THE THURSDAY CLUB
VII. SOME EXPERIENCES OF A DISCIPLE
IX. I AM INTRODUCED TO STRONG MAGIC
X. CONFIDENCES AT A WAYSIDE INN
XI. HOW A GERMAN ENGINEER FOUND STRANGE FISHING
XIII. I VISIT THE FIELDS OF EDEN
XIV. SIR ARCHIBALD ROYLANCE PUTS HIS FOOT IN IT
XV. HOW A FRENCH NOBLEMAN DISCOVERED FEAR
XVII. THE DISTRICT-VISITOR IN PALMYRA SQUARE
XVIII. THE NIGHT OF THE FIRST OF JUNE
XIX. THE NIGHT OF THE FIRST OF JUNE—LATER
XXI. HOW I STALKED WILDER GAME THAN DEER
DEDICATION
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF ETON COLLEGE
Honoured Sir,
On your last birthday a well-meaning godfather presented you with a volume of mine, since you had been heard on occasion to express approval of my works. The book dealt with a somewhat arid branch of historical research, and it did not please you. You wrote to me, I remember, complaining that I had ‘let you down,’ and summoning me, as I valued your respect, to ‘pull myself together.’ In particular you demanded to hear more of the doings of Richard Hannay, a gentleman for whom you professed a liking. I, too, have a liking for Sir Richard, and when I met him the other day (he is now a country neighbour) I observed that his left hand had been considerably mauled, an injury which I knew bad not been due to the war. He was so good as to tell me the tale of an unpleasant business in which he had. recently been engaged, and to give me permission to retell it for your benefit. Sir Richard took a modest pride in the affair, because from first to last it had been a pure contest of wits, without recourse to those more obvious methods of strife with which he is familiar. So I herewith present it to you, in the hope that in the eyes of you and your friends it may atone for certain other writings of mine with which you have been afflicted by those in authority.
J.B., June 1924
I.
DOCTOR GREENSLADE THEORISES
That evening, I remember, as I came up through the Mill Meadow, I was feeling peculiarly happy and contented. It was still mid-March, one of those spring days when noon is like May, and only the cold pearly haze at sunset warns a man that he is not done with winter. The season was absurdly easy, for the black-thorn was in flower and the hedge roots were full of primroses. The partridges were paired, the rooks were well on with their nests, and the meadows were full of shimmering grey flocks of fieldfares on their way north. I put up half a dozen snipe on the boggy edge of the stream, and in the bracken in Stern Wood I thought I saw a woodcock, and hoped that the birds might nest with us this year, as they used to do long ago. It was jolly to see the world coming to life again, and to remember that this patch of England was my own, and all these wild things, so to speak, members of my little household.
As I say, I was in a very contented mood, for I had found something I had longed for all my days. I had bought Fosse Manor just after the War as a wedding present for Mary, and for two and a half years we had been settled there. My son, Peter John, was rising fifteen months, a thoughtful infant, as healthy as a young colt and as comic as a terrier puppy. Even Mary’s anxious eye could scarcely detect in him any symptoms of decline. But the place wanted a lot of looking to, for it had run wild during the War, and the woods had to be thinned, gates and fences repaired, new drains laid, a ram put in to supplement the wells, a heap of thatching to be done, and the garden borders to be brought back to cultivation. I had got through the worst of it, and as I came out of the Home Wood on to the lower lawns and saw the old stone gables that the monks had built, I felt that I was anchored at last in the pleasantest kind of harbour.
There was a pile of letters on the table in the hall, but I let them be, for I was not in the mood for any communication with the outer world. As I was having a hot bath Mary kept giving me the news through her bedroom door. Peter John had been raising Cain over a first tooth; the new shorthorn cow was drying off; old George Whaddon had got his grand-daughter back from service; there was a new brood of runner-ducks; there was a missel-thrush building in the box hedge by the lake. A chronicle of small beer, you will say, but I was by a long chalk more interested in it than in what might be happening in Parliament or Russia or the Hindu Kush. The fact is I was becoming such a mossback that I had almost stopped reading the papers. Many a day The Times would remain unopened, for Mary never looked at anything but the first page to see who was dead or married. Not that I didn’t read a lot, for I used to spend my evenings digging into county history, and learning all I could about the old fellows who had been my predecessors. I liked to think that I lived in a place that had been continuously inhabited for a thousand years. Cavalier and Roundhead had ought over the countryside, and I was becoming a considerable authority on their tiny battles. That was about the only interest I had left in soldiering.
As we went downstairs, I remember we stopped to look out of the long staircase window which showed a segment of lawn, a corner of the lake, and through a gap in the woods a vista of green downland. Mary squeezed my arm. ‘What a blessed country,’ she said. ‘Dick, did you ever dream of such peace? We’re lucky, lucky people.’
Then suddenly her face changed in that way she has and grew very grave. I felt a little shiver run along her arm.
‘It’s too good and beloved to last,’ she whispered. ‘Sometimes I am afraid.’
‘Nonsense,’
