Sheiks and Adders by Michael Innes

analysis – about which the Prof has no doubt told you. It’s just that about this particular thing he appears to have a bee in his bonnet. It puzzles me, as a matter of fact. And now I think I’ll take a look at the archery. It was a fashionable sport with the gentry until superseded by lawn tennis about a hundred years ago.’
    ‘It is a curious fact,’ Professor McIlwraith said, ‘that lawn tennis was originally introduced into these islands under the name of “sphairistike”. As you will recall, Sir John, sphairisticos was the classical Greek term for any sort of ball-game. Its adoption affords a striking instance of the continued vitality of that ancient tongue as an instrument of education in the latter part of the nineteenth century.’
    ‘“Striking” is just the word,’ Mark said, ‘although “pit-pat” might have been more accurate. As for archery, the gentlemen liked it, since it constrained the ladies to exhibit what was called their figures – and before the invention of the brassière , I imagine. But it was a long time before even lawn tennis permitted them to exhibit their legs.’
    ‘It is a remarkable circumstance,’ McIlwraith said, ‘that, in French, brassières were originally leading-strings for infants.’
    ‘I must look round for my friends the Birch-Blackies,’ Appleby said disingenuously.
    ‘I’ll come a bit of the way with you,’ Mark said promptly. ‘We’ll see you later, Prof.’ And with this he led Appleby away without ceremony. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he then went on, ‘I’m going to slip into the house and get rid of these togs. The joke’s rather boring.’
    ‘Well, yes – enough is enough.’
    ‘And that’s true of the Prof as well, wouldn’t you say? In your time, I believe, one talked about a sleeping dictionary as a nice means of picking up a foreign language. The Prof might be called a peripatetic one, it seems to me. And nobody would want to go to bed with him.’
    ‘Demonstrably not.’
    ‘You ought to have a go at the archery yourself. You and the Chief Constable can compete at hitting the gold. I believe that’s the expression.’
    ‘I believe it is.’
    It was with no great reluctance that Appleby parted from young Mark Chitfield a couple of minutes later. He was a clever young man, and his determined flippancy was not to be accounted seriously against him. But for the time being, Appleby felt, enough was enough, not only of the eminent retired lexicographer but of his late abortive pupil as well.

 
     
5
    Appleby made his own way to the archery field a little later, having discovered that nothing was going to happen in the theatre for some time. It was during this walk that he saw his first sheik. Sheiks were in those days very thick on the ground – or were so if the word be taken to mean any adequately prosperous person self-evidently from the Middle East. Appleby saw a score of such visitors whenever he went to London, which it was apparent they thought of as an emporium rather than a city of historic interest. Being thus commanded by a laudable and single-minded impulse to spend money, they didn’t often stray beyond the capital. But here was at least a fancy-dress sheik attending the fête at Drool Court.
    Appleby, rather oddly, had got all this way in his thinking before Tibby Fancroft returned to his head. When this did happen he concluded that the figure he had just glimpsed in a crowd must be Tibby, defiantly attired in his forbidden costume. Then he realized that this was not necessarily so. Because of the very abundance of authentic sheiks on the metropolitan scene – not to speak of television – it was likely that dressing up in such a character might come into anybody’s head. This mightn’t be Tibby at all. Tibby might be quite elsewhere in the crush, blamelessly attired as a mediaeval knight. And there was yet a further possibility. The man mightn’t be pretending to be a real sheik. He might be pretending to be