by Lord Dunsany
“When at last I reached the village the steps were far fainter, and yet I was still pursued, and only my fears could guess how far the revengeful tree would dare to penetrate into Lingham to face the arrogant mastery, and even the incredulity, of our kind. I hurried on, still without running, till I came to an inn with a good stout door. For a moment I stood and looked at it, door, roof and front wall, to satisfy myself that it could not easily be battered in, and when I saw it was really the shelter I sought, I slipped in like a rabbit.
“The brave appearance I kept up in front of the poplar dropped from me like a falling cloak, as I sat or lay on a wooden chair by a table, part of me on the table and part on the chair; till people came up and began to speak to me. But I couldn’t speak. Three or four working men, in there for their glass of beer, and the landlord of the Mug of Ale, all came round me. I couldn’t speak at all.
“They were very good to me. And, when I found that the words would come again, I said I had had an attack. I didn’t say of what, as I might have blundered on to something that whiskey was bad for, and my life depended on a drink. And they gave me one. I will indeed say that for them. They gave me a tumbler of neat whiskey. I just drank it. And they gave me another. Do you know, the two glasses had no effect on me whatever. Not the very slightest. I wanted another, but before I took that there was one thing I had to be sure of. Was there anything waiting for me outside? I daren’t ask straight out.
“ ‘A nice village,’ I said, lifting up my head from the table. ‘Nice tree outside.’
“ ‘No tree out there,’ said one of the men.
“ ‘No tree?’ I said. ‘I’ll bet you five shillings there is.’
“ ‘No,’ he said, and stuck to it. He didn’t even want to bet.
“ ‘I thought I noticed something like a’ I daren’t even say the word ‘poplar,’ so I said ‘a tree’ instead. ‘Just outside the door,’ I added.
“‘No, no tree,’ he repeated.
“ ‘I’ll bet you ten shillings,’ I said.
“He took that.
“ ‘Well, go and have a look, governor,’ he said.
“You don’t think I was going outside that door again. So I said, ‘No, you shall decide. I mayn’t trust your memory against mine, but if you go outside and look, and say whether it’s there or not, that’s quite good enough for me.’
“He smiled and thought me a bit dotty. Oh Lord, what would he have thought me if I’d told him the bare truth.
“Well, he came back with the news that thrilled all through me, the golden glorious news that I’d lost my ten shillings. And at that I paid my bet and had my third tumbler of whiskey, which I did not dare to risk while I didn’t know how things were. And that third whiskey won. It beat my misery, it beat my fatigue and my terror, and the awful suspicion which partly haunted my reason, that this unquestioned dominion that animal life believes itself to have established was possibly overthrown. It beat everything, and I dropped into a deep sleep there at the table.
“I woke next day at noon immensely refreshed, where the good fellows had laid me upstairs on a bed. I looked out over ruddy tiles; there was a yard below, with poultry, among walls of red brick, and a goat was tied up there, and a woman went out to feed him; and from beyond came all the ancient sounds of the farm, against which time can do nothing. I revelled in all these sounds of animal mastery, and felt a safety there in the light of that bright morning that somehow told me my dreadful experience was over.
“Of course you may say it was all a dream; but one doesn’t remember a dream all those years like that. No, that frightful poplar had something against man, and with cause enough I’ll admit.
“What it would have done if I’d run doesn’t bear thinking of.” And Jorkens didn’t think of it; with a cheery wave of his hand he made the sign to the waiter, that drowns memory.
The Development of the Rillswood Estate
A few of us at the Billiards Club one day were sitting in the bay window: no one that day had any particular idea as to what the Government ought to do, or what things were coming to, or indeed about any topic whatever; so we were looking out at the street. Not only had conversation drooped and then died away; but, as often happens when things are dull in the club, they seemed dull in the street too. I for one would not have watched the street at all if I had had anything else to do; and that, I think, was the feeling of all of us. It was dull, and dull people passed through it. And then came an open motor, and in it reclined a man with sun-tanned skin, sharp aquiline features, small grey beard and rather foreign expression, in a coat of luxurious fur; with a cigar in the fingers of his right hand and one large diamond shining on one of them. His passage through the street seemed to change its whole aspect: it was dull no longer. I turned to my next neighbour, who chanced to be Jorkens, to make some comment on this rare personality; and I saw as I turned that everyone else seemed a little stirred by him too.
“He’s gone up a lot in the world,” said Jorkens.
Was it envy that made him say this?
“Who?” I said in order to draw Jorkens.
“That fellow,” said Jorkens pointing to the man in the new car. “Satyrides, the Greek financier.”
I had heard the name. “Is that who he is?” I said.
“Yes,” said Jorkens. “He is not Greek really.”
“What is he?” two or three of us asked.
“I’ll tell you his story,” said Jorkens.
And there and then he did; and it only shows us that one can wander the countryside for years, and at the end of all that time find something one knew nothing about; or, as is very often the case, never find it at all.
“There was a painter called Meddin,” said Jorkens, “who lived in a very large cottage, or perhaps one should call it a farmhouse, a really delightful building covered with honey-suckle and built in the way they used to build in Kent, with large flints and mortar. It had a garden behind it, and beyond that a small orchard, and beyond the orchard a wood. Meddin’s property ended at the further edge of the orchard: the wood belonged to the Rillswood estate. Meddin lived there with his sister. All through the warm weather he used to sit and paint in the garden, until there was no light left. I think he preferred the dim gloaming to good light, as he did imaginative pictures and could fancy classical figures between the wood and his orchard more easily when the glare of day was gone. It is not easy to describe in words a picture painted with oils, but an evident love of trees and an interest in old mythology, that was showed by his dim figures, often haunting a wood, rather suggested Corot.15 He was not imitative; but, if he had a master during the last hundred years, Corot would have been the man. Even in actual fact there can have been few places pleasanter than that garden of Meddin’s, and in his pictures it was doubly delightful. And then they developed, as they call it, the Rillswood estate; and one day they began to cut the wood down. In a month it was all gone, and in two months bungalows were going up.
“At this time Meddin and his sister Lucy both began to notice scratchings in their lawn: buttercups were being scratched up and larger plants, and sometimes they saw a bulb, all white in the earth, that had been exposed by these scratchings and then left where it grew, as though whatever had laid it bare had been scared away before eating it. They put it down to a badger. And then the tulips, that they had in the orchard, began to be scratched up. Meddin and his sister went all round the garden and could find nothing. Sometimes they listened from their windows at night, and both distinctly heard noises. Then they talked it all over, and they decided that the best thing to do would be for Meddin to sit up later than usual in the garden, with a gun. They had a shotgun with which Meddin used to shoot pigeons, until the houses of the Rillswood estate began to grow round them, and the pigeons came no longer.
“ ‘But you mustn’t shoot it if it’s a fox,’ said Lucy.
“ ‘No, no, that would never do,’ said Meddin.
“All this, I may say, was more than thirty years ago, an
d the shooting of a fox would have meant the placing of the Meddins for the rest of their lives in a class or caste to which the nearest approach would perhaps be the Indian Untouchables.
“Whatever it was seemed to avoid the house, and the scratchings in the lawn were all on the far side, and there were more of them in the orchard, deep scratchings to uncover small roots, which had apparently been eaten. Meddin had never had any more exciting sport than shooting an occasional pigeon, and when he left the house with his loaded shotgun and crossed the lawn, all hushed except for the birds’ last songs coming from shrubs and hedge, I gather that some of those thrills that come to men who sit up at nightfall for tigers came as near to Meddin as they were ever to come. The mystery with which evening always leaves us, and the uncertainty of sport, helped to bring such feelings to Meddin in his villa-surrounded garden. He crossed the lawn to the orchard in the direction in which the scratchings were thickest, and a new look came to the apple-trees; for hitherto he had looked at them as an artist, and beyond them to catch fancies stealing out from the wood, but now he approached them as a hunter. The difference was immense, for the fancies that lurked on the orchard’s edge for the artist were all friendly, while he carried a gun for them now; and whatever haunted the evening seemed hostile to Meddin, as he was hostile to it. As an artist he would almost have wept at that hour to see all the solemnity and mystery that had haunted the wood gone, and all its beauty, and the very earth that the wood had enchanted lying bare and untidy; but as a man with a gun, looking for something that lurked, he felt glad that it had less hiding-place than it had a month ago, if only the whole evening, stealing swiftly towards night, were not hiding-place enough for anything that might lurk. He went cautiously to a rhododendron just at the edge of the orchard, and got into it and sat down on a small camp-stool he carried, and was pretty well hidden, but could see the orchard. Darkness came to the desolate land where the wood had been, and Meddin had not hidden in his rhododendron long, when he heard the sound of steps that seemed soft and heavy stealing amongst his apple-trees. He shoved forward the safety-catch of his gun, which his sister had told him, quite rightly, not to do until the very last moment, and peered through his leafy screen. Whatever was coming came from where the wood had been, but it kept so persistently behind apple-trees that, though Meddin could hear where it was, he could not catch a glimpse of it. It stopped to scratch up some roots from the earth, still hidden from view: Meddin knew which apple-tree was giving it covert, but could not move to see round it without disturbing the whole rhododendron, which must have scared whatever it was away. Then, when the thing had eaten whatever it had scratched up, it came forward again, slipping slowly round the apple-tree. Meddin says that he knew what it was the moment he saw it, though I don’t set much store by what men tell you afterwards about such moments as that. Anyway it was a satyr.”
“A satyr!” exclaimed Terbut, who was on the window-seat with us.
“Yes,” said Jorkens, “and a full-grown one. A young satyr, Meddin thought, but quite full-grown; and it was looking straight at Meddin from round the trunk of the apple-tree, as he hadn’t hidden himself very well.”
“Do you usually get satyrs in suburban gardens?” said Terbut.
“No,” said Jorkens, “that’s just the point of it. They live in woods. But this wood had been cut down; and the satyr had nowhere to go. When it first put its head round the apple-tree, Meddin says, its lips were twitching as though it were hungry. Then it saw him, and surprise spread over its face, and it gave a low whistle. Meddin’s first thought, as he put his gun down on the ground, was that he had got a model, such a model as even Corot had probably never had. But there were many more thoughts to come, thoughts that worried Meddin and his sister for weeks, until Lady Rillswood called.”
“How did she come into it?” asked Terbut.
“I’m getting ahead of my story,” said Jorkens. “The first thing was what on earth Meddin was to do with the satyr. It was cold and had no wood to go to; and he couldn’t leave it there in his garden, hiding behind apple-trees for one of the neighbours to find it, quite naked.
“The first to speak was Meddin. ‘Come here,’ he said. And the satyr whistled again. ‘Come here,’ repeated Meddin, ‘and don’t make that noise. Where do you come from?’
“ ‘The wood,’ said the satyr.
“ ‘What’s your name?’ asked Meddin.
“And the satyr laughed.
“ ‘Are you hungry?’ said Meddin.
“The satyr nodded quickly.
“ ‘What do you get to eat?’ asked Meddin.
“ ‘Roots,’ said the satyr.
“ ‘Out of my garden, I suppose,’ said Meddin.
“ ‘Yes,’ said the satyr. ‘They’re good.’
“It was many years before the B.B.C. spoke to everyone every evening, and the satyr’s accent was wild and beastly. But Meddin understood him.
“ ‘Where do you sleep?’ he asked.
“ ‘I hide,’ said the satyr.
“ ‘So I thought,’ said Meddin.
“And looking round he saw that there were few hiding-places left, now that the wood was gone, and it could not be many hours before someone would see the satyr. What was to be done? The question perplexed Meddin, for a reason that I find it rather hard to make clear. Briefly, then, at the dawn of this century there was a certain system of civilization in England, remnants of which still survive; and it had its definite rules. For instance, if a newcomer in any neighbourhood called first on an oldcomer, the act was classed with burglaries: nobody ever did call thus on an older resident, but, if anyone had, that is how it would have been looked on. That was one of the rules. The rules were not written out, because everyone knew them. And another of the rules, which everyone knew instinctively, but which was never even mentioned, let alone written, because no one ever contemplated a breach of it, was that you did not keep a satyr in your garden.
“ ‘Well, hide now,’ said Meddin. ‘You’d better get into this rhododendron bush, while I get you some clothes.’
“ ‘Don’t wear clothes,’ said the satyr.
“ ‘Then you don’t eat food,’ said Meddin.
“ ‘Roots?’ said the satyr.
“ ‘Yes, plenty of roots,’ said Meddin. For he had a heap of potatoes in a shed, and several tulip bulbs.
“So the satyr took a dive into the rhododendron, and Meddin went to get him some clothes.
“ ‘Lucy,’ he said when he got back to the house and found his sister waiting for news, ‘you know those things Corot used to put into his landscapes.’
“‘Satyrs?’ she said.
“ ‘Yes,’ replied Meddin. ‘I wonder if he ever saw one.’
“ ‘No,’ said Lucy, ‘they’re all nonsense.’
“ ‘Well, there’s one in the garden now,’ said her brother.
“ ‘In the garden now?’ said Lucy.
“ ‘Yes,’ said Meddin, ‘in the rhododendron. And it’s only a matter of time before one of the neighbours will see it.’
“Lucy saw at once that her brother really meant it, so she saved time on exclamations or wonder, and got her mind instantly to the thing that really mattered, which was to protect the respectability of their garden. If a neighbour should see that satyr, or even anything half so odd, she knew that their house would not be a place at which anybody would call. And if no one called on you; well, you would not be much better than this thing, whatever it was, in the garden. They must hide the satyr; that was clear to both of them; or the satyr would drag them down.
“‘No clothes of course,’ said Meddin.
“ ‘No,’ said Lucy.
“ ‘We’ve got that old suit that Thomas had.’
“For they had had an odd man to do the work of the house, but had sent him away for economy. Such fluctuations depended upon the sale of pictures. And now they had only a cook, and a charwoman occasionally.
“They got the old suit out, and some hyacinth bulbs, that had
been intended for pots in a window, and were the nearest roots to hand: Meddin knew they were edible, because pheasants had come to his garden in the days of the wood and had always gone for those bulbs. And with the suit of clothes and a handful of bulbs he went back to the rhododendron. The boots of his former employé had walked away with that odd man, so Meddin had to bring an old pair of his own. He hoped that the rule would apply to the satyr that seemed to apply to tramps, which was that any pair of old boots always fitted. And so it fortunately did. But he had the greatest difficulty with the suit of clothes; for not only had the satyr never put on any clothes before, but the breeches were tight for him. Well, he got them on eventually, and back they came to the house and Meddin took the satyr straight up to his room and said: ‘Now shave off that beard.’
“But he might just as well have told a goat to shave, as of course he soon realized; and then he shaved off the satyr’s small pointed beard himself and carefully clipped the tufts from the tops of his ears, while the satyr munched the bulbs.
“ ‘I expect you’d have got many already if I’d planted them out in the garden,’ said Meddin as he pointed at the last of his hyacinth bulbs, which was already sprouting.
“ ‘Yes,’ said the satyr. ‘They’re good.’
“Then they came downstairs to the parlour, the satyr hobbling uncomfortably, for of course no boots could have really fitted him; boots were for him a concealment, not a fit. He wanted to take them off, but curtly received from Meddin the words that he heard so often at this period that at a later date he took them for his motto: ‘It can’t be done.’
“‘What do you think of him now?’ said Meddin to Lucy. And to the satyr, ‘This is my sister.’
“Lucy held out her hand to the satyr, and he licked it. That was only one of a thousand things that they taught him not to do later. They brought him into the dining-room there and then, and taught him to hand them dishes while they had supper; and from that very hour they both of them concentrated on hiding away all traces by which the neighbours might guess that they kept a satyr. Their work was difficult and, though they got an odd man for no wages, who seemed delighted to work for them and who could be fed on much cheaper roots than the bulbs of tulips and hyacinths, it would have been a relief to get rid of him. But whenever the question of sending him back arose, as at first it often did, there came the answer at once, ‘But the wood is gone.’ So they kept their secret and lived in perpetual fear, either because they were too kind-hearted to get rid of the satyr, or because they couldn’t think of a way to do it.
