Octavian Ruttle was one of those lively cheerful individuals on whom
amiability had set its unmistakable stamp, and, like most of his kind,
his soul’s peace depended in large measure on the unstinted approval of
his fellows. In hunting to death a small tabby cat he had done a thing
of which he scarcely approved himself, and he was glad when the gardener
had hidden the body in its hastily dug grave under a lone oak-tree in the
meadow, the same tree that the hunted quarry had climbed as a last effort
towards safety. It had been a distasteful and seemingly ruthless deed,
but circumstances had demanded the doing of it. Octavian kept chickens;
at least he kept some of them; others vanished from his keeping, leaving
only a few bloodstained feathers to mark the manner of their going. The
tabby cat from the large grey house that stood with its back to the
meadow had been detected in many furtive visits to the hen-coups, and
after due negotiation with those in authority at the grey house a
sentence of death had been agreed on. “The children will mind, but they
need not know,” had been the last word on the matter.
The children in question were a standing puzzle to Octavian; in the
course of a few months he considered that he should have known their
names, ages, the dates of their birthdays, and have been introduced to
their favourite toys. They remained however, as non-committal as the
long blank wall that shut them off from the meadow, a wall over which
their three heads sometimes appeared at odd moments. They had parents in
India—that much Octavian had learned in the neighbourhood; the children,
beyond grouping themselves garment-wise into sexes, a girl and two boys,
carried their life-story no further on his behoof. And now it seemed he
was engaged in something which touched them closely, but must be hidden
from their knowledge.
The poor helpless chickens had gone one by one to their doom, so it was
meet that their destroyer should come to a violent end; yet Octavian felt
some qualms when his share of the violence was ended. The little cat,
headed off from its wonted tracks of safety, had raced unfriended from
shelter to shelter, and its end had been rather piteous. Octavian walked
through the long grass of the meadow with a step less jaunty than usual.
And as he passed beneath the shadow of the high blank wall he glanced up
and became aware that his hunting had had undesired witnesses. Three
white set faces were looking down at him, and if ever an artist wanted a
threefold study of cold human hate, impotent yet unyielding, raging yet
masked in stillness, he would have found it in the triple gaze that met
Octavian’s eye.
“I’m sorry, but it had to be done,” said Octavian, with genuine apology
in his voice.
“Beast!”
The answer came from three throats with startling intensity.
Octavian felt that the blank wall would not be more impervious to his
explanations than the bunch of human hostility that peered over its
coping; he wisely decided to withhold his peace overtures till a more
hopeful occasion.
Two days later he ransacked the best sweet shop in the neighbouring
market town for a box of chocolates that by its size and contents should
fitly atone for the dismal deed done under the oak tree in the meadow.
The two first specimens that were shown him he hastily rejected; one had
a group of chickens pictured on its lid, the other bore the portrait of a
tabby kitten. A third sample was more simply bedecked with a spray of
painted poppies, and Octavian hailed the flowers of forgetfulness as a
happy omen. He felt distinctly more at ease with his surroundings when
the imposing package had been sent across to the grey house, and a
message returned to say that it had been duly given to the children. The
next morning he sauntered with purposeful steps past the long blank wall
on his way to the chicken-run and piggery that stood at the bottom of the
meadow. The three children were perched at their accustomed look-out,
and their range of sight did not seem to concern itself with Octavian’s
presence. As he became depressingly aware of the aloofness of their gaze
he also noted a strange variegation in the herbage at his feet; the
greensward for a considerable space around was strewn and speckled with a
chocolate-coloured hail, enlivened here and there with gay tinsel-like
wrappings or the glistening mauve of crystallised violets. It was as
though the fairy paradise of a greedyminded child had taken shape and
substance in the vegetation of the meadow. Octavian’s bloodmoney had
been flung back at him in scorn.
To increase his discomfiture the march of events tended to shift the
blame of ravaged chicken-coops from the supposed culprit who had already
paid full forfeit; the young chicks were still carried off, and it seemed
highly probable that the cat had only haunted the chicken-run to prey on
the rats which harboured there. Through the flowing channels of servant
talk the children learned of this belated revision of verdict, and
Octavian one day picked up a sheet of copy-book paper on which was
painstakingly written: “Beast. Rats eated your chickens.” More ardently
than ever did he wish for an opportunity for sloughing off the disgrace
that enwrapped him, and earning some happier nickname from his three
unsparing judges.
And one day a chance inspiration came to him. Olivia, his two-year-old
daughter, was accustomed to spend the hour from high noon till one
o’clock with her father while the nursemaid gobbled and digested her
dinner and novelette. About the same time the blank wall was usually
enlivened by the presence of its three small wardens. Octavian, with
seeming carelessness of purpose, brought Olivia well within hail of the
watchers and noted with hidden delight the growing interest that dawned
in that hitherto sternly hostile quarter. His little Olivia, with her
sleepy placid ways, was going to succeed where he, with his anxious
well-meant overtures, had so signally failed. He brought her a large
yellow dahlia, which she grasped tightly in one hand and regarded with a
stare of benevolent boredom, such as one might bestow on amateur
classical dancing performed in aid of a deserving charity. Then he
turned shyly to the group perched on the wall and asked with affected
carelessness, “Do you like flowers?” Three solemn nods rewarded his
venture.
“Which sorts do you like best?” he asked, this time with a distinct
betrayal of eagerness in his voice.
“Those with all the colours, over there.” Three chubby arms pointed to a
distant tangle of sweet-pea. Child-like, they had asked for what lay
farthest from hand, but Octavian trotted off gleefully to obey their
welcome behest. He pulled and plucked with unsparing hand, and brought
every variety of tint that he could see into his bunch that was rapidly
becoming a bundle. Then he turned to retrace his steps, and found the
blank wall blanker and more deserted than ever, while the foreground was
void of all trace of Olivia. Far down the meadow three children were
pushing a go-cart at the utmost speed they could muster in the direction
of the piggeries; it was Olivia’s go-cart and Olivia sat in it, somewhat
bumped and shaken by the pace at which she was being driven, but
apparently retaining her wonted composure of mind. Octavian stared for a
moment at the rapidly moving group, and then started in hot pursuit,
shedding as he ran sprays of blossom from the mass of sweet-pea that he
still clutched in his hands. Fast as he ran the children had reached the
piggery before he could overtake them, and he arrived just in time to see
Olivia, wondering but unprotesting, hauled and pushed up to the roof of
the nearest sty. They were old buildings in some need of repair, and the
rickety roof would certainly not have borne Octavian’s weight if he had
attempted to follow his daughter and her captors on their new vantage
ground.
“What are you going to do with her?” he panted. There was no mistaking
the grim trend of mischief in those flushed by sternly composed young
faces.
“Hang her in chains over a slow fire,” said one of the boys. Evidently
they had been reading English history.
“Frow her down the pigs will d’vour her, every bit ’cept the palms of her
hands,” said the other boy. It was also evident that they had studied
Biblical history.
The last proposal was the one which most alarmed Octavian, since it might
be carried into effect at a moment’s notice; there had been cases, he
remembered, of pigs eating babies.
“You surely wouldn’t treat my poor little Olivia in that way?” he
pleaded.
“You killed our little cat,” came in stern reminder from three throats.
“I’m sorry I did,” said Octavian, and if there is a standard measurement
in truths Octavian’s statement was assuredly a large nine.
“We shall be very sorry when we’ve killed Olivia,” said the girl, “but we
can’t be sorry till we’ve done it.”
The inexorable child-logic rose like an unyielding rampart before
Octavian’s scared pleadings. Before he could think of any fresh line of
appeal his energies were called out in another direction. Olivia had
slid off the roof and fallen with a soft, unctuous splash into a morass
of muck and decaying straw. Octavian scrambled hastily over the pigsty
wall to her rescue, and at once found himself in a quagmire that engulfed
his feet. Olivia, after the first shock of surprise at her sudden drop
through the air, had been mildly pleased at finding herself in close and
unstinted contact with the sticky element that oozed around her, but as
she began to sink gently into the bed of slime a feeling dawned on her
that she was not after all very happy, and she began to cry in the
tentative fashion of the normally good child. Octavian, battling with
the quagmire, which seemed to have learned the rare art of giving way at
all points without yielding an inch, saw his daughter slowly disappearing
in the engulfing slush, her smeared face further distorted with the
contortions of whimpering wonder, while from their perch on the pigsty
roof the three children looked down with the cold unpitying detachment of
the Parcæ Sisters.
“I can’t reach her in time,” gasped Octavian, “she’ll be choked in the
muck. Won’t you help her?”
“No one helped our cat,” came the inevitable reminder.
“I’ll do anything to show you how sorry I am about that,” cried Octavian,
with a further desperate flounder, which carried him scarcely two inches
forward.
“Will you stand in a white sheet by the grave?”
“Yes,” screamed Octavian.
“Holding a candle?”
“An’ saying ‘I’m a miserable Beast’?”
Octavian agreed to both suggestions.
“For a long, long time?”
“For half an hour,” said Octavian. There was an anxious ring in his
voice as he named the time-limit; was there not the precedent of a German
king who did open-air penance for several days and nights at
Christmas-time clad only in his shirt? Fortunately the children did not
appear to have read German history, and half an hour seemed long and
goodly in their eyes.
“All right,” came with threefold solemnity from the roof, and a moment
later a short ladder had been laboriously pushed across to Octavian, who
lost no time in propping it against the low pigsty wall. Scrambling
gingerly along its rungs he was able to lean across the morass that
separated him from his slowly foundering offspring and extract her like
an unwilling cork from it’s slushy embrace. A few minutes later he was
listening to the shrill and repeated assurances of the nursemaid that her
previous experience of filthy spectacles had been on a notably smaller
scale.
That same evening when twilight was deepening into darkness Octavian took
up his position as penitent under the lone oak-tree, having first
carefully undressed the part. Clad in a zephyr shirt, which on this
occasion thoroughly merited its name, he held in one hand a lighted
candle and in the other a watch, into which the soul of a dead plumber
seemed to have passed. A box of matches lay at his feet and was resorted
to on the fairly frequent occasions when the candle succumbed to the
night breezes. The house loomed inscrutable in the middle distance, but
as Octavian conscientiously repeated the formula of his penance he felt
certain that three pairs of solemn eyes were watching his moth-shared
vigil.
And the next morning his eyes were gladdened by a sheet of copy-book
paper lying beside the blank wall, on which was written the message
“Un-Beast.”