Fancies and Goodnights Read Free Page A

began
to hoot and holler after the boy. He called him down, he ordered
him down, he begged him down, he began to swear and curse horribly.
The boy, it seemed, took no notice at all. Henry roared.
    Now the black, clapping his abominable great scimitar between
his teeth, took hold of the rope himself, and went up it like a
sailor. He, also, disappeared at the top. Henry

LITTLE MEMENTO
    A young man who was walking fast came out of a deep lane onto a
wide hilltop space, where there was a hamlet clustered about a
green. The setting encompassed a pond, ducks, the Waggoner Inn,
with white paint and swinging sign; in fact, all the fresh, clean,
quiet, ordinary appurtenances of an upland Somerset hamlet.
    The road went on, and so did the young man, over to the very
brink of the upland, where a white gate gave upon a long garden
well furnished with fruit trees, and at the end of it a snug little
house sheltered by a coppice and enjoying a view over the vast vale
below. An old man of astonishingly benevolent appearance was
pottering about in the garden. He looked up as the walker, Eric
Gaskell, approached his gate.

GREEN THOUGHTS
Annihilating all that

ROMANCE LINGERS ADVENTURE LIVES
    There is a great deal of devilry in a bright and windy midnight
in the month of March. A little naked moon rides high over Fairlawn
Avenue in the heart of the Sweetholme building development. The new
houses are chalk-masked by its light, except for their darkened
windows, which glare broodingly, like deep-set eyes, or the sockets
of eyes. There are some young almond trees, which ordinarily look
as if drawn by a childish hand. Now, as the wind sets their weak
branches gibbering, they seem like shamanistic scratches on the
white bone of the brittle bright night.
    The wind causes a man to tuck his chin into his coat collar, to
become a mere rag, curved against the wind. His bowler-hatted
moon-shadow, apparently cut from a sheet of tin, scythes its way
implacably through the asphalt, and seems the better man of the
two, probably the real man, the genuine Mr. Watkins. Around the
bend, just out of sight, comes another figure, bowler-hatted also,
scythe-curved also, also chopping its way through the icy air. It
might be the shadow of the shadow. It might be Death. It is,
however, only Mr. Gosport.
    The carriage from which he alighted out of the midnight train
was the farthest from the station barrier. Also, his shoelace came
undone. There is an explanation for everything: sometimes two
explanations. These two explain why Mr. Gosport was a hundred yards
or so behind Mr. Wat-kins.
    Mr. Watkins, with his little grin slipped in like a scarf-pin
behind his upturned lapels, observed with a stare of desolate and
hopeless superiority the monotony of the houses of Fairlawn Avenue.
This was the vilest ingratitude, for the uniformity was due to the
fact that each was the best possible house at the figure. Watkins,
however, having drunk and sung away the Saturday evening in
exclusively male company, was full of blood and villainy,
intolerant of caution and incapable of gratitude. He decided that
on Monday he would rob the bank at which he was employed, and fly
to South America, where he would set up a seraglio.
    How different were the thoughts of Mr. Gosport, as out of sight,
around the bend, he sheared his way into the wind and also regarded
the monotony of Fairlawn Avenue! The good Gosport fully realized
that each house was the best possible at the price; he knew that
each chalky bump was a vertebra in the backbone of the country; he
had read that the life of the little man was as full of romance and
high adventure as that of any buccaneer of old; columnists had told
him that the Fairlawn Avenues of the world are its very jewels, its
necklaces of simple joys and sorrows, its rosaries in which each
well matched home is a pearl. The only trouble was, he had no great
fondness for jewelry, and wished that he was dead.

BIRD OF PREY
    The house they call the Engineer

VARIATION