“Strong brogues,” he said. “Indispensable.”

  “Three guineas, or about,” I said inexorably. He fished three notes from his pocket. “Make it pounds, my dear, and it’s a go.”

  “Having settled that,” I said, “let us return to motives. What does Lionel want of us, when he might have had a party of best-sellers?”

  “That would mean bloodshed,” he replied gravely. “There are, as you know, two kinds, or species, of best-sellers; the first loves being it, but hates to be called it. He wants the money for spending, and the credit for conceit. The second class is best-seller pure and simple, though often merely simple. Both species are only tolerable in the presence of their inferiors.”

  “Very nice, but doesn’t answer my question,” I said. “What’s the catch?”

  “We may hear when we get there. I haven’t a notion at present. By the way, I said we would be met at the station with cars. We shall. Two.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I met Spooner to-day. He’s been there, and he described to me very graphically the struggle Lionel had over choosing a car. It appears that he could have had a Rolls, but that only seats seven, and seven look frugal even in a Rolls. So he compromised by buying a Sunbeam and a large Austin. He saved even then, and can still bring up his guests in style.”

  “What about the extra chauffeur?” I asked.

  “The question occurred to me, and Spooner answered it. It seems that there is a man to do odd jobs, and clean the cars. He also drives, and the only other expense is a uniform.”

  “I don’t know how Lionel does it?”

  Vincie smiled. “You’re like some of your fellow novelists, darling—short on economics. You can put up a damn’ fine show on seven thousand a year, even allowing for income-tax. It’s only in novels that the man with one thousand a year can just afford a daily girl to help his wife.”

  “I have a faint idea,” I remarked, scorning the suggestion that I knew nothing about money. “You know old Tishy?”

  Tishy is the name of a well-known editor in circles which bear for him affection and respect, and has an origin in racing, I believe. Vincie nodded. “Tishy? He loathes Lionel.”

  “Quite,” I agreed. “Lionel may want me for a bridge.”

  “There is that,” he said. “But now I must go to change. Also to put away my cartridges. It seems that you bring those. I’m taking two hundred.”

  “Two hundred!” I gasped. “What shall we do with the birds?”

  He grinned. “First, we don’t get them. Secondly, my sponsor this afternoon said if I was anxious to get a brace I should need a lot. The cracks fire off thousands every year. A winning old fellow that—told me if pheasants only flew backwards, there’d be more carrying their tails behind them, like the sheep in the rhyme.”

  “Too cryptic,” I complained. “If they flew forwards, the tails would be behind them, surely; and if backwards, before them?”

  Vincie laughed as he got up. “My informant referred to what he said was a common, but not praiseworthy practice, darling; which consists in cutting off the birds’ tails in mid-air, which leaves them rudderless, but otherwise intact. As soon as pheasants learn to go in reverse, they will save their tails at the expense of their heads.”

  “I think you had better go and change,” I said.

  CHAPTER II

  We set off on the Tuesday with a markedly sporty appearance. I wore my oldest tweeds, heavy brogues, and carried a shooting-stick. Vince wore a tweed cap and plus-fours, with stout shoes and anklets. I thought the latter was rather ostentatious, since we were not likely to meet with wet bracken in the train, but he said he wanted to get used to them. At first they gave him the feeling that his garters had come down. The cartridges were packed with our luggage.

  At Waterloo we were in good time, and found Benjy and Vanity Doe on the platform. Benjy was carrying a gun-case, which he would not entrust to the porter. Addie wore a tailor-made in heather mixture, and obviously envied my swagger-coat. She had also a shooting-stick, but it was a very elaborate one, while mine was plain but good.

  Benjy is very tall and thin, and he wore a Donegal tweed suit, which looked too new for the country, a hard collar, his school tie, and a pair of brown boots with lumpy soles. After we met he was uneasy about himself for some time, till I showed him a copy of the Sketch. Here was a marquess at a shoot, wearing obvious reach-me-downs, with trousers so baggy and ill-fitting that it reminded me of that oddly phrased advertisement one sees: “Misfits from Savile Row.” I often wonder what Savile Row thinks of it. I used to think that you were fitted there, whether you were or not. I know my own swaggerest dressmaker insists that all her creations fit perfectly, even if I can’t get them on, or off. They have a cachet, she says. “They stick in your throat, that’s what that means!” Vincent assures me.

  Vanity is a very clever, but plain, young woman. Like most high-brows, she is fond of her food, and very scornful about those who are indifferent to the claims of gastronomy. But I like her because she considers me too low to converse with, and only talks to me. And she is very conscientious. She won’t review her brother’s novels, when most of her colleagues will even review a pal’s.

  “Do I look right for a shooting-party, Penny?” she asked me, as we idled on the platform.

  “Perfect,” I assured her. “As long as you take care to fly in the normal position, you’re safe.”

  “Who’s going to fly?” said Benjy, who was rather literal.

  “It’s one of Penny’s jokes,” said Vanity.

  “Merely a question of keeping your tail behind you,” said Vincie, with great gravity.

  Vanity stared at him, and then down the platform. “Who’s the gun-woman?” she asked.

  Of course, it was Addie Stole. Her sheikhs were always firing off guns, as they careered over the desert on pedigree dromedaries, with a girl across the saddle-bow, and she had a natty leather gun-case in her hand. Otherwise, she was suitably clad, in workmanlike tweed, and strong stockings, with brogues. Incidentally, I got mine at a sale at Hepeter’s, for one-pound-twelve, so was twenty-eight bob up on Vincie.

  Addie is pretty, after a fashion, and very quiet really. She is shy with men, and a bit dumb, if you know what I mean.

  “Are you all going down to Mr. Fonders’s?” she asked me, when we had exchanged greetings.

  “To Lionel’s? Yes.”

  “I have never met him,” said Addie. “Is he nice?”

  “All a matter of taste, my dear,” Vincie assured her. “What’s this coming up?”

  “Mr. Whick,” said Benjy, who did not like Mr. Whick. “He’s got a gun, too.”

  Mr. Whick writes long satirical poems, in which he scarifies all the people he doesn’t like. I figure in one of them as “Penny Pumpernickel,” but I like the man, because I know he pays for publication, and can’t help disliking the folk like ourselves who do not.

  “The gun is mightier than the pen this time, Gerald,” I said, as he came up; “but perhaps you’re less dangerous with it.”

  “I brought it to shoot Lionel,” he said. “I can’t miss that head of his, can I?”

  “They’re decreasing the size of the target at Bisley,” Vince said, “but Lionel exposes himself more and more each year. Shall we get into our compartment before the train actually starts?”

  We got in; the guard walked back down the train fingering his whistle, and then I saw a man dragging a recalcitrant dog after him at top speed.

  “Great Scott! it’s Bob Varek,” said Benjy. “Never knew he had a hound.”

  “It’s a Labrador,” said Vincie, as we waved to Bob to come to us.

  “I have a friend who breeds them,” Vanity said gravely. “That isn’t one.”

  “It’s a Springer,” Whick told us; “kind of spaniel.”

  Bob crowded in, dog and all, and when we had seated ourselves again, he agreed that it was a sort of spaniel, not exactly a Golden, or a Springer, or Clumber—just a sort of.

  “Springer blood, for all that,” Vince told him. “Get down, you ruffian! What did you bring him for?”

  “Useful at the pick-up,” he said.

  “What’s that?” asked Benjy, looking at the dog suspiciously.

  “Collecting the game,” said Bob.

  “What actually are we going to shoot, Mr. Doe?” Addie asked.

  “Ah, there you have me. Pheasants, isn’t it, Vincent?”

  “There will be pheasants, Benjy. That is the only truthful way in which I can answer your question. What’s your form, by the way? My own life-bag to date is two rooks, young at that, like myself at the time, but I expect you’re a hardened gun-man.”

  “Well, no,” said Benjy. “I have taken lessons.”

  “Not at the school where the old man works off the jape about the pheasants’ tails,” I said.

  “Oh, is that what you meant a while back?” said Benjy. “No, it can’t be the same. My teacher wasn’t very jocular, and the only remark he made was something I couldn’t understand.”

  “Give our brains a chance, then,” said Whick sneeringly.

  “He simply said that the attendant must have speeded up the clays under the impression that I was Lord Walsingham.”

  That beat us all. Whick turned to Addie Stole.

  “As a devotee of the wild, I expect you carry a gun, Miss Stole?”

  She blushed. “I have a sixteen-bore in the rack.”

  “That the best kind?” Benjy inquired. “If so, they choused me with a twelve.”

  “It’s smaller, that’s all,” said Addie. “Smaller charge.”

  “Are you not afraid to fire it,” said Vanity. “I am gun-shy, I know.”

  “I have shot a little,” Addie admitted. “Mostly rabbits.”

  Whick turned on Vincent. “Now, my dear fellow, you must be a spectator.”

  “I am a gun, though without one,” my husband smiled. “I am going to use one of our host’s expensive weapons. I need something like that to do myself justice.”

  “Same here,” said Bob. “I thought I might as well bring the pup in reciprocation—sort of.”

  “Meantime,” I said, looking hard at Gerald, “you come here and put us all through our paces. What about you? Do the pheasants blanch and wilt when you get the drop on them?”

  “I was at Henry’s shoot the other day,” he said vexedly, for all satirists are very thin-skinned.

  “Well?” said Benjy. “And—”

  “I was there,” said Whick.

  “Any deaths in the air while you were there?” Vincent asked.

  “Or among the beaters on earth?” I asked, having read a book on shooting over the weekend.

  “Oh, go to blazes!” he said.

  Try stinging a satirist! It’s great fun.

  “Very short notice, wasn’t it?” said Vanity, who loathes even the mildest brawls. “Benjy was asked by telephone.”

  “So was I,” said Varek, with a puzzled expression, “but what about that?”

  Vincent had been rung up by Lionel at his club, and Addie had been asked by someone who knew Lionel who proposed her. Whick was the only one who had had a note—a short one.

  “I know,” I cried, when we heard this. “We’re the Highways and Hedges!”

  “Any relation to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries?” Whick asked.

  “No; that’s quite respectable, I believe,” I replied.

  “I think you are right, Penny,” Vanity said, her lips compressed. “He asked other guests, and they refused.”

  “So we’re the sweepings,” said Benjy bitterly. “How like Lionel.”

  “Sweeps to the sweep,” Whick murmured, as if he had exceeded his normal allowance of wit. “Dirty dog!”

  Vanity wrinkled her nose. “I wish everyone would forget these abominable scraps of American slang,” she said. “Destroying our language!”

  “Enriching it, that phrase,” Vincent suggested. “And I deny that it is American, my dear girl. Good English, all of it.”

  “That review of yours is a poem in itself,” Whick snapped. “A bad poem in worse prose.”

  “Then I suggest that you use it for your next effort,” said Vanity. “It will be at least intelligible.”

  How I love these dog-fights. So does Vincie. But they both shut up after that, and the conversation went back to sporting matters.

  The guns would be: Lionel, Vincie, Addie, Verek, Whick, Benjy.

  The applauding throng would consist of: Myself, Vanity.

  “That gives us three men each,” I remarked, when I had enumerated the sporting classes. “I suppose we sit behind one, and watch the other two through glasses?”

  “Wrong again in your count,” Vincie said. “There’s a bloke called Musson, if he shoots. Then there will be several drives.”

  “Avenues?” said Vanity.

  “No,” Benjy said. “We don’t explore those. Drives. The beaters drive the birds. They beat them out of the bushes, don’t they, Vince?”

  “So I hear.”

  Vanity looked worried. “What pleasure there can be in shooting crippled birds—” she began, to be interrupted by a howl from Whick.

  “First they beat the birds, and then the birds beat the guns. How lovely!”

  “The beaters merely drive the birds over the guns,” I said, “and I suppose Vincie means that they will do it several times. If so, we spectators—you and me, Vanity—can take it in turns to sit with the various performers.”

  “I don’t want Vanity behind me, putting me off with her yammer about the S.P.C.A.,” Whick remarked violently.

  “There won’t be any cruelty at your stand,” Benjy said stoutly. “I can bet my top-hat on that.”

  It was a mercy, in a sense, that the train soon reached our station. A company of best-sellers would have been worse, of course. But we loved each other quite well enough to go on with.

  “Does Mr. Fonders really wear an eyeglass?” Addie asked, as we slowed for Chustable.

  “He wears an eyeglass because he has a glass eye,” Whick said.

  All Addie’s heroes do—the eyeglass alone, of course—and she looked wounded, under the impression that Whick was making fun of her.

  But that was not the fact. Nowadays, when people tell you all about their most intimate innards, even when you are at the meat course, it is nothing to mention dentures or artificial eyes. But I did not like to be too personal in my description of Lionel at first, since it is obvious that I do not like him.

  He says he lost his eye in the war. I did not know him then, but there is a scurrilous story to the effect that he hit it on a peg in a cupboard under the stairs when some maroons went off unexpectedly.

  “True,” said Vincie. “A relic of the war.”

  “A what?” said Whick.

  Vincie scowled at him. “Here we are. Look out for a title for your new satire, Gerald. What about ‘Bloomsbury at the Battue’?”

  The train stopped, and we got our effects, and streamed out on to the bare platform, to get a decided kick out of the station-master’s greeting.

  “Mr. Fonders’s party, sir?”

  “We are,” Benjy said importantly.

  “This way, sir.”

  An author may be no hero to his rivals, but country station-masters are in another category. The stout man in uniform led us, beaming, to the station yard, where two cars awaited us.

  Two chauffeurs touched their caps, and a porter with our united luggage piled high on a truck sweated behind.

  Whick jumped into the Sunbeam, after helping Addie in. He was followed by Bob Varek. The two Does, Vincie and I, got thankfully into the Austin.

  “Satire has sunk low since the days of Pope,” Vanity murmured.

  “Literature has gone to the devil altogether,” Vincie agreed. “Bar our four noble selves, I see no hope for it.”

  Chustable is set in very charming country, well wooded, with river valleys, and hills of small elevation, but picturesque irregularity. The manor lies two miles from the station, is surrounded by a large park, and has two entrances. I could just see a glimpse of its mellow brick, set on top of a slope among woods, as our cars turned in at the South Lodge.

  I know Lionel rented it cheaply, and the house was not really large. He had a thousand acres with it. I heard later that the trouble was drains. But, as Vincie says, Lionel’s books must have put him beyond troubling about a small thing like that.

  It is a fair question to ask why we went if we disliked the man so much. It is, I think, equally fair to reply that if you never accepted invitations to the houses of people you disliked, you would be shorn of much entertaining—and Lionel would have had no guests at all.

  But to return to the house. It was Queen Anne, had a suite of five reception-rooms, and nine bedrooms. I think there was accommodation for five servants as well.

  As we drew up on the gravel sweep, we saw Lionel and another man on the steps of the porch.

  He looked almost distinguished, as he came forward to welcome us, in his knicker-breeches with brown leggings, loose grey tweed shooting-jacket with chamois-leather gun-pad, and his eyeglass glinting in the bright winter sun.

  When I had spoken to him, I had leisure to inspect the last guest. He was a bulky man, about six feet high, with a thatch of unruly dark hair tending to curl, and a very surly, disagreeable face. He saw my glance, and came to me.

  “More devotees of le Sport, I suppose?” he said mockingly. “My name’s Musson. Who are the other merchants?”

  “Suppose you go and ask them, Mr. Musson?” I said. “But be careful! Most of us are armed.”

  He guffawed as he glanced round at the butler picking up two gun-cases. “That’s why I’m not shooting to-morrow.”

  “That, or a natural desire to appear at your best?” I said. “Well, you can number the tribes if you wish. Come along, Vanity.”

  “Why Vanity, I wonder?” we heard him murmur as we walked into the house. “And what about?”

 

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