To fill the leaden moments, she immersed herself in her work. She had a long-standing commission to supply the Animal-Lovers' Gazette with a poem for its Christmas number, and to the task of writing this she proceeded to devote herself. And gradually the ecstasy of literary composition eased her pain.
The days crept by. Old Sir Alexander continued to maltreat magpies. Reginald and the local rabbits fought a never-ceasing battle, they striving to keep up the birthrate, he to reduce it. Colonel Pashley-Drake maundered on about gnus he had met. And Aubrey dragged himself about the house, looking licked to a splinter. Eventually Tuesday came, and with it the garden-party.
Lady Bassinger's annual garden-party was one of the big events of the countryside. By four o'clock all that was bravest and fairest for miles around had assembled on the big lawn. But Charlotte, though she had stayed on specially to be present, was not one of the gay throng. At about the time when the first strawberry was being dipped in its cream, she was up in her room, staring with bewildered eyes at a letter which had arrived by the second post.
The Animal-Lovers' Gazette had turned her poem down!
Yes, turned it down flat, in spite of the fact that it had been commissioned and that she was not asking a penny for it. Accompanying the rejected manuscript was a curt note from the editor, in which he said that he feared its tone might offend his readers.
Charlotte was stunned. She was not accustomed to having her efforts rejected. This one, moreover, had seemed to her so particularly good. A hard judge of her own work, she had said to herself, as she licked the envelope, that this time, if never before, she had delivered the goods.
She unfolded the manuscript and re-read it.
It ran as follows:
GOOD GNUS
(A Vignette in Verse)
BY
CHARLOTTE MULLINER
When cares attack and life seems black,
How sweet it is to pot a yak,
Or puncture hares and grizzly bears,
And others I could mention:
But in my Animals' 'Who's Who'
No name stands higher than the Gnu:
And each new gnu that comes in view
Receives my prompt attention.
When Afric's sun is sinking low,
And shadows wander to and fro,
And everywhere there's in the air
A hush that's deep and solemn;
Then is the time good men and true
With View Halloo pursue the gnu:
(The safest spot to put your shot
Is through the spinal column).
To take the creature by surprise
We must adopt some rude disguise,
Although deceit is never sweet,
And falsehoods don't attract us:
So, as with gun in hand you wait,
Remember to impersonate
A tuft of grass, a mountain-pass,
A kopje or a cactus.
A brief suspense, and then at last
The waiting's o'er, the vigil past:
A careful aim. A spurt of flame.
It's done. You've pulled the trigger,
And one more gnu, so fair and frail,
Has handed in its dinner-pail:
(The females all are rather small,
The males are somewhat bigger).
Charlotte laid the manuscript down, frowning. She chafed at the imbecility of editors. Less than ever was she able to understand what anyone could find in it to cavil at. Tone likely to offend? What did the man mean about the tone being likely to offend? She had never heard such nonsense in her life. How could the tone possibly offend? It was unexceptionable. The whole poem breathed that clean, wholesome, healthy spirit of Sport which has made England what it is. And the thing was not only lyrically perfect, but educational as well. It told the young reader, anxious to shoot gnus but uncertain of the correct procedure, exactly what he wanted to know.
She bit her lip. Well, if this Animal-Lovers' bird didn't know a red-hot contribution when he saw one, she would jolly well find somebody else who did – and quick, too. She . . .
At this moment, something occurred to distract her thoughts. Down on the terrace below, little Wilfred, complete with airgun, had come into her line of vision. The boy was creeping along in a quiet, purposeful manner, obviously intent on the chase: and it suddenly came over Charlotte Mulliner in a wave that here she had been in this house all this time and never once had thought of borrowing the child's weapon and having a plug at something with it.
The sky was blue. The sun was shining. All Nature seemed to call to her to come out and kill things.
She left the room and ran quickly down the stairs.
And what of Aubrey, meanwhile? Grief having slowed him up on his feet, he had been cornered by his mother and marched off to hand cucumber sandwiches at the garden-party. After a brief spell of servitude, however, he had contrived to escape and was wandering on the terrace, musing mournfully, when he observed his brother Wilfred approaching. And at the same moment Charlotte Mulliner emerged from the house and came hurrying in their direction. In a flash, Aubrey perceived that here was a situation which, shrewdly handled, could be turned greatly to his advantage. Affecting to be unaware of Charlotte's approach, he stopped his brother and eyed the young thug sternly.
'Wilfred,' he said, 'where are you going with that gun?'
The boy appeared embarrassed.
'Just shooting.'
Aubrey took the weapon from him and raised his voice slightly. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen that Charlotte was now well within hearing.
'Shooting, eh?' he said. 'Shooting? I see. And have you never been taught, wretched child, that you should be kind to the animals that crave your compassion? Has no one ever told you that he prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small? For shame, Wilfred, for shame!'
Charlotte had come up, and was standing there, looking at them inquiringly.
'What's all this about?' she asked.
Aubrey started dramatically.
'Miss Mulliner! I was not aware that you were there. All this? Oh, nothing. I found this lad here on his way to shoot sparrows with his air-gun, and I am taking the thing from him. It may seem to you a high-handed action on my part. You may consider me hyper-sensitive. You may ask, Why all this fuss about a few birds? But that is Aubrey Bassinger. Aubrey Bassinger will not lightly allow even the merest sparrow to be placed in jeopardy. Tut, Wilfred,' he said. 'Tut! Cannot you see now how wrong it is to shoot the poor sparrows?'
'But I wasn't going to shoot sparrows,' said the boy. 'I was going to shoot uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath.'
'It is also wrong,' said Aubrey, after a slight hesitation, 'to shoot uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath.'
Charlotte Mulliner uttered an impatient exclamation. And Aubrey, looking at her, saw that her eyes were glittering with a strange light. She breathed quickly through her delicately-chiselled nose. She seemed feverish, and a medical man would have been concerned about her blood-pressure.
'Why?' she demanded vehemently. 'Why is it wrong? Why shouldn't he shoot his uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath?'
Aubrey stood for a moment, pondering. Her razor-like feminine intelligence had cut cleanly to the core of the matter. After all, now that she put it like that, why not?
'Think how it would tickle him up.'
'True,' said Aubrey, nodding. 'True.'
'And his uncle Francis is precisely the sort of man who ought to have been shot at with air-guns incessantly for the last thirty years. The moment I met him, I said to myself, ''That man ought to be shot at with air-guns.'' '
Aubrey nodded again. Her girlish enthusiasm had begun to infect him.
'There is much in what you say,' he admitted.
'Where is he?' asked Charlotte, turning to the boy.
'On the roof of the boathouse.'
Charlotte's face clouded.
'H'm!' she said. 'That's awkward. How
is one to get at him?'
'I remember uncle Francis telling me once,' said Aubrey, 'that, when you went shooting tigers, you climbed a tree. There are plenty of trees by the boathouse.'
'Admirable!'
For an instant there came to disturb Aubrey's hearty joy in the chase a brief, faint flicker of prudence.
'But . . . I say . . . Do you really think . . . Ought we . . .?'
Charlotte's eyes flashed scornfully.
'Infirm of purpose,' she said. 'Give me the air-gun!'
'I was only thinking . . .'
'Well?'
'I suppose you know he'll have practically nothing on?'
Charlotte Mulliner laughed lightly.
'He can't intimidate me,' she said. 'Come! Let us be going.'
Up on the roof of the boathouse, the beneficent ultra-violet rays of the afternoon sun pouring down on his globular surface, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake lay in that pleasant half-waking, half-dreaming state that accompanies this particular form of lumbago-treatment. His mind flitted lightly from one soothing subject to another. He thought of elks he had shot in Canada, of moufflon he had shot in the Grecian Archipelago, of giraffes he had shot in Nigeria. He was just on the point of thinking of a hippopotamus which he had shot in Egypt, when the train of his meditations was interrupted by a soft popping sound not far away. He smiled affectionately. So little Wilfred was out with his air-gun, eh?
A thrill of quiet pride passed through Colonel Pashley-Drake. He had trained the lad well, he felt. With a garden-party in progress, with all the opportunities it offered for quiet gorging, how many boys of Wilfred's age would have neglected their shooting to hang round the tea-table and stuff themselves with cakes. But this fine lad . . .
Ping! There it was again. The boy must be somewhere quite close at hand. He wished he could be at his side, giving him kindly advice. Wilfred, he felt, was a young fellow after his own heart. What destruction he would spread among the really worthwhile animals when he grew up and put aside childish things and exchanged his air-gun for a Winchester repeater.
Sir Francis Pashley-Drake started. Two inches from where he lay a splinter of wood had sprung from the boathouse roof. He sat up, feeling a little less affectionate.
'Wilfred!'
There was no reply.
'Be careful, Wilfred, my boy. You nearly . . .'
A sharp, agonizing twinge caused him to break off abruptly. He sprang to his feet and began to address the surrounding landscape passionately in one of the lesser-known dialects of the Congo basin. He no longer thought of Wilfred with quiet pride. Few things so speedily modify an uncle's love as a nephew's air-gun bullet in the fleshy part of the leg. Sir Francis Pashley-Drake's plans for this boy's future had undergone in one brief instant a complete change. He no longer desired to stand beside him through his formative years, teaching him the secrets of shikar. All he wanted to do was to get close enough to him to teach him with the flat of his right hand to be a bit more careful where he pointed his gun.
He was expressing a synopsis of these views in a mixture of Urdu and Cape Dutch, when the words were swept from his lips by the sight of a woman's face, peering from the branches of a near-by tree.
Colonel Pashley-Drake reeled where he stood. Like so many out-door men, he was the soul of modesty. Once, in Bechuanaland, he had left a native witch-dance in a marked manner because he considered the chief 's third supplementary wife insufficiently clad. An acute consciousness of the sketchiness of his costume overcame him. He blushed brightly.
'My dear young lady . . .' he stammered.
He had got thus far when he perceived that the young woman was aiming at him something that looked remarkably like an air-gun. Her tongue protruded thoughtfully from the corner of her mouth, she had closed one eye and with the other was squinting tensely along the barrel.
Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake did not linger. In all England there was probably no man more enthusiastic about shooting: but the fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. With an agility which no gnu, unless in the very pink of condition, could have surpassed, he sprang to the side of the roof and leaped off. There was a clump of reeds not far from the boathouse. He galloped across the turf and dived into them.
Charlotte descended from her tree. Her expression was petulant. Girls nowadays are spoiled, and only too readily become peevish when baulked of their pleasures.
'I had no idea he was so nippy,' she said.
'A quick mover,' agreed Aubrey. 'I imagine he got that way from dodging rhinoceroses.'
'Why can't they make these silly guns with two barrels? A single barrel doesn't give a girl a chance.'
Nestling among the reeds, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake, in spite of the indignation natural to a man in his position, could not help feeling a certain complacency. The old woodcraft of the hunter had stood him, he felt, in good stead. Not many men, he told himself, would have had the initiative and swift intelligence to act so promptly in the face of peril.
He was aware of voices close by.
'What do we do now?' he heard Charlotte Mulliner say.
'We must think,' said the voice of his nephew Aubrey.
'He's in there somewhere.'
'Yes.'
'I hate to see a fine head like that get away,' said Charlotte, and her voice was still querulous. 'Especially after I winged him. The very next poem I write is going to be an appeal to air-gun manufacturers to use their intelligence, if they have any, and turn out a line with two barrels.'
'I shall write a Pastel in Prose on the same subject,' agreed Aubrey.
'Well, what shall we do?'
There was a short silence. An insect of unknown species crept up Colonel Pashley-Drake and bit him in the small of the back.
'I'll tell you what,' said Aubrey. 'I remember uncle Francis mentioning to me once that when wounded zebus take cover by the reaches of the Lower Zambesi, the sportsman despatches a native assistant to set fire to . . .'
Sir Francis Pashley-Drake emitted a hollow groan. It was drowned by Charlotte's cry of delight.
'Why, of course! How clever you are, Mr Bassinger.'
'Oh no,' said Aubrey modestly.
'Have you matches?'
'I have a cigarette-lighter.'
'Then would it be bothering you too much to go and set light to those reeds – about there would be a good place – and I'll wait here with the gun.'
'I should be charmed.'
'I hate to trouble you.'
'No trouble, I assure you,' said Aubrey. 'A pleasure.'
Three minutes later the revellers on the lawn were interested to observe a sight rare at the better class of English garden-party. Out of a clump of laurel-bushes that bordered the smoothly mown turf there came charging a stout, pink gentleman of middle age who hopped from side to side as he ran. He was wearing a loin-cloth, and seemed in a hurry. They had just time to recognize in this newcomer their hostess's brother, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake, when he snatched a cloth from the nearest table, draped it round him, and with a quick leap took refuge behind the portly form of the Bishop of Stortford, who was talking to the local Master of Hounds about the difficulty he had in keeping his vicars off the incense.
Mr. Mulliner Speaking Page 12
