Free The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes by Sterling E. Lanier Page A

Ffellowes a hard time. Can't you hear him? 'Rotten bunch of degenerates! Lousy overbearing crooks and cadgers! Long line of aristocratic bums and swindlers!' It would be the best opportunity he's had in years for trying to annoy the Brigadier."
     
                  "I notice you were smart enough to say 'trying,' " said some one else. "He's never managed to annoy Ffellowes yet. I doubt if this would do it either."
     
                  "Who wants to annoy me, eh?" came the easy, clipped tones of our favorite English member. He had come up the narrow back stairs at the other end of the room and was now standing behind me. He always moved silently; not, I feel certain, out of a desire to be stealthy, but from a lifetime's training. Ffellowes' years in (apparently) every secret as well as public branch of Her Majesty's service had given him the ability to walk like a cat, and a quiet one at that.
     
                  I jumped and so did a couple of the others and then there was a moment of embarrassed silence.
     
                  Ffellowes is very quick. He saw the newspaper headline in my neighbor's lap and began to chuckle.
     
                  "Good heavens, is that supposed to offend me? What a hope! I suppose someone thought our friend Williams might make use of it to savage the British Lion, eh?" He moved from behind my chair and sat in a vacant seat, his eyes twinkling.
     
                  "Item," he said, "the man in question's a Scot, not English. Most important distinction. A lesser and unstable breed." This was said with such dead-pan emphasis that we all started to laugh at once. Ffellowes' smooth, ruddy face remained immobile, but his blue eyes danced.
     
                  "If you won't be serious," he said, when the laughter died away, "I shall have to explain why Chattan's little peccadilloes are unlikely to move me to wrath. Or anyone else with any real knowledge, for that matter.
     
                  "You know, Richard the Lion Heart was a bad debtor on a scale that makes anyone modern look silly. All the Plantagenets were, for that matter. Richard seems to have been a quite unabashed queer as well, of course, and likewise William the Second, called Rufus. When, at any rate, one asked those lads for monies due, one had better have a fast horse and a waiting ship ready. They cancelled debts rather abruptly. There are thousands more examples, but I mention the kings as quite a fairish sample.
     
                  Now Chattan's an ass and his sexual troubles are purely squalid, fit only for headlines in a cheap paper. But there are other cases no paper ever got to print. Not so long ago, one of your splashier magazines ran a purely fictional piece about an aged nobleman, Scots again, who was sentenced never to leave his family castle, as a result of an atrocious crime, not quite provable. The story happens to be quite true and the verdict was approved by the Lords in a closed session. The last Pope but two had a South Italian cardinal locked up in his own palace for the remainder of his life on various charges not susceptible of public utterance. The old man died only ten years ago. So it goes, and there are dozens more cases of a similar nature.
     
                  The fact is, persons in positions of power often abuse that power in the oddest and most unpleasant ways. The extent of caprice in the human mind is infinite. Whenever public gaze, so to speak, is withdrawn, oddities occur, and far worse than illicit sex is involved in these pockets of infection. Once off the highways of humanity, if you care for analogies, one finds the oddest byways. All that's needed is isolation, that and power, economic or physical." He seemed to brood for a moment.
     
                  Outside the windows, the haze and smog kept even the blaze of Manhattan at night dim and sultry-looking. The garish electricity