For the Duration of the War
The Rev. Wilfrid Gaspilton, in one of those clerical migrations
inconsequent-seeming to the lay mind, had removed from the
moderately fashionable parish of St. Luke's, Kensingate, to the
immoderately rural parish of St. Chuddocks, somewhere in
Yondershire. There were doubtless substantial advantages connected
with the move, but there were certainly some very obvious drawbacks.
Neither the migratory clergyman nor his wife were able to adapt
themselves naturally and comfortably to the conditions of country
life. Beryl, Mrs. Gaspilton, had always looked indulgently on the
country as a place where people of irreproachable income and
hospitable instincts cultivated tennis-lawns and rose-gardens and
Jacobean pleasaunces, wherein selected gatherings of interested
week-end guests might disport themselves. Mrs. Gaspilton considered
herself as distinctly an interesting personality, and from a limited
standpoint she was doubtless right. She had indolent dark eyes and
a comfortable chin, which belied the slightly plaintive inflection
which she threw into her voice at suitable intervals. She was
tolerably well satisfied with the smaller advantages of life, but
she regretted that Fate had not seen its way to reserve for her some
of the ampler successes for which she felt herself well qualified.
She would have liked to be the centre of a literary, slightly
political salon, where discerning satellites might have recognised
the breadth of her outlook on human affairs and the undoubted
smallness of her feet. As it was, Destiny had chosen for her that
she should be the wife of a rector, and had now further decreed that
a country rectory should be the background to her existence. She
rapidly made up her mind that her surroundings did not call for
exploration; Noah had predicted the Flood, but no one expected him
to swim about in it. Digging in a wet garden or trudging through
muddy lanes were exertions which she did not propose to undertake.
As long as the garden produced asparagus and carnations at
pleasingly frequent intervals Mrs. Gaspilton was content to approve
of its expense and otherwise ignore its existence. She would fold
herself up, so to speak, in an elegant, indolent little world of her
own, enjoying the minor recreations of being gently rude to the
doctor's wife and continuing the leisurely production of her one
literary effort, The Forbidden Horsepond, a translation of Baptiste
Leopoy's L'Abreuvoir interdit. It was a labour which had already
been so long drawn-out that it seemed probable that Baptiste Lepoy
would drop out of vogue before her translation of his temporarily
famous novel was finished. However, the languid prosecution of the
work had invested Mrs. Gaspilton with a certain literary dignity,
even in Kensingate circles, and would place her on a pinnacle in St.
Chuddocks, where hardly any one read French, and assuredly no one
had heard of L'Abreuvoir interdit.
The Rector's wife might be content to turn her back complacently on
the country; it was the Rector's tragedy that the country turned its
back on him. With the best intention in the world and the immortal
example of Gilbert White before him, the Rev. Wilfrid found himself
as bored and ill at ease in his new surroundings as Charles II would
have been at a modern Wesleyan Conference. The birds that hopped
across his lawn hopped across it as though it were their lawn, and
not his, and gave him plainly to understand that in their eyes he
was infinitely less interesting than a garden worm or the rectory
cat. The hedgeside and meadow flowers were equally uninspiring; the
lesser celandine seemed particularly unworthy of the attention that
English poets had bestowed on it, and the Rector knew that he would
be utterly miserable if left alone for a quarter of an hour in its
company. With the human inhabitants of his parish he was no better
off; to know them was merely to know their ailments, and the
ailments were almost invariably rheumatism. Some, of course, had
other bodily infirmities, but they always had rheumatism as well.
The Rector had not yet grasped the fact that in rural cottage life
not to have rheumatism is as glaring an omission as not to have been
presented at Court would be in more ambitious circles. And with all
this death of local interest there was Beryl shutting herself off
with her ridiculous labours on The Forbidden Horsepond.
"I don't see why you should suppose that any one wants to read
Baptiste Lepoy in English," the Reverend Wilfrid remarked to his
wife one morning, finding her surrounded with her usual elegant
litter of dictionaries, fountain pens, and scribbling paper; "hardly
any one bothers to read him now in France."
"My dear," said Beryl, with an intonation of gentle weariness,
"haven't two or three leading London publishers told me they
wondered no one had ever translated L'Abreuvoir interdit, and begged
me--"
"Publishers always clamour for the books that no one has ever
written, and turn a cold shoulder on them as soon as they're
written. If St. Paul were living now they would pester him to write
an Epistle to the Esquimaux, but no London publisher would dream of
reading his Epistle to the Ephesians."
"Is there any asparagus in the garden?" asked Beryl; "because I've
told cook--"
"Not anywhere in the garden," snapped the Rector, "but there's no
doubt plenty in the asparagus-bed, which is the usual place for it."
And he walked away into the region of fruit trees and vegetable beds
to exchange irritation for boredom. It was there, among the
gooseberry bushes and beneath the medlar trees, that the temptation
to the perpetration of a great literary fraud came to him.
Some weeks later the Bi-Monthly Review gave to the world, under the
guarantee of the Rev. Wilfrid Gaspilton, some fragments of Persian
verse, alleged to have been unearthed and translated by a nephew who
was at present campaigning somewhere in the Tigris valley. The Rev.
Wilfrid possessed a host of nephews, and it was of course, quite
possible that one or more of them might be in military employ in
Mesopotamia, though no one could call to mind any particular nephew
who could have been suspected of being a Persian scholar.
The verses were attributed to one Ghurab, a hunter, or, according to
other accounts, warden of the royal fishponds, who lived, in some
unspecified century, in the neighbourhood of Karmanshah. They
breathed a spirit of comfortable, even-tempered satire and
philosophy, disclosing a mockery that did not trouble to be bitter,
a joy in life that was not passionate to the verge of being
troublesome.
"A Mouse that prayed for Allah's aid
Blasphemed when no such aid befell:
A Cat, who feasted on that mouse,
Thought Allah managed vastly well.
Pray not for aid to One who made
A set of never-changing Laws,
But in your need remember well
He gave you speed, or guile--or claws.
Some laud a life of mild content:
Content may fall, as well as Pride.
The Frog who hugged his lowly Ditch
Was much disgruntled when it dried.
'You are not on the Road to Hell,'
You tell me with fanatic glee:
Vain boaster, what shall that avail
If Hell is on the road to thee?
A Poet praised the Evening Star,
Another praised the Parrot's hue:
A Merchant praised his merchandise,
And he, at least, praised what he knew."
It was this verse which gave the critics and commentators some clue
as to the probable date of the composition; the parrot, they
reminded the public, was in high vogue as a type of elegance in the
days of Hafiz of Shiraz; in the quatrains of Omar it makes no
appearance.
The next verse, it was pointed out, would apply to the political
conditions of the present day as strikingly as to the region and era
for which it was written -
"A Sultan dreamed day-long of Peace,
The while his Rivals' armies grew:
They changed his Day-dreams into sleep
- The Peace, methinks, he never knew."
Woman appeared little, and wine not at all in the verse of the
hunter-poet, but there was at least one contribution to the love-
philosophy of the East -
"O Moon-faced Charmer, and Star-drowned Eyes,
And cheeks of soft delight, exhaling musk,
They tell me that thy charm will fade; ah well,
The Rose itself grows hue-less in the Dusk."
Finally, there was a recognition of the Inevitable, a chill breath
blowing across the poet's comfortable estimate of life -
"There is a sadness in each Dawn,
A sadness that you cannot rede:
The joyous Day brings in its train
The Feast, the Loved One, and the Steed.
Ah, there shall come a Dawn at last
That brings no life-stir to your ken,
A long, cold Dawn without a Day,
And ye shall rede its sadness then."
The verses of Ghurab came on the public at a moment when a
comfortable, slightly quizzical philosophy was certain to be
welcome, and their reception was enthusiastic. Elderly colonels,
who had outlived the love of truth, wrote to the papers to say that
they had been familiar with the works of Ghurab in Afghanistan, and
Aden, and other suitable localities a quarter of a century ago. A
Ghurab-of-Karmanshah Club sprang into existence, the members of
which alluded to each other as Brother Ghurabians on the slightest
provocation. And to the flood of inquiries, criticisms, and
requests for information, which naturally poured in on the
discoverer, or rather the discloser, of this long-hidden poet, the
Rev. Wilfrid made one effectual reply: Military considerations
forbade any disclosures which might throw unnecessary light on his
nephew's movements.
After the war the Rector's position will be one of unthinkable
embarrassment, but for the moment, at any rate, he has driven The
Forbidden Horsepond out of the field.
[H.H. Munro] Saki's short story: For the Duration of the War
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