Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches
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Saki (H.H. Munro) >> Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches
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When the Chaplain returned to his quarters some fifteen minutes
later, the black flag was floating over the prison tower. Breakfast
was waiting for him in the dining-room, but he first passed into his
library, and, taking up the Times Atlas, consulted a map of the
Balkan Peninsula. "A thing like that," he observed, closing the
volume with a snap, "might happen to any one."
THE SEX THAT DOESN'T SHOP
The opening of a large new centre for West End shopping,
particularly feminine shopping, suggests the reflection, Do women
ever really shop? Of course, it is a well-attested fact that they
go forth shopping as assiduously as a bee goes flower-visiting, but
do they shop in the practical sense of the word? Granted the money,
time, and energy, a resolute course of shopping transactions would
naturally result in having one's ordinary domestic needs unfailingly
supplied, whereas it is notorious that women servants (and
housewives of all classes) make it almost a point of honour not to
be supplied with everyday necessities. "We shall be out of starch
by Thursday," they say with fatalistic foreboding, and by Thursday
they are out of starch. They have predicted almost to a minute the
moment when their supply would give out and if Thursday happens to
be early closing day their triumph is complete. A shop where starch
is stored for retail purposes possibly stands at their very door,
but the feminine mind has rejected such an obvious source for
replenishing a dwindling stock. "We don't deal there" places it at
once beyond the pale of human resort. And it is noteworthy that,
just as a sheep-worrying dog seldom molests the flocks in his near
neighbourhood, so a woman rarely deals with shops in her immediate
vicinity. The more remote the source of supply the more fixed seems
to be the resolve to run short of the commodity. The Ark had
probably not quitted its last moorings five minutes before some
feminine voice gloatingly recorded a shortage of bird-seed. A few
days ago two lady acquaintances of mine were confessing to some
mental uneasiness because a friend had called just before lunch-
time, and they had been unable to ask her to stop and share their
meal, as (with a touch of legitimate pride) "there was nothing in
the house." I pointed out that they lived in a street that bristled
with provision shops and that it would have been easy to mobilise a
very passable luncheon in less than five minutes. "That," they said
with quiet dignity, "would not have occurred to us," and I felt that
I had suggested something bordering on the indecent.
But it is in catering for her literary wants that a woman's shopping
capacity breaks down most completely. If you have perchance
produced a book which has met with some little measure of success,
you are certain to get a letter from some lady whom you scarcely
known to bow to, asking you "how it can be got." She knows the name
of the book, its author, and who published it, but how to get into
actual contact with it is still an unsolved problem to her. You
write back pointing out that to have recourse to an ironmonger or a
corn-dealer will only entail delay and disappointment, and suggest
an application to a bookseller as the most hopeful thing you can
think of. In a day or two she writes again: "It is all right; I
have borrowed it from your aunt." Here, of course, we have an
example of the Beyond-Shopper, one who has learned the Better Way,
but the helplessness exists even when such bypaths of relief are
closed. A lady who lives in the West End was expressing to me the
other day her interest in West Highland terriers, and her desire to
know more about the breed, so when, a few days later, I came across
an exhaustive article on that subject in the current number of one
of our best known outdoor-life weeklies, I mentioned that
circumstance in a letter, giving the date of that number. "I cannot
get the paper," was her telephoned response. And she couldn't. She
lived in a city where newsagents are numbered, I suppose, by the
thousand, and she must have passed dozens of such shops in her daily
shopping excursions, but as far as she was concerned that article on
West Highland terriers might as well have been written in a missal
stored away in some Buddhist monastery in Eastern Thibet.
The brutal directness of the masculine shopper arouses a certain
combative derision in the feminine onlooker. A cat that spreads one
shrew-mouse over the greater part of a long summer afternoon, and
then possibly loses him, doubtless feels the same contempt for the
terrier who compresses his rat into ten seconds of the strenuous
life. I was finishing off a short list of purchases a few
afternoons ago when I was discovered by a lady of my acquaintance
whom, swerving aside from the lead given us by her godparents thirty
years ago, we will call Agatha.
"You're surely not buying blotting-paper HERE?" she exclaimed in an
agitated whisper, and she seemed so genuinely concerned that I
stayed my hand.
"Let me take you to Winks and Pinks," she said as soon as we were
out of the building: "they've got such lovely shades of blotting-
paper--pearl and heliotrope and momie and crushed--"
"But I want ordinary white blotting-paper," I said.
"Never mind. They know me at Winks and Pinks," she replied
inconsequently. Agatha apparently has an idea that blotting-paper
is only sold in small quantities to persons of known reputation, who
may be trusted not to put it to dangerous or improper uses. After
walking some two hundred yards she began to feel that her tea was of
more immediate importance than my blotting-paper.
"What do you want blotting-paper for?" she asked suddenly. I
explained patiently.
"I use it to dry up the ink of wet manuscript without smudging the
writing. Probably a Chinese invention of the second century before
Christ, but I'm not sure. The only other use for it that I can
think of is to roll it into a ball for a kitten to play with."
"But you haven't got a kitten," said Agatha, with a feminine desire
for stating the entire truth on most occasions.
"A stray one might come in at any moment," I replied.
Anyway, I didn't get the blotting-paper.
THE BLOOD-FEUD OF TOAD-WATER
A WEST-COUNTRY EPIC
The Cricks lived at Toad-Water; and in the same lonely upland spot
Fate had pitched the home of the Saunderses, and for miles around
these two dwellings there was never a neighbour or a chimney or even
a burying-ground to bring a sense of cheerful communion or social
intercourse. Nothing but fields and spinneys and barns, lanes and
waste-lands. Such was Toad-Water; and, even so, Toad-Water had its
history.
Thrust away in the benighted hinterland of a scattered market
district, it might have been supposed that these two detached items
of the Great Human Family would have leaned towards one another in a
fellowship begotten of kindred circumstances and a common isolation
from the outer world. And perhaps it had been so once, but the way
of things had brought it otherwise. Indeed, otherwise. Fate, which
had linked the two families in such unavoidable association of
habitat, had ordained that the Crick household should nourish and
maintain among its earthly possessions sundry head of domestic
fowls, while to the Saunderses was given a disposition towards the
cultivation of garden crops. Herein lay the material, ready to
hand, for the coming of feud and ill-blood. For the grudge between
the man of herbs and the man of live stock is no new thing; you will
find traces of it in the fourth chapter of Genesis. And one sunny
afternoon in late spring-time the feud came--came, as such things
mostly do come, with seeming aimlessness and triviality. One of the
Crick hens, in obedience to the nomadic instincts of her kind,
wearied of her legitimate scatching-ground, and flew over the low
wall that divided the holdings of the neighbours. And there, on the
yonder side, with a hurried consciousness that her time and
opportunities might be limited, the misguided bird scratched and
scraped and beaked and delved in the soft yielding bed that had been
prepared for the solace and well-being of a colony of seedling
onions. Little showers of earth-mould and root-fibres went spraying
before the hen and behind her, and every minute the area of her
operations widened. The onions suffered considerably. Mrs.
Saunders, sauntering at this luckless moment down the garden path,
in order to fill her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of the
weeds, which grew faster than she or her good man cared to remove
them, stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a more
magnificent grievance. And then, in the hour of her calamity, she
turned instinctively to the Great Mother, and gathered in her
capacious hands large clods of the hard brown soil that lay at her
feet. With a terrible sincerity of purpose, though with a
contemptible inadequacy of aim, she rained her earth bolts at the
marauder, and the bursting pellets called forth a flood of cackling
protest and panic from the hastily departing fowl. Calmness under
misfortune is not an attribute of either hen-folk or womenkind, and
while Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such portions of
the slang dictionary as are permitted by the Nonconformist
conscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da Gama fowl was waking the
echoes of Toad-Water with crescendo bursts of throat music which
compelled attention to her griefs. Mrs. Crick had a long family,
and was therefore licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have a
short temper, and when some of her ubiquitous offspring had informed
her, with the authority of eye-witnesses, that her neighbour had so
far forgotten herself as to heave stones at her hen--her best hen,
the best layer in the countryside--her thoughts clothed themselves
in language "unbecoming to a Christian woman"--so at least said Mrs.
Saunders, to whom most of the language was applied. Nor was she, on
her part, surprised at Mrs. Crick's conduct in letting her hens
stray into other body's gardens, and then abusing of them, seeing as
how she remembered things against Mrs. Crick--and the latter
simultaneously had recollections of lurking episodes in the past of
Susan Saunders that were nothing to her credit. "Fond memory, when
all things fade we fly to thee," and in the paling light of an April
afternoon the two women confronted each other from their respective
sides of the party wall, recalling with shuddering breath the blots
and blemishes of their neighbour's family record. There was that
aunt of Mrs. Crick's who had died a pauper in Exeter workhouse--
every one knew that Mrs. Saunders' uncle on her mother's side drank
himself to death--then there was that Bristol cousin of Mrs.
Crick's! From the shrill triumph with which his name was dragged
in, his crime must have been pilfering from a cathedral at least,
but as both remembrancers were speaking at once it was difficult to
distinguish his infamy from the scandal which beclouded the memory
of Mrs. Saunders' brother's wife's mother--who may have been a
regicide, and was certainly not a nice person as Mrs. Crick painted
her. And then, with an air of accumulating and irresistible
conviction, each belligerent informed the other that she was no
lady--after which they withdrew in a great silence, feeling that
nothing further remained to be said. The chaffinches clinked in the
apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and the
waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, but
between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate,
permeating and permanent.
The male heads of the families were necessarily drawn into the
quarrel, and the children on either side were forbidden to have
anything to do with the unhallowed offspring of the other party. As
they had to travel a good three miles along the same road to school
every day, this was awkward, but such things have to be. Thus all
communication between the households was sundered. Except the cats.
Much as Mrs. Saunders might deplore it, rumour persistently pointed
to the Crick he-cat as the presumable father of sundry kittens of
which the Saunders she-cat was indisputably the mother. Mrs.
Saunders drowned the kittens, but the disgrace remained.
Summer succeeded spring, and winter summer, but the feud outlasted
the waning seasons. Once, indeed, it seemed as though the healing
influences of religion might restore to Toad-Water its erstwhile
peace; the hostile families found themselves side by side in the
soul-kindling atmosphere of a Revival Tea, where hymns were blended
with a beverage that came of tea-leaves and hot water and took after
the latter parent, and where ghostly counsel was tempered by
garnishings of solidly fashioned buns--and here, wrought up by the
environment of festive piety, Mrs. Saunders so far unbent as to
remark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the evening had been a fine one.
Mrs. Crick, under the influence of her ninth cup of tea and her
fourth hymn, ventured on the hope that it might continue fine, but a
maladroit allusion on the part of the Saunders good man to the
backwardness of garden crops brought the Feud stalking forth from
its corner with all its old bitterness. Mrs. Saunders joined
heartily in the singing of the final hymn, which told of peace and
joy and archangels and golden glories; but her thoughts were
dwelling on the pauper aunt of Exeter.
Years have rolled away, and some of the actors in this wayside drama
have passed into the Unknown; other onions have arisen, have
flourished, have gone their way, and the offending hen has long
since expiated her misdeeds and lain with trussed feet and a look of
ineffable peace under the arched roof of Barnstaple market.
But the Blood-feud of Toad-Water survives to this day.
A YOUNG TURKISH CATASTROPHE
IN TWO SCENES
The Minister for Fine Arts (to whose Department had been lately
added the new sub-section of Electoral Engineering) paid a business
visit to the Grand Vizier. According to Eastern etiquette they
discoursed for a while on indifferent subjects. The minister only
checked himself in time from making a passing reference to the
Marathon Race, remembering that the Vizier had a Persian grandmother
and might consider any allusion to Marathon as somewhat tactless.
Presently the Minister broached the subject of his interview.
"Under the new Constitution are women to have votes?" he asked
suddenly.
"To have votes? Women?" exclaimed the Vizier in some astonishment.
"My dear Pasha, the New Departure has a flavour of the absurd as it
is; don't let's try and make it altogether ridiculous. Women have
no souls and no intelligence; why on earth should they have votes?"
"I know it sounds absurd," said the Minister, "but they are
seriously considering the idea in the West."
"Then they must have a larger equipment of seriousness than I gave
them credit for. After a lifetime of specialised effort in
maintaining my gravity I can scarcely restrain an inclination to
smile at the suggestion. Why, out womenfolk in most cases don't
know how to read or write. How could they perform the operation of
voting?"
"They could be shown the names of the candidates and where to make
their cross."
"I beg your pardon?" interrupted the Vizier.
"Their crescent, I mean," corrected the Minister. "It would be to
the liking of the Young Turkish Party," he added.
"Oh, well," said the Vizier, "if we are to do the thing at all we
may as well go the whole h- " he pulled up just as he was uttering
the name of an unclean animal, and continued, "the complete camel.
I will issue instructions that womenfolk are to have votes."
* * *
The poll was drawing to a close in the Lakoumistan division. The
candidate of the Young Turkish Party was known to be three or four
hundred votes ahead, and he was already drafting his address,
returning thanks to the electors. His victory had been almost a
foregone conclusion, for he had set in motion all the approved
electioneering machinery of the West. He had even employed
motorcars. Few of his supporters had gone to the poll in these
vehicles, but, thanks to the intelligent driving of his chauffeurs,
many of his opponents had gone to their graves or to the local
hospitals, or otherwise abstained from voting. And then something
unlooked-for happened. The rival candidate, Ali the Blest, arrived
on the scene with his wives and womenfolk, who numbered, roughly,
six hundred. Ali had wasted little effort on election literature,
but had been heard to remark that every vote given to his opponent
meant another sack thrown into the Bosphorus. The Young Turkish
candidate, who had conformed to the Western custom of one wife and
hardly any mistresses, stood by helplessly while his adversary's
poll swelled to a triumphant majority.
"Cristabel Columbus!" he exclaimed, invoking in some confusion the
name of a distinguished pioneer; "who would have thought it?"
"Strange," mused Ali, "that one who harangued so clamorously about
the Secret Ballot should have overlooked the Veiled Vote."
And, walking homeward with his constituents, he murmured in his
beard an improvisation on the heretic poet of Persia:
"One, rich in metaphors, his Cause contrives
To urge with edged words, like Kabul knives;
And I, who worst him in this sorry game,
Was never rich in anything but--wives."
JUDKIN OF THE PARCELS
A figure in an indefinite tweed suit, carrying brown-paper parcels.
That is what we met suddenly, at the bend of a muddy Dorsetshire
lane, and the roan mare stared and obviously thought of a curtsey.
The mare is road-shy, with intervals of stolidity, and there is no
telling what she will pass and what she won't. We call her Redford.
That was my first meeting with Judkin, and the next time the
circumstances were the same; the same muddy lane, the same rather
apologetic figure in the tweed suit, the same--or very similar--
parcels. Only this time the roan looked straight in front of her.
Whether I asked the groom or whether he advanced the information, I
forget; but someway I gradually reconstructed the life-history of
this trudger of the lanes. It was much the same, no doubt, as that
of many others who are from time to time pointed out to one as
having been aforetime in crack cavalry regiments and noted
performers in the saddle; men who have breathed into their lungs the
wonder of the East, have romped through life as through a cotillon,
have had a thrust perhaps at the Viceroy's Cup, and done fantastic
horsefleshy things around the Gulf of Aden. And then a golden
stream has dried up, the sunlight has faded suddenly out of things,
and the gods have nodded "Go." And they have not gone. They have
turned instead to the muddy lanes and cheap villas and the marked-
down ills of life, to watch pear trees growing and to encourage hens
for their eggs. And Judkin was even as these others; the wine had
been suddenly spilt from his cup of life, and he had stayed to suck
at the dregs which the wise throw away. In the days of his scorn
for most things he would have stared the roan mare and her turn-out
out of all pretension to smartness, as he would have frozen a cheap
claret behind its cork, or a plain woman behind her veil; and now he
was walking stoically through the mud, in a tweed suit that would
eventually go on to the gardener's boy, and would perhaps fit him.
The dear gods, who know the end before the beginning, were perhaps
growing a gardener's boy somewhere to fit the garments, and Judkin
was only a caretaker, inhabiting a portion of them. That is what I
like to think, and I am probably wrong. And Judkin, whose clothes
had been to him once more than a religion, scarcely less sacred than
a family quarrel, would carry those parcels back to his villa and to
the wife who awaited him and them--a wife who may, for all we know
to the contrary, have had a figure once, and perhaps has yet a heart
of gold--of nine-carat gold, let us say at the least--but assuredly
a soul of tape. And he that has fetched and carried will explain
how it has fared with him in his dealings, and if he has brought the
wrong sort of sugar or thread he will wheedle away the displeasure
from that leaden face as a pastrycook girl will drive bluebottles
off a stale bun. And that man has known what it was to coax the
fret of a thoroughbred, to soothe its toss and sweat as it danced
beneath him in the glee and chafe of its pulses and the glory of its
thews. He has been in the raw places of the earth, where the desert
beasts have whimpered their unthinkable psalmody, and their eyes
have shone back the reflex of the midnight stars--and he can immerse
himself in the tending of an incubator. It is horrible and wrong,
and yet when I have met him in the lanes his face has worn a look of
tedious cheerfulness that might pass for happiness. Has Judkin of
the Parcels found something in the lees of life that I have missed
in going to and fro over many waters? Is there more wisdom in his
perverseness than in the madness of the wise? The dear gods know.
I don't think I saw Judkin more than three times all told, and
always the lane was our point of contact; but as the roan mare was
taking me to the station one heavy, cloud-smeared day, I passed a
dull-looking villa that the groom, or instinct, told me was Judkin's
home. From beyond a hedge of ragged elder-bushes could be heard the
thud, thud of a spade, with an occasional clink and pause, as if
some one had picked out a stone and thrown it to a distance, and I
knew that HE was doing nameless things to the roots of a pear tree.
Near by him, I felt sure, would be lying a large and late vegetable
marrow, and its largeness and lateness would be a theme of
conversation at luncheon. It would be suggested that it should
grace the harvest thanksgiving service; the harvest having been so
generally unsatisfactory, it would be unfair to let the farmers
supply all the material for rejoicing.
And while I was speeding townwards along the rails Judkin would be
plodding his way to the vicarage bearing a vegetable marrow and a
basketful of dahlias. The basket to be returned.
GABRIEL-ERNEST
"There is a wild beast in your woods," said the artist Cunningham,
as he was being driven to the station. It was the only remark he
had made during the drive, but as Van Cheele had talked incessantly
his companion's silence had not been noticeable.
"A stray fox or two and some resident weasels. Nothing more
formidable," said Van Cheele. The artist said nothing.
"What did you mean about a wild beast?" said Van Cheele later, when
they were on the platform.
"Nothing. My imagination. Here is the train," said Cunningham.
That afternoon Van Cheele went for one of his frequent rambles
through his woodland property. He had a stuffed bittern in his
study, and knew the names of quite a number of wild flowers, so his
aunt had possibly some justification in describing him as a great
naturalist. At any rate, he was a great walker. It was his custom
to take mental notes of everything he saw during his walks, not so
much for the purpose of assisting contemporary science as to provide
topics for conversation afterwards. When the bluebells began to
show themselves in flower he made a point of informing every one of
the fact; the season of the year might have warned his hearers of
the likelihood of such an occurrence, but at least they felt that he
was being absolutely frank with them.
What Van Cheele saw on this particular afternoon was, however,
something far removed from his ordinary range of experience. On a
shelf of smooth stone overhanging a deep pool in the hollow of an
oak coppice a boy of about sixteen lay asprawl, drying his wet brown
limbs luxuriously in the sun. His wet hair, parted by a recent
dive, lay close to his head, and his light-brown eyes, so light that
there was an almost tigerish gleam in them, were turned towards Van
Cheele with a certain lazy watchfulness. It was an unexpected
apparition, and Van Cheele found himself engaged in the novel
process of thinking before he spoke. Where on earth could this
wild-looking boy hail from? The miller's wife had lost a child some
two months ago, supposed to have been swept away by the mill-race,
but that had been a mere baby, not a half-grown lad.
"What are you doing there?" he demanded.
"Obviously, sunning myself," replied the boy.
"Where do you live?"
"Here, in these woods."
"You can't live in the woods," said Van Cheele.
"They are very nice woods," said the boy, with a touch of patronage
in his voice.
"But where do you sleep at night?"
"I don't sleep at night; that's my busiest time."
Van Cheele began to have an irritated feeling that he was grappling
with a problem that was eluding him.
"What do you feed on?" he asked.
"Flesh," said the boy, and he pronounced the word with slow relish,
as though he were tasting it.
"Flesh! What Flesh?"
"Since it interests you, rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs
in their season, children when I can get any; they're usually too
well locked in at night, when I do most of my hunting. It's quite
two months since I tasted child-flesh."