JOCANTHA BESSBURY was in the mood to be serenely and
graciously happy. Her world was a pleasant place, and it
was wearing one of its pleasantest aspects. Gregory had
managed to get home for a hurried lunch and a smoke
afterwards in the little snuggery; the lunch had been a
good one, and there was just time to do justice to the
coffee and cigarettes. Both were excellent in their way,
and Gregory was, in his way, an excellent husband.
Jocantha rather suspected herself of making him a very
charming wife, and more than suspected herself of having
a first-rate dressmaker.
"I don't suppose a more thoroughly contented
personality is to be found in all Chelsea," observed
Jocantha in allusion to herself; "except perhaps Attab,"
she continued, glancing towards the large tabby-marked
cat that lay in considerable ease in a corner of the
divan. "He lies there, purring and dreaming, shifting
his limbs now and then in an ecstasy of cushioned
comfort. He seems the incarnation of everything soft and
silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his
composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let
sleep; and then, as evening draws on, he goes out into
the garden with a red glint in his eyes and slays a
drowsy sparrow."
"As every pair of sparrows hatches out ten or more
young ones in the year, while their food supply remains
stationary, it is just as well that the Attabs of the
community should have that idea of how to pass an amusing
afternoon," said Gregory. Having delivered himself of
this sage comment he lit another cigarette, bade Jocantha
a playfully affectionate good-bye, and departed into the
outer world.
"Remember, dinner's a wee bit earlier to-night, as
we're going to the Haymarket," she called after him.
Left to herself, Jocantha continued the process of
looking at her life with placid, introspective eyes. If
she had not everything she wanted in this world, at least
she was very well pleased with what she had got. She was
very well pleased, for instance, with the snuggery, which
contrived somehow to be cosy and dainty and expensive all
at once. The porcelain was rare and beautiful, the
Chinese enamels took on wonderful tints in the firelight,
the rugs and hangings led the eye through sumptuous
harmonies of colouring. It was a room in which one might
have suitably entertained an ambassador or an archbishop,
but it was also a room in which one could cut out
pictures for a scrap-book without feeling that one was
scandalising the deities of the place with one's litter.
And as with the snuggery, so with the rest of the house,
and as with the house, so with the other departments of
Jocantha's life; she really had good reason for being one
of the most contented women in Chelsea.
From being in a mood of simmering satisfaction with
her lot she passed to the phase of being generously
commiserating for those thousands around her whose lives
and circumstances were dull, cheap, pleasureless, and
empty. Work girls, shop assistants and so forth, the
class that have neither the happy-go-lucky freedom of the
poor nor the leisured freedom of the rich, came specially
within the range of her sympathy. It was sad to think
that there were young people who, after a long day's
work, had to sit alone in chill, dreary bedrooms because
they could not afford the price of a cup of coffee and a
sandwich in a restaurant, still less a shilling for a
theatre gallery.
Jocantha's mind was still dwelling on this theme
when she started forth on an afternoon campaign of
desultory shopping; it would be rather a comforting
thing, she told herself, if she could do something, on
the spur of the moment, to bring a gleam of pleasure and
interest into the life of even one or two wistful-
hearted, empty-pocketed workers; it would add a good deal
to her sense of enjoyment at the theatre that night. She
would get two upper circle tickets for a popular play,
make her way into some cheap tea-shop, and present the
tickets to the first couple of interesting work girls
with whom she could casually drop into conversation. She
could explain matters by saying that she was unable to
use the tickets herself and did not want them to be
wasted, and, on the other hand, did not want the trouble
of sending them back. On further reflection she decided
that it might be better to get only one ticket and give
it to some lonely-looking girl sitting eating her frugal
meal by herself; the girl might scrape acquaintance with
her next-seat neighbour at the theatre and lay the
foundations of a lasting friendship.
With the Fairy Godmother impulse strong upon her,
Jocantha marched into a ticket agency and selected with
immense care an upper circle seat for the "Yellow
Peacock," a play that was attracting a considerable
amount of discussion and criticism. Then she went forth
in search of a tea-shop and philanthropic adventure, at
about the same time that Attab sauntered into the garden
with a mind attuned to sparrow stalking. In a corner of
an A.B.C. shop she found an unoccupied table, whereat she
promptly installed herself, impelled by the fact that at
the next table was sitting a young girl, rather plain of
feature, with tired, listless eyes, and a general air of
uncomplaining forlornness. Her dress was of poor
material, but aimed at being in the fashion, her hair was
pretty, and her complexion bad; she was finishing a
modest meal of tea and scone, and she was not very
different in her way from thousands of other girls who
were finishing, or beginning, or continuing their teas in
London tea-shops at that exact moment. The odds were
enormously in favour of the supposition that she had
never seen the "Yellow Peacock"; obviously she supplied
excellent material for Jocantha's first experiment in
haphazard benefaction.
Jocantha ordered some tea and a muffin, and then
turned a friendly scrutiny on her neighbour with a view
to catching her eye. At that precise moment the girl's
face lit up with sudden pleasure, her eyes sparkled, a
flush came into her cheeks, and she looked almost pretty.
A young man, whom she greeted with an affectionate
"Hullo, Bertie," came up to her table and took his seat
in a chair facing her. Jocantha looked hard at the new-
comer; he was in appearance a few years younger than
herself, very much better looking than Gregory, rather
better looking, in fact, than any of the young men of her
set. She guessed him to be a well-mannered young clerk
in some wholesale warehouse, existing and amusing himself
as best he might on a tiny salary, and commanding a
holiday of about two weeks in the year. He was aware, of
course, of his good looks, but with the shy self-
consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, not the blatant
complacency of the Latin or Semite. He was obviously on
terms of friendly intimacy with the girl he was talking
to, probably they were drifting towards a formal
engagement. Jocantha pictured the boy's home, in a
rather narrow circle, with a tiresome mother who always
wanted to know how and where he spent his evenings. He
would exchange that humdrum thraldom in due course for a
home of his own, dominated by a chronic scarcity of
pounds, shillings, and pence, and a dearth of most of the
things that made life attractive or comfortable.
Jocantha felt extremely sorry for him. She wondered if
he had seen the "Yellow Peacock"; the odds were
enormously in favour of the supposition that he had not.
The girl had finished her tea and would shortly be going
back to her work; when the boy was alone it would be
quite easy for Jocantha to say: "My husband has made
other arrangements for me this evening; would you care to
make use of this ticket, which would otherwise be
wasted?" Then she could come there again one afternoon
for tea, and, if she saw him, ask him how he liked the
play. If he was a nice boy and improved on acquaintance
he could be given more theatre tickets, and perhaps asked
to come one Sunday to tea at Chelsea. Jocantha made up
her mind that he would improve on acquaintance, and that
Gregory would like him, and that the Fairy Godmother
business would prove far more entertaining than she had
originally anticipated. The boy was distinctly
presentable; he knew how to brush his hair, which was
possibly an imitative faculty; he knew what colour of tie
suited him, which might be intuition; he was exactly the
type that Jocantha admired, which of course was accident.
Altogether she was rather pleased when the girl looked at
the clock and bade a friendly but hurried farewell to her
companion. Bertie nodded "good-bye," gulped down a
mouthful of tea, and then produced from his overcoat
pocket a paper-covered book, bearing the title "Sepoy and
Sahib, a tale of the great Mutiny."
The laws of tea-shop etiquette forbid that you
should offer theatre tickets to a stranger without having
first caught the stranger's eye. It is even better if
you can ask to have a sugar basin passed to you, having
previously concealed the fact that you have a large and
well-filled sugar basin on your own table; this is not
difficult to manage, as the printed menu is generally
nearly as large as the table, and can be made to stand on
end. Jocantha set to work hopefully; she had a long and
rather high-pitched discussion with the waitress
concerning alleged defects in an altogether blameless
muffin, she made loud and plaintive inquiries about the
tube service to some impossibly remote suburb, she talked
with brilliant insincerity to the tea-shop kitten, and as
a last resort she upset a milk-jug and swore at it
daintily. Altogether she attracted a good deal of
attention, but never for a moment did she attract the
attention of the boy with the beautifully-brushed hair,
who was some thousands of miles away in the baking plains
of Hindostan, amid deserted bungalows, seething bazaars,
and riotous barrack squares, listening to the throbbing
of tom-toms and the distant rattle of musketry.
Jocantha went back to her house in Chelsea, which
struck her for the first time as looking dull and over-
furnished. She had a resentful conviction that Gregory
would be uninteresting at dinner, and that the play would
be stupid after dinner. On the whole her frame of mind
showed a marked divergence from the purring complacency
of Attab, who was again curled up in his corner of the
divan with a great peace radiating from every curve of
his body.
But then he had killed his sparrow.
-THE END-
The Philanthropist and The Happy Cat,
a short story by Saki [H H Munro]
from the collection of 'Beasts and Super-Beasts'.
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