Clovis sat in the hottest zone but two of a Turkish bath,
alternately inert in statuesque contemplation and rapidly
manoeuvring a fountain-pen over the pages of a note-book.
"Don't interrupt me with your childish prattle," he observed to
Bertie van Tahn, who had slung himself languidly into a
neighbouring chair and looked conversationally inclined; "I'm
writing deathless verse."
Bertie looked interested.
"I say, what a boon you would be to portrait painters if you
really got to be notorious as a poetry writer. If they couldn't
get your likeness hung in the Academy as 'Clovis Sangrail, Esq.,
at work on his latest poem,' they could slip you in as a Study of
the Nude or Orpheus descending into Jermyn Street. They always
complain that modern dress handicaps them, whereas a towel and a
fountain-pen--"
"It was Mrs. Packletide's suggestion that I should write this
thing," said Clovis, ignoring the bypaths to fame that Bertie van
Tahn was pointing out to him. "You see, Loona Bimberton had a
Coronation Ode accepted by the NEW INFANCY, a paper that has been
started with the idea of making the NEW AGE seem elderly and
hidebound. 'So clever of you, dear Loona,' the Packletide
remarked when she had read it; 'of course, anyone could write a
Coronation Ode, but no one else would have thought of doing it.'
Loona protested that these things were extremely difficult to do,
and gave us to understand that they were more or less the province
of a gifted few. Now the Packletide has been rather decent to me
in many ways, a sort of financial ambulance, you know, that
carries you off the field when you're hard hit, which is a
frequent occurrence with me, and I've no use whatever for Loona
Bimberton, so I chipped in and said I could turn out that sort of
stuff by the square yard if I gave my mind to it. Loona said I
couldn't, and we got bets on, and between you and me I think the
money's fairly safe. Of course, one of the conditions of the
wager is that the thing has to be published in something or other,
local newspapers barred; but Mrs. Packletide has endeared herself
by many little acts of thoughtfulness to the editor of the SMOKY
CHIMNEY, so if I can hammer out anything at all approaching the
level of the usual Ode output we ought to be all right. So far
I'm getting along so comfortably that I begin to be afraid that I
must he one of the gifted few."
"It's rather late in the day for a Coronation Ode, isn't it?" said
Bertie.
"Of course," said Clovis; "this is going to be a Durbar
Recessional, the sort of thing that you can keep by you for all
time if you want to."
"Now I understand your choice of a place to write it in," said
Bertie van Tahn, with the air of one who has suddenly unravelled a
hitherto obscure problem; "you want to get the local temperature."
"I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the
mentally deficient," said Clovis, "but it seems I asked too much
of fate."
Bertie van Tahn prepared to use his towel as a weapon of
precision, but reflecting that he had a good deal of unprotected
coast-line himself, and that Clovis was equipped with a fountain-
pen as well as a towel, he relapsed pacifically into the depths of
his chair.
"May one hear extracts from the immortal work?" he asked. "I
promise that nothing that I hear now shall prejudice me against
borrowing a copy of the SMOKY CHIMNEY at the right moment."
"It's rather like casting pearls into a trough," remarked Clovis
pleasantly, "but I don't mind reading you bits of it. It begins
with a general dispersal of the Durbar participants:
'Back to their homes in Himalayan heights
The stale pale elephants of Cutch Behar
Roll like great galleons on a tideless sea--'"
"I don't believe Cutch Behar is anywhere near the Himalayan
region," interrupted Bertie. "You ought to have an atlas on hand
when you do this sort of thing; and why stale and pale?"
"After the late hours and the excitement, of course," said Clovis;
"and I said their HOMES were in the Himalayas. You can have
Himalayan elephants in Cutch Behar, I suppose, just as you have
Irish-bred horses running at Ascot."
"You said they were going back to the Himalayas," objected Bertie.
"Well, they would naturally be sent home to recuperate. It's the
usual thing out there to turn elephants loose in the hills, just
as we put horses out to grass in this country."
Clovis could at least flatter himself that he had infused some of
the reckless splendour of the East into his mendacity.
"Is it all going to be in blank verse?" asked the critic.
"Of course not; 'Durbar' comes at the end of the fourth line."
"That seems so cowardly; however, it explains why you pitched on
Cutch Behar."
"There is more connection between geographical place-names and
poetical inspiration than is generally recognized; one of the
chief reasons why there are so few really great poems about Russia
in our language is that you can't possibly get a rhyme to names
like Smolensk and Tobolsk and Minsk."
Clovis spoke with the authority of one who has tried.
"Of course, you could rhyme Omsk with Tomsk," he continued; "in
fact, they seem to be there for that purpose, but the public
wouldn't stand that sort of thing indefinitely."
"The public will stand a good deal," said Bertie malevolently,
"and so small a proportion of it knows Russian that you could
always have an explanatory footnote asserting that the last three
letters in Smolensk are not pronounced. It's quite as believable
as your statement about putting elephants out to grass in the
Himalayan range."
"I've got rather a nice bit," resumed Clovis with unruffled
serenity, "giving an evening scene on the outskirts of a jungle
village:
'Where the coiled cobra in the gloaming gloats,
And prowling panthers stalk the wary goats.'"
"There is practically no gloaming in tropical countries," said
Bertie indulgently; "but I like the masterly reticence with which
you treat the cobra's motive for gloating. The unknown is
proverbially the uncanny. I can picture nervous readers of the
SMOKY CHIMNEY keeping the light turned on in their bedrooms all
night out of sheer sickening uncertainty as to WHAT the cobra
might have been gloating about."
"Cobras gloat naturally," said Clovis, "just as wolves are always
ravening from mere force of habit, even after they've hopelessly
overeaten themselves. I've got a fine bit of colour painting
later on," he added, "where I describe the dawn coming up over the
Brahma-putra river:
'The amber dawn-drenched East with sun-shafts kissed,
Stained sanguine apricot and amethyst,
O'er the washed emerald of the mango groves
Hangs in a mist of opalescent mauves,
While painted parrot-flights impinge the haze
With scarlet, chalcedon and chrysoprase.'"
"I've never seen the dawn come up over the Brahma-putra river,"
said Bertie, "so I can't say if it's a good description of the
event, but it sounds more like an account of an extensive jewel
robbery. Anyhow, the parrots give a good useful touch of local
colour. I suppose you've introduced some tigers into the scenery?
An Indian landscape would have rather a bare, unfinished look
without a tiger or two in the middle distance."
"I've got a hen-tiger somewhere in the poem," said Clovis, hunting
through his notes. "Here she is:
'The tawny tigress 'mid the tangled teak
Drags to her purring cubs' enraptured ears
The harsh death-rattle in the pea-fowl's beak,
A jungle lullaby of blood and tears.'"
Bertie van Tahn rose hurriedly from his recumbent position and
made for the glass door leading into the next compartment.
"I think your idea of home life in the jungle is perfectly
horrid," he said. "The cobra was sinister enough, but the
improvised rattle in the tiger-nursery is the limit. If you're
going to make me turn hot and cold all over I may as well go into
the steam room at once."
"Just listen to this line," said Clovis; "it would make the
reputation of any ordinary poet:
'and overhead
The pendulum-patient Punkah, parent of stillborn breeze.'"
"Most of your readers will think 'punkah' is a kind of iced drink
or half-time at polo," said Bertie, and disappeared into the
steam.
. . . . . . . . . .
The SMOKY CHIMNEY duly published the "Recessional," but it proved
to be its swan song, for the paper never attained to another
issue.
Loona Bimberton gave up her intention of attending the Durbar and
went into a nursing-home on the Sussex Downs. Nervous breakdown
after a particularly strenuous season was the usually accepted
explanation, but there are three or four people who know that she
never really recovered from the dawn breaking over the Brahma-
putra river.
_________
-THE END-
[Hector Munro] Saki's short story: The Recessional
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