The Rev. Wilfrid Gaspilton, in one of those clerical migrations
inconsequent-seeming to the lay mind, had removed from the moderately
fashionable parish of St. Luke’s, Kensingate, to the immoderately rural
parish of St. Chuddocks, somewhere in Yondershire. There were doubtless
substantial advantages connected with the move, but there were certainly
some very obvious drawbacks. Neither the migratory clergyman nor his
wife were able to adapt themselves naturally and comfortably to the
conditions of country life. Beryl, Mrs. Gaspilton, had always looked
indulgently on the country as a place where people of irreproachable
income and hospitable instincts cultivated tennis-lawns and rose-gardens
and Jacobean pleasaunces, wherein selected gatherings of interested
week-end guests might disport themselves. Mrs. Gaspilton considered
herself as distinctly an interesting personality, and from a limited
standpoint she was doubtless right. She had indolent dark eyes and a
comfortable chin, which belied the slightly plaintive inflection which
she threw into her voice at suitable intervals. She was tolerably well
satisfied with the smaller advantages of life, but she regretted that
Fate had not seen its way to reserve for her some of the ampler successes
for which she felt herself well qualified. She would have liked to be
the centre of a literary, slightly political salon, where discerning
satellites might have recognised the breadth of her outlook on human
affairs and the undoubted smallness of her feet. As it was, Destiny had
chosen for her that she should be the wife of a rector, and had now
further decreed that a country rectory should be the background to her
existence. She rapidly made up her mind that her surroundings did not
call for exploration; Noah had predicted the Flood, but no one expected
him to swim about in it. Digging in a wet garden or trudging through
muddy lanes were exertions which she did not propose to undertake. As
long as the garden produced asparagus and carnations at pleasingly
frequent intervals Mrs. Gaspilton was content to approve of its expense
and otherwise ignore its existence. She would fold herself up, so to
speak, in an elegant, indolent little world of her own, enjoying the
minor recreations of being gently rude to the doctor’s wife and
continuing the leisurely production of her one literary effort, _The
Forbidden Horsepond_, a translation of Baptiste Leopoy’s _L’Abreuvoir
interdit_. It was a labour which had already been so long drawn-out that
it seemed probable that Baptiste Lepoy would drop out of vogue before her
translation of his temporarily famous novel was finished. However, the
languid prosecution of the work had invested Mrs. Gaspilton with a
certain literary dignity, even in Kensingate circles, and would place her
on a pinnacle in St. Chuddocks, where hardly any one read French, and
assuredly no one had heard of _L’Abreuvoir interdit_.
The Rector’s wife might be content to turn her back complacently on the
country; it was the Rector’s tragedy that the country turned its back on
him. With the best intention in the world and the immortal example of
Gilbert White before him, the Rev. Wilfrid found himself as bored and ill
at ease in his new surroundings as Charles II would have been at a modern
Wesleyan Conference. The birds that hopped across his lawn hopped across
it as though it were their lawn, and not his, and gave him plainly to
understand that in their eyes he was infinitely less interesting than a
garden worm or the rectory cat. The hedgeside and meadow flowers were
equally uninspiring; the lesser celandine seemed particularly unworthy of
the attention that English poets had bestowed on it, and the Rector knew
that he would be utterly miserable if left alone for a quarter of an hour
in its company. With the human inhabitants of his parish he was no
better off; to know them was merely to know their ailments, and the
ailments were almost invariably rheumatism. Some, of course, had other
bodily infirmities, but they always had rheumatism as well. The Rector
had not yet grasped the fact that in rural cottage life not to have
rheumatism is as glaring an omission as not to have been presented at
Court would be in more ambitious circles. And with all this death of
local interest there was Beryl shutting herself off with her ridiculous
labours on _The Forbidden Horsepond_.
“I don’t see why you should suppose that any one wants to read Baptiste
Lepoy in English,” the Reverend Wilfrid remarked to his wife one morning,
finding her surrounded with her usual elegant litter of dictionaries,
fountain pens, and scribbling paper; “hardly any one bothers to read him
now in France.”
“My dear,” said Beryl, with an intonation of gentle weariness, “haven’t
two or three leading London publishers told me they wondered no one had
ever translated _L’Abreuvoir interdit_, and begged me—”
“Publishers always clamour for the books that no one has ever written,
and turn a cold shoulder on them as soon as they’re written. If St. Paul
were living now they would pester him to write an Epistle to the
Esquimaux, but no London publisher would dream of reading his Epistle to
the Ephesians.”
“Is there any asparagus in the garden?” asked Beryl; “because I’ve told
cook—”
“Not anywhere in the garden,” snapped the Rector, “but there’s no doubt
plenty in the asparagus-bed, which is the usual place for it.”
And he walked away into the region of fruit trees and vegetable beds to
exchange irritation for boredom. It was there, among the gooseberry
bushes and beneath the medlar trees, that the temptation to the
perpetration of a great literary fraud came to him.
Some weeks later the _Bi-Monthly Review_ gave to the world, under the
guarantee of the Rev. Wilfrid Gaspilton, some fragments of Persian verse,
alleged to have been unearthed and translated by a nephew who was at
present campaigning somewhere in the Tigris valley. The Rev. Wilfrid
possessed a host of nephews, and it was of course, quite possible that
one or more of them might be in military employ in Mesopotamia, though no
one could call to mind any particular nephew who could have been
suspected of being a Persian scholar.
The verses were attributed to one Ghurab, a hunter, or, according to
other accounts, warden of the royal fishponds, who lived, in some
unspecified century, in the neighbourhood of Karmanshah. They breathed a
spirit of comfortable, even-tempered satire and philosophy, disclosing a
mockery that did not trouble to be bitter, a joy in life that was not
passionate to the verge of being troublesome.
“A Mouse that prayed for Allah’s aid
Blasphemed when no such aid befell:
A Cat, who feasted on that mouse,
Thought Allah managed vastly well.
Pray not for aid to One who made
A set of never-changing Laws,
But in your need remember well
He gave you speed, or guile—or claws.
Some laud a life of mild content:
Content may fall, as well as Pride.
The Frog who hugged his lowly Ditch
Was much disgruntled when it dried.
‘You are not on the Road to Hell,’
You tell me with fanatic glee:
Vain boaster, what shall that avail
If Hell is on the road to thee?
A Poet praised the Evening Star,
Another praised the Parrot’s hue:
A Merchant praised his merchandise,
And he, at least, praised what he knew.”
It was this verse which gave the critics and commentators some clue as to
the probable date of the composition; the parrot, they reminded the
public, was in high vogue as a type of elegance in the days of Hafiz of
Shiraz; in the quatrains of Omar it makes no appearance.
The next verse, it was pointed out, would apply to the political
conditions of the present day as strikingly as to the region and era for
which it was written—
“A Sultan dreamed day-long of Peace,
The while his Rivals’ armies grew:
They changed his Day-dreams into sleep
—The Peace, methinks, he never knew.”
Woman appeared little, and wine not at all in the verse of the
hunter-poet, but there was at least one contribution to the
love-philosophy of the East—
“O Moon-faced Charmer, and Star-drownèd Eyes,
And cheeks of soft delight, exhaling musk,
They tell me that thy charm will fade; ah well,
The Rose itself grows hue-less in the Dusk.”
Finally, there was a recognition of the Inevitable, a chill breath
blowing across the poet’s comfortable estimate of life—
“There is a sadness in each Dawn,
A sadness that you cannot rede:
The joyous Day brings in its train
The Feast, the Loved One, and the Steed.
Ah, there shall come a Dawn at last
That brings no life-stir to your ken,
A long, cold Dawn without a Day,
And ye shall rede its sadness then.”
The verses of Ghurab came on the public at a moment when a comfortable,
slightly quizzical philosophy was certain to be welcome, and their
reception was enthusiastic. Elderly colonels, who had outlived the love
of truth, wrote to the papers to say that they had been familiar with the
works of Ghurab in Afghanistan, and Aden, and other suitable localities a
quarter of a century ago. A Ghurab-of-Karmanshah Club sprang into
existence, the members of which alluded to each other as Brother
Ghurabians on the slightest provocation. And to the flood of inquiries,
criticisms, and requests for information, which naturally poured in on
the discoverer, or rather the discloser, of this long-hidden poet, the
Rev. Wilfrid made one effectual reply: Military considerations forbade
any disclosures which might throw unnecessary light on his nephew’s
movements.
After the war the Rector’s position will be one of unthinkable
embarrassment, but for the moment, at any rate, he has driven _The
Forbidden Horsepond_ out of the field.