"IT'S not the daily grind that I complain of," said
Blenkinthrope resentfully; "it's the dull grey sameness
of my life outside of office hours. Nothing of interest
comes my way, nothing remarkable or out of the common.
Even the little things that I do try to find some
interest in don't seem to interest other people. Things
in my garden, for instance."
"The potato that weighed just over two pounds," said
his friend Gorworth.
"Did I tell you about that?" said Blenkinthrope; "I
was telling the others 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 I took into account the fact that
abnormal vegetables and freshwater fish have an after-
life, in which growth is not arrested."
"You're just like the others," said Blenkinthrope
sadly, "you only make fun of it."
"The fault is with the potato, not with us," said
Gorworth; "we are not in 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
case as yourself; their lives are commonplace and not
very interesting to themselves, and they certainly are
not going to wax enthusiastic over the commonplace events
in other men's lives. Tell them something startling,
dramatic, piquant that has happened to yourself or to
someone in your family, and you will capture their
interest at once. They will talk about you with a
certain personal pride to all their acquaintances. 'Man
I know intimately, fellow called Blenkinthrope, lives
down my way, had two of his fingers clawed clean off by a
lobster he was carrying home to supper. Doctor says
entire hand may have to come off.' Now that is
conversation of a very high order. But imagine walking
into a tennis club with the remark: 'I know a man who has
grown a potato weighing two and 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 happens to me?"
"Invent something," said Gorworth. Since winning a
prize for excellence in Scriptural knowledge at a
preparatory school he had felt licensed to be a little
more unscrupulous than the circle he moved in. Much
might surely be excused to one who in early life could
give a list of seventeen trees 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 of seven pullets, first mesmerising them
with its eyes and then biting them as they stood
helpless. The seventh pullet was one of that French
sort, with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the
mesmeric snare, and just 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 should have been
proud and interested to tell people about it. But I'd
rather stick to fact, even if it is plain fact." All the
same his mind dwelt wistfully on the story of the Seventh
Pullet. He could picture himself telling it in the train
amid the absorbed interest of his fellow-passengers.
Unconsciously all sorts of little details and
improvements began to suggest themselves.
Wistfulness was still his dominant mood when he took
his seat in the railway carriage the next morning.
Opposite him sat Stevenham, who had attained to a
recognised brevet of importance through the fact of an
uncle having dropped dead in the act of voting at a
Parliamentary election. That had happened three years
ago, but Stevenham was still deferred to on all questions
of home and foreign politics.
"Hullo, how's the giant mushroom, or whatever it
was?" was all the notice Blenkinthrope got from his
fellow travellers.
Young Duckby, whom he mildly disliked, speedily
monopolised the general attention 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 hole he made breaking into
the loft."
No moderate-sized rat ever seemed to carry out any
predatory operations in these regions; they were all
enormous in their enormity.
"Pretty hard lines that," continued Duckby, seeing
that he had secured the attention and respect of the
company; "four squeakers carried off at one swoop. You'd
find it rather hard to match that in the way of unlooked-
for bad luck."
"I had six pullets out of a pen of seven killed by a
snake yesterday afternoon," said Blenkinthrope, in a
voice which he hardly recognised as his own.
"By a snake?" came in excited chorus.
"It fascinated them with its deadly, glittering
eyes, one after the other, and struck them down while
they stood helpless. A bedridden neighbour, who wasn't
able to call for assistance, witnessed it all from her
bedroom window."
"Well, I never!" broke in the chorus, with
variations.
"The interesting part of it is about the seventh
pullet, the one that didn't get killed," resumed
Blenkinthrope, slowly lighting a cigarette. His
diffidence had left him, and he was beginning to realise
how safe and easy depravity can seem once one has the
courage to begin. "The six dead birds were Minorcas; the
seventh was a Houdan with a mop of feathers all over its
eyes. It could hardly see the snake at all, so of course
it wasn't mesmerised like the others. It just could see
something wriggling on 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 little the loss of one's self-respect
affects one when one has gained the esteem of 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 general interest. A lady wrote from the North of
Scotland recounting a similar episode which she had
witnessed as occurring between a stoat and a blind
grouse. Somehow a lie seems so much less reprehensible
when one can call it a lee.
For awhile the adapter of the Seventh Pullet story
enjoyed to the full his altered standing as a person of
consequence, one who had had some share in the strange
events of his times. Then he was thrust once again into
the cold grey background by the sudden blossoming into
importance of Smith-Paddon, a daily fellow-traveller,
whose little girl had been knocked down and nearly hurt
by a car belonging to a musical-comedy actress. The
actress was not in the car at the time, but she was in
numerous photographs which appeared in the illustrated
papers of Zoto Dobreen inquiring after the well-being of
Maisie, daughter of Edmund Smith-Paddon, Esq. With this
new human interest to absorb them the travelling
companions were almost rude when Blenkinthrope tried to
explain his contrivance for keeping vipers and peregrine
falcons out of his chicken-run.
Gorworth, to whom he unburdened himself in private,
gave him the same counsel as heretofore.
"Invent something."
"Yes, but what?"
The ready affirmative coupled with the question
betrayed a significant shifting of the ethical
standpoint.
It was a few days later that Blenkinthrope revealed
a chapter of family history to the customary gathering in
the railway carriage.
"Curious thing happened to my aunt, the one who
lives in Paris," he began. He had several aunts, but
they were all geographically distributed over Greater
London.
"She was sitting on a seat in the Bois the other
afternoon, after lunching at the Roumanian Legation."
Whatever the story gained in picturesqueness from
the dragging-in of diplomatic "atmosphere," it ceased
from that moment to command any acceptance as a record of
current events. Gorworth had warned his neophyte that
this would be the case, but the traditional enthusiasm of
the 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's aunts were not used to taking
champagne in the middle of the year, regarding it
exclusively as a Christmas and New Year accessory.
"Presently a rather portly gentleman passed by her
seat and paused an instant to light a cigar. At that
moment a youngish man came up behind him, drew the blade
from a swordstick, and stabbed him half a dozen times
through and through. 'Scoundrel,' he cried to his
victim, 'you do not know me. My name is Henri Leturc.'
The elder man wiped away some of the blood that was
spattering his clothes, turned to his assailant, and
said: `And since when has an attempted assassination been
considered an introduction?' Then he finished lighting
his cigar and walked away. My aunt had intended
screaming for the police, but seeing the indifference
with which the principal in the affair treated the matter
she felt that it would be an impertinence on her part to
interfere. Of course I need hardly say she put the whole
thing down to the effects of a warm, drowsy afternoon and
the Legation champagne. Now comes the astonishing part
of my story. A fortnight later a bank manager was
stabbed to death with a swordstick in that very part of
the Bois. His assassin was the son of a charwoman
formerly working at the bank, who had been dismissed from
her job by the manager on account of chronic
intemperance. His name was Henri Leturc."
From that moment Blenkinthrope was tacitly accepted
as the Munchausen of the party. No effort was spared to
draw him out from day to day in the exercise of testing
their powers of credulity, and Blenkinthrope, in the
false security of an assured and receptive audience,
waxed industrious and ingenious in supplying the demand
for marvels. Duckby's satirical story of a tame otter
that had a tank in the garden to swim in, and whined
restlessly whenever the water-rate was overdue, was
scarcely an unfair parody of some of Blenkinthrope's
wilder efforts. And then one day came Nemesis.
Returning to his villa one evening Blenkinthrope
found his wife sitting in front of a pack of cards, which
she was scrutinising with unusual concentration.
"The same old patience-game?" he asked carelessly.
"No, dear; this is the Death's Head patience, the
most difficult of them all. I've never got it to work
out, and somehow I should be rather frightened if I did.
Mother only got it out once in her life; she was afraid
of it, too. Her great-aunt had done it once and fallen
dead from excitement the next moment, and mother always
had a feeling that she would die if she ever got it out.
She died the same night that she did it. She was in bad
health at the time, certainly, but it was a strange
coincidence."
"Don't do it if it frightens you," was
Blenkinthrope's practical comment as 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 of diamonds 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 be moved on to the
six."
His wife made the suggested move with hasty,
trembling fingers, and piled the outstanding cards on to
their respective packs. Then she followed the example of
her mother and great-grand-aunt.
Blenkinthrope had been genuinely fond of his wife,
but in the midst of his bereavement one dominant thought
obtruded itself. Something sensational and real had at
last come into his life; no longer was it a grey,
colourless record. The headlines which might
appropriately describe 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." He
wrote 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 a condensed account, to be
taken up to the office of one of the halfpenny dailies.
But in both cases his reputation as a romancer stood
fatally in the way of the fulfilment of his ambitions.
"Not the right thing to be Munchausening in a time of
sorrow" agreed his friends among themselves, and a brief
note of regret at the "sudden death of the wife of our
respected neighbour, Mr. John Blenkinthrope, from heart
failure," appearing in the news column of the local paper
was the forlorn outcome of his visions of widespread
publicity.
Blenkinthrope shrank from the society of his
erstwhile travelling companions and took to travelling
townwards by an earlier train. He sometimes tries to
enlist the sympathy and attention of a chance
acquaintance in details of the whistling prowess of his
best canary or the dimensions of his largest beetroot; he
scarcely recognises himself as the man who was once
spoken about and pointed out as the owner of the Seventh
Pullet.
-THE END-
The Seven Pullet, by Saki [H H Munro]
from the collection of 'Beasts and Super-Beasts'.
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