by Saki
‘Let’s jolly well hope he does,’ said Bertie van Tahn; ‘under the circumstances a second cousin is almost as useful as second sight.’
‘That stable ought to know something, if knowledge is to be found anywhere,’ said Mrs Packletide hopefully.
‘I expect you’ll find he’ll echo my fancy for Motorboat,’ said Colonel Drake.
At this moment the subject had to be hastily dropped. Lady Susan bore down upon them, leaning on the arm of Clovis’s mother, to whom she was confiding the fact that she disapproved of the craze for Pekingese spaniels. It was the third thing she had found time to disapprove of since lunch, without counting her silent and permanent disapproval of the way Clovis’s mother did her hair.
‘We have been admiring the Himalayan pheasants,’ said Mrs Packletide suavely.
‘They went off to a bird-show at Nottingham early this morning,’ said Lady Susan, with the air of one who disapproves of hasty and ill-considered lying.
‘Their house, I mean; such perfect roosting arrangements, and all so clean,’ resumed Mrs Packletide, with an increased glow of enthusiasm. The odious Bertie van Tahn was murmuring audible prayers for Mrs Packletide’s ultimate estrangement from the paths of falsehood.
‘I hope you don’t mind dinner being a quarter of an hour late tonight,’ said Lady Susan; ‘Motkin has had an urgent summons to go and see a sick relative this afternoon. He wanted to bicycle there, but I am sending him in the motor.’
‘How very kind of you! Of course we don’t mind dinner being put off.’ The assurances came with unanimous and hearty sincerity.
At the dinner-table that night an undercurrent of furtive curiosity directed itself towards Motkin’s impassive countenance. One or two of the guests almost expected to find a slip of paper concealed in their napkins, bearing the name of the second cousin’s selection. They had not long to wait. As the butler went round with the murmured question, ‘Sherry?’ he added in an even lower tone the cryptic words, ‘Better not.’ Mrs Packletide gave a start of alarm, and refused the sherry; there seemed some sinister suggestion in the butler’s warning, as though her hostess had suddenly become addicted to the Borgia habit. A moment later the explanation flashed on her that ‘Better Not’ was the name of one of the runners in the big race. Clovis was already pencilling it on his cuff, and Colonel Drake, in his turn, was signalling to every one in hoarse whispers and dumb-show the fact that he had all along fancied ‘B.N.’.
Early next morning a sheaf of telegrams went Townward, representing the market commands of the house-party and servants’ hall.
It was a wet afternoon, and most of Lady Susan’s guests hung about the hall, waiting apparently for the appearance of tea, though it was scarcely yet due. The advent of a telegram quickened every one into a flutter of expectancy; the page who brought the telegram to Clovis waited with unusual alertness to know if there might be an answer.
Clovis read the message and gave an exclamation of annoyance.
‘No bad news, I hope,’ said Lady Susan. Every one else knew that the news was not good.
‘It’s only the result of the Derby,’ he blurted out; ‘Sadowa won; an utter outsider.’
‘Sadowa!’ exclaimed Lady Susan; ‘you don’t say so! How remarkable! It’s the first time I’ve ever backed a horse; in fact I disapprove of horseracing, but just for once in a way I put money on this horse, and it’s gone and won.’
‘May I ask,’ said Mrs Packletide, amid the general silence, ‘why you put your money on this particular horse? None of the sporting prophets mentioned it as having an outside chance.’
‘Well,’ said Lady Susan, ‘you may laugh at me, but it was the name that attracted me. You see, I was always mixed up with the Franco-German war; I was married on the day that the war was declared, and my eldest child was born the day that peace was signed, so anything connected with the war has always interested me. And when I saw there was a horse running in the Derby called after one of the battles in the Franco-German war, I said I must put some money on it, for once in a way, though I disapprove of racing. And it’s actually won.’
There was a general groan. No one groaned more deeply than the professor of military history.
The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope
‘Who and what is Mr Brope?’ demanded the aunt of Clovis suddenly.
Mrs Riversedge, who had been snipping off the heads of defunct roses, and thinking of nothing in particular, sprang hurriedly to mental attention. She was one of those old-fashioned hostesses who consider that one ought to know something about one’s guests, and that the something ought to be to their credit.
‘I believe he comes from Leighton Buzzard,’ she observed by way of preliminary explanation.
‘In these days of rapid and convenient travel,’ said Clovis, who was dispersing a colony of green-fly with visitations of cigarette smoke, ‘to come from Leighton Buzzard does not necessarily denote any great strength of character. It might only mean mere restlessness. Now if he had left it under a cloud, or as a protest against the incurable and heartless frivolity of its inhabitants, that would tell us something about the man and his mission in life.’
‘What does he do?’ pursued Mrs Troyle magisterially
‘He edits the Cathedral Monthly,’ said her hostess, ‘and he’s enormously learned about memorial brasses and transepts and the influence of Byzantine worship on modern liturgy, and all those sort of things. Perhaps he is just a little bit heavy and immersed in one range of subjects, but it takes all sorts to make a good house-party, you know. You don’t find him too dull, do you?’
‘Dullness I could overlook,’ said the aunt of Clovis: ‘what I can not forgive is his making love to my maid.’
‘My dear Mrs Troyle,’ gasped the hostess, ‘what an extraordinary idea! I assure you Mr Brope would not dream of doing such a thing.’
‘His dreams are a matter of indifference to me, for all I care his slumbers may be one long indiscretion of unsuitable erotic advances, in which the entire servants’ hall may be involved. But in his waking hours he shall not make love to my maid. It’s no use arguing about it, I’m firm on the point.’
‘But you must be mistaken,’ persisted Mrs Riversedge; ‘Mr Brope would be the last person to do such a thing.’
‘He is the first person to do such a thing, as far as my information goes, and if I have any voice in the matter he certainly shall be the last. Of course, I am not referring to respectably-intentioned lovers.’
‘I simply cannot think that a man who writes so charmingly and informingly about transepts and Byzantine influences would behave in such an unprincipled manner,’ said Mrs Riversedge; ‘what evidence have you that he’s doing anything of the sort? I don’t want to doubt your word, of course, but we mustn’t be too ready to condemn him unheard, must we?’
‘Whether we condemn him or not, he has certainly not been unheard. He has the room next to my dressing-room, and on two occasions, when I dare say he thought I was absent, I have plainly heard him announcing through the wall, “I love you, Florrie.” Those partition walls upstairs are very thin; one can almost hear a watch ticking in the next room.’
‘Is your maid called Florence?’
‘Her name is Florinda.’
‘What an extraordinary name to give a maid!’
‘I did not give it to her; she arrived in my service already christened.’
‘What I mean is,’ said Mrs Riversedge, ‘that when I get maids with unsuitable names I call them Jane; they soon get used to it.’
‘An excellent plan,’ said the aunt of Clovis coldly; ‘unfortunately I have got used to being called Jane myself. It happens to be my name.’
She cut short Mrs Riversedge’s flood of apologies by abruptly remarking:
‘The question is not whether I’m to call my maid Florinda, but whether Mr Brope is to be permitted to call her Florrie. I am strongly of opinion that he shall not.’
‘He may have been repeating the words of some song,’ said M
rs Riversedge hopefully; ‘there are lots of those sorts of silly refrains with girls’ names,’ she continued, turning to Clovis as a possible authority on the subject. ‘“You mustn’t call me Mary –’”
‘I shouldn’t think of doing so,’ Clovis assured her; ‘in the first place, I’ve always understood that your name was Henrietta; and then I hardly know you well enough to take such a liberty.’
‘I mean there’s a song with that refrain,’ hurriedly explained Mrs Riversedge, ‘and there’s “Rhoda, Rhoda kept a pagoda”, and “Maisie is a daisy”, and heaps of others. Certainly it doesn’t sound like Mr Brope to be singing such songs, but I think we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.’
‘I had already done so,’ said Mrs Troyle, ‘until further evidence came my way.’
She shut her lips with the resolute finality of one who enjoys the blessed certainty of being implored to open them again.
‘Further evidence!’ exclaimed her hostess; ‘do tell me!’
‘As I was coming upstairs after breakfast Mr Brope was just passing my room. In the most natural way in the world a piece of paper dropped out of a packet that he held in his hand and fluttered to the ground just at my door. I was going to call out to him “You’ve dropped something”, and then for some reason I held back and didn’t show myself till he was safely in his room. You see it occurred to me that I was very seldom in my room just at that hour, and that Florinda was almost always there tidying up things about that time. So I picked up that innocent-looking piece of paper.’
Mrs Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte.
Mrs Riversedge snipped vigorously at the nearest rose bush, incidentally decapitating a Viscountess Folkestone that was just coming into bloom.
‘What was on the paper?’ she asked.
‘Just the words in pencil, “I love you Florrie”, and then underneath, crossed out with a faint line, but perfectly plain to read, “Meet me in the garden near the yew”.
‘There’s a yew tree at the bottom of the garden,’ admitted Mrs Riversedge.
‘At any rate he appears to be truthful,’ commented Clovis.
‘To think that a scandal of this sort should be going on under my roof!’ said Mrs Riversedge indignantly.
‘I wonder why it is that scandal seems so much worse under a roof,’ observed Clovis; ‘I’ve always regarded it as a proof of the superior delicacy of the cat tribe that it conducts most of its scandals above the slates.’
‘Now I come to think of it,’ resumed Mrs Riversedge, ‘there are things about Mr Brope that I’ve never been able to account for. His income, for instance: he only gets two hundred a year as editor of the Cathedral Monthly, and I know that his people are quite poor, and he hasn’t any private means. Yet he manages to afford a flat somewhere in Westminster, and he goes abroad to Bruges and those sorts of places every year, and always dresses well, and gives quite nice luncheon-parties in the season. You can’t do all that on two hundred a year, can you?’
‘Does he write for any other papers?’ queried Mrs Troyle.
‘No, you see he specialises so entirely on liturgy and ecclesiastical architecture that his field is rather restricted. He once tried the Sporting and Dramatic with an article on church edifices in famous fox-hunting centres, but it wasn’t considered of sufficient general interest to be accepted. No, I don’t see how he can support himself in his present style merely by what he writes.’
‘Perhaps he sells spurious transepts to American enthusiasts,’ suggested Clovis.
‘How could you sell a transept?’ said Mrs Riversedge; ‘such a thing would be impossible.’
‘Whatever he may do to eke out his income,’ interrupted Mrs Troyle, ‘he is certainly not going to fill in his leisure moments by making love to my maid.’
‘Of course not,’ agreed her hostess; ‘that must be put a stop to at once. But I don’t quite know what we ought to do.’
‘You might put a barbed wire entanglement round the yew tree as a precautionary measure,’ said Clovis.
‘I don’t think that the disagreeable situation that has arisen is improved by flippancy,’ said Mrs Riversedge; ‘a good maid is a treasure –’
‘I am sure I don’t know what I should do without Florinda,’ admitted Mrs Troyle, ‘she understands my hair. I’ve long ago given up trying to do anything with it myself. I regard one’s hair as I regard husbands: as long as one is seen together in public one’s private divergences don’t matter. Surely that was the luncheon gong.’
Septimus Brope and Clovis had the smoking-room to themselves after lunch. The former seemed restless and preoccupied, the latter quietly observant.
‘What is a lorry?’ asked Septimus suddenly; ‘I don’t mean the thing on wheels, of course I know what that is, but isn’t there a bird with a name like that, the larger form of a lorikeet?’
‘I fancy it’s a lory, with one “r,”’ said Clovis lazily, ‘in which case it’s no good to you.’
Septimus Brope stared in some astonishment.
‘How do you mean, no good to me?’ he asked, with more than a trace of uneasiness in his voice.
‘Won’t rhyme with Florrie,’ explained Clovis briefly.
Septimus sat upright in his chair, with unmistakable alarm on his face.
‘How did you find out? I mean how did you know I was trying to get a rhyme to Florrie?’ he asked sharply.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Clovis, ‘I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested itself as rhyming with lorry.’
Septimus still looked uneasy.
‘I believe you know more,’ he said.
Clovis laughed quietly, but said nothing.
‘How much do you know?’ Septimus asked desperately.
‘The yew tree in the garden,’ said Clovis.
‘There! I felt certain I’d dropped it somewhere. But you must have guessed something before. Look here, you have surprised my secret. You won’t give me away, will you? It is nothing to be ashamed of, but it wouldn’t do for the editor of the Cathedral Monthly to go in openly for that sort of thing, would it?’
‘Well, I suppose not,’ admitted Clovis.
‘You see,’ continued Septimus, ‘I get quite a decent lot of money out of it. I could never live in the style I do on what I get as editor of the Cathedral Monthly.’
Clovis was even more startled than Septimus had been earlier in the conversation, but he was better skilled in repressing surprise.
‘Do you mean to say you get money out of – Florrie?’ he asked.
‘Not out of Florrie, as yet,’ said Septimus; ‘in fact, I don’t mind saying that I’m having a good deal of trouble over Florrie. But there are a lot of others.’
Clovis’s cigarette went out.
‘This is very interesting,’ he said slowly. And then, with Septimus Brope’s next words, illumination dawned on him.
‘There are heaps of others; for instance:
‘“Cora with the lips of coral
You and I will never quarrel.”
That was one of my earliest successes, and it still brings me in royalties. And then there is – “Esmeralda, when I first beheld her” and “Fair Teresa, how I love to please her”, both of those have been fairly popular. And there is one rather dreadful one,’ continued Septimus, flushing deep carmine, ‘which has brought me in more money than any of the others:
‘“Lively little Lucie
With her naughty nez retrousée.”
Of course, I loathe the whole lot of them; in fact, I’m rapidly becoming something of a woman-hater under their influence, but I can’t afford to disregard the financial aspect of the matter. And at the same time you can understand that my position as an authority on ecclesiastical architecture and liturgical subjects would be weake
ned, if not altogether ruined, if it once got about that I was the author of “Cora with the lips of coral” and all the rest of them.’
Clovis had recovered sufficiently to ask in a sympathetic, if rather unsteady, voice what was the special trouble with ‘Florrie’.
‘I can’t get her into lyric shape, try as I will,’ said Septimus mournfully. ‘You see, one has to work in a lot of sentimental, sugary compliment with a catchy rhyme, and a certain amount of personal biography or prophecy. They’ve all of them got to have a long string of past successes recorded about them, or else you’ve got to foretell blissful things about them and yourself in the future. For instance, there is:
‘“Dainty little girlie Mavis,
She is such a rara avis.
All the money I can save is
All to be for Mavis mine.”
It goes to a sickening namby-pamby waltz tune, and for months nothing else was sung and hummed in Blackpool and other popular centres.’
This time Clovis’s self-control broke down badly.
‘Please excuse me,’ he gurgled, ‘but I can’t help it when I remember the awful solemnity of that article of yours that you so kindly read us last night, on the Coptic Church in its relation to early Christian worship.’
Septimus groaned.
‘You see how it would be,’ he said; ‘as soon as people knew me to be the author of that miserable sentimental twaddle, all respect for the serious labours of my life would be gone. I dare say I know more about memorial brasses than any one living, in fact I hope one day to publish a monograph on the subject, but I should be pointed out everywhere as the man whose ditties were in the mouths of nigger minstrels along the entire coast-line of our Island home. Can you wonder that I positively hate Florrie all the time that I’m trying to grind out sugar-coated rhapsodies about her?’
‘Why not give free play to your emotions, and be brutally abusive? An uncomplimentary refrain would have an instant success as a novelty if you were sufficiently outspoken.’