Tales of Wonder | Page 7

this state the
champagne had found me, and what would have been harmless at any other time must
somehow have got the better of me when quite tired out--anyhow I went too far, I made
some joke--I cannot in the least remember what--that suddenly seemed to offend them. I
felt all at once a commotion in the air, I looked up and saw that they had all arisen from
the table and were sweeping towards the door: I had not time to open it but it blew open
on a wind, I could scarcely see what Sir Richard was doing because only two candles
were left, I think the rest blew out when the ladies suddenly rose. I sprang up to apologise,
to assure them--and then fatigue overcame me as it had overcome my horse at the last
fence, I clutched at the table but the cloth came away and then I fell. The fall, and the
darkness on the floor and the pent up fatigue of the day overcame me all three together.
The sun shone over glittering fields and in at a bedroom window and thousands of birds
were chanting to the Spring, and there I was in an old four-poster bed in a quaint old
panelled bedroom, fully dressed and wearing long muddy boots; someone had taken my
spurs and that was all. For a moment I failed to realise and then it all came back, my
enormity and the pressing need of an abject apology to Sir Richard. I pulled an
embroidered bell rope until the butler came. He came in perfectly cheerful and
indescribably shabby. I asked him if Sir Richard was up, and he said he had just gone
down, and told me to my amazement that it was twelve o'clock. I asked to be shown in to
Sir Richard at once. He was in his smoking-room. "Good morning," he said cheerfully
the moment I went in. I went directly to the matter in hand. "I fear that I insulted some
ladies in your house--" I began.
"You did indeed," he said, "You did indeed." And then he burst into tears and took me by
the hand. "How can I ever thank you?" he said to me then. "We have been thirteen at
table for thirty years and I never dared to insult them because I had wronged them all, and
now you have done it and I know they will never dine here again." And for a long time he
still held my hand, and then he gave it a grip and a kind of a shake which I took to mean
"Goodbye" and I drew my hand away then and left the house. And I found James in the
stables with the hounds and asked him how he had fared, and James, who is a man of

very few words, said he could not rightly remember, and I got my spurs from the butler
and climbed on to my horse and slowly we rode away from that queer old house, and
slowly we wended home, for the hounds were footsore but happy and the horses were
tired still. And when we recalled that the hunting season was ended we turned our faces
to Spring and thought of the new things that try to replace the old. And that very year I
heard, and have often heard since, of dances and happier dinners at Sir Richard Arlen's
house.

The City on Mallington Moor
Besides the old shepherd at Lingwold whose habits render him unreliable I am probably
the only person that has ever seen the city on Mallington Moor.
I had decided one year to do no London season; partly because of the ugliness of the
things in the shops, partly because of the unresisted invasions of German bands, partly
perhaps because some pet parrots in the oblong where I lived had learned to imitate
cab-whistles; but chiefly because of late there had seized me in London a quite
unreasonable longing for large woods and waste spaces, while the very thought of little
valleys underneath copses full of bracken and foxgloves was a torment to me and every
summer in London the longing grew worse till the thing was becoming intolerable. So I
took a stick and a knapsack and began walking northwards, starting at Tetherington and
sleeping at inns, where one could get real salt, and the waiter spoke English and where
one had a name instead of a number; and though the tablecloth might be dirty the
windows opened so that the air was clean, where one had the excellent company of
farmers and men of the wold, who could not be thoroughly vulgar, because they had not
the money to be so even if they had wished it. At first