When William Came, Saki [red scrolls of magic .txt] 📗

to think with greater energy and determination.  For this winter, at any rate, he would hunt and do a little shooting, entertain a few of his neighbours and make friends with any congenial fellow-sportsmen who might be within reach.  Next year things would be different; he would have had time to look round him, to regain something of his aforetime vigour of mind and body.  Next year, when the hunting season was over, he would set about finding out whether there was any nobler game for him to take a hand in.  He would enter into correspondence with old friends who had gone out into the tropics and the backwoods—he would do something.

So he told himself, but he knew thoroughly well that he had found his level.  He had ceased to struggle against the fascination of his present surroundings.  The slow, quiet comfort and interest of country life appealed with enervating force to the man whom death had half conquered.  The pleasures of the chase, well-provided for in every detail, and dovetailed in with the assured luxury of a well-ordered, well-staffed establishment, were exactly what he wanted and exactly what his life down here afforded him.  He was experiencing, too, that passionate recurring devotion to an old loved scene that comes at times to men who have travelled far and willingly up and down the world.  He was very much at home.  The alien standard floating over Buckingham Palace, the Crown of Charlemagne on public buildings and official documents, the grey ships of war riding in Plymouth Bay and Southampton Water with a flag at their stern that older generations of Britons had never looked on, these things seemed far away and inconsequent amid the hedgerows and woods and fallows of the East Wessex country.  Horse and hound-craft, harvest, game broods, the planting and felling of timber, the rearing and selling of stock, the letting of grasslands, the care of fisheries, the up-keep of markets and fairs, they were the things that immediately mattered.  And Yeovil saw himself, in moments of disgust and self-accusation, settling down into this life of rustic littleness, concerned over the late nesting of a partridge or the defective draining of a loose-box, hugely busy over affairs that a gardener’s boy might grapple with, ignoring the struggle-cry that went up, low and bitter and wistful, from a dethroned dispossessed race, in whose glories he had gloried, in whose struggle he lent no hand.  In what way, he asked himself in such moments, would his life be better than the life of that parody of manhood who upholstered his rooms with art hangings and rosewood furniture and babbled over the effect?

The lanes seemed interminable and without aim or object except to bisect one another; gates and gaps disclosed nothing in the way of a landmark, and the night began to draw down in increasing shades of darkness.  Presently, however, the tired horse quickened its pace, swung round a sharp corner into a broader roadway, and stopped with an air of thankful expectancy at the low doorway of a wayside inn.  A cheerful glow of light streamed from the windows and door, and a brighter glare came from the other side of the road, where a large motorcar was being got ready for an immediate start.  Yeovil tumbled stiffly out of his saddle, and in answer to the loud rattle of his hunting crop on the open door the innkeeper and two or three hangers-on hurried out to attend to the wants of man and beast.  Flour and water for the horse and something hot for himself were Yeovil’s first concern, and then he began to clamour for geographical information.  He was rather dismayed to find that the cumulative opinions of those whom he consulted, and of several others who joined unbidden in the discussion, placed his destination at nothing nearer than nine miles.  Nine miles of dark and hilly country road for a tired man on a tired horse assumed enormous, far-stretching proportions, and although he dimly remembered that he had asked a guest to dinner for that evening he began to wonder whether the wayside inn possessed anything endurable in the way of a bedroom.  The landlord interrupted his desperate speculations with a really brilliant effort of suggestion.  There was a gentleman in the bar, he said, who was going in a motorcar in the direction for which Yeovil was bound, and who would no doubt be willing to drop him at his destination; the gentleman had also been out with the hounds.  Yeovil’s horse could be stabled at the inn and fetched home by a groom the next morning.  A hurried embassy to the bar parlour resulted in the news that the motorist would be delighted to be of assistance to a fellow-sportsman.  Yeovil gratefully accepted the chance that had so obligingly come his way, and hastened to superintend the housing of his horse in its night’s quarters.  When he had duly seen to the tired animal’s comfort and foddering he returned to the roadway, where a young man in hunting garb and a livened chauffeur were standing by the side of the waiting car.

“I am so very pleased to be of some use to you, Mr. Yeovil,” said the car-owner, with a polite bow, and Yeovil recognised the young Leutnant von Gabelroth, who had been present at the musical afternoon at Berkshire Street.  He had doubtless seen him at the meet that morning, but in his hunting kit he had escaped his observation.

“I, too, have been out with the hounds,” the young man continued; “I have left my horse at the Crow and Sceptre at Dolford.  You are living at Black Dene, are you not?  I can take you right past your door, it is all on my way.”

Yeovil hung back for a moment, overwhelmed with vexation and embarrassment, but it was too late to cancel the arrangement he had unwittingly entered into, and he was constrained to put himself under obligation to the young officer with the best grace he could muster.  After all, he reflected, he had met him under his own roof as his wife’s guest.  He paid his reckoning to mine host, tipped the stable lad who had helped him with his horse, and took his place beside von Gabelroth in the car.

As they glided along the dark roadway and the young German reeled off a string of comments on the incidents of the day’s sport, Yeovil lay back amid his comfortable wraps and weighed the measure of his humiliation.  It was Cicely’s gospel that one should know what one wanted in life and take good care that one got what one wanted.  Could he apply that test of achievement to his own life?  Was this what he really wanted to be doing, pursuing his uneventful way as a country squire, sharing even his sports and pastimes with men of the nation that had conquered and enslaved his Fatherland?

The car slackened its pace somewhat as they went through a small hamlet, past a schoolhouse, past a rural police-station with the new monogram over its notice-board, past a church with a little tree-grown graveyard.  There, in a corner, among wild-rose bushes and tall yews, lay some of Yeovil’s own kinsfolk, who had lived in these parts and hunted and found life pleasant in the days that were not so very long ago.  Whenever he went past that quiet little gathering-place of the dead Yeovil was wont to raise his hat in mute affectionate salutation to those who were now only memories in his family; to-night he somehow omitted the salute and turned his head the other way.  It was as though the dead of his race saw and wondered.

Three or four months ago the thing he was doing would have seemed an impossibility, now it was actually happening; he was listening to the gay, courteous, tactful chatter of his young companion, laughing now and then at some joking remark, answering some question of interest, learning something of hunting ways and traditions in von Gabelroth’s own country.  And when the car turned in at the gate of the hunting lodge and drew up at the steps the laws of hospitality demanded that Yeovil should ask his benefactor of the road to come in for a few minutes and drink something a little better than the wayside inn had been able to supply.  The young officer spent the best part of a half hour in Yeovil’s snuggery, examining and discussing the trophies of rifle and collecting gun that covered the walls.  He had a good knowledge of woodcraft, and the beasts and birds of Siberian forests and North African deserts were to him new pages in a familiar book.  Yeovil found himself discoursing eagerly with his chance guest on the European distribution and local variation of such and such a species, recounting peculiarities in its habits and incidents of its pursuit and capture.  If the cold observant eyes of Lady Shalem could have rested on the scene she would have hailed it as another root-fibre thrown out by the fait accompli.

Yeovil closed the hall door on his departing visitor, and closed his mind on the crowd of angry and accusing thoughts that were waiting to intrude themselves.  His valet had already got his bath in readiness and in a few minutes the tired huntsman was forgetting weariness and the consciousness of outside things in the languorous abandonment that steam and hot water induce.  Brain and limbs seemed to lay themselves down in a contented waking sleep, the world that was beyond the bathroom walls dropped away into a far unreal distance; only somewhere through the steam clouds pierced a hazy consciousness that a dinner, well chosen, was being well cooked, and would presently be well served—and right well appreciated.  That was the lure to drag the bather away from the Nirvana land of warmth and steam.  The stimulating after-effect of the bath took its due effect, and Yeovil felt that he was now much less tired and enormously hungry.  A cheery fire burned in his dressing-room and a lively black kitten helped him to dress, and incidentally helped him to require a new tassel to the cord of his dressing-gown.  As he finished his toilet and the kitten finished its sixth and most notable attack on the tassel a ring was heard at the front door, and a moment later a loud, hearty, and unmistakably hungry voice resounded in the hall.  It belonged to the local doctor, who had also taken part in the day’s run and had been bidden to enliven the evening meal with the entertainment of his inexhaustible store of sporting and social reminiscences.  He knew the countryside and the countryfolk inside out, and he was a living unwritten chronicle of the East Wessex hunt.  His conversation seemed exactly the right accompaniment to the meal; his stories brought glimpses of wet hedgerows, stiff ploughlands, leafy spinneys and muddy brooks in among the rich old Worcester and Georgian silver of the dinner service, the glow and crackle of the wood fire, the pleasant succession of well-cooked dishes and mellow wines.  The world narrowed itself down again to a warm, drowsy-scented dining-room, with a productive hinterland of kitchen and cellar beyond it, and beyond that an important outer world of loose box and harness-room and stable-yard; further again a dark hushed region where pheasants roosted and owls flitted and foxes prowled.

Yeovil sat and listened to story after story of the men and women and horses of the neighbourhood; even the foxes seemed to have a personality, some of them, and a personal history.  It was a little like Hans Andersen, he decided, and a little like the Reminiscences of an Irish R.M., and perhaps just a little like some of the more probable adventures of Baron Munchausen.  The newer stories were evidently true to the smallest detail, the earlier ones had altered somewhat in repetition, as plants and animals vary under domestication.

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