Storytelling. The terrible Solomons and other stories. Сборник

we better attack?” asked Mr. Peterkin.

      Mrs. Peterkin was alarmed.

      “What will Mr. Mudge, the owner of the house, think of it?” she exclaimed. “Have we a right to injure the wall of the house?”

      “It is right to preserve ourselves from starving,” said Mr. Peterkin. “The drowning man must snatch at a straw!”

      “It is better that he should find his house chopped a little when the thaw comes,” said Elizabeth Eliza, “than that he should find us lying about the house, dead of hunger, upon the floor.”

      Mrs. Peterkin was partially convinced.

      The little boys came in to warm their hands. They had not succeeded in opening the side door, and were planning trying to open the door from the wood-house to the garden.

      “That would be of no use,” said Mrs. Peterkin, “the butcher cannot get into the garden.”

      “But we might shovel off the snow,” suggested one of the little boys, “and dig down to some of last year’s onions.”

      Meanwhile, Mr. Peterkin, Agamemnon, and Solomon John had been bringing together their carpenter’s tools, and Elizabeth Eliza proposed using a gouge, if they would choose the right spot to begin.

      The little boys were delighted with the plan, and hastened to find, – one, a little hatchet, and the other a gimlet. Even Amanda armed herself with a poker.

      “It would be better to begin on the ground floor,” said Mr. Peterkin.

      “Except that we may meet with a stone foundation,” said Solomon John.

      “If the wall is thinner upstairs,” said Agamemnon, “it will do as well to cut a window as a door, and haul up anything the butcher may bring below in his cart.”

      Everybody began to pound a little on the wall to find a favorable place, and there was a great deal of noise. The little boys actually cut a bit out of the plastering with their hatchet and gimlet. Solomon John confided to Elizabeth Eliza that it reminded him of stories of prisoners who cut themselves free, through stone walls, after days and days of secret labor.

      Mrs. Peterkin, even, had come with a pair of tongs in her hand. She was interrupted by a voice behind her.

      “Here’s your leg of mutton, marm!”

      It was the butcher. How had he got in?

      “Excuse me, marm, for coming in at the side door, but the back gate is kinder blocked up. You were making such a pounding I could not make anybody hear me knock at the side door.”

      “But how did you make a path to the door?” asked Mr. Peterkin. “You must have been working at it a long time. It must be near noon now.”

      “I’m about on regular time,” answered the butcher. “The town team has cleared out the high road, and the wind has been down the last half-hour. The storm is over.”

      True enough! The Peterkins had been so busy inside the house they had not noticed the ceasing of the storm outside.

      “And we were all up an hour earlier than usual,” said Mr. Peterkin, when the butcher left. He had not explained to the butcher why he had a pickaxe in his hand.

      “If we had lain abed till the usual time,” said Solomon John, “we should have been all right.”

      “For here is the milkman!” said Elizabeth Eliza, as a knock was now heard at the side door.

      “It is a good thing to learn,” said Mr. Peterkin, “not to get up any earlier than is necessary.”

      Mrs. Packletide’s tiger

      by Saki

      It was Mrs. Packletide’s pleasure and intention that she should shoot a tiger. Not that the lust to kill had suddenly descended on her, or that she felt that she would leave India safer and more wholesome than she had found it, with one fraction less of wild beast per million of inhabitants. The compelling motive for her sudden deviation towards the footsteps of Nimrod was the fact that Loona Bimberton had recently been carried eleven miles in an aeroplane by an Algerian aviator, and talked of nothing else; only a personally procured tiger-skin and a heavy harvest of Press photographs could successfully counter that sort of thing. Mrs. Packletide had already arranged in her mind the lunch she would give at her house in Curzon Street, ostensibly in LoonaBimberton’shonour, with a tiger-skin rug occupying most of the foreground and all of the conversation. She had also already designed in her mind the tiger-claw brooch that she was going to give Loona Bimberton on her next birthday. In a world that is supposed to be chiefly swayed by hunger and by love Mrs. Packletide was an exception; her movements and motives were largely governed by dislike of Loona Bimberton.

      Circumstances proved propitious. Mrs. Packletide had offered a thousand rupees for the opportunity of shooting a tiger without overmuch risk or exertion, and it so happened that a neighbouring village could boast of being the favoured rendezvous of an animal of respectable antecedents, which had been driven by the increasing infirmities of age to abandon game-killing and confine its appetite to the smaller domestic animals. The prospect of earning the thousand rupees had stimulated the sporting and commercial instinct of the villagers; children were posted night and day on the outskirts of the local jungle to head the tiger back in the unlikely event of his attempting to roam away to fresh hunting-grounds, and the cheaper kinds of goats were left about with elaborate carelessness to keep him satisfied with his present quarters. The one great anxiety was lest he should die of old age before the date appointed for the memsahib’s shoot. Mothers carrying their babies home through the jungle after the day’s work in the fields hushed their singing lest they might curtail the restful sleep of the venerable herd-robber.

      The great night duly arrived, moonlit and cloudless. A platform had been constructed in a comfortable and conveniently placed tree, and thereon crouched Mrs. Packletide and her paid companion, Miss Mebbin. A goat, gifted with a particularly persistent bleat, such as even a partially deaf tiger might be reasonably expected to hear on a still night, was tethered at the correct distance. With an accurately sighted rifle and a thumbnail pack of patience cards the sportswoman awaited the coming of the quarry.

      “I suppose we are in some danger?” said Miss Mebbin.

      She was not actually nervous about the wild beast, but she had a morbid dread of performing an atom more service than she had been paid for.

      “Nonsense,” said Mrs. Packletide; “it’s a very old tiger. It couldn’t spring up here even if it wanted to.”

      “If it’s an old tiger I think you ought to get it cheaper. A thousand rupees is a lot of money.”

      Louisa Mebbin adopted a protective elder-sister attitude towards money in general, irrespective of nationality or denomination. Her energetic intervention had saved many a rouble from dissipating itself in tips in some Moscow hotel, and francs and centimes clung to her instinctively under circumstances which would have driven them headlong from less sympathetic hands. Her speculations as to the market depreciation of tiger remnants were cut short by the appearance on the scene of the animal itself. As soon as it caught sight of the tethered goat it lay flat on the earth, seemingly less from a desire to take advantage of all available cover than for the purpose of snatching a short rest before commencing the grand attack.

      “I believe it’s ill,” said Louisa Mebbin, loudly in Hindustani, for the benefit of the village headman, who was in ambush in a neighbouring tree.

      “Hush!” said Mrs. Packletide, and at that moment the tiger commenced ambling towards his victim.

      “Now, now!” urged Miss Mebbin with some excitement; “if he doesn’t touch the goat we needn’t pay for it.” (The bait was an extra.)

      The rifle flashed out with a loud report, and the great tawny beast sprang to one side and then rolled over in the stillness of death. In a moment a crowd of excited natives had swarmed on to the scene, and their shouting speedily carried the glad news to the village, where a thumping of tom-toms took up the chorus of triumph. And their triumph and rejoicing found a ready echo in the heart of Mrs.