Ian Hay

“ It was quite impossible to move Excalibur once he had decided to remain where he was; so Eileen and the curate agreed to regard him as a sort of artificial excrescence, like the buttress in a fives court. If the ball hit him, as it frequently did, the player waiting for it was at liberty either to play it or claim a let. This arrangement added a piquant and pleasing variety to what is too often—especially [53] when indulged in by mediocre players—a very dull game. ”

“ There was the case of the tennis lawn, for instance. He had always regarded this as his own particular sanctuary, dedicated to reflection and repose; but now the net was stretched across it and Eileen and the curate performed antics all over the court with rackets and small white balls which, though they did not hurt Excalibur, kept him awake. It did not [52] occur to him to convey himself elsewhere, for his mind moved slowly; and the united blandishments of the players failed to bring the desirability of such a course home to him. ”

“ They looked not so much at Excalibur as through him. First the hare, then Eileen and the curate! Excalibur began to fear that he had become invisible, or at least transparent. Greatly agitated he drifted away into a neighboring plantation full of young pheasants. Here [58] he encountered a keeper, who was able to dissipate his gloomy suspicions for him without any difficulty whatsoever. But Eileen and the curate sat on.
"A hundred pounds a year!" repeated the curate. "A pass degree and no influence! I can't preach and I have no money of my own. ”

“ All curates ought to be able to play cricket. I do my best; but there isn't a single boy in the Sunday School who can't bowl me. It's humiliating!"
"Do you play tennis at all?" asked Eileen.
"Yes, in a way." [50]
"I am sure my sister will be pleased if you come and have a game with us some afternoon."
The enraptured curate had already opened his mouth to accept this demure invitation when Excalibur, rising from the hearthrug, stretched himself luxuriously and wagged his tail, thereby removing three pipes, an inkstand, a tobacco jar, and a half-completed sermon from the writing table. ”

“ I replied. "I see no parallel. He was not the product of the pond. Some one must have thrown him in, and he came out." [26]
"That is just what some one must have done with the sword," retorted Eileen. "So we'll call you Excalibur, won't we, darling little Scally?"
She embraced the puppy warmly and the unsuspecting animal replied by frantically licking her face.
However, the name stuck, with variations. When the puppy was big enough he was presented with a collar, engraved with the name Excalibur, together with my name and address. Among ourselves we usually addressed him as Scally. ”

“ Excalibur always sent his love to the curate—Eileen wrote every Friday—and he and Eileen walked together, rain or shine, on Friday afternoons to post the letter in the next village. Much Moreham's post office was too small to remain oblivious to such a regular correspondence.
The curate was seen no more in his old parish. Railroad journeys are costly things and curates' holidays rare. Besides, he had no overt excuse for coming. And so life went on for five years. The curate and Eileen may have met during that period, for Eileen sometimes went away visiting. ”

“ But the curate shook his head.
"Dearest, I should be an utter cad if I allowed you to do such a thing," he said. "A hundred a year is less than two pounds a week!"
"A lot of people live on less than two pounds a week," Eileen pointed out longingly.
"Yes; I know. If we could rent a three-shilling cottage and I could go about with a spotted handkerchief round my neck, and you could scrub the doorsteps coram populo, we might be very comfortable; but the clergy belong to the black-coated class, and people in the lower ranks of the black-coated class are the poorest people in the whole wide world. ”

“ No, little girl; you and I are too [62] proud—too proud of the cloth—for that. We will never give a handle to the people who are always waiting to have a fling at the improvident clergy—not if it breaks our hearts, we won't!"
"You are quite right, dear," said Eileen quietly. "We must wait."
Then the curate said the most difficult thing he had said yet:—
"I shall have to go away from here."
Eileen's hand turned cold in his.
"Why?" she whispered; but she knew.
"Because if we wait here we shall wait forever. The last curate in Much Moreham—what happened to him?" ”

“ To those who have never attempted to track a fellow creature surreptitiously through the streets of London on a hot day, the feat may appear simple. It is in reality a most exhausting, dilatory, and humiliating exercise. Our difficulty lay not so much in keeping our friend in sight as in avoiding frequent and unexpected collisions with him. ”

“ My wife, who has been married long enough to feel deeply gratified at being mistaken for a maiden lady, smiled seraphically at the conductor, and allowed herself to be hoisted up the steps of the majestic vehicle provided by a paternal county council to convey passengers—at a loss to the ratepayers, I understand—from the Embankment to Battersea. ”

“ Yes; I admit it was criminal folly. A man who asks a London street boy [11] to be so kind as to direct him to a Home for Lost Dogs has only himself to thank for the consequence.
The wistful little boy smiled up at us. He had a pinched face and large eyes.
"Lost Dogs' 'Ome, sir?" he said courteously. "It's a good long way. Do you want to get there quick?"
"Yes."
"Then if I was you, sir," replied the infant, edging to the mouth of an alleyway, "I should bite a policeman!" And, with an ear-splitting yell, he vanished.
We walked on, hot-faced.
"Little wretch!" said Stella. ”

“ About three o'clock in the morning, as the train was crossing a bleak Yorkshire moor seven miles from Tetley Junction, the curate suddenly left the seat on which he lay stretched dreaming of Eileen and flew across the compartment on to the recumbent form of a stout commercial traveler. [77] Then he rebounded to the floor and woke up—unhurt.
"'Tis an accident, lad!" gasped the commercial traveler as he got his wind.
"So it seems," said the curate. "Hold tight! She's rocking!" ”

“ Little dogs merely bit his legs and big dogs cut him dead.
I think this was why he usually commenced his morning round by calling on a rabbit. The rabbit lived in a hutch in a yard at the end of a passage between two cottages, the first turning on the right after you entered the village, and Excalibur always dived down this at the earliest opportunity. It was no use for Eileen, [39] who usually took him out on these occasions, to endeavor to hold him back. Either Excalibur called on the rabbit by himself or Eileen went with him; there was no other alternative. ”

“ On the lawn a lady was sitting in a basket chair beside a perambulator, the occupant of which was slumbering peacefully. A small but intensely capable nursemaid, prone on the grass in a curvilinear attitude, was acting as tunnel to a young gentleman of three who was impersonating a locomotive.
The tramp approached the group and asked huskily for alms. He was a burly and unpleasant specimen of his class—a class all too numerous [90] on the outskirts of the great industrial parish of Smeltingborough. The lady in the basket chair looked up. ”

“ It was Excalibur, jammed fast between two stationary tramcars—he had not yet shaken down to town life—submitting to a painful but effective process of extraction at the hands of a posse of policemen and tram conductors, shrilly directed by a small but commanding girl of the lodging-house-drudge variety.
When this enterprise had been [85] brought to a successful conclusion and the congested traffic moved on by the overheated policemen, Lord Caversham crossed the street and tapped the damsel on the shoulder. ”

“ At the Junction, however, the curate found a special waiting to proceed north by a loop line; and, being in no mind to receive compliments or waste his substance on a hotel, he departed forthwith, taking his charred confederate, Excalibur, with him. [84]
VIII
Fortune, once she takes a fancy to you, is not readily shaken off, however, as most successful men are always trying to forget. A fortnight later Lord Caversham, leaving his hotel in a great northern town, encountered an acquaintance he had no difficulty whatever in recognizing. ”

“ The pair sprinted along the line toward the blazing coaches.
It was dawn—gray, weeping, and cheerless—on Tetley Moor. Another engine had come up from behind to take what was left of the train back to the Junction. Seven coaches, including the lordly sleeping saloon, stood intact; four, with the engine and tender, lay where they had fallen, a mass of charred wood and twisted metal.
A motor car belonging to a doctor stood in the roadway a hundred yards off, and its owner, with a brother of the craft who had been a passenger on the train, was attending to the injured. ”

“ Meantime his two confederates, Excalibur and Eileen, continued to reside at Much Moreham. Eileen was still the recognized beauty of the district, but she spread her net less promiscuously than of yore. Girl friends she always had in plenty, but it was noticed that she avoided intimacy with all eligible males of over twenty and under forty-five years of age. No one knew the reason for this except Excalibur. Eileen used to read Gerald's letters aloud to him every Tuesday morning; sometimes the letter contained a friendly message to Excalibur himself. ”

“ Eileen said no more. There are problems that even girls of twenty cannot solve.
A warm bath had revealed to us the fact that the puppy was of a dingy yellow hue. I suggested that we should call him Mustard. Our son John, on being consulted—against [25] my advice—by his mother, addressed the animal as Pussy. Stella continued to favor Tiny. Finally Eileen, who was at the romantic age, produced a copy of Tennyson and suggested Excalibur, alleging in support of her preposterous proposition that
It rose from out the bosom of the lake. ”

“ Five minutes later the window framed another picture—this time a girl of twenty, white-clad and wearing a powder-blue felt hat, caught up on one side by a silver buckle which twinkled in the hot morning sun. [45] The curate started to his feet. Excalibur, who was now lying on the hearthrug dismembering the chicken, thumped his tail guiltily on the floor, but made no attempt to rise.
"I am very sorry," said Eileen, "but I am afraid my dog is trespassing. May I call him out?" ”

“ Eileen's brother-in-law—he was Excalibur's master no longer, for Excalibur had been transferred to Eileen by deed of gift, at her own request, on her first birthday after the curate's departure—fell ill. There was an operation and a crisis, and a deal of unhappiness at Much Moreham; then came convalescence, followed by directions for a sea voyage of six months. It was arranged that the house should be shut up and the children sent to their grandmother at Bath.
"That settles everything and everybody," said the gaunt man on [70] the sofa, "except you, Eileen? What about you?" ”

“ The advertiser, who resided in Aberdeen, added that these prices did not cover cost of carriage. We decided not to stand in the way of the gentleman in Constantinople, and having sent back the pedigrees by return of post, resumed the debate.
Finally Stella, my wife, said:—
"We don't really want a dog with a pedigree. We only want something that will bark at beggars and be gentle with baby. Why not go to the Home for Lost Dogs at Battersea? I believe you can get any dog you like there for five shillings. ”

“ It was half-past eleven, which is a late hour for the clergy to breakfast; but this young man appeared to be suffering from no qualms of conscience on the subject. He was making an excellent breakfast and reading the Henley results with a mixture of rapture and longing.
He had just removed the "Sportsman" from the convenient buttress of the teapot and substituted "Punch" when he became aware that day had turned to night. Looking up he perceived that his open window, which was rather small and of the casement [44] variety, was completely blocked by a huge, shapeless, and opaque mass. ”

“ They have to [61] spend money on luxuries—collars and charwomen, and so on—which a workingman can spend entirely on necessities. It wouldn't merely mean no pretty dresses and a lot of hard work for you, Eileen. ”