Page 17 (1/2)

BANQUET AT BELBURY

IT ith great pleasure that Mark found hiot a seat with Filostrato on his right and an inconspicuous newcomer on his left Even Filostrato seemed human compared with the two initiates, and to the newcomer his heart positively warh table between Jules and Wither, but did not often look in that direction, for the tralass and winked at hie priest stood patiently behind the tra&039;s health had been drunk and Jules rose to make his speech

For the first fewtables would have seen ays see on such occasions : the placid faces of bons viveurs whom food and wine had placed in a contentment which no amount of speeches could violate, the patient faces of diners who had learned how to pursue their own thoughts while attending just enough to respond wherever a laugh or a ru ry for tobacco, the over-elaborate attention on the powdered faces of woone on looking down the tables you would presently have seen a change You would have seen face after face look up and turn in the direction of the speaker You would have seen first curiosity, then fixed attention, then incredulity Finally, you would have noticed that the rooh or a creak, that every eye was fixed on Jules, and soon everybetween fascination and horror

To different e caan at the ross an anachronism as to trust to calvary for salvation in ht Frost Why couldn&039;t the foolPerhaps-but hallo! as this? Jules see that the future density of mankind depended on the iht Frost Then, crystal clear in articulation, beyond all possibility of ore of verjuice must be talthibianised"

Wither was slower to notice as happening He had never expected the speech to have anytime the familiar catchwords rolled on in a manner which did not disturb the expectation of his ear Then he thought: "Co too far Even they e of the past by throwing down the gauntlet of the future" He looked cautiously down the room All ell But it wouldn&039;t be if Jules didn&039;t sit down pretty soon In that last sentence there were surely words he didn&039;t know What the deuce did he ain They were attending too ates esemplanted in a continual of porous variations"

Mark did not at first attend to the speech at all Once or twice some phrase made him want to smile What first awoke him to the real situation was the behaviour of those who sat near hi stillness He noticed that everyone except hiun to attend He looked up and saw their faces And then first he really listened "We shall not," Jules was saying, &039;&039; we shall not till we can secure the erebation of all pros-tundiary initeain Obviously it was not he as ibberish Except possibly the trae He had never heard a speech from one of these real toffs before, and would have been disappointed if he could understand it Nor had he ever before drunk vintage port, and though he did notaway like a otten that there were reporters present That in itself did notunsuitable appeared in to-morrow&039;s paper, it would be child&039;s play for him to say that the reporters were drunk or ht let the story pass Jules was a nuisance, and thishis career But this was not the i whether he should wait till Jules sat down or whether he should rise and interrupt him with a few judicious words He did not want a scene Glancing at his watch, he decided to wait two ed it An intolerable falsetto laugh rang out; soot hysterics Immediately Wither touched Jules on the arm and rose

"Eh? Blotcher bulldoo?"his hand on the little ht, forced hi position Then Wither cleared his throat He kne to do that so that every eye in the room turned i Wither looked down the roorip on the audience He saw that he already had thean to speak

They ought to have all looked ht soon to have been edy which they had just witnessed That hat Wither expected What he actually saildered hi Jules&039;s speech had returned The woain-or no, this time it omen Cosser bolted from the room

The Deputy Director could not understand this, forto hi the speech he had resolved to emen-I sheel foor that we all-er-h, I trust, lavatory, aspasia which glea It would-ah-be shark, very shark, from anyone&039;s debenture"

The wohed rose hastily from her chair The man next to her heard her less syllables and her unnatural expression at one moment Both for some reason infuriated him He rose to help her to e politeness which often, in modern society, serve instead of blows He wrenched the chair, in fact, out of her hand She screamed, tripped, and fell The man on the other side of her saw the first man&039;s expression of fury "Bot are you bla towards him Four or five people in that part of the roo There wasfor the door "Bundlemen, bundlemen," said Wither sternly, in a much louder voice

He was not even heard At least twenty people present were at that veryTo each of thee when a word or so of plain sense, spoken in a new voice, would restore the whole rooreat variety of tones rang out from several places at once Frost was the only one of the leaders who atte Instead he pencilled a feords on a slip of paper, beckoned to a servant, and iven to Miss Hardcastle

By the tie was put into her hands the clamour was universal Miss Hardcastle se ran: Blunt frippers intantly to pointed bdeluroid Pwgent Cost

Miss Hardcastle had known before she got the e that she was three parts drunk She had expected and intended to be so: she knew that later on in the evening she would go down to the cells and do things There was a new prisoner there-a little fluffy girl of the kind the Fairy enjoyed-hoibberish did not alar Apparently Frost wanted her to take some action She decided that she would She rose and walked the whole length of the room to the door, locked it, put the key in her pocket, and then turned to survey the company She noticed for the first time that neither the supposed Merlin nor the Basque priest were anywhere to be seen Wither and Jules, both on their feet, were struggling with each other She set out towards them

Sotime to reach them All semblance of a dinner-party had disappeared: it was more like the scene at a London ter to restore order, but everyone was unintelligible, and everyone, in the effort to be understood, was talking louder and louder She shouted several tiood deal before she reached her goal

There ca noise and after that, at last, a few seconds of dead silence Mark noticed first that Jules had been killed: only secondly that Miss Hardcastle had shot him After that it was difficult to be sure what happened The stathe ain and again It was the s else which recalled the scene to Mark in later life: the s mixed with the sticky compound smell of blood and port and Madeira

Suddenly the confusion of cries ran all together into one thin, long-drawn noise of terror Everyone had beco had darted across the floor between the two long tables and disappeared under one of them Perhaps half the people present had not seen what it was-had only caught a gleaer

For the first ti-places the rooht be under any of the tables It ht be in any of the deep bay s, behind the curtains There was a screen across one corner of the room, too

It is not to be supposed that even now none of the company kept their heads With loud appeals to the whole roohbours they tried to stee an orderly retreat from the room, to indicate how the brute could be lured or scared into the open and shot The dooibberish frustrated their efforts They could not arrest the twoon The majority had not seen Miss Hardcastle lock the door: they were pressing towards it, to get out at all costs A large minority, on the other hand, knew that the door was locked Thereto the opposite end of the room to find it The whole centre of the rooe scrum, at first noisy with efforts at explanation, but soon, as the struggle thickened, silent except for the sound of labouring breath, kicking or tra

Four or five of these co off the cloth in their fall and with it all the fruit-dishes, decanters, glasses, plates Out of that confusion with a howl of terror broke the tiger It happened so quickly that Mark hardly took it in He saw the hideous head, the cat&039;s snarl of theeyes He heard a shot-the last Then the tiger had disappeared again So the feet of the scrunise it at first, for the face, frouised it until it was quite dead Then he recognised Miss Hardcastle

Wither and Frost were no longer to be seen There was a growling close at hand Mark turned, thinking he had located the tiger Then he caught out of the corner of his eye a gliht it was an Alsatian If so, the dog was s, slavering A wo with her back to the table, turned, saw it, tried to scream, next moment went down as the creature leaped at her throat It was a wolf "Ai-ai!!" squealed Filostrato, and ju else had darted between his feet Mark saw it streak across the floor and enter the scrum and wake that mass of interlocked terror into new and frantic convulsions It was some kind of snake

Above the chaos of sounds which nooke-there seemed to be a new animal in the room every minute- there came at last one sound in which those still capable of understanding could take co battered fro door, a door by which a small locomotive could almost enter, for the room was made in imitation of Versailles Already one or two of the panels were splintering The noise oal It seeorilla leaped on the table where Jules had sat and began dru on its chest Then, with a roar, it juave Both wings gave The passage, framed in the dooras dark Out of the darkness there caan methodically to break off the splintered wood on each side and make the doorway clear Then Mark saw distinctly how it swooped down, curled itself round a h off the floor After that, e shape of the elephant thrust its way into the roo in the curl of its trunk and then dashed him to the floor It traain and brayed horribly, then plunged straight forward into the rooirl treading grapes, heavily and soon wetly tra in a mash of blood and bones, of flesh, wine, fruit, and sodden table-cloth Then everything went black and Mark knew no more

When Mr Bultitude came to his senses he had found himself in a dark place full of unfa He perceived that food was in the neighbourhood and-reat many other animals about too, apparently, but that was irrelevant He decided to go and find both the female bear and the food It was then he discovered that walls met hiet out This, combined with an inarticulate want for the hued hie seas of disconsolate emotion with not one little raft of reason to float on-drowned him fathoms deep In his own fashion he lifted up his voice and wept

And yet, not far away fros, seated in a little white cell, chewed steadily on his great sorrow as only a simple man can chew An educatedhow this new idea of cure instead of punish, had in fact deprived the cri away the naht all the ti: that this was the day he had counted on all through his sentence, that he had expected by this tiot soht) and that it hadn&039;t happened He sat quite still About once in every two e tear trickled down his cheek He wouldn&039;t have s

It was Merlin who brought release to both He had left the dining-room as soon as the curse of Babel ell fixed upon the ene loud and intolerably glad above the riot of nonsense, "Qyi Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis"

"They that have despised the Word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away"