in the paper this morning, and I thought----I--er--just thought I would
look in and ask you what you would like for a wedding-present."
"My dear chap! Much too kind of you."
"So--er--so silly if I gave a fish-slice and found that everybody else
had given fish-slices."
"That's true. Well, why not come inside and talk it over."
"No, I won't come in, thanks. I'd rather not come in. Perhaps you will
write and let me know. _Poste Restante_, Bongo on the Congo, will find
me. I am returning there immediately."
"Certainly," said Osbert. He looked down at his companion's feet. "My
dear old lad, what on earth are you wearing those extraordinary boots
for?"
"Corns," said Bashford Braddock.
"Why the spikes?"
"They relieve the pressure on the feet."
"I see, well, good night, Mr. Braddock."
"Good night, Mr. Mulliner."
"Good night," said Osbert.
"Good night," said Bashford Braddock.
V
UNPLEASANTNESS AT BLUDLEIGH COURT
The poet who was spending the summer at the Anglers' Rest had just
begun to read us his new sonnet-sequence when the door of the
bar-parlour opened and there entered a young man in gaiters. He
came quickly in and ordered beer. In one hand he was carrying a
double-barrelled gun, in the other a posy of dead rabbits. These he
dropped squashily to the floor: and the poet, stopping in mid-sentence,
took one long, earnest look at the remains. Then, wincing painfully, he
turned a light green and closed his eyes. It was not until the banging
of the door announced the visitor's departure that he came to life
again.
Mr. Mulliner regarded him sympathetically over his hot Scotch and lemon.
"You appear upset," he said.
"A little," admitted the poet. "A momentary malaise. It may be a purely
personal prejudice, but I confess to preferring rabbits with rather
more of their contents inside them."
"Many sensitive souls in your line of business hold similar views," Mr.
Mulliner assured him. "My niece Charlotte did."
"It is my temperament," said the poet. "I dislike all dead
things--particularly when, as in the case of the above rabbits, they
have so obviously, so--shall I say?--blatantly made the Great Change.
Give me," he went on, the greenish tinge fading from his face, "life
and joy and beauty."
"Just what my niece Charlotte used to say."
"Oddly enough, that thought forms the theme of the second sonnet in my
sequence--which, now that the young gentleman with the portable Morgue
has left us, I will...."
"My niece Charlotte," said Mr. Mulliner, with quiet firmness, "was one
of those gentle, dreamy, wistful girls who take what I have sometimes
felt to be a mean advantage of having an ample private income to write
Vignettes in Verse for the artistic weeklies. Charlotte's Vignettes
in Verse had a wide vogue among the editors of London's higher-browed
but less prosperous periodicals. Directly these frugal men realized
that she was willing to supply unstinted Vignettes gratis, for the
mere pleasure of seeing herself in print, they were all over her. The
consequence was that before long she had begun to move freely in the
most refined literary circles: and one day, at a little luncheon at the
Crushed Pansy (The Restaurant With A Soul), she found herself seated
next to a godlike young man at the sight of whom something seemed to go
off inside her like a spring."
"Talking of Spring ..." said the poet.
"Cupid," proceeded Mr. Mulliner, "has always found the family to which
I belong a ready mark for his bow. Our hearts are warm, our passions
quick. It is not too much to say that my niece Charlotte was in love
with this young man before she had finished spearing the first anchovy
out of the hors-d'œuvres dish. He was intensely spiritual-looking,
with a broad, white forehead and eyes that seemed to Charlotte not so
much eyes as a couple of holes punched in the surface of a beautiful
soul. He wrote, she learned, Pastels in Prose: and his name, if she had
caught it correctly at the moment of their introduction, was Aubrey
Trefusis.
"Friendship ripens quickly at the Crushed Pansy. The _poulet rôti au
cresson_ had scarcely been distributed before the young man was
telling Charlotte his hopes, his fears, and the story of his boyhood.
And she was amazed to find that he sprang--not from a long line of
artists but from an ordinary, conventional county family of the type
that cares for nothing except hunting and shooting.
"You can readily imagine," he said, helping her to Brussels sprouts,
"how intensely such an environment jarred upon my unfolding spirit. My
family are greatly respected in the neighbourhood, but I personally
have always looked upon them as a gang of blood-imbrued plug-uglies.
My views on kindness to animals are rigid. My impulse, on encountering
a rabbit, is to offer it lettuce. To my family, on the other hand,
a rabbit seems incomplete without a deposit of small shot in it. My
father, I believe, has cut off more assorted birds in their prime than
any other man in the Midlands. A whole morning was spoiled for me last
week by the sight of a photograph of him in the _Tatler_, looking
rather severely at a dying duck. My elder brother Reginald spreads
destruction in every branch of the animal kingdom. And my younger
brother Wilfred is, I understand, working his way up to the larger
fauna by killing sparrows with an air-gun. Spiritually, one might just
as well live in Chicago as at Bludleigh Court."
"Bludleigh Court?" cried Charlotte.
"The moment I was twenty-one and came into a modest but sufficient
inheritance, I left the place and went to London to lead the life
literary. The family, of course, were appalled. My uncle Francis, I
remember, tried to reason with me for hours. Uncle Francis, you see,
used to be a famous big-game hunter. They tell me he has shot more gnus
than any other man who ever went to Africa. In fact, until recently he
virtually never stopped shooting gnus. Now, I hear, he has developed
lumbago and is down at Bludleigh treating it with Riggs's Super-fine
Emulsion and sun-baths."
"But is Bludleigh Court your home?"
"That's right. Bludleigh Court, Lesser Bludleigh, near
Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire."
"But Bludleigh Court belongs to Sir Alexander Bassinger."
"My name is really Bassinger. I adopted the pen-name of Trefusis to
spare the family's feelings. But how do you come to know of the place?"
"I'm going down there next week for a visit. My mother was an old
friend of Lady Bassinger."
Aubrey was astonished. And, being, like all writers of Pastels in
Prose, a neat phrase-maker, he said what a small world it was, after
all.
"Well, well, well!" he said.
"From what you tell me," said Charlotte, "I'm afraid I shall not enjoy
my visit. If there's one thing I loathe, it's anything connected with
sport."
"Two minds with but a single thought," said Aubrey. "Look here, I'll
tell you what. I haven't been near Bludleigh for years, but if you're
going there, why, dash it, I'll come too--aye, even though it means
meeting my uncle Francis."
"You will?"
"I certainly will. I don't consider it safe that a girl of your
exquisite refinement and sensibility should be dumped down at an
abattoir like Bludleigh Court without a kindred spirit to lend her
moral stability."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll tell you." His voice was grave. "That house exercises a spell."
"A what?"
"A spell. A ghastly spell that saps the strongest humanitarian
principles. Who knows what effect it might have upon you, should you
go there without someone like me to stand by you and guide you in your
hour of need?"
"What nonsense!"
"Well, all I can tell you is that once, when I was a boy, a high
official of Our Dumb Brothers' League of Mercy arrived there lateish on
a Friday night, and at two-fifteen on the Saturday afternoon he was the
life and soul of an informal party got up for the purpose of drawing
one of the local badgers out of an upturned barrel."
Charlotte laughed merrily.
"The spell will not affect me," she said.
"Nor me, of course," said Aubrey. "But all the same, I would prefer to
be by your side, if you don't mind."
"Mind, Mr. Bassinger!" breathed Charlotte softly, and was thrilled to
note that at the words and the look with which she accompanied them
this man to whom--for, as I say, we Mulliners are quick workers--she
had already given her heart, quivered violently. It seemed to her that
in those soulful eyes of his she had seen the lovelight.
* * * * *
Bludleigh Court, when Charlotte reached it some days later, proved to
be a noble old pile of Tudor architecture, situated in rolling parkland
and flanked by pleasant gardens leading to a lake with a tree-fringed
boathouse. Inside, it was comfortably furnished and decorated
throughout with groves of glass cases containing the goggle-eyed
remnants of birds and beasts assassinated at one time or another by Sir
Alexander Bassinger and his son, Reginald. From every wall there peered
down with an air of mild reproach selected portions of the gnus, moose,
elks, zebus, antelopes, giraffes, mountain goats and wapiti which had
had the misfortune to meet Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake before
lumbago spoiled him for the chase. The cemetery also included a few
stuffed sparrows, which showed that little Wilfred was doing his bit.
The first two days of her visit Charlotte passed mostly in the society
of Colonel Pashley-Drake, the uncle Francis to whom Aubrey had alluded.
He seemed to have taken a paternal fancy to her: and, lithely though
she dodged down back-stairs and passages, she generally found him
breathing heavily at her side. He was a red-faced, almost circular man,
with eyes like a prawn's, and he spoke to her freely of lumbago, gnus
and Aubrey.
"So you're a friend of my young nephew?" he said, snorting twice in
a rather unpleasant manner. It was plain that he disapproved of the
pastel-artist. "Shouldn't see too much of him, if I were you. Not the
sort of fellow I'd like any daughter of mine to get friendly with."
"You are quite wrong," said Charlotte warmly. "You have only to gaze
into Mr. Bassinger's eyes to see that his morals are above reproach."
"I never gaze into his eyes," replied Colonel Pashley-Drake. "Don't
like his eyes. Wouldn't gaze into them if you paid me. I maintain his
whole outlook on life is morbid and unwholesome. I like a man to be a
clean, strong, upstanding Englishman who can look his gnu in the face
and put an ounce of lead in it."
"Life," said Charlotte coldly, "is not all gnus."
"You imply that there are also wapiti, moose, zebus and
mountain goats?" said Sir Francis. "Well, maybe you're right. All the
same, I'd give the fellow a wide berth, if I were you."
"So far from doing so," replied Charlotte proudly, "I am about to go
for a stroll with him by the lake at this very moment."
And, turning away with a petulant toss of her head, she moved off to
meet Aubrey, who was hurrying towards her across the terrace.
"I am so glad you came, Mr. Bassinger," she said to him as they walked
together in the direction of the lake. "I was beginning to find your
uncle Francis a little excessive."
Aubrey nodded sympathetically. He had observed her in conversation with
his relative and his heart had gone out to her.
"Two minutes of my uncle Francis," he said, "is considered by the best
judges a good medium dose for an adult. So you find him trying, eh? I
was wondering what impression my family had made on you."
Charlotte was silent for a moment.
"How relative everything is in this world," she said pensively.
"When I first met your father, I thought I had never seen anybody
more completely loathsome. Then I was introduced to your brother
Reginald, and I realized that, after all, your father might have been
considerably worse. And, just as I was thinking that Reginald was the
furthest point possible, along came your uncle Francis, and Reginald's
quiet charm seemed to leap out at me like a beacon on a dark night.
Tell me," she said, "has no one ever thought of doing anything about
your uncle Francis?"
Aubrey shook his head gently.
"It is pretty generally recognised now that he is beyond the reach of
human science. The only thing to do seems to be to let him go on till
he eventually runs down."
They sat together on a rustic bench overlooking the water. It was a
lovely morning. The sun shone on the little wavelets which the sighing
breeze drove gently to the shore. A dreamy stillness had fallen on the
world, broken only by the distant sound of Sir Alexander Bassinger
murdering magpies, of Reginald Bassinger encouraging dogs to eviscerate
a rabbit, of Wilfred busy among the sparrows, and a monotonous
droning noise from the upper terrace, which was Colonel Sir Francis
Pashley-Drake telling Lady Bassinger what to do with the dead gnu.
Aubrey was the first to break the silence.
"How lovely the world is, Miss Mulliner."
"Yes, isn't it!"
"How softly the breeze caresses yonder water."
"Yes, doesn't it!"
"How fragrant a scent of wild flowers it has."
"Yes, hasn't it!"
They were silent again.
"On such a day," said Aubrey, "the mind seems to turn irresistibly to
Love."
"Love?" said Charlotte, her heart beginning to flutter.
"Love," said Aubrey. "Tell me, Miss Mulliner, have you ever thought of
Love?"
He took her hand. Her head was bent, and with the toe of her dainty
shoe she toyed with a passing snail.
"Life, Miss Mulliner," said Aubrey, "is a Sahara through which we all
must pass. We start at the Cairo of the cradle and we travel on to
the--er--well, we go travelling on."
"Yes, don't we!" said Charlotte.
"Afar we can see the distant goal...."
"Yes, can't we!"
"... and would fain reach it."
"Yes, wouldn't we!"
"But the way is rough and weary. We have to battle through the
sand-storms of Destiny, face with what courage we may the howling
simoons of Fate. And very unpleasant it all is. But sometimes in the
Sahara of Life, if we are fortunate, we come upon the Oasis of Love.
That oasis, when I had all but lost hope, I reached at one-fifteen on
the afternoon of Tuesday, the twenty-second of last month. There comes
a time in the life of every man when he sees Happiness beckoning to him
and must grasp it. Miss Mulliner, I have something to ask you which
I have been trying to ask ever since the day when we two first met.
Miss Mulliner... Charlotte.... Will you be my.... Gosh! Look at that
whacking great rat! Loo-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo!" said Aubrey,
changing the subject.
Once, in her childhood, a sportive playmate had secretly withdrawn the
chair on which Charlotte Mulliner was preparing to seat herself. Years
had passed, but the recollection of the incident remained green in her
memory. In frosty weather she could still feel the old wound. And now,
as Aubrey Bassinger suddenly behaved in this remarkable manner, she
experienced the same sensation again. It was as though something blunt
and heavy had hit her on the head at the exact moment when she was
slipping on a banana-skin.
She stared round-eyed at Aubrey. He had released her hand, sprung to
his feet, and now, armed with her parasol, was beating furiously in the
lush grass at the waterside. And every little while his mouth would
open, his head would go back, and uncouth sounds would proceed from his
slavering jaws.
"Yoicks! Yoicks! Yoicks!" cried Aubrey.
And again,
"Tally-ho! Hard For'ard! Tally-ho!"
Presently the fever seemed to pass. He straightened himself and came
back to where she stood.
"It must have got away into a hole or something," he said, removing
a bead of perspiration from his forehead with the ferrule of the
parasol. "The fact of the matter is, it's silly ever to go out in the
country without a good dog. If only I'd had a nice, nippy terrier
with me, I might have obtained some solid results. As it is, a fine
rat--gone--just like that! Oh, well, that's Life, I suppose." He
paused. "Let me see," he said. "Where was I?"
And then it was as though he waked from a trance. His flushed face
paled.
"I say," he stammered, "I'm afraid you must think me most awfully rude."
"Pray do not mention it," said Charlotte coldly.
"Oh, but you must. Dashing off like that."
"Not at all."
"What I was going to say, when I was interrupted, was, will you be my
wife?"
"Oh?"
"Yes."
"Well, I won't."
"You won't?"
"No. Never." Charlotte's voice was tense with a scorn which she did
not attempt to conceal. "So this is what you were all the time, Mr.
Bassinger--a secret sportsman!"
Aubrey quivered from head to foot.
"I'm not! I'm not! It was the hideous spell of this ghastly house that
overcame me."
"Pah!"
"What did you say?"
"I said 'Pah'."
"Why did you say 'Pah'?"
"Because," said Charlotte, with flashing eyes, "I do not believe you.
Your story is thin and fishy."
"But it's the truth. It was as if some hypnotic influence had gripped
me, forcing me to act against all my higher inclinations. Can't you
understand? Would you condemn me for a moment's passing weakness? Do
you think," he cried passionately, "that the real Aubrey Bassinger
would raise a hand to touch a rat, save in the way of kindness? I love
rats, I tell you--love them. I used to keep them as a boy. White ones
with pink eyes."
Charlotte shook her head. Her face was cold and hard.
"Good-bye, Mr. Bassinger," she said. "From this instant we meet as
strangers."
She turned and was gone. And Aubrey Bassinger, covering his face with
his hands, sank on the bench, feeling like a sand-bagged leper.
The mind of Charlotte Mulliner, in the days which followed the
painful scene which I have just described, was torn, as you may well
imagine, with conflicting emotions. For a time, as was natural, anger
predominated. But after awhile sadness overcame indignation. She
mourned for her lost happiness.
And yet, she asked herself, how else could she have acted? She had
worshipped Aubrey Bassinger. She had set him upon a pedestal, looked
up to him as a great white soul. She had supposed him one who lived,
far above this world's coarseness and grime, on a rarified plane of his
own, thinking beautiful thoughts. Instead of which, it now appeared, he
went about the place chasing rats with parasols. What could she have
done but spurn him?
That there lurked in the atmosphere of Bludleigh Court a sinister
influence that sapped the principles of the most humanitarian and sent
them ravening to and fro, seeking for prey, she declined to believe.
The theory was pure banana-oil. If such an influence was in operation
at Bludleigh, why had it not affected her?
No, if Aubrey Bassinger chased rats with parasols, it could only mean
that he was one of Nature's rat-chasers. And to such a one, cost what
it might to refuse, she could never confide her heart.
Few things are more embarrassing to a highly-strung girl than to be for
any length of time in the same house with a man whose love she has been
compelled to decline, and Charlotte would have given much to be able to
leave Bludleigh Court. But there was, it seemed, to be a garden-party
on the following Tuesday, and Lady Bassinger had urged her so strongly
to stay on for it that departure was out of the question.
To fill the leaden moments, she immersed herself in her work. She had
a long-standing commission to supply the _Animal-Lovers Gazette_ with
a poem for its Christmas number, and to the task of writing this she
proceeded to devote herself. And gradually the ecstasy of literary
composition eased her pain.
The days crept by. Old Sir Alexander continued to maltreat magpies.
Reginald and the local rabbits fought a never-ceasing battle,
they striving to keep up the birth-rate, he to reduce it. Colonel
Pashley-Drake maundered on about gnus he had met. And Aubrey dragged
himself about the house, looking licked to a splinter. Eventually
Tuesday came, and with it the garden-party.
Lady Bassinger's annual garden-party was one of the big events of the
countryside. By four o'clock all that was bravest and fairest for miles
around had assembled on the big lawn. But Charlotte, though she had
stayed on specially to be present, was not one of the gay throng. At
about the time when the first strawberry was being dipped in its cream,
she was up in her room, staring with bewildered eyes at a letter which
had arrived by the second post.
The _Animal-Lovers Gazette_ had turned her poem down!
Yes, turned it down flat, in spite of the fact that it had been
commissioned and that she was not asking a penny for it. Accompanying
the rejected manuscript was a curt note from the editor, in which he
said that he feared its tone might offend his readers.
Charlotte was stunned. She was not accustomed to having her efforts
rejected. This one, moreover, had seemed to her so particularly good. A
hard judge of her own work, she had said to herself, as she licked the
envelope, that this time, if never before, she had delivered the goods.
She unfolded the manuscript and re-read it.
It ran as follows:
GOOD GNUS
(_A Vignette in Verse_)
BY
CHARLOTTE MULLINER
When cares attack and life seems black,
How sweet it is to pot a yak,
Or puncture hares and grizzly bears,
And others I could mention:
But in my Animals "Who's Who"
No name stands higher than the Gnu:
And each new gnu that comes in view
Receives my prompt attention.
When Afric's sun is sinking low,
And shadows wander to and fro,
And everywhere there's in the air
A hush that's deep and solemn;
Then is the time good men and true
With View Halloo pursue the gnu:
(The safest spot to put your shot
Is through the spinal column).
To take the creature by surprise
We must adopt some rude disguise,
Although deceit is never sweet,
And falsehoods don't attract us:
So, as with gun in hand you wait,
Remember to impersonate
A tuft of grass, a mountain-pass,
A kopje or a cactus.
A brief suspense, and then at last
The waiting's o'er, the vigil past:
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.
It's done. You've pulled the trigger,
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,
Has handed in its dinner-pail:
(The females all are rather small,
The males are somewhat bigger).
Charlotte laid the manuscript down, frowning. She chafed at the
imbecility of editors. Less than ever was she able to understand what
anyone could find in it to cavil at. Tone likely to offend? What did
the man mean about the tone being likely to offend? She had never heard
such nonsense in her life. How could the tone possibly offend? It was
unexceptionable. The whole poem breathed that clean, wholesome, healthy
spirit of Sport which has made England what it is. And the thing was
not only lyrically perfect, but educational as well. It told the young
reader, anxious to shoot gnus but uncertain of the correct procedure,
exactly what he wanted to know.
She bit her lip. Well, if this Animal-Lovers bird didn't know a red-hot
contribution when he saw one, she would jolly well find somebody else
who did--and quick, too. She....
At this moment, something occurred to distract her thoughts. Down
on the terrace below, little Wilfred, complete with air-gun, had
come into her line of vision. The boy was creeping along in a quiet,
purposeful manner, obviously intent on the chase: and it suddenly came
over Charlotte Mulliner in a wave that here she had been in this house
all this time and never once had thought of borrowing the child's
weapon and having a plug at something with it.
The sky was blue. The sun was shining. All Nature seemed to call to her
to come out and kill things.
She left the room and ran quickly down the stairs.
* * * * *
And what of Aubrey, meanwhile? Grief having slowed him up on his feet,
he had been cornered by his mother and marched off to hand cucumber
sandwiches at the garden-party. After a brief spell of servitude,
however, he had contrived to escape and was wandering on the terrace,
musing mournfully, when he observed his brother Wilfred approaching.
And at the same moment Charlotte Mulliner emerged from the house and
came hurrying in their direction. In a flash, Aubrey perceived that
here was a situation which, shrewdly handled, could be turned greatly
to his advantage. Affecting to be unaware of Charlotte's approach, he
stopped his brother and eyed the young thug sternly.
"Wilfred," he said, "where are you going with that gun?"
The boy appeared embarrassed.
"Just shooting."
Aubrey took the weapon from him and raised his voice slightly. Out of
the corner of his eye he had seen that Charlotte was now well within
hearing.