by Saki
The Interlopers
In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Carpathians, a man stood one winter night watching and listening, as though he waited for some beast of the woods to come within the range of his vision, and, later, of his rifle. But the game for whose presence he kept so keen an outlook was none that figured in the sportsman’s calendar as lawful and proper for the chase; Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled the dark forest in quest of a human enemy.
The forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well stocked with game; the narrow strip of precipitous woodland that lay on its outskirt was not remarkable for the game it harboured or the shooting it afforded, but it was the most jealously guarded of all its owner’s territorial possessions. A famous lawsuit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment of the Courts, and a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations. The neighbour feud had grown into a personal one since Ulrich had come to be head of his family; if there was a man in the world whom he detested and wished ill to it was Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the quarrel and the tireless game-snatcher and raider of the disputed border-forest. The feud might, perhaps, have died down or been compromised if the personal ill-will of the two men had not stood in the way; as boys they had thirsted for one another’s blood, as men each prayed that misfortune might fall on the other, and this wind-scourged winter night Ulrich had banded together his foresters to watch the dark forest, not in quest of four-footed quarry, but to keep a look-out for the prowling thieves whom he suspected of being afoot from across the land boundary. The roebuck, which usually kept in the sheltered hollows during a storm-wind, were running like driven things tonight, and there was movement and unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours. Assuredly there was a disturbing element in the forest, and Ulrich could guess the quarter from whence it came.
He strayed away by himself from the watchers whom he had placed in ambush on the crest of the hill, and wandered far down the steep slopes amid the wild tangle of undergrowth, peering through the tree-trunks and listening through the whistling and skirting of the wind and the restless beating of the branches for sight or sound of the marauders. If only on this wild night, in this dark, lone spot, he might come across Georg Znaeym, man to man, with none to witness – that was the wish that was uppermost in his thoughts. And as he stepped round the trunk of a huge beech he came face to face with the man he sought.
The two enemies stood glaring at one another for a long silent moment. Each had a rifle in his hand, each had hate in his heart and murder uppermost in his mind. The chance had come to give full play to the passions of a lifetime. But a man who has been brought up under the code of a restraining civilisation cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down his neighbour in cold blood and without word spoken, except for an offence against his hearth and honour. And before the moment of hesitation had given way to action a deed of Nature’s own violence overwhelmed them both. A fierce shriek of the storm had been answered by a splitting crash over their heads, and ere they could leap aside a mass of falling beech tree had thundered down on them. Ulrich von Gradwitz found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of forked branches, while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass. His heavy shooting-boots had saved his feet from being crushed to pieces, but if his fractures were not as serious as they might have been, at least it was evident that he could not move from his present position till some one came to release him. The descending twigs had slashed the skin of his face, and he had to wink away some drops of blood from his eyelashes before he could take in a general view of the disaster. At his side, so near that under ordinary circumstances he could almost have touched him, lay Georg Znaeym, alive and struggling, but obviously as helplessly pinioned down as himself. All round them lay a thick-strewn wreckage of splintered branches and broken twigs.
Relief at being alive and exasperation at his captive plight brought a strange medley of pious thank-offerings and sharp curses to Ulrich’s lips. Georg, who was nearly blinded with the blood which trickled across his eyes, stopped his struggling for a moment to listen, and then gave a short, snarling laugh.
‘So you’re not killed, as you ought to be, but you’re caught, anyway,’ he cried; ‘caught fast. Ho, what a jest, Ulrich von Gradwitz snared in his stolen forest. There’s real justice for you!’
And he laughed again, mockingly and savagely.
‘I’m caught in my own forest-land,’ retorted Ulrich. ‘When my men come to release us you will wish, perhaps, that you were in a better plight than caught poaching on a neighbour’s land, shame on you.’
Georg was silent for a moment; then he answered quietly:
‘Are you sure that your men will find much to release? I have men, too, in the forest tonight, close behind me, and they will be here first and do the releasing. When they drag me out from under these damned branches it won’t need much clumsiness on their part to roll this mass of trunk right over on the top of you. Your men will find you dead under a fallen beech tree. For form’s sake I shall send my condolences to your family.’
‘It is a useful hint,’ said Ulrich fiercely. ‘My men had orders to follow in ten minutes’ time, seven of which must have gone by already, and when they get me out – I will remember the hint. Only as you will have met your death poaching on my lands I don’t think I can decently send any message of condolence to your family.’
‘Good,’ snarled Georg, ‘good. We fight this quarrel out to the death, you and I and our foresters, with no cursed interlopers to come between us. Death and damnation to you, Ulrich von Gradwitz.’
‘The same to you, Georg Znaeym, forest-thief, game-snatcher.’
Both men spoke with the bitterness of possible defeat before them, for each knew that it might be long before his men would seek him out or find him; it was a bare matter of chance which party would arrive first on the scene.
Both had now given up the useless struggle to free themselves from the mass of wood that held them down; Ulrich limited his endeavours to an effort to bring his one partially free arm near enough to his outer coat-pocket to draw out his wine-flask. Even when he had accomplished that operation it was long before he could manage the unscrewing of the stopper or get any of the liquid down his throat. But what a Heaven-sent draught it seemed! It was an open winter, and little snow had fallen as yet, hence the captives suffered less from the cold than might have been the case at that season of the year; nevertheless, the wine was warming and reviving to the wounded man, and he looked across with something like a throb of pity to where his enemy lay, just keeping the groans of pain and weariness from crossing his lips.
‘Could you reach this flask if I threw it over to you?’ asked Ulrich suddenly; ‘there is good wine in it, and one may as well be as comfortable as one can. Let us drink, even if tonight one of us dies.’
‘No, I can scarcely see anything; there is so much blood caked round my eyes,’ said Georg, ‘and in any case I don’t drink wine with an enemy.’
Ulrich was silent for a few minutes, and lay listening to the weary screeching of the wind. An idea was slowly forming and growing in his brain, an idea that gained strength every time that he looked across at the man who was fighting so grimly against pain and exhaustion. In the pain and languor that Ulrich himself was feeling the old fierce hatred seemed to be dying down.
‘Neighbour,’ he said presently, ‘do as you please if your men come first. It was a fair compact. But as for me, I’ve changed my mind. If my men are the first to come you shall be the first to be helped, as though you were my guest. We have quarrelled like devils all our lives over this stupid strip of forest, where the trees can’t even stand upright in a breath of wind. Lying here tonight, thinking, I’ve come t
o think we’ve been rather fools; there are better things in life than getting the better of a boundary dispute. Neighbour, if you will help me to bury the old quarrel I – I will ask you to be my friend.’
Georg Znaeym was silent for so long that Ulrich thought, perhaps, he had fainted with the pain of his injuries. Then he spoke slowly and in jerks.
‘How the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode into the market-square together. No one living can remember seeing a Znaeym and a von Gradwitz talking to one another in friendship. And what peace there would be among the forester folk if we ended our feud tonight. And if we choose to make peace among our people there is none other to interfere, no interlopers from outside…You would come and keep the Sylvester night beneath my roof, and I would come and feast on some high day at your castle…I would never fire a shot on your land, save when you invited me as a guest; and you should come and shoot with me down in the marshes where the wildfowl are. In all the countryside there are none that could hinder if we willed to make peace. I never thought to have wanted to do other than hate you all my life, but I think I have changed my mind about things too, this last half-hour. And you offered me your wine-flask…Ulrich von Gradwitz, I will be your friend.’
For a space both men were silent, turning over in their minds the wonderful changes that this dramatic reconciliation would bring about. In the cold, gloomy forest, with the wind tearing in fitful gusts through the naked branches and whistling round the tree-trunks, they lay and waited for the help that would now bring release and succour to both parties. And each prayed a private prayer that his men might be the first to arrive, so that he might be the first to show honourable attention to the enemy that had become a friend.
Presently, as the wind dropped for a moment, Ulrich broke silence.
‘Let’s shout for help,’ he said; ‘in this lull our voices may carry a little way.’
‘They won’t carry far through the trees and undergrowth,’ said Georg, ‘but we can try. Together, then.’
The two raised their voices in a prolonged hunting call.
‘Together again,’ said Ulrich a few minutes later, after listening in vain for an answering halloo.
‘I heard something that time, I think,’ said Ulrich.
‘I heard nothing but the pestilential wind,’ said Georg hoarsely.
There was silence again for some minutes, and then Ulrich gave a joyful cry.
‘I can see figures coming through the wood. They are following in the way I came down the hillside.’
Both men raised their voices in as loud a shout as they could muster.
‘They hear us! They’ve stopped. Now they see us. They’re running down the hill towards us,’ cried Ulrich.
‘How many of them are there?’ asked Georg.
‘I can’t see distinctly,’ said Ulrich; ‘nine or ten.’
‘Then they are yours,’ said Georg; ‘I had only seven out with me.’
‘They are making all the speed they can, brave lads,’ said Ulrich gladly.
‘Are they your men?’ asked Georg. ‘Are they your men?’ he repeated impatiently as Ulrich did not answer.
‘No,’ said Ulrich with a laugh, the idiotic chattering laugh of a man unstrung with hideous fear.
‘Who are they?’ asked Georg quickly, straining his eyes to see what the other would gladly not have seen.
‘Wolves.’
Quail Seed
‘The outlook is not encouraging for us smaller businesses,’ said Mr Scarrick to the artist and his sister, who had taken rooms over his suburban grocery store. ‘These big concerns are offering all sorts of attractions to the shopping public which we couldn’t afford to imitate, even on a small scale – reading-rooms and play-rooms and gramophones and Heaven knows what. People don’t care to buy half a pound of sugar nowadays unless they can listen to Harry Lauder and have the latest Australian cricket scores ticked off before their eyes. With the big Christmas stock we’ve got in we ought to keep half a dozen assistants hard at work, but as it is my nephew Jimmy and myself can pretty well attend to it ourselves. It’s a nice stock of goods, too, if I could only run it off in a few weeks’ time, but there’s no chance of that – not unless the London line was to get snowed up for a fortnight before Christmas. I did have a sort of idea of engaging Miss Luffcombe to give recitations during afternoons; she made a great hit at the Post Office entertainment with her rendering of “Little Beatrice’s Resolve.”’
‘Anything less likely to make your shop a fashionable shopping centre I can’t imagine,’ said the artist, with a very genuine shudder; ‘if I were trying to decide between the merits of Carlsbad plums and confected figs as a winter dessert it would infuriate me to have my train of thought entangled with little Beatrice’s resolve to be an Angel of Light or a girl scout. No,’ he continued, ‘the desire to get something thrown in for nothing is a ruling passion with the feminine shopper, but you can’t afford to pander effectively to it. Why not appeal to another instinct, which dominates not only the woman shopper but the male shopper – in fact, the entire human race?’
‘What is that instinct, sir?’ said the grocer.
Mrs Greyes and Miss Fritten had missed the 2.18 to Town, and as there was not another train till 3.12 they thought that they might as well make their grocery purchases at Scarrick’s. It would not be sensational, they agreed, but it would still be shopping.
For some minutes they had the shop almost to themselves, as far as customers were concerned, but while they were debating the respective virtues and blemishes of two competing brands of anchovy paste they were startled by an order, given across the counter, for six pomegranates and a packet of quail seed. Neither commodity was in general demand in that neighbourhood. Equally unusual was the style and appearance of the customer; about sixteen years old, with dark olive skin, large dusky eyes, and thick, low-growing, blue-black hair, he might have made his living as an artist’s model. As a matter of fact he did. The bowl of beaten brass that he produced for the reception of his purchases was distinctly the most astonishing variation on the string bag or marketing basket of suburban civilisation that his fellow-shoppers had ever seen. He threw a gold piece, apparently of some exotic currency, across the counter, and did not seem disposed to wait for any change that might be forthcoming.
‘The wine and figs were not paid for yesterday,’ he said; ‘keep what is over of the money for our future purchases.’
‘A very strange-looking boy?’ said Mrs Greyes interrogatively to the grocer as soon as his customer had left.
‘A foreigner, I believe,’ said Mr Scarrick, with a shortness that was entirely out of keeping with his usually communicative manner.
‘I wish for a pound and a half of the best coffee you have,’ said an authoritative voice a moment or two later. The speaker was a tall, authoritative-looking man of rather outlandish aspect, remarkable among other things for a full black beard, worn in a style more in vogue in early Assyria than in a London suburb of the present day.
‘Has a dark-faced boy been here buying pomegranates?’ he asked suddenly, as the coffee was being weighed out to him.
The two ladies almost jumped on hearing the grocer reply with an unblushing negative.
‘We have a few pomegranates in stock,’ he continued, ‘but there has been no demand for them.’
‘My servant will fetch the coffee as usual,’ said the purchaser, producing a coin from a wonderful metal-work purse. As an apparent afterthought he fired out the question: ‘Have you, perhaps, any quail seed?’
‘No,’ said the grocer, without hesitation, ‘we don’t stock it.’
‘What will he deny next?’ asked Mrs Greyes under her breath. What made it seem so much worse was the fact that Mr Scarrick had quite recently presided at a lecture on Savonarola.
Turning up the deep astrachan collar of his long coat, the stranger swept out of the shop, with the air, as Miss Fritten afterwards described it, of a Satrap proroguing a Sanhedrin. Whether such a pleasan
t function ever fell to a Satrap’s lot she was not quite certain, but the simile faithfully conveyed her meaning to a large circle of acquaintances.
‘Don’t let’s bother about the 3.12,’ said Mrs Greyes; ‘let’s go and talk this over at Laura Lipping’s. It’s her day.’
When the dark-faced boy arrived at the shop next day with his brass marketing bowl there was quite a fair gathering of customers, most of whom seemed to be spinning out their purchasing operations with the air of people who had very little to do with their time. In a voice that was heard all over the shop, perhaps because everybody was intently listening, he asked for a pound of honey and a packet of quail seed.
‘More quail seed!’ said Miss Fritten. ‘Those quails must be voracious, or else it isn’t quail seed at all.’
‘I believe it’s opium, and the bearded man is a detective,’ said Mrs Greyes brilliantly.
‘I don’t,’ said Laura Lipping; ‘I’m sure it’s something to do with the Portuguese Throne.’
‘More likely to be a Persian intrigue on behalf of the ex-Shah,’ said Miss Fritten; ‘the bearded man belongs to the Government Party. The quail seed is a countersign, of course; Persia is almost next door to Palestine, and quails come into the Old Testament, you know.’
‘Only as a miracle,’ said her well-informed younger sister; ‘I’ve thought all along it was part of a love intrigue.’
The boy who had so much interest and speculation centred on him was on the point of departing with his purchases when he was waylaid by Jimmy, the nephew-apprentice, who, from his post at the cheese and bacon counter, commanded a good view of the street.
‘We have some very fine Jaffa oranges,’ he said hurriedly, pointing to a corner where they were stored, behind a high rampart of biscuit tins. There was evidently more in the remark than met the ear. The boy flew at the oranges with the enthusiasm of a ferret finding a rabbit family at home after a long day of fruitless subterranean research. Almost at the same moment the bearded stranger stalked into the shop, and flung an order for a pound of dates and a tin of the best Smyrna halva across the counter. The most adventurous housewife in the locality had never heard of halva, but Mr Scarrick was apparendy able to produce the best Smyrna variety of it without a moment’s hesitation.