyer, the
chances of armed revolt would probably be equally hopeless, equally remote seeming. But
in the meantime something could have been effected in another way. The conquerors might
partially Germanize London, but on the other hand, if the thing was skillfully
managed, the British element within the empire might impress the mark of its influence
on everything German. The fighting men might remain Prussian or Bavarian, but the
thinking men, and eventually the ruling men, could gradually come under British influence,
or even be of British blood. An English liberal conservative center might stand
as a bulwork against the junkodum socialism of continental Germany. So cecily reasoned with
herself in a fashion induced perhaps by an earlier apprenticeship to the reading of nineteenth
century articles in which the possible political and racial developments of various countries were examined
and discussed and put away in the pigeonholes of probable happenings. She had sufficient
knowledge of political history to know that such a development might possibly come to pass,
she had not sufficient insight into actual conditions to know that the possibility was
as remote as that of armed resistance. And the role which she saw herself
playing was that of her deft and courtly political intriguer, rallying the British element
and making herself agreeable to the German element, a political inspiration to the one
and a social distraction to the other. At the back of her mind there
lurked an honest confession that she was probably overrating her powers of statecraft and personality,
that she was more likely to be carried along by the current of events
than to control or divert its direction. The political daydream remained, however,
as daydreams will, in spite of the clear light of probability shining through them.
At any rate, she knew, as usual what she wanted to do,
and as usual she had taken steps to carry out her intentions. Last
night remained in her mind a night of important victory. There also remained the
anxious proceeding of finding out if the victory had entailed any serious losses. Cicily
was not one of those ill regulated people who treat the first meal of the
day as a convenient occasion for serving up any differences or contentions that have been
left over from the day before, more overlooked in the press of other matters.
She enjoyed her breakfast and gave you Ovill unhindered opportunity for enjoying his.
A discussion as to the right cooking of a dish that he had first tasted
among the Orenburg tartars was the prevailing topic on this particular morning, and blended
well with trout and toast and coffee in a cozy nook of the smoking room
in participation of the after breakfast cigarettes, Cecily made her dash into debatable ground.
You haven't asked me how my supper party went off, she said.
There's a notice of it in two of the morning papers with a list of
those present. Said Yeovil, The conquering race seems to have been very well
represented. Several races were represented, said Cecily. A function of that sort,
celebrating a dramatic first night was bound to be cosmopolitan. In fact,
blending of races and nationalities is the tendency of the age we live in.
The blending of races seems to have been consummated already in one of the individuals
at your party, said Yeovil dryly. The name Menteith Mendelssohn struck me as
a particularly happy obliteration of racial landmarks, Cicily laughed. A noisy and very
wearisome sort of woman, she commented, She reminds one of garlic that's been
planted by mistake in the conservatory. Still, she is useful as an advertising
agent to anyone who rubs her the right way. She'll be invaluable claiming the
merits of Gaula's performance to all and sundry. That's why I invited her.
She'll probably lunch today at the hotel Cecil, and everyone's sitting within a hundred
yards of her table will hear what an emotional education they can get by going
to see Gaula. Dance at the Caravanswery. She seems to be like the
Salvation Army, said Yovil. Her noise reaches a class of people who wouldn't
travel to read press notices exactly, said Cecily. Gaula gets quite good notices
on the whole, doesn't she. The one that took my fancy was the
one in the standard, said Yovil, picking up the paper from a table
by his side and searching its columns for the notice in question. The wolves,
which appeared earlier in the evening's entertainment are the programmershows us trained entirely by
kindness. It would have been a further kindness at any rate to the audience
if some of the training, which the wolves doubtless do not appreciate at its
proper value, had been expended on Miss Musseleford's efforts at stage dancing. We
are assured again on the authority of the program at the much talked of suggestion
dances of the last word imposture dancing. The last word belongs by immemorial right
to the sex which Miss Musseleford a dawns, and it would be ungallant to
seek to deprive her of her privilege. As far as the educational aspect of
her performance is concerned, we must admit that the life of the Fern remains
to us a private life. Still, Miss Musseleford has abandoned her own private
life in an unveiling attempt to draw the Fern into the gaze of publicity.
And so it was with her other suggestions. They suggested many things, but
nothing that was announced on the program. Chiefly, they suggested one outstanding reflection
that stage dancing is not like those advertised breakfast foods that can be served up
after three minutes preparation. Half a lifetime, or rather half a youth time,
is a much more satisfactory allowance. The standard is prejudiced, said Cecily.
Some of the other papers are quite enthusiastic. The Dawn gives her a
column and a quarter of notice, nearly all of it complimentary. It says
the report of her fame as a dancer went before her, but that her
performance last night caught it up and outstripped it. I should not like to
suggest that The Dawn is prejudiced, said Yoval, But shame them is a
managing director on it, and one of its biggest childers. Gall As dancing
is an event of the social season, and shame them is one of those
most interested in keeping out the appearance at any rate of a London social season.
Besides, her debut gave the opportunity for an imperial visit to the theater,
the first appearance at a festive public function of the conqueror among the monkad.
Apparently the experiment passed off well. Shalem has every reason to feel pleased
with himself and well disposed towards Gaula. Find a way, added Yobil,
talking of Gaula, I'm going down to Torywood one day next week to Torywood,
exclaimed Cecily. The turn of her exclamation gave the impression that the announcement
was not very acceptable to her. I promised the old lady that I would
go and have a talk with her when I came back from my Siberian trip.
She traveled in eastern Russia, you know, long before the Trans Siberian
Railway was built, and she's enormously interested in those parts. In any case,
I should like to see her again. She does not see many people
nowadays, said Cecily. I fancy she's breaking up. Rather she was very
fond of the son who went down. You know, she has seen a
great many of the things she cared for go down, said Yobil. It
is a sad old life that's left to her when one thinks of all that
the past has been to her, of the part she used to play in
the world, the work she used to get through. Is used to seem
as though she could never grow old, as if she would die standing up
with some unfinished command on her lips. Now I suppose her tragedy is that
she has grown old, bitterly old, and cannot die. Cecily was silent
for a moment and seemed about to leave the room. Then she turned back
and said, I don't think I would say anything about Gaula to her.
If I were you, it would not have occurred to me to drag her
name into our conversation, said Yovil coldly. But in any case, the
accounts of her dancing performance will have reached Torryward through the newspapers, also the
record of your racially blended supper party. Cecily said nothing. She knew that
by last night affair she had definitely identified her in public opinion. With the
Shalem clique and that many of her old friends would look on her with distrust
and suspicion. On that account, it was unfortunate, but she reckoned it
a lesser evil than tearing herself away from her London life, its successes and
pleasures and possibilities. These social dislocations and severings of friendship were to be looked
for after any great and violent change and state affairs. It was Yeovil's attitude
that really troubled her. She would not give way to his prejudices and accept
his point of view, but she knew that a victory that involved estrangement from
him would only bring a mockery of happiness. She still hoped that he would
come round to an acceptance of established facts and then his political malaise in the
absorbing distraction of field sports. The visit to tory Wood was a misfortune.
It might just turn the balance in the undesired direction. Only a few weeks
of late summer and early morning remained before the hunting season and its preparations would
be at hand, and Yovil might be caught in the meshes of an old
enthusiasm. In those few weeks, however, he might be fired by another
sort of enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which would sooner or later mean voluntary or enforced
exile for his part, and the probable breaking up of her own social plans
and ambitions. But Cecily knew something of the futility of improvising objections where no
real obstacle exists. The visit to Torywood was a graceful attention on Yovil's part
to an old friend. There was no decent ground on which it could be
opposed. If the influence of that visit came athwart Yovil's life and hers with
disastrous effect, that was kismet, And once again the reek from her burned
and smoldering boats mingled threateningly with the incense fumes of her taedium for victory.
She left the room, and Yovil turned once more to an item of use
in the morning's papers that had already arrested his attention. The Imperial auf Clarum
on the subject of military service was to be made public in the course of
the day end of chapter ten Chapter eleven of When William came by Saki.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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by and imentor when William came by Saki chapter eleven the tea shop, Yeovil
wandered down Piccadilly that afternoon in a spirit of restlessness and expectancy. The long
awaited auf Clarum dealing with the new law of military service had not yet appeared.
At any moment he might meet the horse throated newsboys running along with their
papers announcing the special edition which would give the terms of the edict to the
public. Every sound or movement that detached itself with isolated significance from the general
word and scurity of the streets seemed to Yovil to herald the oncoming clamor and
rush that he was looking for. But the long endless succession of motors and
buses and vans went by, hooting and grunting, and such newsboys as were
to be seen, hung about listlessly, bearing no more attractive bait on their
posters than the announcement of an earthquake shock in Hungary fear loss of life.
The Green Park end of Piccadilly was a changed, and in some respect a
livelier thoroughfare than that which Yovill remembered with affectionate regret. A great political club
had migrated from its palatial home to a shrunken habitation in a less prosperous quarter.
Place was filled by the flamboyant frontage of the hotel Constantinople. Gorgeous Turkey
carpets were spread over the wide entrance steps, and boys in Circassian and Anatolian
costumes hung about the doors or dashed forth in none oriental haste to carry such
messages, as the telephone was unable to transmit Picturesque sellers of Turkish delight,
atter of roses and brasswork coffee services squatted under the portico on terms of obvious
good understanding with the hotel management. A few doors further down, a service
club that had long been a Piccadilly landmark was a landmark still as the home
of the Army aeronaut Club, and there was a constant coming and going of
gay hued uniforms Saxon, Prussian, Bavarian, Hessian and so forth through its
portals. The mastering of the air and the creation of a scientific aerial war
fleet second anon in the world was an achievement of which the conquering race was
pardonably proud, which it had good reason to be duly thankful. Over the
gateways was blazoned the badge of the Club, an elephant, whale and eagle,
typifying the three armed forces of the state by land and sea and air.
The eagle bore in its beak a scroll with the proud legend the last
am I, but not the least. To the eastward of this gaily humming
hive, the long shuttered front, who are deserted ducal mansions struck a note
of protest and mourning amid the noise and whirl and color of a seemingly uncaring
city. On the other side of the roadway, on the graveled paths of
the Green Park, small ragged children from the back streets of Westminster looked wistfully
at the smooth, trim stretches of grass on which it was now forbidden in
two languages to set foot. Only the pigeons, disregarding the changes of political
geography, walked about as usual, wondering, perhaps if they ever wondered at
anything, At the sudden change in the distribute of park humans, Jovial turned
his steps out of the hot sunlight into the shade of the Burlington Arcade,
familiarly known to many of its newer frequenters as the Passage. Here, the
change that new conditions and requirements had wrought was more immediately noticeable than anywhere else
in the West End. Most of the shops on the western side had been
cleared away, and in their place had been installed an open air cafe,
converting the long alley into a sort of promenade tea garden, Flanked on one
side by a line of haberdashers, perfumers and jewelers show windows. The patrons
of the cafe could sit at the little round tables, drinking their coffee and
syrups and aperitifs, and gazing, if they were so minded, at the
pajamas and cravats and Brazilian diamonds spread out for inspection Before them. A string
orchestra hidden away somewhere in a gallery was alternating Grand Opera with the Gondola Girl
and the latest gems of Transatlantic melody. From around the tightly packed tables arose
a babble of tongues made up chiefly of German, a South American rendering of
Spanish and a North American rendering of English, with here and there the sharp,
shaken out staccato of Japanese. A sleepy looking boy in a nondescript uniform
was wandering to and fro among the customers, offering for sale the Matta New
York Herald, bone in a tagerblat, and a host of crudely colored illustrated
papers embodying the hard worked wit of a world legion of comic artists. Y
Oval hurried through the arcade. It was not here, in this atmosphere of
staring alien eyes and jangling tongues, that he wanted to read the news of
the Imperial Aufklarul. By a succession of byways, he reached Hanover Square and
thence made his way into Oxford Street. There was no commotion of activity to
be noticed yet among the newsboys. The posters, still concerned themselves with the
earthqua making Hungary, varied with references to the health of the King of Roumania
and a motor accident in South London. Yeovil wandered aimlessly along the street for
a few dozen yards, and then turned down into the smoking room of a
cheap tea shop, where he judged that the flourishing foreign element would be less
conspicuously represented. Quiet, voiced, smooth headed youths from neighboring shops and wholesale
houses sat drinking tea in munching pastry, some of them reading, others making
a fitful rattle with dominoes on the marble topped tables. A clean, wholesome
smell of tea and coffee made itself felt through clouds of cigarette smoke. Cleanliness
and listlessness seemed to be the dominant notes of the place, a cleanliness that
was commendable and a listlessness that seemed unnatural and undesirable. Where so much youth
was gathered together for a refreshment and recreation, Yeovil seated himself at a table
already occupied by a young clergyman who was smoking a cigarette over The remains were
plateful of buttered toast. He had a keen, clever, hard lined face,
the face of a man who, in an earlier stage of European history
might have been a warlike prior, awkward to tackle. At the council board,
greatly to be avoided. Where blows were being exchanged, a pale,
silent, damosel drifted up to Yovil, and took his order with an air
of being mentally some hundreds of miles away and utterly indifferent to the requirements of
those whom she served. If she had brought calf's foot jelly instead of a
pot of china tea he had asked for, Yeovil would hardly have been surprised.
However, the tea Julie arrived on the table, and the pale Damosel
scribbled a figure on a slip of paper, put it silently by the side
of the teapot, and drifted silently away. Yovil had seen the same sort
of thing done on the musical comedy stage, and done rather differently. The
can who tell me, sir, is the Imperial announcement out yet, asked
the young clergyman, after a brief scrutiny of his neighbor. Now, I've
been waiting about from the last half hour on the lookout for it, said
Yeovil. The special editions ought to be out now, Then, he added,
I have only just lately come back from abroad. I know scarcely anything
of Landon as it is now. You may imagine that a good deal of
it is very strange to me. Your profession must take you a good deal
among all classes of people. I've seen something of what one can call the
upper or attenuate the richer classes since I came back. Do tell me something
about the poorer classes of the community. How do they take the new order
of things? Badly? Said the young cleric. Badly in more senses than
one. They are helpless, and they are bitter, bitter in the useless
kind of way that produces no great resolutions. They look round for some one
to blame for what has happened. They blamed politicians, They blamed the leiged
classes. In an indirect way, I believe they blamed the church. Certainly,
their national disaster has not drawn them towards religion in any form. One
thing you may be sure of. They do not blame themselves. No true
landoner ever admits that the fault lies at his door. No I never is
an exclamation that is on his lips from earliest childhood, whenever he is charged
with anything blameworthy or punishable. That is why's school discipline was ever a thing
repugnant to the school board child and its parents. No school board scholar ever
deserved punishment, however obvious the fault might seem to a disciplinarian. No,
I never exonerated it as something that had not happened. Public schoolboys and private
schoolboys of the upper and middle class had their fling and took their thrashings when
they were found out as a piece of bad luck. But our bird and
our Sid were of those for whom there is no condemnation. If they were
punished, it was for faults that now they never committed. Naturally, the
grown up generation of Berts and Sids, the voters and householders, do not
realize, still less admit that it was they who called the tune to which
the politicians danced. They had to choose between the vote mongers and the so
called scaremongers, and their verdict was for the vote mongers all the time.
Now they're bitter. They're being punished, and punishment is not a thing that
they have been schooled to bear. The taxes that are falling on them are
a grievous source of discontent, and the military service that will be imposed on
them for the first time in their lives will be another. There is a
more lovable side to their character under misfortune, though, added the young clergyman
deep down in their hearts, there was a very real affection for the Old
Dynasty. Future historians will perhaps be able to explain how and why the Royal
Family of Great Britain captured the imaginations of its subjects in so genuine and lasting
of hair. Among the poorest and most matter of fact, for whom the
name of no public man, politician or philanthropist stands out with any especial significance,
the old Queen and the dead King, the dethroned monarch, and the
young prince live in a sort of domestic pantheon, a recollection that is a
proud and wistful personal possession, when so little remains to be proud of or
to possess. There is no favor that I am so often asked for among
my poorer parishioners as the gift of the picture of this or that member of
the Old Dynasty. I have got all of them, only except Princess Mary,
an old woman said to me last week, and she nearly cried with
pleasure when I brought her an old bystander portrait that filled the gap in her
collection. And on Queen alexanter As day, they bring out and where the
faded wild rose favors that they boughted their pennies in days gone by. The
tragedy of the enactment that is about to enforce military service on these people is
that it comes when they have no longer a country to fight for, said
Yeovil, the young clergyman, gave an exclamation of bitter impatience. That is
the cruel mockery of the whole thing. Every now and then, in the
course of my work, I have come across lads who were rarely drifting to
the bed. Through the good qualities in them, a clean combative strain in
their blood, and a natural turn for adventure, made the ordinary and mnemic
routine of shop or warehouse or factory almost unbearable for them. What splendid little
soldiers they would have made, and how grandly the discipline of a military training
would have steadied them in after life when steadiness was wanted. The only adventure
that their surroundings offered them had been the adventure of practicing mildly criminal misdeeds without
getting landed in reformatoris in prisons. Those of them that have not been successful
in keeping clear of detection are walking round and round prison yards, experiencing the
operation of a discipline that breaks and does not build. They were many hearted
boys once with nothing of the criminal, or ne'er do well in their natures.
And now, who you ever seen the prison yard with that walk round
and round and round between gray walls under a blue sky. You will nodded.
It's good enough for criminals and imbeciles, said the parson, But think
of it for those boys who might have been marching along to the tap of
the drum with a laugh on their lips instead of hell in their hearts.
I have had hell in my heart sometimes when I have come in touch with
cases like those. I suppose you're thinking that I'm a strange sort of parson.
I was justifying you in my mind, said Yoval, as a man
of God with an infinite tendency for little devil's. The clergyman flushed, and
rather a fine epish half to have on one's tombstone, he said, especially
if the tombstone were in some crowded city graveyard. I suppose I am a
man of God, but I don't think I could be called a man of
peace. Looking into the strong young face with its suggestion of a fighting prior
of bygone days more marked than ever. Yeo will mentally agreed that he could
not have learnt one thing in life, continued the young man, and that
his piece is not for this world. Peace is what God gives us when
he takes us into his rest. Beat your sword into a plowshare of you
like, but beat your enemy into Smitherin's first, a long drawn cry,
repeated again and again, detached itself from the throb and hoot and word of
the street traffic special, military serves Special. The young clergyman sprang up from
his seat and went up the staircase in a succession of bounds, causing the
domino players and novelette readers to look up for a moment in mild astonishment.
In a few seconds he was back again with a copy of an afternoon paper.
The Imperial prescript was set forth in heavy type in parallel columns of English
and German. As the young man read, a deep burning flush spread over
his face, then headed away into a chalky whiteness. He read the announcement
to the end, and then handed the paper to Yeovil and left without a
word. Beneath the courtly politeness and benignant phraseology of the document ran a trenchant,
searing irony. The British born subjects of the Germanic Crown inhabiting the islands
of Great Britain and Ireland had habituated themselves as a people to the disuse of
arms and resolutely excluded military service and national training from their political system and daily
life. Their judgment that they were unsuited as a race to bear arms and
conform to military discipline was not to be set aside. Their new overlord did
not propose to do violence to their feelings and customs by requiring from them the
personal military sacrifices and services which were rendered by his subjects German born. The
British subjects of the Crown were to remain a people consecrated to peaceful pursuits to
commerce and trade and husbandry. The defense of their coasts and shipping, and
the maintenance of order and general safety would be guaranteed by a garrison of German
troops with the co operation of the Imperial War Fleet. German born subjects residing
temporarily or permanently in the British Isles would come under the same laws respecting compulsory
military service as their fellow subjects of German blood in the other parts of the
Empire, and special enactments would be drawn up to ensure that their interests did
not suffer from a periodical withdrawing on training or other military calls. Necessarily,
a heavily differentiated scale of war taxation would fall on British taxpayers to provide for
the upkeep of the garrison and to equalize the services and sacrifices rendered by the
two branches of His Majesty's subjects. As military service was not henceforth open to
any subject of British birth, no further necessity for any training or exercise of
a military nature existed. Therefore, all rifle clubs, drill associations, cadet
cause and similar bodies were henceforth declared to be illegal. No weapons other than
guns for specified sporting purposes, duly declared and registered, and open to inspection
when required, could be owned, purchased, or carried. The science of
arms was to be eliminated altogether from the life of a people who had shown
such marked repugnance to its study and practice. The cold irony of the measure
struck home with the greater force because its nature was so utterly unexpected. Public
anticipation had guessed at various forms of military service, aggressively irksome or tactfully lightened,
as the case might be, in any event, certain to be bitterly
unpopular. And now there had come this contemptuous boon, which had removed at
one stroke the bogey of compulsory military service from the troubled imaginings of the British
people, and fastened on them the cruel distinction of being, in actual fact
what an enemy had called them in splenetic scorn long years ago, A nation
of shopkeepers, ay something even below that level, a race of shopkeepers who
were no longer a nation. Jovel crumpled the paper in his hand and went
out into the sunlit street. A sudden roll of drums and crash of brass
music filled the air. A company of Bavarian infantry went by, in all
the pomp and circumstance of martial array and the joyous swing of rapid rhythmic movement.
The street echoed and throbbed in the Englishman's ears, with the exultant pulse
of youth and mastery set to loud pagan music. A group of lads from
the tea shop clustered on the pavement and watched the troops go by, staring
at a phase of life in which they had no share. The marshal trappings,
the swaggering joy of life, the comradeship of camp and barracks, the
hard discipline of drill yard and fatigue duty, the long sentry watchings, the
trench digging, forced marches, wound cold hunger, makeshift hospitals, and the
blood wet laurels. These were not for them, such things they might only
guess at or see on a cinema film. Darkly, they belonged to the
civilian nation. The function of afternoon tea was still being languidly observed in the
Big drawing room when Yoval returned to Berkshire Street. Cicily was playing the part
of hostess to a man of perhaps forty one years of age, who looked
slightly older from his palpable attempts to look very much younger. Percival Plazi was
a plump, pale faced, short legged individual with puffy cheeks, over prominent
nose, and thin, colorless hair. His mother, with nothing more than
maternal prejudice to excuse her, had discovered some twenty years ago that he was
a well favored young man and had easily imbued her son with the same opinion.
The slipping away of years and the natural transition of an unathletic boy into
the podgy, unhealthy looking man did little to weaken the tradition. Plasi had
never been able to relinquish the idea that a youthful charm and comeliness still centered
in his person, and labored daily at his toilet with the devotion that a
hopelessly lost cause is so often able to inspire. He babbled incessantly about himself
and the accessory futilities of his life, in short, neat complacent sentences,
and in a voice that Ronald Store said reminded one of a fat bishop blessing
a butter making competition. While he babbled, he kept his eyes fastened on
his listeners to observe the impression which his important little announcements and pronouncements were making.
On the present occasion, he was pattering forth a detailed description of the
upholstery and fittings of his new music room, all the hangings violet deparm,
all the furnish of rosewood, the only ornament in the room is a replica
of the Mozart statue in Vienna. Nothing but Mozart is to be played in
the room. Absolutely nothing but Mozart. You will get rather tired of that,
won't you, said Cecily, feeling that she was expected to comment on
this tremendous announcement. One gets tired of everything, said Plasi, with a
fat little sigh of resignation. I can't tell you how tired I am of
Rubenstein, and one day I suppose I should be tired of Mozarts and Violet
de Palm and Rosewood. I never thought it possible that I could ever tire
of john quills, and now I simply won't have one in the house.
Oh the scene the other day because someone brought some John quils into the house.
I'm afraid I was dreadfully rude, but I rarely couldn't help it.
He could talk like this through a long summer day or long winter evening.
Jovial belonged to a race forbidden to bear arms. At the moment, he
would gladly have contented himself with the weapons with which nature had endowed him.
If he might have kicked and pommeled the abhorrent specimen of male humanity whom he
saw before him. Instead, he broke into the conversation with an inspired flash
of malicious untruthfulness. It is wonderful, he observed, carelessly, how popular
that Viennese statue of Mozart has become. A friend who inspects county council art
schools, tell me you'll find a copy of it in every classroom you go
into. It was a poor substitute for physical violence, but it was all
that civilization allowed him in the way of relieving his feelings. It had,
moreover, the effect of making Plaza profoundly miserable. End of chapter eleven.
Chapter twelve of When William Came By Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer,
please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came
By Sarkee, Chapter twelve, The Traveling Companions. The train bearing Yeovil on
his visit to Torywood, slid and rattled westward through the hazy dreamland of an
English summer landscape seen from the train windows. The stark, bare uglinness of
the metal line was forgotten, and the eye rested only on the green solitude
that unfolded itself as the miles went slipping by. Tall grasses and meadoweeds stood
in deep shocks field after field, between the leafy boundaries of hedge or coppice,
thrusting themselves higher and higher till they touched the low, sweeping branches of
the trees that here and there overshadowed them. Broad streams, bordered with the
heavy fringe of reed and sedge, went winding away into a green distance where
woodland and meadowland seemed indefinitely prolonged. Narrow streamlets lost to view in the growth
that they fostered, disclosed their presence merely by the water weed that showed in
a riband of rank verdure threading the mellow a green of the fields. On
the stream banks, more hens walked with jerky, confident steps, in the
easy boldness of those who had a couple of other elements at their disposal in
an emergency. More timorous partridges raced away from the apparition of the train,
looking all leg and neck like little forest elves fleeing from human encounter, and
in the distance over the tree line. A heron or two flapped with slow
measured wing beats and an air of being bent on an immeasurably longer journey than
the train that hurtled so frantically along the rails. Now and then the meadow
land changed itself suddenly into orchard, with close growing trees already showing the measure
of their coming harvest. And then strawyard and farm buildings would slide into view.
Heavy dairy cattle, roan and skewballed and dappled, stood near the gates,
drowsily, resentful of insect stings, and bunched up companies of ducks,
halted in seeming a resolution between the charms of the horse bond and the alluring
neighborhood of the farm kitchen. Away by the banks of some rushing mill stream,
in a setting of copse and cornfield, a village might be guessed at
just a hint of red roof, gray wreathed chimney and old church tower as
seen from the windows of the passing train, and over it all brooded a
happy, settled calm, like the dreaming murmur of a trout stream and the
far away cawing of rooks. It was a land where it seemed as if
it must be always summer and generally afternoon, a land where bees hummed among
the wild thyme and in the flower beds of cottage gardens, where the harvest
mice rustled amid the corn and nettles, and the mill race flowed cool and
silent through water weeds and dark tunneled sluices, and made soft, droning music
with the wooden mill wheel. And the music carried with it the wording of
old, undying rhymes and sang of the jolly, uncaring, uncared for miller,
of the farmer who went riding upon his gray mare, of the mouse
who lived beneath the merry mill pin, of the sweet music on yonder green
Hill, and the dancers all in yellow, the songs and fancies of a
lingering olden time when men took life as children take a long summer day,
and went to bed at last, with a simple trust in something they could
not have explained. Jovial watched the passing landscape with the intent, hungry eyes
of a man who revisits a scene that holds high place in his affections.
His imagination raced even quicker than the train, following winding roads and twisting valleys
into unseen distances, picturing farms and hamlets, hills and hollows, clattering in
yards and sleepy woodlands. A beautiful country, said his only fellow traveler,
who was also gazing at the fleeting landscape. Surely a country worth fighting for.
He spoke in fairly correct English, But he was unmistakably a foreigner.
One could have allotted him with some certainty to the eastern half of Europe.
A beautiful country, as you say, replied Jovil. Then he added the
question are you German? No, a Hungarian, said the other. And
you are English, he asked. I have been much in England, but
I am from Russia, said Yeovil, purposely misneading his companion on the subject
of his nationality in order to induce him to talk with greater freedom on a
delicate topic. While living among foreigners in a foreign land, he had shrunk
from hearing his country's disaster discuss nor even alluded to. Now he was anxious
to learn what unprejudiced foreigners thought of the catastrophe and the causes which had led
up to it. It is a strange spectacle I wonder is it not so
resumed the other? A great nation such as this was one of the greatest
nations in modern times or of any time, carrying its flag and its language
into all parts of the world. And now, after one short campaign,
it is. And he shrugged his shoulders many times and made clucking noises at
the roof of his voice, like a hen calling to a brood of roving
chickens as they grow soft. He resumed a great world. Commerce brings great
luxury, and luxury brings softness. They had everything to warn them things happening
in their own time and before their eyes, and they would not be warned.
They had seen in one generation the rise of the military and naval power
of the Japanese, a brown skinned race living in some island, ice fields
and a tropical sea, the people once thought of in connection with paper fans
and flowers and pretty tea gardens, who suddenly marched and sailed into the world's
gaze as a great power. They had seen two so eyes of the Bulgards,
a poor herd of Zappidiere, who ridden peasants fist, a few students
scattered in exile in Bucharest, Odessa, who shot up in one generation to
be an armed and aggressive nation with history in its hands. The English saw
these things happening, arm them, and with a war cloud growing blacker and
bigger and always more threatening, on their old threshold, they sat down to
grow soft and peaceful. They goose, soft and accommodating in all things.
In religion. In religion, said Yovil. In religion, yes, said
his companion emphatically. They had come to look on the Christ as a sort
of amiable elder father, whose letters from aboard were worth reading. Then when
they had emptied all the divine mystery and wonder out of their faith, naturally
they grew tired of it. Oh, but dreadfully tired of it. I
know many English of the country parts, and always they tell me they go
to church once in each week to set the good example to the servants.
They were tired of their faith, but they were not ver high enough to
become real pagans. Their dancing fauns were good young men who tripped morris dancers
and late helped foods, and believed in a sort of socialism which made for
the greatest dullness. Of the greatest number, you will find plenty of them.
Still if you go into us remains of social London, yeovil gave a
grunt of acquiescence. They grew soften, their political ideas tinued. The unsparing
critic for the old insular beliefs that all the foreigners were devils and rogues.
They substituted an ass a belief equally guarded in insular lack of knowledge, that
most foreigners were amiable good fellows who only needed to be talked to and patted
on the back to become your friends and benefactors. They began to believe that
our foreign minister would train English long cherished schemes of national policy and hostile expansion
if he came over on a holiday and was asked out to country houses and
so unders tennis court and the ock garden and the younger children decent. I
once heard it solemnly stated that an after dinner debate in some listollery club that
a certain very prominent a German statesman had a daughter at school in England,
and that future friendly relations between the two countries were improved in prospect. If
not a rued by that circumstance, you think I'm laughing, I am according
fact and the men present with politicians and statesmen, as very literary didly Dante.
It was an insular lack of insights the words the mischief or some of
the mischief we in Hungary if he left too much cheek by jove with our
racial neighbors to have many illusions about them Austrians, Romanians, Serbs, Italians,
checks We know of what they think of us, and we know what
to think of them. We know what we want in the world, and
we know what they want. That knowledge does not send us flying at each
other's roads, but he does keep us from going soft. Ah, the
British lion was in a hurry to inaugurate the Millennium and to lie down gracefully
with the lamb. He made two mistakes, only two, but they were
very bad ones. The Millennium hadn't arrived, and it was not a lamb
as he was lie down with. You do not like the English, I
gadda, said Yeovil, as the Hungarian went off into a short burst of
satirical laughter. I have always liked them, he answered, but now I
am angry with them for being soft. Here's my station, he added,
as the train slowed down and he commenced to gather his belongings together. I
am angry with them, he continued, as a final word on the subject,
because I hate sir Germans. He raised his hat punctiliously in a parting
salute and stepped out onto the platform. His place was taken by a large,
loose limbed man with a florid face and big staring eyes, and an
immense array of fishing basket, rod, flycases and so forth. He was
of the type that one could instinctively locate as a loud voiced, self constituted
authority on whatever topic might happen to be discussed in the bars of small hotels.
Are you English? He asked, after a preliminary stare at Yeovil.
This time Yeovil did not trouble to disguise his nationality. He nodded curtly to
his questioner. Glad of that, said the fisherman. I don't like traveling
with Germans. Unfortunately, said Yobil. We have to travel with them as
partners in the same state concern, and not by any means a predominant partner
either. Oh, that will soon write itself, said the other, with
loud assertiveness. That will right itself damn soon. Nothing in politics rights itself,
said Yobil. Things have to be righted, which is a different matter.
What do you mean, said the fisherman, who did not like to
have his assertions taken up and shaken into shape. We have given a clever
and domineering people a chance to plant themselves down as masters in our land.
I don't imagine that they are going to give us an easy chance to push
them out. To do that, we shall have to be a little cleverer
than they are, a little harder, a little fiercer, and a good
deal more self sacrificing than we have been in my life time, or yours
will be that. Right enough, said the fisherman. We mean business this
time. The last war wasn't a war. There was a snap. We
weren't prepared and they were. That won't happen again, bless you. I
know what I'm talking about. I go up and down the country and I
hear what people are saying. Yeovil privately doubted if he ever heard anything that
his own opinions. It tends to reason, continued the Fisherman did a highly
civilized race like ours. With the record that we've had for leading the whole
world is not going to be held under for long by a lot of dams
sausage eating Germans. Don't you believe it. I know what I'm talking about
now. I've traveled about the world a bit. Yeovil shrewdly suspected that the
world travels amounted to nothing more than a trip to the United States and perhaps
the Channel Islands, with possibly a week or a fortnight in Paris. It
isn't the past you've got to think of, it's the future, said Yeovil.
Other maritime pars had passed to look on Spain and Harmon, for instance.
The past didn't help when they let their sea sovereignty slip from them.
That is a matter of history, and not very distant history either. Now
that's where you make a mistake, said the other. Our sea sovereignty hasn't
slipped from us and won't do neither. There's a British empire beyond the seas
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, East Africa. He rolled the names round
his tongue with obvious relish. If it was a list of first class battleships,
en armored cruisers and destroyers, and the airships that you were reading off.
There would be some comfort and hope in the situation, said Yeovil.
The loyalty of the colonies is a splendid thing, but it is only pathetically
splendid because it can do so little to recover for us what we last against
the Zeppelin air fleet, and the dreadnought sea squadrons and the new gelber House
cruisers. The last word in maritime mobility of what a vail is loyal devotion
class half a dozen warships one keel to ten, scattered over one or two
ocean coasts. Ah. But they'll build, said the fisherman, Confidently,
they'll build. They're only waiting to enlarge their dockyard accommodation and get the right
class of artificers and engineers and workmen together. The money will be forthcoming somehow,
and they'll start in and build. And do you suppose, asked Yeovil,
in slow, bitter contempt, that the victorious nation is going to sit
and watch and wait till the defeated foe has created a new war fleet big
enough to drive it from the seas. Do you suppose that is going to
watch? Keel added to keel for gun to gun airship to airship till its
preponderance has been wiped out or even threatened. That sort of thing is done
once in a generation, not twice. Who is going to protect Australia on
New Zealand while they enlarge their dockyards and hangers and build their dreadnoughts and their
airships. Here's my station, and I'm not sorry, said the fisherman,
gathering his tackle together and rising to depart. I've listened to you long enough.
You and me wouldn't agree, not if we were to talk all day.
Fact is, I'm out and out patriot, and you're only a half
hearted one. That's what you are, half hearted. And with that parting
shot, he left the carriage and lounged heavily adown the platform. A patriot
who had never handled a rifle, or mounted a horse or pulled a know
but who had never flinched from demolishing his country's enemies with his tongue. England
has never had any lack of patriots on a time, thought Yeovil, Sadly,
so many patriots and so little patriotism. End of chapter twelve, Chapter
thirteen of When William came by Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording. All
LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer,
please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William came by
Saki, chapter thirteen, Tory Wood, Yeovil got out of the train a
small clean wayside station, and rapidly formed the conclusion that neatness, abundant leisure,
and a devotion to the cultivation of wall flowers and wyandots were the prevailing
influences of the station master's life. The train slid away into the hazy distance
of trees and meadows, and left the traveler standing in a world that seemed
to be made up in equal parts of rock garden, chicken coops, and
whiskey advertisements. The station master, who appeared also to act as emergency porter,
took Yeoville's ticket with the gesture of a kind arted person, brushing away
a troublesome wasp, and returned to a study of the Poultry Chronicle, which
was giving its readers sage Council concerning the ailments of belated July chickens. Yovil
called to mind the station master of a tiny railway town in Siberia, who
had held him in long and rather intelligent converse on the poetical merits and demerits
of Shelley, And he wondered what the result would be if he were to
engage the English official in a discussion on Lermontoff, or, for the matter
of that, on Shelley. The temptation to experiment was, however, removed
by the arrival of a young groom with brown eyes and a friendly smile,
who hurried into the station and took Yovil once more into a world where he
was of fleeting importance. In the roadway outside was a four wheeled dog cart
with a pair of the famous Torywood blue roans. It was an agreeable variation
in modern locomotion to be met at a station with high class horse flesh instead
of the ubiquitous motor, and the landscape was not of such a nature that
one wished to be whirled through it in a cloud of dust. After a
quick spin of some ten or fifteen minutes through twisting hedgegirt country roads, the
roans turned in at a wide gateway and went with dancing rhythmic step along the
park drive. The screen of oak crowned upland suddenly fell away, and a
gray, sharp cornered building came into view in a setting of low growing beaches
and dark pines. Tory Wood was not a stately, reposeful looking house.
It lay amid the sleepy landscape like a couched watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful
eyes. Built somewhere about the last years of Dutch William's reign, it had
been the center ever since for the political life of the countryside, a storm
center of discontent, or a rallying ground for the well affected, as the
circumstances of the day might entail. On the stone flagged terrace in front of
the house, with its quaint leaden figures of Diana pursuing a hound pressed stag.
Successive squires and lords of Torywood had walked to and fro with their friends,
watching the thunderclouds on the political horizon, or the shifting shadows on the
sundial of political favor, tapping the political barometer for indications of change, working
out a party campaign, or arranging for the support of some national movement.
To and fro they had gone, in their respective generations, men with the
passion for stake craft and political combats strong in their veins, and many oft
recurring names had echoed under those wakeful looking casements, names spoken in anger or
exultation, or murmured in fear and anxiety. Bolingbrook, Charles, Edward,
Walpole, the Farmer, King Bonaparte, Pitt Wellington, Peel, Ladstone,
Echo, and Time might have gravened their names on the stone flags and gray
walls. And now one tired old woman walked there with names on her lips
that she never uttered. A friendly riot of fox terriers and spaniels greeted the
carriage, leaping and rolling and yelping in an exuberance of sociability, as though
horses and coachmen and groom were comrades who had been absent for long months.
Instead of half an hour, an indiscriminately affectionate puppy lay flat and whimpering at
Yovil's feet, sending up little showers of gravel with its wildly thumping tail,
while two of the terriers raced each other madly across lawn and shrubbery, as
though to show the blue roans what speed really was. The laughing eyed young
groom disentangled the puppy from between Yovil's legs, and then he was ushered into
the gray silence of the entrance hall, leaving sunlight and noise and the stir
of life behind him. Her ladyship will see you in her writing room,
he was told, and he followed a irvant along the dark passages to the
well remembered room. There was something tragic in the sudden contrast between the vigor
and youth and pride of life that Yeovil had seen crystallized in those dancing,
high stepping horses, scampering dogs, and alert, clean limbed young men servants,
and the aged, frail woman who came forward to meet him. Eleanor
Dowager Lady gray Martin had for more than half a century been the ruling spirit
at Torywood. The affairs of the county had not sufficed for her untiring activities
of mind and body. In the wider field of national and imperial service,
she had worked and schemed and fought with an energy and a far sightedness that
came probably from the blend of caution and bold restlessness in her Scottish blood.
For many educated minds, the arena of politics and public life is a weariness
of dust and disgust. To others, it is a fascinating study to be
watched from the comfortable seat of a spec data. To her, it was
a home in her town house, or down at Tory Wood, with her
writing pad on her knee and the telephone at her elbow, or in personal
counsel with some trusted colleague, or persuasive argument with a halting, adherent or
half convinced opponent. She had labored on behalf of the poor and the ill
equipped, had fought for her idea of the right, and above all,
for the safety and sanity of her fatherland. Spadework when necessary and leadership when
called for came alike within the scope of her activities, and not least of
her achievements, though perhaps she hardly realized it was the force of her example
alone, indomitable fighter, calling to the half caring and the half discouraged,
to the laggard and the slow moving. And now she came across the room
with the tired step of a tired king. And that look which the French
so expressively call leir de fae, the charm which Heaven bestows on old ladies,
reserving its highest gift to the end, had always seemed in her case
to be lost sight of in the dignity and interest of a great dame who
was still in the full prime of her fighting and ruling powers. Now in
Ioville's eyes, she had suddenly come to be very old, stricken with the
forlorn languor of one who knows that death will be weary to wait. For
she had spared herself nothing in the long labor, the ceaseless building, the
watch and ward, and in one short autumn week she had seen the overthrow
of all that she had built, the falling asunder of the world in which
she had labored. Her life's end was like a harvest home, when blight
and storm have laid waste the fruit of long toil and unsparing outlay. Victory
had been her goal, the death or victory of an old heroic challenge,
for she had always dreamt to die fighting to the last death or victory,
and the gods had given her neither, only the bitterness of a defeat that
could not be measured in words, and the weariness of a life that had
outlived happiness or hope. Such was Eleanor Dowager, Lady gray Martin, a
shadow amid the young, red blooded life at Torywood, but a shadow that
was too real to die, a shadow that was stronger than the substance that
surrounded it. Jeovill talked long and hurriedly of his late travels, of the
vast Siberian forests and rivers, the desolate tundras, the lakes and marshes where
the wild swans rear their broods, the flower carpet of the summer fields,
and the winter ice mantled of Rusha's northern sea. He talked as a man
talks who avoids the subject that is uppermost in his mind and in the mind
of his hearer, as one who looks away from a wound or deformity that
is too cruel to be taken notice of. Tea was served in a long
oak paneled gallery where generations of musselfords had romped and played as children, and
remained yet in effigy, in a collection of more or less faithful portraits.
After Tea, Yovil was taken by his hostess to the Aviaries, which constituted
the sole claim which Tory would possessed to being considered a show place. The
third Earl of gray Martin had collected rare and interesting birds. Somewhere about the
time when Gilbert White was penning the last of his Deathless letters and his successors
in the title had perpetuated the hobby. Little lawns and ponds and shrubberies were
partitioned off for the various ground loving species, and higher cages with interlacing perches
and rockwood shelves accommodated the birds, whose natural expression of movement was on the
wing. Quails and francolins scurried about under low growing shrubs. Peacock pheasants strutted
and sunned themselves. Pugnacious ruffs engaged in perfunctory battles from force of habit.
Now that the rivalry of the mating season was over, chaffs, ravens and
loud throated gulls occupied sections of a vast rockery, and bright hued Chinese pond
herons and delicately stepping egrets waded among the water lilies of a marble terraced tank.
One or two dusky shapes seen dimly in the recesses of a large cage
built round a hollow tree would be lively owls. When the evening came on.
In the course of his many wanderings. Jovill had himself contributed three or
four inhabitants to this little feathered town, and he went round the enclosures,
renewing old acquaintances and examining new editions. The falcon cage is empty, said
Lady gray Martin, pointing to a large wid dome that towered high above the
other enclosures. I let the lana fly free one day. The other birds
may be reconciled to their comfortable quarters and abundant food and absence of dangers.
But I don't think all those things could make up to a falcon for the
wild range of cliff and desert. When one has lost one's own liberty,
one feels a quicker sympathy for other caged things. I suppose there was silence
for a moment, and then the dowager went on in a wistful, passionate
voice. I am an old woman, now, Mary, I must die
in my cage. I haven't the strength to fight. Age is a very
real and cruel thing, though we may shut our eyes to it and pretend
it is not there. I thought at one time that I should never really
know what it meant, what it brought to one I thought of it as
a messenger that one could keep waiting out in the yard till the very last
moment. I know now what it means. But you will marry. You
are young, you can fight. Are you going to be a fighter or
the very humble servant of the Peter Compli? I shall never be the servant
of the faith a Compli, said Yovil. I loathe it. As to
fighting, one must first find out what weapon to use and how to use
it effectively. One must watch and wait. One must not wait too long,
said the old woman. Time is on their side, not ours.
It is the young people we must fight for now. If they are ever
to fight for us, a new generation will spring up, a weaker memory
of old glories will survive the eCloud. The ruling race will capture young imaginations.
If I had your youth, Malley, and your sex, I would
become a commercial traveler. A commercial traveler, exclaimed Jovil, Yes, one
whose business took him up and down the country into contact with all classes,
into homes and shops and inns and railway carriages. And as I traveled,
I would work work on the minds of every boy and girl. I came
across every young father and young mother too, every young couple that were going
to be man and wife. I would awaken or keep alive in their memory
the things that we have been, the grand, brave things that some of
our race have done, and I would stir up a longing, a determination
for the future that we must win back. I would be a counter agent
to the agents of the Beata Compli. In course of time, the government
would find out what I was doing, and I should be sent out of
the country. But I should have accomplished something, and others would carry on
the work. That is what I would do, Murray, even if it
is to be a losing battle, fight it, Fight it. Yovill knew
that the old lady was fighting her last battle, rallying the discouraged and spurring
on the backward. A footman came to announce that the carriage waited to take
him back to the station. His hostess walked with him through the hall and
came out on to the stone flag terrace, the terrace from which a former
lady gray Martin had watched the twinkling bonfires that told of Waterloo. Yovil said
goodbye to her as she stood there. A Wan, shrunken shadow, yet
with the greater strength and reality in her flickering life than those parrot men and
women that fluttered and chattered through London drawing rooms and theater foyers. As the
carriage swung round a bend in the drive, Yovil looked back at Torywood,
a lone gray building in the midst of the sleeping landscape. An old,
pleading voice was still ringing in his ears. Imperious and yet forlorn, came
through the silence of the trees, the echoes of a golden horn calling to
distances. Somehow, Yovil knew that he would never hear that voice again,
and he knew too that he would hear it always with its message be a
fighter. And he knew, now, with a shameful consciousness that sprang suddenly
into existence, that the summons would sound for him in vain. The weary
brain, torturing months of fever had left their trail behind, a lassitude of
spirit and a sluggishness of blood, the quenching of the desire to roam and
court, adventure and hardship. In the hours of waking and depression between the
raging intervals of delirium. He had speculated with a sort of detached, listless
indifference on the chances of his getting back to life and strength and energy.
The prospect of filling a corner of some lonely Siberian graveyard or Finnish cemetry had
seemed near realization at times, and for a man who was already half dead,
the other half did not particularly matter. But when he had allowed himself
to dwell on the more hopeful side of the case, it had always been
a complete recovery that awaited him. The same yovil as of Yore, a
little thinner and more lined about the eyes, perhaps, would go through life
in the same way, alert, resolute, enterprising, ready to start off
at short notice for some desert or upland where the eagles were circling and the
wild fowl were calling. He had not reckoned that death evaded and held off
by the doctor's skill might exact a compromise, and that only part of the
man would go free to the west. And now he began to realize how
little of mental and physical energy he could count on. His own country had
never seemed in his eyes so comfort yielding and to be desired as it did
now. When it had passed into alien keeping and become a prison land as
much as a homeland. London, with its thin mockery of a season and
its chattering horde of empty hearted self seekers, held no attraction for him.
But the spell of English country life was weaving itself round him, now that
the charm of the desert was receding into a mist of memories, the waning
of pleasant autumn days in an English woodland, the whir of game birds in
the clean harvested fields, the gray, moist mornings in the saddle with the
magical cry of hounds coming up from some misty hollow, and then the delicious
abandon of physical weariness in bathroom and bedroom after a long run, and the
heavenly snatched hour of luxurious sleep before stirring back to life and hunger, the
coming of the dinner hour, and the jollity of a well chosen house party.
That was the call which was competing with that other trumpet call, and
the oval knew on which side his choice would incline end of chapter thirteen,
Chapter fourteen of When William Came by Sake. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer,
please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Imenta, When William
came by Sarkee, Chapter fourteen, A perfectly glorious afternoon. It was one
of the last days of July. Cooled and freshened by a touch of rain,
and dropping back again to a languorous warmth, London looked at its summer
best, rainwashed and sunlit, with the maximum of coming and going in its
more fashionable streets. Cicily Yoville sat in a screened alcove of the Anchorage Restaurant,
a feeding ground which had lately sprung into favor. Opposite her sat Ronnie,
confronting the ruins of what had been a dish of prawns in aspec Cool
and clean and fresh colored, he was good to look on in the eyes
of his companion. And yet perhaps there was a ruffle in her soul that
called for some answering disturbance on the part of that superbly, tranquil young man,
and certainly called in vain Cecily had set up for herself a fetish of
onyx, with eyes of jade, and doubtless hungered at times with an unreasonable
but perfectly natural hunger for something of flesh and blood. It was the religion
of her life to know exactly what she wanted and to see that she got
it. But there was no possible guarantee against her occasionally experiencing a desire for
something else. It is the golden rule of all religions that no one should
really live up to their precepts. When a man observes the principle of his
religion too exactly, he is in immediate danger of founding a new sect.
To day is going to be your day of triumph, said Cecily to the
young man, who was wondering at the moment whether he would care to embark
on an artitoke. I believe I'm more nervous than you are, she added,
And yet I rather hate the idea of your scoring a great success,
Why, asked Ronnie, diverting his mind for a moment from the attitude question
and its ramifications of source on on days or Venegre. I like you as
you are, said Cecily, just a nice looking boy to flatter and spoil
and pretend to be fond of. You've got a charming young body, and
you've no soul, and that such a fascinating combination. If you had a
soul, you would either dislike or worship me. And I'd much rather have
things as they are. And now you're going to go step beyond that,
and other people will applaud you and say that you're wonderful and invite you to
eat with them, and motor with them and yacht with them. Soon as
that begins to happen, Ronnie, a lot of other things will come to
an end. Of course, I've always known that you don't really care for
me, But as soon as the world knows it, you're irrevocably damaged as
a plaything. That is the great secret that binds us together, the knowledge
that we have no real affection for one another. And this afternoon every one
will know that you're a great artist, and no great artist was ever a
great lover. I shall be difficult to replace. Anyway, said Ronnie,
with what he imagined was a becoming modesty. There are lots of boys standing
round, ready to be fed and flattered and put on an imaginary pedestal,
most of them more or less good looking and well turned out, and amusing
to talk to. Oh, I daresay I could find a success of your
vacated niche said Cecily. Lightly. One thing I'm determined on. Though he
shan't be a musician. It's so unsatisfactory to have to share a grand passion
with the grand piano. He shall be a delightful young barbarian who would think
saurs Oles was a Derby winner or a claret. Don't be in too much
of a hurry to replace me, said Ronnie, who did not care to
have his successor too seriously discussed. I may not score the success you expect.
This afternoon, my dear boy, a minor crowned head from across the
sea is coming to hear you play, and that alone will count as a
success with most of your listeners. Also, I have secured a real duchess
for you, which is rather an achievement in the London of to day an
English duchess, asked Ronnie, who early in life learnt to apply the Merchandise
Marks Act to ducal titles English. Oh, certainly, as far as the
title goes, she was born under the constellation of the star spangled banner.
Who I don't suppose the Duke approves of her being here, lending her countenance
to the fate. A compli. But when you've got Republican blood in your
veins, a kaiser is quite as a tract of a load star as a
king rather more so. And Canon mousepace is coming, continued Cecily, referring
to a closely written list of guests. The excellent von Torb has been attending
his church lately, and the Cannon is longing to meet her. She is
just the sort of person he adores. I fancy he sincerely realizes how difficu
it will be for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and he
tries to make up for it by being as nice as possible to them in
this world. Ronnie held out his hand for the list. I think you
know most of the others, said Cecily, passing it to him. Lieutenant
von Gabel wrote, read out, Ronnie, who is he in one of
the whose are regiments quartered here? A friend of the Gryffins, Ugly but
amiable, and I'm told good cross country rider. I suppose Mary will be
disgusted at meeting the utlard and visible sign under his roof, but these encounters
are inevitable as long as he is in London. I didn't know Murray was
coming, said Ronnie. I believe he's going to look in on us,
said Cecily. It's just as well, you know, otherwise we should have
Joan asking in her loudest voice when he was going to be back in England
again. I haven't asked her, but she overheard the Gryffin arranging to come
and hear you play. And I fancy that will be quite enough. Now,
how about some Turkish coffee, said Ronnie, who had decided against the
art joke. Turkish coffee, certainly, and a cigarette and a moment's peast
before the serious business of the afternoon claims us talking about peace. Do you
know, Ronnie, it has just occurred to me that we have left out
one of the most important things in our affair. We have never had a
quarrel. I hate quarrels, said Ronnie. They're so domesticated. That's the
first time I've ever heard you talk about your home, said Cecily. I
fancy it would apply to most homes, said Ronnie. The last boyfriend I
had used to quarrel furious with me at least once a week, said Cecily
reflectively. But then he had dark, slumberous eyes that lit up magnificently when
he was angry, So it would have been a sure waste of God's good
gifts not to have sent him into a passion. Now and then, with
your excur into the past and future, you're making me feel dreadfully like an
installment of a serial novel, protested Ronnie. We have now got to synopsis
of earlier chapters. It shan't be teased, said Cecide. We will live
in the present and go no further into the future than to make arrangements for
Tuesday's dinner party. I have asked the Duchess. She would never have forgiven
me if she'd found out that I had a crowned head dining with me and
hadn't asked her to meet him. A sudden hush descended on the company gathered
in the Great Drawing Room at Berkshire Street as Ronnie took his seat at the
piano. The voice of Cannon Mousepace outlasted the others for a moment or so,
and then subsided into a regretful but gracious silence. For the next nine
or ten minutes, Ronnie held possession of the crowded room, a tense,
slender figure with cold green eyes aflame in a sudden fire and smooth, burnished
head bent low over the keyboard that yielded a disciplined out of melody under his
strong, deft fingers. The world weary Landgraf forgot for the moment the regrettable
trend of his subjects towards parliamentary socialism. The excellent Kaifn von tob forgot all
that the Cannon had been saying to her for the last ten minutes, forgot
the depressing certainty that he would have a great deal more that he wanted to
say in the immediate future, over and above the thirty five minutes or so
of discourse that she would contract to listen to next Sunday, And Cecily listened
with the wistful, equivocal triumph of one whose goose has turned out to be
a swan, and who realizes with secret concern that she has only planned the
role of goose girl for herself. The last chords died away, the fire
faded out of the jade colored eyes, and Ronnie became once more a well
groomed youth in a drawing room full of well dressed people. But around him
rose an explosive clamor of applause and congratulation, the sincere tribute of a siation,
and the equally hearty expression of imitative homage. It's a great gift,
A great gift, chanted cannon Mousepace. You must put it to a great
use. A talent is vouchsafed to us for a purpose. You must fulfill
the purpose. Talent such as yours is a responsibility. You must meet that
responsibility. The dictionary of the English language was an inexhaustible quarry from which the
cannon her hewn and fashion for himself a great reputation. Your must common Clavid
me Aus Scharsenburg said the kindly face to Landgraft, whom the world adored,
and thought it in about equal proportions. Eh Christmas, yea, this will
be a good time. Vie still keeps the Christ's fist at Schlassenburg. Order,
Sawsie, keep telling our school children that it is only your Christ meath
never mind. I will have as a wise president of our land atout to
listen to you. He is a soutsie. We are good friends. Outsides
of Parliament House. You shall blate to him my good friend, and convince
him that that right have got in heaven, you will come. Yes,
its beautiful, said the Greffin, Simply it's made me cry. Go back
to the piano again, place at once. Perhaps the near neighborhood of the
cannon inspired this command, but the Gryffin had been genuinely charmed. She adored
good music, and she was unaffectedly fond of good looking boys. Ronnie went
back to the piano and tasted the matured pleasure of her repeated success. Any
measure of nervousness that he may have felt at first had completely passed away.
He was sure of his audience, and he played as though they did not
exist. A renewed clamor of excited approval attended the conclusion of his performance.
It's a triumph, A perfectly glorious triumph, exclaimed the Duchess of Draycia,
turning to Yeovil, who sat silent among his wife's guests. Isn't it just
glorious? She demanded, with heavy insistent intonation of the word. Is it,
said Yovil, Well, isn't it, she cried with a rising inflection.
Isn't it just perfectly glorious? I don't know, confessed Yovil, your
see, glory hasn't come very much my way lately. Then, before he
exactly realized what he was doing, he raised his voice and quoted loudly for
the benefit of half the room. Other romans shall arise, heedless of a
soldier's name, sounds, not deeds, shall win the prize, harmony,
the path to aim. There was a sort of shiver of surprised silence at
Yovil's end of the room. Hell, the word rang out in a strong,
young voice. Hell, and it's true. That's the worst of it.
It is damned true. Yovil turned with some dozen others to see who
was responsible for this vigorously expressed statement. Tony Luton confronted him, an angry
scowl on his face, ablaze in his heavy, lidid eyes. The boy
was without a conscience, almost without a soul, as priests and parsons reconcoles,
But there was a slumbering devil god within him, and Jovil's taunting words
had broken the slumber. Life had been for Tony a hard school in which
right and wrong, high endeavor, and good resolve were untaught subjects. But
there was a sterling something in him, just that something that helped poor street
scavenged men to die brave fronted deaths in the trenches of Salamanca, that fired
a handful of apprentice boys to shut the gates of dairy and stare unflinchingly at
grim leguer and starvation. It was just that nameless something that was lacking in
the young musician, who stood at the further end of the room, bathed
in a flood of compliment and congratulation. Enjoying the honey drops of his triumph,
Luton pushed his way through the crowd and left the room, without traveling
to take leave of his hostess. What a strange young man, exclaimed the
Duchess. Now, do take me into the next room, She went on,
almost in the same breath. I'm just dying for some iced coffee.
Yovil escorted her through the throng of Ronnie worshippers to the desired haven of refreshment.
Marvelous missus Menteith Mendelssohn was exclaiming, in ringing trumpet tones. Of course
I always knew he could play, But this is not mere piano playing.
It is tone mastery. It is sound magic. Missus Yeovil has introduced us
to a new star in the musical firmament. Do you know I feel this
afternoon just like Cortez in the poem gazing at the newly discovered sea, silent
upon a peak? In Darien quoted a penetrate voice that could only belong to
Joan Mardle. I say, can anyone picture missus menteith Mendelsohn, silent on
any peak, or under any circumstances, If anyone had that measure of imagination,
no one acknowledged the fact a great gift and a great responsibility. Canon
Mousepace was assuring the Grayfin, the power of evoking sublime melody is akin to
the power of awakening thoughts. A musician can appeal to dormant consciousness as a
preacher can appeal to dormant conscience. It is a responsibility, an instrument for
good or evil. Our young friend here, we may be sure, will
use it as an instrument for good. He has, I feel certain a
sense of his responsibility. Here's a nice boy, said the gryfin, simply
he has such pretty hair. In one of the window recesses Rhapsody, Pantril
was talking vaguely but beautifully to a small audience on the subject of chromatic chords.
She had the advantage of knowing what she was talking about, an advantage
that her listeners did not, in the least chair, all through his playing
there ran a tone note of malachite green, she declared, recklessly, feeling
safe from immediate contradiction. Malachite green my color, the color of striving.
Having satisfied the ruling passion that demanded gentle and dexterous self advertisement, she realized
that the Augustus Smith in her craved refreshment, and moved with one of her
overorder admirers towards the haven, where peaches and iced coffee might be considered a
certainty. The refreshment alcove, which was really a good sized room, a
sort of chapel of ease to the larger drawing room, was already packed with
a crowd who felt that they could best discuss Ronie's triumph between mouthfuls of fruit
salad and iced drafts of hot cup. So brief is human glory that two
or three independent souls had even now drifted from the theme of the moment on
other more personally interesting topics. Iced mulberry salad, my dear it's a speciality
de la maisan, so to speak. They say the riving husband brought the
recipe from Astrakhan or Seville or some such outlandish place. Now, I wish
my husband would roam about a bit and bring back strange pellet of dishes.
No such luck. She's got asthma and has to keep on a gravel soil
with a south aspect, and all sorts of other restrictions. I don't think
you ought to be pitied in the least. The husband with asthma is like
a captive golf ball who could always put your hand on him when you want
him. All the hangings violet the palm, or in the furniture rosewood.
Nothing is to be played in it except Mozart. Mozart only. Some of
my friends wanted me to have a replica of the Mozart statue at Vienna put
up in a corner of the room, with flowers always around it. But
I really couldn't. I couldn't. One is so tired of it, one
sees it everywhere. I couldn't do it. I'm like that, you know.
Yes, I've secured the hero of the hour Ronnie's Store. Oh yes,
Rather, he's going to join our yachting trip third week of August.
We're going as far afield as fuel men in the Adriatic. Nor is it
the Aegean? Won't it beat jolly? Oh no, we're not asking missus.
Yeovil is quite a small lot, you know, at least it's a
small party. The excellent Fontalbe took her departure, bearing off with her the
Landglarf, who had already settled the date and duration of Ronnie's Christmas visit.
It will be done, you know, he warned the prospective guest. Our
landtag will not be sitting. And what is a bear garden without the bears?
However, we have some valad shrine in our woods. We consure you're
some sport in that way. Ronnie instantly saw himself in a well fitting shooting
costume with a terrelle's hat placed at a very careful angle on his head,
but he confessed that the other details of bore hunting were rather beyond him.
With the departure of the von Toal party, cannon mousepace gravitated decently but persistently
towards a corner where the Duchess, still at concert pitch, was alternatively praising
Ronnie's performance and the mulberry salad. Joan Mardle, who formed one of the
group, was not openly praising any one, but she was paying a silent
tribute to the salad. We were just talking about ronnie Stores music, Cannon
said the Duchess. I consider it just perfectly glorious. It's a great talent,
isn't it, Cannon put in Joan briskly. And of course it's a
responsibility as well. Don't you think music can be such an influence, just
as eloquence can. Don't you agree with me? The quarry of the English
language was, of course a public property, but it was disconcerting to have
one's own particular barrel load of sentence building material carried off before one's eyes.
The Cannon's impressive homily on Ronnie's gift, its possibilities had to be hastily whittled
down to a weakly acquiescent Quite so, Quite so if you tasted this ice
mowberry salad, Cannon asked the Duchess, it's perfectly luscious. Just hurry along
and get some before it's all gone. And her grace hurried along in an
opposite direction to thank Cicily for past favors, and to express lively gratitude for
the Tuesday to come. The guests departed with a rather irritating slowness, for
which perhaps the excellence of Cicily's buffet arrangements was partly responsible. The great drawing
room seemed to grow larger and more oppressive as the human wave receded, and
the hostess fled at last with some relief to the narrower limits of her writing
room and the sedative influences of a cigarette. She was inclined to be sorry
for herself. The triumph of the afternoon had turned out much as she had
predicted. At lunch time. Her idol of Onyx had not been swept from
its pedestal, but the atoll itself had an air of being packed up,
ready for transport to some other temple. Ronnie would be flattered and spoiled by
half a hundred people just because he could conjure sounds out of a keyboard,
and Cicily felt no great incentive to go on flattering and spoiling him herself.
And Ronnie would acquiesce in his dismissal with the good grace born of indifference.
The surest guaranteur of perfect manners. Already he had social engagements for the coming
months in which she had no share. The drifting apart would be mutual.
He had been an intelligent and amusing companion, and he had played the game
as she had wished it to be played, without the fatigue of keeping up
pretenses which neither of them could have believed in. Let us have a wonderfully
good time together had been the single stipulation in their unwritten treaty of comradeship,
and they had had the good time. Their wholehearted pursuit of material happiness would
go on as keenly as before, but they would hunt in different company.
That was all, Yes, that was all. Cecily found the effect of
her cigarette less seditative than she was disposed to exact. It might be necessary
to change the brand. Some ten or eleven days later, Yeoville read an
announcement in the papers that, in spite of handsome offers who increased salary,
mister Tony Luton, the original singer of the popular ditty Eccleston Square, had
terminated his engagement with Messrs Isaac Grovenor and Leon Harp, Heart of the Caravansary
Theater, and signed on as a deck hand in the Canadian Marine. Perhaps,
after all there had been some shred of glory amid the trumpet triumph of
that July afternoon. End of chapter fourteen. Chapter fifteen of When William Came
By Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot
org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee, Chapter fifteen,
The Intelligent Anticipator of wants. Two of Yeoville's London clubs, the two that
he had been accustomed to frequent had closed their doors after the catastrophe. One
of them had perished from off the face of the earth. Its fittings had
been sold, and its papers lay stored in some solicitor's office, a titbit
of material for the pain of some future historian. The other had transplanted itself
to Delhi, whither it had removed its early Georgian furniture and its traditions,
and sought to reproduce its Saint James's Street atmosphere as nearly as the conditions of
a tropic Asiatic city would permit. There remained the cart Wheel, a considerably
newer institution which had sprung into existence somewhere about the time of Yovil's last sojourn
in England. He had joined it on the solicitation of a friend who was
interested in the venture, and his bankers had paid his subscription during his absence.
As he had never been inside its doors, there could be no depressing
comparisons to make between its present state and a four time Glories, and Yovil
turned into its portals one afternoon with the adventurous detachment of a man who breaks
new ground and challenges new experiences. He entered with a diffident sense of intrusion,
conscious that his standing as a member might not be recognized by the keepers
of the doors. In a moment, however, he realized that a rajah's
escort of elephants might almost have marched through the entrance hall and vestibule without challenge.
The general atmosphere of the scene suggested a blend of the railway a station
at Cologne, the hotel Bristol in any European capital, and the second act
in most musical comedies, a score of brilliant and brilliantine pages decorated the foreground,
while Hebraic looking gentlemen wearing tartan waistcoats of the clans of their adoption flitted
restlessly between the tape machines and telephone boxes. The army of occupation had obviously
established a firm footing in the hospitable premises. A kaleidoscopic pattern of uniforms sky
blue, indico and bottle green relieved the civilian attire of the groups that clustered
in lounge and card rooms and corridors. Yeoville rapidly came to the conclusion that
the joys of membership were not for him. He had turned to go after
a very cursory inspection of the premises and their human occupants, when he was
hailed by a young man dressed with strenuous neatness, whom he remembered having met
in past days at the houses of one or two common friends. Hubert Hurlton's
parents had brought him into the world, and some twenty one years later had
put him into a motor business. Having taken these pardonable liberties, they had
completely exhausted their ideas of what to do with him, and Hubert seemed unlikely
to develop any ideas of his own on the subject. The motor business elected
to conduct itself without his connivance. Journalism, the stage, tomato culture without
capital, and other professions that could be entered on at short notice were submitted
to his consideration by nimble minded relations and friends. He listened to their suggestions
with polite indifference, being rude only to a cousin who demonstrated how he might
achieve a settled income of from two hundred to a thousand pounds a year by
the propagation of mushrooms in a London basement. While his walk in life was
still an undetermined promenade, his parents died, leaving him with a carefully invested
income of thirty seven pounds a year at that point of his career. Yovil's
knowledge of him stopped short. The journey to Siberia had taken him beyond the
range of Hurlton's domestic vicissitude. The young man greeted him in a decidedly friendly
manner. I didn't know you were a member here, he exclaimed. It's
the first time I've ever been in the club, said Yovil, and I
fancy it will be the last. There's rather too much of the fighting machine
in evidence here. One doesn't want a perpetual reminder of what has happened staring
one in the face. We tried at first to keep the alien element out,
said Hurlton apologetically. But we couldn't have carried on the club if we'd
stuck to that line. You see, we'd lost more than two thirds of
our old members, so we couldn't afford to be exclusive. As a matter
of fact, the whole thing was decided over our heads. A new syndicate
took over the concern, and a new committee was installed, with a good
many foreigners on it. And it's horrid having these uniforms flaunting all over the
place. But what is one to do? Yovil said nothing, with the
air of a man who could have said a great deal. I suppose you
wonder why remain a member under those conditions, continued Hurlton. Well, as
far as I'm concerned, a place like this is a necessity for me.
In fact, it's my profession, my source of income. I as good
at bridge as all that asked Yeovil. I'm a fairly successful player myself,
But I should be sorry to have to live on my winnings year in year
out. I don't play cards, said Hurlton, at least not for serious
stakes. My winnings all loosings wouldn't come to a tenor in an average year.
No. I live by commissions by introducing likely buyers to would be sellers.
Sell out of what asked yobil anything everything, horses, yachts, old
masters, play, shooting, poetry, farms, weekend cottages, motor cars,
almost anything you can think of. Look, and he produced from his
breast pocket a bulky notebook illusually inscribed engagements. Here, he explained, tapping
the book, I've got a double entry of every likely client that I know,
with a note of the things he may have to sell and the things
he may want to buy when it's something that he has for sale, or
a cross references to likely purchases of that particular line of article. I don't
limit myself to things that I actually know people to be in want of.
I go further than that and have theories, carefully indexed theories as to the
things that people might want to buy at the right moment if I can get
the opportunity I mentioned the article that's in my mind's eye, and the possible
purchaser who has also been in my mind's eye, and I frequently bring off
a sale. I started a chance acquaintance on a career of print buying the
other day merely by telling him of a couple of good prints I know of
that were to be had at a quite reasonable price. He's a man with
more money than he knows what to do with, and he has laid out
a lot on Old Prince since his first purchase. Most of his collection he's
got through me, And of course I net a commission on each transaction.
So you see, old man, how useful, not to say necessary,
a club with a large membership is. To me, the more mixed and
socially chaotic it is, the more serviceable it is, of course, said
Yeovil. And I suppose, as a matter of fact, a good many
of your clients belong to the conquering race. Well you see there the people
who have got the money, said Hurlton. I don't mean to say that
the invading Germans are usually people of wealth, but while they live over here
they escape the crushing taxation that falls on the British worn subject. They serve
their country as soldiers, and we have to serve it in garrison money,
ship money and so forth. Besides the ordinary taxes of the state. The
German shoulders the rifle. The Englishman has to shoulder everything else. That's what
will help more than anything towards the gradual Germanizing of our big town. The
comparatively lightly tax German workmen over here will have a much bigger spending power and
purchasing power than his heavily taxed English neighbor. The public houses, bars,
eating houses, places of amusements and so forth will come to cater more and
more for many yielding German patronage. The stream of British emigration will swell rather
than diminish, and the stream of Teuton immigration will be equally persistent and progressive.
Yes, the military service ordinance was a cunning stroke on the part of
that old fox von Karal. As a civilian statesman, he's far and away
cleverer than Bismarck was. He smothers with a feather bed where Bismarck would have
tried to smash with a snedge hammer. Have you got me down on your
list of noteworthy people? Asked Jobil, turning the drift of the conversation back
to the personal topic. Certainly I have, said Hurlton, turning the pages
of his pocket directory to the letter. Why as soon as I knew you
were back in England, I made several entries concerning you. In the first
place, it was possible that you might have a volume on Siberian travel and
natural history notes to publish, And I've cross referenced you to a publisher I
know who rather wants books of that sort on his list. I may tell
you at once, and I've no intentions in that direction, said Yeovil in
some amusement. Just as well, said Hurlton, cheerfully scribbling a hieroglyphic in
his book, that branch of business is rather outside my line, too little
in it, and the gratitude of author and publisher for being introduced to one
another as usually short lived. A most serious entry was the item that if
you were wintering in England you would be looking out for a hunter or two
you used to hunt with the East Wessex. I remember, I've got just
a very animal that will suit that country ready waiting for you, a beautiful
clean jumper. I put it over a fence or two myself and you and
I ride much the same way. A stiffish price is being asked for it.
But I've got the letters d O after your name in Heaven's Name,
said Yovil, now openly grinning before I die of curiosity. Tell me what
d O stands for. It means someone who doesn't object to pay a good
price for anything that really suits him. There are some people, of course,
who won't consider a thing unless they can get it for about a third
of what they imagine to be its market value. I've got another suggestion down
against you in my book. You may not be staying in the country at
all. You may be clearing out in disgust at existing conditions. In that
case, you would be selling a lot of things that you wouldn't want to
cart away with you. That involves another set of entries and a whole lot
of cross references. I'm afraid I've given you a lot of trouble, said
Yovill dryly. Not at all, said Hurlton. But it would simplify matters
if we take it for granted that you're going to stay here for this winter
anyhow, and are looking out for hunters. Can you lunch with me?
Here on Wednesday and come and look at the animal afterwards. It's only thirty
five minutes by train. It will take us longer if we motor. There
is a two fifty three from charing Cross that we could catch comfortably. If
you're going to persuade me to hunt in the East Wessex country this season,
said Yovil, you must find me a convenient hunting box somewhere down there.
I have found it, cried Hurlton, whipping out a styleograph and hastily scribbling
an order to view on a card. Central as possible for all the meats,
grand stabling, accommodation, excellent water supply, big bathroom, game larder,
celler ridge, a bake house if you want to bake your own bread.
Any land with it not enough to be a nuisance. An acre or
two of padderk, and about the same of garden. You're fond of wild
things. The wood comes down to the edge of the garden, a wood
that harbors owls and buzzards and kestrels. Have you got all those details in
your book, asked Yovil. Wood adjoining property b K. I keep those
details in my head, said Hurlton. But they're quite reliable. I shall
insist on something substantial off the rent if there are no buzzards, said Yovil.
Now that you mention them, they seem an indispensable accessory to any decent
hunting box. Look, he exclaimed, catching sight of a plump, middle
aged individual crossing the vestibule with an air of restrained importance. There goes a
delectable piphebe. Does he come on your books at all? I should say,
exclaimed Hurlton fervently. The delectable p nourishes expectations of a barony or viscounty.
At an early date, most of his life has been spent in streets
and squares, with occasional migrations to the esplanades of fashionable watering places or the
graveled walks of country house gardens. Now that no bless is about to impose
its obligations on him, quite a new catalog of wants as sprang into his
mind. There are things that the plainest choir may leave undone without causing scandalized
remark. But a fiercer light beats on a baron trigger pulling is one of
the obligations up to the present. Pithoby's never hit a partridge in anger.
But this year he's commissioned me to rent him a deer forest, some pedigree
hair efforts for his home farm. Was another commission, and a dozen and
a half swans for a swanery. Swanery, I may say was my idea.
I said once in his hearing, that it gave a baronial air to
an estate. You see, I knew a man who'd got a lot of
surplus swan stock for sale. Now Pithoby wants a heronry as well. I've
put him in communication with a client of mine who suffers from superfluous herons.
But of course I can't guarantee that the bird's nesting arrangements will fall in with
his territorial requirement. I'm getting him some carp too, of quite respectable age.
For a carp pond. I thought it would look so well for his
lady wife to be discovered by interviewers feeing the carp with her own fair hands.
And I put the same idea into bith Ofby's mind. I had no
idea that so many things were necessary to endorse a pattern of nobility, said
Yovil. If there should be any miscarriage in the bestow of the honor at
least bitherby will who absolved himself from any charge of contributory negligence. Shall we
say Wednesday here one o'clock, lunch first, and go down and look at
the horse afterwards, said Hurlton, returning to the matter in mind. Yovil
hesitated. Then he nodded his head. There's no harm in going to look
at the animal, he said. End of chapter fifteen. Chapter sixteen of
When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings
are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go
to librevox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee,
Chapter sixteen Sunrise. Missus Kerrick sat at a little teakwood table in the verandah
of a low pitched teak built house that stood on the steep slope of a
brown hillside. Her youngest child, with the grave natural dignity of nine year
old girlhood, maintained a correct but observant silence, looking carefully yet unobtrusively after
the wants of the one guest, and checking from time to time the incursions
of ubiquitous ants that were obstinately disposed to treat the tablecloth as a foraging ground.
The wayfaring visitor, who was experiencing a British blend of Eastern hospitality,
was a French naturalist, traveling thus far Afield in quest of feathered specimens to
enrich the aviaries of a bird collecting Balkan king. On the previous evening,
while shrugging his shoulders and unloosing his vocabulary over the meager accommodation afforded by the
native rest house, he had been enchanted by receiving an invitation to transfer his
quarters to the house on the hillside, where he found not only a pleasant
voice hostess and some drinkable wine, but three brown skinned English youngsters who were
able to give him a mass of intelligent, first hand information about the bird
life of the region. And now, at the early morning breakfast ere the
sun was showing over the rim of the brown baked hills, he was learning
something of the life of the little community he had chanced on. It was
in these parts many years ago, explained the hostess, When my husband was
alive and had an appointment out here. It is a healthy hill district and
I had pleasant memories of the place. So when it became necessary, well
desirable, let us say, to leave our English home and find a new
one, it occurred to me to bring my boys and my little girl here.
My eldest girl is at school in Paris. Labor is cheap here,
and I try my hand at farming. In a small way. Of course,
it is very different work to just superintending the dairy and poultry yard arrangements
of an English country estate. There are so many things insect ravages, bird
depredations and so on that one only knows on a small scale in England that
happen here in wholesale fashion, not to mention droughts and torrential rains and other
tropical visitations. And then the domestic animals are so disconcertingly different from the ones
one has been used to. Humped cattle never seem to behave in the way
that straight backed cattle would, and goats and geese and chickens are not a
bit the same here that they are in Europe. And of course the farm's
servants are utterly unlike the same class in England. One has to unlearn a
great deal of what one thought one knew about stock keeping and agriculture, and
take notes of the native ways of doing things. They're primitive and surprising,
of course, but they have an accumulated store of experience behind them, and
one has to tread warily in initiating improvements. The Frenchman looked round at the
brown sun scorched hills, with the dusty empty road showing here and there in
the middle distance, and other brown sun scorched hills rounding off the scene.
He looked at the lizards on the veranda walls, at the jars for keeping
the water cool, at the numberless little insect board holes in the furniture,
at the heat drawn lines on his hostess's comely face. Notwithstanding his present wanderings,
he had a Frenchman's strong homing instinct, and he marveled to hear this
lady, who should have been a lively and popular figure in the social circle
of some English country town, talking serenely of the ways of humped cattle and
native servants. And your children, how do they like the change? He
asked? Is healthy up here among the hills? Said the mother, also
looking round at the landscape and thinking doubtless of a very different scene they have
an outdoor life and plenty of liberty. They have their ponies to ride,
and there is a lake up above us that's a fine place for them to
bathe and boat in. The three boys are there now having their morning swim.
The eldest is sixteen, and he's allowed to have a gun, and
there's some good wildfowl shooting to be had in the reed beds at the further
end of the lake. I think that part of the joy of his shooting
expeditions lies in the fact that many of the duck and plover that he comes
across belonged to the same species that frequent our English moors and rivers. It
was the first hint that she had given of a wistful sense of exile,
the yearning for other skies, the message that a dead bird's plumage could bring
across rolling seas and scorching plains, and the education of your boys. How
do you manage for that, asked the visitor. There's a young tutor living
out in these wilds, said missus Kerrick. He was assistant master at a
private school in Scotland, but it had to be given up when ah,
when things changed, so many of the boys left the country. He came
out to an uncle who has a small estate eight miles from here, and
three days in the week he rides over to teach my boys, and three
days he goes to another family living in the opposite direction. Today he is
due to come here. It's a great boom to have such an opportunity for
getting the boys educated, and of course it helps him to earn a living
and the society of the place, asked the Frenchman. His hostess laughed,
I must admit that it has to be looked for with a strong pair of
field glasses. She said. It's almost as difficult to get a good bridge
four together as it would have been to get up a tennis tournament or a
subscription dance. In our particular corner of England. One has to ignore distances
and forget fatigue if one wants to be gregarious, even on a limited scale.
There are one or two officials who are our chief social mainstays. But
the difficulty is to muster the few available souls under the same roof at the
same moment. A road will be impassable in one quarter, a pony will
be lame in another, a stress of work will prevent someone else from a
coming, and another may be down with a touch of fever. When my
little girl gave a birthday party here, her only little girl guest had to
come twelve miles to attend it. The forest officer happened to drop in on
us that evening, so we felt quite festive. The Frenchman's eyes grew round
in wonder. He had once thought that the capital city of a Balkan kingdom
was the uttermost limit of social desolation viewed from a Parisian standpoint, and there,
at any rate one could get cafe chantins, tennis, picnic parties,
and occasional theater performance by a foreign troop, now and then a traveling circus,
not to speak of court and diplomatic functions of a more or less sociable
character. Here, it seems, one went on a day's journey to reach
an evening's entertainment, and the chance arrival of a tard official took on the
nature of a festivity. He looked round again at the rolling stretches of brown
hills. Before he had regarded them merely as the background to this little,
shut away world. Now he saw that they were the foreground as well.
They were everything. There was nothing else. And again his glance traveled to
the face of his hostess, with its bright, pleasant eyes and smiling mouth.
An you live here with your children, he said. In here,
in this wilderness, you'll leave England. You'll leave everything for this. His
hostess rose and took him over to the far side of the verandah. The
beginnings of a garden were spread out before them, with young fruit trees and
flowering shrubs, and bushes of pale, pink roses. Exuberant tropical growths were
interspersed with carefully tended vestiges of plants that had evidently been brought in from a
more temperate climate and had not borne the transition. Well bushes and trees and
shrubs away for some distance, to where the ground rose in a small hillock,
and then fell abruptly into bare hillside. In all this garden that you
see, said the englishwoman, there is one tree that is sacred. A
tree, said the Frenchman, a tree that we could not grow in England.
The Frenchman followed the direction of her eyes and saw a tall, bare
pole at the summit of the hillock. At the same moment, the sun
came over the hilltops in a deep orange glow, and a new light stole
like magic over the brown landscape, and as if they had timed their arrival
to the exact moment of sunburst, three brown faced boys appeared under the straight
bare pole. A cord shivered and flapped, and something ran swiftly up into
the air and swung out in the breeze that blew across the hills, a
blue flag with red and white crosses. The three boys bared their heads,
and the small girl on the veranda steps stood rigidly to attention. Far away
down the hill, a young man cantering into view round the corner of a
dusty road, removed his hat in loyal salutation. That is why we live
out here, said the englishwoman quietly. End of chapter sixteen. Chapter seventeen
of When William Came By Sake. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox
recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please
go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Iminta, When William Came By
Sarkee, Chapter seventeen, The event of the season in the first swelter room
of the new Osmanly Baths in cork Street. Four or five recumbent individuals,
in a state of moist nudity and self respecting inertia, were smoking cigarettes or
making occasional pretense of reading damp newspapers. A glass wall with a glass door
shut them off from the yet more torrid regions of the further swelter chambers.
Another glass partition disclosed the dimly lit vault, where other patrons of the establishment
had arrived at the stage of being pounded and kneaded and sluiced by oriental looking
attendants. The splashing and trickling of taps, the flip flap of wet slippers
on a wet floor, and the low murmur of conversation filtered through glass doors
made an appropriately drowsy accompaniment to the scene. A newcomer fluttered into the room,
beamed at one of the occupants, and settled himself with an air of
elaborate languor in a long canvas chair. Cornelian Valpy was a fair young man,
with perpetual or surprise impinged on his countenance and a chin that seemed to
have retired from competition with the rest of his features. The beam of recognition
that he had given to his friend or acquaintance, subsided into a subdued but
lingering simper. What's the matter, drawled his neighbor, lazily dropping the end
of a cigarette into a small bowl of water and helping himself from a silver
case on the table at his side. Matter, said Cornelian, opening wide
a pair of eyes in which unhealthy intelligence seemed to struggle in undetermined battle with
utter vacuity. Why should you suppose that anything is the matter when you wear
a look of idiotic complaisance in a Turkish bath, said the other. It
is the more noticeable from the fact that you're wearing nothing else. Were you
at the Shalem House danced last night, asked Cornelian, by way of explaining
his air of complaisant retrospection. No, said the other, But I feel
as if I had been. I've been reading columns about it in the Dawn,
the last event of the season, said Cornelian, and quite one of
the most amusing and lively functions that there have been so the Dawn said.
But then, as Shalem practically owns and controls that paper, its favorable opinion
might be taken for granted. The whole idea of The revel was quite original,
said Cornelian, who was not going to have his personal narrative of the
event forestalled by anything that a newspaper reporter might have given to the public.
A certain number of guests went as famous personages in the world's history, and
each one was accompanied by another guest typifying the prevailing characteristic of that personage.
One man went as Julius Caesar, for instance, and had a girl typifying
ambition as his shadow. Another went as Louis the Eleventh and his companion personified
superstition. Your shadow had to be some one of the opposite sex, you
see, and every alternate danced throughout the evening. You dance with your shadow
partner. Quite a clever IDEA young Goth von Schneidelstein is supposed to have invented
it. New York will be deeply beholden to him, said the other shadow
dances with all manner of eccentric variations. Will be the rage there for the
next eighteen months. Some of the costumes were really sumptuous, continued Cornelian.
The Duchess of Draysia was magnificent as Ahaliba. You never saw so many jewels
on one person. Only of course she didn't look dark enough for the character.
She had Billy concept for her shadow, representing unspeakable depravity on earth.
Did he manage that? Oh? A blend of Beardsley and Baxed as far
as get up and costume, and of course his own personality counted for a
good deal quite One of the successes of the evening was Lieutenant von Gable,
wrought as George Washington, with Joan Mardle as his shadow, typifying inconvenient candor.
He put her down officially his truthfulness, but everyone had heard the other
version. Oh good forgave alert. Though he does belong to the invading Horde.
It's not often that aim one scores off Joan. Another blaze of magnificence
was the loud voice Bessimer woman as the Goddess Juno, with peacock tails and
opals all over her. She had Ronnie's Store to represent green eyed jealousy.
Talking of ronnie Store and of jealousy, you will naturally wonder who missus Yeovil
went with. Now I forget what her costume was, but she'd got that
dark headed youth with her that she's been trotting round everywhere with the last few
days, Cornelian's neighbor kicked him furtively on the shin and frowned in the direction
of a dark haired youth reclining in an adjacent chair. The youth in question
rose from his seat and stalked into the further swelter. So clever of him
to go into the furnace room, said the unabashed Cornelian. Now if he
turns scarlet all over, we shall never know how much is embarrassment and how
much is due to the process of being boiled. Laoville hasn't done badly by
the exchange. He's better looking than Ronnie. I see that Pitherby went as
Frederick the Great, said Cornelian's neighbor, fingering a sheet of the dawn.
Isn't that exactly what one would have expected Pitherby to do, said Cornelian.
He's so desperately anxious to announce to all whom it may concern that he has
written a life of that hero. He had none inspiring looking woman with him
supposed to represent military genius. The spirit of advertisement would have been more appropriate,
said the other. The opening scene of the revel was rather effective,
continued Cornelian. All the shadow people reclined in the dimly lit center of the
ballroom in an indistinguishable mass, and the human characters marched round the illuminated sides
of the room to solemn processional music. Every now and then a shadow would
detach itself from the mass, hail its partner by name, and glide out
to join him or her into procession. Then, when the last shadows had
found their mates and everyone was partnered, the lights were turned up into blaze.
The orchestra crashed out a whirl of nondescript dance music, and people just
let themselves go. It was pandemonium. Afterwards, everyone strutted about for half
an hour or so, showing themselves off. Then the legitimate program of dances
began. There were some rather amusing incidents throughout the evening. One set of
lancers was danced entirely by the seven Deadly Sins and their human exemplars. Of
course, seven couples were not sufficient to make up the set, so they
had to bring in an eighth sin. I forget what it was. The
Sins of patriotism would have been rather appropriate considering who were giving the dance,
said the other. Hush exclaimed Cornelian nervously. You don't know who may will
hear you in a place like this, You'll get yourself into trouble. Wasn't
there some rather daring new dance of the bunny hug variety, asked the indiscreet
one the cubby cuddle, said Cornelian. Three or four adventurous couples danced it
towards the end of the evening. The Dawn says that without being strikingly new,
it was strikingly modern. The best description I can give of it,
said Cornelian, is summed up in the comment of the griefin von Toll when
she saw it being danced. If they really love each other, I suppose
it does not matter. By the way, he added, with apparent indifference,
is there any detailed account of my costume in the Dawn? His companion
laughed cynically, as if you hadn't read everything that the Dawn and the other
morning papers have to say about the ball hours ago. The naked truth should
be avoided in a Turkish bath, said Cornelian, kindly assumed that I've only
had I'm to glance at the weather forecast and the news from China. Oh
very well, said the other Your costume isn't described you, Simptin Cameramene,
a host of others as mister Cornelian Vaalby resplendent as the Emperor Nero with him
miss kate lera typifying insensate vanity. Many hard things have been said of Nero,
but his unkindest critics have never accused him of resembling you in feature until
some very clear evidence is produced national shoes to believe it. Cornelian was proof
against these shafts. Leaning back gracefully in his chair, he launched forth into
that detailed description of his last night's attire which the dawn had so unaccountably failed
to supply. I wore a tunic of white Nappalese silk, with a collar
of pearls, real pearls. Round my waist. I had a girdle of
twisted serpents in beaten gold, studied all over with amethysts. My sandals were
of gold laced with scarlet thread, and I had seven bracelets of gold on
each arm. Round my head, I had a wreath of gold and laurel
leaves set with scarlet berries, and hanging over my left shoulder as a silk
robe of mulberry purple broidered with the signs of the zodiac in golden scarlet.
I had it made specially for the occasion. At my side, I had
an ivory sheathed dagger with a green jade handle, hung in a green cord
dover leather. At this point in the recital, his companion rose softly,
flung his cigarette end into the little water bowl, and passed into the further
swelter room. Cornelian Valpy was left still clothed in a look of ineffable complacency,
still engaged in all probability in reclothing himself in the finery of the previous
evening. End of chapter seventeen. Chapter eighteen of When William Came By Sarkee.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org.
Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee, Chapter eighteen, The dead
who do not understand The pale light of a November afternoon faded rapidly into the
dusk of a November evening. Far over the countryside, housewives put up their
cottage shutters, lit their lamps and made the customary a remark that the days
were drawing in. In barnyards and poultry runs, the greediest bullets made a
final tour of inspection, picking up the stray remaining morsels of the evening meal,
and then, with much scrambling and squawking, sought the places on the
roosting pole that they thought should belong to them. Laborers working in yard and
field began to turn their thoughts homeward or tavernwood, as the case might be,
And through the cold, squelching slush of a water logged meadow, a
weary, bedraggled but unbeaten fox stiffly picked his way, climbed a high bramble
grown bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching tangle of
woods. The pack of fierce mouthed things that had rattled him from copse and
gorse cover along fallow and plow hedgerow and wooded lane for nigh on an hour,
and had pressed hard on his life for the last few minutes, receded
suddenly into the background of his experiences, the cold, wet meadow, the
thick mask of woods, and the oncoming dusk had stayed the chase, and
the fox had outstayed it. In a short time, he would fall mechanically
to licking off some of the mud that caked on his weary pads. In
a shorter time, horseman and hounds would have drawn off kennelward and homeward.
Yeoville rode through the deepening twilight, relying chiefly on his horse to find its
way in the network of hedge bordered lanes that presumably led to a high road
or to some human habitation. He was desperately tired after his day's hunting,
a legacy of weakness that the fever had bequeathed to him. But even though
he could scarcely sit upright in his saddle, his mind dwelt complacently on the
day's sport and looked forward to the snug, cheery comfort that awaited him at
his hunting box. There was a charm, too, even for a tired
man, in the eerie stillness of the lone twilight land through which he was
passing, a gray, shadow hung land which seemed to have been emptied of
all things that belonged to the daytime, and filled with a lurking, moving
life of which one knew nothing beyond the sense that it was there, there
and very near. If there had been wood gods and wicked eyed forms in
the sunlit groves and hillsides of old hellas, surely there were watchful living things
of kindred mold in this dusk hidden wilderness of fields and hedge and coppice.
It was Yeovil's third or fourth day with the hounds, without taking into account
a couple of mornings cub hunting. Already he felt that he had been doing
nothing different from this all his life. His foreign travels, his illness,
his recent weeks in London. They were part of a tapestried background that had
very slight and distant connection with his present existence. Of the future, he
tried to think with greater energy and determination. For this winter, at any
rate, he would hunt and do a little shooting, entertain a few of
his neighbors, and make friends with any congenial fellow sportsman who might be within
reach. Next year, things would be different. He would have had time
to look around him to regain something of his a four time vigor of mind
and body. Next year, when the hunting season was over, he would
set about finding out whether there was any nobler game for him to take a
hand in. He would enter into correspondence with old friends who had gone out
into the tropics and the backwoods. He would do something, so, he
told himself. But he knew thoroughly well that he had found his level.
He had ceased to struggle against the fascination of his present surroundings. The slow,
quiet comfort and interest of country life appealed with innovating force to the man
whom death had half conquered. The pleasures of the chase, well provided for
in every detail, and dovetailed in with the assured luxury of a well ordered,
Welsh staffed establishment, were exactly what he wanted and exactly what his life
down here afforded him. He was experiencing, too, that passionate, recurring
devotion to an old, loved scene that comes at times to men who have
traveled far and willingly up and down the world. He was very much at
home. The alien standard floating over Buckingham Palace, the Crown of Charlene on
public buildings and official documents, the gray ships of war riding in Plymouth Bay
and Southampton Water with a flag at their stern, that older generations of Britons
had never looked on. These things seemed far away, and inconsequent amid the
hedgerows and woods and fallows of the East Wessex country, horse and poundcraft,
harvest, game broods, the planting and felling of timber, the rearing and
selling of stock, the letting of grasslands, the care of fisheries, the
upkeep of markets and fairs. They were the things that immediately mattered, And
Yeoville saw himself, in moments of disgust and self accusation, settling down into
this life of rustic littleness, concerned over the late nesting of a partridge or
the defective draining of a loose box, hued busy over affairs that a gardener's
boy might grapple with, ignoring the struggle cry that went up, low and
bitter and wistful from a dethroned, dispossessed race in whose glories he had gloried,
in whose struggle he leant no hand. In what way, he asked
himself in such moments, would his life be better than the life of that
parody of manhood who upholsted his rooms with art hangings and rosewood furniture, and
babbled over the effect. The lanes seemed interminable and without a more object except
to bisect one another. Gates and gaps disclosed nothing in the way of a
landmark, and the night began to draw down in increasing shades of darkness.
Presently, however, the tirred horse quickened its pace, swung round a sharp
corner into a broader roadway, and stopped with an air of thankful expectancy,
at the low doorway of a wayside inn. A cheerful glow of light streamed
from windows and door, and a brighter glare came from the other side of
the road, where a large motor car was being got ready for an immediate
start. Yovil tumbled stiffly out of his saddle, and in answer to the
loud rattle of his hunting crop on the open door, the innkeeper and two
or three hangers on hurried out to attend to the wants of man and beast,
flower and water for the horse, and something hot for himself or Yovil's
first concern. And then he began to clamor for geographical information. He was
rather dismayed to find that the cumulative opinions of those whom he consulted, and
of several others who joined unbidden in the discussion, placed his destination at nothing
nearer than nine miles. Nine miles of dark and hilly country road for a
tired man on a tired horse assumed enormous far stretching proportions, and although he
dimly remembered that he had asked a guest to dinner for that evening, he
began to wonder whether the Wayside Inn possessed anything endurable in the way of a
bedroom. The landlord interrupted his desperate speculations with a really brilliant effort of suggestion.
There was a gentleman in the bar, he said, who was going
in a motor car in the direction for which Yovil was bound, and who
would no doubt be willing to drop him at his destination. The gentleman had
also been out with the hounds. Yovill's horse could be stabled at the inn
and fetched home by groom. Next morning. A hurried embassy to the bar
parlor resulted in the news that the motorist would be delighted to be of assistance
to a fellow sportsman. Yeovil gratefully accepted the chance that had so obligingly come
his way and hastened to superintend the housing of his horse in its night's quarters.
When he had duly seen to the tired animal's comfort and foddering, he
returned to the roadway, where a young man in hunting garb and a leveried
chauffeur was standing by the side of the waiting car. I am suppleased to
be of some use to you, mister Yorville, said the car owner with
a polite bow. And Yovil recognized the young Lieutenant von gabel Route, who
had been present at the musical afternoon at Berkshire Street. He had doubtless seen
him at the meet that morning, but in his hunting kit he had escaped
his observation. I too have been out of Sir Hans, the young man
continued, I have left my horse at the crow and sipter in Dolfood.
You are living at Black Dean, are you not? I can tissue right
past your door. It is all on my way. Yovil hung back for
a moment, overwhelmed with vexation and embarrassment, but it was too late to
cancel the arrangement that he had unwittingly entered into, and he was constrained to
put himself under obligation to the young officer with the best grace he could muster.
After all, he reflected, he had met him under his own roof
as his wife's guest. He paid his reckoning to mine host, tipped the
stable lad who had helped him with his horse, and took his place beside
von gabel Rot in the car. As they glided along the dark roadway,
and the young German reeled off a string of comments on the incidents of the
day's sport, Yeovil lay back amid his comfortable wraps and weighed the measure of
his humiliation. It was Secily's gospel that one should know what one wanted in
life and take good care that one got what one wanted. Could he apply
that test of achievement to his own life? Was this what he really wanted
to be doing, pursuing his uneventful way as a country's squire, sharing even
his sports and pastimes with men of the nation that had conquered and enslaved his
fatherland. The car slackened its pace somewhat as they went through a small hamlet,
past a schoolhouse, past a rural police station. With the new monogram
over its notice board, past a church with a little tree grown graveyard.
There in a corner, among wild rose bushes and tall ewes lay some of
Yovill's own kinsfolk, who had lived in these parts and hunted and life pleasant
in the days that were not so very long ago. Whenever he went past
that quiet little gathering place of the dead, Yovil was wont to raise his
hat in mute affectionate salutation to those who were now only memories in his family.
To night, he somehow omitted the salute and turned his head the other
way. It was as though the dead of his race sow and wondered.
Three or four months ago, the thing he was doing would have seemed an
impossibility. Now it was actually happening. He was listening to the gay,
courteous, tactful shadow of his young companion, laughing now and then at some
joking remark, answering some question of interest, learning something of hunting ways and
traditions in von gabel Orte's own country. And when the car turned in at
the gate of the hunting lodge and drew up at the steps, the laws
of hospitality demanded that Yovil should ask his benefactor of the road to come in
for a few minutes and drink something a little better than the wayside in had
been been able to supply. The young officer spent the best part of a
half hour in Yovill's snuggery, examining and discussing that the trophies of rifle and
collecting gun that covered the walls. He had a good knowledge of woodcraft,
and the beasts and birds of Siberian forests and North African deserts were to him
new pages in a familiar book. Yovil found himself discoursing eagerly with his chance
guest on the European distribution and local variation of such and such a species,
recounting peculiarities in its habits and incidents of its pursuit and capture. If the
cold observant eyes of Lady Shalam could have rested on the scene, she would
have hailed it as another root fiber thrown out by the Fete a compli.
Yovill closed the hall door on his departing visitor and closed his mind on the
crowd of angry and accusing thoughts that were waiting to intrude themselves. His valet
had already got his bath in readiness, and in a few minutes the tired
huntsman was forgetting weariness and the consciousness of outside things. In the languorous abandonment
that steam and hot water induce, brain and limbs seemed to lay themselves down
in a contented, waking sleep. The world that was beyond the bathroom walls
dropped away into a far unreal distance. Only somewhere through the steam clouds pierced
a hasty consciousness that a dinner well chosen was being cooked and would presently be
well served and right well appreciated. That was a lure to drag the bather
away from the nirvana land of warmth and steam. The stimulating after effect of
the bath took its due effect, and Jovill felt that he was now much
less tired and enormously hungry. A cheery fire burned in his dressing room,
and a lively black kitten helped him to dress, and incidentally helped him to
require a new tassel to the cord of his dressing gown. As he finished
his toilet and the kitten finished its sixth and most notable attack on the tassel,
a ring was heard at the front door, and a moment later a
loud, hearty and unmistakably hungry voice resounded in the hall. It belonged to
the local doctor, who had also taken part in the day's run and had
been bidden to enliven the evening meal with the entertainment of his inexhaustible store of
sporting and social reminiscences. He knew the countryside and the country folk inside out,
and he was a living, unwritten chronicle of the East Wessex hunt.
His conversation seemed exactly the right accompaniment to the meal. His stories brought glimpses
of wet hedgerows, stiff plowlands, leafy spines and muddy brooks in among the
rich old Worcester and George, and silver at the dinner service, the glow
and crattle of the wood fire, the pleasant succession of well cooked dishes and
mellow wines. The world narrowed itself down again to a warm, drowsy scented
dining room, with the productive hinterland of kitchen and cellar beyond it, and
beyond that an important outer world of loose box and harness room and stable yard.
Further again, a dark, hush region where pheasants roosted and owls flitted,
and foxes prowled, Yeovil sat and listened to story after story of the
men and women and horses of the neighborhood. Even the foxes seemed to have
a personality, some of them, and a personal history. It was a
little like Hans Andersen, he decided, and a little like the reminiscences of
an Irish r m, and perhaps just a little like some of the more
probable adventures of Baron Munchhausen. The newer stories were evidently true to the smallest
detail. The earlier ones had altered somewhat in repetition. As plants and animals
vary under domestication, and all the time, there was one topic that was
never touched on. Of half the families mentioned, it was necessary to add
the qualifying information that they used to live at such and such a place.
The countryside knew them no longer their properties were for sale or had already passed
into the hands of strangers. But neither man cared to allude to the grinning
shadow that sat at the feast and sent an icy chill now and again through
the cheeriest jest and most jovial story. The brisk run with the hounds that
day had stirred and warmed their pulses. It was an evening for comfortable forgetting.
Later that night, in the stillness of his bedroom, with the dwindling
noises of a retiring household dropping off one by one into ordered silence, a
door shutting here, a fire being raked out there, the thoughts that had
been held away came crowding in. The body was tired, but the brain
was not, and Yeovil lay awake with his thoughts for company. The world
grew suddenly wide again, filled with the significance of things that mattered, held
by the actions of men that mattered. Hunting box and stable and gun room
dwindled to a mere pinpoint in the universe. There were other, larger,
more absorbing things on which the mine dwelt. There was the gray, cold
sea outside Dover and Portsmouth and Cork, where the great gray ships of war
rocked and swung with the tides, where the sailors sang in doggerel English,
that bitter sounding adaptation Germania rules to waves, where the flag of a world
power floated for the world to see, And in oven like cities of India.
There were men who looked out at the white sun glare, the heat
baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, who listened to the unceasing chorus
of harsh throated crows, the strident creaking of cart wheels, the buzz and
drone of insect swarms, and the rattle call of the tree lizards. Men
whose thoughts went hungrily to the cool, gray skies and wet turf and moist
lowlands of an English hunting country. Men whose memories listened yearningly to the music
of a deep throated hound and the call of a game bird in the stubble.
Yovil had secured for himself the enjoyment of the things for which these men
hungered. He had known what he wanted in life slowly and with hesitation,
yet nevertheless, surely he had arrived at the achievement of his unconfessed desires.
Here, installed under his own roof tree, with as good horse flesh in
his stable as man could desire, with sport lying almost at his door,
with his wife ready to come down and help him entertain his neighbors, mari
Jovil had found the life that he wanted and was accursed in his own eyes.
He argued with himself, and palliated and explained, but he knew why
he had turned his eyes away that evening from the little graveyard under the trees.
One cannot plain things to the dead end of chapter eighteen. Chapter nineteen
of When William Came by Sake. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox
recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please
go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Iminta, When William Came by
Saki, Chapter nineteen, The little Foxes take us the foxes, the little
foxes that spoil the vines. On a warm and sunny May afternoon, some
ten months since Yeoville's return from his Siberian wanderings and sickness, Cicily sat at
a small table in the open air restaurant in Hyde Park, finishing her after
luncheon coffee and listening to the meritorious performance of the orchestra. Opposite her sat
Larry meadow Field, absorbed for the moment in the slow enjoyment of a cigarette,
which also was not without its short lived merits. Larry was a well
dressed youngster who was, in Secily's opinion, distinctly good to look on,
an opinion which the boy himself obviously shared. He had the healthy, well
cared appearance of a country dweller who has turned into a town dandy without suffering
in the process. His blue black hair, growing very low down on a
broad forehead, was brushed back in the smoothness that gave his head the appearance
of a rain polished sloe. His eyebrows were two dark smudges, and his
large, violet gray eyes expressed the RESTful, good temper of an animal whose
immediate requirements have been satisfied. The lunch had been an excellent one, and
it was jolly to feed out of doors in the warm spring air, the
only drawback to the arrangement being the absence of mirrors. However, if he
could not look at himself, a great many people could look at him.
Cicily listened to the orchestra as it jerked and strutted through a fantastic dance measure,
and as she listened, she looked appreciatively at the boy on the other
side of the table, whose soul for the moment seemed to be in his
cigarette. Her scheme of life, knowing just what you wanted and taking good
care that you got it was justifying itself by results. Ronnie, grown tarsome
with success, had not been difficult to replace, and no one in her
world had the satisfaction of being able to condole with her on the undesirable experience
of a long interregnum to feminine acquaintances with fewer advantages of purse and brains and
looks. She might figure as that Yeoville woman, but never had she given
them the justification to allude to her as poor Sicily Yeoville. And Murray dear
old soul had cooled down, as she had hoped and wished, from his
white heat of disgust at the things that she had preferred herself to accept philosophically,
a new chapter of their married life, and man and woman friendship had
opened. Many a rare gallop they had had together that winter, many a
cheery dinner gathering and long bridge evening in the cozy hunting lodge. Though he
still hated the new London and held himself aloof from most of her town set,
yet he had not shown himself rigidly intolerant of the sprinkling of Teuton sportsmen
who hunted and shot down in his part of the country. The orchestra finished
its clicking and caracoling, and was accorded a short clatter of applause. The
dance macabre, said Cecily to her companion. One of Saint Saanz's best known
pieces is it, said Larry indifferently. Now take your word for it.
Fraid I don't know much about music, you dear boy. That's just what
I like in you, said Cecily. You're such a delicious young barbarian,
am I said Larry? I dare say? I suppose you know? Larry's
father had been a brilliantly clever man who had married a brilliantly handsome woman.
The fates had not the least intention that Larry should take after both parents.
The fashion of having one Blanche in the open air has quite caught on this
season, said Cecily. One sees everybody here on a fine day. There's
Lady Bailquist over there. She used to be Lady Shalam, you know,
before her husband got the earldom. To be more correct, before she got
it for him. I suppose she's all god to see the great review.
It was, in fact precisely the absorbing topic of the Fourthoming Boy Scout March
past that was engaging the Countess of Bailquist's earnest attention at the moment. It's
going to be an historical occasion, she was saying to Sir Leonard Pitherby,
whose services to literature had up to the present received a half measure of recognition.
If it miscarries, it will be a serious setback for the fitter compli.
If it is a success, it will be the biggest step forward in
the path of reconciliation between the two races that has yet been taken. It
will mean that the younger generation is on our side, not all, of
course, but some. That is all we can expect at present, and
that will be enough to work on. Supposing the Scouts hang back and don't
turn up in the numbers, said Sir Leonard anxiously, That, of course
is the danger, said Lady Belfist quietly. Probably two thirds of the available
strength will hold back, but a third or even a sixth would be enough.
It would redeem the parade from the calamity of fiasco, and it would
be a nucleus to work on for the future. That is what we want
a good start, a preliminary rally. It is the first step that counts.
That is why today's event is of much importance. Of course, of
course, the first step on the road, assented Sir Leonard, I can
assure you, continued Lady Belgfist, that nothing has been left undone to rally
the Scouts to the new order of things. Special privileges have been showered on
them alone among all the Cannet corps. They have been allowed to retain their
organization. A decoration of merit has been instituted for them. A large hostelry
and gymnasium has been provided for them in Westminster. His Majesty's youngest son is
to be their Scout Master in chief. A great athletic meeting is to be
held for them each year, with valuable prizes. Three or four hundred of
them are to be taken every summer free of charge, for a holiday in
the Bavarian Highlands and the Baltic seaboard. Besides this, the parent of every
Scout who obtains the Medal for Efficiency is to be exempted from part of the
new war taxation that the people are finding so burdensome. The one certainly cannot
say that they have not had attractions held out to them, said sir Leonard.
It is a special effort, said Lady Belfist. It is worth making
an effort. Four. They are going to be the janisseries of the Empire,
the younger generation, knocking at the doors of progress and thrusting the bars
and bolts of old racial prejudices. I tell you, Sir Leonard, it
will be an historic moment when the first core of those little CARKI glad boys
swings through the gates of the park. When do they come, asked the
baronet, catching something of his companion's zeal. The first detachment is due to
arrive at three, said Lady Belchfist, referring to a small timetable of the
afternoon's proceedings three punctually, and the others will follow in rapid succession. The
Emperor and Suite will arrive at two fifty and take up their positions at the
saluting base over there, where the big flagstaff has been set up. The
boys will come in by Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch and the Albert Gate
according to their districts, and form in one big column over there where the
little flags are pegged out, then the young Prince will inspect them and lead
them past His majesty. Who will be with the imperial party, asked Sir
Leonard. Oh, it is to be an important occasion. Everything will be
done to emphasize the significance of the occasion, said Lady belcrist again, consulting
her program. The King of Wurtemburg and two of the Bavarian royal princes,
an Abyssinian envoy who is over here. He will lend a touch of picturesque
barbarism to the scene. The General commanding the London District, and a whole
lot of other military big wigs, and the Austrian, Italian and Romanian military
attaches. She reeled off the posing list of notables with an air of quiet
satisfaction. Sir Leonard made mental notes of personages to whom he might send presentation
copies of his new work, Frederick William the Great Elector a popular biography as
a souvenir of today's or suspicious event. It's nearlier quarter to three now,
he said, let us get a good position before the crowd gets thicker.
Come along to my car. It is just opposite to the saluting base,
said her ladyship. I have a police passed that will let us through.
We'll ask missus Yeovil and her young friend to join us. Larry excused himself
from joining the party. He had a barbarian's reluctance to assisting at an imperial
triumph. I think I'll push off to the swimming bath, he said to
Cecily. See you again about tea time. Cecily walked with Lady beaulkfast and
a literary baronet towards the crowd of spectators, which will steadily growing in dimensions.
The newsboy ran in front of them, displaying a poster with the intelligence
Essex's wickets fall rapidly. A semblance of county crickets still survived under the new
order of things. Near the saluting base, some thirty or forty motor cars
were drawn up in line, and Cecily and her companions exchanged greetings with many
of the occupants. A lovely deaf or review, isn't it, said the
Gryfin von Tolb, breaking off her conversation with the hair Rybinoc, the little
Pomeranium banker, who was sitting by her side. They haven't you brought mister
Meadowfield, such a nice by. I wanted him to come and sit in
my carriage and talk to me. He doesn't talk, you know, said
Cecily. He's only brilliant to look at. Well, I could have looked
at him, said the Gryfinn. There'll be thousands of other boys to look
at presently, said Cecily, laughing at the old woman's frankness. Oh do
you think so, it'd be thousands, asked the Greffin, with an anxious
lowering of the voice. Really, thousands, hundreds perhaps, though it's some
uncertainty. Everyone is not saving hundreds anyway, said Sicily. The Gryffin turned
to the little banker and spoke to him rapidly and earnestly in German. It
is most important that we should consolidate our position in this country. We must
coax the younger generation over by degrees. We must disarm their hostility. We
cannot afford to be always on the watch in this quarter. It is our
sort of weakness, and we cannot afford to be weak. This slave upheaval
in southeastern Europe is to becoming a serious menace. Have you seen today's telegrams
from my gram they are bad reading. There is no computing the extent of
this movement. It is directed against us, said the banker. Agreed,
said the gryffin. It is in the nature of things that it must be
against us. Let us have no illusions. Within the next ten years sooner,
perhaps we shall be faced with a crisis which will be only a beginning.
We shall need all our strength. That is why we cannot afford to
be weak over here. To day is an important day, I confess I
am anxious. Hark the kettle drums, exclaimed the commanding voice of Lady Bailcrist.
His Majesty is coming, quick, bundle into the car. The crowd
behind the police kept lines surged expectantly into closer formation. Spectators hurried up from
sidewalks and stood craning their necks above the shoulders of earlier arrivals. Through the
archway at Hyde Park Corner came a resplendid cavalcade with a swirl of color and
rhythmic movement, and a crash of exultant music. Lifeguards with gleaming helmets,
a detachment of Wurtemburg lancers with a flutter of black and yellow pennons, a
rich medley of staff uniforms, a prancing array of princely horsemen, the perial
standard, and the King of Prussia, Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor of
the West. It was the most imposing display that Londoners had seen since the
catastrophe. Slowly, grandly, with thunder of music and beat of hoofs,
the procession passed through the crowd across the sward towards the saluting base. Slowly
the eagle standard, charged with the leopards, lion and harp of the conquered
kingdoms rose, massed high on the flagstaff and fluttered in the breeze. Slowly
and with military precision, the troops and suite took up their position round the
central figure of the great pageant. Trumpets and kettle drums suddenly ceased their music,
and in a moment there rose in their stead an eager buzz of comment
from the nearest spectators. How well the young prince looks in his scout uniform.
The King of Wuchnemburg is much younger man than I thought he was.
Is that a Prussian or Bavarian uniform? There on the right, the man
on the back horse neither it's Austrian, the Austrian military attache. It is
one stop or talking to his majesty. He organized the boy scouts in Germany.
You know his Majesty's looking very pleased. He has reason to be pleased.
This is a great event in the history of the two countries. It
marks a new epoch. Oh do you see the Abyssinian envoy. What a
picturesque figure he makes, How well he sits his horse. That is the
Grand Duke of Bardon's nephew talking to the King of Wurtemburg. Now on the
bosom, chatter of the spectators fell. Suddenly three sound strokes, distant,
measured sinister, the clang of a clock striking three three o'clock. And not
a boy scout within sight or hearing, exclaimed the loud ringing voice of Joan
Mardle. One can usually hear their drums and trumpets a couple of miles away.
There's the traffic to get through, said Sir Leonard Pitherby in an equally
high pitched voice. And of course, he added vaguely, it takes some
time to get the various units together. One must give them a few minutes.
Grease, Lady Belfist, said nothing but her RESTful, watchful eyes were
turned first to Hyde Park Corner, and then in the direction of the marble
larch, back again to Hyde Park Corner. Only the dark lines of the
waiting crowd met her view, with the yellow newspaper placards fitting in and out,
announcing to an indifferent public the fate of Essex's wickets. As far as
her searching eyes could travel, the green stretch of tree and sward remained unbroken
save by casual loiterers. No small brown columns appeared, No drum beat came
throbbing up from the distance. The little flags pegged out to mark the positions
of the awaited scout cause fluttered in meaningless isolation on the empty parade ground.
His Majesty was talking unconcernedly with one of his officers. The foreign attaches looked
steadily between their charges, as though nothing in particular was hanging in the balance.
The Abyssinian envoy displayed an untroubled serenity, which was probably genuine. Elsewhere
among the suite was a perceptible fidget, the more obvious because it was elaborately
cloaked. Among the privileged onlookers drawn up near the saluting point, the fidgeting
was more unrestrained. Six minutes passed three and not a sign of them,
exclaimed Joan Mardle, with the explosive articulation of one who cannot any longer hold
back a truth hark, said some one. I hear trumpets. There was
an instant concentration of listening, a straining of eyes. It was only the
tute of a passing motor car. Even Sir Leonard Pitherby, with the eye
of faith, could not locate so as much as a cloud of dust on
the park horizon. And now another sound was heard, a sound difficult to
define without beginning without dimension, the growing murmur of a crowd waking to a
slowly dawning sensation. Ever is the bend would strike up an air, said
the Griffin von Tol fretfully. It is stupid waiting here in silence. Joan
fingered her watch, but she made no further remark. She realized that no
amount of malicious comment could be so dramatically effective. Now, as the slow
slipping away of the intolerable seconds, the murmur from the crowd grew in volume.
Some satirical wits started whistling in imitation of an advancing fife and drum band.
Others took it up. When the air resounded with the shrill music of
a phantom army on the march, the mock throbbing of drum and squealing of
fife rose and fell above the packed masses of spectators, But no answering echo
came from beyond the distant trees. Like mushrooms in the night, A muster
of uniform police and plainclothes detectives sprang into evidence on all sides. Whatever happened,
there must be no disloyal demonstration. The whistlers and mockers were pointedly invited
to keep silence, and one or two addresses were taken under the trees.
Well at the back of the crowd, a young man stood watching the long
stretch of road along which the scouts should come. Something had drawn him there
against his will, to witness the imperial triumph, to watch the writing of
yet another chapter in the history of his country's submission to an accepted fact.
And now a dull flush crept into his gray face, a look that was
partly new born hope and resurrected pride, partly remorse and shame burned in his
eyes shame, the choking, searing shame of self reproach that cannot be reasoned
away, was dominant in his heart. He had laid down his arms.
There were others who had never hoisted the flag of surrender. He had given
up the fight and joined the ranks of the hopelessly subservient in thousands of English
homes throughout the lad And there were young hearts that had not forgotten, and
knock compounded, would not yield. The younger generation had barred the door,
and in the pleasant May sunshine, the eagle standard floated and flapped, The
black and yellow pennons shifted restlessly. Emperor and princes, generals and guards sat
stiffly in their saddles, and waited and waited. End of Chapter nineteen and
of when William came by, sake red by and imentor