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the whole story. The parson listened, and put a question or two,
and then asked:
" 'Have you tried to open the lock since that night?'
" ' I han't dared to touch it,' says my father.
" 'Then come along and try.' When the parson came to the
cottage here, he took the things oflf the hook and tried the lock.
'Did he say "Bayonne"} The word has seven letters.'
" 'Not if you spell it with one "n" as he did,' says my father.
"The parson spelt it outB-A-Y-O-N-E. 'Whew!' says he, for
the lock had fallen open in his hand.
"He stood considering it a moment, and then he says, 'I tell
you what. I shouldn't blab this all round the parish, if I was you.
You won't get no credit for truth-telling, and a miracle's wasted
on a set of fools. But if you like, I'll shut down the lock again
upon a holy word that no one but me shall know, and neither
drummer nor trumpeter, dead or alive, shall frighten the secret
out of me.'
" 'I wish to gracious you would, parson,' said my father.
"The parson chose the holy word there and then, and shut the
lock back upon it, and hung the drum and trumpet back in
their place. He is gone long since, taking the word with him.
And till the lock is broken by force, nobody will ever separate
those twain."

Naomi

RoydeSmith

MANGAROO
From The Storyteller, 1026. Used by special permission of the
author.
"T
1 don't know," said the Vicar, "if I've committed a crime,
though I rather think it is criminal to buy a corpse that's already
buried from a man who believes that it's still alive in the kitchen.
But I'm quite sure, that as an ecclesiastic, I've done something so
irregular that I shall never be able to tell anyone about it. Anyone but you, that is," he added, putting the heel of one shoe on
the edge of Miss Dillington's low, broad fire-stool and the heel
of the other on the toe of the lower shoe so as to warm the
soles of both feet to the greatest advantage.

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Miss Dillington laid aside the jumper she was knitting. It was
a very beautiful, very complicated jumper and she was using ever
so many small balls of bright coloured wool and one larger one
of the loveliest creamy fawn. She knew that the Vicar would
require an undivided mind to attend to the confession he seemed
willing to make.
"Well?" she said, as though murder were a fine art and so
quite a usual matter for long, calm fireside talks at the end of
an afternoon.
"That's right," said the Vicar. "I'll tell you what I've done
and you shall tell me if I ought not to have done it."
"So I will," said Miss Dillington. "But if you think you ought
not you wouldn't tell me about it at all. So we'll skip the excuses."
"This isn't one of the usual things. It's the kind of thing that's
never happened before and that will not even be useful as a precedent. Did you ever see Mangaroo?"
"Old Mrs. Dishart's macaw? Yes. And hear him. Last time I
stayed with you there was a terrible fuss because he'd bitten the
milk-man. Have you killed him?"
"Certainly not," said the Vicar. "I've done something much
worse than that."
"You couldn't do anything worse because killing him wouldn't
have been a bad action." Miss Dillington, though a perfect
darling, was sometimes rather a prig.
"Mrs. Dishart died last week," said the Vicar. "She'd been ill
for a long time but she wouldn't let Lockhart send in a nurse.
Said she could manage quite well with Alice. I don't suppose
you ever saw Alice. She was a workhouse child. Mrs. Dishart
got her a couple of years ago, and never succeeded in making
her presentable. She wasn't exacdy a dwarf, and she wasn't
exactly an idiot, and she was very strong. She was the only
maid who ever stayed more than three months with the old
lady, so Martha tells me. The ten years Mrs. Dishart has been
in the parish have about exhausted the local supply. The girls
were either restive under Mrs. Dishart's strong Sabbatarianism
and her Scotch economy, or else they were frightened of Mangaroo. Whatever it was, none of them would stay with her. None
till Alice came. I didn't know much about it. Mrs. Dishart was
not one of my communicants. She belonged to some small and
very uppish sect and used at times to entertain its visiting ministers. She'd come to church on Sunday mornings but not on
Saints' Days, or at Christmas or on Good Friday. I called on her

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sometimes and she always improved the occasion by denouncing


me for Popery. I think she meant choral celebration."
"I daresay all those candles upset her," said Miss Dillington,
who loved the Vicar because he was her second cousin, and had
been uncle, aunt and best friend to her ever since, a lonely and
terrified schoolgirl, she had found him waiting for her at Southampton when she was sent home from Japan after her parents'
death in an earthquake twenty years ago.
"They might have done if she'd ever seen them, but I've just
told you she wasn't a communicant."
"Perhaps Alice told her?"
"She may have done. But Mrs. Dishart scolded me about my
ways long before Alice came on the scene. She let Alice come to
church as often as she wanted, I'm bound to confess," said the
Vicar, running a finger round his clerical collar and clearing his
throat slightly. "I admit, and I'm ashamed of it, that I got a litde
weary of seeing Alice at almost every service. She breathed
through her mouth, and she wore her hat so very far back on
her head, and she generally arrived late and stamped up the aisle
in a peculiar rocking and very noisy way. She was square in
shape, with her legs and arms put on at the corners and she
liked a front seat, and she always dropped her prayer-book when
she bobbed to the altar. Genuflexion was a physiological uprooting to Alice. I couldn't help wishing she wouldn't attempt it. I
used to think that all the beauty, the symbolism, the meaning of
the services must be lost on Alice; that she'd be far better suited
at the conventicle her mistress attended on week-nights in the
summer, at St. Albans. There was a Sunday service there, of
course, but that meant Sunday travelling, and Mrs. Dishart naturally neither travelled herself nor would she have permitted any
one to travel from her house on Sundays. So Alice kept on
coming to church. Being a work house child she'd been baptized
and confirmed, just as she'd been vaccinated. She was, now, one
of my cure of souls and I had to put up with her. I used to
try and talk to her sometimes, but all I got out of her was a snort,
a giggle and a dreadful twisting of her shoulders and rolling of
her eyes."
"I do hope, Harold," said Miss Dillington, "that you've not
been murdering poor Alice."
"Who said anything about murder?" said the Vicar rather
crossly. "Let me get on with my tale, child, and stop chattering."
"You've not really begun it yet," said Miss Dillington. "I've

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seen Alice come into church myself, and heard about her devotion to Mrs, Dishart and that blue and yellow bird, from Martha.
Martha told me that it had been brought home from what she
calls the 'troppings' by Mrs. Dishart's son who was killed at Jutland, and that it would come down from its perch and follow
Alice all over the house like a cator a dog."
"How horrible!" said the Vicar.
"Oh, I don't know," said Miss Dillington. "I think it was
rather sweet. That poor Alice must have loved the creature. She
was probably the only human being who didn't tease itwho
wasn't frightened of it. And it must have been the most miraculous creature in her eyes. All that colour and strangeness . . . "
"You don't understand," said the Vicar, "Look here," he went
on, taking his feet down from the fire-stool and leaning forward
in his chair. "The night after the funeral Alice killed that
macaw."
"But
" gasped Miss Dillington.
"Alice killed Mangaroowith her own hands, killed him in
the kitchen. Wrung his neck. He struggled most dreadfully, bit
and clawed her hands and face and tore her apron. She'd
wrapped him in her apron to do it. But she killed him all right
and buried him too."
"In the garden?" asked Miss Dillington.
"No. That's the whole point. She was all alone in the house.
That brute of a nephew took himself and madam, his Wife, off
after the funeral, having given Alice a month's notice, and told
her she was to stop on until he could clear out the furniture,
next week. They left her quite alone in the house. Alice said she
wasn't frightenedshe'd got the macaw. And young Mrs,
Dishart, may God forgive her, said she wouldn't have that for
long, as she intended to take it to a taxidermist next day and
have it killed and get its plumage made up into a hat. It seems
that whole-bird toques are being worn in London this winter."
"I've seen some," said Miss Dillington. "Julia Debenham was
here yesterday in one^but it was a quieter bird than Mangaroo
a pheasant I think. And I don't suppose it had ever been an
indoor pet. What brutes some women are!"
"Quite," said the Vicar, "And Mrs. Gerald Dishart is among
them. I'd forgive her for wanting to wear a blue and orange
macaw on her head, if she'd had any heart. But to leave that
tired, simple childAlice is not nineteen yetalone in the house
where her mistress had just died was devilishdevilish^

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"I agree," said Miss Dillington, "but I'm getting a little anxious
to know where you come in. Did you go down to comfort Alice
and find her killing the macaw so that the she-devil shouldn't
have it to hat?"
"No," said the Vicar, "I'm sorry to say that such a thing never
occurred to me. I'd buried Mrs. Dishart, and I'd allowed her
own parson to read part of the service, and I didn't give Alice a
thought. I had to take a service over at Ainley that evening and
there was only just time to prepare for it and get there after
her funeral. I stayed to supper with Brayton and got back late
after ten o'clock, and went to bed about eleven. I read for half an
hour or so, and, towards midnight, I got out of bed to draw
the curtains away from the window before putting out my lamp.
There was a full moon on Friday, as you being a Londoner won't
know, and the sky was clearing under the wind, so that there
were alternations of light and shadow across that strip of road
between the elms, the bit I can see from my bed room. I like to
see it, when there is enough moonlight to show it, emptyresting after all the to and fro of the village. I've never, in all the
ten years I've been here, known anyone cross that bit of road
after nightfall. The road leads to the churchyou know that,
and then bends back again and runs in to Sharpies End, across
the bridge. There's a footway through the marsh that people take
as a short cut, anyway. I think most of the villagers would take
some persuasion to pass the churchyard wall after dark. The
road's a new one as roads go. The last Squire had it made, forty
years ago, to save the three miles round to Sharpies End, and it
runs over the bit of ground in which they buried suicides and unchristened children in the brave old days.,Their spirits are said
to resent the infringement of their poor half-rights."
"I know," said Miss Dillington. "Martha has told me an awful
tale of a ghost with a stake driven through it, and the souls
of little babies floating with blue lights over them at Ail
Hallows."
"She daren't tell me that," said the Vicar.
"No," said Miss Dillington, "naturally. Did you see a ghost on
the road?"
"I thought I saw what your friends at the Psychical Research
call a phantasm of the living," said the Vicar. "The shadow had
cleared off from the piece of road between the elms and what I
saw was hurrying across the brighmess. I should know that
rocking stagger, like the mast of a fishing smack in a choppy

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sea, wherever I saw it, and she'd got her hat well on the back
o her head."
"Alice?" breathed Miss Dillington.
"Even i she'd walked as light and straight as you do, my dear,
I should have known her when she stumbled over her own feet
(the road was clear enough) and dropped something she was
carrying."
"Running away with the macaw, poor thing."
"So I thought, though I did not know about Mangaroo then.
I thought, God in His mercy forgive me, I thought she was
making off with booty. Taking spoons and things to some confederate,"
"My poor Harold!"
"I thought Alice was robbing the dead."
"I'm sure you'd never let her do that."
"Naturally. I put on a few clothes and spent some minutes
looking for my overcoat. When I got out on to the road she'd
disappeared. I ran on looking for her. There's a dark bit just
past the churchyard wall and I thought she might be about
there and that was why I couldn't see her. But when I got to
the bend of the road towards the bridgethere are no trees for
half a mile after you come out of that copsethere was no one
in sight. The moon was clear of cloud and the marsh lay like
an empty saucer with the river glittering across it like a polished
spoon. Not a soul stirring. Owls of course^but nothing human.
There are no cross roads or lanes until the further side of the
bridge, and she couldn't have got so far in the time. I thought
I'd just made a sleepy old fool of myself, seen one of the ghosts,
or just imagined or dreamed it. So I turned back, walking slowly,
as I was out of breath after my pursuit of the criminal. As I
came out of the shade by the church gate I thought the delusion must have become auditory, because from the other side
of the wall, I could hear a fearful thwacking noise accompanied
by just such sniffs and snuffles as I'd come to associate with
Alice's presence anywhere within earshot. I am," the Vicar paused
with a wry smile, "I am obliged to admit that for a moment I
allowed myself to remember those hints which I had not allowed
Martha to amplify but which you seem to have encouraged her
to expand into narrative . . . "
"Harold, dear, you are not writing a letter to the Bishop, you're
just confessing to me,"
"Well! I thought it was a banshee or something of the kind.

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But I pulled myself together and went into the churchyard. Mrs.
Dishart's grave is on the slope, in the new part as they call it,
and it lay full in the moonlight. Alice was there all right, beating
down the newly turned soil with a weapon of some kind. It
turned out to be the basting-spoona long, black, iron affair,
strong too. She saw me. She couldn't have heard me walking on
the grass through the noise she was making. She took me for
the Devil. It was an unusual experience."
"Did she run away?"
"No," said the Vicar, "she rose from her knees, sat on the
grave-mound, and waved the spoon round her head and shouted
'Go away, Satan' several times."
"She must have been frightened out of her wits."
"That is very kind of you, my dear, but she was nothing of the
kind. She had been frightened when she dropped Mangaroo's
body on the road, in the place where she knew there were ghosts,
but, once inside the churchyard, she knew she was on consecrated ground. You are pitying her for quite the wrong things.
Alice is a truculent being with a sense of eternal values and an
almost impenetrable earthly darkness of mind. She was burying
Mangaroo, not to prevent his being made into a fashionable hat,
as you imagine, but in order that he might accompany Mrs.
Dishart to heaven. She was giving him Christian burial, you
understand, in consecrated ground, and with his mistress. She was
quite as ready to defy me about it when I had made my identity
clear to her, as she had been to drive Satan away from the
grave. It appears that she had consulted Martha in the morning
as to the possibility of getting me to allow her to come to the
funeral with the bird, which she then had thought of burying
alive in the grave, and that Martha had assured her I would not
countenance such heathen wickedness. When I explained that
there was no reason why a dead bird should not lie in Mrs.
Dishart's grave, she asked me to read the burial-serviceor to
pronounce the blessing Mangaroo had missed, so as to ensure
his safe passage to glory."
"And did you?" asked Miss Dillington, the tears running
down her face.
The Vicar ignored the question.
"Alice had quite intended to appeal to Mrs. Dishart's own
minister in the matter, but young Mrs. Dishart's threat had made
her realise that she could not risk any delay. So she was outwitting us all. She must have misunderstood her mistress. When she

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was dying, Mrs. Dishart had said several times that it would not
be heaven if he were not there. I think she meant her son. She
did, I know, have misgivings about the boy's salvation. He'd been
a little wUd. I tried the comfortable doctrine of purgatory one
day, I remember, and she routed me with great decision, announcing that her own Mr. Stephenson was inclined to hope that,
as Jack had died in battle for his country, he was automatically
saved. But neither of them could be sure."
"Oh dear," sobbed Miss Dillington, "I'm so glad I'm an
atheist."
"Alice had a much less complicated outlook," said the Vicar.
"She knew Mrs. Dishart had gone to heaven, in spite of her
Nonconformity, but she was quite sure that the best route there
was the one through our own Church. She seemed to feel that
Mangaroo might catch Mrs. Dishart up, and that my official
benediction would expedite the journey. 'I'd like the mistress to
find him there in the morning,' she said."
"Oh, I do hope . . ." said Miss Dillington.
"Mrs. Dishart, it seems, has left Alice ^^^50. I daresay that annoyed the nephew and his wife a little. To Alice it was an evidence of saintliness strong enough to counteract any blemishy
Dissent in her mistress's soul. 'After that,' she said, 'I was bound
to let her have Mangaroo. He was such a pet.' I tok her back to
the vicarage and made her a shake-down on the study sofa so as
not to disturb Martha in the small hours, ond the next day I went
over to St. Albans and called on young Dishart. He is cashier at a
bank there. I told him exacdy what I thought of him and his
wife for leaving Alice alone in the house to suit their own greedy
convenience, and before he'd time to recover from the shock I
offered him ten shillings for the macaw. Said Martha'd taken a
fancy for it to decorate the vicarage kitchen."
"But did . . . "
"I didn't tell him the creature was dead and buried, of course.
He'd have brought an action against Alice for destroying his
property. He took the ten shillings and gave me a receipt for it
too, and a month's wages for Alice."
"But did you read a prayer over Mangaroo?"
Miss Dillington got it out at last.
"Haven't I been telling you all this time that that's a thing
I cannot tell anybody?" said the Vicar.

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"Sahj" (H. H. Munro)

SREDNI VASHTAR
From The Short Stories of Sa\i (H. K. Munro), copyright, 1930,
by The Viking Press, Inc., N . Y.
Lvonradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his
professional opinion that the boy would not live another five
years. The doctor was silky and effete, and counted for little, but
his opinion was endorsed by Mrs. de Ropp, who counted for
nearly everything. Mrs. de Ropp was Conradin's cousin and
guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the
world that are necessary and disagreeable and real; the other twofifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up
in himself and his imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome
necessary thingssuch as illnesses and coddling restrictions and
drawnout dullness. Without his imagination, which was rampant
under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago.
Mrs. de Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have
confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might
have been dimly aware that thwarting him "for his good" was
a duty which she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin
hated her with a desperate sincerity which he was perfectly able
to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself
gained an added relish from the likelihood that they would be
displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked outan unclean thing, which should find no
entrance.
In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows
that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or
a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction.
The few fruit-trees that it contained were set jealously apart from
his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of their kind
blooming in an arid waste; it would probably have been difficult
to find a market-gardener who would have offered ten shillings
for their entire yearly produce. In a forgotten corner, however,
almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused tool-shed
of respectable proportions, and within its walls Conradin found
a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral. He had peopled it with a legion of familiar
phantoms, evoked pardy from fragments of history and pardy
825

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