Snake and Sword | Page 8

little anxious, I admit. Still, it's got to come, as I say, and
better a picture first, with ourselves present. If the picture don't affect
him I'll show him a real one. May be all right of course, but I don't
know. I came across a somewhat similar case once before--and it was
not all right. Not by any means," and he disclosed the brilliantly
coloured Animal Picture Book and knelt beside the expectant boy.
On the first page was an incredibly leonine lion, who appeared to have
solved with much satisfaction the problem of aerial flight, so far was he

from the mountain whence he had sprung and above the back of the
antelope towards which he had propelled himself. One could almost
hear him roar. There was menace and fate in eye and tooth and claw,
yea, in the very kink of the prehensile-seeming tail wherewith he
apparently steered his course in mid-air. To gaze upon his impressive
and determined countenance was to sympathize most fully with the
sore-tried Prophet of old (known to Damocles as
Dannle-in-the-lines-den) for ever more.
The boy was wholly charmed, stroked the glowing ferocity and
observed that he was a pukka Bahadur.[7]
On the next page, burning bright, was a tiger, if possible one degree
more terrible than the lion. His "fearful cemetery" appeared to be full,
judging by its burgeoned bulge and the shocking state of depletion
exhibited by the buffalo on which he fed with barely inaudible snarls
and grunts of satisfaction. Blood dripped from his capacious and
over-furnished mouth.
"Booful," murmured Damocles. "I shall go shooting tigerth
to-mowwow. Shoot vem in ve mouth, down ve froat, so as not to spoil
ve wool."
Turning over the page, the Major disclosed a most grievous grizzly
bear, grizzly and bearish beyond conception, heraldic, regardant,
expectant, not collared, fanged and clawed proper, rampant, erect,
requiring no supporters.
"You could thtab him wiv a thword if you were quick, while he was
doing that," opined Damocles, charmed, enraptured, delighted. One by
one, other savage, fearsome beasts were disclosed to the increasingly
delighted boy until, without warning, the Major suddenly turned a page
and disclosed a brilliant and hungry-looking snake.
With a piercing shriek the boy leapt convulsively from Nurse Beaton's
arms, rushed blindly into the wall and endeavoured to butt and bore his
way through it with his head, screaming like a wounded horse. As the
man and woman sprang to him he shrieked, "It'th under my foot! It'th

moving, moving, moving out" and fell to the ground in a fit.
Major John Decies arose from his bachelor dinner-table that evening, lit
his "planter" cheroot, and strolled into the verandah that looked across
a desert to a mountain range.
Dropping into a long low chair, he raised his feet on to the long leg-rest
extensions of its arms, and, as he settled down and waited for coffee,
wondered why no such chairs are known in the West; why the trunks of
the palms looked less flat in the moonlight than in the daylight (in
which, from that spot, they always looked exactly as though cut out of
cardboard); why Providence had not arranged for perpetual full-moon;
why the world looked such a place of peaceful, glorious beauty by
moonlight, the bare cruel mountains like diaphanous clouds of
tenderest soothing mist, the Judge's hideous bungalow like a fairy
palace, his own parched compound like a plot of Paradise, when all was
so abominable by day; and, as ever--why his darling, Lenore Stukeley,
had had to marry de Warrenne and die in the full flower and promise of
her beautiful womanhood.
Having finished his coffee and lighted his pipe (vice the over-dry
friable cheroot, flung into the garden) the Major then turned his mind to
serious and consecutive thought on the subject of her son, his beloved
little pal, Dammy de Warrenne.
Poor little beggar! What an eternity it had seemed before he had got
him to sleep. How the child had suffered. Mad! Absolutely stark,
staring, raving mad with sheer terror.... Had he acted rightly in showing
him the picture? He had meant well, anyhow. Cruel phrase, that. How
cuttingly his friend de Warrenne had observed, "You mean well,
doubtless," on more than one occasion. He could make it the most
stinging of insults.... Surely he had acted rightly.... Poor little
beggar--but he was bound to see a picture or a real live specimen,
sooner or later. Perhaps when there was no help at hand.... Would he be
like it always? Might grow out of it as he grew older and stronger.
What would have happened if he had encountered a live snake? Lost
his reason permanently, perhaps.... What would happen when he did
see one, as sooner or later, he certainly must?

What would be the best