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The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes
Bernard Capes

Hugh Lamb


Bernard Capes was celebrated as one of the most prolific authors of the late Victorian period, producing dozens of short stories, articles, and more than forty novels across multiple genres, culminating in the first original crime novel published by Collins, The Skeleton Key.Bernard Capes was celebrated as one of the most prolific authors of the late Victorian period, producing dozens of short stories, articles, and more than forty novels across multiple genres, culminating in the first original crime novel published by Collins, The Skeleton Key. His greatest acclaim, however, came from penning some of the most terrifying ghost stories of the era. Yet following his death in 1918 his work all but slipped into oblivion until the 1980s, when veteran anthologist Hugh Lamb first collected Capes’s tales of terror as The Black Reaper.Every story bears the stamp of Capes’s fertile and deeply pessimistic imagination, from werewolf priests and haunted typewriters to marble hands that come to life and plague-stricken villagers haunted by a scythe-wielding ghost. Now expanded with eleven further stories, a revised introduction and a new foreword by Capes’s grandson, Ian Burns, this classic collection will thrill horror fans and restore Capes’s reputation as one of the best writers in the horror genre.















Copyright (#ueee37b72-d2a2-5530-8341-6e514af1dd11)


HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by Equation 1989

Foreword В© Ian Burns 2017

Introduction В© Hugh Lamb 2017

Cover design by Mike Topping В© HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover images В© Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com)

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008249076

Ebook Edition В© October 2017 ISBN: 9780008249083

Version: 2017–09–07




Dedication (#ueee37b72-d2a2-5530-8341-6e514af1dd11)


To my good friends,

Steve Jones and Randy Broecker,

and happy times at the Shakespeare.


Table of Contents

Cover (#u55ef7935-1dc2-52a3-808c-80634eebb660)

Title Page (#u2ca9d679-d2a1-5b2d-98a3-845f79404e7b)

Copyright (#u5275e3ed-50d5-5013-a735-92ef4ca893c8)

Dedication (#u794044d6-1007-5f70-9890-476b2a13009e)

Foreword (#u285e23c7-e7c8-59a8-a0be-8f39a2f6445d)

Introduction (#u26dc5c4a-fb7e-5cd1-bb67-1c371012296b)

The Black Reaper (#u0f0db9cc-8462-5bdf-a701-fb1d944a191d)

The Vanishing House (#udfd8c361-c057-51a2-8507-6ece9d76b8ae)



The Thing in the Forest (#u1600e810-f4b0-519d-bd37-c8124da3c4f7)



The Accursed Cordonnier (#ua3461db7-7ca5-51b3-8409-b1a61bd97606)



The Shadow-Dance (#ue25d1dfe-6336-5b6b-8184-5015e784cebf)



William Tyrwhitt’s �Copy’ (#u95580d2c-77f3-5547-a3d1-6c01b816df61)



A Queer Cicerone (#litres_trial_promo)



A Gallows-Bird (#litres_trial_promo)



The Sword of Corporal Lacoste (#litres_trial_promo)



The Glass Ball (#litres_trial_promo)



Poor Lucy Rivers (#litres_trial_promo)



The Apothecary’s Revenge (#litres_trial_promo)



The Green Bottle (#litres_trial_promo)



The Closed Door (#litres_trial_promo)



The Dark Compartment (#litres_trial_promo)



The Marble Hands (#litres_trial_promo)



The Moon Stricken (#litres_trial_promo)



The Queer Picture (#litres_trial_promo)



Dark Dignum (#litres_trial_promo)



The Mask (#litres_trial_promo)



The Strength of the Rope (#litres_trial_promo)



The White Hare (#litres_trial_promo)



An Eddy on the Floor (#litres_trial_promo)



Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)



Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




FOREWORD (#ueee37b72-d2a2-5530-8341-6e514af1dd11)


These words are the culmination (so far, at least!) of a series of events which, together, tell a story that would have appealed hugely to Bernard Capes. It is a story of coincidences and timing, and the odd ounce or nanogram of good luck – all essential tools for an author. We could add, for the spookilyminded, a dash of the metaphysical to properly set the scene.

What made me go on to the Internet? Well, nothing other than ego: I wanted to see whether a book I’d written a few years ago could be purchased today. Without even a hint of surprise, it wasn’t listed anywhere; so I proceeded, with little confidence, to look up my grandfather �Bernard Capes’. And, lo! (I’m not sure why we use this expression, when we mean the exact opposite) there he was! Bernard E. Capes, At a Winter’s Fire, 1969 – seventy years after it was first published. Why on earth would someone reissue a comprehensively-forgotten (I thought) author, and then not in his own country?

The journey had begun!

I then wrote, for the Amazon Books site, a brief piece about my grandfather which – lo! again – drew a response from John in Connecticut, who’d come across a single phrase in Bloody Murder by Julian Symons: �… Bernard Capes’s neglected tour de forceThe Skeleton Key’.

Shortly after, I received an e-mail from Bruce in New York, who’d come across another Capes book that I didn’t know of, and – yet another lo! – he sent me a photocopy of the introduction to the original 1989 edition of The Black Reaper, another book I hadn’t heard of. It was a collection of short stories, and the editor was identified only as �Hugh Lamb, Sutton, Surrey, England’.

This wasn’t much to go on, but Lamb’s words (I almost said �tales’) told me so much that I didn’t know about my grandfather that I simply had to write to him. Indeed, until I read Hugh’s introduction, which filled in many gaps, all I knew about my grandfather was that my mother had adored him, that he had quite a sense of humour, that he died in a ’flu epidemic twenty years before I was born, and that his work was peppered with peerless similes.

Would my letter reach Hugh Lamb? Would he still be alive? And would he reply?

Yes, my letter was delivered. Bless Royal Mail!

Yes, he was still alive. Bless … well someone!

And yes, he did reply. Bless Hugh!

In his introduction, Hugh talks about my grandfather’s contrarian angel, and the bad luck he must have experienced, which led me somewhat to consider the parallels in our lives (his and mine). I’ve been fortunately deprived on the bad luck front and over-supplied on the good. However, bad luck is relative. To win second prize in a $30,000 competition at age forty-three, and first prize a year later, is luck of a kind that I would quite happily contribute half of my pension to receive! (From an Australian perspective, as well, being unable to breed rabbits would, to us, have been nearly as valuable as the Gold Rushes.)

The portrait of my grandfather that has been built up ought to give heart to other authors engaged in the eternal struggle to get published. Not many can say that they started at an age when many would have given up, and then actually had work published at an average rate of two books a year over a twenty-year period; and in fields ranging from poetry (two volumes) and history to detective stories, mysteries, romances, and – in numerous magazines – inventive tales of ghosts and other things which, deliciously, still go bump in the night.

Hugh speculates that Bernard probably had to bear his share of literary snobbery, but he might have had a bit of his own. His daughter (my mother) said that he made some disparaging remarks about authors of detective or crime stories – �Anyone could write that sort of stuff’ kind of thing – and was obviously called out by his publishers, William Collins. In something akin to petard and hoist, the result was The Skeleton Key, now recognised as the first original crime novel issued by that legendary publishing house.

My 1990s search for my name on the Internet – even before Google! – now brings up fourteen books, including Four Hander: Paths to Murder, which was directly inspired by HarperCollins re-issuing The Mystery of the Skeleton Key in 2015 and now The Black Reaper. Being the fourth generation in our family to have been published, it appears to me that there’s something in this gene thing. Or maybe it’s due to a clammy, twisting English Channel mist rolling its indefatigable, irresistible way through unsuspecting generations of veins across the Seven Seas and over more than a few black-cragged threatening mountain ranges …

And so, thanks to the Internet, some un-met friends in the States, two highly professional libraries (Sutton, England; Mercantile, New York), several happy coincidences, impeccable timing, Hugh Lamb, the oft-maligned postal service, several tons of good luck, and – above all – the spirits who inhabit those worlds so often visited by Bernard Capes, I commend to your reading this new edition of some of the work of my grandfather, (very) late of Winchester, England. I hope the old stories entertain you, and whip the odd tingle up your spine, more than a supernatural century since they were written. He would be amused.

Ian Burns

Melbourne

July 2017




INTRODUCTION (#ueee37b72-d2a2-5530-8341-6e514af1dd11)


Literary fame seems almost like a lottery; ghost story writers in particular seem to pick losing tickets more than any other kind of author. It is an interesting exercise to ponder why certain authors and their works in this vein, just as well equipped to stand the test of time as their contemporaries, fall into speedy obscurity, while others stay in the public eye. The Victorian era is a fine example of this – for every tale of terror that has survived in print today, there are a hundred languishing in undeserved obscurity.

Bernard Capes is a case in point. During his writing career, he published forty-one books, contributed to all the leading Victorian magazines, and left behind some of the most imaginative tales of terror of his era – yet within ten years of his death, he had slipped down the familiar slope into total neglect. Until the early 1980s, Capes seldom appeared in reference works in this (or any other) field of literature, and even histories of Victorian writers published in his lifetime give him scant mention. He was overlooked by every anthologist in this genre from his death in 1918 right up until 1978: sixty years of lingering in the dark while many of his contemporaries were brought back to light.

I would place Capes among the most imaginative writers of his day. He turned out plot after plot worthy of the recognition accorded to such contemporaries as Stevenson, Haggard, and Conan Doyle, all of whom are still in print today. I hope this selection of his stories will help put Capes in his deserved position with the leading talents of Victorian fantasy.

Bernard Edward Joseph Capes was born in London on 30 August 1854, a nephew of John Moore Capes, a prominent figure in the Oxford Movement. He was educated at Beaumont College and brought up as a Catholic. His elder sister, Harriet Capes (1849–1936), was to become a noted translator and writer of children’s books, publishing a dozen or more up to 1932.

As we will see, a very awkward angel perched on Capes’s shoulder all his life, and made its presence felt at an early stage of his career. He was meant to go into the army; but somehow there was an almighty bureaucratic tangle, and his intended commission was not granted due to some mistake about the age he should have been when presenting himself for examination. There is no record as to why he did not pursue the matter further but the army career came to nothing.

Capes’s awkward angel then accompanied him on the long string of ventures that he made into the world at large. After the army fiasco, he started work in a tea-broker’s office. It must have been dreadfully dull – the tea business in the 1870s was not the most exciting field of human activity, and the young Capes must have endured it in silence until, after a few years, he packed it in and went to study art at the Slade School. What he did about an art career is not recorded; but we do know that in 1888 he went to work for the publishers Eglington and Co., and succeeded Clement Scott as editor of the journal The Theatre.

At this point in his career, he made his first attempts at novel writing, publishing two under the pseudonym �Bevis Cane’: The Haunted Tower (1888) and The Missing Man (1889), the latter being issued by Eglington. Presumably neither novel won him success, as �Bevis Cane’ never appeared again; and what was generally thought to have been his first novel – under his own name – did not appear for another eight years.

Capes must have thought he had found his niche at last; this foray into writing was to spark off his final (and successful) career. But the angel was not finished yet. Eglington and Co. went out of business in 1892, and Capes must have been really stuck for an occupation to follow his editorship of The Theatre, for he is next discovered making an unsuccessful attempt at, of all things, rabbit farming. There is a dreadful black humour in the thought of a man who cannot successfully breed rabbits.

At long last, however, Capes, aged forty-three, found his true vocation. In 1897 he entered a competition for new authors organised by the Chicago Record. Capes came second with his novel The Mill of Silence, published in Chicago that year by Rand, McNally.

Obviously heartened by this turn of events, Capes entered the competition in 1898 when the Chicago Record repeated it. This time he hit the jackpot. His entry, The Lake of Wine – a long, sometimes quite macabre tale of a fabulous ruby bearing the title of the book – won the competition. It was published by Heinemann the same year, and Capes was a writer from then on.

And write he did. Out flooded short stories, articles, newspaper editorials, reviews, and novels. He published a further two in 1898 (including the book bearing one of the most unappetising titles of all time: The Adventures of the Comte de la Muette During the Reign of Terror). All through the early 1900s, with a four-book bulge in 1910, and right up through the First World War, Capes knocked out a couple of books every year.

Each novel took three months to write, working six hours a day, and Capes would take a month’s holiday after finishing the book. He also played the piano and made games for his children. Another great interest was painting and illustrating.

When I met Ian Burns and Helen Capes in October 2002, they honoured me by showing me (and letting me hold!) a precious family heirloom – the only copy of Bernard’s The Book Of The Beasts. Subtitled �Being certain animals which through their own perversity or ill temper have become extinct’, the book had been hand-made by Capes, written and illustrated with his own watercolours, for his children. It was fascinating. No wonder Renalt said of his father in 1982: �Bernard was the nicest, kindest man I have ever known, and never had anything nasty to say about anybody at all.’

He wrote mainly novels, but every so often he issued a book of his stories collected from their various magazine appearances. The list of magazines he contributed to is impressive, and includes Blackwood’s, Cassell’s, Cornhill, The Idler, Illustrated London News, Lippincott’s, Macmillan’s, Pall Mall and Pearson’s: a roll of honour of the finest magazines of the era.

In 1889, Bernard Capes married Rosalie Amos (1865–1949) and they moved from Streatham to Winchester, where he spent the rest of his life. Rosalie appears to have been something of a domestic tyrant, handling the finances and running the household (vigorously, so it seems). Bernard must have been quite happy to concentrate on his writing. They had three children: Gareth (1893–1921), Nerine (1897–1967), and Renalt (1905–1983). Gareth had an army career (perhaps to make up for the one his father never had), while Renalt Capes (1905–1983) became, like his father, a writer late in life. He published three books in the late 1940s, including studies on Lord Nelson and Alexandre Dumas. He also wrote short stories, one of which was filmed as Dual Alibi (1946) with Herbert Lom. Nerine married Graham Burns and had an eventful time in the Second World War; Graham was later to be the last European killed in the Malayan emergency in 1952. Their son, Ian Burns, lives in Australia and carries on the Capes’s writing tradition, as the author of the children’s book Scratcher (1987) and many more since.

Bernard was very popular in Winchester and Renalt recalled one incident which indicates why. He remembered the First Army, the �contemptible little army’ according to the Kaiser, on its way from Winchester to Southampton, there to go to France, at the beginning of the first world war. The soldiers marched past Bernard’s house (for three days) and he set up tables outside, with coffee, sandwiches and cigarettes for the troops.

Even during his period of literary success, Bernard Capes’s angel was never far away. With a new novel on the stocks (The Skeleton Key, published posthumously), Capes was struck down by the influenza epidemic which swept Europe at the end of the First World War. A short illness was followed by heart failure, and he died in Winchester on 1 November 1918. He was sixty-four, and had had only twenty years at writing. Capes’s luck, as always, ran out at the wrong time.

Rosalie organised a plaque for him in Winchester Cathedral, among the likes of Izaak Walton and Jane Austen. It can still be seen, next to the entrance to the crypt.

He had earned enough of a reputation to merit an obituary in The Times on 4 November 1918. It called him a �busy writer, and always a readable one … as he grew older, his style mellowed, for gifted as he was he took some time to find himself’; then added, in typically sniffy fashion, �Nor were his The Fabulists, a collection of eerie tales, unworthy of him.’ This fastidious approach to tales of terror is very familiar, even now; Capes probably had to bear his share of literary snobbery in his lifetime. Ghost stories are always treated as a poor relation by literary thinkers, although heaven knows why – they are one of the longest surviving branches of literature.

Capes received a less snooty obituary from The New Witness, which called him �one of our most brilliant contributors’. It said of him that �He had a very real genius for the supernatural, his ghost stories are among the best in the language. He had an eerie gift for touching on the very quick of horror and never spoilt a supernatural situation by the suggestion of materialism.’

Capes had also earned the enthusiasm of G.K. Chesterton, who wrote an introduction for Capes’s posthumous The Skeleton Key (a fine detective novel). Chesterton said of Capes; �It may seem a paradox to say that he was insufficiently appreciated because he did popular things well. But it is true to say that he always gave a touch of distinction to a detective story or a tale of adventure; and so gave it where it was not valued, because it was not expected.’ Chesterton obviously knew about the sniffy tones of the day as well. He praised Capes’s �technical liberality of writing a penny-dreadful so as to make it worth a pound. In his short stories … he did indeed permit himself to be poetic in a more direct and serious fashion.’ And it is those stories which concern us now.

Capes’s imagination soared. He imagined the moon being the repository of lost souls (�The Moon Stricken’); the soul of a dead glassblower trapped in a bottle and released to terrorise a foolish investigator (�The Green Bottle’); a smuggler brought down by the man whose death he caused twenty years earlier (�Dark Dignum’); a werewolf priest in a grisly variation of �Little Red Riding Hood’ (�The Thing in the Forest’); a prison cell haunted by a dead man who makes the dust swirl constantly (�An Eddy on the Floor’); a suicide returning to teach his ne’er-do-well nephew a grisly lesson (�The Closed Door’); and a wicked ancestor who steps down from his portrait to give visitors a guided tour (�A Queer Cicerone’). He ranged from Napoleonic terrors to haunted typewriters; from marble hands which come to life to plague-stricken villagers haunted by a scythe-wielding ghost; from werewolves to the Wandering Jew. Bernard Capes rang the changes on tales of terror like very few writers of his day. It makes his neglect all the more surprising.

Of the tales in this book, nearly all appeared first in magazine form and were then collected into various books of short stories as Capes published them. Those from The Fabulists need some explanation. The shorter stories first appeared in The New Witness, and were tales told by four young men who decide to journey from village to village telling stories to earn their keep. They merely narrate the tales, without necessarily appearing in them; but the stories all bear the marks of a camp-fire yarn. As for the others, they stand up superbly on their own. Capes could hit the mark better than most.

We must never forget the sardonic angel on Capes’s shoulder. When I reprinted a couple of these stories in Tales from a Gas-Lit Graveyard in 1979, I sent a copy of the volume to Robert Aickman, one of our foremost ghost story writers (his grandfather, Richard Marsh, was in the book as well). Aickman wrote back, commenting on the stories, and said this of Capes: �His stories reveal the author’s desperate frustration, an all too familiar property of the trade. He also uses words in a curious way at many places; as if he were writing under the influence of drink, as perhaps he was, when one considers his basic attitude.’

Intrigued by Aickman’s insight (I had not told him of Capes’s long record of failure), I asked him to elaborate for the benefit of this book when it finally appeared. His reply deserves reprinting:

Consider the opening paragraph and second paragraph in �The Green Bottle’. When Capes describes himself as �happening to be grinding his literary barrel organ – always adaptable to the popular need’, this is not character drawing but an expression of rueful awareness that the words are largely true. Similarly, the contempt expressed for Sewell is partly self contempt and partly contempt for the awful people one has to mix with in the awful trade of popular authorship. Thus again with the first paragraph of �An Eddy on the Floor’; these words do not even pretend to be in character. They are Capes speaking. No man who sees himself as even reasonably content or fulfilled writes like this. The entire atmosphere is saturated with disappointment, disillusionment, and despair. None of this means that Capes’s stories are without good qualities. Still less does it mean that Capes was necessarily justified in his apparent estimate of his powers and deserts. Least of all does it mean that you have to accept a word I say on the subject.

Anyone who knew Robert Aickman would accept his word on this like a shot. Aickman did his fair share of research into ghost stories and knew his authors well.

If you examine Capes’s tales, you won’t find any conventional heroes or conventional happy endings. His protagonists wander into situations or are obliged to take action almost by default, while suffering humanity gets short shrift as well. He also seems to reserve harsh fates for gentlemen of the press – consider �The Green Bottle’, �An Eddy on the Floor’, or �William Tyrwhitt’s “Copy”’. Capes hardly needed to populate the moon with lost souls – he sends them wandering blindly through the pages of his stories down here on earth.

Perhaps it is his basic pessimism that gives Capes’s stories their undoubted power. Few authors from the time conjured up such dark canvasses as he paints in �A Gallows-bird’ or �The Sword of Corporal Lacoste’. However, this dark vision never seemed to extend to his novels, which are often lighter, less grim, historical follies. The Pot of Basil (1913), for instance, is an airy, whimsical piece about eighteenth century court life in Italy – a long way from the grinding horror of �A Gallows-bird’. And the lovers in The Story of Fifine (1914) are in a world far removed from the blossoming courtship we see outlined in �The Accursed Cordonnier’.

Capes soon passed into the neglect so common in this field. After The Skeleton Key was published in 1919, nothing more appeared in Britain until a couple of re-issues in 1928 and 1929 – and then that was it. His neglect over the years is strange indeed, especially when other authors from the same era are reprinted mercilessly.

I hope that this new edition of The Black Reaper will bring Bernard Capes back into the eye of the ghost story enthusiast, and a wider public. He deserves reprinting and a second chance. We must hope that his usual bad luck died with him.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

February 2017




THE BLACK REAPER (#ueee37b72-d2a2-5530-8341-6e514af1dd11)


Taken from the Q— Register of Local Events,

as Compiled from Authentic Narratives

Now I am to tell you of a thing that befell in the year 1665 of the Great Plague, when the hearts of certain amongst men, grown callous in wickedness upon that rebound from an inhuman austerity, were opened to the vision of a terror that moved and spoke not in the silent places of the fields. Forasmuch as, however, in the recovery from delirium a patient may marvel over the incredulity of neighbours who refuse to give credence to the presentments that have been ipso facto to him, so, the nation being sound again, and its constitution hale, I expect little but a laugh for my piety in relating of the following incident; which, nevertheless, is as essential true as that he who shall look through the knot-hole in the plank of a coffin shall acquire the evil eye.

For, indeed, in those days of a wild fear and confusion, when every condition that maketh for reason was set wandering by a devious path, and all men sitting as in a theatre of death looked to see the curtain rise upon God knows what horrors, it was vouchsafed to many to witness sights and sounds beyond the compass of Nature, and that as if the devil and his minions had profited by the anarchy to slip unobserved into the world. And I know that this is so, for all the insolence of a recovered scepticism; and, as to the unseen, we are like one that traverseth the dark with a lanthorn, himself the skipper of a little moving blot of light, but a positive mark for any secret foe without the circumference of its radiance.

Be that as it may, and whether it was our particular ill-fortune, or, as some asserted, our particular wickedness, that made of our village an inviting back-door of entrance to the Prince of Darkness, I know not; but so it is that disease and contagion are ever inclined to penetrate by way of flaws or humours where the veil of the flesh is already perforated, as a kite circleth round its quarry, looking for the weak place to strike: and, without doubt, in that land of corruption we were a very foul blot indeed.

How this came about it were idle to speculate; yet no man shall have the hardihood to affirm that it was otherwise. Nor do I seek to extenuate myself, who was in truth no better than my neighbours in most that made us a community of drunkards and forswearers both lewd and abominable. For in that village a depravity that was like madness had come to possess the heads of the people, and no man durst take his stand on honesty or even common decency, for fear he should be set upon by his comrades and drummed out of his government on a pint pot. Yet for myself I will say was one only redeeming quality, and that was the pure love I bore to my solitary orphaned child, the little Margery.

Now, our vicar – a patient and God-fearing man, for all his predial tithes were impropriated by his lord, that was an absentee and a sheriff in London – did little to stem that current of lewdness that had set in strong with the Restoration. And this was from no lack of virtue in himself, but rather from a natural invertebracy, as one may say, and an order of mind that, yet being no order, is made the sport of any sophister with a wit for paragram. Thus it always is that mere example is of little avail without precept – of which, however, it is an important condition – and that the successful directors of men be not those who go to the van and lead, unconscious of the gibes and mockery in their rear, but such rather as drive the mob before them with a smiting hand and no infirmity of purpose. So, if a certain affection for our pastor dwelt in our hearts, no tittle of respect was there to leaven it and justify his high office before Him that consigned the trust; and ever deeper and deeper we sank in the slough of corruption, until was brought about this pass – that naught but some scourging despotism of the Church should acquit us of the fate of Sodom. That such, at the eleventh hour, was vouchsafed us of God’s mercy, it is my purpose to show; and, doubtless, this offering of a loop-hole was to account by reason of the devil’s having debarked his reserves, as it were, in our port; and so quartering upon us a soldiery that we were, at no invitation of our own, to maintain, stood us a certain extenuation.

It was late in the order of things before in our village so much as a rumour of the plague reached us. Newspapers were not in those days, and reports, being by word of mouth, travelled slowly, and were often spent bullets by the time they fell amongst us. Yet, by May, some gossip there was of the distemper having gotten a hold in certain quarters of London and increasing, and this alarmed our people, though it made no abatement of their profligacy. But presently the reports coming thicker, with confirmation of the terror and panic that was enlarging on all sides, we must take measures for our safety; though into June and July, when the pestilence was raging, none infected had come our way, and that from our remote and isolated position. Yet it needs but fear for the crown to that wickedness that is self-indulgence; and forasmuch as this fear fattens like a toadstool on the decomposition it springs from, it grew with us to the proportions that we were set to kill or destroy any that should approach us from the stricken districts.

And then suddenly there appeared in our midst he that was appointed to be our scourge and our cautery.

Whence he came, or how, no man of us could say. Only one day we were a community of roysterers and scoffers, impious and abominable, and the next he was amongst us smiting and thundering.

Some would have it that he was an old collegiate of our vicar’s, but at last one of those wandering Dissenters that found never as now the times opportune to their teachings – a theory to which our minister’s treatment of the stranger gave colour. For from the moment of his appearance he took the reins of government, as it were, appropriating the pulpit and launching his bolts therefrom, with the full consent and encouragement of the other. There were those, again, who were resolved that his commission was from a high place, whither news of our infamy had reached, and that we had best give him a respectful hearing, lest we should run a chance of having our hearing stopped altogether. A few were convinced he was no man at all, but rather a fiend sent to thresh us with the scourge of our own contriving, that we might be tender, like steak, for the cooking; and yet other few regarded him with terror, as an actual figure or embodiment of the distemper.

But, generally, after the first surprise, the feeling of resentment at his intrusion woke and gained ground, and we were much put about that he should have thus assumed the pastorship without invitation, quartering with our vicar, who kept himself aloof and was little seen, and seeking to drive us by terror, and amazement, and a great menace of retribution. For, in truth, this was not the method to which we were wont, and it both angered and disturbed us.

This feeling would have enlarged the sooner, perhaps, were it not for a certain restraining influence possessed of the newcomer, which neighboured him with darkness and mystery. For he was above the common tall, and ever appeared in public with a slouched hat, that concealed all the upper part of his face and showed little otherwise but the dense black beard that dropped upon his breast like a shadow.

Now with August came a fresh burst of panic, how the desolation increased and the land was overrun with swarms of infected persons seeking an asylum from the city; and our anger rose high against the stranger, who yet dwelt with us and encouraged the distemper of our minds by furious denunciations of our guilt.

Thus far, for all the corruption of our hearts, we had maintained the practice of church-going, thinking, maybe, poor fools! to hoodwink the Almighty with a show of reverence; but now, as by a common consent, we neglected the observances and loitered of a Sabbath in the fields, and thither at the last the strange man pursued us and ended the matter.

For so it fell that at the time of the harvest’s ripening a goodish body of us males was gathered one Sunday for coolness about the neighbourhood of the dripping well, whose waters were a tradition, for they had long gone dry. This well was situate in a sort of cave or deep scoop at the foot of a cliff of limestone, to which the cultivated ground that led up to it fell somewhat. High above, the cliff broke away into a wide stretch of pasture land, but the face of the rock itself was all patched with bramble and little starved birch trees clutching for foothold; and in like manner the excavation beneath was half-stifled and gloomed over with undergrowth, so that it looked a place very dismal and uninviting, save in the ardour of the dog-days.

Within, where had been the basin, was a great shattered hole going down to unknown depths; and this no man had thought to explore, for a mystery held about the spot that was doubtless the foster-child of ignorance.

But to the front of the well and of the cliff stretched a noble field of corn, and this field was of an uncommon shape, being, roughly, a vast circle and a little one joined by a neck and in suggestion not unlike an hour-glass; and into the crop thereof, which was of goodly weight and condition, were the first sickles to be put on the morrow.

Now as we stood or lay around, idly discussing of the news, and congratulating ourselves that we were for once quit of our incubus, to us along the meadow path, his shadow jumping on the corn, came the very subject of our gossip.

He strode up, looking neither to right nor left, and with the first word that fell, low and damnatory, from his lips, we knew that the moment had come when, whether for good or evil, he intended to cast us from him and acquit himself of further responsibility in our direction.

�Behold!’ he cried, pausing over against us, �I go from among ye! Behold, ye that have not obeyed nor inclined your ear, but have walked everyone in the imagination of his evil heart! Saith the Lord, “I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto Me, I will not hearken unto them.”’

His voice rang out, and a dark silence fell among us. It was pregnant, but with little of humility. We had had enough of this interloper and his abuse. Then, like Jeremiah, he went to prophesy:

�I read ye, men of Anathoth, and the murder in your hearts. Ye that have worshipped the shameful thing and burned incense to Baal – shall I cringe that ye devise against me, or not rather pray to the Lord of Hosts, “Let me see Thy vengeance on them”? And he answereth, “I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth, even the year of their visitation.”’

Now, though I was no participator in that direful thing that followed, I stood by, nor interfered, and so must share the blame. For there were men risen all about, and their faces lowering, and it seemed that it would go hard with the stranger were he not more particular.

But he moved forward, with a stately and commanding gesture, and stood with his back to the well-scoop and threatened us and spoke.

�Lo!’ he shrieked, �your hour is upon you! Ye shall be mowed down like ripe corn, and the shadow of your name shall be swept from the earth! The glass of your iniquity is turned, and when its sand is run through, not a man of ye shall be!’

He raised his arm aloft, and in a moment he was overborne. Even then, as all say, none got sight of his face; but he fought with lowered head, and his black beard flapped like a wounded crow. But suddenly a boy-child ran forward of the bystanders, crying and screaming—

�Hurt him not! They are hurting him – oh, me! oh, me!’

And from the sweat and struggle came his voice, gasping, �I spare the little children!’

Then only I know of the surge and the crash towards the well-mouth, of an instant cessation of motion, and immediately of men toiling hither and thither with boulders and huge blocks, which they piled over the rent, and so sealed it with a cromlech of stone.

That, in the heat of rage and of terror, we had gone further than we had at first designed, our gloom and our silence on the morrow attested. True we were quit of our incubus, but on such terms as not even the severity of the times could excuse. For the man had but chastised us to our improvement; and to destroy the scourge is not to condone the offence. For myself, as I bore up the little Margery to my shoulder on my way to the reaping, I felt the burden of guilt so great as that I found myself muttering of an apology to the Lord that I durst put myself into touch with innocence. �But the walk would fatigue her otherwise,’ I murmured; and, when we were come to the field, I took and carried her into the upper or little meadow, out of reach of the scythes, and placed her to sleep amongst the corn, and so left her with a groan.

But when I was come anew to my comrades, who stood at the lower extremity of the field – and this was the bottom of the hour-glass, so to speak – I was aware of a stir amongst them, and, advancing closer, that they were all intent upon the neighbourhood of the field I had left, staring like distraught creatures, and holding well together, as if in a panic. Therefore, following the direction of their eyes, and of one that pointed with rigid finger, I turned me about, and looked whence I had come; and my heart went with a somersault, and in a moment I was all sick and dazed.

For I saw, at the upper curve of the meadow, where the well lay in gloom, that a man had sprung out of the earth, as it seemed, and was started reaping; and the face of this man was all in shadow, from which his beard ran out and down like a stream of gall.

He reaped swiftly and steadily, swinging like a pendulum; but, though the sheaves fell to him right and left, no swish of the scythe came to us, nor any sound but the beating of our own hearts.

Now, from the first moment of my looking, no doubt was in my lost soul but that this was him we had destroyed come back to verify his prophecy in ministering to the vengeance of the Lord of Hosts; and at the thought a deep groan rent my bosom, and was echoed by those about me. But scarcely was it issued when a second terror smote me as that I near reeled. Margery – my babe! put to sleep there in the path of the Black Reaper!

At that, though they called to me, I sprang forward like a madman, and running along the meadow, through the neck of the glass, reached the little thing, and stooped and snatched her into my arms. She was sound and unfrighted, as I felt with a burst of thankfulness; but, looking about me, as I turned again to fly, I had near dropped in my tracks for the sickness and horror I experienced in the nearer neighbourhood of the apparition. For, though it never raised its head, or changed the steady swing of its shoulders, I knew that it was aware of and was reaping at me. Now, I tell you, it was ten yards away, yet the point of the scythe came gliding upon me silently, like a snake, through the stalks, and at that I screamed out and ran for my life.

I escaped, sweating with terror; but when I was sped back to the men, there was all the village collected, and our vicar to the front, praying from a throat that rattled like a dead leaf in a draught. I know not what he said, for the low cries of the women filled the air; but his face was white as a smock, and his fingers writhed in one another like a knot of worms.

�The plague is upon us!’ they wailed. �We shall be mowed down like ripe corn!’

And even as they shrieked the Black Reaper paused, and, putting away his scythe, stooped and gathered up a sheaf in his arms and stood it on end. And, with the very act, a man – one that had been forward in yesterday’s business – fell down amongst us yelling and foaming; and he rent his breast in his frenzy, revealing the purple blot thereon, and he passed blaspheming. And the reaper stooped and stooped again, and with every sheaf he gathered together one of us fell stricken and rolled in his agony, while the rest stood by palsied.

But, when at length all that was cut was accounted for, and a dozen of us were gone each to his judgment, and he had taken up his scythe to reap anew, a wild fury woke in the breasts of some of the more abandoned and reckless amongst us.

�It is not to be tolerated!’ they cried. �Let us at once fire the corn and burn this sorcerer!’

And with that, some five or six of them, emboldened by despair, ran up into the little field, and, separating, had out each his flint and fired the crop in his own place, and retreated to the narrow part for safety.

Now the reaper rested on his scythe, as if unexpectedly acquitted of a part of his labour; but the corn flamed up in these five or six directions, and was consumed in each to the compass of a single sheaf: whereat the fire died away. And with its dying the faces of those that had ventured went black as coal; and they flung up their arms, screaming, and fell prone where they stood, and were hidden from our view.

Then, indeed, despair seized upon all of us that survived, and we made no doubt but that we were to be exterminated and wiped from the earth for our sins, as were the men of Anathoth. And for an hour the Black Reaper mowed and trussed, till he had cut all from the little upper field and was approached to the neck of juncture with the lower and larger. And before us that remained, and who were drawn back amongst the trees, weeping and praying, a fifth of our comrades lay foul, and dead, and sweltering, and all blotched over with the dreadful mark of the pestilence.

Now, as I say, the reaper was nearing the neck of juncture; and so we knew that if he should once pass into the great field towards us and continue his mowing, not one of us should be left to give earnest of our repentance.

Then, as it seemed, our vicar came to a resolution, moving forward with a face all wrapt and entranced; and he strode up the meadow path and approached the apparition, and stretched out his arms to it entreating. And we saw the other pause, awaiting him; and, as he came near, put forth his hand, and so, gently, on the good old head. But as we looked, catching at our breaths with a little pathos of hope, the priestly face was thrown back radiant, and the figure of him that would give his life for us sank amongst the yet standing corn and disappeared from our sight.

So at last we yielded ourselves fully to our despair; for if our pastor should find no mercy, what possibility of it could be for us!

It was in this moment of an uttermost grief and horror, when each stood apart from his neighbour, fearing the contamination of his presence, that there was vouchsafed to me, of God’s pity, a wild and sudden inspiration. Still to my neck fastened the little Margery – not frighted, it seemed, but mazed – and other babes there were in plenty, that clung to their mothers’ skirts and peeped out, wondering at the strange show.

I ran to the front and shrieked: �The children! the children! He will not touch the little children! Bring them and set them in his path!’ And so crying I sped to the neck of the meadow, and loosened the soft arms from my throat, and put the little one down within the corn.

Now at once the women saw what I would be at, and full a score of them snatched up their babes and followed me. And here we were reckless for ourselves; but we knelt the innocents in one close line across the neck of land, so that the Black Reaper should not find space between any of them to swing his scythe. And having done this, we fell back with our hearts bubbling in our breasts, and we stood panting and watched.

He had paused over that one full sheaf of his reaping; but now, with the sound of the women’s running, he seized his weapon again and set to upon the narrow belt of corn that yet separated him from the children. But presently, coming out upon the tender array, his scythe stopped and trailed in his hand, and for a full minute he stood like a figure of stone. Then thrice he walked slowly backwards and forwards along the line, seeking for an interval whereby he might pass; and the children laughed at him like silver bells, showing no fear, and perchance meeting that of love in his eyes that was hidden from us.

Then of a sudden he came to before the midmost of the line, and, while we drew our breath like dying souls, stooped and snapped his blade across his knee, and, holding the two parts in his hand, turned and strode back into the shadow of the dripping well. There arrived, he paused once more, and, twisting him about, waved his hand once to us and vanished into the blackness. But there were those who affirmed that in that instant of his turning, his face was revealed, and that it was a face radiant and beautiful as an angel’s.

Such is the history of the wild judgment that befell us, and by grace of the little children was foregone; and such was the stranger whose name no man ever heard tell, but whom many have since sought to identify with that spirit of the pestilence that entered into men’s hearts and confounded them, so that they saw visions and were afterwards confused in their memories.

But this I may say, that when at last our courage would fetch us to that little field of death, we found it to be all blackened and blasted, so as nothing would take root there then or ever since; and it was as if, after all the golden sand of the hour-glass was run away and the lives of the most impious with it, the destroyer saw fit to stay his hand for sake of the babes that he had pronounced innocent, and for such as were spared to witness to His judgment. And this I do here, with a heart as contrite as if it were the morrow of the visitation, the which with me it ever has remained.




THE VANISHING HOUSE (#ueee37b72-d2a2-5530-8341-6e514af1dd11)


�My grandfather,’ said the banjo, �drank “dog’s-nose”, my father drank “dog’s-nose”, and I drink “dog’s-nose”. If that ain’t heredity, there’s no virtue in the board schools.’

�Ah!’ said the piccolo, �you’re always a-boasting of your science. And so, I suppose, your son’ll drink “dog’s-nose”, too?’

�No,’ retorted the banjo, with a rumbling laugh, like wind in the bung-hole of an empty cask; �for I ain’t got none. The family ends with me; which is a pity, for I’m a full-stop to be proud on.’

He was an enormous, tun-bellied person – a mere mound of expressionless flesh, whose size alone was an investment that paid a perpetual dividend of laughter. When, as with the rest of his company, his face was blackened, it looked like a specimen coal on a pedestal in a museum.

There was Christmas company in the Good Intent, and the sanded tap-room, with its trestle tables and sprigs of holly stuck under sooty beams, reeked with smoke and the steam of hot gin and water.

�How much could you put down of a night, Jack?’ said a little grinning man by the door.

�Why,’ said the banjo, �enough to lay the dustiest ghost as ever walked.’

�Could you, now?’ said the little man.

�Ah!’ said the banjo, chuckling. �There’s nothing like settin’ one sperit to lay another; and there I could give you proof number two of heredity.’

�What! Don’t you go for to say you ever see’d a ghost?’

�Haven’t I? What are you whisperin’ about, you blushful chap there by the winder?’

�I was only remarkin’, sir, ’twere snawin’ like the devil!’

�Is it? Then the devil has been misjudged these eighteen hundred and ninety odd years.’

�But did you ever see a ghost?’ said the little grinning man, pursuing his subject.

�No, I didn’t, sir,’ mimicked the banjo, �saving in coffee grounds. But my grandfather in his cups see’d one; which brings us to number three in the matter of heredity.’

�Give us the story, Jack,’ said the �bones’, whose agued shins were extemporising a rattle on their own account before the fire.

�Well, I don’t mind,’ said the fat man. �It’s seasonable; and I’m seasonable, like the blessed plum-pudden, I am; and the more burnt brandy you set about me, the richer and headier I’ll go down.’

�You’d be a jolly old pudden to digest,’ said the piccolo.

�You blow your aggrawation into your pipe and sealing-wax the stops,’ said his friend.

He drew critically at his �churchwarden’ a moment or so, leaned forward, emptied his glass into his capacious receptacles, and, giving his stomach a shift, as if to accommodate it to its new burden, proceeded as follows:

�Music and malt is my nat’ral inheritance. My grandfather blew his “dog’s-nose”, and drank his clarinet like a artist; and my father—’

�What did you say your grandfather did?’ asked the piccolo.

�He played the clarinet.’

�You said he blew his “dog’s-nose”.’

�Don’t be an ass, Fred!’ said the banjo, aggrieved. �How the blazes could a man blow his dog’s nose, unless he muzzled it with a handkercher, and then twisted its tail? He played the clarinet, I say; and my father played the musical glasses, which was a form of harmony pertiklerly genial to him. Amongst us we’ve piped out a good long century – ah! we have, for all I look sich a babby bursting on sops and spoon meat.’

�What!’ said the little man by the door. �You don’t include them cockt hatses in your experience?’

�My grandfather wore ’em, sir. He wore a play-actin’ coat, too, and buckles to his shoes, when he’d got any; and he and a friend or two made a permanency of “waits” (only they called ’em according to the season), and got their profit goin’ from house to house, principally in the country, and discoursin’ music at the low rate of whatever they could get for it.’

�Ain’t you comin’ to the ghost, Jack?’ said the little man hungrily.

�All in course, sir. Well, gentlemen, it was hard times pretty often with my grandfather and his friends, as you may suppose; and never so much as when they had to trudge it across country, with the nor’-easter buzzin’ in their teeth and the snow piled on their cockt hats like lemon sponge on entry dishes. The rewards, I’ve heard him say – for he lived to be ninety, nevertheless – was poor compensation for the drifts, and the influenza, and the broken chilblains; but now and again they’d get a fair skinful of liquor from a jolly squire, as ’d set ’em up like boggarts mended wi’ new broomsticks.’

�Ho-haw!’ broke in a hurdle-maker in a corner; and then, regretting the publicity of his merriment, put his fingers bashfully to his stubble lips.

�Now,’ said the banjo, �it’s of a pertikler night and a pertikler skinful that I’m a-going to tell you; and that night fell dark, and that skinful were took a hundred years ago this December, as I’m a Jack-pudden!’

He paused for a moment for effect, before he went on:

�They were down in the sou’-west country, which they little knew; and were anighing Winchester city, or should ’a’ been. But they got muzzed on the ungodly downs, and before they guessed, they was off the track. My good hat! there they was, as lost in the snow as three nut-shells a-sinkin’ into a hasty pudden. Well, they wandered round; pretty confident at first, but getting madder and madder as every sense of their bearings slipped from them. And the bitter cold took their vitals, so they saw nothing but a great winding sheet stretched abroad for to wrap their dead carcasses in.

�At last my grandfather he stopt and pulled hisself together with an awful face, and says he: “We’re Christmas pie for the carrying-on crows if we don’t prove ourselves human. Let’s fetch our pipes and blow our trouble into ’em.” So they stood together, like as if they were before a house, and they played “Kate of Aberdare” mighty dismal and flat, for their fingers froze to the keys.

�Now, I tell you, they hadn’t climbed over the first stave, when there come a skirl of wind and spindrift of snow as almost took them off their feet; and, on the going down of it, Jem Sloke, as played the hautboy, dropped the reed from his mouth, and called out, “Sakes alive! if we fools ain’t been standin’ outside a gentleman’s gate all the time, and not knowin’ it!”

�You might ’a’ knocked the three of ’em down wi’ a barley straw, as they stared and stared, and then fell into a low, enjoyin’ laugh. For they was standin’ not six fut from a tall iron gate in a stone wall, and behind these was a great house showin’ out dim, with the winders all lighted up.

�“Lord!” chuckled my grandfather, “to think o’ the tricks o’ this vagarious country! But, as we’re here, we’ll go on and give ’em a taste of our quality.”

�They put new heart into the next movement, as you may guess; and they hadn’t fair started on it, when the door of the house swung open, and down the shaft of light that shot out as far as the gate there come a smiling young gal, with a tray of glasses in her hands.

�Now she come to the bars; and she took and put a glass through, not sayin’ nothin’, but invitin’ someone to drink with a silent laugh.

�Did anyone take that glass? Of course he did, you’ll be thinkin’; and you’ll be thinkin’ wrong. Not a man of the three moved. They was struck like as stone, and their lips was gone the colour of sloe berries. Not a man took the glass. For why? The moment the gal presented it, each saw the face of a thing lookin’ out of the winder over the porch, and the face was hidjus beyond words, and the shadder of it, with the light behind, stretched out and reached to the gal, and made her hidjus, too.

�At last my grandfather give a groan and put out his hand; and, as he did it, the face went, and the gal was beautiful to see agen.

�“Death and the devil!” said he. “It’s one or both, either way; and I prefer ’em hot to cold!”

�He drank off half the glass, smacked his lips, and stood staring a moment.

�“Dear, dear!” said the gal, in a voice like falling water, “you’ve drunk blood, sir!”

�My grandfather gave a yell, slapped the rest of the liquor in the faces of his friends, and threw the cup agen the bars. It broke with a noise like thunder, and at that he up’d with his hands and fell full length into the snow.’

There was a pause. The little man by the door was twisting nervously in his chair.

�He came to – of course, he came to?’ said he at length.

�He come to,’ said the banjo solemnly, �in the bitter break of dawn; that is, he come to as much of hisself as he ever was after. He give a squiggle and lifted his head; and there was he and his friends a-lyin’ on the snow of the high downs.’

�And the house and the gal?’

�Narry a sign of either, sir, but just the sky and the white stretch; and one other thing.’

�And what was that?’

�A stain of red sunk in where the cup had spilt.’

There was a second pause, and the banjo blew into the bowl of his pipe.

�They cleared out of that neighbourhood double quick, you’ll bet,’ said he. �But my grandfather was never the same man agen. His face took purple, while his friends’ only remained splashed with red, same as birth marks; and, I tell you, if ever he ventur’d upon “Kate of Aberdare”, his cheeks swelled up to the reed of his clarinet, like as a blue plum on a stalk. And forty years after, he died of what they call solution of blood to the brain.’

�And you can’t have better proof than that,’ said the little man.

�That’s what I say,’ said the banjo. �Next player, gentlemen, please.’




THE THING IN THE FOREST (#ulink_335f0777-b28a-5aba-b0a4-d2ef99864fa7)


Into the snow-locked forests of Upper Hungary steal wolves in winter; but there is a footfall worse than theirs to knock upon the heart of the lonely traveller.

One December evening Elspet, the young, newly wedded wife of the woodman Stefan, came hurrying over the lower slopes of the White Mountains from the town where she had been all day marketing. She carried a basket with provisions on her arm; her plump cheeks were like a couple of cold apples; her breath spoke short, but more from nervousness than exhaustion. It was nearing dusk, and she was glad to see the little lonely church in the hollow below, the hub, as it were, of many radiating paths through the trees, one of which was the road to her own warm cottage yet a half-mile away.

She paused a moment at the foot of the slope, undecided about entering the little chill, silent building and making her plea for protection to the great battered stone image of Our Lady of Succour which stood within by the confessional box; but the stillness and the growing darkness decided her, and she went on. A spark of fire glowing through the presbytery window seemed to repel rather than attract her, and she was glad when the convolutions of the path hid it from her sight. Being new to the district, she had seen very little of Father Ruhl as yet, and somehow the penetrating knowledge and burning eyes of the pastor made her feel uncomfortable.

The soft drift, the lane of tall, motionless pines, stretched on in a quiet like death. Somewhere the sun, like a dead fire, had fallen into opalescent embers faintly luminous: they were enough only to touch the shadows with a ghastlier pallor. It was so still that the light crunch in the snow of the girl’s own footfalls trod on her heart like a desecration.

Suddenly there was something near her that had not been before. It had come like a shadow, without more sound or warning. It was here – there – behind her. She turned, in mortal panic, and saw a wolf. With a strangled cry and trembling limbs she strove to hurry on her way; and always she knew, though there was no whisper of pursuit, that the gliding shadow followed in her wake. Desperate in her terror, she stopped once more and faced it.

A wolf! – was it a wolf? O who could doubt it! Yet the wild expression in those famished eyes, so lost, so pitiful, so mingled of insatiable hunger and human need! Condemned, for its unspeakable sins, to take this form with sunset, and so howl and snuffle about the doors of men until the blessed day released it. A werewolf – not a wolf.

That terrific realisation of the truth smote the girl as with a knife out of darkness: for an instant she came near fainting. And then a low moan broke into her heart and flooded it with pity. So lost, so infinitely hopeless. And so pitiful – yes, in spite of all, so pitiful. It had sinned, beyond any sinning that her innocence knew or her experience could gauge; but she was a woman, very blest, very happy, in her store of comforts and her surety of love. She knew that it was forbidden to succour these damned and nameless outcasts, to help or sympathise with them in any way. But—

There was good store of meat in her basket, and who need ever know or tell? With shaking hands she found and threw a sop to the desolate brute – then, turning, sped upon her way.

But at home her secret sin stood up before her, and, interposing between her husband and herself, threw its shadow upon both their faces. What had she dared – what done? By her own act forfeited her birthright of innocence; by her own act placed herself in the power of the evil to which she had ministered. All that night she lay in shame and horror, and all the next day, until Stefan had come about his dinner and gone again, she moved in a dumb agony. Then, driven unendurably by the memory of his troubled, bewildered face, as twilight threatened she put on her cloak and went down to the little church in the hollow to confess her sin.

�Mother, forgive, and save me,’ she whispered, as she passed the statue.

After ringing the bell for the confessor, she had not knelt long at the confessional box in the dim chapel, cold and empty as a waiting vault, when the chancel rail clicked, and the footsteps of Father Ruhl were heard rustling over the stones. He came, he took his seat behind the grating; and, with many sighs and falterings, Elspet avowed her guilt. And as, with bowed head, she ended, a strange sound answered her – it was like a little laugh, and yet not so much like a laugh as a snarl. With a shock as of death she raised her face. It was Father Ruhl who sat there – and yet it was not Father Ruhl. In that time of twilight his face was already changing, narrowing, becoming wolfish – the eyes rounded and the jaw slavered. She gasped, and shrunk back; and at that, barking and snapping at the grating, with a wicked look he dropped – and she heard him coming. Sheer horror lent her wings. With a scream she sprang to her feet and fled. Her cloak caught in something – there was a wrench and crash and, like a flood, oblivion overswept her.

It was the old deaf and near senile sacristan who found them lying there, the woman unhurt but insensible, the priest crushed out of life by the fall of the ancient statue, long tottering to its collapse. She recovered, for her part: for his, no one knows where he lies buried. But there were dark stories of a baying pack that night, and of an empty, bloodstained pavement when they came to seek for the body.




THE ACCURSED CORDONNIER (#ulink_103fa50f-14d0-5711-a716-fdaa754127ce)


I

Poor Chrymelus, I remember, arose from the diversion of

a card-table, and dropped into the dwellings of darkness.

Hervey

It must be confessed that Amos Rose was considerably out of his element in the smoking-room off Portland Place. All the hour he remained there he was conscious of a vague rising nausea, due not in the least to the visible atmosphere – to which, indeed, he himself contributed languorously from a crackling spilliken of South American tobacco rolled in a maize leaf and strongly tinctured with opium – but to the almost brutal post-prandial facundity of its occupants.

Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or give the comfort that Nature denies.

Yet he was a little bit of each – poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a �three-bottle’ JP, who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessness, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection – self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable. Another evolution, only less negative, was of a certain desperate pugnacity, that derived from a sense of the inhuman injustice conveyed in the fact that temperamental debility not only debarred him from that bold and healthy expression of self that it was his nature to wish, but made him actually appear to act in contradiction to his own really sweet and sound predilections.

So he sat (in the present instance, listening and revolting) in a travesty of resignation between the stools of submission and defiance.

The neurotic youth of today renews no ante-existent type. You will look in vain for a face like Amos’s amongst the busts of the recovered past. The same weakness of outline you may point to – the sheep-like features falling to a blunt prow; the lax jaw and pinched temples – but not to that which expresses a consciousness that combative effort in a world of fruitless results is a lost desire.

Superficially, the figure in the smoking-room was that of a long, weedy young man – hairless as to his face; scalped with a fine lank fleece of neutral tint; pale-eyed, and slave to a bored and languid expression, over which he had little control, though it frequently misrepresented his mood. He was dressed scrupulously, though not obtrusively, in the mode, and was smoking a pungent cigarette with an air that seemed balanced between a genuine effort at self abstraction and a fear of giving offence by a too pronounced show of it. In this state, flying bubbles of conversation broke upon him as he sat a little apart and alone.

�Johnny, here’s Callander preaching a divine egotism.’

�Is he? Tell him to beg a lock of the Henbery’s hair. Ain’t she the dog that bit him?’

�Once bit, twice shy.’

�Rot! – In the case of a woman? I’m covered with their scars.’

�What,’ thought Rose, �induced me to accept an invitation to this person’s house?’

�A divine egotism, eh? It jumps with the dear Sarah’s humour. The beggar is an imitative beggar.’

�Let the beggar speak for himself. He’s in earnest. Haven’t we been bred on the principle of self-sacrifice, till we’ve come to think a man’s self is his uncleanest possession?’

�There’s no thinking about it. We’ve long been alarmed on your account, I can assure you.’

�Oh! I’m no saint.’

�Not you. Your ecstasies are all of the flesh.’

�Don’t be gross. I—’

�Oh! take a whisky and seltzer.’

�If I could escape without exciting observation,’ thought Rose.

Lady Sarah Henbery was his hostess, and the inspired projector of a new scheme of existence (that was, in effect, the repudiation of any scheme) that had become quite the �thing’. She had found life an arbitrary design – a coil of days (like fancy pebbles, dull or sparkling) set in the form of a main spring, and each gem responsible to the design. Then she had said, �Today shall not follow yesterday or precede tomorrow’; and she had taken her pebbles from their setting and mixed them higgledy-piggledy, and so was in the way to wear or spend one or the other as caprice moved her. And she became without design and responsibility, and was thus able to indulge a natural bent towards capriciousness to the extent that – having a face for each and every form of social hypocrisy and licence – she was presently hardly to be put out of countenance by the extremest expression of either.

It followed that her reunions were popular with worldlings of a certain order.

By-and-by Amos saw his opportunity, and slipped out into a cold and foggy night.

II

De savoir votr’ grand age,

Nous serions curieux;

A voir votre visage,

Vous paraissez fort vieux;

Vous avez bien cent ans,

Vous montrez bien autant?

A stranger, tall, closely wrapped and buttoned to the chin, had issued from the house at the same moment, and now followed in Rose’s footsteps as he hurried away over the frozen pavement.

Suddenly this individual overtook and accosted him. �Pardon,’ he said. �This fog baffles. We have been fellow-guests, it seems. You are walking? May I be your companion? You look a little lost yourself.’

He spoke in a rather high, mellow voice – too frank for irony.

At another time Rose might have met such a request with some slightly agitated temporising. Now, fevered with disgust of his late company, the astringency of nerve that came to him at odd moments, in the exaltation of which he felt himself ordinarily manly and human, braced him to an attitude at once modest and collected.

�I shall be quite happy,’ he said. �Only, don’t blame me if you find you are entertaining a fool unawares.’

�You were out of your element, and are piqued. I saw you there, but wasn’t introduced.’

�The loss is mine. I didn’t observe you – yes, I did!’

He shot the last words out hurriedly – as they came within the radiance of a street lamp – and his pace lessened a moment with a little bewildered jerk.

He had noticed this person, indeed – his presence and his manner. They had arrested his languid review of the frivolous forces about him. He had seen a figure, strange and lofty, pass from group to group; exchange with one a word or two, with another a grave smile; move on and listen; move on and speak; always statelily restless; never anything but an incongruous apparition in a company of which every individual was eager to assert and expound the doctrines of self.

This man had been of curious expression, too – so curious that Amos remembered to have marvelled at the little comment his presence seemed to excite. His face was absolutely hairless – as, to all evidence, was his head, upon which he wore a brown silk handkerchief loosely rolled and knotted. The features were presumably of a Jewish type – though their entire lack of accent in the form of beard or eyebrow made identification difficult – and were minutely covered, like delicate cracklin, with a network of flattened wrinkles. Ludicrous though the description, the lofty individuality of the man so surmounted all disadvantages of appearance as to overawe frivolous criticism. Partly, also, the full transparent olive of his complexion, and the pools of purple shadow in which his eyes seemed to swim like blots of resin, neutralised the superficial barrenness of his face. Forcibly, he impelled the conviction that here was one who ruled his own being arbitrarily through entire fearlessness of death.

�You saw me?’ he said, noticing with a smile his companion’s involuntary hesitation. �Then let us consider the introduction made, without further words. We will even expand to the familiarity of old acquaintanceship, if you like to fall in with the momentary humour.’

�I can see,’ said Rose, �that years are nothing to you.’

�No more than this gold piece, which I fling into the night. They are made and lost and made again.’

�You have knowledge and the gift of tongues.’

The young man spoke bewildered, but with a strange warm feeling of confidence flushing up through his habitual reserve. He had no thought why, nor did he choose his words or inquire of himself their source of inspiration.

�I have these,’ said the stranger. �The first is my excuse for addressing you.’

�You are going to ask me something.’

�What attraction—’

�Drew me to Lady Sarah’s house? I am young, rich, presumably a desirable parti. Also, I am neurotic, and without the nerve to resist.’

�Yet you knew your taste would take alarm – as it did.’

�I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue.’

�Then – excuse me – why put yours to a demoralising test?’

�I am not my own master. Any formless apprehension – any shadowy fear enslaves my will. I go to many places from the simple dread of being called upon to explain my reasons for refusing. For the same cause I may appear to acquiesce in indecencies my soul abhors; to give countenance to opinions innately distasteful to me. I am a quite colourless personality.’

�Without force or object in life?’

�Life, I think, I live for its isolated moments – the first half-dozen pulls at a cigarette, for instance, after a generous meal.’

�You take the view, then—’

�Pardon me. I take no views. I am not strong enough to take anything – not even myself – seriously.’

�Yet you know that the trail of such volitionary ineptitude reaches backwards under and beyond the closed door you once issued from?’

�Do I? I know at least that the ineptitude intensifies with every step of constitutional decadence. It may be that I am wearing down to the nerve of life. How shall I find that? diseased? Then it is no happiness to me to think it imperishable.’

�Young man, do you believe in a creative divinity?’

�Yes.’

�And believe without resentment?’

�I think God hands over to His apprentices the moulding of vessels that don’t interest Him.’

The stranger twitched himself erect.

�I beg you not to be profane,’ he said.

�I am not,’ said Rose. �I don’t know why I confide in you, or what concern I have to know. I can only say my instincts, through bewildering mental suffering, remain religious. You take me out of myself and judge me unfairly on the result.’

�Stay. You argue that a perishing of the bodily veil reveals the soul. Then the outlook of the latter should be the cleaner.’

�It gazes through a blind of corruption. It was never designed to stand naked in the world’s market-places.’

�And whose the fault that it does?’

�I don’t know. I only feel that I am utterly lonely and helpless.’

The stranger laughed scornfully.

�You can feel no sympathy with my state?’ said Rose.

�Not a grain. To be conscious of a soul, yet to remain a craven under the temporal tyranny of the flesh; fearful of revolting, though the least imaginative flight of the spirit carries it at once beyond any bodily influence! Oh, sir! Fortune favours the brave.’

�She favours the fortunate,’ said the young man, with a melancholy smile. �Like a banker, she charges a commission on small accounts. At trifling deposits she turns up her nose. If you would escape her tax, you must keep a fine large balance at her house.’

�I dislike parables,’ said the stranger drily.

�Then, here is a fact in illustration. I have an acquaintance, an impoverished author, who anchored his ark of hope on Mount Olympus twenty years ago. During all that time he has never ceased to send forth his doves; only to have them return empty beaked with persistent regularity. Three days ago the olive branch – a mere sprouting twig – came home. For the first time a magazine – an indifferent one – accepted a story of his and offered him a pound for it. He acquiesced; and the same night was returned to him from an important American firm an understamped MS, on which he had to pay excess postage, half a crown. That was Fortune’s commission.’

�Bully the jade, and she will love you.’

�Your wisdom has not learned to confute that barbarism?’

The stranger glanced at his companion with some expression of dislike.

�The sex figures in your ideals, I see,’ said he. �Believe my long experience that its mere animal fools constitute its only excuse for existing – though’ (he added under his breath) �even they annoy one by their monogamous prejudices.’

�I won’t hear that with patience,’ said Rose. �Each sex in its degree. Each is wearifully peevish over the hateful rivalry between mind and matter; but the male only has the advantage of distractions.’

�This,’ said the stranger softly, as if to himself, �is the woeful proof, indeed, of decadence. Man waives his prerogative of lordship over the irreclaimable savagery of earth. He has warmed his temperate house of clay to be a hot-house to his imagination, till the very walls are frail and eaten with fever.’

�Christ spoke of no spiritual division between the sexes.’

There followed a brief silence. Preoccupied, the two moved slowly through the fog, that was dashed ever and anon with cloudy blooms of lamplight.

�I wish to ask you,’ said the stranger at length, �in what has the teaching of Christ proved otherwise than so impotent to reform mankind, as to make one sceptical as to the divinity of the teacher?’

�Why, what is your age?’ asked Rose in a tone of surprise.

�I am a hundred tonight.’

The astounded young man jumped in his walk.

�A hundred!’ he exclaimed. �And you cannot answer that question yourself?’

�I asked you to answer it. But never mind. I see faith in you like a garden of everlastings – as it should be – as of course it should be. Yet disbelievers point to inconsistencies. There was a reviling Jew, for instance, to whom Christ is reported to have shown resentment quite incompatible with His teaching.’

�Whom do you mean?’

�Cartaphilus; who was said to be condemned to perpetual wandering.’

�A legend,’ cried Amos scornfully. �Bracket it with Nero’s fiddling and the hymning of Memnon.’

A second silence fell. They seemed to move in a dead and stagnant world. Presently said the stranger suddenly—

�I am quite lost; and so, I suppose, are you?’

�I haven’t an idea where we are.’

�It is two o’clock. There isn’t a soul or a mark to guide us. We had best part, and each seek his own way.’

He stopped and held out his hand.

�Two pieces of advice I should like to give you before we separate. Fall in love and take plenty of exercise.’

�Must we part?’ said Amos. �Frankly, I don’t think I like you. That sounds strange and discourteous after my ingenuous confidences. But you exhale an odd atmosphere of witchery; and your scorn braces me like a tonic. The pupils of your eyes, when I got a glimpse of them, looked like the heads of little black devils peeping out of windows. But you can’t touch my soul on the raw when my nerves are quiescent; and then I would strike any man that called me coward.’

The stranger uttered a quick, chirping laugh, like the sound of a stone on ice.

�What do you propose?’ he said.

�I have an idea you are not so lost as you pretend. If we are anywhere near shelter that you know, take me in and I will be a good listener. It is one of my negative virtues.’

�I don’t know that any addition to my last good counsel would not be an anti-climax.’

He stood musing and rubbing his hairless chin.

�Exercise – certainly. It is the golden demephitizer of the mind. I am seldom off my feet.’

�You walk much – and alone?’

�Not always alone. Periodically I am accompanied by one or another. At this time I have a companion who has tramped with me for some nine months.’

Again he pondered apart. The darkness and the fog hid his face, but he spoke his thoughts aloud.

�What matter if it does come about? Tomorrow I have the world – the mother of many daughters. And to redeem this soul – a dog of a Christian – a friend at Court!’

He turned quickly to the young man.

�Come!’ he said. �It shall be as you wish.’

�Do you know where we are?’

�We are at the entrance to Wardour Street.’

He gave a gesture of impatience, whipped a hand at his companion’s sleeve, and once more they trod down the icy echoes, going onwards.

The narrow lane reverberated to their footsteps; the drooping fog swayed sluggishly; the dead blank windows and high-shouldered doors frowned in stubborn progression and vanished behind them.

The stranger stopped in a moment where a screen of iron bars protected a shop front. From behind them shot leaden glints from old clasped bookcovers, hanging tongues of Toledo steel, croziers rich in nielli – innumerable and antique curios gathered from the lumber-rooms of history

A door to one side he opened with a latch-key. A pillar of light, seeming to smoke as the fog obscured it, was formed of the aperture.

Obeying a gesture, Rose set foot on the threshold. As he was entering, he found himself unable to forbear a thrill of effrontery.

�Tell me,’ said he. �It was not only to point a moral that you flung away that coin?’

The stranger, going before, grinned back sourly over his shoulder.

�Not only,’ he said. �It was a bad one.’

III

… La Belle Dame sans merci

Hath thee in thrall!

All down the dimly luminous passage that led from the door straight into the heart of the building, Amos was aware, as he followed his companion over the densely piled carpet, of the floating sweet scent of amber-seed. Still his own latter exaltation of nerve burned with a steady radiance. He seemed to himself bewitched – translated; a consciousness apart from yesterday; its material fibres responsive to the least or utmost shock of adventure. As he trod in the other’s footsteps, he marvelled that so lavish a display of force, so elastic a gait, could be in a centenarian.

�Are you ever tired?’ he whispered curiously.

�Never. Sometimes I long for weariness as other men desire rest.’

As the stranger spoke, he pulled aside a curtain of stately black velvet, and softly opening a door in a recess, beckoned the young man into the room beyond.

He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And here the scent was thick and motionless. Costly marqueterie; Palissy candlesticks reflected in half-concealed mirrors framed in embossed silver; antique Nankin vases brimming with potpourri; in one corner a suit of Milanese armour, fluted, damasquinée, by Felippo Negroli; in another a tripod table of porphyry, spectrally repeating in its polished surface the opal hues of a vessel of old Venetian glass half-filled with some topaz-coloured liqueur – such and many more tokens of a luxurious aestheticism wrought in the observer an immediate sense of pleasurable enervation. He noticed, with a swaying thrill of delight, that his feet were on a padded rug of Astrakhan – one of many, disposed eccentrically about the yellow tessellated-marble floor; and he noticed that the sole light in the chamber came from an iridescent globed lamp, fed with some fragrant oil, that hung near an alcove traversed by a veil of dark violet silk.

The door behind him swung gently to: his eyes half-closed in a dreamy surrender of will: the voice of the stranger speaking to him sounded far away as the cry of some lost unhappiness.

�Welcome!’ it said only.

Amos broke through his trance with a cry.

�What does it mean – all this? We step out of the fog, and here – I think it is the guest-parlour of Hell!’

�You flatter me,’ said the stranger, smiling. �Its rarest antiquity goes no further back, I think, than the eighth century. The skeleton of the place is Jacobite and comparatively modern.’

�But you – the shop!’

�Contains a little of the fruit of my wanderings.’

�You are a dealer?’

�A casual collector only. If through a representative I work my accumulations of costly lumber to a profit – say thousands per cent – it is only because utility is the first principle of Art. As to myself, here I but pitch my tent – periodically, and at long intervals.’

�An unsupervised agent must find it a lucrative post.’

�Come – there shows a little knowledge of human nature. For the first time I applaud you. But the appointment is conditional on many things. At the moment the berth is vacant. Would you like it?’

�My (paradoxically) Christian name was bestowed in compliment to a godfather, sir. I am no Jew. I have already enough to know the curse of having more.’

�I have no idea how you are called. I spoke jestingly, of course; but your answer quenches the flicker of respect I felt for you. As a matter of fact, the other’s successor is not only nominated, but is actually present in this room.’

�Indeed? You propose to fill the post yourself?’

�Not by any means. The mere suggestion is an insult to one who can trace his descent backwards at least two thousand years.’

�Yes, indeed. I meant no disparagement, but—’

�I tell you, sir,’ interrupted the stranger irritably, �my visits are periodic. I could not live in a town. I could not settle anywhere. I must always be moving. A prolonged constitutional – that is my theory of health.’

�You are always on your feet – at your age—’

�I am a hundred tonight – But – mark you – I have eaten of the Tree of Life.’

As the stranger uttered these words, he seized Rose by the wrist in a soft, firm grasp. His captive, staring at him amazed, gave out a little involuntary shriek.

�Hadn’t I better leave? There is something – nameless – I don’t know; but I should never have come in here. Let me go!’

The other, heedless, half-pulled the troubled and bewildered young man across the room, and drew him to within a foot of the curtain closing the alcove.

�Here,’ he said quietly, �is my fellow-traveller of the last nine months, fast, I believe, in sleep – unless your jarring outcry has broken it.’

Rose struggled feebly.

�Not anything shameful,’ he whimpered – �I have a dread of your manifestations.’

For answer, the other put out a hand, and swiftly and silently withdrew the curtain. A deepish recess was revealed, into which the soft glow of the lamp penetrated like moonlight. It fell in the first instance upon a couch littered with pale, uncertain shadows, and upon a crucifix that hung upon the wall within.

In the throb of his emotions, it was something of a relief to Amos to see his companion, releasing his hold of him, clasp his hands and bow his head reverently to this pathetic symbol. The cross on which the Christ hung was of ebony a foot high; the figure itself was chryselephantine and purely exquisite as a work of art.

�It is early seventeenth century,’ said the stranger suddenly, after a moment of devout silence, seeing the other’s eyes absorbed in contemplation. �It is by Duquesnoy.’ (Then, behind the back of his hand) �The rogue couldn’t forget his bacchanals even here.’

�It is a Christ of infidels,’ said Amos, with repugnance. He was adding involuntarily (his savoir faire seemed suddenly to have deserted him) – �But fit for an unbelieving—’ when his host took him up with fury—

�Dog of a Gentile! – if you dare to call me Jew!’

The dismayed start of the young man at this outburst blinded him to its paradoxical absurdity. He fell back with his heart thumping. The eyes of the stranger flickered, but in an instant he had recovered his urbanity.

�Look!’ he whispered impatiently. �The Calvary is not alone in the alcove.’

Mechanically Rose’s glance shifted to the couch; and in that moment shame and apprehension and the sickness of being were precipitated in him as in golden flakes of rapture.

Something, that in the instant of revelation had seemed part only of the soft tinted shadows, resolved itself into a presentment of loveliness so pure, and so pathetic in its innocent self-surrender to the passionate tyranny of his gaze, that the manhood in him was abashed in the very flood of its exaltation. He put a hand to his face before he looked a second time, to discipline his dazzled eyes. They were turned only upon his soul, and found it a reflected glory. Had the vision passed? His eyes, in a panic, leaped for it once more.

Yes, it was there – dreaming upon its silken pillow; a grotesque carved dragon in ivory looking down, from a corner of the fluted couch, upon its supernal beauty – a face that, at a glance, could fill the vague desire of a suffering, lonely heart – spirit informing matter with all the flush and essence of some flower of the lost garden of Eden.

And this expressed in the form of one simple slumbering girl; in its drifted heap of hair, bronze as copper-beech leaves in spring; in the very pulsing of its half-hidden bosom, and in its happy morning lips, like Psyche’s, night-parted by Love and so remaining entranced.

A long light robe, sulphur-coloured, clung to the sleeper from low throat to ankle; bands of narrow nolana-blue ribbon crossed her breast and were brought together in a loose cincture about her waist; her white, smooth feet were sandalled; one arm was curved beneath her lustrous head; the other lay relaxed and drooping. Chrysoberyls, the sea-virgins of stones, sparkled in her hair and lay in the bosom of her gown like dewdrops in an evening primrose.

The gazer turned with a deep sigh, and then a sputter of fury—

�Why do you show me this? You cruel beast, was not my life barren enough before?’

�Can it ever be so henceforward? Look again.’

�Does the devil enter? Something roars in me! Have you no fear that I shall kill you?’

�None. I cannot die.’

Amos broke into a mocking, fierce laugh. Then, his blood shooting in his veins, he seized the sleeper roughly by her hand.

�Wake!’ he cried, �and end it!’

With a sigh she lifted her head. Drowsiness and startled wonderment struggled in her eyes; but in a moment they caught the vision of the stranger standing aside, and smiled and softened. She held out her long, white arms to him.

�You have come, dear love,’ she said, in a happy, low voice, �and I was not awake to greet you.’

Rose fell on his knees.

�Oh, God in Heaven!’ he cried, �bear witness that this is monstrous and unnatural! Let me die rather than see it.’

The stranger moved forward.

�Do honour, Adnah, to this our guest; and minister to him of thy pleasure.’

The white arms dropped. The girl’s face was turned, and her eyes, solemn and witch-like, looked into Amos’s. He saw them, their irises golden-brown shot with little spars of blue; and the soul in his own seemed to rush towards them and to recoil, baffled and sobbing.

Could she have understood? He thought he saw a faint smile, a gentle shake of the head, as she slid from the couch and her sandals tapped on the marble floor.

She stooped and took him by the hand.

�Rise, I pray you,’ she said, �and I will be your handmaiden.’

She led him unresisting to a chair, and bade him sweetly to be seated. She took from him his hat and overcoat, and brought him rare wine in a cup of crystal.

�My lord will drink,’ she murmured, �and forget all but the night and Adnah.’

�You I can never forget,’ said the young man, in a broken voice.

As he drank, half-choking, the girl turned to the other, who still stood apart, silent and watchful.

�Was this wise?’ she breathed. �To summon a witness on this night of all – was this wise, beloved?’

Amos dashed the cup on the floor. The red liquid stained the marble like blood.

�No, no!’ he shrieked, springing to his feet. �Not that! It cannot be!’

In an ecstasy of passion he flung his arms about the girl, and crushed all her warm loveliness against his breast. She remained quite passive – unstartled even. Only she turned her head and whispered: �Is this thy will?’

Amos fell back, drooping, as if he had received a blow.

�Be merciful and kill me,’ he muttered. �I – even I can feel at last the nobility of death.’

Then the voice of the stranger broke, lofty and passionless.

�Tell him what you see in me.’

She answered, low and without pause, like one repeating a cherished lesson—

�I see – I have seen it for the nine months I have wandered with you – the supreme triumph of the living will. I see that this triumph, of its very essence, could not be unless you had surmounted the tyranny of any, the least, gross desire. I see that it is incompatible with sin; with offence given to oneself or others; that passion cannot live in its serene atmosphere; that it illustrates the enchantment of the flesh by the intellect; that it is happiness for evermore redeemed.’

�How do you feel this?’

�I see it reflected in myself – I, the poor visionary you took from the Northern Island. Week by week I have known it sweetening and refining in my nature. None can taste the bliss of happiness that has not you for master – none can teach it save you, whose composure is unshadowed by any terror of death.’

�And love that is passion, Adnah?’

�I hear it spoken as in a dream. It is a wicked whisper from far away. You, the lord of time and of tongues, I worship – you, only you, who are my God.’

�Hush! But the man of Nazareth?’

�Ah! His name is an echo. What divine egotism taught He?’

Where lately had Amos heard this phrase? His memory of all things real seemed suspended.

�He was a man, and He died,’ said Adnah simply.

The stranger threw back his head, with an odd expression of triumph; and almost in the same moment abased it to the crucifix on the wall.

Amos stood breathing quickly, his ears drinking in every accent of the low musical voice. Now, as she paused, he moved forward a hurried step, and addressed himself to the shadowy figure by the couch—

�Who are you, in the name of the Christ you mock and adore in a breath, that has wrought this miracle of high worship in a breathing woman?’

�I am he that has eaten of the Tree of Life.’

�Oh, forego your fables! I am not a child.’

�It could not of its nature perish’ (the voice went on evenly, ignoring the interruption). �It breathes its immortal fragrance in no transplanted garden, invisible to sinful eyes, as some suppose. When the curse fell, the angel of the flaming sword bore it to the central desert; and the garden withered, for its soul was withdrawn. Now, in the heart of the waste place that is called Tiah-Bani-Israïl, it waits in its loveliness the coming of the Son of God.’

�He has come and passed.’

It might have been an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders that twitched the tall figure by the couch. If so, it converted the gesture into a bow of reverence.

�Is He not to be revealed again in His glory? But there, set as in the crater of a mountain of sand, and inaccessible to mortal footstep, stands unperishing the glory of the earth. And its fragrance is drawn up to heaven, as through a wide chimney; and from its branches hangs the undying fruit, lustrous and opalescent; and in each shining globe the world and its starry system are reflected in miniature, moving westwards; but at night they glow, a cluster of tender moons.’

�And whence came your power to scale that which is inaccessible?’

�From Death, that, still denying me immortality, is unable to encompass my destruction.’

The young man burst into a harsh and grating laugh.

�Here is some inconsistency!’ he cried, �By your own showing you were not immortal till you ate of the fruit!’

Could it be that this simple deductive snip cut the thread of coherence? A scowl appeared to contract the lofty brow for an instant. The next, a gay chirrup intervened, like a little spark struck from the cloud.

�The pounding logic of the steam engine!’ cried the stranger, coming forward at last with an open smile. �But we pace in an altitude refined above sensuous comprehension. Perhaps before long you will see and believe. In the meantime let us be men and women enjoying the warm gifts of Fortune!’

IV

Nous pensions comme un songe

Le rГ©cit de vos maux;

Nous traitions de mensonge

Tous vos plus grands travaux!

In that one night of an unreality that seemed either an enchanted dream or a wilfully fantastic travesty of conventions, Amos alternated between fits of delirious self-surrender and a rage of resignation, from which now and again he would awake to flourish an angry little bodkin of irony.

Now, at this stage, it appeared a matter for passive acquiescence that he should be one of a trio seated at a bronze table, that might have been recovered from Herculaneum, playing three-handed cribbage with a pack of fifteenth-century cards – limned, perhaps, by some Franceso Bachiacca – and an ivory board inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl. To one side a smaller �occasional’ table held the wine, to which the young man resorted at the least invitation from Adnah.

In this connection (of cards), it would fitfully perturb him to find that he who had renounced sin with mortality, had not only a proneness to avail himself of every oversight on the part of his adversaries, but frequently to peg-up more holes than his hand entitled him to. Moreover, at such times, when the culprit’s attention was drawn to this by his guest – at first gently; later, with a little scorn – he justified his action on the assumption that it was an essential interest of all games to attempt abuse of the confidence of one’s antagonist, whose skill in checkmating any movement of this nature was in right ratio with his capacity as a player; and finally he rose, the sole winner of a sum respectable enough to allow him some ingenuous expression of satisfaction.

Thereafter conversation ensued; and it must be remarked that nothing was further from Rose’s mind than to apologise for his long intrusion and make a decent exit. Indeed, there seemed some thrill of vague expectation in the air, to the realisation of which his presence sought to contribute; and already – so rapidly grows the assurance of love – his heart claimed some protective right over the pure, beautiful creature at his feet.

For there, at a gesture from the other, had Adnah seated herself, leaning her elbow, quite innocently and simply, on the young man’s knee.

The sweet strong Moldavian wine buzzed in his head; love and sorrow and intense yearning went with flow and shock through his veins. At one moment elated by the thought that, whatever his understanding of the ethical sympathy existing between these two, their connection was, by their own acknowledgement, platonic; at another, cruelly conscious of the icy crevasse that must gape between so perfectly proportioned an organism and his own atrabilarious personality, he dreaded to avail himself of a situation that was at once an invitation and a trust; and ended by subsiding, with characteristic lameness, into mere conversational commonplace.

�You must have got over a great deal of ground,’ said he to his host, �on that constitutional hobby horse of yours?’

�A great deal of ground.’

�In all weathers?’

�In all weathers; at all times; in every country.’

�How do you manage – pardon my inquisitiveness – the little necessities of dress and boots and such things?’

�Adnah,’ said the stranger, �go fetch my walking suit and show it to our guest.’

The girl rose, went silently from the room, and returned in a moment with a single garment, which she laid in Rose’s hands.

He examined it curiously. It was a marvel of sartorial tact and ingenuity; so fashioned that it would have appeared scarcely a solecism on taste in any age. Built in one piece to resemble many, and of the most particularly chosen material, it was contrived and ventilated for any exigencies of weather and of climate, and could be doffed or assumed at the shortest notice. About it were cunningly distributed a number of strong pockets or purses for the reception of diverse articles, from a comb to a sandwich-box; and the position of these was so calculated as not to interfere with the symmetry of the whole.

�It is indeed an excellent piece of work,’ said Amos, with considerable appreciation; for he held no contempt for the art which sometimes alone seemed to justify his right of existence.

�Your praise is deserved,’ said the stranger, smiling, �seeing that it was contrived for me by one whose portrait, by Giambattista Moroni, now hangs in your National Gallery.’

�I have heard of it, I think. Is the fellow still in business?’

�The tailor or the artist? The first died bankrupt in prison – about the year 1560, it must have been. It was fortunate for me, inasmuch as I acquired the garment for nothing, the man disappearing before I had settled his claim.’

Rose’s jaw dropped. He looked at the beautiful face reclining against him. It expressed no doubt, no surprise, no least sense of the ludicrous.

�Oh, my God!’ he muttered, and ploughed his forehead with his hands. Then he looked up again with a pallid grin.

�I see,’ he said. �You play upon my fancied credulity. And how did the garment serve you in the central desert?’

�I had it not then, by many centuries. No garment would avail against the wicked Samiel – the poisonous wind that is the breath of the eternal dead sand. Who faces that feels, pace by pace, his body wither and stiffen. His clothes crackle like paper, and so fall to fragments. From his eyeballs the moist vision flakes and flies in powder. His tongue shrinks into his throat, as though fire had writhed and consumed it to a little scarlet spur. His furrowed skin peels like the cerements of an ancient mummy. He falls, breaking in his fall – there is a puff of acrid dust, dissipated in a moment – and he is gone.’

�And this you met unscathed?’

�Yes; for it was preordained that Death should hunt, but never overtake me – that I might testify to the truth of the first Scriptures.’

Even as he spoke, Rose sprang to his feet with a gesture of uncontrollable repulsion; and in the same instant was aware of a horrible change that was taking place in the features of the man before him.

V

Trahentibus autem Judaeis Jesum extra praetorium cum venisset ad ostium, Cartaphilus praetorii ostiarius et Pontii Pilati, cum per ostium exiret Jesus, pepulit Eum pugno contemptibiliter post tergum, et irridens dixit, �Vade, Jesu citius, vade, quid moraris?’ Et Jesus severo vultu et oculo respiciens in eum, dixit: �Ego, vado, et expectabis donec veniam!’ Itaque juxta verbum Domini expectat adhuc Cartaphilus ille, qui tempore Dominicae passionis – erat quasi triginta annorum, et semper cum usque ad centum attigerit aetatem redeuntium annorum redit redivivus ad illum aetatis statum, quo fuit anno quand passus est Dominus.

Matthew of Paris, Historia Major

The girl – from whose cheek Rose, in his rough rising, had seemed to brush the bloom, so keenly had its colour deepened – sank from the stool upon her knees, her hands pressed to her bosom, her lungs working quickly under the pressure of some powerful excitement.

�It comes, beloved!’ she said, in a voice half-terror, half-ecstasy.

�It comes, Adnah,’ the stranger echoed, struggling – �this periodic self-renewal – this sloughing of the veil of flesh that I warned you of.’

His soul seemed to pant grey from his lips; his face was bloodless and like stone; the devils in his eyes were awake and busy as maggots in a wound. Amos knew him now for wickedness personified and immortal, and fell upon his knees beside the girl and seized one of her hands in both his.

�Look!’ he shrieked. �Can you believe in him longer? believe that any code or system of his can profit you in the end?’

She made no resistance, but her eyes still dwelt on the contorted face with an expression of divine pity.

�Oh, thou sufferest!’ she breathed; �but thy reward is near!’

�Adnah!’ wailed the young man, in a heartbroken voice. �Turn from him to me! Take refuge in my love. Oh, it is natural, I swear. It asks nothing of you but to accept the gift – to renew yourself in it, if you will; to deny it, if you will, and chain it for your slave. Only to save you and die for you, Adnah!’

He felt the hand in his shudder slightly; but no least knowledge of him did she otherwise evince.

He clasped her convulsively, released her, mumbled her slack white fingers with his lips. He might have addressed the dead.

In the midst, the figure before them swayed with a rising throe – turned – staggered across to the couch, and cast itself down before the crucifix on the wall.

�Jesu, Son of God,’ it implored, through a hurry of piercing groans, �forbear Thy hand: Christ, register my atonement! My punishment – eternal – and oh, my mortal feet already weary to death! Jesu, spare me! Thy justice, Lawgiver – let it not be vindictive, oh, in Thy sacred name! lest men proclaim it for a baser thing than theirs. For a fault of ignorance – for a word of scorn where all reviled, would they have singled one out, have made him, most wretched, the scapegoat of the ages? Ah, most holy, forgive me! In mine agony I know not what I say. A moment ago I could have pronounced it something seeming less than divine that Thou couldst so have stultified with a curse Thy supreme hour of self-sacrifice – a moment ago, when the rising madness prevailed. Now, sane once more – Nazarene, oh, Nazarene! not only retribution for my deserts, but pity for my suffering – Nazarene, that Thy slanderers, the men of little schisms, be refuted, hearing me, the very witness to Thy mercy, testify how the justice of the Lord triumphs supreme through that His superhuman prerogative – that they may not say, He can destroy, even as we; but can He redeem? The sacrifice – the yearling lamb; – it awaits Thee, Master, the proof of my abjectness and my sincerity. I, more curst than Abraham, lift my eyes to Heaven, the terror in my heart, the knife in my hand. Jesu – Jesu!’

He cried and grovelled. His words were frenzied, his abasement fulsome to look upon. Yet it was impressed upon one of the listeners, with a great horror, how unspeakable blasphemy breathed between the lines of the prayer – the blasphemy of secret disbelief in the Power it invoked, and sought, with its tongue in its cheek, to conciliate.

Bitter indignation in the face of nameless outrage transfigured Rose at this moment into something nobler than himself. He feared, but he upheld his manhood. Conscious that the monstrous situation was none of his choosing, he had no thought to evade its consequences so long as the unquestioning credulity of his co-witness seemed to call for his protection. Nerveless, sensitive natures, such as his, not infrequently give the lie to themselves by accesses of an altruism that is little less than self-effacement.

�This is all bad,’ he struggled to articulate. �You are hipped by some devilish cantrip. Oh, come – come! – in Christ’s name I dare to implore you – and learn the truth of love!’

As he spoke, he saw that the apparition was on its feet again – that it had returned, and was standing, its face ghastly and inhuman, with one hand leaned upon the marble table.

�Adnah!’ it cried, in a strained and hollow voice. �The moment for which I prepared you approaches. Even now I labour. I had thought to take up the thread on the further side; but it is ordained otherwise, and we must part.’

�Part!’ The word burst from her in a sigh of lost amazement.

�The holocaust, Adnah!’ he groaned – �the holocaust with which every seventieth year my expiation must be punctuated! This time the cross is on thy breast, beloved; and tomorrow – oh! thou must be content to tread on lowlier altitudes than those I have striven to guide thee by.’

�I cannot – I cannot, I should die in the mists. Oh, heart of my heart, forsake me not!’

�Adnah – my selma, my beautiful – to propitiate—’

�Whom? Thou hast eaten of the Tree, and art a God!’

�Hush!’ He glanced round with an awed visage at the dim hanging Calvary; then went on in a harsher tone, �It is enough – it must be.’ (His shifting face, addressed to Rose, was convulsed into an expression of bitter scorn). �I command thee, go with him. The sacrifice – oh, my heart, the sacrifice! And I cry to Jehovah, and He makes no sign; and into thy sweet breast the knife must enter.’

Amos sprang to his feet with a loud cry.

�I take no gift from you. I will win or lose her by right of manhood!’

The girl’s face was white with despair.

�I do not understand,’ she cried in a piteous voice.

�Nor I,’ said the young man, and he took a threatening step forward. �We have no part in this – this lady and I. Man or devil you may be; but—’

�Neither!’

The stranger, as he uttered the word, drew himself erect with a tortured smile. The action seemed to kilt the skin of his face into hideous plaits.

�I am Cartaphilus,’ he said, �who denied the Nazarene shelter.’

�The Wandering Jew!’

The name of the old strange legend broke involuntarily from Rose’s lips.

�Now you know him!’ he shrieked then. �Adnah, I am here! Come to me!’

Tears were running down the girl’s cheeks. She lifted her hands with an impassioned gesture; then covered her face with them.

But Cartaphilus, penetrating the veil with eyes no longer human, cried suddenly, so that the room vibrated with his voice, �Bismillah! Wilt thou dare the Son of Heaven, questioning if His sentence upon the Jew – to renew, with his every hundredth year, his manhood’s prime – was not rather a forestalling through His infinite penetration, of the consequences of that Jew’s finding and eating of the Tree of Life? Is it Cartaphilus first, or Christ?’

The girl flung herself forward, crushing her bosom upon the marble floor, and lay blindly groping with her hands.

�He was a God and vindictive!’ she moaned. �He was a man and He died. The cross – the cross!’

The lost cry pierced Rose’s breast like a knife. Sorrow, rage, and love inflamed his passion to madness. With one bound he met and grappled with the stranger.

He had no thought of the resistance he should encounter. In a moment the Jew, despite his age and seizure, had him broken and powerless. The fury of blood blazed down upon him from the unearthly eyes.

�Beast! that I might tear you! But the Nameless is your refuge. You must be chained – you must be chained. Come!’

Half-dragging, half-bearing, he forced his captive across the room to the corner where the flask of topaz liquid stood.

�Sleep!’ he shrieked, and caught up the glass vessel and dashed it down upon Rose’s mouth.

The blow was a stunning one. A jagged splinter tore the victim’s lip and brought a gush of blood; the yellow fluid drowned his eyes and suffocated his throat. Struggling to hold his faculties, a startled shock passed through him, and he dropped insensible on the floor.

VI

�Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.’

Where had he read these words before? Now he saw them as scrolled in lightning upon a dead sheet of night.

There was a sound of feet going on and on.

Light soaked into the gloom, faster – faster; and he saw—

The figure of a man moved endlessly forward by town and pasture and the waste places of the world. But though he, the dreamer, longed to outstrip and stay the figure and look searchingly in its face, he could not, following, close upon the intervening space; and its back was ever towards him.

And always as the figure passed by populous places, there rose long murmurs of blasphemy to either side, and bestial cries: �We are weary! the farce is played out! He reveals Himself not, nor ever will! Lead us – lead us, against Heaven, against hell; against any other, or against ourselves! The cancer of life spreads, and we cannot enjoy nor can we think cleanly. The sins of the fathers have accumulated to one vast mound of putrefaction. Lead us, and we follow!’

And, uttering these cries, swarms of hideous half-human shapes would emerge from holes and corners and rotting burrows, and stumble a little way with the figure, cursing and jangling, and so drop behind, one by one, like glutted flies shaken from a horse.

And the dreamer saw in him, who went ever on before, the sole existent type of a lost racial glory, a marvellous survival, a prince over monstrosities; and he knew him to have reached, through long ages of evil introspection, a terrible belief in his own self-acquired immortality and lordship over all abased peoples that must die and pass; and the seed of his blasphemy he sowed broadcast in triumph as he went; and the ravenous horrors of the earth ran forth in broods and devoured it like birds, and trod one another underfoot in their gluttony.

And he came to a vast desolate plain, and took his stand upon a barren drift of sand; and the face the dreamer longed and feared to see was yet turned from him.

And the figure cried in a voice that grated down the winds of space: �Lo! I am he that cannot die! Lo! I am he that has eaten of the Tree of Life; who am the Lord of Time and of the races of the earth that shall flock to my standard!’

And again: �Lo! I am he that God was impotent to destroy because I had eaten of the fruit! He cannot control that which He hath created. He hath builded His temple upon His impotence, and it shall fall and crush Him. The children of His misrule cry out against Him. There is no God but Antichrist!’

Then from all sides came hurrying across the plain vast multitudes of the degenerate children of men, naked and unsightly; and they leaped and mouthed about the figure on the hillock, like hounds baying a dead fox held aloft; and from their swollen throats came one cry:

�There is no God but Antichrist!’

And thereat the figure turned about – and it was Cartaphilus the Jew.

VII

There is no death! What seems so is transition.

Uttering an incoherent cry, Rose came to himself with a shock of agony and staggered to his feet. In the act he traversed no neutral ground of insentient purposelessness. He caught the thread of being where he had dropped it – grasped it with an awful and sublime resolve that admitted no least thought of self-interest.

If his senses were for the moment amazed at their surroundings – the silence, the perfumed languor, the beauty and voluptuousness of the room – his soul, notwithstanding, stood intent, unfaltering – waiting merely the physical capacity for action.

The fragments of the broken vessel were scattered at his feet; the blood of his wound had hardened upon his face. He took a dizzy step forward, and another. The girl lay as he had seen her cast herself down – breathing, he could see; her hair in disorder; her hands clenched together in terror or misery beyond words.

Where was the other?

Suddenly his vision cleared. He saw that the silken curtains of the alcove were closed.

A poniard in a jewelled sheath lay, with other costly trifles, on a settle hard by. He seized and, drawing it, cast the scabbard clattering on the floor. His hands would have done; but this would work quicker.

Exhaling a quick sigh of satisfaction, he went forward with a noiseless rush and tore apart the curtains.

Yes – he was there – the Jew – the breathing enormity, stretched silent and motionless. The shadow of the young man’s lifted arm ran across his white shirt front like a bar sinister.

To rid the world of something monstrous and abnormal – that was all Rose’s purpose and desire. He leaned over to strike. The face, stiff and waxen as a corpse’s, looked up into his with a calm impenetrable smile – looked up, for all its eyes were closed. And this was a horrible thing, that, though the features remained fixed in that one inexorable expression, something beneath them seemed alive and moving – something that clouded or revealed them as when a sheet of paper glowing in the fire wavers between ashes and flame. Almost he could have thought that the soul, detached from its envelope, struggled to burst its way to the light.

An instant he dashed his left palm across his eyes; then shrieking, �Let the fruit avail you now!’ drove the steel deep into its neck with a snarl.

In the act, for all his frenzy, he had a horror of the spurting blood that he knew must foul his hand obscenely, and sprinkle his face, perhaps, as when a finger half-plugs a flowing water-tap.

None came! The fearful white wound seemed to suck at the steel, making a puckered mouth of derision.

A thin sound, like the whinny of a dog, issued from Rose’s lips. He pulled out the blade – it came with a crackling noise, as if it had been drawn through parchment.

Incredulous – mad – in an ecstasy of horror, he stabbed again and again. He might as fruitfully have struck at water. The slashed and gaping wounds closed up so soon as he withdrew the steel, leaving not a scar.

With a scream he dashed the unstained weapon on the floor and sprang back into the room. He stumbled and almost fell over the prostrate figure of the girl.

A strength as of delirium stung and prickled in his arms. He stooped and forcibly raised her – held her against his breast – addressed her in a hurried passion of entreaty.

�In the name of God, come with me! In the name of God, divorce yourself from this horror! He is the abnormal! – the deathless – the Antichrist!’

Her lids were closed; but she listened.

�Adnah, you have given me myself. My reason cannot endure the gift alone. Have mercy and be pitiful, and share the burden!’

At last she turned on him her swimming gaze.

�Oh! I am numbed and lost! What would you do with me?’

With a sob of triumph he wrapped his arms hard about her, and sought her lips with his. In the very moment of their meeting, she drew herself away, and stood panting and gazing with wide eyes over his shoulder. He turned.

A young man of elegant appearance was standing by the table where he had lately leaned.

In the face of the newcomer the animal and the fanatic were mingled, characteristics inseparable in pseudo-revelation.

He was unmistakably a Jew, of the finest primitive type – such as might have existed in preneurotic days. His complexion was of a smooth golden russet; his nose and lips were cut rather in the lines of sensuous cynicism; the look in his polished brown eyes was of defiant self-confidence, capable of the extremes of devotion or of obstinacy. Short curling black hair covered his scalp, and his moustache and small crisp beard were of the same hue.

�Thanks, stranger,’ he said, in a somewhat nasal but musical voice. �Your attack – a little cowardly, perhaps, for all its provocation – has served to release me before my time. Thanks – thanks indeed!’

Amos sent a sick and groping glance towards the alcove. The curtain was pulled back – the couch was empty. His vision returning, caught sight of Adnah still standing motionless.

�No, no!’ he screeched in a suffocated voice, and clasped his hands convulsively.

There was an adoring expression in her wet eyes that grew and grew. In another moment she had thrown herself at the stranger’s feet.

�Master,’ she cried, in a rich and swooning voice: �O Lord and Master – as blind love foreshadowed thee in these long months!’

He smiled down upon her.

�A tender welcome on the threshold,’ he said softly, �that I had almost renounced. The young spirit is weak to confirm the self-sacrifice of the old. But this ardent modern, Adnah, who, it seems, has slipped his opportunity?’

Passionately clasping the hands of the young Jew, she turned her face reluctant.

�He has blood on him,’ she whispered. �His lip is swollen like a schoolboy’s with fighting. He is not a man, sane, self-reliant and glorious – like you, O my heart!’

The Jew gave a high, loud laugh, which he checked in mid-career.

�Sir,’ he said derisively, �we will wish you a very pleasant good-morning.’

How – under what pressure or by what process of self-effacement – he reached the street, Amos could never remember. His first sense of reality was in the stinging cold, which made him feel, by reaction, preposterously human.

It was perhaps six o’clock of a February morning, and the fog had thinned considerably, giving place to a wan and livid glow that was but half-measure of dawn.

He found himself going down the ringing pavement that was talcous with a sooty skin of ice, a single engrossing resolve hammering time in his brain to his footsteps.

The artificial glamour was all past and gone – beaten and frozen out of him. The rest was to do – his plain duty as a Christian, as a citizen – above all, as a gentleman. He was, unhypnotised, a law-abiding young man, with a hatred of notoriety and a detestation of the abnormal. Unquestionably his forebears had made a huge muddle of his inheritance.

About a quarter to seven he walked (rather unsteadily) into Vine Street Police Station and accosted the inspector on duty.

�I want to lay an information.’

The officer scrutinised him, professionally, from the under side, and took up a pen.

�What’s the charge?’

�Administering a narcotic, attempted murder, abduction, profanity, trading under false pretences, wandering at large – great heavens! what isn’t it?’

�Perhaps you’ll say. Name of accused?’

�Cartaphilus.’

�Any other?’

�The Wandering Jew.’

The Inspector laid down his pen and leaned forward, bridging his finger-tips under his chin.

�If you take my advice,’ he said, �you’ll go and have a Turkish bath.’

The young man grasped and frowned.

�You won’t take my information?’

�Not in that form. Come again by-and-by.’

Amos walked straight out of the building and retraced his steps to Wardour Street.

�I’ll watch for his coming out,’ he thought, �and have him arrested, on one charge only, by the constable on the beat. Where’s the place?’

Twice he walked the length of the street and back, with dull increasing amazement. The sunlight had edged its way into the fog by this time, and every door and window stood out sleek and self-evident. But amongst them all was none that corresponded to the door or window of his adventure.

He hung about till day was bright in the air, and until it occurred to him that his woeful and bloodstained appearance was beginning to excite unflattering comment. At that he trudged for the third time the entire length to and fro, and so coming out into Oxford Street stood on the edge of the pavement, as though it were the brink of Cocytus.

�Well, she called me a boy,’ he muttered; �what does it matter?’

He hailed an early hansom and jumped in.




THE SHADOW-DANCE (#ulink_c6236c0a-9216-5cd8-a67d-75528a45a892)


�Yes, it was a rum start,’ said the modish young man.

He was a modern version of the crutch and toothpick genus, a derivative from the �Gaiety boy’ of the Nellie Farren epoch, very spotless, very superior, very – fundamentally and combatively – simple. I don’t know how he had found his way into Carleon’s rooms and our company, but Carleon had a liking for odd characters. He was a collector, as it were, of human pottery, and to the collector, as we know, primitive examples are of especial interest.

The bait in this instance, I think, had been Bridge, which, since some formal �Ducdame’ must serve for calling fools into a circle, was our common pretext for assembling for an orgy of talk. We had played, however, for insignificant stakes and, on the whole, irreverently as regarded the sanctity of the game; and the young man was palpably bored. He thought us, without question, outsiders, and not altogether good form; and it was even a relief to him when the desultory play languished, and conversation became general in its place.

Somebody – I don’t remember on what provocation – had referred to the now historic affair of the Hungarian Ballet, which, the rage in London for a season, had voluntarily closed its own career a week before the date advertised for its termination; and the modish young man, it appeared, was the only one of us all who had happened to be present in the theatre on the occasion of the final performance. He told us so; and added that �it was a rum start’.

�The abrupt finish was due, of course,’ said Carleon, bending forward, hectic, bright-eyed, and hugging himself, as was his wont, �to Kaunitz’s death. She was the bright particular “draw”. It would have been nothing without her. Besides, there was the tragedy. What was the “rum start”? Tell us.’

�The way it ended that night,’ said the young man. He was a little abashed by the sudden concentration of interest on himself; but carried it off with sang-froid. Only a slight flush of pink on his youthful cheek, as he flicked the ash from his cigarette with the delicate little finger of the hand that held it, confessed to a certain uneasy self-consciousness.

�I have heard something about it,’ said Carleon. �Give us your version.’

�I’m no hand at describing things,’ responded the young man, committed and at bay; �never wrote a line of description in my life, nor wanted to. It was the Shadow-Dance, you know – the last thing on the programme. I dare say some of you have seen Kaunitz in it.’

One or two of us had. It was incomparably the most beautiful, the most mystic, idyll achieved by even that superlative dancer; a fantasia of moonlight, supported by an ethereal, only half-revealed, shimmer of attendant sylphids.

�Yes,’ said Carleon eagerly.

�Well, you know,’ said the young man, �there is a sort of dance first, in and out of the shadows, a mysterious, gossamery kind of business, with nobody made out exactly, and the moon slowly rising behind the trees. And then, suddenly, the moon reaches a gap in the branches, and – and it’s full moon, don’t you know, a regular white blaze of it, and all the shapes have vanished; only you sort of guess them, get a hint of their arms and faces hiding behind the leaves and under the shrubs and things. And that was the time when Kaunitz ought to have come on.’

�Didn’t she come on?’

�Not at first; not when she ought to. There was a devil of a pause, and you could see something was wrong. And after a bit there was a sort of rustle in the house, and people began to cough; and the music slipped round to the beginning again; and they danced it all over a second time, until it came to the full moonlight – and there she was this time all right – how, I don’t know, for I hadn’t seen her enter.’

�How did she dance – when she did appear?’

The young man blew the ash from his cigarette. �Oh, I don’t know!’ he said.

�You must know. Wasn’t it something quite out of the common? You called it a rum start, you remember.’

�Well, if you insist upon it, it was – the most extraordinary thing I ever witnessed – more like what they describe the Pepper’s Ghost business than anything else I can think. She was here, there, anywhere; seemingly independent of what d’ye call – gravitation, you know; she seemed to jump and hang in the air before she came down. And there was another thing. The idea was to dance to her own shadow, you see – follow it, run away from it, flirt with it – and it was the business of the moon, or the limelight man, to keep the shadow going.’

�Well?’

�Well, there was no shadow – not a sign of one.’

�That may have been the limelight man’s fault.’

�Very likely; but I don’t think so. There was something odd about it all; and most in the way she went.’

�How was that?’

�Why, she just gave a spring, and was gone.’

Carleon sank back, with a sigh as if of repletion, and sat softly cracking his fingers together.

�Didn’t you notice anything strange about the house, the audience?’ he said – �people crying out; girls crouching and hiding their faces, for instance?’

�Perhaps, now I think of it,’ answered the modish youth. �I noticed, anyhow, that the curtain came down with a bang, and that there seemed a sort of general flurry and stampede of things, both behind it and on our side.’

�Well, as to that, it is a fact, though you may not know it, that after that night the company absolutely refused to complete its engagement on any terms.’

�I dare say. They had lost Kaunitz.’

�To be sure they had. She was already lying dead in her dressing-room when the Shadow-Dance began.’

�Not when it began?’

�So, anyhow, it was whispered.’

�Oh I say,’ said the young man, looking rather white; �I’m not going to believe that, you know.’




WILLIAM TYRWHITT’S �COPY’ (#ulink_1cfad1ac-98ea-54ae-9e33-38d7b49e1584)


This is the story of William Tyrwhitt, who went to King’s Cobb for rest and change, and, with the latter, at least, was so far accommodated as for a time to get beyond himself and into regions foreign to his experiences or his desires. And for this condition of his I hold myself something responsible, inasmuch as it was my inquisitiveness was the means of inducing him to an exploration, of which the result, with its measure of weirdness, was for him alone. But, it seems, I was appointed an agent of the unexplainable without my knowledge, and it was simply my misfortune to find my first unwitting commission in the selling of a friend.

I was for a few days, about the end of a particular July, lodged in that little old seaboard town of Dorset that is called King’s Cobb. Thither there came to me one morning a letter from William Tyrwhitt, the polemical journalist (a queer fish, like the cuttle, with an ink-bag for the confusion of enemies), complaining that he was fagged and used up, and desiring me to say that nowhere could complete rest be obtained as in King’s Cobb.

I wrote and assured him on this point. The town, I said, lay wrapped in the hills as in blankets, its head only, winking a sleepy eye, projecting from the top of the broad, steep gully in which it was stretched at ease. Thither few came to the droning coast; and such as did, looked up at the High Street baking in the sun, and, thinking of Jacob’s ladder, composed them to slumber upon the sand and left the climbing to the angels. Here, I said, the air and the sea were so still that one could hear the oysters snoring in their beds; and the little frizzle of surf on the beach was like to the sound to dreaming ears of bacon frying in the kitchens of the blest.

William Tyrwhitt came, and I met him at the station, six or seven miles away. He was all strained and springless, like a broken child’s toy – �not like that William who, with lance in rest, shot through the lists in Fleet Street’. A disputative galley-puller could have triumphed over him morally; a child physically.

The drive in the inn brake, by undulating roads and scented valleys, shamed his cheek to a little flush of self-assertion.

�I will sleep under the vines,’ he said, �and the grapes shall drop into my mouth.’

�Beware,’ I answered, �lest in King’s Cobb your repose should be everlasting. The air of that hamlet has matured like old port in the bin of its hills, till to drink of it is to swoon.’

We alighted at the crown of the High Street, purposing to descend on foot the remaining distance to the shore.

�Behold,’ I exclaimed, �how the gulls float in the shimmer, like ashes tossed aloft by the white draught of a fire! Behold these ancient buildings nodding to the everlasting lullaby of the bay waters! The cliffs are black with the heat apoplexy; the lobster is drawn scarlet to the surface. You shall be like an addled egg put into an incubator.’

�So,’ he said, �I shall rest and not hatch. The very thought is like sweet oil on a burn.’

He stayed with me a week, and his body waxed wondrous round and rosy, while his eye acquired a foolish and vacant expression. So it was with me. We rolled together, by shore and by road of this sluggard place, like spent billiard balls; and if by chance we cannoned, we swerved sleepily apart, until, perhaps, one would fall into a pocket of the sand, and the other bring up against a cushion of sea-wall.

Yet, for all its enervating atmosphere, King’s Cobb has its fine traditions of a sturdy independence, and a slashing history withal; and its aspect is as picturesque as that of an opera bouffe fishing-harbour. Then, too, its High Street, as well as its meandering rivulets of low streets, is rich in buildings, venerable and antique.

We took an irresponsible, smiling pleasure in noting these advantages – particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimney-pieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as �copy’. But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, and then vaguely wondering at them for that, being pencils, they would not draw.

By then we were so sinewless and demoralised that we could hear in the distant strains of the European Concert nothing but an orchestra of sweet sounds, and would have given ourselves away in any situation with a pound of tea. Therefore, perhaps, it was well for us that, a peremptory summons to town reaching me after seven days of comradeship with William, I must make shift to collect my faculties with my effects, and return to the more bracing climate of Fleet Street.




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