man’s obvious terror.
“Go right away along the coast to Punchford and keep hid there. When Michael’s safe gone I’ll ride the roan over to the Green Dragon at Punchford; when you see the cob stabled at the Green Dragon ‘tis a sign you may come back agen.”
“But—” began Stoner hesitatingly.
“’Tis all right for money,” said the other; “the old Missus agrees you’d best do as I say, and she’s given me this.”
The old man produced three sovereigns and some odd silver.
Stoner felt more of a cheat than ever as he stole away that night from the back gate of the farm with the old woman’s money in his pocket. Old George and Bowker’s pup stood watching him a silent farewell from the yard. He could scarcely fancy that he would ever come back, and he felt a throb of compunction for those two humble friends who would wait wistfully for his return. Some day perhaps the real Tom would come back, and there would be wild wonderment among those simple farm folks as to the identity of the shadowy guest they had harboured under their roof. For his own fate he felt no immediate anxiety; three pounds goes but little way in the world when there is nothing behind it, but to a man who has counted his exchequer in pennies it seems a good starting-point. Fortune had done him a whimsically kind turn when last he trod these lanes as a hopeless adventurer, and there might yet be a chance of his finding some work and making a fresh start; as he got further from the farm his spirits rose higher. There was a sense of relief in regaining once more his lost identity and ceasing to be the uneasy ghost of another. He scarcely bothered to speculate about the implacable enemy who had dropped from nowhere into his life; since that life was now behind him one unreal item the more made little difference. For the first time for many months he began to hum a careless lighthearted refrain. Then there stepped out from the shadow of an overhanging oak tree a man with a gun. There was no need to wonder who he might be; the moonlight falling on his white set face revealed a glare of human hate such as Stoner in the ups and downs of his wanderings had never seen before. He sprang aside in a wild effort to break through the hedge that bordered the lane, but the tough branches held him fast. The hounds of Fate had waited for him in those narrow lanes, and this time they were not to be denied.
THE RECESSIONAL
Clovis sat in the hottest zone but two of a Turkish bath, alternately inert in statuesque contemplation and rapidly manoeuvring a fountain-pen over the pages of a note-book.
“Don’t interrupt me with your childish prattle,” he observed to Bertie van Tahn, who had slung himself languidly into a neighbouring chair and looked conversationally inclined; “I’m writing deathless verse.”
Bertie looked interested.
“I say, what a boon you would be to portrait painters if you really got to be notorious as a poetry writer. If they couldn’t get your likeness hung in the Academy as ‘Clovis Sangrail, Esq., at work on his latest poem,’ they could slip you in as a Study of the Nude or Orpheus descending into Jermyn Street. They always complain that modern dress handicaps them, whereas a towel and a fountain-pen—”
“It was Mrs. Packletide’s suggestion that I should write this thing,” said Clovis, ignoring the bypaths to fame that Bertie van Tahn was pointing out to him. “You see, Loona Bimberton had a Coronation Ode accepted by the New Infancy, a paper that has been started with the idea of making the New Age seem elderly and hidebound. ‘So clever of you, dear Loona,’ the Packletide remarked when she had read it; ‘of course, anyone could write a Coronation Ode, but no one else would have thought of doing it.’ Loona protested that these things were extremely difficult to do, and gave us to understand that they were more or less the province of a gifted few. Now the Packletide has been rather decent to me in many ways, a sort of financial ambulance, you know, that carries you off the field when you’re hard hit, which is a frequent occurrence with me, and I’ve no use whatever for Loona Bimberton, so I chipped in and said I could turn out that sort of stuff by the square yard if I gave my mind to it. Loona said I couldn’t, and we got bets on, and between you and me I think the money’s fairly safe. Of course, one of the conditions of the wager is that the thing has to be published in something or other, local newspapers barred; but Mrs. Packletide has endeared herself by many little acts of thoughtfulness to the editor of the Smoky Chimney, so if I can hammer out anything at all approaching the level of the usual Ode output we ought to be all right. So far I’m getting along so comfortably that I begin to be afraid that I must be one of the gifted few.”
“It’s rather late in the day for a Coronation Ode, isn’t it?” said Bertie.
“Of course,” said Clovis; “this is going to be a Durbar Recessional, the sort of thing that you can keep by you for all time if you want to.”
“Now I understand your choice of a place to write it in,” said Bertie van Tahn, with the air of one who has suddenly unravelled a hitherto obscure problem; “you want to get the local temperature.”
“I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient,” said Clovis, “but it seems I asked too much of fate.”
Bertie van Tahn prepared to use his towel as a weapon of precision, but reflecting that he had a good deal of unprotected coast-line himself, and that Clovis was equipped with a fountain-pen as well as a towel, he relapsed pacifically into the depths of his chair.
“May one hear extracts from the immortal work?” he asked. “I promise that nothing that I hear now shall prejudice me against borrowing a copy of the Smoky Chimney at the right moment.”
“It’s rather like casting pearls into a trough,” remarked Clovis pleasantly, “but I don’t mind reading you bits of it. It begins with a general dispersal of the Durbar participants:
‘Back to their homes in Himalayan heights
The stale pale elephants of Cutch Behar
Roll like great galleons on a tideless sea—’”
“I don’t believe Cutch Behar is anywhere near the Himalayan region,” interrupted Bertie. “You ought to have an atlas on hand when you do this sort of thing; and why stale and pale?”
“After the late hours and the excitement, of course,” said Clovis; “and I said their homes were in the Himalayas. You can have Himalayan elephants in Cutch Behar, I suppose, just as you have Irish-bred horses running at Ascot.”
“You said they were going back to the Himalayas,” objected Bertie.
“Well, they would naturally be sent home to recuperate. It’s the usual thing out there to turn elephants loose in the hills, just as we put horses out to grass in this country.”
Clovis could at least flatter himself that he had infused some of the reckless splendour of the East into his mendacity.
“Is it all going to be in blank verse?” asked the critic.
“Of course not; ‘Durbar’ comes at the end of the fourth line.”
“That seems so cowardly; however, it explains why you pitched on Cutch Behar.”
“There is more connection between geographical place-names and poetical inspiration than is generally recognized; one of the chief reasons why there are so few really great poems about Russia in our language is that you can’t possibly get a rhyme to names like Smolensk and Tobolsk and Minsk.”
Clovis spoke with the authority of one who
