Beasts and Super-Beasts Read online

  LAURA

  “You are not really dying, are you?” asked Amanda.

  “I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,” said Laura.

  “But to-day is Saturday; this is serious!” gasped Amanda.

  “I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” saidLaura.

  “Death is always serious,” said Amanda.

  “I never said I was going to die. I am presumably going to leave offbeing Laura, but I shall go on being something. An animal of some kind,I suppose. You see, when one hasn’t been very good in the life one hasjust lived, one reincarnates in some lower organism. And I haven’t beenvery good, when one comes to think of it. I’ve been petty and mean andvindictive and all that sort of thing when circumstances have seemed towarrant it.”

  “Circumstances never warrant that sort of thing,” said Amanda hastily.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so,” observed Laura, “Egbert is acircumstance that would warrant any amount of that sort of thing. You’remarried to him—that’s different; you’ve sworn to love, honour, and endurehim: I haven’t.”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with Egbert,” protested Amanda.

  “Oh, I daresay the wrongness has been on my part,” admitted Lauradispassionately; “he has merely been the extenuating circumstance. Hemade a thin, peevish kind of fuss, for instance, when I took the colliepuppies from the farm out for a run the other day.”

  “They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex and drove two sittinghens off their nests, besides running all over the flower beds. You knowhow devoted he is to his poultry and garden.”

  “Anyhow, he needn’t have gone on about it for the entire evening and thenhave said, ‘Let’s say no more about it’ just when I was beginning toenjoy the discussion. That’s where one of my petty vindictive revengescame in,” added Laura with an unrepentant chuckle; “I turned the entirefamily of speckled Sussex into his seedling shed the day after the puppyepisode.”

  “How could you?” exclaimed Amanda.

  “It came quite easy,” said Laura; “two of the hens pretended to be layingat the time, but I was firm.”

  “And we thought it was an accident!”

  “You see,” resumed Laura, “I really _have_ some grounds for supposingthat my next incarnation will be in a lower organism. I shall be ananimal of some kind. On the other hand, I haven’t been a bad sort in myway, so I think I may count on being a nice animal, something elegant andlively, with a love of fun. An otter, perhaps.”

  “I can’t imagine you as an otter,” said Amanda.

  “Well, I don’t suppose you can imagine me as an angel, if it comes tothat,” said Laura.

  Amanda was silent. She couldn’t.

  “Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable,” continuedLaura; “salmon to eat all the year round, and the satisfaction of beingable to fetch the trout in their own homes without having to wait forhours till they condescend to rise to the fly you’ve been dangling beforethem; and an elegant svelte figure—”

  “Think of the otter hounds,” interposed Amanda; “how dreadful to behunted and harried and finally worried to death!”

  “Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worsethan this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then Ishould go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otterI suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probablysomething rather primitive—a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I shouldthink.”

  “I wish you would be serious,” sighed Amanda; “you really ought to be ifyou’re only going to live till Tuesday.”

  As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.

  “So dreadfully upsetting,” Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, SirLulworth Quayne. “I’ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf andfishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best.”

  “Laura always was inconsiderate,” said Sir Lulworth; “she was born duringGoodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies.”

  “She had the maddest kind of ideas,” said Amanda; “do you know if therewas any insanity in her family?”

  “Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in WestKensington, but I believe he’s sane on all other subjects.”

  “She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter,” saidAmanda.

  “One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in theWest,” said Sir Lulworth, “that one can hardly set them down as beingmad. And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that Ishould not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doingin an after state.”

  “You think she really might have passed into some animal form?” askedAmanda. She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readilyfrom the standpoint of those around them.

  Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air ofbereavement that Laura’s demise would have been insufficient, in itself,to account for.

  “Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed,” he exclaimed; “the veryfour that were to go to the show on Friday. One of them was dragged awayand eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I’ve been tosuch trouble and expense over. My best flower bed and my best fowlssingled out for destruction; it almost seems as if the brute that did thedeed had special knowledge how to be as devastating as possible in ashort space of time.”

  “Was it a fox, do you think?” asked Amanda.

  “Sounds more like a polecat,” said Sir Lulworth.

  “No,” said Egbert, “there were marks of webbed feet all over the place,and we followed the tracks down to the stream at the bottom of thegarden; evidently an otter.”

  Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir Lulworth.

  Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintendthe strengthening of the poultry yard defences.

  “I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,” saidAmanda in a scandalised voice.

  “It’s her own funeral, you know,” said Sir Lulworth; “it’s a nice pointin etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortalremains.”

  Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to further lengths nextday; during the absence of the family at the funeral ceremony theremaining survivors of the speckled Sussex were massacred. Themarauder’s line of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flowerbeds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower garden had alsosuffered.

  “I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the earliest possiblemoment,” said Egbert savagely.

  “On no account! You can’t dream of such a thing!” exclaimed Amanda. “Imean, it wouldn’t do, so soon after a funeral in the house.”

  “It’s a case of necessity,” said Egbert; “once an otter takes to thatsort of thing it won’t stop.”

  “Perhaps it will go elsewhere now there are no more fowls left,”suggested Amanda.

  “One would think you wanted to shield the beast,” said Egbert.

  “There’s been so little water in the stream lately,” objected Amanda; “itseems hardly sporting to hunt an animal when it has so little chance oftaking refuge anywhere.”

  “Good gracious!” fumed Egbert, “I’m not thinking about sport. I want tohave the animal killed as soon as possible.”

  Even Amanda’s opposition weakened when, during church time on thefollowing Sunday, the otter made its way into the house, raided half asalmon from the larder and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persianrug in Egbert’s studio.

  “We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feetbefore long,” said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particularotter she felt that the possibility was not a remote one.

  On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt Amanda spent asolitary hour walking by the banks of the stream, making what sheimagined to be hound noises. It was charitably suppo
sed by those whooverheard her performance, that she was practising for farmyardimitations at the forth-coming village entertainment.

  It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who brought her news ofthe day’s sport.

  “Pity you weren’t out; we had quite a good day. We found at once, in thepool just below your garden.”

  “Did you—kill?” asked Amanda.

  “Rather. A fine she-otter. Your husband got rather badly bitten intrying to ‘tail it.’ Poor beast, I felt quite sorry for it, it had sucha human look in its eyes when it was killed. You’ll call me silly, butdo you know who the look reminded me of? My dear woman, what is thematter?”

  When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from her attack of nervousprostration Egbert took her to the Nile Valley to recuperate. Change ofscene speedily brought about the desired recovery of health and mentalbalance. The escapades of an adventurous otter in search of a variationof diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda’s normally placidtemperament reasserted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses,coming from her husband’s dressing-room, in her husband’s voice, buthardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as shemade a leisurely toilet one evening in a Cairo hotel.

  “What is the matter? What has happened?” she asked in amused curiosity.

  “The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath! Waittill I catch you, you little—”

  “What little beast?” asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh;Egbert’s language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outragedfeelings.

  “A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy,” spluttered Egbert.

  And now Amanda is seriously ill.