When William Came

out to an uncle who has a small estate eight miles from here, and three days in the week he rides over to teach my boys, and three days he goes to another family living in the opposite direction.  To-day he is due to come here.  It is a great boon to have such an opportunity for getting the boys educated, and of course it helps him to earn a living.”

“And the society of the place?” asked the Frenchman.

His hostess laughed.

“I must admit it has to be looked for with a strong pair of field-glasses,” she said; “it is almost as difficult to get a good bridge four together as it would have been to get up a tennis tournament or a subscription dance in our particular corner of England.  One has to ignore distances and forget fatigue if one wants to be gregarious even on a limited scale.  There are one or two officials who are our chief social mainstays, but the difficulty is to muster the few available souls under the same roof at the same moment.  A road will be impassable in one quarter, a pony will be lame in another, a stress of work will prevent some one else from coming, and another may be down with a touch of fever.  When my little girl gave a birthday party here her only little girl guest had come twelve miles to attend it.  The Forest officer happened to drop in on us that evening, so we felt quite festive.”

The Frenchman’s eyes grew round in wonder.  He had once thought that the capital city of a Balkan kingdom was the uttermost limit of social desolation, viewed from a Parisian standpoint, and there at any rate one could get cafe chantant, tennis, picnic parties, an occasional theatre performance by a foreign troupe, now and then a travelling circus, not to speak of Court and diplomatic functions of a more or less sociable character.  Here, it seemed, one went a day’s journey to reach an evening’s entertainment, and the chance arrival of a tired official took on the nature of a festivity.  He looked round again at the rolling stretches of brown hills; before he had regarded them merely as the background to this little shut-away world, now he saw that they were foreground as well.  They were everything, there was nothing else.  And again his glance travelled to the face of his hostess, with its bright, pleasant eyes and smiling mouth.

“And you live here with your children,” he said, “here in this wilderness?  You leave England, you leave everything, for this?”

His hostess rose and took him over to the far side of the verandah.  The beginnings of a garden were spread out before them, with young fruit trees and flowering shrubs, and bushes of pale pink roses.  Exuberant tropical growths were interspersed with carefully tended vestiges of plants that had evidently been brought from a more temperate climate, and had not borne the transition well.  Bushes and trees and shrubs spread away for some distance, to where the ground rose in a small hillock and then fell away abruptly into bare hillside.

“In all this garden that you see,” said the Englishwoman, “there is one tree that is sacred.”

“A tree?” said the Frenchman.

“A tree that we could not grow in England.”

The Frenchman followed the direction of her eyes and saw a tall, bare pole at the summit of the hillock.  At the same moment the sun came over the hilltops in a deep, orange glow, and a new light stole like magic over the brown landscape.  And, as if they had timed their arrival to that exact moment of sunburst, three brown-faced boys appeared under the straight, bare pole.  A cord shivered and flapped, and something ran swiftly up into the air, and swung out in the breeze that blew across the hills—a blue flag with red and white crosses.  The three boys bared their heads and the small girl on the verandah steps stood rigidly to attention.  Far away down the hill, a young man, cantering into view round a corner of the dusty road, removed his hat in loyal salutation.

“That is why we live out here,” said the Englishwoman quietly.

XVII: The Event Of The Season

In the first swelter room of the new Osmanli Baths in Cork Street four or five recumbent individuals, in a state of moist nudity and self-respecting inertia, were smoking cigarettes or making occasional pretence of reading damp newspapers.  A glass wall with a glass door shut them off from the yet more torrid regions of the further swelter chambers; another glass partition disclosed the dimly-lit vault where other patrons of the establishment had arrived at the stage of being pounded and kneaded and sluiced by Oriental-looking attendants.  The splashing and trickling of taps, the flip-flap of wet slippers on a wet floor, and the low murmur of conversation, filtered through glass doors, made an appropriately drowsy accompaniment to the scene.

A new-comer fluttered into the room, beamed at one of the occupants, and settled himself with an air of elaborate languor in a long canvas chair.  Cornelian Valpy was a fair young man, with perpetual surprise impinged on his countenance, and a chin that seemed to have retired from competition with the rest of his features.  The beam of recognition that he had given to his friend or acquaintance subsided into a subdued but lingering simper.

“What is the matter?” drawled his neighbour lazily, dropping the end of a cigarette into a small bowl of water, and helping himself from a silver case on the table at his side.

“Matter?” said Cornelian, opening wide a pair of eyes in which unhealthy