Love Among the Chickens

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"That's what she calls me two lines farther on. No wonder Millie was
upset. Why can't these cats leave people alone?"

"O woman, woman!" I threw in helpfully.

"Always interfering--"

"Beastly!"

"--and backbiting--"

"Awful!"

"I shan't stand it!"

"I shouldn't."

"Look here! On the next page she calls me a gaby!"

"It's time you took a strong hand."

"And in the very next sentence refers to me as a perfect guffin.
What's a guffin, Garny, old boy?"

"It sounds indecent."

"I believe it's actionable."

"I shouldn't wonder."

Ukridge rushed to the door.

"Millie!" he shouted.

No answer.

He slammed the door, and I heard him dashing upstairs.

I turned with a sense of relief to my letters. One was from Lickford.
It bore a Cornish postmark. I glanced through it, and laid it aside
for a more exhaustive perusal later on.

The other was in a strange handwriting. I looked at the signature.
Patrick Derrick. This was queer. What had the professor to say to me?

The next moment my heart seemed to spring to my throat.

"Sir," the letter began.

A pleasant, cheery beginning!

Then it got off the mark, so to speak, like lightning. There was no
sparring for an opening, no dignified parade of set phrases leading up
to the main point. It was the letter of a man who was almost too
furious to write. It gave me the impression that, if he had not
written it, he would have been obliged to have taken some very violent
form of exercise by way of relief to his soul.

"You will be good enough," he wrote, "to look on our acquaintance as
closed. I have no wish to associate with persons of your stamp. If we
should happen to meet, you will be good enough to treat me as a total
stranger, as I shall treat you. And, if I may be allowed to give you a
word of advice, I should recommend you in future, when you wish to
exercise your humor, to do so in some less practical manner than by
bribing boatmen to upset your" (_friends_ crossed out thickly, and
_acquaintances_ substituted). "If you require further enlightenment in
this matter, the inclosed letter may be of service to you."

With which he remained mine faithfully, Patrick Derrick.

The inclosed letter was from one Jane Muspratt. It was bright and
interesting.

DEAR SIR: My Harry, Mr. Hawk, sas to me how it was him
upseting the boat and you, not because he is not steddy in a
boat which he is no man more so in Lyme Regis but because
one of the gentmen what keeps chikkens up the hill, the
little one, Mr. Garnick his name is, says to him Hawk, I'll
give you a sovrin to upset Mr. Derrick in your boat, and my
Harry being esily led was took in and did but he's sory now
and wishes he hadn't, and he sas he'll niver do a prackticle
joke again for anyone even for a bank note.

Yours obedly

JANE MUSPRATT.

O woman, woman!

At the bottom of everything! History is full of cruel tragedies caused
by the lethal sex.

Who lost Mark Antony the world? A woman. Who let Samson in so
atrociously? Woman again. Why did Bill Bailey leave home? Once more,
because of a woman. And here was I, Jerry Garnet, harmless,
well-meaning writer of minor novels, going through the same old mill.

I cursed Jane Muspratt. What chance had I with Phyllis now? Could I
hope to win over the professor again? I cursed Jane Muspratt for the
second time.

My thoughts wandered to Mr. Harry Hawk. The villain! The scoundrel!
What business had he to betray me? Well, I could settle with him. The
man who lays a hand upon a woman, save in the way of kindness, is
justly disliked by society; so the woman Muspratt, culpable as she
was, was safe from me. But what of the man Hawk? There no such
considerations swayed me. I would interview the man Hawk. I would give
him the most hectic ten minutes of his career. I would say things to
him the recollection of which would make him start up shrieking in his
bed in the small hours of the night. I would arise, and be a man and
slay him--take him grossly, full of bread, with all his crimes,
broad-blown, as flush as May; at gaming, swearing, or about some act
that had no relish of salvation in it.

The demon!

My life--ruined. My future--gray and blank. My heart--shattered. And
why? Because of the scoundrel--Hawk.

Phyllis would meet me in the village, on the Cob, on the links, and
pass by as if I were the invisible man. And why? Because of the
reptile--Hawk. The worm--Hawk. The varlet--Hawk.

I crammed my hat on and hurried out of the house toward the village.

A CHANCE MEETING

XVI

I roamed the place in search of the varlet for the space of half an
hour, and, after having drawn all his familiar haunts, found him at
length leaning over the sea wall near the church, gazing thoughtfully
into the waters below.

I confronted him.

"Well," I said, "you're a beauty, aren't you?"

He eyed me owlishly. Even at this early hour, I was grieved to see, he
showed signs of having looked on the bitter while it was brown.

"Beauty?" he echoed.

"What have you got to say for yourself?"

It was plain that he was engaged in pulling his faculties together by
some laborious process known only to himself. At present my words
conveyed no meaning to him. He was trying to identify me. He had seen
me before somewhere, he was certain, but he could not say where, or
who I was.

"I want to know," I said, "what induced you to be such an abject idiot
as to let our arrangement get known?"

I spoke quietly. I was not going to waste the choicer flowers of
speech on a man who was incapable of understanding them. Later on,
when he had awakened to a sense of his position, I would begin really
to talk to him.

He continued to stare at me. Then a sudden flash of intelligence lit
up his features.

"Mr. Garnick," he said.

"You've got it at last."

He stretched out a huge hand.

"I want to know," I said distinctly, "what you've got to say for
yourself after letting our affair with the professor become public
property?"

He paused a while in thought.

"Dear sir," he said at last, as if he were dictating a letter, "dear
sir, I owe you--ex--exp--"

"You do," said I grimly. "I should like to hear it."

"Dear sir, listen me."

"Go on, then."

"You came me. You said, 'Hawk, Hawk, ol' fren', listen me. You tip
this ol' bufflehead into sea,' you said, 'an' gormed if I don't give
'ee a gould savrin.' That's what you said me. Isn't that what you said
me?"

I did not deny it.

"Ve' well. I said you, 'Right,' I said. I tipped the ol' soul into
sea, and I got the gould savrin."

"Yes, you took care of that. All this is quite true, but it's beside
the point. We are not disputing about what happened. What I want to
know for the third time--is what made you let the cat out of the bag?
Why couldn't you keep quiet about it?"

He waved his hand.

"Dear sir," he replied. "This way. Listen me."

It was a tragic story that he unfolded. My wrath ebbed as I listened.
After all, the fellow was not so greatly to blame. I felt that in his
place I should have acted as he had done. Fate was culpable, and fate
alone.

It appeared that he had not come well out of the matter of the
accident. I had not looked at it hitherto from his point of view.
While the rescue had left me the popular hero, it had had quite the
opposite result for him. He had upset his boat and would have drowned
his passenger, said public opinion, if the young hero from
London--myself--had not plunged in, and at the risk of his life
brought the professor to shore. Consequently, he was despised by all
as an inefficient boatman. He became a laughing stock. The local wags
made laborious jests when he passed. They offered him fabulous sums to
take their worst enemies out for a row with him. They wanted to know
when he was going to school to learn his business. In fact, they
behaved as wags do and always have done at all times all the world
over.

Now, all this Mr. Hawk, it seemed, would have borne cheerfully and
patiently for my sake, or, at any rate, for the sake of the good
golden sovereign I had given him. But a fresh factor appeared in the
problem, complicating it grievously. To wit, Miss Jane Muspratt.

"She said me," explained Mr. Hawk with pathos, "'Harry 'Awk,' she
said, 'yeou'm a girt fule, an' I don't marry noone as is ain't to be
trusted in a boat by hisself, and what has jokes made about him by
that Tom Leigh.' I punched Tom Leigh," observed Mr. Hawk
parenthetically. "'So,' she said me, 'yeou can go away, an' I don't
want to see yeou again.'"

This heartless conduct on the part of Miss Muspratt had had the
natural result of making him confess all in self-defense, and she had
written to the professor the same night.

I forgave Mr. Hawk. I think he was hardly sober enough to understand,
for he betrayed no emotion.

"It is fate, Hawk," I said, "simply fate. There is a divinity that
shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will, and it's no good
grumbling."

"Yiss," said Mr. Hawk, after chewing this sentiment for a while in
silence, "so she said me, 'Hawk,' she said--like that--'you're a girt
fule--'"

"That's all right," I replied. "I quite understand. As I say, it's
simply fate. Good-by."

And I left him.

As I was going back, I met the professor and Phyllis.

They passed me without a look.

I wandered on in quite a fervor of self-pity. I was in one of those
moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future
stretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it is
imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of
Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance.
Work was what I wanted. I would toil like a navvy all day among the
fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when
they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even,
if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when they
were stricken with roop. Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit,
and Mrs. Ukridge petted Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars and
incited the gramophone to murder "Mumbling Mose," I would steal away
to my bedroom and write--and write--and _write_--and go on writing
till my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty. And,
when time had passed, I might come to feel that it was all for the
best. A man must go through the fire before he can write his
masterpiece. We learn in suffering what we teach in song. What we lose
on the swings we make up on the roundabouts. Jerry Garnet, the man,
might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron planted
irremovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the author, should turn
out such a novel of gloom that strong critics would weep and the
public jostle for copies till Mudie's doorways became a shambles.

Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a
blessing--effectively disguised.

But I doubted it.

We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm. Even Ukridge's
spirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by every
post. It was as if the tradesmen of the neighborhood had formed a
league and were working in concert. Or it may have been due to thought
waves. Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions. The
popular demand for a sight of the color of his money grew daily. Every
morning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state of
mind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcement
that Whiteley's were getting cross and Harrod's jumpy, or that the
bearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming over-heated. We lived
in a continual atmosphere of worry. Chicken and nothing but chicken
at meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals, had
frayed our nerves. An air of defeat hung over the place. We were a
beaten side, and we realized it. We had been playing an uphill game
for nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell. Ukridge
became uncannily silent. Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand,
I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was.
Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack
of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art. And as for me,
I have never since spent so profoundly miserable a week. I was not
even permitted the anodyne of work. There seemed to be nothing to do
on the farm. The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be let
alone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals. And every
day one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, and
Mrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and we
would try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was something
altogether different.

There was one solitary gleam of variety in our menu. An editor sent me
a check for a guinea for a set of verses. We cashed that check and
trooped round the town in a body, laying out the money. We bought a
leg of mutton and a tongue and sardines and pineapple chunks and
potted meat and many other noble things, and had a perfect banquet.

After that we relapsed into routine again.

Deprived of physical labor, with the exception of golf and
bathing--trivial sports compared with work in the fowl runs at its
hardest--I tried to make up for it by working at my novel.

It refused to materialize.

I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a mean
trick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order of
cauliflower. By no manner of means could I get the plot to shape
itself. I could not detach my mind from my own painful case. Instead
of thinking of my characters, I sat in my chair and thought miserably
of Phyllis.

The only progress I achieved was with my villain.

I drew him from the professor and made him a blackmailer. He had
several other social defects, but that was his profession. That was
the thing he did really well.

It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, pen
in hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no better
result than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that little
paradise on the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed by green
woods. I had not been there for sometime, owing principally to an
entirely erroneous idea that I could do more solid work sitting in a
straight, hard chair at a table than lying on soft turf with the sea
wind in my eyes.

But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me from
my room. In the drawing-room below, the gramophone was dealing
brassily with "Mister Blackman." Outside, the sun was just thinking of
setting. The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What does
Kipling say?

And soon you will find that the sun and the wind
And the Djinn of the Garden, too,
Have lightened the Hump, Cameelious Hump,
The Hump that is black and blue.

His instructions include digging with a hoe and a shovel also, but I
could omit that. The sun and wind were what I needed.

I took the upper road. In certain moods I preferred it to the path
along the cliff. I walked fast. The exercise was soothing.

To reach my favorite clearing I had to take to the fields on the left
and strike down hill in the direction of the sea. I hurried down the
narrow path.

I broke into the clearing at a jog trot, and stood panting. And at the
same moment, looking cool and beautiful in her white dress, Phyllis
entered it from the other side. Phyllis--without the professor.

OF A SENTIMENTAL NATURE

XVII

She was wearing a Panama, and she carried a sketching block and camp
stool.

"Good evening," I said.

"Good evening," said she.

It is curious how different the same words can sound when spoken by
different people. My "good evening" might have been that of a man with
a particularly guilty conscience caught in the act of doing something
more than usually ignoble. She spoke like a somewhat offended angel.

"It's a lovely evening," I went on pluckily.

"Very."

"The sunset!"

"Yes."

"Er--"

She raised a pair of blue eyes, devoid of all expression save a faint
suggestion of surprise, gazed through me for a moment at some object a
couple of thousand miles away, and lowered them again, leaving me with
a vague feeling that there was something wrong with my personal
appearance.

Very calmly she moved to the edge of the cliff, arranged her camp
stool, and sat down. Neither of us spoke a word. I watched her while
she filled a little mug with water from a little bottle, opened her
paint box, selected a brush, and placed her sketching block in
position.

She began to paint.

Now, by all the laws of good taste, I should before this have made a
dignified exit. When a lady shows a gentleman that his presence is
unwelcome, it is up to him, as an American friend of mine pithily
observed to me on one occasion, to get busy and chase himself, and
see if he can make the tall timber in two jumps. In other words, to
retire. It was plain that I was not regarded as an essential ornament
of this portion of the Ware Cliff. By now, if I had been the perfect
gentleman, I ought to have been a quarter of a mile away.

But there is a definite limit to what a man can do. I remained.

The sinking sun flung a carpet of gold across the sea. Phyllis's hair
was tinged with it. Little waves tumbled lazily on the beach below.
Except for the song of a distant blackbird running through its
repertory before retiring for the night, everything was silent.

Especially Phyllis.

She sat there, dipping and painting and dipping again, with never a
word for me--standing patiently and humbly behind her.

"Miss Derrick," I said.

She half turned her head.

"Yes?"

One of the most valuable things which a lifetime devoted to sport
teaches a man is "never play the goose game." Bold attack is the
safest rule in nine cases out of ten, wherever you are and whatever
you may be doing. If you are batting, attack the ball. If you are
boxing, get after your man. If you are talking, go to the point.

"Why won't you speak to me?" I said.

"I don't understand you."

"Why won't you speak to me?"

"I think you know, Mr. Garnet."

"It is because of that boat accident?"

"Accident!"

"Episode," I amended.

She went on painting in silence. From where I stood I could see her
profile. Her chin was tilted. Her expression was determined.

"Is it?" I said.

"Need we discuss it?"

"Not if you do not wish."

I paused.

"But," I added, "I should have liked a chance to defend myself....
What glorious sunsets there have been these last few days. I believe
we shall have this sort of weather for another month."

"I should not have thought that possible."

"The glass is going up," I said.

"I was not talking about the weather."

"It was dull of me to introduce such a worn-out topic."

"You said you could defend yourself."

"I said I should like the chance to do so."

"Then you shall have it."

"That is very kind of you. Thank you."

"Is there any reason for gratitude?"

"Every reason."

"Go on, Mr. Garnet. I can listen while I paint. But please sit down.
I don't like being talked to from a height."

I sat down on the grass in front of her, feeling as I did so that the
change of position in a manner clipped my wings. It is difficult to
speak movingly while sitting on the ground. Instinctively, I avoided
eloquence. Standing up, I might have been pathetic and pleading.
Sitting down, I was compelled to be matter of fact.

"You remember, of course, the night you and Professor Derrick dined
with us? When I say dined, I use the word in a loose sense."

For a moment I thought she was going to smile. We were both thinking
of Edwin. But it was only for a moment, and then her face grew cold
once more, and the chin resumed its angle of determination.

"Yes," she said.

"You remember the unfortunate ending of the festivities?"

"Well?"

"I naturally wished to mend matters. It occurred to me that an
excellent way would be by doing your father a service. It was seeing
him fishing that put the idea of a boat accident into my head. I hoped
for a genuine boat accident. But those things only happen when one
does not want them. So I determined to engineer one."

"You didn't think of the shock to my father."

"I did. It worried me very much."

"But you upset him all the same."

"Reluctantly."

She looked up and our eyes met. I could detect no trace of forgiveness
in hers.

"You behaved abominably," she said.

"I played a risky game, and I lost. And I shall now take the
consequences. With luck I should have won. I did not have luck, and I
am not going to grumble about it. But I am grateful to you for letting
me explain. I should not have liked you to go on thinking that I
played practical jokes on my friends. That is all I have to say, I
think. It was kind of you to listen. Good-by, Miss Derrick."

I got up.

"Are you going?"

"Why not?"

"Please sit down again."

"But you wish to be alone--"

"Please sit down!"

There was a flush on the fair cheek turned toward me, and the chin was
tilted higher.

I sat down.

To westward the sky had changed to the hue of a bruised cherry. The
sun had sunk below the horizon, and the sea looked cold and leaden.
The blackbird had long since gone to bed.

"I am glad you told me, Mr. Garnet."

She dipped her brush in the water.

"Because I don't like to think badly of--people."

She bent her head over her painting.

"Though I still think you behaved very wrongly. And I am afraid my
father will never forgive you for what you did."

Her father! As if he counted!

"But you do?" I said eagerly.

"I think you are less to blame than I thought you were at first."

"No more than that?"

"You can't expect to escape all consequences. You did a very stupid
thing."

"Consider the temptation."

The sky was a dull gray now. It was growing dusk. The grass on which I
sat was wet with dew.

I stood up.

"Isn't it getting a little dark for painting?" I said. "Are you sure
you won't catch cold? It's very damp."

"Perhaps it is. And it is late, too."

She shut her paint box and emptied the little mug on the grass.

"You will let me carry your things?" I said.

I think she hesitated, but only for a moment. I possessed myself of
the camp stool, and we started on our homeward journey. We were both
silent. The spell of the quiet summer evening was on us.

"'And all the air a solemn stillness holds,'" she said softly. "I love
this cliff, Mr. Garnet. It's the most soothing place in the world."

"I have found it so this evening."

She glanced at me quickly.

"You're not looking well," she said. "Are you sure you are not
overworking yourself?"

"No, it's not that."

Somehow we had stopped, as if by agreement, and were facing each
other. There was a look in her eyes I had never seen there before.
The twilight hung like a curtain between us and the world. We were
alone together in a world of our own.

"It is because I had displeased you," I said.

She laughed nervously.

"I have loved you ever since I first saw you," I said doggedly.

UKRIDGE GIVES ME ADVICE

XVIII

Hours after--or so it seemed to me--we reached the spot at which our
ways divided. We stopped, and I felt as if I had been suddenly cast
back into the workaday world from some distant and pleasanter planet.
I think Phyllis must have had something of the same sensation, for we
both became on the instant intensely practical and businesslike.

"But about your father," I said briskly. I was not even holding her
hand.

"That's the difficulty."

"He won't give his consent?"

"I'm afraid he wouldn't dream of it."

"You can't persuade him?"

"I can in most things, but not in this. You see, even if nothing had
happened, he wouldn't like to lose me just yet, because of Norah."

"Norah!"

"My sister. She's going to be married in October. I wonder if we shall
ever be as happy as they will?"

I laughed scornfully.

"Happy! They will be miserable compared with us. Not that I know who
the man is."

"Why, Tom, of course. Do you mean to say you really didn't know?"

"Tom! Tom Chase?"

"Of course."

I gasped.

"Well, I'm--hanged," I said. "When I think of the torments I've been
through because of that wretched man, and all for nothing, I don't
know what to say."

"Don't you like Tom?"

"Very much. I always did. But I was awfully jealous of him."

"You weren't! How silly of you."

"Of course I was. He was always about with you, and called you
Phyllis, and generally behaved as if you and he were the heroine and
hero of a musical comedy, so what else could I think? I heard you
singing duets after dinner once. I drew the worst conclusions."

"When was that?"

"It was shortly after Ukridge had got on your father's nerves, and
nipped our acquaintance in the bud. I used to come every night to the
hedge opposite your drawing-room window, and brood there by the hour."

"Poor old boy!"

"Hoping to hear you sing. And when you did sing, and he joined in all
flat, I used to scold. You'll probably find most of the bark worn off
the tree I leaned against."

"Poor old man! Still, it's all over now, isn't it?"

"And when I was doing my very best to show off before you at tennis,
you went away just as I got into form."

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