Amusement Only

"Come, Mr. Pratt, why will you persist in this absurdity?"

"I'm going to whip you, sir."

"In that case you really must excuse me for putting on the steam. If a waiter or someone were to come and find me engaged like this, I should never hear the last of it as long as I lived. Here goes!"

It went. He had been warding off Mr. Pratt's blows while he was speaking. When he ceased the battle really joined. Mr. Pratt's guards were nowhere. In spite of all that he could do to save himself, his antagonist proceeded to administer severe punishment in thoroughly workmanlike style. The blows rang out upon his head and body. Mr. Pownceby wound up with one under the chin which lifted him off his feet and laid him on his back. He lay where he fell. The blow had knocked him senseless. Mr. Pownceby proceeded to revive him with the remains of the champagne.

"This," he murmured, opening his eyes and looking up, "is nice."

Mr. Pownceby propped him up upon a chair.

"You compelled me to rush the thing; but I hope I haven't hurt you much."

"Well," said Mr. Pratt, "you haven't killed me-quite. I never enjoyed whipping a man so much before. Say, stranger, is this the first little fight you've had?"

"I've sparred for the amateur championship, and won it twice. I'm going in for it again next week."

"You might have mentioned that before the game began."

"If the inherent absurdity of your proposal could not deter you, I doubt if any information I might have imparted would have been of much avail."

"There's something in that. Time!"

Mr. Pratt rose from his chair. He stood on his feet-rather doubtfully.

"What do you mean?" asked Mr. Pownceby.

"I'm going on whipping you."

"Look here, Mr. Pratt, each time you stand up I shall simply knock you down again. Of course you can go on with that sort of thing as long as you like."

"That is so; I can. And that's a sort of thing of which one doesn't care to get more than enough."

Mr. Pratt rested his hand on the back of a chair. It seemed as though, without some support of that kind, he could not stand. Mr. Pownceby advanced to him.

"Mr. Pratt, give me your hand."

Mr. Pratt gave it to him, it would seem, mechanically. The two men stood looking at each other in silence-the one almost without a scratch, the other a battered ruin. While they were so engaged the latch of the French window was opened from without, the blind was thrust aside, and a lady entered. It was Mrs. Pratt. When she saw what met her eyes she stared, which, as a breach of good manners, was, under the circumstances, excusable.

"Mr. Pownceby! Gilead! What have you been doing?"

"I've been whipping him," said Mr. Pratt. "I must be off my ordinary, for I never whipped a man that way before."

Mr. Pownceby slipped on his jacket. He helped Mr. Pratt to put on his.

"It's my fault, Mrs. Pratt. When I told your husband of our little experiment and that I found myself unable to release you from the hypnotic state which I had induced he thought I must have done you a serious injury, and that he naturally resented."

Mrs. Pratt looked at Mr. Pownceby. There was a twinkle of intelligence in her sweet blue eyes.

"I see. Miss Haseltine is looking for you. You'll find her in the drawing-room."

"Thank you," said Mr. Pownceby. "I-I'll go and look for her."

As he sneaked out of the room, with his shirt and waistcoat under his arm, devoutly hoping that no one might encounter him on his journey to his own apartment, he heard Mrs. Pratt make this remark to her husband-the first after two years absence:

"So, Gilead, you've been at it again."

He heard Mr. Pratt reply:

"I have. I was raised fighting, and I reckon that fighting I shall die. If I have to whip that Pownceby again it is a certainty I shall."

AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS

CHAPTER I

THE PROMISE

"An old-fashioned Christmas. – A lively family will accept a gentleman as paying guest to join them in spending an old-fashioned Christmas in the heart of the country."

That was the advertisement. It had its points. I was not sure what, in this case, an old-fashioned Christmas might happen to mean. I imagine there were several kinds of "old-fashioned" Christmases; but it could hardly be worse than a chop in my chambers, or-horror of horrors! – at the club; or my cousin Lucy's notion of what she calls the "festive season." Festive? Yes! She and her husband, who suffers from melancholia, and all the other complaints which flesh is heir to, and I, dragging through what I call a patent-medicine dinner, and talking of everybody who is dead and gone, or else going, and of nothing else.

So I wrote to the advertiser. The reply was written in a sprawling feminine hand. It was a little vague. It appeared that the terms would be five guineas; but there was no mention of the length of time which that fee would cover. I might arrive, it seemed, on Christmas Eve, but there was no hint as to when I was to go, if ever. The whole thing was a trifle odd. There was nothing said about the sort of accommodation which would be provided, nothing about the kind of establishment which was maintained, or the table which was kept. No references were offered or asked for. It was merely stated that "we're a very lively family, and that if you're lively yourself you'll get on uncommonly well." The letter was signed "Madge Wilson."

Now it is a remarkable thing that I have always had an extraordinary predilection for the name Madge. I do not know why. I have never known a Madge. And yet, from my boyhood upward, I have desired to meet one. Here was an opportunity offered. She was apparently the careworn mother of a "lively family." Under such circumstances she was hardly likely to be "lively" herself, but her name was Madge, and it was the accident of her Christian name which decided me to go.

I had no illusions. No doubt the five guineas were badly wanted; even a "lively family" would be hardly likely to advertise for a perfect stranger to spend Christmas with them if they were not. I did not expect a princely entertainment. Still I felt that it could hardly be worse than a chop or cousin Lucy; the subjects of her conversation I never cared about when they were alive, and I certainly do not want to talk about them now they are dead. As for the "pills" and "drops" with which her husband doses himself between the courses, it makes me ill even to think of them.

On Christmas Eve the weather was abominable. All night it had been blowing and raining. In the morning it began to freeze. By the time the streets were like so many skating rinks it commenced to snow. And it kept on snowing; that turned out to be quite a record in the way of snow-storms. Hardly the sort of weather to start for an unknown destination "in the heart of the country." But, at the last moment, I did not like to back out. I said I would go, and I meant to go.

I had been idiot enough to load myself with a lot of Christmas presents, without the faintest notion why. I had not given a Christmas present for years-there had been no one to give them to. Lucy cannot bear such trifling, and her husband's only notion of a present at any time was a gallon jar of somebody's Stomach Stirrer. I am no dealer in poisons.

I knew nothing of the people I was going to. The youngest member of the family might be twenty, or the oldest ten. No doubt the things I had bought would be laughed at, probably I should never venture to offer them. Still, if you have not tried your hand at that kind of thing for ever so long, the mere act of purchasing is a pleasure. That is a fact.

I had never enjoyed "shopping" so much since I was a boy. I felt quite lively myself as I mingled with the Christmas crowd, looking for things which might not turn out to be absolutely preposterous. I even bought something for Madge-I mean Mrs. Wilson. Of course, I knew that I had no right to do anything of the kind, and was aware that the chances were a hundred to one against my ever presuming to hint at its existence. I was actually ass enough to buy something for her husband-two things, indeed; alternatives, as it were-a box of cigars, if he turned out to be a smoker, and a case of whiskey if he didn't. I hoped to goodness that he would not prove to be a hypochondriac, like Lucy's husband. I would not give him pills. What the "lively family" would think of a perfect stranger arriving burdened with rubbish, as if he had known them all their lives, I did not dare to think. No doubt they would set him down as a lunatic right away.

It was a horrible journey. The trains were late, and, of course, overcrowded; there was enough luggage in our compartment to have filled it, and still there was one more passenger than there ought to have been; an ill-conditioned old fellow who wanted my hat-box put into the van because it happened to tumble off the rack on to his head. I pointed out to him that the rack was specially constructed for light luggage, that a hat-box was light luggage, and that if the train jolted, he ought to blame the company, not me. He was impervious to reason. His wrangling and jangling so upset me, that I went past the station at which I ought to have changed. Then I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for a train to take me back again, only to find that I had missed the one I intended to catch. So I had to cool my heels for two hours and a half in a wretched cowshed amidst a bitter, whirling snowstorm. It is some satisfaction for me to be able to reflect that I made it warm for the officials, however cold I might have been myself.

When the train did start, some forty minutes after scheduled time, it jolted along in a laborious fashion at the rate of about six miles an hour, stopping at every roadside hovel. I counted seven in a distance, I am convinced, of less than twenty miles. When at last I reached Crofton, my journey's end, it turned out that the station staff consisted of a half-witted individual, who was stationmaster, porter, and clerk combined, and a hulking lad who did whatever else there was to do. No one had come to meet me, the village was "about half a mile," and Hangar Dene, the house for which my steps were bent, "about four miles by the road" – how far it was across ploughed fields my informant did not mention.

There was a trap at the "Boy and Blunderbuss," but that required fetching. Finally the hulking lad was dispatched. It took him some time, considering the distance was only "about half a mile." When the trap did appear it looked to me uncommonly like an open spring cart. In it I was deposited, with my luggage. The snow was still descending in whirling clouds. Never shall I forget the drive, in that miserable cart, through the storm and those pitch black country lanes. We had been jogging along some time before the driver opened his mouth.

"Be you going to stop with they Wilsons?"

"I am."

"Ah!"

There was something in the tone of his "Ah!" which whetted my curiosity, near the end of my tether though I was.