Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches
S >>
Saki (H.H. Munro) >> Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches
Ignoring the chaffing nature of the last remark Van Cheele tried to
draw the boy on the subject of possible poaching operations.
"You're talking rather through your hat when you speak of feeding on
hares." (Considering the nature of the boy's toilet the simile was
hardly an apt one.) "Our hillside hares aren't easily caught."
"At night I hunt on four feet," was the somewhat cryptic response.
"I suppose you mean that you hunt with a dog?" hazarded Van Cheele.
The boy rolled slowly over on to his back, and laughed a weird low
laugh, that was pleasantly like a chuckle and disagreeably like a
snarl.
"I don't fancy any dog would be very anxious for my company,
especially at night."
Van Cheele began to feel that there was something positively uncanny
about the strange-eyed, strange-tongued youngster.
"I can't have you staying in these woods," he declared
authoritatively.
"I fancy you'd rather have me here than in your house," said the
boy.
The prospect of this wild, nude animal in Van Cheele's primly
ordered house was certainly an alarming one.
"If you don't go. I shall have to make you," said Van Cheele.
The boy turned like a flash, plunged into the pool, and in a moment
had flung his wet and glistening body half-way up the bank where Van
Cheele was standing. In an otter the movement would not have been
remarkable; in a boy Van Cheele found it sufficiently startling.
His foot slipped as he made an involuntarily backward movement, and
he found himself almost prostrate on the slippery weed-grown bank,
with those tigerish yellow eyes not very far from his own. Almost
instinctively he half raised his hand to his throat. They boy
laughed again, a laugh in which the snarl had nearly driven out the
chuckle, and then, with another of his astonishing lightning
movements, plunged out of view into a yielding tangle of weed and
fern.
"What an extraordinary wild animal!" said Van Cheele as he picked
himself up. And then he recalled Cunningham's remark "There is a
wild beast in your woods."
Walking slowly homeward, Van Cheele began to turn over in his mind
various local occurrences which might be traceable to the existence
of this astonishing young savage.
Something had been thinning the game in the woods lately, poultry
had been missing from the farms, hares were growing unaccountably
scarcer, and complaints had reached him of lambs being carried off
bodily from the hills. Was it possible that this wild boy was
really hunting the countryside in company with some clever poacher
dogs? He had spoken of hunting "four-footed" by night, but then,
again, he had hinted strangely at no dog caring to come near him,
"especially at night." It was certainly puzzling. And then, as Van
Cheele ran his mind over the various depredations that had been
committed during the last month or two, he came suddenly to a dead
stop, alike in his walk and his speculations. The child missing
from the mill two months ago--the accepted theory was that it had
tumbled into the mill-race and been swept away; but the mother had
always declared she had heard a shriek on the hill side of the
house, in the opposite direction from the water. It was
unthinkable, of course, but he wished that the boy had not made that
uncanny remark about child-flesh eaten two months ago. Such
dreadful things should not be said even in fun.
Van Cheele, contrary to his usual wont, did not feel disposed to be
communicative about his discovery in the wood. His position as a
parish councillor and justice of the peace seemed somehow
compromised by the fact that he was harbouring a personality of such
doubtful repute on his property; there was even a possibility that a
heavy bill of damages for raided lambs and poultry might be laid at
his door. At dinner that night he was quite unusually silent.
"Where's your voice gone to?" said his aunt. "One would think you
had seen a wolf."
Van Cheele, who was not familiar with the old saying, thought the
remark rather foolish; if he HAD seen a wolf on his property his
tongue would have been extraordinarily busy with the subject.
At breakfast next morning Van Cheele was conscious that his feeling
of uneasiness regarding yesterday's episode had not wholly
disappeared, and he resolved to go by train to the neighbouring
cathedral town, hunt up Cunningham, and learn from him what he had
really seen that had prompted the remark about a wild beast in the
woods. With this resolution taken, his usual cheerfulness partially
returned, and he hummed a bright little melody as he sauntered to
the morning-room for his customary cigarette. As he entered the
room the melody made way abruptly for a pious invocation.
Gracefully asprawl on the ottoman, in an attitude of almost
exaggerated repose, was the boy of the woods. He was drier than
when Van Cheele had last seen him, but no other alteration was
noticeable in his toilet.
"How dare you come here?" asked Van Cheele furiously.
"You told me I was not to stay in the woods," said the boy calmly.
"But not to come here. Supposing my aunt should see you!"
And with a view to minimising that catastrophe, Van Cheele hastily
obscured as much of his unwelcome guest as possible under the folds
of a Morning Post. At that moment his aunt entered the room.
"This is a poor boy who has lost his way--and lost his memory. He
doesn't know who he is or where he comes from," explained Van Cheele
desperately, glancing apprehensively at the waif's face to see
whether he was going to add inconvenient candour to his other savage
propensities.
Miss Van Cheele was enormously interested.
"Perhaps his underlinen is marked," she suggested.
"He seems to have lost most of that, too," said Van Cheele, making
frantic little grabs at the Morning Post to keep it in its place.
A naked homeless child appealed to Miss Van Cheele as warmly as a
stray kitten or derelict puppy would have done.
"We must do all we can for him," she decided, and in a very short
time a messenger, dispatched to the rectory, where a page-boy was
kept, had returned with a suit of pantry clothes, and the necessary
accessories of shirt, shoes, collar, etc. Clothed, clean, and
groomed, the boy lost none of his uncanniness in Van Cheele's eyes,
but his aunt found him sweet.
"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she
said. "Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names."
Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being
grafted on to a nice suitable child. His misgivings were not
diminished by the fact that his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted
out of the house at the first incoming of the boy, and now
obstinately remained shivering and yapping at the farther end of the
orchard, while the canary, usually as vocally industrious as Van
Cheele himself, had put itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps.
More than ever he was resolved to consult Cunningham without loss of
time.
As he drove off to the station his aunt was arranging that Gabriel-
Ernest should help her to entertain the infant members of her
Sunday-school class at tea that afternoon.
Cunningham was not at first disposed to be communicative.
"My mother died of some brain trouble," he explained, "so you will
understand why I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly
fantastic nature that I may see or think that I have seen."
"But what DID you see?" persisted Van Cheele.
"What I thought I saw was something so extraordinary that no really
sane man could dignify it with the credit of having actually
happened. I was standing, the last evening I was with you, half-
hidden in the hedgegrowth by the orchard gate, watching the dying
glow of the sunset. Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a
bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was
standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His
pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I
instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I
think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of
view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving
it cold and grey. And at the same moment an astounding thing
happened--the boy vanished too!"
"What! vanished away into nothing?" asked Van Cheele excitedly.
"No; that is the dreadful part of it," answered the artist; "on the
open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a
large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel,
yellow eyes. You may think--"
But Van Cheele did not stop for anything as futile as thought.
Already he was tearing at top speed towards the station. He
dismissed the idea of a telegram. "Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf"
was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and
his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted
to give her the key. His one hope was that he might reach home
before sundown. The cab which he chartered at the other end of the
railway journey bore him with what seemed exasperating slowness
along the country roads, which were pink and mauve with the flush of
the sinking sun. His aunt was putting away some unfinished jams and
cake when he arrived.
"Where is Gabriel-Ernest?" he almost screamed.
"He is taking the little Toop child home," said his aunt. "It was
getting so late, I thought it wasn't safe to let it go back alone.
What a lovely sunset, isn't it?"
But Van Cheele, although not oblivious of the glow in the western
sky, did not stay to discuss its beauties. At a speed for which he
was scarcely geared he raced along the narrow lane that led to the
home of the Toops. On one side ran the swift current of the mill-
stream, on the other rose the stretch of bare hillside. A dwindling
rim of red sun showed still on the skyline, and the next turning
must bring him in view of the ill-assorted couple he was pursuing.
Then the colour went suddenly out of things, and a grey light
settled itself with a quick shiver over the landscape. Van Cheele
heard a shrill wail of fear, and stopped running.
Nothing was ever seen again of the Toop child or Gabriel-Ernest, but
the latter's discarded garments were found lying in the road so it
was assumed that the child had fallen into the water, and that the
boy had stripped and jumped in, in a vain endeavour to save it. Van
Cheele and some workmen who were near by at the time testified to
having heard a child scream loudly just near the spot where the
clothes were found. Mrs. Toop, who had eleven other children, was
decently resigned to her bereavement, but Miss Van Cheele sincerely
mourned her lost foundling. It was on her initiative that a
memorial brass was put up in the parish church to "Gabriel-Ernest,
an unknown boy, who bravely sacrificed his life for another."
Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly
refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.
THE SAINT AND THE GOBLIN
The little stone Saint occupied a retired niche in a side aisle of
the old cathedral. No one quite remembered who he had been, but
that in a way was a guarantee of respectability. At least so the
Goblin said. The Goblin was a very fine specimen of quaint stone
carving, and lived up in the corbel on the wall opposite the niche
of the little Saint. He was connected with some of the best
cathedral folk, such as the queer carvings in the choir stalls and
chancel screen, and even the gargoyles high up on the roof. All the
fantastic beasts and manikins that sprawled and twisted in wood or
stone or lead overhead in the arches or away down in the crypt were
in some way akin to him; consequently he was a person of recognised
importance in the cathedral world.
The little stone Saint and the Goblin got on very well together,
though they looked at most things from different points of view.
The Saint was a philanthropist in an old fashioned way; he thought
the world, as he saw it, was good, but might be improved. In
particular he pitied the church mice, who were miserably poor. The
Goblin, on the other hand, was of opinion that the world, as he knew
it, was bad, but had better be let alone. It was the function of
the church mice to be poor.
"All the same," said the Saint, "I feel very sorry for them."
"Of course you do," said the Goblin; "it's YOUR function to feel
sorry for them. If they were to leave off being poor you couldn't
fulfil your functions. You'd be a sinecure."
He rather hoped that the Saint would ask him what a sinecure meant,
but the latter took refuge in a stony silence. The Goblin might be
right, but still, he thought, he would like to do something for the
church mice before winter came on; they were so very poor.
Whilst he was thinking the matter over he was startled by something
falling between his feet with a hard metallic clatter. It was a
bright new thaler; one of the cathedral jackdaws, who collected such
things, had flown in with it to a stone cornice just above his
niche, and the banging of the sacristy door had startled him into
dropping it. Since the invention of gunpowder the family nerves
were not what they had been.
"What have you got there?" asked the Goblin.
"A silver thaler," said the Saint. "Really," he continued, "it is
most fortunate; now I can do something for the church mice."
"How will you manage it?" asked the Goblin.
The Saint considered.
"I will appear in a vision to the vergeress who sweeps the floors.
I will tell her that she will find a silver thaler between my feet,
and that she must take it and buy a measure of corn and put it on my
shrine. When she finds the money she will know that it was a true
dream, and she will take care to follow my directions. Then the
mice will have food all the winter."
"Of course YOU can do that," observed the Goblin. "Now, I can only
appear to people after they have had a heavy supper of indigestible
things. My opportunities with the vergeress would be limited.
There is some advantage in being a saint after all."
All this while the coin was lying at the Saint's feet. It was clean
and glittering and had the Elector's arms beautifully stamped upon
it. The Saint began to reflect that such an opportunity was too
rare to be hastily disposed of. Perhaps indiscriminate charity
might be harmful to the church mice. After all, it was their
function to be poor; the Goblin had said so, and the Goblin was
generally right.
"I've been thinking," he said to that personage, "that perhaps it
would be really better if I ordered a thaler's worth of candles to
be placed on my shrine instead of the corn."
He often wished, for the look of the thing, that people would
sometimes burn candles at his shrine; but as they had forgotten who
he was it was not considered a profitable speculation to pay him
that attention.
"Candles would be more orthodox," said the Goblin.
"More orthodox, certainly," agreed the Saint, "and the mice could
have the ends to eat; candle-ends are most fattening."
The Goblin was too well bred to wink; besides, being a stone goblin,
it was out of the question.
* * *
"Well, if it ain't there, sure enough!" said the vergeress next
morning. She took the shining coin down from the dusty niche and
turned it over and over in her grimy hands. Then she put it to her
mouth and bit it.
"She can't be going to eat it," thought the Saint, and fixed her
with his stoniest stare.
"Well," said the woman, in a somewhat shriller key, "who'd have
thought it! A saint, too!"
Then she did an unaccountable thing. She hunted an old piece of
tape out of her pocket, and tied to crosswise, with a big loop,
round the thaler, and hung it round the neck of the little Saint.
Then she went away.
"The only possible explanation," said the Goblin, "is that it's a
bad one."
* * *
"What is that decoration your neighbour is wearing?" asked a wyvern
that was wrought into the capital of an adjacent pillar.
The Saint was ready to cry with mortification, only, being of stone,
he couldn't.
"It's a coin of--ahem!--fabulous value," replied the Goblin
tactfully.
And the news went round the Cathedral that the shrine of the little
stone Saint had been enriched by a priceless offering.
"After all, it's something to have the conscience of a goblin," said
the Saint to himself.
The church mice were as poor as ever. But that was their function.
THE SOUL OF LAPLOSHKA
Laploshka was one of the meanest men I have ever met, and quite one
of the most entertaining. He said horrid things about other people
in such a charming way that one forgave him for the equally horrid
things he said about oneself behind one's back. Hating anything in
the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to
those who do it for us and do it well. And Laploshka did it really
well.
Naturally Laploshka had a large circle of acquaintances, and as he
exercised some care in their selection it followed that an
appreciable proportion were men whose bank balances enabled them to
acquiesce indulgently in his rather one-sided views on hospitality.
Thus, although possessed of only moderate means, he was able to live
comfortably within his income, and still more comfortably within
those of various tolerantly disposed associates.
But towards the poor or to those of the same limited resources as
himself his attitude was one of watchful anxiety; he seemed to be
haunted by a besetting fear lest some fraction of a shilling or
franc, or whatever the prevailing coinage might be, should be
diverted from his pocket or service into that of a hard-up
companion. A two-franc cigar would be cheerfully offered to a
wealthy patron, on the principle of doing evil that good may come,
but I have known him indulge in agonies of perjury rather than admit
the incriminating possession of a copper coin when change was needed
to tip a waiter. The coin would have been duly returned at the
earliest opportunity--he would have taken means to insure against
forgetfulness on the part of the borrower--but accidents might
happen, and even the temporary estrangement from his penny or sou
was a calamity to be avoided.
The knowledge of this amiable weakness offered a perpetual
temptation to play upon Laploshka's fears of involuntary generosity.
To offer him a lift in a cab and pretend not to have enough money to
pay the fair, to fluster him with a request for a sixpence when his
hand was full of silver just received in change, these were a few of
the petty torments that ingenuity prompted as occasion afforded. To
do justice to Laploshka's resourcefulness it must be admitted that
he always emerged somehow or other from the most embarrassing
dilemma without in any way compromising his reputation for saying
"No." But the gods send opportunities at some time to most men, and
mine came one evening when Laploshka and I were supping together in
a cheap boulevard restaurant. (Except when he was the bidden guest
of some one with an irreproachable income, Laploshka was wont to
curb his appetite for high living; on such fortunate occasions he
let it go on an easy snaffle.) At the conclusion of the meal a
somewhat urgent message called me away, and without heeding my
companion's agitated protest, I called back cruelly, "Pay my share;
I'll settle with you to-morrow." Early on the morrow Laploshka
hunted me down by instinct as I walked along a side street that I
hardly ever frequented. He had the air of a man who had not slept.
"You owe me two francs from last night," was his breathless
greeting.
I spoke evasively of the situation in Portugal, where more trouble
seemed brewing. But Laploshka listened with the abstraction of the
deaf adder, and quickly returned to the subject of the two francs.
"I'm afraid I must owe it to you," I said lightly and brutally. "I
haven't a sou in the world," and I added mendaciously, "I'm going
away for six months or perhaps longer."
Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little and his cheeks
took on the mottled hues of an ethnographical map of the Balkan
Peninsula. That same day, at sundown, he died. "Failure of the
heart's action," was the doctor's verdict; but I, who knew better,
knew that he died of grief.
There arose the problem of what to do with his two francs. To have
killed Laploshka was one thing; to have kept his beloved money would
have argued a callousness of feeling of which I am not capable. The
ordinary solution, of giving it to the poor, would by no means fit
the present situation, for nothing would have distressed the dead
man more than such a misuse of his property. On the other hand, the
bestowal of two francs on the rich was an operation which called for
some tact. An easy way out of the difficulty seemed, however, to
present itself the following Sunday, as I was wedged into the
cosmopolitan crowd which filled the side-aisle of one of the most
popular Paris churches. A collecting-bag, for "the poor of Monsieur
le Cure," was buffeting its tortuous way across the seemingly
impenetrable human sea, and a German in front of me, who evidently
did not wish his appreciation of the magnificent music to be marred
by a suggestion of payment, made audible criticisms to his companion
on the claims of the said charity.
"They do not want money," he said; "they have too much money. They
have no poor. They are all pampered."
If that were really the case my way seemed clear. I dropped
Laploshka's two francs into the bag with a murmured blessing on the
rich of Monsieur le Cure.
Some three weeks later chance had taken me to Vienna, and I sat one
evening regaling myself in a humble but excellent little Gasthaus up
in the Wahringer quarter. The appointments were primitive, but the
Schnitzel, the beer, and the cheese could not have been improved on.
Good cheer brought good custom, and with the exception of one small
table near the door every place was occupied. Half-way through my
meal I happened to glance in the direction of that empty seat, and
saw that it was no longer empty. Poring over the bill of fare with
the absorbed scrutiny of one who seeks the cheapest among the cheap
was Laploshka. Once he looked across at me, with a comprehensive
glance at my repast, as though to say, "It is my two francs you are
eating," and then looked swiftly away. Evidently the poor of
Monsieur le Cure had been genuine poor. The Schnitzel turned to
leather in my mouth, the beer seemed tepid; I left the Emmenthaler
untasted. My one idea was to get away from the room, away from the
table where THAT was seated; and as I fled I felt Laploshka's
reproachful eyes watching the amount that I gave to the piccolo--out
of his two francs. I lunched next day at an expensive restaurant
which I felt sure that the living Laploshka would never have entered
on his own account, and I hoped that the dead Laploshka would
observe the same barriers. I was not mistaken, but as I came out I
found him miserably studying the bill of fare stuck up on the
portals. Then he slowly made his way over to a milk-hall. For the
first time in my experience I missed the charm and gaiety of Vienna
life.
After that, in Paris or London or wherever I happened to be, I
continued to see a good deal of Laploshka. If I had a seat in a box
at a theatre I was always conscious of his eyes furtively watching
me from the dim recesses of the gallery. As I turned into my club
on a rainy afternoon I would see him taking inadequate shelter in a
doorway opposite. Even if I indulged in the modest luxury of a
penny chair in the Park he generally confronted me from one of the
free benches, never staring at me, but always elaborately conscious
of my presence. My friends began to comment on my changed looks,
and advised me to leave off heaps of things. I should have liked to
have left off Laploshka.
On a certain Sunday--it was probably Easter, for the crush was worse
than ever--I was again wedged into the crowd listening to the music
in the fashionable Paris church, and again the collection-bag was
buffeting its way across the human sea. An English lady behind me
was making ineffectual efforts to convey a coin into the still
distant bag, so I took the money at her request and helped it
forward to its destination. It was a two-franc piece. A swift
inspiration came to me, and I merely dropped my own sou into the bag
and slid the silver coin into my pocket. I had withdrawn
Laploshka's two francs from the poor, who should never have had the
legacy. As I backed away from the crowd I heard a woman's voice
say, "I don't believe he put my money in the bag. There are swarms
of people in Paris like that!" But my mind was lighter that it had
been for a long time.
The delicate mission of bestowing the retrieved sum on the deserving
rich still confronted me. Again I trusted to the inspiration of
accident, and again fortune favoured me. A shower drove me, two
days later, into one of the historic churches on the left bank of
the Seine, and there I found, peering at the old wood-carvings, the
Baron R., one of the wealthiest and most shabbily dressed men in
Paris. It was now or never. Putting a strong American inflection
into the French which I usually talked with an unmistakable British
accent, I catechised the Baron as to the date of the church's
building, its dimensions, and other details which an American
tourist would be certain to want to know. Having acquired such
information as the Baron was able to impart on short notice, I
solemnly placed the two-franc piece in his hand, with the hearty
assurance that it was "pour vous," and turned to go. The Baron was
slightly taken aback, but accepted the situation with a good grace.
Walking over to a small box fixed in the wall, he dropped
Laploshka's two francs into the slot. Over the box was the
inscription, "Pour les pauvres de M. le Cure."