by Saki
In the cold light of morning Stoner laughed mirthlessly as he slowly realized the position in which he found himself. Perhaps he might snatch a bit of breakfast on the strength of his likeness to this other missing ne’er-do-well, and get safely away before any one discovered the fraud that had been thrust on him. In the room downstairs he found the bent old man ready with a dish of bacon and fried eggs for “Master Tom’s” breakfast, while a hard-faced elderly maid brought in a teapot and poured him out a cup of tea. As he sat at the table a small spaniel came up and made friendly advances.
“’Tis old Bowker’s pup,” explained the old man, whom the hard-faced maid had addressed as George. “She was main fond of you; never seemed the same after you went away to Australee. She died ’bout a year agone. ’Tis her pup.”
Stoner found it difficult to regret her decease; as a witness for identification she would have left something to be desired.
“You’ll go for a ride, Master Tom?” was the next startling proposition that came from the old man. “We’ve a nice little roan cob that goes well in saddle. Old Biddy is getting a bit up in years, though ’er goes well still, but I’ll have the little roan saddled and brought round to door.”
“I’ve got no riding things,” stammered the castaway, almost laughing as he looked down at his one suit of well-worn clothes.
“Master Tom,” said the old man earnestly, almost with an offended air, “all your things is just as you left them. A bit of airing before the fire an’ they’ll be all right. ’Twill be a bit of a distraction like, a little riding and wild-fowling now and agen. You’ll find the folk around here has hard and bitter minds towards you. They hasn’t forgotten nor forgiven. No one’ll come nigh you, so you’d best get what distraction you can with horse and dog. They’m good company, too.”
Old George hobbled away to give his orders, and Stoner, feeling more than ever like one in a dream, went upstairs to inspect “Master Tom’s” wardrobe. A ride was one of the pleasures dearest to his heart, and there was some protection against immediate discovery of his imposture in the thought that none of Tom’s aforetime companions were likely to favour him with a close inspection. As the interloper thrust himself into some tolerably well-fitting riding cords he wondered vaguely what manner of misdeed the genuine Tom had committed to set the whole countryside against him. The thud of quick, eager hoofs on damp earth cut short his speculations. The roan cob had been brought up to the side door.
“Talk of beggars on horseback,” thought Stoner to himself, as he trotted rapidly along the muddy lanes where he had tramped yesterday as a down-at-heel outcast; and then he flung reflection indolently aside and gave himself up to the pleasure of a smart canter along the turf-grown side of a level stretch of road. At an open gateway he checked his pace to allow two carts to turn into a field. The lads driving the carts found time to give him a prolonged stare, and as he passed on he heard an excited voice call out, “’Tis Tom Prike! I knowed him at once; showing hisself here agen, is he?”
Evidently the likeness which had imposed at close quarters on a doddering old man was good enough to mislead younger eyes at a short distance.
In the course of his ride he met with ample evidence to confirm the statement that local folk had neither forgotten nor forgiven the bygone crime which had come to him as a legacy from the absent Tom. Scowling looks, mutterings, and nudgings greeted him whenever he chanced upon human beings; “Bowker’s pup,” trotting placidly by his side, seemed the one element of friendliness in a hostile world.
As he dismounted at the side door he caught a fleeting glimpse of a gaunt, elderly woman peering at him from behind the curtain of an upper window. Evidently this was his aunt by adoption.
Over the ample midday meal that stood in readiness for him Stoner was able to review the possibilities of his extraordinary situation. The real Tom, after four years of absence, might suddenly turn up at the farm, or a letter might come from him at any moment. Again, in the character of heir to the farm, the false Tom might be called on to sign documents, which would be an embarrassing predicament. Or a relative might arrive who would not imitate the aunt’s attitude of aloofness. All these things would mean ignominious exposure. On the other hand, the alternatives was the open sky and the muddy lanes that led down to the sea. The farm offered him, at any rate, a temporary refuge from destitution; farming was one of the many things he had “tried,” and he would be able to do a certain amount of work in return for the hospitality to which he was so little entitled.
“Will you have cold pork for your supper,” asked the hard-faced maid, as she cleared the table, “or will you have it hotted up?”
“Hot, with onions,” said Stoner. It was the only time in his life that he had made a rapid decision. And as he gave the order he knew that he meant to stay.
Stoner kept rigidly to those portions of the house which seemed to have been allotted to him by a tacit treaty of delimitation. When he took part in the farm-work it was as one who worked under orders and never initiated them. Old George, the roan cob, and Bowker’s pup were his sole companions in a world that was otherwise frostily silent and hostile. Of the mistress of the farm he saw nothing. Once, when he knew she had gone forth to church, he made a furtive visit to the farm parlour in an endeavour to glean some fragmentary knowledge of the young man whose place he had usurped, and whose ill-repute he had fastened on himself. There were many photographs hung on the walls, or stuck in prim frames, but the likeness he sought for was not among them. At last, in an album thrust out of sight, he came across what he wanted. There was a whole series, labelled “Tom,” a podgy child of three, in a fantastic frock, an awkward boy of about twelve, holding a cricket bat as though he loathed it, a rather good-looking youth of eighteen with very smooth, evenly parted hair, and, finally, a young man with a somewhat surly dare-devil expression. At this last portrait Stoner looked with particular interest; the likeness to himself was unmistakable.
From the lips of old George, who was garrulous enough on most subjects, he tried again and again to learn something of the nature of the offence which shut him off as a creature to be shunned and hated by his fellow-men.
“What do the folk around here say about me?” he asked one day as they were walking home from an outlying field.
The old man shook his head.
“They be bitter agen you, mortal bitter. Ay, ’tis a sad business, a sad business.”
And never could he be got to say anything more enlightening.
On a clear frosty evening, a few days before the festival of Christmas, Stoner stood in a corner of the orchard which commanded a wide view of the countryside. Here and there he could see the twinkling dots of lamp or candle glow which told of human homes where the goodwill and jollity of the season held their sway. Behind him lay the grim, silent farm-house, where no one ever laughed, where even a quarrel would have seemed cheerful. As he turned to look at the long grey front of the gloom-shadowed building, a door opened and old George came hurriedly forth. Stoner heard his adopted name called in a tone of strained anxiety. Instantly he knew that something untoward had happened, and with a quick revulsion of outlook his sanctuary became in his eyes a place of peace and contentment, from which he dreaded to be driven.
“Master Tom,” said the old man in a hoarse whisper, “you must slip away quiet from here for a few days. Michael Ley is back in the village, an’ he swears to shoot you if he can come across you. He’ll do it, too, there’s murder in the look of him. Get away under cover of night, ’tis only for a week or so, he won’t be here longer.”
“But where am I to go?” stammered Stoner, who had caught the infection of the old man’s obvious terror.
“Go right away along the coast to Punchford and keep hid there. When Michael’s safe gone I’ll ride the roan over to the Green Dragon at Punchford; when you see the cob stabled at the Green Dragon ’tis a sign you may come back agen.”
“But—” began Stoner hesitatingly.
“’Tis all r
ight for money,” said the other; “the old Missus agrees you’d best do as I say, and she’s given me this.”
The old man produced three sovereigns and some odd silver.
Stoner felt more of a cheat than ever as he stole away that night from the back gate of the farm with the old woman’s money in his pocket. Old George and Bowker’s pup stood watching him a silent farewell from the yard. He could scarcely fancy that he would ever come back, and he felt a throb of compunction for those two humble friends who would wait wistfully for his return. Some day perhaps the real Tom would come back, and there would be wild wonderment among those simple farm folks as to the identity of the shadowy guest they had harboured under their roof. For his own fate he felt no immediate anxiety; three pounds goes but little way in the world when there is nothing behind it, but to a man who has counted his exchequer in pennies it seems a good starting-point. Fortune had done him a whimsically kind turn when last he trod these lanes as a hopeless adventurer, and there might yet be a chance of his finding some work and making a fresh start; as he got further from the farm his spirits rose higher. There was a sense of relief in regaining once more his lost identity and ceasing to be the uneasy ghost of another. He scarcely bothered to speculate about the implacable enemy who had dropped from nowhere into his life; since that life was now behind him one unreal item the more made little difference. For the first time for many months he began to hum a careless light-hearted refrain. Then there stepped out from the shadow of an overhanging oak tree a man with a gun. There was no need to wonder who he might be; the moonlight falling on his white set face revealed a glare of human hate such as Stoner in the ups and downs of his wanderings had never seen before. He sprang aside in a wild effort to break through the hedge that bordered the lane, but the tough branches held him fast. The hounds of Fate had waited for him in those narrow lanes, and this time they were not to be denied.
THE RECESSIONAL
CLOVIS sat in the hottest zone but two of a Turkish bath, alternately inert in statuesque contemplation and rapidly manœuvring a fountain-pen over the pages of a note-book.
“Don’t interrupt me with your childish prattle,” he observed to Bertie van Tahn, who had slung himself languidly into a neighbouring chair and looked conversationally inclined; “I’m writing deathless verse.”
Bertie looked interested.
“I say, what a boon you would be to portrait painters if you really got to be notorious as a poetry writer. If they couldn’t get your likeness hung in the Academy as ‘Clovis Sangrail, Esq., at work on his latest poem,’ they could slip you in as a Study of the Nude or Orpheus descending into Jermyn Street. They always complain that modern dress handicaps them, whereas a towel and a fountain-pen—”
“It was Mrs. Packletide’s suggestion that I should write this thing,” said Clovis, ignoring the bypaths to fame that Bertie van Tahn was pointing out to him. “You see, Loona Bimberton had a Coronation Ode accepted by the New Infancy, a paper that has been started with the idea of making the New Age seem elder and hidebound. ‘So clever of you, dear Loona,’ the Packletide remarked when she had read it; ‘of course, any one could write a Coronation Ode, but no one else would have thought of doing it’ Loona protested that these things were extremely difficult to do, and gave us to understand that they were more or less the province of a gifted few. Now the Packletide has been rather decent to me in many ways, a sort of financial ambulance, you know, that carries you off the field when you’re hard hit, which is a frequent occurrence with me, and I’ve no use whatever for Loona Bimberton, so I chipped in and said I could turn out that sort of stuff by the square yard if I gave my mind to it. Loona said I couldn’t, and we got bets on, and between you and me I think the money’s fairly safe. Of course, one of the conditions of the wager is that the thing has to be published in something or other, local newspapers barred; but Mrs. Packletide has endeared herself by many little acts of thoughtfulness to the editor of the Smoky Chimney, so if I can hammer out anything at all approaching the level of the usual Ode output we ought to be all right. So far I’m getting along so comfortably that I begin to be afraid that I must be one of the gifted few.”
“It’s rather late in the day for a Coronation Ode, isn’t it?” said Bertie.
“Of course,” said Clovis; “this is going to be a Durbar Recessional, the sort of thing that you can keep by you for all time if you want to.”
“Now I understand your choice of a place to write it in,” said Bertie van Tahn, with the air of one who has suddenly unravelled a hitherto obscure problem; “you want to get the local temperature.”
“I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient,” said Clovis, “but it seems I asked too much of fate.”
Bertie van Tahn prepared to use his towel as a weapon of precision, but reflecting that he had a good deal of unprotected coast-line himself, and that Clovis was equipped with a fountain-pen as well as a towel, he relapsed pacifically into the depths of his chair.
“May one hear extracts from the immortal work?” he asked. “I promise that nothing that I hear now shall prejudice me a against borrowing a copy of the Smoky Chimney at the right moment.”
“It’s rather like casting pearls into a trough,” remarked Clovis pleasantly, “but I don’t mind reading you bits of it. It begins with a general dispersal of the Durbar participants:
“‘Back to their homes in Himalayan heights
The stale pale elephants of Cutch Behar
Roll like great galleons on a tideless sea—’”
“I don’t believe Cutch Behar is anywhere near the Himalayan region,” interrupted Bertie. “You ought to have an atlas on hand when you do this sort of thing; and why stale and pale?”
“After the late hours and the excitement, of course,” said Clovis; “and I said their homes were in the Himalayas. You can have Himalayan elephants in Cutch Behar, I suppose, just as you have Irish-bred horses running at Ascot.”
“You said they were going back to the Himalayas,” objected Bertie.
“Well, they would naturally be sent home to recuperate. It’s the usual thing out there to turn elephants loose in the hills, just as we put horses out to grass in this country.”
Clovis could at least flatter himself that he had infused some of the reckless splendour of the East into his mendacity.
“Is it all going to be in blank verse?” asked the critic.
“Of course not; ‘Durbar’ comes at the end of the fourth line.”
“That seems so cowardly; however, it explains why you pitched on Cutch Behar.”
“There is more connection between geographical place-names and poetical inspiration than is generally recognized; one of the chief reasons why there are so few really great poems about Russia in our language is that you can’t possibly get a rhyme to names like Smolensk and Tobolsk and Minsk.”
Clovis spoke with the authority of one who has tried.
“Of course, you could rhyme Omsk with Tomsk,” he continued; “in fact, they seem to be there for that purpose, but the public wouldn’t stand that sort of thing indefinitely.”
“The public will stand a good deal,” said Bertie malevolently, “and so small a proportion of it knows Russian that you could always have an explanatory footnote asserting that the last three letters in Smolensk are not pronounced. It’s quite as believable as your statement about putting elephants out to grass in the Himalayan range.”
“I’ve got rather a nice bit,” resumed Clovis with unruffled serenity, “giving an evening scene on the outskirts of a jungle village:
“‘Where the coiled cobra in the gloaming gloats,
And prowling panthers stalk the wary goats.’”
“There is practically no gloaming in tropical countries,” said Bertie indulgently; “but I like the masterly reticence with which you treat the cobra’s motive for gloating. The unknown is proverbially the uncanny. I can picture nervous readers of the Smoky Chimney keeping the light turned on
in their bedrooms all night out of sheer sickening uncertainty as to what the cobra might have been gloating about.”
“Cobras gloat naturally,” said Clovis, “just as wolves are always ravening from mere force of habit, even after they’ve hopelessly overeaten themselves. I’ve got a fine bit of colour painting later on,” he added, “where I describe the dawn coming up over the Brahmaputra river:
“‘The amber dawn-drenched East with sun-shafts kissed,
Stained sanguine apricot and amethyst,
O’er the washed emerald of the mango groves
Hangs in a mist of opalescent mauves,
While painted parrot-flights impinge the haze
With scarlet, chalcedon and chrysoprase.’”
“I’ve never seen the dawn come up over the Brahma-putra river,” said Bertie, “so I can’t say if it’s a good description of the event, but it sounds more like an account of an extensive jewel robbery. Anyhow, the parrots give a good useful touch of local colour. I suppose you’ve introduced some tigers into the scenery? An Indian landscape would have rather a bare, unfinished look without a tiger or two in the middle distance.”
“I’ve got a hen-tiger somewhere in the poem,” said Clovis, hunting through his notes. “Here she is:
“‘The tawny tigress ’mid the tangled teak
Drags to her purring cub’s enraptured ears
The harsh death-rattle in the pea-fowl’s beak,