The Complete Short Stories Read Free Page B

dressing—it’s dreadfully bad for one to think whilst one’s dressing—and all lunch-time, and I’m still hung up over it. I feel like those unfortunate automobilists who achieve an unenviable motoriety by coming to a hopeless stop with their cars in the most crowded thoroughfares. I’m afraid I shall have to drop the aasvogel, and it did give such lovely local colour to the thing.”
    â€œStill you’ve got the heedless hartebeest.”
    â€œAnd quite a decorative bit of moral admonition—when you’ve worried the meaning out—
    â€˜Cease, War, thy bubbling madness that the wine shares,
    And bid thy legions turn their swords to mine shares.’
    Mine shares seems to fit the case better than ploughshares. There’s lots more about the blessings of Peace, shall I go on reading it?”
    â€œIf I must make a choice, I think I would rather they went on with the war.”

REGINALD’S CHOIR TREAT
    â€œN EVER ,” wrote Reginald to his most darling friend, “be a pioneer. It’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.”
    Reginald, in his way, was a pioneer.
    None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration.
    It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.
    Therefore the family was relieved when the vicar’s daughter undertookthe reformation of Reginald. Her name was Amabel; it was the vicar’s one extravagance. Amabel was accounted a beauty and intellectually gifted; she never played tennis, and was reputed to have read Maeterlinck’s
Life of the Bee.
If you abstain from tennis
and
read Maeterlinck in a small country village, you are of necessity intellectual. Also she had been twice to Fécamp to pick up a good French accent from the Americans staying there; consequently she had a knowledge of the world which might be considered useful in dealings with a worldling.
    Hence the congratulations in the family when Amabel undertook the reformation of its wayward member.
    Amabel commenced operations by asking her unsuspecting pupil to tea in the vicarage garden; she believed in the healthy influence of natural surroundings, never having been in Sicily, where things are different.
    And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night.
    Reginald recalled the lilies of the field, “which simply sat and looked beautiful, and defied competition.”
    â€œBut that is not an example for us to follow,” gasped Amabel.
    â€œUnfortunately, we can’t afford to. You don’t know what a world of trouble I take in trying to rival the lilies in their artistic simplicity.”
    â€œYou are really indecently vain of your appearance. A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks.”
    â€œYou agree with me that the two are incompatible. I always say beauty is only sin deep.”
    Amabel began to realize that the battle is not always to the strong-minded. With the immemorial resource of her sex, she abandoned the frontal attack and laid stress on her unassisted labours in parish work, her mental loneliness, her discouragements—and at the right moment she produced strawberries and cream. Reginald was obviously affected by the latter, and when his preceptress suggested that he might begin the strenuous life by helping her to supervise the annual outing of the bucolic infants who composed the local choir, his eyes shone with the dangerous enthusiasm of a convert.
    Reginald entered on the strenuous life alone, as far as Amabel was concerned. The most virtuous