When William Came

by Saki (H. H. Munro)

  A friendly riot of fox terriers and spaniels greeted the carriage, leaping and rolling and yelping in an exuberance of sociability, as though horses and coachman and groom were comrades who had been absent for long months instead of half an hour. An indiscriminately affectionate puppy lay flat and whimpering at Yeovil’s feet, sending up little showers of gravel with its wildly thumping tail, while two of the terriers raced each other madly across lawn and shrubbery, as though to show the blue roans what speed really was. The laughing-eyed young groom disentangled the puppy from between Yeovil’s legs, and then he was ushered into the grey silence of the entrance hall, leaving sunlight and noise and the stir of life behind him.

  “Her ladyship will see you in her writing room,” he was told, and he followed a servant along the dark passages to the well-remembered room.

  There was something tragic in the sudden contrast between the vigour and youth and pride of life that Yeovil had seen crystallised in those dancing, high-stepping horses, scampering dogs, and alert, clean-limbed young men-servants, and the age-frail woman who came forward to meet him.

  Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, had for more than half a century been the ruling spirit at Torywood. The affairs of the county had not sufficed for her untiring activities of mind and body; in the wider field of national and Imperial service she had worked and schemed and fought with an energy and a far-sightedness that came probably from the blend of caution and bold restlessness in her Scottish blood. For many educated minds the arena of politics and public life is a weariness of dust and disgust, to others it is a fascinating study, to be watched from the comfortable seat of a spectator. To her it was a home. In her town house or down at Torywood, with her writing-pad on her knee and the telephone at her elbow, or in personal counsel with some trusted colleague or persuasive argument with a halting adherent or half-convinced opponent, she had laboured on behalf of the poor and the ill-equipped, had fought for her idea of the Right, and above all, for the safety and sanity of her Fatherland. Spadework when necessary and leadership when called for, came alike within the scope of her activities, and not least of her achievements, though perhaps she hardly realised it, was the force of her example, a lone, indomitable fighter calling to the half-caring and the half-discouraged, to the laggard and the slow-moving.

  And now she came across the room with “the tired step of a tired king,” and that look which the French so expressively called l’air défait. The charm which Heaven bestows on old ladies, reserving its highest gift to the end, had always seemed in her case to be lost sight of in the dignity and interest of a great dame who was still in the full prime of her fighting and ruling powers. Now, in Yeovil’s eyes, she had suddenly come to be very old, stricken with the forlorn languor of one who knows that death will be weary to wait for. She had spared herself nothing in the long labour, the ceaseless building, the watch and ward, and in one short autumn week she had seen the overthrow of all that she had built, the falling asunder of the world in which she had laboured. Her life’s end was like a harvest home when blight and storm have laid waste the fruit of long toil and unsparing outlay. Victory had been her goal, the death or victory of old heroic challenge, for she had always dreamed to die fighting to the last; death or victory—and the gods had given her neither, only the bitterness of a defeat that could not be measured in words, and the weariness of a life that had outlived happiness or hope. Such was Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, a shadow amid the young red-blooded life at Torywood, but a shadow that was too real to die, a shadow that was stronger than the substance that surrounded it.

  Yeovil talked long and hurriedly of his late travels, of the vast Siberian forests and rivers, the desolate tundras, the lakes and marshes where the wild swans rear their broods, the flower carpet of the summer fields and the winter ice-mantle of Russia’s northern sea. He talked as a man talks who avoids the subject that is uppermost in his mind, and in the mind of his hearer, as one who looks away from a wound or deformity that is too cruel to be taken notice of.

  Tea was served in a long oak-panelled gallery, where generations of Mustelfords had romped and played as children, and remained yet in effigy, in a collection of more or less faithful portraits. After tea Yeovil was taken by his hostess to the aviaries, which constituted the sole claim which Torywood possessed to being considered a show place. The third Earl of Greymarten had collected rare and interesting birds, somewhere about the time when Gilbert White was penning the last of his deathless letters, and his successors in the title had perpetuated the hobby. Little lawns and ponds and shrubberies were partitioned off for the various ground-loving species, and higher cages with interlacing perches and rockwork shelves accommodated the birds whose natural expression of movement was on the wing. Quails and francolins scurried about under low-growing shrubs, peacock-pheasants strutted and sunned themselves, pugnacious ruffs engaged in perfunctory battles, from force of habit now that the rivalry of the mating season was over; choughs, ravens, and loud-throated gulls occupied sections of a vast rockery, and bright-hued Chinese pond-herons and delicately stepping egrets waded among the waterlilies of a marble-terraced tank. One or two dusky shapes seen dimly in the recesses of a large cage built round a hollow tree would be lively owls when evening came on.

  In the course of his many wanderings Yeovil had himself contributed three or four inhabitants to this little feathered town, and he went round the enclosures, renewing old acquaintances and examining new additions.

  “The falcon cage is empty,” said Lady Greymarten, pointing to a large wired dome that towered high above the other enclosures, “I let the lanner fly free one day. The other birds may be reconciled to their comfortable quarters and abundant food and absence of dangers, but I don’t think all those things could make up to a falcon for the wild range of cliff and desert. When one has lost one’s own liberty one feels a quicker sympathy for other caged things, I suppose.”

  There was silence for a moment, and then the Dowager went on, in a wistful, passionate voice:

  “I am an old woman now, Murrey, I must die in my cage. I haven’t the strength to fight. Age is a very real and very cruel thing, though we may shut our eyes to it and pretend it is not there. I thought at one time that I should never really know what it meant, what it brought to one. I thought of it as a messenger that one could keep waiting out in the yard till the very last moment. I know now what it means. . . . But you, Murrey, you are young, you can fight. Are you going to be a fighter, or the very humble servant of the fait accompli?”

  “I shall never be the servant of the fait accompli,” said Yeovil. “I loathe it. As to fighting, one must first find out what weapon to use, and how to use it effectively. One must watch and wait.”

  “One must not wait too long,” said the old woman. “Time is on their side, not ours. It is the young people we must fight for now, if they are ever to fight for us. A new generation will spring up, a weaker memory of old glories will survive, the éclat of the ruling race will capture young imaginations. If I had your youth, Murrey, and your sex, I would become a commercial traveller.”

  “A commercial traveller!” exclaimed Yeovil.

  “Yes, one whose business took him up and down the country, into contact with all classes, into homes and shops and inns and railway carriages. And as I travelled I would work, work on the minds of every boy and girl I came across, every young father and young mother too, every young couple that were going to be man and wife. I would awaken or keep alive in their memory the things that we have been, the grand, brave things that some of our race have done, and I would stir up a longing, a determination for the future that we must win back. I would be a counter-agent to the agents of the fait accompli. In course of time the Government would find out what I was doing, and I should be sent out of the country, but I should have accomplished something, and others would carry on the work. That is what I would do. Murrey, even if it is to be a losing battle, fight it, fight it!”

  Yeovil knew that the old lady was
fighting her last battle, rallying the discouraged, and spurring on the backward.

  A footman came to announce that the carriage waited to take him back to the station. His hostess walked with him through the hall, and came out on to the stone-flagged terrace, the terrace from which a former Lady Greymarten had watched the twinkling bonfires that told of Waterloo.

  Yeovil said good-bye to her as she stood there, a wan, shrunken shadow, yet with a greater strength and reality in her flickering life than those parrot men and women that fluttered and chattered through London drawing-rooms and theatre foyers.

  As the carriage swung round a bend in the drive Yeovil looked back at Torywood, a lone, grey building, couched like a watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes in the midst of the sleeping landscape. An old pleading voice was still ringing in his ears:

  Imperious and yet forlorn,

  Came through the silence of the trees,

  The echoes of a golden horn,

  Calling to distances.

  Somehow Yeovil knew that he would never hear that voice again, and he knew, too, that he would hear it always, with its message, “Be a fighter.” And he knew now, with a shamefaced consciousness that sprang suddenly into existence, that the summons would sound for him in vain.

  The weary brain-torturing months of fever had left their trail behind, a lassitude of spirit and a sluggishness of blood, a quenching of the desire to roam and court adventure and hardship. In the hours of waking and depression between the raging intervals of delirium he had speculated, with a sort of detached, listless indifference, on the chances of his getting back to life and strength and energy. The prospect of filling a corner of some lonely Siberian graveyard or Finnish cemetery had seemed near realisation at times, and for a man who was already half dead the other half didn’t particularly matter. But when he had allowed himself to dwell on the more hopeful side of the case it had always been a complete recovery that awaited him; the same Yeovil as of yore, a little thinner and more lined about the eyes perhaps, would go through life in the same way, alert, resolute, enterprising, ready to start off at short notice for some desert or upland where the eagles were circling and the wild-fowl were calling. He had not reckoned that Death, evaded and held off by the doctors’ skill, might exact a compromise, and that only part of the man would go free to the West.

  And now he began to realise how little of mental and physical energy he could count on. His own country had never seemed in his eyes so comfort-yielding and to-be-desired as it did now when it had passed into alien keeping and become a prison land as much as a homeland. London with its thin mockery of a Season, and its chattering horde of empty-hearted self-seekers, held no attraction for him, but the spell of English country life was weaving itself round him, now that the charm of the desert was receding into a mist of memories. The waning of pleasant autumn days in an English woodland, the whir of game birds in the clean harvested fields, the grey moist mornings in the saddle, with the magical cry of hounds coming up from some misty hollow, and then the delicious abandon of physical weariness in bathroom and bedroom after a long run, and the heavenly snatched hour of luxurious sleep, before stirring back to life and hunger, the coming of the dinner hour and the jollity of a well-chosen house-party.

  That was the call which was competing with that other trumpet-call, and Yeovil knew on which side his choice would incline.

  XIV: “a Perfectly Glorious Afternoon”

  It was one of the last days of July, cooled and freshened by a touch of rain and dropping back again to a languorous warmth. London looked at its summer best, rain-washed and sun-lit, with the maximum of coming and going in its more fashionable streets.

  Cicely Yeovil sat in a screened alcove of the Anchorage Restaurant, a feeding-ground which had lately sprung into favour. Opposite her sat Ronnie, confronting the ruins of what had been a dish of prawns in aspic. Cool and clean and fresh-coloured, he was good to look on in the eyes of his companion, and yet, perhaps, there was a ruffle in her soul that called for some answering disturbance on the part of that superbly tranquil young man, and certainly called in vain. Cicely had set up for herself a fetish of onyx with eyes of jade, and doubtless hungered at times with an unreasonable but perfectly natural hunger for something of flesh and blood. It was the religion of her life to know exactly what she wanted and to see that she got it, but there was no possible guarantee against her occasionally experiencing a desire for something else. It is the golden rule of all religions that no one should really live up to their precepts; when a man observes the principles of his religion too exactly he is in immediate danger of founding a new sect.

  “To-day is going to be your day of triumph,” said Cicely to the young man, who was wondering at the moment whether he would care to embark on an artichoke; “I believe I’m more nervous than you are,” she added, “and yet I rather hate the idea of you scoring a great success.”

  “Why?” asked Ronnie, diverting his mind for a moment from the artichoke question and its ramifications of sauce hollandaise or vinaigre.

  “I like you as you are,” said Cicely, “just a nice-looking boy to flatter and spoil and pretend to be fond of. You’ve got a charming young body and you’ve no soul, and that’s such a fascinating combination. If you had a soul you would either dislike or worship me, and I’d much rather have things as they are. And now you are going to go a step beyond that, and other people will applaud you and say that you are wonderful, and invite you to eat with them and motor with them and yacht with them. As soon as that begins to happen, Ronnie, a lot of other things will come to an end. Of course I’ve always known that you don’t really care for me, but as soon as the world knows it you are irrevocably damaged as a plaything. That is the great secret that binds us together, the knowledge that we have no real affection for one another. And this afternoon every one will know that you are a great artist, and no great artist was ever a great lover.”

  “I shan’t be difficult to replace, anyway,” said Ronnie, with what he imagined was a becoming modesty; “there are lots of boys standing round ready to be fed and flattered and put on an imaginary pedestal, most of them more or less good-looking and well turned out and amusing to talk to.”

  “Oh, I dare say I could find a successor for your vacated niche,” said Cicely lightly; “one thing I’m determined on though, he shan’t be a musician. It’s so unsatisfactory to have to share a grand passion with a grand piano. He shall be a delightful young barbarian who would think Saint Saëns was a Derby winner or a claret.”

  “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to replace me,” said Ronnie, who did not care to have his successor too seriously discussed. “I may not score the success you expect this afternoon.”

  “My dear boy, a minor crowned head from across the sea is coming to hear you play, and that alone will count as a success with most of your listeners. Also, I’ve secured a real Duchess for you, which is rather an achievement in the London of to-day.”

  “An English Duchess?” asked Ronnie, who had early in life learned to apply the Merchandise Marks Act to ducal titles.

  “English, oh certainly, at least as far as the title goes; she was born under the constellation of the Star-spangled Banner. I don’t suppose the Duke approves of her being here, lending her countenance to the fait accompli, but when you’ve got republican blood in your veins a Kaiser is quite as attractive a lodestar as a King, rather more so. And Canon Mousepace is coming,” continued Cicely, referring to a closely-written list of guests; “the excellent von Tolb has been attending his church lately, and the Canon is longing to meet her. She is just the sort of person he adores. I fancy he sincerely realises how difficult it will be for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and he tries to make up for it by being as nice as possible to them in this world.”

  Ronnie held out his hand for the list.

  “I think you know most of the others,” said Cicely, passing it to him.

  “Leutnant von Gabelroth?” read out Ronnie; “who is h
e?”

  “In one of the hussar regiments quartered here; a friend of the Gräfin’s. Ugly but amiable, and I’m told a good cross-country rider. I suppose Murrey will be disgusted at meeting the ‘outward and visible sign’ under his roof, but these encounters are inevitable as long as he is in London.”

  “I didn’t know Murrey was coming,” said Ronnie.

  “I believe he’s going to look in on us,” said Cicely; “it’s just as well, you know, otherwise we should have Joan asking in her loudest voice when he was going to be back in England again. I haven’t asked her, but she overheard the Gräfin arranging to come and hear you play, and I fancy that will be quite enough.”

  “How about some Turkish coffee?” said Ronnie, who had decided against the artichoke.

  “Turkish coffee, certainly, and a cigarette, and a moment’s peace before the serious business of the afternoon claims us. Talking about peace, do you know, Ronnie, it has just occurred to me that we have left out one of the most important things in our affaire; we have never had a quarrel.”

  “I hate quarrels,” said Ronnie, “they are so domesticated.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you talk about your home,” said Cicely.

  “I fancy it would apply to most homes,” said Ronnie.

  “The last boy-friend I had used to quarrel furiously with me at least once a week,” said Cicely reflectively; “but then he had dark slumberous eyes that lit up magnificently when he was angry, so it would have been a sheer waste of God’s good gifts not to have sent him into a passion now and then.”

  “With your excursions into the past and the future you are making me feel dreadfully like an instalment of a serial novel,” protested Ronnie; “we have now got to ‘synopsis of earlier chapters.’”

  “It shan’t be teased,” said Cicely; “we will live in the present and go no further into the future than to make arrangements for Tuesday’s dinner-party. I’ve asked the Duchess; she would never have forgiven me if she’d found out that I had a crowned head dining with me and hadn’t asked her to meet him.”