It was Mrs. Packletide's pleasure and intention that she should shoot a
tiger. Not that the lust to kill had suddenly descended on her, or
that she felt that she would leave India safer and more wholesome than
she had found it, with one fraction less of wild beast per million of
inhabitants. The compelling motive for her sudden deviation towards
the footsteps of Nimrod was the fact that Loona Bimberton had recently
been carried eleven miles in an aeroplane by an Algerian aviator, and
talked of nothing else; only a personally procured tiger-skin and a
heavy harvest of Press photographs could successfully counter that sort
of thing. Mrs. Packletide had already arranged in her mind the lunch
she would give at her house in Curzon Street, ostensibly in Loona
Bimberton's honour, with a tiger-skin rug occupying most of the
foreground and all of the conversation. She had also already designed
in her mind the tiger-claw brooch that she was going to give Loona
Bimberton on her next birthday. In a world that is supposed to be
chiefly swayed by hunger and by love Mrs. Packletide was an exception;
her movements and motives were largely governed by dislike of Loona
Bimberton.
Circumstances proved propitious. Mrs. Packletide had offered a
thousand rupees for the opportunity of shooting a tiger without
overmuch risk or exertion, and it so happened that a neighbouring
village could boast of being the favoured rendezvous of an animal of
respectable antecedents, which had been driven by the increasing
infirmities of age to abandon game-killing and confine its appetite to
the smaller domestic animals. The prospect of earning the thousand
rupees had stimulated the sporting and commercial instinct of the
villagers; children were posted night and day on the outskirts of the
local jungle to head the tiger back in the unlikely event of his
attempting to roam away to fresh hunting-grounds, and the cheaper kinds
of goats were left about with elaborate carelessness to keep him
satisfied with his present quarters. The one great anxiety was lest he
should die of old age before the date appointed for the memsahib's
shoot. Mothers carrying their babies home through the jungle after the
day's work in the fields hushed their singing lest they might curtail
the restful sleep of the venerable herd-robber.
The great night duly arrived, moonlit and cloudless. A platform had
been constructed in a comfortable and conveniently placed tree, and
thereon crouched Mrs. Packletide and her paid companion, Miss Mebbin.
A goat, gifted with a particularly persistent bleat, such as even a
partially deaf tiger might be reasonably expected to hear on a still
night, was tethered at the correct distance. With an accurately sighted
rifle and a thumbnail pack of patience cards the sportswoman awaited
the coming of the quarry.
"I suppose we are in some danger?" said Miss Mebbin.
She was not actually nervous about the wild beast, but she had a morbid
dread of performing an atom more service than she had been paid for.
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Packletide; "it's a very old tiger. It couldn't
spring up here even if it wanted to."
"If it's an old tiger I think you ought to get it cheaper. A thousand
rupees is a lot of money."
Louisa Mebbin adopted a protective elder-sister attitude towards money
in general, irrespective of nationality or denomination. Her energetic
intervention had saved many a rouble from dissipating itself in tips in
some Moscow hotel, and francs and centimes clung to her instinctively
under circumstances which would have driven them headlong from less
sympathetic hands. Her speculations as to the market depreciation of
tiger remnants were cut short by the appearance on the scene of the
animal itself. As soon as it caught sight of the tethered goat it lay
flat on the earth, seemingly less from a desire to take advantage of
all available cover than for the purpose of snatching a short rest
before commencing the grand attack.
"I believe it's ill," said Louisa Mebbin, loudly in Hindustani, for the
benefit of the village headman, who was in ambush in a neighbouring
tree.
"Hush!" said Mrs. Packletide, and at that moment the tiger commenced
ambling towards his victim.
"Now, now!" urged Miss Mebbin with some excitement; "if he doesn't
touch the goat we needn't pay for it." (The bait was an extra.)
The rifle flashed out with a loud report, and the great tawny beast
sprang to one side and then rolled over in the stillness of death. In
a moment a crowd of excited natives had swarmed on to the scene, and
their shouting speedily carried the glad news to the village, where a
thumping of tom-toms took up the chorus of triumph. And their triumph
and rejoicing found a ready echo in the heart of Mrs. Packletide;
already that luncheon-party in Curzon Street seemed immeasurably nearer.
It was Louisa Mebbin who drew attention to the fact that the goat was
in death-throes from a mortal bullet-wound, while no trace of the
rifle's deadly work could be found on the tiger. Evidently the wrong
animal had been hit, and the beast of prey had succumbed to
heart-failure, caused by the sudden report of the rifle, accelerated by
senile decay. Mrs. Packletide was pardonably annoyed at the discovery;
but, at any rate, she was the possessor of a dead tiger, and the
villagers, anxious for their thousand rupees, gladly connived at the
fiction that she had shot the beast. And Miss Mebbin was a paid
companion. Therefore did Mrs. Packletide face the cameras with a light
heart, and her pictured fame reached from the pages of the TEXAS WEEKLY
SNAPSHOT to the illustrated Monday supplement of the NOVOE VREMYA. As
for Loona Bimberton, she refused to look at an illustrated paper for
weeks, and her letter of thanks for the gift of a tiger-claw brooch was
a model of repressed emotions. The luncheon-party she declined; there
are limits beyond which repressed emotions become dangerous.
From Curzon Street the tiger-skin rug travelled down to the Manor
House, and was duly inspected and admired by the county, and it seemed
a fitting and appropriate thing when Mrs. Packletide went to the County
Costume Ball in the character of Diana. She refused to fall in,
however, with Clovis's tempting suggestion of a primeval dance party,
at which every one should wear the skins of beasts they had recently
slain. "I should be in rather a Baby Bunting condition," confessed
Clovis, "with a miserable rabbit-skin or two to wrap up in, but then,"
he added, with a rather malicious glance at Diana's proportions, "my
figure is quite as good as that Russian dancing boy's."
"How amused every one would be if they knew what really happened," said
Louisa Mebbin a few days after the ball.
"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Packletide quickly.
"How you shot the goat and frightened the tiger to death," said Miss
Mebbin, with her disagreeably pleasant laugh.
"No one would believe it," said Mrs. Packletide, her face changing
colour as rapidly as though it were going through a book of patterns
before post-time.
"Loona Bimberton would," said Miss Mebbin. Mrs. Packletide's face
settled on an unbecoming shade of greenish white.
"You surely wouldn't give me away?" she asked.
"I've seen a week-end cottage near Dorking that I should rather like to
buy," said Miss Mebbin with seeming irrelevance. "Six hundred and
eighty, freehold. Quite a bargain, only I don't happen to have the
money."
* * * * *
Louisa Mebbin's pretty week-end cottage, christened by her "Les
Fauves," and gay in summertime with its garden borders of tiger-lilies,
is the wonder and admiration of her friends.
"It is a marvel how Louisa manages to do it," is the general verdict.
Mrs. Packletide indulges in no more big-game shooting.
"The incidental expenses are so heavy," she confides to inquiring
friends.