Beasts and Super-Beasts | Page 6

little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath! Wait till I
catch you, you little--"
"What little beast?" asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh;
Egbert's language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outraged
feelings.
"A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy," spluttered Egbert.
And now Amanda is seriously ill.

THE BOAR-PIG
"There is a back way on to the lawn," said Mrs. Philidore Stossen to her
daughter, "through a small grass paddock and then through a walled
fruit garden full of gooseberry bushes. I went all over the place last
year when the family were away. There is a door that opens from the
fruit garden into a shrubbery, and once we emerge from there we can
mingle with the guests as if we had come in by the ordinary way. It's
much safer than going in by the front entrance and running the risk of
coming bang up against the hostess; that would be so awkward when
she doesn't happen to have invited us."
"Isn't it a lot of trouble to take for getting admittance to a garden
party?"

"To a garden party, yes; to the garden party of the season, certainly not.
Every one of any consequence in the county, with the exception of
ourselves, has been asked to meet the Princess, and it would be far
more troublesome to invent explanations as to why we weren't there
than to get in by a roundabout way. I stopped Mrs. Cuvering in the road
yesterday and talked very pointedly about the Princess. If she didn't
choose to take the hint and send me an invitation it's not my fault, is it?
Here we are: we just cut across the grass and through that little gate
into the garden."
Mrs. Stossen and her daughter, suitably arrayed for a county garden
party function with an infusion of Almanack de Gotha, sailed through
the narrow grass paddock and the ensuing gooseberry garden with the
air of state barges making an unofficial progress along a rural trout
stream. There was a certain amount of furtive haste mingled with the
stateliness of their advance, as though hostile search-lights might be
turned on them at any moment; and, as a matter of fact, they were not
unobserved. Matilda Cuvering, with the alert eyes of thirteen years old
and the added advantage of an exalted position in the branches of a
medlar tree, had enjoyed a good view of the Stossen flanking
movement and had foreseen exactly where it would break down in
execution.
"They'll find the door locked, and they'll jolly well have to go back the
way they came," she remarked to herself. "Serves them right for not
coming in by the proper entrance. What a pity Tarquin Superbus isn't
loose in the paddock. After all, as every one else is enjoying themselves,
I don't see why Tarquin shouldn't have an afternoon out."
Matilda was of an age when thought is action; she slid down from the
branches of the medlar tree, and when she clambered back again
Tarquin, the huge white Yorkshire boar-pig, had exchanged the narrow
limits of his stye for the wider range of the grass paddock. The
discomfited Stossen expedition, returning in recriminatory but
otherwise orderly retreat from the unyielding obstacle of the locked
door, came to a sudden halt at the gate dividing the paddock from the
gooseberry garden.

"What a villainous-looking animal," exclaimed Mrs. Stossen; "it wasn't
there when we came in."
"It's there now, anyhow," said her daughter. "What on earth are we to
do? I wish we had never come."
The boar-pig had drawn nearer to the gate for a closer inspection of the
human intruders, and stood champing his jaws and blinking his small
red eyes in a manner that was doubtless intended to be disconcerting,
and, as far as the Stossens were concerned, thoroughly achieved that
result.
"Shoo! Hish! Hish! Shoo!" cried the ladies in chorus.
"If they think they're going to drive him away by reciting lists of the
kings of Israel and Judah they're laying themselves out for
disappointment," observed Matilda from her seat in the medlar tree. As
she made the observation aloud Mrs. Stossen became for the first time
aware of her presence. A moment or two earlier she would have been
anything but pleased at the discovery that the garden was not as
deserted as it looked, but now she hailed the fact of the child's presence
on the scene with absolute relief.
"Little girl, can you find some one to drive away--" she began
hopefully.
"_Comment? Comprends pas_," was the response.
"Oh, are you French? _Etes vous francaise_?"
"_Pas de tous. 'Suis anglaise_."
"Then why not talk English? I want to know if--"
"_Permettez-moi expliquer_. You see, I'm rather under a cloud,"