The Toys of Peace, and Other Papers. Saki

      “We’ll give him a purple coat from my paintbox by and by,” said Bertie.

      “Yes, an’ red heels. That is Madame de Maintenon, that one he called Mrs. Hemans. She begs Louis not to go on this expedition, but he turns a deaf ear. He takes Marshal Saxe with him, and we must pretend that they have thousands of men with them. The watchword is Qui vive? and the answer is L’état c’est moi—that was one of his favourite remarks, you know. They land at Manchester in the dead of the night, and a Jacobite conspirator gives them the keys of the fortress.”

      Peeping in through the doorway Harvey observed that the municipal dust-bin had been pierced with holes to accommodate the muzzles of imaginary cannon, and now represented the principal fortified position in Manchester; John Stuart Mill had been dipped in red ink, and apparently stood for Marshal Saxe.

      “Louis orders his troops to surround the Young Women’s Christian Association and seize the lot of them. ‘Once back at the Louvre and the girls are mine,’ he exclaims. We must use Mrs. Hemans again for one of the girls; she says ‘Never,’ and stabs Marshal Saxe to the heart.”

      “He bleeds dreadfully,” exclaimed Bertie, splashing red ink liberally over the façade of the Association building.

      “The soldiers rush in and avenge his death with the utmost savagery. A hundred girls are killed”—here Bertie emptied the remainder of the red ink over the devoted building—“and the surviving five hundred are dragged off to the French ships. ‘I have lost a Marshal,’ says Louis, ‘but I do not go back empty-handed.’ ”

      Harvey stole away from the room, and sought out his sister.

      “Eleanor,” he said, “the experiment—”

      “Yes?”

      “Has failed. We have begun too late.”

LOUISE

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      “The tea will be quite cold, you’d better ring for some more,” said the Dowager Lady Beanford.

      Susan Lady Beanford was a vigorous old woman who had coquetted with imaginary ill-health for the greater part of a lifetime; Clovis Sangrail irreverently declared that she had caught a chill at the Coronation of Queen Victoria and had never let it go again. Her sister, Jane Thropplestance, who was some years her junior, was chiefly remarkable for being the most absent-minded woman in Middlesex.

      “I’ve really been unusually clever this afternoon,” she remarked gaily, as she rang for the tea. “I’ve called on all the people I meant to call on; and I’ve done all the shopping that I set out to do. I even remembered to try and match that silk for you at Harrod’s, but I’d forgotten to bring the pattern with me, so it was no use. I really think that was the only important thing I forgot during the whole afternoon. Quite wonderful for me, isn’t it?”

      “What have you done with Louise?” asked her sister. “Didn’t you take her out with you? You said you were going to.”

      “Good gracious,” exclaimed Jane, “what have I done with Louise? I must have left her somewhere.”

      “But where?”

      “That’s just it. Where have I left her? I can’t remember if the Carrywoods were at home or if I just left cards. If there were at home I may have left Louise there to play bridge. I’ll go and telephone to Lord Carrywood and find out.”

      “Is that you, Lord Carrywood?” she queried over the telephone; “it’s me, Jane Thropplestance. I want to know, have you seen Louise?”

      “ ‘Louise,’ ” came the answer, “it’s been my fate to see it three times. At first, I must admit, I wasn’t impressed by it, but the music grows on one after a bit. Still, I don’t think I want to see it again just at present. Were you going to offer me a seat in your box?”

      “Not the opera ‘Louise’—my niece, Louise Thropplestance. I thought I might have left her at your house.”

      “You left cards on us this afternoon, I understand, but I don’t think you left a niece. The footman would have been sure to have mentioned it if you had. Is it going to be a fashion to leave nieces on people as well as cards? I hope not; some of these houses in Berkeley-square have practically no accommodation for that sort of thing.”

      “She’s not at the Carrywoods’,” announced Jane, returning to her tea; “now I come to think of it, perhaps I left her at the silk counter at Selfridge’s. I may have told her to wait there a moment while I went to look at the silks in a better light, and I may easily have forgotten about her when I found I hadn’t your pattern with me. In that case she’s still sitting there. She wouldn’t move unless she was told to; Louise has no initiative.”

      “You said you tried to match the silk at Harrod’s,” interjected the dowager.

      “Did I? Perhaps it was Harrod’s. I really don’t remember. It was one of those places where every one is so kind and sympathetic and devoted that one almost hates to take even a reel of cotton away from such pleasant surroundings.”

      “I think you might have taken Louise away. I don’t like the idea of her being there among a lot of strangers. Supposing some unprincipled person was to get into conversation with her.”

      “Impossible. Louise has no conversation. I’ve never discovered a single topic on which she’d anything to say beyond ‘Do you think so? I dare say you’re right.’ I really thought her reticence about the fall of the Ribot Ministry was ridiculous, considering how much her dear mother used to visit Paris. This bread and butter is cut far too thin; it crumbles away long before you can get it to your mouth. One feels so absurd, snapping at one’s food in mid-air, like a trout leaping at may-fly.”

      “I am rather surprised,” said the dowager, “that you can sit there making a hearty tea when you’ve just lost a favourite niece.”

      “You talk as if I’d lost her in a churchyard sense, instead of having temporarily mislaid her. I’m sure to remember presently where I left her.”

      “You didn’t visit any place of devotion, did you? If you’ve left her mooning about Westminster Abbey or St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, without being able to give any satisfactory reason why she’s there, she’ll be seized under the Cat and Mouse Act and sent to Reginald McKenna.”

      “That would be extremely awkward,” said Jane, meeting an irresolute piece of bread and butter halfway; “we hardly know the McKennas, and it would be very tiresome having to telephone to some unsympathetic private secretary, describing Louise to him and asking to have her sent back in time for dinner. Fortunately, I didn’t go to any place of devotion, though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was quite interesting to be at close quarters with them, they’re so absolutely different to what they used to be when I first remember them in the ’eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now they’re spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions. Laura Kettleway was going on about them in the lift of the Dover Street Tube the other day, saying what a lot of good work they did, and what a loss it would have been if they’d never existed. ‘If they had never existed,’ I said, ‘Granville Barker would have been certain to have invented something that looked exactly like them.’ If you say things like that, quite loud, in a Tube lift, they always sound like epigrams.”

      “I think you ought to do something about Louise,” said the dowager.

      “I’m trying to think whether she was with me when I called on Ada Spelvexit. I rather enjoyed myself there. Ada was trying, as usual, to ram that odious Koriatoffski woman down my throat, knowing perfectly well that I detest her, and in an unguarded moment she said: ‘She’s leaving her present