The Toys of Peace

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"In Coronation year there were as many as sixty," put in the aunt, "your
uncle has kept a record for the last eight years."

"Doesn't it ever strike you," continued the niece relentlessly, "that if
we moved away from here or were blotted out of existence our local claim
to fame would pass on automatically to whoever happened to take the house
and garden? People would say to one another, 'Have you seen the Smith-
Jenkins' magnolia? It is a perfect mass of flowers,' or else
'Smith-Jenkins tells me there won't be a single blossom on their magnolia
this year; the east winds have turned all the buds black.' Now if, when
we had gone, people still associated our names with the magnolia tree, no
matter who temporarily possessed it, if they said, 'Ah, that's the tree
on which the Gurtleberrys hung their cook because she sent up the wrong
kind of sauce with the asparagus,' that would be something really due to
our own initiative, apart from anything east winds or magnolia vitality
might have to say in the matter."

"We should never do such a thing," said the aunt.

The niece gave a reluctant sigh.

"I can't imagine it," she admitted. "Of course," she continued, "there
are heaps of ways of leading a real existence without committing
sensational deeds of violence. It's the dreadful little everyday acts of
pretended importance that give the Mappin stamp to our life. It would be
entertaining, if it wasn't so pathetically tragic, to hear Uncle James
fuss in here in the morning and announce, 'I must just go down into the
town and find out what the men there are saying about Mexico. Matters
are beginning to look serious there.' Then he patters away into the
town, and talks in a highly serious voice to the tobacconist,
incidentally buying an ounce of tobacco; perhaps he meets one or two
others of the world's thinkers and talks to them in a highly serious
voice, then he patters back here and announces with increased importance,
'I've just been talking to some men in the town about the condition of
affairs in Mexico. They agree with the view that I have formed, that
things there will have to get worse before they get better.' Of course
nobody in the town cared in the least little bit what his views about
Mexico were or whether he had any. The tobacconist wasn't even fluttered
at his buying the ounce of tobacco; he knows that he purchases the same
quantity of the same sort of tobacco every week. Uncle James might just
as well have lain on his back in the garden and chattered to the lilac
tree about the habits of caterpillars."

"I really will not listen to such things about your uncle," protested
Mrs. James Gurtleberry angrily.

"My own case is just as bad and just as tragic," said the niece,
dispassionately; "nearly everything about me is conventional
make-believe. I'm not a good dancer, and no one could honestly call me
good-looking, but when I go to one of our dull little local dances I'm
conventionally supposed to 'have a heavenly time,' to attract the ardent
homage of the local cavaliers, and to go home with my head awhirl with
pleasurable recollections. As a matter of fact, I've merely put in some
hours of indifferent dancing, drunk some badly-made claret cup, and
listened to an enormous amount of laborious light conversation. A
moonlight hen-stealing raid with the merry-eyed curate would be
infinitely more exciting; imagine the pleasure of carrying off all those
white minorcas that the Chibfords are always bragging about. When we had
disposed of them we could give the proceeds to a charity, so there would
be nothing really wrong about it. But nothing of that sort lies within
the Mappined limits of my life. One of these days somebody dull and
decorous and undistinguished will 'make himself agreeable' to me at a
tennis party, as the saying is, and all the dull old gossips of the
neighbourhood will begin to ask when we are to be engaged, and at last we
shall be engaged, and people will give us butter-dishes and
blotting-cases and framed pictures of young women feeding swans. Hullo,
Uncle, are you going out?"

"I'm just going down to the town," announced Mr. James Gurtleberry, with
an air of some importance: "I want to hear what people are saying about
Albania. Affairs there are beginning to take on a very serious look.
It's my opinion that we haven't seen the worst of things yet."

In this he was probably right, but there was nothing in the immediate or
prospective condition of Albania to warrant Mrs. Gurtleberry in bursting
into tears.




FATE


Rex Dillot was nearly twenty-four, almost good-looking and quite
penniless. His mother was supposed to make him some sort of an allowance
out of what her creditors allowed her, and Rex occasionally strayed into
the ranks of those who earn fitful salaries as secretaries or companions
to people who are unable to cope unaided with their correspondence or
their leisure. For a few months he had been assistant editor and
business manager of a paper devoted to fancy mice, but the devotion had
been all on one side, and the paper disappeared with a certain abruptness
from club reading-rooms and other haunts where it had made a gratuitous
appearance. Still, Rex lived with some air of comfort and well-being, as
one can live if one is born with a genius for that sort of thing, and a
kindly Providence usually arranged that his week-end invitations
coincided with the dates on which his one white dinner-waistcoat was in a
laundry-returned condition of dazzling cleanness. He played most games
badly, and was shrewd enough to recognise the fact, but he had developed
a marvellously accurate judgement in estimating the play and chances of
other people, whether in a golf match, billiard handicap, or croquet
tournament. By dint of parading his opinion of such and such a player's
superiority with a sufficient degree of youthful assertiveness he usually
succeeded in provoking a wager at liberal odds, and he looked to his week-
end winnings to carry him through the financial embarrassments of his mid-
week existence. The trouble was, as he confided to Clovis Sangrail, that
he never had enough available or even prospective cash at his command to
enable him to fix the wager at a figure really worth winning.

"Some day," he said, "I shall come across a really safe thing, a bet that
simply can't go astray, and then I shall put it up for all I'm worth, or
rather for a good deal more than I'm worth if you sold me up to the last
button."

"It would be awkward if it didn't happen to come off," said Clovis.

"It would be more than awkward," said Rex; "it would be a tragedy. All
the same, it would be extremely amusing to bring it off. Fancy awaking
in the morning with about three hundred pounds standing to one's credit.
I should go and clear out my hostess's pigeon-loft before breakfast out
of sheer good-temper."

"Your hostess of the moment mightn't have a pigeon-loft," said Clovis.

"I always choose hostesses that have," said Rex; "a pigeon-loft is
indicative of a careless, extravagant, genial disposition, such as I like
to see around me. People who strew corn broadcast for a lot of feathered
inanities that just sit about cooing and giving each other the glad eye
in a Louis Quatorze manner are pretty certain to do you well."

"Young Strinnit is coming down this afternoon," said Clovis reflectively;
"I dare say you won't find it difficult to get him to back himself at
billiards. He plays a pretty useful game, but he's not quite as good as
he fancies he is."

"I know one member of the party who can walk round him," said Rex softly,
an alert look coming into his eyes; "that cadaverous-looking Major who
arrived last night. I've seen him play at St. Moritz. If I could get
Strinnit to lay odds on himself against the Major the money would be safe
in my pocket. This looks like the good thing I've been watching and
praying for."

"Don't be rash," counselled Clovis, "Strinnit may play up to his self-
imagined form once in a blue moon."

"I intend to be rash," said Rex quietly, and the look on his face
corroborated his words.

"Are you all going to flock to the billiard-room?" asked Teresa
Thundleford, after dinner, with an air of some disapproval and a good
deal of annoyance. "I can't see what particular amusement you find in
watching two men prodding little ivory balls about on a table."

"Oh, well," said her hostess, "it's a way of passing the time, you know."

"A very poor way, to my mind," said Mrs. Thundleford; "now I was going to
have shown all of you the photographs I took in Venice last summer."

"You showed them to us last night," said Mrs. Cuvering hastily.

"Those were the ones I took in Florence. These are quite a different
lot."

"Oh, well, some time to-morrow we can look at them. You can leave them
down in the drawing-room, and then every one can have a look."

"I should prefer to show them when you are all gathered together, as I
have quite a lot of explanatory remarks to make, about Venetian art and
architecture, on the same lines as my remarks last night on the
Florentine galleries. Also, there are some verses of mine that I should
like to read you, on the rebuilding of the Campanile. But, of course, if
you all prefer to watch Major Latton and Mr. Strinnit knocking balls
about on a table--"

"They are both supposed to be first-rate players," said the hostess.

"I have yet to learn that my verses and my art _causerie_ are of second-
rate quality," said Mrs. Thundleford with acerbity. "However, as you all
seem bent on watching a silly game, there's no more to be said. I shall
go upstairs and finish some writing. Later on, perhaps, I will come down
and join you."

To one, at least, of the onlookers the game was anything but silly. It
was absorbing, exciting, exasperating, nerve-stretching, and finally it
grew to be tragic. The Major with the St. Moritz reputation was playing
a long way below his form, young Strinnit was playing slightly above his,
and had all the luck of the game as well. From the very start the balls
seemed possessed by a demon of contrariness; they trundled about
complacently for one player, they would go nowhere for the other.

"A hundred and seventy, seventy-four," sang out the youth who was
marking. In a game of two hundred and fifty up it was an enormous lead
to hold. Clovis watched the flush of excitement die away from Dillot's
face, and a hard white look take its place.

"How much have you go on?" whispered Clovis. The other whispered the sum
through dry, shaking lips. It was more than he or any one connected with
him could pay; he had done what he had said he would do. He had been
rash.

"Two hundred and six, ninety-eight."

Rex heard a clock strike ten somewhere in the hall, then another
somewhere else, and another, and another; the house seemed full of
striking clocks. Then in the distance the stable clock chimed in. In
another hour they would all be striking eleven, and he would be listening
to them as a disgraced outcast, unable to pay, even in part, the wager he
had challenged.

"Two hundred and eighteen, a hundred and three." The game was as good as
over. Rex was as good as done for. He longed desperately for the
ceiling to fall in, for the house to catch fire, for anything to happen
that would put an end to that horrible rolling to and fro of red and
white ivory that was jostling him nearer and nearer to his doom.

"Two hundred and twenty-eight, a hundred and seven."

Rex opened his cigarette-case; it was empty. That at least gave him a
pretext to slip away from the room for the purpose of refilling it; he
would spare himself the drawn-out torture of watching that hopeless game
played out to the bitter end. He backed away from the circle of absorbed
watchers and made his way up a short stairway to a long, silent corridor
of bedrooms, each with a guests' name written in a little square on the
door. In the hush that reigned in this part of the house he could still
hear the hateful click-click of the balls; if he waited for a few minutes
longer he would hear the little outbreak of clapping and buzz of
congratulation that would hail Strinnit's victory. On the alert tension
of his nerves there broke another sound, the aggressive, wrath-inducing
breathing of one who sleeps in heavy after-dinner slumber. The sound
came from a room just at his elbow; the card on the door bore the
announcement "Mrs. Thundleford." The door was just slightly ajar; Rex
pushed it open an inch or two more and looked in. The august Teresa had
fallen asleep over an illustrated guide to Florentine art-galleries; at
her side, somewhat dangerously near the edge of the table, was a reading-
lamp. If Fate had been decently kind to him, thought Rex, bitterly, that
lamp would have been knocked over by the sleeper and would have given
them something to think of besides billiard matches.

There are occasions when one must take one's Fate in one's hands. Rex
took the lamp in his.

"Two hundred and thirty-seven, one hundred and fifteen." Strinnit was at
the table, and the balls lay in good position for him; he had a choice of
two fairly easy shots, a choice which he was never to decide. A sudden
hurricane of shrieks and a rush of stumbling feet sent every one flocking
to the door. The Dillot boy crashed into the room, carrying in his arms
the vociferous and somewhat dishevelled Teresa Thundleford; her clothing
was certainly not a mass of flames, as the more excitable members of the
party afterwards declared, but the edge of her skirt and part of the
table-cover in which she had been hastily wrapped were alight in a
flickering, half-hearted manner. Rex flung his struggling burden on the
billiard table, and for one breathless minute the work of beating out the
sparks with rugs and cushions and playing on them with soda-water syphons
engrossed the energies of the entire company.

"It was lucky I was passing when it happened," panted Rex; "some one had
better see to the room, I think the carpet is alight."

As a matter of fact the promptitude and energy of the rescuer had
prevented any great damage being done, either to the victim or her
surroundings. The billiard table had suffered most, and had to be laid
up for repairs; perhaps it was not the best place to have chosen for the
scene of salvage operations; but then, as Clovis remarked, when one is
rushing about with a blazing woman in one's arms one can't stop to think
out exactly where one is going to put her.




THEBULL


Tom Yorkfield had always regarded his half-brother, Laurence, with a lazy
instinct of dislike, toned down, as years went on, to a tolerant feeling
of indifference. There was nothing very tangible to dislike him for; he
was just a blood-relation, with whom Tom had no single taste or interest
in common, and with whom, at the same time, he had had no occasion for
quarrel. Laurence had left the farm early in life, and had lived for a
few years on a small sum of money left him by his mother; he had taken up
painting as a profession, and was reported to be doing fairly well at it,
well enough, at any rate, to keep body and soul together. He specialised
in painting animals, and he was successful in finding a certain number of
people to buy his pictures. Tom felt a comforting sense of assured
superiority in contrasting his position with that of his half-brother;
Laurence was an artist-chap, just that and nothing more, though you might
make it sound more important by calling an animal painter; Tom was a
farmer, not in a very big way, it was true, but the Helsery farm had been
in the family for some generations, and it had a good reputation for the
stock raised on it. Tom had done his best, with the little capital at
his command, to maintain and improve the standard of his small herd of
cattle, and in Clover Fairy he had bred a bull which was something rather
better than any that his immediate neighbours could show. It would not
have made a sensation in the judging-ring at an important cattle show,
but it was as vigorous, shapely, and healthy a young animal as any small
practical farmer could wish to possess. At the King's Head on market
days Clover Fairy was very highly spoken of, and Yorkfield used to
declare that he would not part with him for a hundred pounds; a hundred
pounds is a lot of money in the small farming line, and probably anything
over eighty would have tempted him.

It was with some especial pleasure that Tom took advantage of one of
Laurence's rare visits to the farm to lead him down to the enclosure
where Clover Fairy kept solitary state--the grass widower of a grazing
harem. Tom felt some of his old dislike for his half-brother reviving;
the artist was becoming more languid in his manner, more unsuitably
turned-out in attire, and he seemed inclined to impart a slightly
patronising tone to his conversation. He took no heed of a flourishing
potato crop, but waxed enthusiastic over a clump of yellow-flowering weed
that stood in a corner by a gateway, which was rather galling to the
owner of a really very well weeded farm; again, when he might have been
duly complimentary about a group of fat, black-faced lambs, that simply
cried aloud for admiration, he became eloquent over the foliage tints of
an oak copse on the hill opposite. But now he was being taken to inspect
the crowning pride and glory of Helsery; however grudging he might be in
his praises, however backward and niggardly with his congratulations, he
would have to see and acknowledge the many excellences of that
redoubtable animal. Some weeks ago, while on a business journey to
Taunton, Tom had been invited by his half-brother to visit a studio in
that town, where Laurence was exhibiting one of his pictures, a large
canvas representing a bull standing knee-deep in some marshy ground; it
had been good of its kind, no doubt, and Laurence had seemed inordinately
pleased with it; "the best thing I've done yet," he had said over and
over again, and Tom had generously agreed that it was fairly life-like.
Now, the man of pigments was going to be shown a real picture, a living
model of strength and comeliness, a thing to feast the eyes on, a picture
that exhibited new pose and action with every shifting minute, instead of
standing glued into one unvarying attitude between the four walls of a
frame. Tom unfastened a stout wooden door and led the way into a straw-
bedded yard.

"Is he quiet?" asked the artist, as a young bull with a curly red coat
came inquiringly towards them.

"He's playful at times," said Tom, leaving his half-brother to wonder
whether the bull's ideas of play were of the catch-as-catch-can order.
Laurence made one or two perfunctory comments on the animal's appearance
and asked a question or so as to his age and such-like details; then he
coolly turned the talk into another channel.

"Do you remember the picture I showed you at Taunton?" he asked.

"Yes," grunted Tom; "a white-faced bull standing in some slush. Don't
admire those Herefords much myself; bulky-looking brutes, don't seem to
have much life in them. Daresay they're easier to paint that way; now,
this young beggar is on the move all the time, aren't you, Fairy?"

"I've sold that picture," said Laurence, with considerable complacency in
his voice.

"Have you?" said Tom; "glad to hear it, I'm sure. Hope you're pleased
with what you've got for it."

"I got three hundred pounds for it," said Laurence.

Tom turned towards him with a slowly rising flush of anger in his face.
Three hundred pounds! Under the most favourable market conditions that
he could imagine his prized Clover Fairy would hardly fetch a hundred,
yet here was a piece of varnished canvas, painted by his half-brother,
selling for three times that sum. It was a cruel insult that went home
with all the more force because it emphasised the triumph of the
patronising, self-satisfied Laurence. The young farmer had meant to put
his relative just a little out of conceit with himself by displaying the
jewel of his possessions, and now the tables were turned, and his valued
beast was made to look cheap and insignificant beside the price paid for
a mere picture. It was so monstrously unjust; the painting would never
be anything more than a dexterous piece of counterfeit life, while Clover
Fairy was the real thing, a monarch in his little world, a personality in
the countryside. After he was dead, even, he would still be something of
a personality; his descendants would graze in those valley meadows and
hillside pastures, they would fill stall and byre and milking-shed, their
good red coats would speckle the landscape and crowd the market-place;
men would note a promising heifer or a well-proportioned steer, and say:
"Ah, that one comes of good old Clover Fairy's stock." All that time the
picture would be hanging, lifeless and unchanging, beneath its dust and
varnish, a chattel that ceased to mean anything if you chose to turn it
with its back to the wall. These thoughts chased themselves angrily
through Tom Yorkfield's mind, but he could not put them into words. When
he gave tongue to his feelings he put matters bluntly and harshly.

"Some soft-witted fools may like to throw away three hundred pounds on a
bit of paintwork; can't say as I envy them their taste. I'd rather have
the real thing than a picture of it."

He nodded towards the young bull, that was alternately staring at them
with nose held high and lowering its horns with a half-playful,
half-impatient shake of the head.

Laurence laughed a laugh of irritating, indulgent amusement.

"I don't think the purchaser of my bit of paintwork, as you call it, need
worry about having thrown his money away. As I get to be better known
and recognised my pictures will go up in value. That particular one will
probably fetch four hundred in a sale-room five or six years hence;
pictures aren't a bad investment if you know enough to pick out the work
of the right men. Now you can't say your precious bull is going to get
more valuable the longer you keep him; he'll have his little day, and
then, if you go on keeping him, he'll come down at last to a few
shillingsworth of hoofs and hide, just at a time, perhaps, when my bull
is being bought for a big sum for some important picture gallery."

It was too much. The united force of truth and slander and insult put
over heavy a strain on Tom Yorkfield's powers of restraint. In his right
hand he held a useful oak cudgel, with his left he made a grab at the
loose collar of Laurence's canary-coloured silk shirt. Laurence was not
a fighting man; the fear of physical violence threw him off his balance
as completely as overmastering indignation had thrown Tom off his, and
thus it came to pass that Clover Fairy was regaled with the unprecedented
sight of a human being scudding and squawking across the enclosure, like
the hen that would persist in trying to establish a nesting-place in the
manger. In another crowded happy moment the bull was trying to jerk
Laurence over his left shoulder, to prod him in the ribs while still in
the air, and to kneel on him when he reached the ground. It was only the
vigorous intervention of Tom that induced him to relinquish the last item
of his programme.

Tom devotedly and ungrudgingly nursed his half brother to a complete
recovery from his injuries, which consisted of nothing more serious than
a dislocated shoulder, a broken rib or two, and a little nervous
prostration. After all, there was no further occasion for rancour in the
young farmer's mind; Laurence's bull might sell for three hundred, or for
six hundred, and be admired by thousands in some big picture gallery, but
it would never toss a man over one shoulder and catch him a jab in the
ribs before he had fallen on the other side. That was Clover Fairy's
noteworthy achievement, which could never be taken away from him.

Laurence continues to be popular as an animal artist, but his subjects
are always kittens or fawns or lambkins--never bulls.




MORLVERA


The Olympic Toy Emporium occupied a conspicuous frontage in an important
West End street. It was happily named Toy Emporium, because one would
never have dreamed of according it the familiar and yet pulse-quickening
name of toyshop. There was an air of cold splendour and elaborate
failure about the wares that were set out in its ample windows; they were
the sort of toys that a tired shop-assistant displays and explains at
Christmas time to exclamatory parents and bored, silent children. The
animal toys looked more like natural history models than the comfortable,
sympathetic companions that one would wish, at a certain age, to take to
bed with one, and to smuggle into the bath-room. The mechanical toys
incessantly did things that no one could want a toy to do more than a
half a dozen times in its lifetime; it was a merciful reflection that in
any right-minded nursery the lifetime would certainly be short.

Prominent among the elegantly-dressed dolls that filled an entire section
of the window frontage was a large hobble-skirted lady in a confection of
peach-coloured velvet, elaborately set off with leopard skin accessories,
if one may use such a conveniently comprehensive word in describing an
intricate feminine toilette. She lacked nothing that is to be found in a
carefully detailed fashion-plate--in fact, she might be said to have
something more than the average fashion-plate female possesses; in place
of a vacant, expressionless stare she had character in her face. It must
be admitted that it was bad character, cold, hostile, inquisitorial, with
a sinister lowering of one eyebrow and a merciless hardness about the
corners of the mouth. One might have imagined histories about her by the
hour, histories in which unworthy ambition, the desire for money, and an
entire absence of all decent feeling would play a conspicuous part.