Beasts and Super-Beasts Page 13

  THE SEVENTH PULLET

  “It’s not the daily grind that I complain of,” said Blenkinthroperesentfully; “it’s the dull grey sameness of my life outside of officehours. Nothing of interest comes my way, nothing remarkable or out ofthe common. Even the little things that I do try to find some interestin don’t seem to interest other people. Things in my garden, forinstance.”

  “The potato that weighed just over two pounds,” said his friend Gorworth.

  “Did I tell you about that?” said Blenkinthrope; “I was telling theothers in the train this morning. I forgot if I’d told you.”

  “To be exact you told me that it weighed just under two pounds, but Itook into account the fact that abnormal vegetables and freshwater fishhave an after-life, in which growth is not arrested.”

  “You’re just like the others,” said Blenkinthrope sadly, “you only makefun of it.”

  “The fault is with the potato, not with us,” said Gorworth; “we are notin the least interested in it because it is not in the least interesting.The men you go up in the train with every day are just in the same caseas yourself; their lives are commonplace and not very interesting tothemselves, and they certainly are not going to wax enthusiastic over thecommonplace events in other men’s lives. Tell them something startling,dramatic, piquant that has happened to yourself or to someone in yourfamily, and you will capture their interest at once. They will talkabout you with a certain personal pride to all their acquaintances. ‘ManI know intimately, fellow called Blenkinthrope, lives down my way, hadtwo of his fingers clawed clean off by a lobster he was carrying home tosupper. Doctor says entire hand may have to come off.’ Now that isconversation of a very high order. But imagine walking into a tennisclub with the remark: ‘I know a man who has grown a potato weighing twoand a quarter pounds.’”

  “But hang it all, my dear fellow,” said Blenkinthrope impatiently,“haven’t I just told you that nothing of a remarkable nature ever happensto me?”

  “Invent something,” said Gorworth. Since winning a prize for excellencein Scriptural knowledge at a preparatory school he had felt licensed tobe a little more unscrupulous than the circle he moved in. Much mightsurely be excused to one who in early life could give a list of seventeentrees mentioned in the Old Testament.

  “What sort of thing?” asked Blenkinthrope, somewhat snappishly.

  “A snake got into your hen-run yesterday morning and killed six out ofseven pullets, first mesmerising them with its eyes and then biting themas they stood helpless. The seventh pullet was one of that French sort,with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the mesmeric snare, andjust flew at what it could see of the snake and pecked it to pieces.”

  “Thank you,” said Blenkinthrope stiffly; “it’s a very clever invention.If such a thing had really happened in my poultry-run I admit I shouldhave been proud and interested to tell people about it. But I’d ratherstick to fact, even if it is plain fact.” All the same his mind dweltwistfully on the story of the Seventh Pullet. He could picture himselftelling it in the train amid the absorbed interest of hisfellow-passengers. Unconsciously all sorts of little details andimprovements began to suggest themselves.

  Wistfulness was still his dominant mood when he took his seat in therailway carriage the next morning. Opposite him sat Stevenham, who hadattained to a recognised brevet of importance through the fact of anuncle having dropped dead in the act of voting at a Parliamentaryelection. That had happened three years ago, but Stevenham was stilldeferred to on all questions of home and foreign politics.

  “Hullo, how’s the giant mushroom, or whatever it was?” was all the noticeBlenkinthrope got from his fellow travellers.

  Young Duckby, whom he mildly disliked, speedily monopolised the generalattention by an account of a domestic bereavement.

  “Had four young pigeons carried off last night by a whacking big rat.Oh, a monster he must have been; you could tell by the size of the holehe made breaking into the loft.”

  No moderate-sized rat ever seemed to carry out any predatory operationsin these regions; they were all enormous in their enormity.

  “Pretty hard lines that,” continued Duckby, seeing that he had securedthe attention and respect of the company; “four squeakers carried off atone swoop. You’d find it rather hard to match that in the way ofunlooked-for bad luck.”

  “I had six pullets out of a pen of seven killed by a snake yesterdayafternoon,” said Blenkinthrope, in a voice which he hardly recognised ashis own.

  “By a snake?” came in excited chorus.

  “It fascinated them with its deadly, glittering eyes, one after theother, and struck them down while they stood helpless. A bedriddenneighbour, who wasn’t able to call for assistance, witnessed it all fromher bedroom window.”

  “Well, I never!” broke in the chorus, with variations.

  “The interesting part of it is about the seventh pullet, the one thatdidn’t get killed,” resumed Blenkinthrope, slowly lighting a cigarette.His diffidence had left him, and he was beginning to realise how safe andeasy depravity can seem once one has the courage to begin. “The six deadbirds were Minorcas; the seventh was a Houdan with a mop of feathers allover its eyes. It could hardly see the snake at all, so of course itwasn’t mesmerised like the others. It just could see something wrigglingon the ground, and went for it and pecked it to death.”

  “Well, I’m blessed!” exclaimed the chorus.

  In the course of the next few days Blenkinthrope discovered how littlethe loss of one’s self-respect affects one when one has gained the esteemof the world. His story found its way into one of the poultry papers,and was copied thence into a daily news-sheet as a matter of generalinterest. A lady wrote from the North of Scotland recounting a similarepisode which she had witnessed as occurring between a stoat and a blindgrouse. Somehow a lie seems so much less reprehensible when one can callit a lee.

  For awhile the adapter of the Seventh Pullet story enjoyed to the fullhis altered standing as a person of consequence, one who had had someshare in the strange events of his times. Then he was thrust once againinto the cold grey background by the sudden blossoming into importance ofSmith-Paddon, a daily fellow-traveller, whose little girl had beenknocked down and nearly hurt by a car belonging to a musical-comedyactress. The actress was not in the car at the time, but she was innumerous photographs which appeared in the illustrated papers of ZotoDobreen inquiring after the well-being of Maisie, daughter of EdmundSmith-Paddon, Esq. With this new human interest to absorb them thetravelling companions were almost rude when Blenkinthrope tried toexplain his contrivance for keeping vipers and peregrine falcons out ofhis chicken-run.

  Gorworth, to whom he unburdened himself in private, gave him the samecounsel as heretofore.

  “Invent something.”

  “Yes, but what?”

  The ready affirmative coupled with the question betrayed a significantshifting of the ethical standpoint.

  It was a few days later that Blenkinthrope revealed a chapter of familyhistory to the customary gathering in the railway carriage.

  “Curious thing happened to my aunt, the one who lives in Paris,” hebegan. He had several aunts, but they were all geographicallydistributed over Greater London.

  “She was sitting on a seat in the Bois the other afternoon, afterlunching at the Roumanian Legation.”

  Whatever the story gained in picturesqueness from the dragging-in ofdiplomatic “atmosphere,” it ceased from that moment to command anyacceptance as a record of current events. Gorworth had warned hisneophyte that this would be the case, but the traditional enthusiasm ofthe neophyte had triumphed over discretion.

  “She was feeling rather drowsy, the effect probably of the champagne,which she’s not in the habit of taking in the middle of the day.”

  A subdued murmur of admiration went round the company. Blenkinthrope’saunts were not used to taking champagne in the middle of the year,regarding it exclusively as a Christmas and New Year ac
cessory.

  “Presently a rather portly gentleman passed by her seat and paused aninstant to light a cigar. At that moment a youngish man came up behindhim, drew the blade from a swordstick, and stabbed him half a dozen timesthrough and through. ‘Scoundrel,’ he cried to his victim, ‘you do notknow me. My name is Henri Leturc.’ The elder man wiped away some of theblood that was spattering his clothes, turned to his assailant, and said:‘And since when has an attempted assassination been considered anintroduction?’ Then he finished lighting his cigar and walked away. Myaunt had intended screaming for the police, but seeing the indifferencewith which the principal in the affair treated the matter she felt thatit would be an impertinence on her part to interfere. Of course I needhardly say she put the whole thing down to the effects of a warm, drowsyafternoon and the Legation champagne. Now comes the astonishing part ofmy story. A fortnight later a bank manager was stabbed to death with aswordstick in that very part of the Bois. His assassin was the son of acharwoman formerly working at the bank, who had been dismissed from herjob by the manager on account of chronic intemperance. His name wasHenri Leturc.”

  From that moment Blenkinthrope was tacitly accepted as the Munchausen ofthe party. No effort was spared to draw him out from day to day in theexercise of testing their powers of credulity, and Blenkinthrope, in thefalse security of an assured and receptive audience, waxed industriousand ingenious in supplying the demand for marvels. Duckby’s satiricalstory of a tame otter that had a tank in the garden to swim in, andwhined restlessly whenever the water-rate was overdue, was scarcely anunfair parody of some of Blenkinthrope’s wilder efforts. And then oneday came Nemesis.

  Returning to his villa one evening Blenkinthrope found his wife sittingin front of a pack of cards, which she was scrutinising with unusualconcentration.

  “The same old patience-game?” he asked carelessly.

  “No, dear; this is the Death’s Head patience, the most difficult of themall. I’ve never got it to work out, and somehow I should be ratherfrightened if I did. Mother only got it out once in her life; she wasafraid of it, too. Her great-aunt had done it once and fallen dead fromexcitement the next moment, and mother always had a feeling that shewould die if she ever got it out. She died the same night that she didit. She was in bad health at the time, certainly, but it was a strangecoincidence.”

  “Don’t do it if it frightens you,” was Blenkinthrope’s practical commentas he left the room. A few minutes later his wife called to him.

  “John, it gave me such a turn, I nearly got it out. Only the five ofdiamonds held me up at the end. I really thought I’d done it.”

  “Why, you can do it,” said Blenkinthrope, who had come back to the room;“if you shift the eight of clubs on to that open nine the five can bemoved on to the six.”

  His wife made the suggested move with hasty, trembling fingers, and piledthe outstanding cards on to their respective packs. Then she followedthe example of her mother and great-grand-aunt.

  Blenkinthrope had been genuinely fond of his wife, but in the midst ofhis bereavement one dominant thought obtruded itself. Somethingsensational and real had at last come into his life; no longer was it agrey, colourless record. The headlines which might appropriatelydescribe his domestic tragedy kept shaping themselves in his brain.“Inherited presentiment comes true.” “The Death’s Head patience:Card-game that justified its sinister name in three generations.” Hewrote out a full story of the fatal occurrence for the _Essex Vedette_,the editor of which was a friend of his, and to another friend he gave acondensed account, to be taken up to the office of one of the halfpennydailies. But in both cases his reputation as a romancer stood fatally inthe way of the fulfilment of his ambitions. “Not the right thing to beMunchausening in a time of sorrow” agreed his friends among themselves,and a brief note of regret at the “sudden death of the wife of ourrespected neighbour, Mr. John Blenkinthrope, from heart failure,”appearing in the news column of the local paper was the forlorn outcomeof his visions of widespread publicity.

  Blenkinthrope shrank from the society of his erstwhile travellingcompanions and took to travelling townwards by an earlier train. Hesometimes tries to enlist the sympathy and attention of a chanceacquaintance in details of the whistling prowess of his best canary orthe dimensions of his largest beetroot; he scarcely recognises himself asthe man who was once spoken about and pointed out as the owner of theSeventh Pullet.