Spawning Ground By LESTER DEL REY - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61052/pg61052-images.html

 They weren't human. They were something
more—and something less—they were,
in short, humanity's hopes for survival!

 

At his confirmation he had annoyed the Bishop of London (at that time it was Frederick Temple) by insisting on taking the additional names of Alfonso Mary Alexander. He had surprised him by the resolute manner in which he had answered his questions about the origin of taking names at confirmation; and enraged him by his explanation that he desired to be called Alexander in memory of that great Pope, the Lord Alexander VI, who had put the whole Christian world under an obligation by his discovery of the devotion of the Angelus. “This devotion,” the boy murmured to the astounded Bishop, “as your Lordship no doubt knows, has been from eternity the privilege of the Holy Angels, and was not entrusted to men until the proximity of the horrible heresies of the German reformation rendered the patronage of Mary necessary for the protection of her son.” The Bishop’s chaplain had tried to prevent Frank Lascelles’ indiscretion; but Temple’s abrupt gesture had hindered his efforts. When Lascelles finished the Bishop gazed at him in silence for a minute. “Well, I hope you’ll live to grow out of this foolery. But you know your rights and you shall have ’em.” Temple, was, as his old foes had discovered years before, eminently just. More than twenty years had passed since that confirmation. Frank Alfonso Mary Alexander Lascelles had gone to Oxford and to Ely, and had been ordained to a small country parish in that diocese. After two years of his curacy, an injudicious layman presented him to the living of S. Uny and S. Petroc in the north of Cornwall. He had been there now for over nineteen years. When he had come he found his church empty; now it was full. It was full of children and boys. Occasionally a few mothers, and, when he was sober, the village drunkard, and, when she was penitent, the prostitute from the Church Town, came to Mass as well; but generally the Church of S. Uny, down by the beach, was filled only by children and boys. This result Frank Lascelles had been long in attaining. The parish he served was predominantly Methodist. He had found a congregation of three—the publican, the ostler of the hotel, and an old maiden lady who rang the bell, and called herself the pew-opener. Lascelles soon shocked the respectability of the publican and the Protestantism of the ostler: but the old lady remained faithful to him. She did not stir when he had the three-decker cut down, and a new altar reared at the East end. She seemed to welcome the great images, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, The Sacred Heart, S. Joseph and S. Anthony which Lascelles put up in his church. She did not care whether he said Mass in Latin or English; and incense and holy water both left her tranquil. It was otherwise with the village. Though the Methodists never entered the church, except for a wedding or a funeral, they thought they had a right to control its services and its priest. There were stormy Easter vestries; there was a Protestant churchwarden. One horrible day the fishermen broke into the church and took out the images and threw them down the cliff: by next week new ones were in their places. Lascelles was boycotted by his parishioners, except a few would-be bold spirits; and was outlawed, in the genial English way, by his Bishop; but he stuck at his job, went on saying offices to an empty church, and singing Mass to his pew-opener and an occasional visitor. Then after five years or so the change began. It was not along the usual lines of such changes. Generally priests of Lascelles’ religion are eager, masculine people who soon win over the more turbulent elements in the parish, and put them, too, in search of the great adventure of Christianity. But Lascelles, though he had grown up, still remained the boy who had chosen Liguori and Alexander for his patrons. He was obsessed with the reality of the spiritual world, of good and evil. His pillow was wet with the tears he shed for the sins of his parish. He was horrified at the evil of the world, and yet constitutionally unable to defy it in any active way. He had only one strong human affection—and that was a great love for children. At first this was not reciprocated. His odd figure, his shuffling walk, his stoop and his occasional outbursts of anger produced ridicule and fear rather than love. Then one child somehow found how large the heart of him was; and then another, and then another. He had won the children. But this would have availed him little had it not been for the arrival at S. Uny of the Rev. Paul Trengrowse. Mr. Trengrowse came to minister to the Primitives about three years after Lascelles’ appointment to the parish. He was young, keen, and sincere. He had not been long in the village when the leading members of his congregation told him of the sins of the parish priest, and horrors of the parish church. Trengrowse prayed for light. He disliked interfering with the affairs of an alien church; but, if half he was told was true, Lascelles must be fought. So he paid a visit to the church, which was always open, and was duly distressed at the idols he saw there. As he was gazing at the smirking fatuity of S. Anthony, he heard a footstep. It was Lascelles who was coming from the sacristy to the altar. Fortunately, before he began Mass, Lascelles looked down the church and saw “a congregation.” So he said Mass in English. Now Trengrowse was no ordinary minister. He was a man of personal holiness, and of real devotion; and that in his spirit which was sincere and mystical recognised in the Popish-seeming priest, muttering his Mass, a kindred soul. Lascelles’ absorption in his work, his grave, yet joyful solemnity, his keen sense of the other world made an immense effect on Trengrowse. The Mass proceeded, and when Trengrowse heard “Therefore with Angels and Archangels and all the Company of Heaven,” he felt that he had had the answer to his prayer. This man was a Christian, however erroneous he might be in details. So the next Sunday the Primitives who were hoping for a strong sermon against the Scarlet Woman, were disagreeably surprised. “Mr. Lascelles may be wrong. I think he is wrong, sadly wrong, in many things; but he du love the Lord, and he du worship Him. And, brethren, no man calls Jesus Lord save by the Holy Ghost. Let us pray for Mr. Lascelles and the church people of S. Uny; and that we may all be led along the narrow way to everlasting life.” Had Trengrowse been a man of less character he might have failed in his defence of Lascelles. But he was an acceptable preacher, and a man whose plain love of his religion it was impossible to doubt. So, first with grumbling, later with a ready acquiescence, the villagers of S. Uny followed his lead. The result was odd. Lascelles attracted the children more and more; and his services attracted them. This worried Trengrowse not a little; but when one of his congregation said scornfully, “Those bit games to the church be only fit for babes,” he looked gravely at him and replied, “Ah! Eli, but the book says ‘Unless ye become as little children.’” This silenced Eli, but it did not silence Trengrowse’s own heart. How was it Lascelles could do anything with children, a good deal with boys up to fifteen or so, and nothing with men and women, and little with girls? Lascelles’ own explanation was simple. His Bishop would not confirm his children until they were thirteen. Lascelles presented them year after year when they were six or seven. He preached an amazing sermon on the three great aids to the Devil in the parish of S. Uny—and the three heads of his sermon were: Lust, Hypocrisy and the Lord Bishop. The more respectable of the neighbouring clergy were furious, but the Bishop, who was a simple, humble-minded man (quite unlike to the ex-head-master who had inducted Lascelles), refused to take any notice of the attack; but also refused to relax his rule about the age of confirmation candidates. The Archdeacon told Lascelles that his parish was the plague-spot of the diocese, and Lascelles retorted that in a mass of corruption any sign of health looks ominous and unusual. But, although he kept up a brave front to the disapprovers, his failure with his people galled him. He would not have minded if they had still been actively hostile. But that had long ceased. They were now fond of their priest. They liked and shared in his notoriety. They supported him against the officials; and when a malicious Protestant from London attempted to stir up a revolt against Lascelles, he was promptly put into the harbour; and Trengrowse started a petition to the Bishop, expressing the affection “all we, whether church people or Methodists, feel for Mr. Lascelles.” Lascelles’ philosophy refused to permit him to see in his failure evidences of his incapacity for his work. He had the proud humility of the perfect priest. Regarding himself as a mere channel for divine grace, he forgot that his personality was so distinctive that it affected the way in which grace reached his people. Once an old friend had tried to make him see this; but the task was hopeless. “My dear fellow,” said Lascelles, “I don’t see what you mean. All they want is the Gospel. And that I give them. I say Mass for them. I will hear their confessions. I instruct them. I lead their devotions. All beside is mere human embellishment. No doubt a more competent man would be more pleasing to them, but he could not do more than give them the Gospel, could he?” On All Souls’ Day, 1912, Lascelles was depressed. Early that morning he had gone up to the cemetery, and said a Requiem in the little chapel. Then there had been the early Mass at 8.30 in church. The church had been full. Not only were all his children there, but there were a good many fathers and mothers: for the services on the day of the dead appealed to a deep human instinct with a power which not even Lascelles could spoil. The Dies Iræ, sung in Latin, had sounded oddly from a congregation so predominantly childish: and Lascelles had preached a short sermon on the “Significance of Death.” “We exaggerate the importance of death. It is to us death matters, not to the dead. For them it is a release, for us it is a warning. Death of the body is only a symbol. It is death of the soul we must fear. Believe me, it would be worth while for every one of you in this church to die, if by dying, you could bring a soul to Jesus. God knows, I would die for you, if that would bring you. There are those here to-day—you, Penberthy, and you, Trevose—who have not been to Mass since you were boys. Make a new resolution to-day, and ask the Holy Souls to help you keep it. Come to your duties, and return to your church.” Lascelles felt at the time that his appeal lacked force. He knew that after Mass, Penberthy would say to Trevose: “Bootivul service, bean’t it, Tom?” “Iss—it be that. I du like it for once or twice. But for usual give me the chapel. It be more nat’ral like.” “Iss—it be. Poor Mr. Lascelles, I did think he would have a slap at us.” “Iss—it be his way. My gosh! I don’t mind.” So Lascelles was depressed. He sat among his books, reading a Renascence treatise on “Death.” He thought a great deal about death. Sometimes he feared it horribly. It seemed the great enemy of faith. It was so disconcerting a thing, so heartless, so unregarding. At other times he felt defiant. But never did he reach the spirit of S. Francis about death. He was too remote from natural life and the events of animal birth and death to understand death as an ordinary thing, something not less usual than the sunset. “It may be”—he read, “that there be more deaths than one. For it is evident that some are so hardened in sin that the death of the body comes long after the man has been really dead. Such men are commonly gay and cheerful: for with the death of their soul, has died all godly fear, all apprehension of judgment, all hope of salvation. They become but as brutes. Wherefore the church has always held that heretics, if they be obstinate and beyond recall, may be handed over to the secular arm for the death of the body. It should not trouble us that they display ordinary human virtues: for these be common in the unregenerate, and are but devices of the devil who would persuade men that religion matters naught. They are his children, and may be lawfully treated as such by any godly prince. The church herself kills not: though the Lord Pope, being a Temporal King, has the power of the sword, and may exercise the same.” Lascelles put the book down and stared at the fire. The words roused a train of thought that almost frightened him. But he was not the man to dismiss any idea because it was terrifying. He believed in giving the devil his due, and always insisted that all temptations should be met boldly, not evaded. He left his chair, and knelt at his prie-dieu, looking at the wounds of the great Crucifix which hung above it. Half an hour later he rose with a look of resolution on his face. 2 The first case of the plague, as the villagers insisted on calling it, happened just before Epiphany. It attacked Penberthy, who had never been ill before; and in four days he was dead. His disease puzzled the doctor from the market-town, but he put it down as a curious case of infantile paralysis. His colleague from Truro, whom he consulted after the third case had occurred, insisted that the symptoms did not disclose anything more definite than shock following on status lymphaticus. The most serious thing was, however, not their incapacity to name, but their inability to cure the mysterious disease, which was spreading in S. Uny. Except for a general weariness, a disinclination to move, and a curious “wambling in the innards,” there were no definite symptoms at all to go on. After the second case they had an inquest, but it yielded no results at all, and Dr. Marlowe began to talk of getting an expert from London. It was not until February, however, that anyone came. Then by a fortunate chance Sir Joshua Tomlinson came down to S. Ives for a holiday. The “plague” at S. Uny had got into the London paper. There had been ten deaths, and two women, the first to be attacked, were lying seriously ill. Dr. Marlowe called on Sir Joshua, and the great physician said he would come over and see the patients. Marlowe was glad that chance had sent him a great general physician rather than a surgeon or a specialist. Although he was willing to defy any specialist to find his pet disease in the mysterious sickness that had killed the ten fishermen, he was relieved that no specialist was to be given the opportunity. “You see, Lascelles,” he said to the priest, “it’s not as if we were in the fifteenth century. We may be in theology, but I’m hanged if we are in medicine. These men are dying like savages: but the savage makes up his mind he has got to die, and dies through sheer hysteria. These fellows want to live. They lust for life.” “You are right, Marlowe. Their desire for life is a lust. It is scarcely decent in a Christian to cling so to this existence. But there—it’s not my business to judge. You know, Marlowe, I have sometimes thought this last month that this mysterious disease is a judgment on S. Uny. It is God’s hand held out over our village. Let us pray for those who are dead, and those who are dying, and most of all, dear God, for those who are not yet to die.” Marlowe, though friendly with Lascelles, was more than a little afraid of him. The vicar had worked like two men during this distress. He had nursed the sick, he had consoled the mourners, he had said Masses and had a service of general humiliation. Somehow he had identified himself with his parish to a degree he had never reached before, and S. Uny was grateful to him. But the little doctor was rather afraid. Lascelles was strained and odd in manner. He spent too long a time in prayer, and not long enough at meals or in bed. “No, Lascelles. I don’t agree with you there. Oh! I’m a good Catholic, I hope, and I know God could intervene; but I don’t see why He should.” “No: you don’t see why. No one does, Marlowe, until He speaks, and then they are forced to.” On the Saturday Sir Joshua came over, he saw Mrs. Pentreath and Mrs. Wichelo, and he shook his head over both of them. He asked them questions about their diet, and about their way of living, while Marlowe stood by, silent and impatient. Then, he said a few kindly, cheerful words, and left them in the big room, which the vicar had had fitted up as a hospital ward; for Marlowe thought the cases were better isolated. “Well, sir, what do you think?” “What sort of a man is your vicar? He seems liked.” “Yes—he is. He’s an odd chap—a bit mad, I think. A very keen Catholic, and very depressed at his failure to keep the people.” “Ah! they don’t go to church.” “Well they do now. They have done since this damned illness. He’s been awfully good to them. And the children have always gone.” “It’s a funny thing, Dr. Marlowe, that no child has been ill.” “Isn’t it? That’s what I say to young Jones of Truro. He will insist on his shock theory, following on status lymphaticus. I keep on pointing out to him that most of the patients are men who have had shocks every week of their lives since they were twelve. They’d have all been dead long since.” “Yes. I am sure Jones is wrong. But I don’t know what this disease is, Dr. Marlowe. I suspect, but I don’t know.” “Here is the vicar coming, Sir Joshua. Shall I introduce you?” “Please do.” Lascelles was walking rapidly towards them. He looked ill but eager. His eyes were full of a fanatic pleasure, a kind of holy rapture that appeared to make him even taller than he actually was. He acknowledged the introduction with a bow, and would have passed on, but Sir Joshua stopped him with a question. “You have come from your sick people, Mr. Lascelles?” “Yes. They are no longer sick. I was just in time to hear their confessions and give them the viaticum.” “Good God!” Sir Joshua was evidently shocked. “It’s not ten minutes since we left them.” “No? The end has always been very sudden, hasn’t it, Marlowe?” “Yes. But this is quicker than usual. Do you think, Sir Joshua”—and he lowered his voice—“a post-mortem?” “No. It would be useless. At least it would be no help to me. By the way, Marlowe, how have you entered the cause of death?” “Well, sir—I’ve frankly put ‘Heart failure, cause unknown.’ There seemed to be nothing between that and ‘Act of God.’” “Ah! Marlowe, that’s what you should have put,” intervened Lascelles. “It is the hand of God—the hand of God.” Then, with a bow to Sir Joshua, he hurried away. “So your vicar thinks it is the hand of God! He may be right. God works through human agents. He is an interesting man, Dr. Marlowe.” “Yes: he is. But this trouble has worried him frightfully. I’m rather nervous for him. Have you got any theory, sir? You talked of suspicion.” “Well, Dr. Marlowe, I’ll tell you what I think. Your patients have been murdered.” Marlowe looked at the great physician, as if he was afraid for his sanity. “No, Dr. Marlowe, I’m not mad, though I have no proof of my assertion. All I ask is this, that I may be allowed to see the next patient within at least half an hour of the beginning of the illness. By the way, can they give me a bed here, do you think? Where do you put up?” “Oh! I’m staying at the vicar’s. I expect he’d be charmed to have you.” “No. I don’t think I will stay with Father Lascelles. I would rather not. I’ll find a room somewhere. I think there will be another case to-morrow night.” 3 That Sunday morning Lascelles preached on the “Hand of Judgment.” The church was packed. Trengrowse had his service at nine and brought all his congregation to the Mass at eleven. Lascelles seemed wonderfully better. His eye was clearer, his step gayer and his whole figure more buoyant. His tone as he gave out his text was exultant. “They pierced his hands. “The symbolism of the Divine Body is strangely arresting. The Jews thought of God as an eye watching, caring for them from heaven. We Christians watch God—here in the Tabernacle, or in the arms of Mary. His care for us we typify by his Hand—the Hand we pierced. This last month God has been with us very wonderfully. He is always with us in the Holy Sacrament: but lately he has been with us in the Sacrament of Death. His Hand of Judgment has been over, and under us; it has clasped us—and some of us it has not let go. “Our natural feeling is one of fear. We are not used to such immediate handling as this of our God’s. We have most of us tried to apply religion to our life, now we have to try and apply our life to religion. God will have us think of nothing but Him, speak to none save Him, hope for none save Him. His Hand is still with us. It will bear yet more away from S. Uny before we learn our lesson. Let me help you to learn that lesson right. Let us all take care that we renew our trust in God, that we recognise His Hand, that we answer His Love.” Sir Joshua had listened attentively to Lascelles’ sermon. He seemed vaguely disappointed, and he was unwilling to discuss it with Marlowe afterwards. There was no doubt that Lascelles’ almost fatalist attitude, while it annoyed the doctor, had a strange welcome from the villagers. They turned in a child-like way to the words of this man who spoke as one who knew the ways and the meaning of the Almighty. Never had Lascelles so much real devotion from his people as he secured during the “plague.” It was not that they shared his feeling of complete abandonment to the Will of God; but the fact that he had such a feeling made their fate seem more tolerable. On Sunday evening there was a new case, as Sir Joshua had expected. The disease attacked Mrs. Bodilly, the wife of the chief grocer in S. Uny. Marlowe was summoned immediately, but he found Sir Joshua already at the poor woman’s bedside. She was frankly terrified; in this her case differed from previous ones, in which the sufferers, though generally resentful, had been not the least afraid. Mrs. Bodilly had been at Mass that morning. She had got back and prepared the dinner. At tea-time she had “felt queer,” but after tea she was better. Then, as she was getting ready to go to the special service of Exposition, she fell down and had to be carried up to her room by her husband and sons. She was, unlike most of the tradesmen’s wives, a nominal church woman, but she had never been confirmed and rarely went to church. The fit of external piety roused in her by the “plague” was frankly based on nervous alarm. She felt that God was taking it out of S. Uny in this way; and she was anxious to escape. Her illness found her divided between anger and fear. She was angry that her efforts to placate Divine wrath had not been more successful—she was terrified of dying, terrified still more of death as a punishment. In the most desolate way she sought reassurances from Marlowe and Sir Joshua; but neither could give her any certain consolation. The disease presented no different aspects. It indeed presented no aspect at all, except extreme weakness, astonishing slowness of the pulse, and irregular beating of the heart. Although Sir Joshua was there within five minutes of the seizure, he admitted to Marlowe that he could discover nothing of what he suspected. “I’ll be frank, Dr. Marlowe, I suspected poison. I still suspect it. I believe all these people have been poisoned in an extremely subtle way by a man so fanatical as to be almost mad. But I can find no trace of the poison. In this case, I will, if you will permit me, conduct a post-mortem, but I expect I shall fail. If I do, I must take my own line, if you wish me to help you.” “Really, Sir Joshua, you talk more like a detective than a physician.” “This is a detective’s business, Dr. Marlowe. I wish it were not.” Before they left Lascelles arrived. He had been summoned by Mr. Bodilly, and he came prepared to give Mrs. Bodilly the last rites. As the boy with the light and the bell approached the stairs, Sir Joshua whispered to Marlowe: “Your vicar seems very certain of her death.” Marlowe shrugged his shoulders. “We haven’t saved a case, you know.” The post-mortem yielded no result. That evening Marlowe dined with Sir Joshua at the village inn, and after dinner the great physician told him of his suspicions. Marlowe listened at first angrily, then with an incredulous horror. “It can’t be. The man lives for his parish, I tell you. Why, he would die for it.” “Yes: I believe he would. Had I found what I looked for, he certainly would.” “But, my dear sir, there isn’t a trace of any known drug. There’s no trace of anything.” “No. I had expected to find—but never mind. I have a great deal of experience, Dr. Marlowe, and I am convinced that your vicar has been murdering his parishioners. And to-night I am coming to tell him so. I will walk home with you. You may be present or not, as you please.” 4 Lascelles looked up a little wearily when Sir Joshua had finished speaking. “Is that all?” Marlowe intervened. “Look here, old man—I only came because—you’ll forgive me, Sir Joshua—I didn’t want you to be alone under this monstrous, this fantastic accusation of Sir Joshua’s. You’ve only got to contradict him, and we’ll go.” Lascelles looked gratefully at his friend. “Thank you, Marlowe. But Sir Joshua is right in telling me his suspicions. You have finished, Sir Joshua?” “Yes. I should like your explanation if you have one, or your admission of my charge, and your promise that this—this—plague shall cease.” “You use strange words, sir, for a man who has no evidence for what he says.” “Yes,” ejaculated Marlowe, “yes, by Jove, you do——” “Please, Marlowe. You will not be content with having relieved your mind, Sir Joshua. You wish me to answer you?” “I do. I require it.” “You know, sir, you great doctors have one failing. It is one priests have, too. You cannot avoid talking to me as if I were your patient—a mental, a nervous case. You can’t help believing that your firm tone, your almost—may I say it—discourteous manner will impress me. Well, it doesn’t.” Sir Joshua got red. Lascelles’ words too entirely diagnosed his method. He was annoyed that he should seem so transparent to a man whom he regarded as at least half-crazy. “I beg your pardon. There is something in what you say. Men in all professions have their—ah! tricks.” “Thank you.” Lascelles got up and stood by the fireplace looking down on his visitor. In the last month he had changed. He seemed bigger and more masculine—more as if he now had personal responsibilities; he looked less of an official, more of a man. He spoke rather slowly. “You have accused me of murder, Sir Joshua. You ask me to admit my crime, and to promise to cease. Well, I expected your visit. I have long been familiar with your Treatise on Renascence Toxicology; it is as complete as any published book. And I am glad you and Marlowe came to-night. I have my answer ready. I admit nothing, and I promise nothing.” Sir Joshua looked with a puzzled air at the priest. For a moment his accusation seemed a monstrous thing to himself. Then his common sense surged back. “Father Lascelles, your answer does not satisfy me. I must take other steps.” “They will not lead anywhere, Sir Joshua. If you find no evidence, no other man can. You say my poor people were poisoned. Well, find the poison. Ah—you know you cannot. It is foolish to threaten me. But I will tell you what I had determined to tell Marlowe to-night. First, I do not expect there will be any more deaths from this plague for a long time. “Secondly, I have a confession to make. Last All Hallows I was depressed. The work here has not gone as it should. I had the children, but not their parents. I thought much of Death and the Departed at that season of all the dead—and at last I prayed to God that if nothing else would move these people, He would send Death. Send Death mysterious and as a judgment. Death has come, and my people have learnt their lesson. All of those who died were reconciled to Holy Church before death. Of those who remain nearly all have adhered to the Church. This afternoon Mr. Trengrowse came and asked to be prepared for Confirmation——” “Trengrowse, the minister——” cried Marlowe. “And this evening I had notice that all who are competent intend to make their Communion next Sunday. This parish has been won for God, Sir Joshua, and at the cost of thirteen deaths. Isn’t it worth it?” “Father Lascelles, I cannot regard you as sane. You are not only practically admitting your crime, you are disclosing your motives.” “I beg your pardon, I admit nothing. I acknowledge I prayed to God to visit this people, if necessary, by His secret Death. That is not a crime. Next Sunday I shall tell my people.” “And have you prayed that the deaths shall cease?” asked Sir Joshua ironically. “I was doing so when you entered,” replied Lascelles quietly. “Good God, man, your hypocrisy sickens me. You prate of God’s intervention, and all the time you’ve been sending man after man to death by some foul poison of your own.” “Sir Joshua—do you believe God commonly works without human intervention?” “Bah! That is sophistry.” “You condemn the machinery of justice, the compromise of war, our human evasion of rope and guillotine?” “Surely, Marlowe,” exclaimed Sir Joshua, “you can’t sit and listen quietly to this damnable nonsense?” Marlowe had been sitting dazed, looking at Lascelles as if he were fascinated. He replied in a remote voice. “I don’t know. I’m wondering”—he gave a nervous laugh—“wondering if Lascelles is a saint or a devil.” Lascelles went on imperturbably. “You don’t answer me. You can’t. Why should you think I, an anointed priest, am less fit to be the doorkeeper of death than Lord Justice Ommaney? At least I use no case-law. I am the slave of no precedent. I know my people. I know them individually. I love them as persons. And as persons I judge them.” The tall figure of the man seemed to glow. His face was lit with an unnatural beauty as he stood looking down on the other two, and dared them to answer him. Sir Joshua rose. He had lost his somewhat pompous judicial air. He was deeply, humanly moved; and he spoke with an anxiety far more impressive than his previous authoritative tone. “Father Lascelles, I have nothing more to say. I believe you have done a very horrible, a very wicked thing. I have heard how you would defend yourself if you were legally brought to book for such an offence. Your defence has, as you are aware, no legal force. I think it has no moral force. You are deceiving yourself strangely. One day you will have a great loneliness of heart. You will realise how terrible a responsibility you have taken. Without the sanction of society, without the approval of your church, you have decided, alone, the fate of your fellow-creatures. I am sorry for you. Good-night.” The light left Lascelles’ face. He looked suddenly ill and careworn. Then with a high, frantic gesture he flung his hand towards the Crucifix. “He, too—He, too—was made sin.”

JOURNEY WORK BY DAVE DRYFOOS - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58899/pg58899-images.html

 Get mad, old man, but don't give up;
you're not through by a long shot. Somewhere
there's a job for you, a job that youth can't
do ... a dangerous job, but a good one
that'll bring you fame, fortune and peace....

 In a central California tomato field a dusty-faced man opened the autodriver of a nuclear-powered truck and inserted a cannery's address card so the truck would know where to deliver its load.

 

You'll be better off in a Home, Pop, than trying to work cheaper than a machine."

"Those Homes are prisons!"

 

But no! Always it's the man who has to adapt to the machine, not the machine to the man. The only way to get by in this world is to find some machine you just naturally fit."

"You sound kind of bitter."

"Why not? I used to be a stock control clerk, keeping track of spare parts supply for a nationally distributed line of machine tools. I had twenty girls working for me. Then one day they put in a big computer."

“Once upon a time,” said the sailor, “the Devil and Davy Jones came to Cardiff, to the place called Tiger Bay. They put up at Tony Adam’s, not far from Pier Head, at the corner of Sunday Lane. And all the time they stayed there, they used to be going to the rum-shop, where they sat at a table, smoking their cigars, and dicing each other for different persons’ souls. Now you must know that the Devil gets landsmen, and Davy Jones gets sailor-folk; and they get tired of having always the same, so then they dice each other for some of another sort. “One time they were in a place in Mary Street, having some burnt brandy, and playing red and black for the people passing. And while they were looking out on the street and turning the cards, they saw all the people on the sidewalk breaking their necks to get into the gutter. And they saw all the shop-people running out and kowtowing, and all the carts pulling up, and all the police saluting. ‘Here comes a big nob,’ said Davy Jones. ‘Yes,’ said the Devil; ‘it’s the Bishop that’s stopping with the Mayor.’ ‘Red or black?’ said Davy Jones, picking up a card. ‘I don’t play for bishops,’ said the Devil. ‘I respect the cloth,’ he said. ‘Come on, man,’ said Davy Jones. ‘I’d give an admiral to have a bishop. Come on, now; make your game. Red or black?’ ‘Well, I say red,’ said the Devil. ‘It’s the ace of clubs,’ said Davy Jones; ‘I win; and it’s the first bishop ever I had in my life.’ The Devil was mighty angry at that—at losing a bishop. ‘I’ll not play any more,’ he said; ‘I’m off home. Some people gets too good cards for me. There was some queer shuffling when that pack was cut, that’s my belief.’ “‘Ah, stay and be friends, man,’ said Davy Jones. ‘Look at what’s coming down the street. I’ll give you that for nothing.’ “Now, coming down the street there was a reefer—one of those apprentice fellows. And he was brass-bound fit to play music. He stood about six feet, and there were bright brass buttons down his jacket, and on his collar, and on his sleeves. His cap had a big gold badge, with a house-flag in seven different colours in the middle of it, and a gold chain cable of a chinstay twisted round it. He was wearing his cap on three hairs, and he was walking on both the sidewalks and all the road. His trousers were cut like wind-sails round his ankles. He had a fathom of red silk tie rolling out over his chest. He’d a cigarette in a twisted clay holder a foot and a half long. He was chewing tobacco over his shoulders as he walked. He’d a bottle of rum-hot in one hand, a bag of jam tarts in the other, and his pockets were full of love-letters from every port between Rio and Callao, round by the East. “‘You mean to say you’ll give me that?’ said the Devil. ‘I will,’ said Davy Jones, ‘and a beauty he is. I never see a finer.’ ‘He is, indeed, a beauty,’ said the Devil. ‘I take back what I said about the cards. I’m sorry I spoke crusty. What’s the matter with some burnt brandy?’ ‘Burnt brandy be it,’ said Davy Jones. So then they rang the bell, and ordered a new jug and clean glasses. “Now the Devil was so proud of what Davy Jones had given him, he couldn’t keep away from him. He used to hang about the East Bute Docks, under the red-brick clock-tower, looking at the barque the young man worked aboard. Bill Harker his name was. He was in the West Coast barque, the Coronel, loading fuel for Hilo. So at last, when the Coronel was sailing, the Devil shipped himself aboard her, as one of the crowd in the fo’c’sle, and away they went down the Channel. At first he was very happy, for Bill Harker was in the same watch, and the two would yarn together. And though he was wise when he shipped, Bill Harker taught him a lot. There was a lot of things Bill Harker knew about. But when they were off the River Plate, they got caught in a pampero, and it blew very hard, and a big green sea began to run. The Coronel was a wet ship, and for three days you could stand upon her poop, and look forward and see nothing but a smother of foam from the break of the poop to the jib-boom. The crew had to roost on the poop. The fo’c’sle was flooded out. So while they were like this the flying jib worked loose. ‘The jib will be gone in a half a tick,’ said the mate. ‘Out there, one of you, and make it fast, before it blows away.’ But the boom was dipping under every minute, and the waist was four feet deep, and green water came aboard all along her length. So none of the crowd would go forward. Then Bill Harker shambled out, and away he went forward, with the green seas smashing over him, and he lay out along the jib-boom and made the sail fast, and jolly nearly drowned he was. ‘That’s a brave lad, that Bill Harker,’ said the Devil. ‘Ah, come off,’ said the sailors. ‘Them reefers, they haven’t got souls to be saved.’ It was that that set the Devil thinking. “By and by they came up with the Horn; and if it had blown off the Plate, it now blew off the roof. Talk about wind and weather. They got them both for shore aboard the Coronel. And it blew all the sails off her, and she rolled all her masts out, and the seas made a breach of her bulwarks, and the ice knocked a hole in her bows. So watch and watch they pumped the old Coronel, and the leak gained steadily, and they were hove to under a weather cloth, five and a half degrees to the south of anything. And while they were like this, just about giving up hope, the old man sent the watch below, and told them they could start prayers. So the Devil crept on to the top of the half-deck, to look through the scuttle, to see what the reefers were doing, and what kind of prayers Bill Harker was putting up. And he saw them all sitting round the table, under the lamp, with Bill Harker at the head. And each of them had a hand of cards, and a length of knotted rope-yarn, and they were playing able-whackets. Each man in turn put down a card, and swore a new blasphemy, and if his swear didn’t come as he played the card, then all the others hit him with their teasers. But they never once had a chance to hit Bill Harker. ‘I think they were right about his soul,’ said the Devil. And he sighed, like he was sad. “Shortly after the Coronel went down, and all hands drowned in her, saving only Bill Harker and the Devil. They came up out of the smothering green seas, and saw the stars blinking in the sky, and heard the wind howling like a pack of dogs. They managed to get aboard the Coronel’s hen-house, which had come adrift, and floated. The fowls were all drowned inside, so they lived on drowned hens. As for drink, they had to do without for there was none. When they got thirsty they splashed their faces with salt water; but they were so cold they didn’t feel thirst very bad. They drifted three days and three nights, till their skins were all cracked and salt-caked. And all the Devil thought of was whether Bill Harker had a soul. And Bill kept telling the Devil what a thundering big feed they would have as soon as they fetched to port, and how good a rum-hot would be, with a lump of sugar and a bit of lemon peel. “And at last the old hen-house came bump on to Terra del Fuego, and there were some natives cooking rabbits. So the Devil and Bill made a raid of the whole jing bang, and ate till they were tired. Then they had a drink out of a brook, and a warm by the fire, and a pleasant sleep. ‘Now,’ said the Devil, ‘I will see if he’s got a soul. I’ll see if he give thanks.’ So after an hour or two Bill took a turn up and down and came to the Devil. ‘It’s mighty dull on this forgotten continent,’ he said. ‘Have you got a ha’penny?’ ‘No,’ said the Devil. ‘What in joy d’ye want with a ha’penny?’ ‘I might have played you pitch and toss,’ said Bill. ‘I give you up,’ said the Devil; ‘you’ve no more soul than the inner part of an empty barrel.’ And with that the Devil vanished in a flame of sulphur. “Bill stretched himself, and put another shrub on the fire. He picked up a few round shells, and began a game of knucklebones.”

BY PROXY By DAVID GORDON - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24707/pg24707-images.html

 It's been said that the act of creation is a solitary thing—that teams never create; only individuals. But sometimes a team may be needed to make creation effective....

I was in South Africa at the time," Elshawe said. "Covering the civil war down there, remember?

Elshawe, who hadn't seen another human being for fifteen minutes, felt that the predicted overcrowding was still some time off.

"'Course," the driver went on, "I reckon folks have t' live some place, but I never could see why human bein's are so all-fired determined to bunch theirselves up so thick together that they can't hardly move—like a bunch of sheep in a snowstorm. It don't make sense to me. Does it to you, Mr. Skinner?"

 Elshawe nodded. He was thinking of the "artists" who splatter up clean canvas and call it "artistic self-expression." And the clodheads who write disconnected, meaningless prose and claim that it's free verse. The muddleminds who forget that Picasso learned to paint within the strict limits of classical art before he tried new methods, and that James Joyce learned to handle the English language well before he wrote "Finnegan's Wake."

No one knew what sin Nikolai Kupreloff had committed to bring on his head so terrible a penalty. Year after year his wife and he had prayed for a child, to their ikons in the tiny basilica in the wood, and when his wife gave birth at last, it was neither a child nor children. She had given birth to two little boys, perfectly made, exquisitely proportioned, but there was a deadly thing had befallen them ... the tiny right hand of the one was inexorably seized by the left hand of the other. The little woodcutter’s cottage of Nikolai lay deeply hidden in the great pine woods of Lower Serbia, miles from his nearest neighbour. Yet even in that wild country the fame of the intertwined children travelled far, and the wise old women from those parts came to see if herbs or chanting or any of their dark gifts might be of the least avail. They were no more useful than a real doctor who had studied at Belgrade, was practising at Monastir, and was stimulated to great interest by the account of these strange children. The case defied all the arts of black or white magic, and the interest of the episode flickered and died down. So it was that Nikolai reconciled himself to the inevitable, and as the boys grew older he would cross himself devoutly and say: “Thank God, it might have been a thousand times worse!” They were lads of extraordinary beauty. Peter and Ivan he called them, Ivan being the lad who held so irrevocably the wrist of his brother within his fingers. In appearance they were identical—the light, tough hair and the laughing blue eyes of the Serbian Slav, sturdy, well-knit limbs, and a sterling robustness of physique. It was only their parents and themselves who knew that between them there was one slight but unmistakable mark of distinction—below the knuckle of Ivan’s thumb was marked dully a little red arrow. In fact, a stranger might not have known that this abnormal bond existed between the two brothers as he saw them swinging along under the pines. “What a loving little pair!” he would exclaim, as he heard them laugh and chatter in complete harmony, and look into each other’s eyes with the understanding born of flawless love. When they were about fifteen years old their mother died, and the father Nikolai began more and more to remain behind in his cottage attending to the frugal needs of the little family, while Peter and Ivan, as the years went on, grew even more skilful in the art of woodcutting; for Peter wielding the axe in his left hand, Ivan in his right, achieved such a fine reciprocity of movement, that Nikolai would laugh in his great yellow beard and mutter: “Truly the ways of God are inscrutable, for even out of their calamity has He made a great blessing!” The passing of time only knit closer their perfect intimacy, so that they almost did not notice when their father Nikolai sickened and died. Now they were left to their cottage and their woodcutting and their complete love, the whole being crowned by the splendid physique of young foresters at twenty-one; so that life, it seemed, had nothing in store for them but long years of undivided love and content. Yet even into their seclusion rumours came of the great world beyond. Now and again they would catch glimpses of the marvels of Salonika in the eyes of travelled men. They would hear of a city where lovely women, infinitely more beautiful than the queen of the tousled gypsies who flickered from time to time along the forest paths, sang upon stages of golden wood, in gardens full of hanging lights. They would hear of the sea and glowing ships, and men who spoke low musical languages uttered in countries beyond the sea. So it was the brothers determined to leave their woodcutting behind them for a season and adventure forth into the world of ships and songs and lovely women. 2 To Peter and Ivan Salonika was a revelation of wonders they barely thought actual. From a little room in the street of Johann Tschimiski they saw the multicoloured tides of cosmopolitan humanity sweeping down from Egnatia Street, down Venizelos Street to the Place de la Concorde. They would walk along the quay-side past the great hotels to the Jardins de la Tour Blanche, and were sent into an ecstasy of delight by the chic little women who smiled archly at these two fair-headed lads from the up-country, who walked along hand clasped in wrist in so naïve and rustic a manner. Yet when they entered the Théatre des Variétés at the White Tower it seemed to them that the very portals of heaven had opened wide. They would return in a daze of delight to their room and recount with an almost religious fervour the beauties and enchantments of the show. Each little Spanish or French girl who came to do her song or minuet had seemed to them more enchanting than the last. Never a cloud of disagreement came between them. There was a perfect coincidence in their tastes, and never, they felt, had their love for each other been so sympathetic and complete as it was now. The brothers had no large sum of money at their disposal. The time of their holiday was drawing to a close. One evening they turned up at the theatre for the last time, their nerves keyed up to a pitch of delighted impatience, the more tense as the brothers knew that the next day would see them on the arduous road back to their Serbian forest. Turn followed turn with alluring consequence. Then at one stage the music ceased for some moments and there was an atmosphere of expectance in the air. It was then that a simple and delightful English girl came half-shyly from the wings. There was nothing flamboyant in her appearance or her manner. Yet at once she seemed to seize the house with the graceful and reticent winsomeness of her song. So she sang her song through, a dainty little ballad of old-world gardens and fragrant flowers and love unto death. Peter felt the fingers of Ivan tighten round his wrist. He himself had been so stirred to his depths by the gentle grace of the girl that it was with a slight feeling of resentment he realised that Ivan had been experiencing once again an identical emotion. As he involuntarily moved away his arm Ivan uttered a slight cry of impatience. He turned round and looked into Peter’s eyes and found them aflame with a light deeper than mere appreciation. Peter was aware of his brother’s glance and looked at Ivan in return to find his face flushed almost as if he were half-drunk. That night for the first time in their history there occurred a slight bickering between the two. No mention of the little English actress passed between them, but each of them determined that some day, when his brother’s interest had died away, he should broach the subject and the possibility of a rediscovery of the English actress at Salonika. Next day they entrained for Monastir, and a few days later saw them installed once again in their father’s cottage in the wood. 3 In proportion as the fortunes of the Kupreloff brothers increased, something that had once existed between them receded further away. The perfection of their old intimacy became a memory of the past. No longer did the most minute physical or spiritual experience of the one become automatically part of his brother’s consciousness. So that now for the first time their indissoluble partnership became more and more galling. There was no doubt of it. Everything dated from that last night at Salonika, when the English girl appeared on the stage. They would still occasionally revive something of the old fervour as they discussed from time to time their impressions of the unforgettable holiday. Yet never a word passed between them concerning the unconscious girl who had captured both their hearts. At night they would lie awake, each thinking that the other was asleep. Bitterly, definitely, they would confess to their own deep hearts: “She is mine, she is mine; I am hers for ever.” And yet to each their love seemed hopeless beyond recall. There was the double sting that each of them loved the girl with an intensity reserved hitherto for his brother; but, if possible, more fatal was the despairing conviction that no girl could ever love the one of two brothers to whom the other would remain physically attached till death carried them both away. As the months passed by the friction between them increased. They were now in a position to buy land and a little livestock. But if Peter insisted upon keeping pigs, in the fashion of the majority of Serbians, Ivan would insist upon cattle. If Peter felt that he had done enough woodcutting for the day, Ivan felt that the day was only just beginning. One night in late autumn Peter lay tossing very heavily in his sleep. Ivan lay awake, thinking, thinking for ever of the girl, his whole heart full of rancour against the brother who must for ever prevent the consummation of his love. Heavily, wearily, Peter heaved on the bed. Outside the wind was howling. The dreariness of the wind seemed to enter Peter’s heart. “My little girl,” he murmured, “my little girl! When shall we meet, my little girl? Never, never, never!” Ivan’s forehead contracted with hate. He was filled suddenly with a tremendous loathing of his brother. “Never, never, never!” moaned Peter. Suddenly, obeying a frantic impulse, Ivan pulled with all his strength away from his brother’s wrist to which Fate had so viciously fastened him. With a great scream of pain Peter half leapt from the bed. “What’s this? What do you mean?” he shouted, his voice thick with pain and sleep. “Nothing! Nothing! I couldn’t help it! I was dreaming!” replied Ivan savagely, and the brothers settled down again for the night. Night after night the same thing happened. Peter would murmur for ever in his sleep, “My little girl, when shall we meet? Never, never, never!” Ivan would lie awake, hatred surging violently through his whole body, till his eyes would see nothing but flames in the darkness of their log-built room; and the sound of the branches in the forest would begin to mutter and moan: “Have done with it, Ivan, have done with it! She is waiting for you, waiting, always waiting. Have done with it! Have done with him—with him—with him!” One desolate night towards mid-winter the room was full of the miserable sleep-cries of Peter. Outside thunder ripped among the clouds. A finger of lightning came suddenly through the windows and pointed with a gesture of flame towards the open breast of Peter. A sudden and terrible thought flooded into Ivan’s soul! Whatever there was of human kindness and brother-love seemed in one sinister moment to be washed away from before the onset of the flood. All the branches upon all the trees shrieked across the night. “We shall be quiet, you shall have rest. She shall be yours. Have done with him, have done with him!” A great calm settled down upon Ivan’s soul—the issue was decided, the issue which had been hovering for so long in his subconsciousness was decided at last. There was nothing left to do. The mere deed was the mere snapping of a thread. With his eyes wide open, a terrible silence laying upon his soul, he stared into the night, waiting, waiting for the dawn. Dawn came at last. The brothers washed and took food. There was a long way to go, far off into the woods. There was almost a tenderness in Ivan’s attitude towards Peter. What mattered now? The issue was decided; the gods had taken the thing out of his hands. With their axes swinging they made their way into the woods, through a day sharp with frost. At last they arrived at the clearing where they were to continue their tree-felling. A brazier stood waiting there, and before work started they lit a fire in preparation for the midday meal. Then they picked up their axes and set to. Lustily their strokes rang through the wood. Chime rang upon chime. It was strenuous work, the work of men with strong muscles and keen eyes. The morning went by steadily. There was no hate in Ivan’s soul—only a deadly patience. He knew the moment would come. He knew when the moment came that he would act. For a few minutes they stopped and wiped their foreheads. Peter opened his shirt wide and exposed his breast to Ivan. The quick vision presented itself of Peter heaving darkly in their bed, the sudden finger of lightning, the naked breast. “Come!” said Ivan thickly, “let us begin!” They both took up their positions against a tree. Peter with the axe in his left hand struck against the tree. Ivan, quick as the lightning which last night had shown him his way, whirled his axe round, away from the tree, and the sharp edge went cracking through Peter’s ribs, deep beyond the heart. A great fountain of blood spurted into the air. A long, feeble moan left Peter’s lips. Deeper than the axe had cut, his eyes looked sorrowfully into the soul of Ivan. His weight tottered and Ivan felt himself following to the ground. There was not a moment to lose. Again the axe whirled through the air. With the whole of a strong man’s strength the axe came down upon his own wrist, and down fell the body of Peter with the hand of his brother indissoluble in death round his wrist, as it had been indissoluble in life. The thing he had brought about was too monstrous for Ivan at that moment to understand. It was only the little things that his ear and eye seized—the frightened screech of a bird in a tree, the sullen shining of the little red arrow in the thumb of his own severed hand. Ivan felt the blood streaming from the stump of his forearm. He knew that if he did not reassert complete mastery over himself he would bleed to death. All would be vain—the call of the far girl, the murder, the last look in Peter’s eyes. He staggered over to the brazier and plunged his forearm for one swift instant into the embers. Then darkness overwhelmed him and he fell backward into unutterable night. 4 It was easy enough to explain. Not the least suspicion attached itself to Ivan. People came from remote cabins and farms to sympathise with the bereaved brother. What was more likely in the world than that Ivan’s axe should slide from a knot in the tree and come crashing against Peter, who, even if he could see the axe coming, could not by any human means have disengaged himself from his brother. “I always thought something like this would happen,” people muttered wisely to each other, and shook their heads and crossed their breasts. Of course they all understood how Ivan could no longer remain in the cottage consecrated by memories of his brother. So Ivan sold his accumulation of timber and his land and what little stock the brothers had bought, and it was not many weeks after his forearm was healed that the jangling train from Monastir was bearing him through the Macedonian hills upon his quest for the English girl at Salonika. In Salonika she was nowhere to be found. Forlornly he went from music-hall to music-hall, but she was gone. He haunted even the cafés chantants along Egnatia Street, even the degenerate brasseries on the Monastir Road, where the red-costumed women stood upon improvised platforms and sang to tipsy crowds with the accompaniment of feeble violins. But there was no trace of her in the whole city. From the director at the White Tower he learned that perhaps she had proceeded to Constantinople, perhaps she had returned to Athens, whence the European artistes generally came to Salonika on their round of the greater Levantine towns. With all the fervour and idealism of a mediæval knight Ivan stepped upon the deck of a Messageries Maritimes boat returning to Marseilles by way of the Piræus. When the electric train from the harbour landed him at the station in Athens a mystic conviction filled him that here in this city, some day, the English girl would be revealed to him. Ambitiously he first tried the great Opéra, but she was not there. The weeks lengthened into months and failure followed failure, but the mysterious foreknowledge of his race held up his weary spirits and bade him put aside despair. When at last she appeared upon the stage of one of the lesser music-halls, it was with no great start of surprise or welcome that he recognised her arrival. It was as if a mother or a sister had slipped back into the place from which for some reason she had been absent. Her features had become engraved upon every curve of his brain. She came upon the stage and filled his life again as naturally as day fills the place of night. Life became for him a thing of meaning and splendour. He realised that at last Life was to begin. He knew little of the half-measures and half-advances of Western civilisation. He lost no time in appearing before the girl. After only a few words of difficult apology, with a voice of low and subdued passion he told her a fragment or two of his tale. It was a broken French that he talked—the French of which his mother long ago had taught her boys the few phrases she knew, and which his experiences in Salonika and Athens during the last few months had greatly improved. The large grey eyes of the English girl opened wide in wonder as she listened, fascinated, to the stammering avowals of this tall stranger from a shadowy land. Half in fright she drew back against the wall of her wretched little dressing-room, but, even so soon she realised that the destiny was overwhelming her which was to bring an end to her wanderings. She consented shyly to his suggestion that she should see him for a little while next night, and it was with a thrill of delight and fear she saw his great figure waiting for her at the gate of the Museum, as the purple Athenian dusk came wandering down from the Acropolis and cast velvet glooms among the pillars of Pentelican marble. For years since her mother had died and her father had become a confirmed drunkard, it was a very lonely life that Mary Weston had led. She had no great talent, and she had drifted from theatre to theatre upon the Continent, for to her England was a place of no kindly memories. Ivan Kupreloff began to mean for her what her mother had meant before she died and her father before he had taken to drink. A few months had passed only. There was no escape from Ivan. There was nothing importunate about him, but he was irresistible. He was Life. Proudly he realised that he had conquered her. To world’s end and Time’s end she was his own. They were married at length. Athens and all the cities she had known, the Serbian wood and the murdered brother—these passed utterly from their souls in the strong kiss which united them for all days. 5 Yet not for ever was the memory of his dead life to vanish from the heart of Ivan. Even during the times of his most passionate love for Mary there began to invade him moments of bitter memory and regret. There was something which prevented the entire fusion with Mary towards which he yearned and ached. It was something deep in his soul. It was something which gnawed at his forearm, bit with teeth of contrition at the place where the axe had fallen and severed the hand from the wrist. He tried to put all this futility from him. He would seize Mary more closely, look desperately into her eyes, and in the perfume of her lips and hair seek anodyne. Between them there was a sufficient store of money, small though it was, to allow them a few months of liberty, undisturbed by any thought of the future. They wandered lazily about Greece for a little time, finding in the Greek day and the immemorial hills a perfect setting for their love. And yet ever more insistently came to him the call of the hand—the hand which had been his own and not his own, the hand which had united in so unique an embrace his brother with himself. Again at night voices tormented him. Again, when winds were about, they called with living words: “The hand! The hand! It is calling you, calling! Answer! He wants you! Peter!” wailed the wind. “Peter! Peter!” Lines began to draw across his forehead. With anxiety Mary saw shadows growing under his eyes, and in his eyes a hunger which grew more and more forlorn. “What is it, love?” she would murmur. “You’ve not slept well!” “Nothing at all, love, nothing! All’s well!” he would reply, trying with a kiss to forget the wind and the hand and the call. “There’s something you’re longing for. Tell me, Ivan. Let me help you. You must.” “Nothing, Mary. I’ve got you. There’s nothing else in the world.” But the call of the hand did not abate. “Peter!” the winds wailed, “Peter! He wants you! Answer!” The urgency of the call grew more imperious. He was sickening and growing weak. There was a hot torpidity in the dry Greek noon which shrivelled his veins. He would drag his coat down from his neck and lift his head and try to breathe the deep breath he had known in his Serbian wood. But there was no spaciousness, no great draughts of cool air in the wind, only voices: “Peter! Peter! Peter!” “We must go somewhere. We must go away,” said Mary. “We must go to Athens and see a doctor, Ivan. I’m afraid!” “Not Athens! No!” he replied with a shudder, his temples contracting as before the hot blast from an oven. Those dry marble spaces! The dusty pepper-trees! The sweating crowds in the shops, swallowing sweet cakes like swine swallowing husks in a sty! Athens became a nightmare. He was lying awake one night, the body of Mary curled beside him, her hair floating vaguely on the pillow in the half-light of the moon. She stirred in her sleep, and her little white hand unconsciously sought his wrist and fastened tightly round it. That moment bridged the buried time. Unescapably Mary had brought back to him the sensation of Peter lying in the grasp of his own hand. Never before was the call of the hand so imperious. Never so clearly did the wind exclaim, “Peter! He wants you! Answer!” An irresistible love for his murdered brother overwhelmed him. He raised himself from his bed and lifted helplessly his lopped arm into the whispering room. “Coming, my brother, I am coming! Wait! Peter!” he moaned, and the wind replied: “Peter! Peter!” He lay back in bed. He realised that the strongest claim in the world upon him was the call of the hand. As for Mary—she was nothing different from himself. For her as for him the call of the hand came dictatorially. In each other they were one, but without the hand their unity was uncompleted. The call of the hand must be obeyed. To-morrow they must leave Greece behind. To-morrow to Serbia, to-morrow the response to the hand. Mary was not surprised when Ivan without warning explained that all their plans were altered. She was used to his unaccountable whims, the sudden mystic impulses of his Slavonic soul. They packed up the few things which were all the impediment they possessed, and next day saw them well started on their way to Monastir, carefully skirting Athens. Arrived at Monastir, a few days elapsed before they appeared at the remote wood where Ivan was born. The cottage built by Ivan Kupreloff was not yet occupied. The strange character of its former inhabitants combined with the terrible nature of Peter’s death had succeeded in keeping it empty! They obtained permission from its owner to occupy the cottage, and with a great sigh of content Ivan flung open the door where he and his brother had passed so frequently in former days. In a little time Mary had made of the house such a palace of delight as it had not been since Ivan’s mother was dead. Happily, Ivan took in large draughts of the Serbian pineland air, filling his lungs. Happily, with Mary beside him on the bed where he and Peter had lain entwined, the dark drowsy nights melted into dawn. He made his reply to the call of the hand. Only faintly, if at all, the wind or the branches whispered “Peter! Peter!” Peter seemed to be happy at last. The severed hand seemed at last to be tranquil round the wrist of the murdered brother. Then the winds died away, and there was no sound of “Peter!”; only fitfully a swaying of twigs and a rustle of pine-needles. So it seemed. Till summer drooped her drowsing hair. Summer became wrinkled and old. Summer went and the swift autumn came. The days shortened into the rigours of winter, the days ever contracted towards the anniversary of that red day when the axe was lifted and Peter fell. Never a moment did it occur to Ivan that now when the fatal day was approaching he might leave behind him his Serbian wood. He knew that, more tightly than ever during his living days, the wrist of Peter lay within his own hand, tight, unescapable. Mary and he lay under the thumb of that severed hand wherefrom the red arrow glowed when the night was dark and the woodfire threw leaping shadows over the log-walls. There was no gainsaying the call of the hand till the end of days. Ivan knew that never again would he leave behind his Serbian wood. Came the night which was the anniversary of that dead, unburyable night when Peter’s doom had been sealed. Again there was the rumbling of thunder, there were evil flashes of lightning that ran among the clouds. Never with so firm an embrace had Mary been clasped within his arms. Nothing in the world was so strong as his love for Mary. They had responded to the call of the hand. There was no further claim upon them. Ivan kissed her sleeping eyes and was lulled in the music of her breathing. A drowsiness came over him, and for a time he slid into sleep. In his sleep something tightened round him, something growing so tight that it forced through the barriers of his sleep. Vaguely, faintly a half-consciousness came back to him. He was not awake. He was not asleep. He was in a borderland where the other world is not dead and this world is half-alive. Tighter grew the thing which pressed against his sleep. It was round his wrist, it was round the wrist where something had once come crashing down. What was it? What was it had come crashing down? An axe it was that had come crashing down. It was the hand of Mary growing tighter round his wrist. No, it could not be the hand of Mary. Mary had fallen from his arms. Mary was turned away from him. He could see her hands pale where she had lifted them in sleep above her head. It was not the hand of Mary growing tighter round his wrist. But it was a hand. No doubt of that. It was a hand. With a dull glow of flame a little red arrow gleamed like embers below the thumb of the hand. Where had he seen that arrow? Where and when? When his hand had fallen away from him, lopped at the wrist. It was the dead hand which was not dead. It was his own hand. It was the hand with the red arrow which had held Peter so tightly. It was the dead hand which was alive, the living hand which had arisen from the dead. Tighter round his wrist grew the pressure of the severed hand. The hand was tired of calling. The hand had come. There was no gainsaying the hand. So tight grew the clutch of the hand that his whole arm slowly lifted from his side. Irresistibly the shoulder followed the rising arm. There was no gainsaying the hand. Neither awake nor asleep, neither living nor dead, he followed the hand, he rose from the bed where Mary lay, sleeping sundered from him, his no more. Mary was alive. He was neither living nor dead. The door of the room was opened wide. Closed doors were no barrier against the hand which had arisen from the grave. Slowly, with steady feet, with wide, filmy eyes, Ivan passed through the door. Slowly through the outer door, slowly into the sound of thunder, into the gleam of lightning and the voices of winds moaning unceasingly, “Peter! Peter! He is calling you! Ivan! Peter is calling you! Follow!” and ever again unceasingly, “Peter! Peter!” Tighter than the bonds of ice or granite hills, tight only as the bond of death, the arisen hand held the lopped wrist, drew the slow body of Ivan through the haunted night far into the wood, far through the talking trees, far to the place of that tree which had not been cut down, to the place where an axe had fallen through bones and flesh, where Peter had fallen, where Peter lay buried, not deep down; where Peter lay buried under twigs and loose earth. Tightly round the wrist of the man neither alive nor dead clutched the resurrected hand. Nearer and nearer to the shallow grave the hand pulled down the body of Ivan. Methodically, steadily, working with no pause, the free hand of Ivan moved the twigs and the loose earth—methodically, with no pause, until at last the body of Peter lay revealed; not recognisable, dissolute beneath the change through which all men shall pass, recognisable only to those filmy eyes of Ivan, to that questing hungry soul of Ivan which had come to claim its own. Closer and closer to the dead brother the severed hand drew the body of Ivan down; so close, so close, until at last the hand clutched again and for ever that wrist to which Fate had fastened it long years ago. Alongside of his dead brother, quietly, with those eyes which neither saw nor did not see, Ivan lay down full length. Gradually the severed hand, the hand which had arisen from the dead to claim him, because the dead brother called and the severed hand called for its own, gradually the hand slipped from the lopped wrist; the wrist and the arm became one. The hand of Ivan had brought Ivan to his own. Indissolubly, Peter and Ivan lay joined together. But the death which lay cold in the heart and body of Peter passed from the clutched wrist, passed into the hand which clutched it, passed along the arm which had been severed once, and along Ivan’s shoulder, until it made his eyes unseeing discs and of his heart cold stone which could beat no more. As the grey light of dawn came emptily down the Serbian woods, the two brothers lay immortally one again, like the two babies the gods had given Nikolai Kupreloff upon a long-vanished night.

The CALL of CTHULHU By H.P. LOVECRAFT - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68283/pg68283-images.html

 

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

“I can account for the man,” said Carstairs, “but what I am curious about is the feelings of the girl. He blew out his brains in her presence, and he did it immediately after she had told him to be gone. Dramatic of him. He did it for love of her—a warm passion. I suppose that that would be the deepest idea in her mind.” “He was a man of his word, at any rate,” said Miss Landells, “for of all the heroes who are eternally swearing they could die for a smile and all the rest of it, hardly one would wet his boots unless he thought he could gain something by it.... I dare say she had begun by despising him, and when he blew out his brains felt some respect for him. Probably if he were alive again, though, she would act in the same way.” “I think I could put a harder case,” said the Colonel, “one where a man sacrificed more——” “Sacrificed more?” “Yes; a man might easily blow out his brains in a burst of rage or disappointment, but that proves little. Blantyre, the man of whom I was thinking, did more, and the girl—Miss Trafford—had therefore to deal with a more complex problem.” With a warning that we might think the story gruesome, the Colonel told it. To understand the circumstances it is necessary to know something of Blantyre’s character. When I knew him first he had the rank of Captain. I being second lieutenant and our relations not being very familiar, I only knew him from what might be called an outsider’s point of view. I hardly think, however, that anyone knew him much better. That will give you a hint—he was a reserved man. Yet he had a fund of high-spirits; also a witty manner, which was at times playful and yet sometimes bitter. He was an unusually handsome man. Above average height, slender but well-made and active, he had regular features, dark complexion and black, blue-black hair. It was said that he had a dash of the “tar-brush”—Indian, you know—and this fact, trivial as it may appear, had, I believe, a powerful influence on his life. I know as a fact, that he became more reserved after a rather unpleasant occurrence, when an ill-bred young spark, losing his temper in an argument, called him a Dago. Blantyre was always a serious sort of chap. He wrote for the United Service Review and the Engineering Magazine, and other technical journals, partly of course for the interest he took in that sort of thing, but also because he was not well-off. That too was his reason for taking as little part as possible in dances, picnics and the other little flutters by which we amused ourselves. He seemed, in fact, rather a fish out of water, and I used to wonder why he remained in the Service; but he was not only of an energetic and resolute habit of mind, but also intensely ambitious. He had the misfortune to fall in love with the prettiest, the most spoilt and, I believe, the most selfish, minx in England. The word “brilliancy” was always on her lips, and she thought of nothing but pleasure and excitement. She was then about twenty. Imagine her reception of him when, carried off his feet, he proposed to her. She laughed in his face and, I am told, asked him if he were “an Indian Nabob”! She probably only meant that the man who married her must be able to give her the sort of life to which she was accustomed; and had not realized—she took it all so lightly and really cared for Blantyre so little—what the phrase might mean to him. His poverty and his supposed origin—no words could have cut more deeply. That very night, he set the wheels in motion and shortly after was transferred to the Indian battalion. For the next seven years he put in as much fighting on the frontiers as was humanly possible. He seemed the veriest glutton for danger, never spared himself, and yet people said he fought without enthusiasm or any warmth of blood. Oh, I grant you a queer chap! At first his men rather disliked him, but in time they became impressed by his courage and dash, and they soon grew to rely on his steady, his inexorable justice. He was never a popular man, too stiff and too reserved, but his men would have followed him to certain death. They called him “The Sabre Prince.” After seven years Blantyre was back amongst us, but by that time he had risen to be Colonel, and his reputation was unique. He was then about thirty-five, still, you see, a young man, and quite naturally London went mad over him. He became the lion that particular season. But India had left her marks on him. He had returned minus his right arm, and the once blue-black hair was grey. However, he was still as handsome as ever and had the air of a man who has seen and dealt with matters of importance. In other words he was distingué. Also he was still in love with Miss Trafford. Nor had time and experience and that unique reputation of his failed of their effect on her. As often happens to a woman of her type she had failed to bring off a match commensurate with her ambitions, and at twenty-seven was still unmarried. The news of their engagement set everybody gossipping. His infatuation was recalled, and it was said she had refused a great alliance in order to wait for him. The story even got into the newspapers. I was not a little pleased, I can tell you, to hear that they were to be married. She was still wonderfully pretty and, rumour said, less vain and spoilt. It might be that she would settle down and make him a good wife. Anyway he wanted her, he had wanted her for a long time, and he was going to get what he wanted. Blantyre himself wrote to tell me, and I think the next few weeks were the happiest of his life. Judge then, of my surprise—sorrow, too—to learn one day, and again from Blantyre himself that the marriage was off, that he had resigned his commission and got an engineering job abroad. Of course I hurried to see him. He was much as usual, cool, collected, finely-tempered. In fact when I entered he looked up with a smile—and I had always thought his smile lighting up that austere face peculiarly winning. It appeared that it was he who had broken off their engagement, and the matter can be put in a nutshell—he had found her out. Mercenary motives, no real affection—also, while he himself had grown and developed, she had remained the social butterfly. He told me—what I had not known—the story of his rejection seven years previously. He had believed he was not worthy of her, and he had gone to India to fight his way up to her standard. When he came back he had believed her story, believed she had waited.... Then he had heard things. People talk, you know. I don’t know that he believed what he was told, but what wrung him to the very vitals was that he should have loved so deeply something that was—well, a poor thing, unworthy. Miss Trafford was in no temper to be jilted. She even went the length of putting the case into her lawyer’s hands for breach of promise. “Before I leave England,” he said, “I mean as far as I can to satisfy justice. The law, I suppose, could not get more from me than I possess, and everything I have, I mean to give her. It was she who sent me to India, and I will strip myself for her of everything I gained there. Will you take my medals?” and he offered me a little mahogany, gold-ornamented box. “Keep them as a memento. I do not want them. I—I feel I may have won them fighting against my own people.” In his words was a something of grief and even shame. I felt I was looking at a man who regretted what could not be helped, who would regret it for the remainder of his days. “There is only now my property in Devonshire. That I have made over to Miss Trafford. The deeds are in this box. The property is a small one but it has now no encumbrances. I have been able to clear off everything; except—” he said musingly—“except something she may or may not regard as a detriment—it is a sort of Sentimental Mortgage.” “A skeleton in the cupboard?” said I, thinking of some ghost story, or creepy legend, or the like. “Precisely. You have hit it. A skeleton in the cupboard.” “But, but,” said I, trying to bring him back to the business side of the matter, “this is not justice, justice to yourself.” “When all is said and done,” he returned quietly, “you will recognise that justice—inexorable justice. Money, position, even reputation are nothing to me now.... No, I am not going to kill myself. I have accepted a post in an enterprise which, if successful, will make a more enduring mark, bring me greater wealth, perhaps even fame, than those frontier exploits of mine.” I was relieved to hear of his fresh interests. “I am undertaking the survey of a line to open up the hinterlands of Argentine. If that be successful, I shall hope to superintend the work. If I do not succeed—well, at any rate I shall have made a beginning, and my successor may find encouragement in the spirit in which I have led the way. But I am dreaming ... I wish you to take this box containing the deeds, and present it to her—if you will do me that last favour.” I promised. I brought the box to her and presented it with ceremony. She was always charming. She begged me to wait while she opened it. When I spoke of the “skeleton in the cupboard” I had little guessed how startlingly true the words must have sounded. It was her fault that Blantyre had gone to India, and with the gift lay the rebuke, for the skeleton grasped the deeds. “The skeleton, Colonel?” “Yes, the skeleton of his right hand.”

Uniform of a Man By Dave Dryfoos - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32737/pg32737-images.html

 After rescue, revenge was uppermost in Chet Barfield's mind; the hideous, bestial Agvars had to be taught a lesson they'd never forget. His rescuers seemed to disagree, however—until Chet learned his lesson too!

 

When the great wars of the Spanish Succession had been brought to an end by the Treaty of Utrecht, the vast number of privateers which had been fitted out by the contending parties found their occupation gone. Some took to the more peaceful but less lucrative ways of ordinary commerce, others were absorbed into the fishing-fleets, and a few of the more reckless hoisted the Jolly Rodger at the mizzen and the bloody flag at the main, declaring a private war upon their own account against the whole human race. With mixed crews, recruited from every nation, they scoured the seas, disappearing occasionally to careen in some lonely inlet, or putting in for a debauch at some outlying port, where they dazzled the inhabitants by their lavishness and horrified them by their brutalities. On the Coromandel Coast, at Madagascar, in the African waters, and above all in the West Indian and American seas, the pirates were a constant menace. With an insolent luxury they would regulate their depredations by the comfort of the seasons, harrying New England in the summer and dropping south again to the tropical islands in the winter. They were the more to be dreaded because they had none of that discipline and restraint which made their predecessors, the Buccaneers, both formidable and respectable. These Ishmaels of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the moment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, after serving as boon companion in some hideous debauch, or might sit at his cabin table with his own nose and his lips served up with pepper and salt in front of him. It took a stout seaman in those days to ply his calling in the Caribbean Gulf. Such a man was Captain John Scarrow, of the ship Morning Star, and yet he breathed a long sigh of relief when he heard the splash of the falling anchor and swung at his moorings within a hundred yards of the guns of the citadel of Basseterre. St. Kitt’s was his final port of call, and early next morning his bowsprit would be pointed for Old England. He had had enough of those robber-haunted seas. Ever since he had left Maracaibo upon the Main, with his full lading of sugar and red pepper, he had winced at every topsail which glimmered over the violet edge of the tropical sea. He had coasted up the Windward Islands, touching here and there, and assailed continually by stories of villainy and outrage. Captain Sharkey, of the 20-gun pirate barque Happy Delivery, had passed down the coast, and had littered it with gutted vessels and with murdered men. Dreadful anecdotes were current of his grim pleasantries and of his inflexible ferocity. From the Bahamas to the Main his coal-black barque, with the ambiguous name, had been freighted with death and many things which are worse than death. So nervous was Captain Scarrow, with his new full-rigged ship and her full and valuable lading, that he struck out to the west as far as Bird’s Island to be out of the usual track of commerce. And yet even in those solitary waters he had been unable to shake off sinister traces of Captain Sharkey. One morning they had raised a single skiff adrift upon the face of the ocean. Its only occupant was a delirious seaman, who yelled hoarsely as they hoisted him aboard, and showed a dried-up tongue like a black and wrinkled fungus at the back of his mouth. Water and nursing soon transformed him into the strongest and smartest sailor on the ship. He was from Marblehead, in New England, it seemed, and was the sole survivor of a schooner which had been scuttled by the dreadful Sharkey. For a week Hiram Evanson, for that was his name, had been adrift beneath a tropical sun. Sharkey had ordered the mangled remains of his late captain to be thrown into the boat, “as provisions for the voyage,” but the seaman had at once committed them to the deep, lest the temptation should be more than he could bear. He had lived upon his own huge frame until, at the last moment, the Morning Star had found him in that madness which is the precursor of such a death. It was no bad find for Captain Scarrow, for, with a short-handed crew, such a seaman as this big New Englander was a prize worth having. He vowed that he was the only man whom Captain Sharkey had ever placed under an obligation. Now that they lay under the guns of Basseterre, all danger from the pirate was at an end, and yet the thought of him lay heavily upon the seaman’s mind as he watched the agent’s boat shooting out from the custom-house quay. “I’ll lay you a wager, Morgan,” said he to the first mate, “that the agent will speak of Sharkey in the first hundred words that pass his lips.” “Well, captain, I’ll have you a silver dollar, and chance it,” said the rough old Bristol man beside him. The negro rowers shot the boat alongside, and the linen-clad steersman sprang up the ladder. “Welcome, Captain Scarrow!” he cried. “Have you heard about Sharkey?” The captain grinned at the mate. “What devilry has he been up to now?” he asked. “Devilry! You’ve not heard, then! Why, we’ve got him safe under lock and key here at Basseterre. He was tried last Wednesday, and he is to be hanged to-morrow morning.” Captain and mate gave a shout of joy, which an instant later was taken up by the crew. Discipline was forgotten as they scrambled up through the break of the poop to hear the news. The New Englander was in the front of them with a radiant face turned up to heaven, for he came of the Puritan stock. “Sharkey to be hanged!” he cried. “You don’t know, Master Agent, if they lack a hangman, do you?” “Stand back!” cried the mate, whose outraged sense of discipline was even stronger than his interest at the news. “I’ll pay that dollar, Captain Scarrow, with the lightest heart that ever I paid a wager yet. How came the villain to be taken?” “Why, as to that, he became more than his own comrades could abide, and they took such a horror of him that they would not have him on the ship. So they marooned him upon the Little Mangles to the south of the Mysteriosa Bank, and there he was found by a Portobello trader, who brought him in. There was talk of sending him to Jamaica to be tried, but our good little governor, Sir Charles Ewan, would not hear of it. ‘He’s my meat,’ said he, ‘and I claim the cooking of it.’ If you can stay till to-morrow morning at ten, you’ll see the point swinging.” “I wish I could,” said the captain wistfully, “but I am sadly behind time now. I should start with the evening tide.” “That you can’t do,” said the agent with decision. “The Governor is going back with you.” “The Governor!” “Yes. He’s had a dispatch from Government to return without delay. The fly-boat that brought it has gone on to Virginia. So Sir Charles has been waiting for you, as I told him you were due before the rains.” “Well, well!” cried the captain, in some perplexity, “I’m a plain seaman, and I don’t know much of governors and baronets and their ways. I don’t remember that I ever so much as spoke to one. But if it’s in King George’s service, and he asks a cast in the Morning Star as far as London, I’ll do what I can for him. There’s my own cabin he can have and welcome. As to the cooking, it’s lobscouse and salmagundy six days in the week; but he can bring his own cook aboard with him if he thinks our galley too rough for his taste.” “You need not trouble your mind, Captain Scarrow,” said the agent. “Sir Charles is in weak health just now, only clear of a quartan ague, and it is likely he will keep his cabin most of the voyage. Dr. Larousse said that he would have sunk had the hanging of Sharkey not put fresh life in him. He has a great spirit in him, though, you must not blame him if he is somewhat short in his speech.” “He may say what he likes and do what he likes so long as he does not come athwart my hawse when I am working the ship,” said the captain. “He is Governor of St. Kitt’s, but I am Governor of the Morning Star. And, by his leave, I must weigh with the first tide, for I owe a duty to my employer, just as he does to King George.” “He can scarce be ready to-night, for he has many things to set in order before he leaves.” “The early morning tide, then.” “Very good. I shall send his things aboard to-night, and he will follow them to-morrow early if I can prevail upon him to leave St. Kitt’s without seeing Sharkey do the rogue’s hornpipe. His own orders were instant, so it may be that he will come at once. It is likely that Dr. Larousse may attend him upon the journey.” Left to themselves, the captain and mate made the best preparations which they could for their illustrious passenger. The largest cabin was turned out and adorned in his honour, and orders were given by which barrels of fruit and some cases of wine should be brought off to vary the plain food of an ocean-going trader. In the evening the Governor’s baggage began to arrive—great ironbound ant-proof trunks, and official tin packing-cases, with other strange-shaped packages, which suggested the cocked hat or sword within. And then there came a note, with a heraldic device upon the big red seal, to say that Sir Charles Ewan made his compliments to Captain Scarrow, and that he hoped to be with him in the morning as early as his duties and his infirmities would permit. He was as good as his word, for the first grey of dawn had hardly begun to deepen into pink when he was brought alongside, and climbed with some difficulty up the ladder. The captain had heard the Governor was an eccentric, but he was hardly prepared for the curious figure who came limping feebly down his quarter-deck, his steps supported by a thick bamboo cane. He wore a Ramillies wig, all twisted into little tails like a poodle’s coat, and cut so low across the brow that the large green glasses which covered his eyes looked as if they were hung from it. A fierce beak of a nose, very long and very thin, cut the air in front of him. His ague had caused him to swathe his throat and chin with a broad linen cravat, and he wore a loose damask powdering-gown secured by a cord round the waist. As he advanced he carried his masterful nose high in the air, but his head turned slowly from side to side in the helpless manner of the purblind, and he called in a high, querulous voice for the captain. “You have my things?” he asked. “Yes, Sir Charles.” “Have you wine aboard?” “I have ordered five cases, sir” “And tobacco?” “There is a keg of Trinidad.” “You play a hand of piquet?” “Passably well, sir.” “Then up anchor, and to sea!” There was a fresh westerly wind, so by the time the sun was fairly through the morning haze, the ship was hull down from the islands. The decrepit Governor still limped the deck, with one guiding hand upon the quarter-rail. “You are on Government service now, captain,” said he. “They are counting the days till I come to Westminster, I promise you. Have you all that she will carry?” “Every inch, Sir Charles.” “Keep her so if you blow the sails out of her. I fear, Captain Scarrow, that you will find a blind and broken man a poor companion for your voyage.” “I am honoured in enjoying your Excellency’s society,” said the captain. “But I am sorry that your eyes should be so afflicted.” “Yes, indeed. It is the cursed glare of the sun on the white streets of Basseterre which has gone far to burn them out.” “I had heard also that you had been plagued by a quartan ague.” “Yes; I have had a pyrexy, which has reduced me much.” “We had set aside a cabin for your surgeon.” “Ah, the rascal! There was no budging him, for he has a snug business amongst the merchants. But hark!” He raised his ring-covered hand in the air. From far astern there came the low deep thunder of cannon. “It is from the island!” cried the captain in astonishment. “Can it be a signal for us to put back?” The Governor laughed. “You have heard that Sharkey, the pirate, is to be hanged this morning. I ordered the batteries to salute when the rascal was kicking his last, so that I might know of it out at sea. There’s an end of Sharkey!” “There’s an end of Sharkey!” cried the captain; and the crew took up the cry as they gathered in little knots upon the deck and stared back at the low, purple line of the vanishing land. It was a cheering omen for their start across the Western Ocean, and the invalid Governor found himself a popular man on board, for it was generally understood that but for his insistence upon an immediate trial and sentence, the villain might have played upon some more venal judge and so escaped. At dinner that day Sir Charles gave many anecdotes of the deceased pirate; and so affable was he, and so skilful in adapting his conversation to men of lower degree, that captain, mate, and Governor smoked their long pipes and drank their claret as three good comrades should. “And what figure did Sharkey cut in the dock?” asked the captain. “He is a man of some presence,” said the Governor. “I had always understood that he was an ugly, sneering devil,” remarked the mate. “Well, I dare say he could look ugly upon occasions,” said the Governor. “I have heard a New Bedford whaleman say that he could not forget his eyes,” said Captain Scarrow. “They were of the lightest filmy blue, with red-rimmed lids. Was that not so, Sir Charles?” “Alas, my own eyes will not permit me to know much of those of others! But I remember now that the Adjutant-General said that he had such an eye as you describe, and added that the jury were so foolish as to be visibly discomposed when it was turned upon them. It is well for them that he is dead, for he was a man who would never forget an injury, and if he had laid hands upon any one of them he would have stuffed him with straw and hung him for a figure-head.” The idea seemed to amuse the Governor, for he broke suddenly into a high, neighing laugh, and the two seamen laughed also, but not so heartily, for they remembered that Sharkey was not the last pirate who sailed the western seas, and that as grotesque a fate might come to be their own. Another bottle was broached to drink for a pleasant voyage, and the Governor would drink just one other on top of it, so that the seamen were glad at last to stagger off—the one to his watch and the other to his bunk. But when after his four hours’ spell the mate came down again, he was amazed to see the Governor in his Ramillies wig, his glasses, and his powdering-gown still seated sedately at the lonely table with his reeking pipe and six black bottles by his side. “I have drunk with the Governor of St. Kitt’s when he was sick,” said he, “and God forbid that I should ever try to keep pace with him when he is well.” The voyage of the Morning Star was a successful one, and in about three weeks she was at the mouth of the British Channel. From the first day the infirm Governor had begun to recover his strength, and before they were half-way across the Atlantic he was, save only for his eyes, as well as any man upon the ship. Those who uphold the nourishing qualities of wine might point to him in triumph, for never a night passed that he did not repeat the performance of his first one. And yet he would be out upon deck in the early morning as fresh and brisk as the best of them, peering about with his weak eyes, and asking questions about the sail and the rigging, for he was anxious to learn the ways of the sea. And he made up for the deficiency of his eyes by obtaining leave from the captain that the New England seaman—he who had been cast away in the boat—should lead him about, and above all that he should sit beside him when he played cards and count the number of the pips, for unaided he could not tell the king from the knave. It was natural that this Evanson should do the Governor willing service, since the one was the victim of the vile Sharkey, and the other was his avenger. One could see that it was a pleasure to the big American to lend his arm to the invalid, and at night he would stand with all respect behind his chair in the cabin and lay his great stub-nailed fore-finger upon the card which he should play. Between them there was little in the pockets either of Captain Scarrow or of Morgan, the first mate, by the time they sighted the Lizard. And it was not long before they found that all they had heard of the high temper of Sir Charles Ewan fell short of the mark. At a sign of opposition or a word of argument his chin would shoot out from his cravat, his masterful nose would be cocked at a higher and more insolent angle, and his bamboo cane would whistle up over his shoulder. He cracked it once over the head of the carpenter when the man had accidentally jostled him upon the deck. Once, too, when there was some grumbling and talk of mutiny over the state of the provisions, he was of opinion that they should not wait for the dogs to rise, but that they should march forward and set upon them until they had trounced the devilment out of them. “Give me a knife and a bucket!” he cried with an oath, and could hardly be withheld from setting forth alone to deal with the spokesman of the seamen. Captain Scarrow had to remind him that though he might be only answerable to himself at St. Kitt’s, killing became murder upon the high seas. In politics he was, as became his official position, a stout prop of the House of Hanover, and he swore in his cups that he had never met a Jacobite without pistolling him where he stood. Yet for all his vapouring and his violence he was so good a companion, with such a stream of strange anecdote and reminiscence, that Scarrow and Morgan had never known a voyage pass so pleasantly. And then at length came the last day, when, after passing the island, they had struck land again at the high white cliffs at Beachy Head. As evening fell the ship lay rolling in an oily calm, a league off from Winchelsea, with the long dark snout of Dungeness jutting out in front of her. Next morning they would pick up their pilot at the Foreland, and Sir Charles might meet the king’s ministers at Westminster before the evening. The boatswain had the watch, and the three friends were met for a last turn of cards in the cabin, the faithful American still serving as eyes to the Governor. There was a good stake upon the table, for the sailors had tried on this last night to win their losses back from their passenger. Suddenly he threw all his cards down, and swept all the money into his long-flapped silken waistcoat. “The game’s mine!” said he. “Heh, Sir Charles, not so fast!” cried Captain Scarrow; “you have not played out the hand, and we are not the losers.” “Sink you for a liar!” said the Governor. “I tell you that I have played out the hand, and that you are a loser.” He whipped off his wig and his glasses as he spoke, and there was a high, bald forehead, and a pair of shifty blue eyes with the red rims of a bull terrier. “Good God!” cried the mate. “It’s Sharkey!” The two sailors sprang from their seats, but the big American castaway had put his huge back against the cabin door, and he held a pistol in each of his hands. The passenger had also laid a pistol upon the scattered cards in front of him, and he burst into his high, neighing laugh. “Captain Sharkey is the name, gentlemen,” said he, “and this is Roaring Ned Galloway, the quartermaster of the Happy Delivery. We made it hot, and so they marooned us: me on a dry Tortuga cay, and him in an oarless boat. You dogs—you poor, fond, water-hearted dogs—we hold you at the end of our pistols!” “You may shoot, or you may not!” cried Scarrow, striking his hand upon the breast of his frieze jacket. “If it’s my last breath, Sharkey, I tell you that you are a bloody rogue and miscreant, with a halter and hell-fire in store for you!” “There’s a man of spirit, and one of my own kidney, and he’s going to make a pretty death of it!” cried Sharkey. “There’s no one aft save the man at the wheel, so you may keep your breath, for you’ll need it soon. Is the dinghy astern, Ned?” “Ay, ay, captain!” “And the other boats scuttled?” “I bored them all in three places.” “Then we shall have to leave you, Captain Scarrow. You look as if you hadn’t quite got your bearings yet. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?” “I believe you’re the devil himself!” cried the captain. “Where is the Governor of St. Kitt’s?” “When last I saw him his Excellency was in bed with his throat cut. When I broke prison I learnt from my friends—for Captain Sharkey has those who love him in every port—that the Governor was starting for Europe under a master who had never seen him. I climbed his verandah and I paid him the little debt that I owed him. Then I came aboard you with such of his things as I had need of, and a pair of glasses to hide these tell-tale eyes of mine, and I have ruffled it as a Governor should. Now, Ned, you can get to work upon them.” “Help! Help! Watch ahoy!” yelled the mate; but the butt of the pirate’s pistol crashed down on his head, and he dropped like a pithed ox. Scarrow rushed for the door, but the sentinel clapped his hand over his mouth, and threw his other arm round his waist. “No use, Master Scarrow,” said Sharkey. “Let us see you go down on your knees and beg for your life.” “I’ll see you—” cried Scarrow, shaking his mouth clear. “Twist his arm round, Ned. Now will you?” “No; not if you twist it off.” “Put an inch of your knife into him.” “You may put six inches, and then I won’t.” “Sink me, but I like his spirit!” cried Sharkey. “Put your knife in your pocket, Ned. You’ve saved your skin, Scarrow, and it’s a pity so stout a man should not take to the only trade where a pretty fellow can pick up a living. You must be born for no common death, Scarrow, since you have lain at my mercy and lived to tell the story. Tie him up, Ned.” “To the stove, captain?” “Tut, tut! there’s a fire in the stove. None of your rover tricks, Ned Galloway, unless they are called for, or I’ll let you know which one of us two is captain and which is quartermaster. Make him fast to the table.” “Nay, I thought you meant to roast him!” said the quartermaster. “You surely do not mean to let him go?” “If you and I were marooned on a Bahama cay, Ned Galloway, it is still for me to command and for you to obey. Sink you for a villain, do you dare to question my orders?” “Nay, nay, Captain Sharkey, not so hot, sir!” said the quartermaster, and, lifting Scarrow like a child, he laid him on the table. With the quick dexterity of a seaman, he tied his spreadeagled hands and feet with a rope which was passed underneath, and gagged him securely with the long cravat which used to adorn the chin of the Governor of St. Kitt’s. “Now, Captain Scarrow, we must take our leave of you,” said the pirate. “If I had half a dozen of my brisk boys at my heels I should have had your cargo and your ship, but Roaring Ned could not find a foremast hand with the spirit of a mouse. I see there are some small craft about, and we shall get one of them. When Captain Sharkey has a boat he can get a smack, when he has a smack he can get a brig, when he has a brig he can get a barque, and when he has a barque he’ll soon have a full-rigged ship of his own—so make haste into London town, or I may be coming back, after all, for the Morning Star.” Captain Scarrow heard the key turn in the lock as they left the cabin. Then, as he strained at his bonds, he heard their footsteps pass up the companion and along the quarter-deck to where the dinghy hung in the stern. Then, still struggling and writhing, he heard the creak of the falls and the splash of the boat in the water. In a mad fury he tore and dragged at his ropes, until at last, with flayed wrists and ankles, he rolled from the table, sprang over the dead mate, kicked his way through the closed door, and rushed hatless on to the deck. “Ahoy! Peterson, Armitage, Wilson!” he screamed. “Cutlasses and pistols! Clear away the long-boat! Clear away the gig! Sharkey, the pirate, is in yonder dinghy. Whistle up the larboard watch, bo’sun, and tumble into the boats all hands.” Down splashed the long-boat and down splashed the gig, but in an instant the coxswains and crews were swarming up the falls on to the deck once more. “The boats are scuttled!” they cried. “They are leaking like a sieve.” The captain gave a bitter curse. He had been beaten and outwitted at every point. Above was a cloudless, starlit sky, with neither wind nor the promise of it. The sails flapped idly in the moonlight. Far away lay a fishing-smack, with the men clustering over their net. Close to them was the little dinghy, dipping and lifting over the shining swell. “They are dead men!” cried the captain. “A shout all together, boys, to warn them of their danger.” But it was too late. At that very moment the dinghy shot into the shadow of the fishing-boat. There were two rapid pistol-shots, a scream, and then another pistol-shot, followed by silence. The clustering fishermen had disappeared. And then, suddenly, as the first puffs of a land-breeze came out from the Sussex shore, the boom swung out, the mainsail filled, and the little craft crept out with her nose to the Atlantic.

The Repairman By Harry Harrison - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22073/pg22073-images.html

 

I looked at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high. I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.”

The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.

But what seems so odd to me, so horribly pathetic, is that such people don’t resist,” said Leidall, suddenly entering the conversation. The intensity of his tone startled everybody; it was so passionate, yet with a beseeching touch that made the women feel uncomfortable a little. “As a rule, I’m told, they submit willingly, almost as though——” He hesitated, grew confused, and dropped his glance to the floor; and a smartly-dressed woman, eager to be heard, seized the opening. “Oh, come now,” she laughed; “one always hears of a man being put into a strait waistcoat. I’m sure he doesn’t slip it on as if he were going to a dance!” And she looked flippantly at Leidall, whose casual manners she resented. “People are put under restraint. It’s not in human nature to accept it—healthy human nature, that is?” But for some reason no one took her question up. “That is so, I believe, yes,” a polite voice murmured, while the group at tea in the Dover Street Club turned with one accord to Leidall as to one whose interesting sentence still remained unfinished. He had hardly spoken before, and a silent man is ever credited with wisdom. “As though—you were just saying, Mr. Leidall?” a quiet little man in a dark corner helped him. “As though, I meant, a man in that condition of mind is not insane all through,” Leidall continued stammeringly; “but that some wise portion of him watches the proceeding with gratitude, and welcomes the protection against himself. It seems awfully pathetic. Still”—again hesitating and fumbling in his speech—“er—it seems queer to me that he should yield quietly to enforced restraint—the waistcoat, handcuffs, and the rest.” He looked round hurriedly, half suspiciously, at the faces in the circle, then dropped his eyes again to the floor. He sighed, leaning back in his chair. “I cannot understand it,” he added, as no one spoke, but in a very low voice, and almost to himself. “One would expect them to struggle furiously.” Someone had mentioned that remarkable book, The Mind that Found Itself, and the conversation had slipped into this serious vein. The women did not like it. What kept it alive was the fact that the silent Leidall, with his handsome, melancholy face, had suddenly wakened into speech, and that the little man opposite to him, half invisible in his dark corner, was assistant to one of London’s great hypnotic doctors, who could, an he would, tell interesting and terrible things. No one cared to ask the direct question, but all hoped for revelations, possibly about people they actually knew. It was a very ordinary tea-party indeed. And this little man now spoke, though hardly in the desired vein. He addressed his remarks to Leidall across the disappointed lady. “I think, probably, your explanation is the true one,” he said gently, “for madness in its commoner forms is merely want of proportion; the mind gets out of right and proper relations with its environment. The majority of madmen are mad on one thing only, while the rest of them is as sane as myself—or you.” The words fell into the silence. Leidall bowed his agreement, saying no actual word. The ladies fidgeted. Someone made a jocular remark to the effect that most of the world was mad anyhow, and the conversation shifted with relief into a lighter vein—the scandal in the family of a politician. Everybody talked at once. Cigarettes were lit. The corner soon became excited and even uproarious. The tea-party was a great success, and the offended lady, no longer ignored, led all the skirmishes—towards herself. She was in her element. Only Leidall and the little invisible man in the corner took small part in it; and presently, seizing the opportunity when some new arrivals joined the group, Leidall rose to say his adieux, and slipped away, his departure scarcely noticed. Dr. Hancock followed him a minute later. The two men met in the hall; Leidall already had his hat and coat on. “I’m going West, Mr. Leidall. If that’s your way too, and you feel inclined for the walk, we might go together.” Leidall turned with a start. His glance took in the other with avidity—a keenly-searching, hungry glance. He hesitated for an imperceptible moment, then made a movement towards him, half inviting, while a curious shadow dropped across his face and vanished. It was both pathetic and terrible. The lips trembled. He seemed to say, “God bless you; do come with me!” But no words were audible. “It’s a pleasant evening for a walk,” added Dr. Hancock gently; “clean and dry under foot for a change. I’ll get my hat and join you in a second.” And there was a hint, the merest flavour, of authority in his voice. That touch of authority was his mistake. Instantly Leidall’s hesitation passed. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, “but I’m afraid I must take a taxi. I have an appointment at the Club, and I’m late already.” “Oh, I see,” the other replied, with a kindly smile; “then I mustn’t keep you. But if you ever have a free evening, won’t you look me up, or come and dine? You’ll find my telephone number in the book. I should like to talk with you about—those things we mentioned at tea.” Leidall thanked him politely and went out. The memory of the little man’s kindly sympathy and understanding eyes went with him. “Who was that man?” someone asked, the moment Leidall had left the tea-table. “Surely he’s not the Leidall who wrote that awful book some years ago?” “Yes—the Gulf of Darkness. Did you read it?” They discussed it and its author for five minutes, deciding by a large majority that it was the book of a madman. Silent, rude men like that always had a screw loose somewhere, they agreed. Silence was invariably morbid. “And did you notice Dr. Hancock? He never took his eyes off him. That’s why he followed him out like that. I wonder if he thought anything!” “I know Hancock well,” said the lady of the wounded vanity. “I’ll ask him and find out.” They chattered on, somebody mentioned a risqué play, the talk switched into other fields, and in due course the tea-party came to an end. And Leidall, meanwhile, made his way towards the Park on foot, for he had not taken a taxi after all. The suggestion of the other man, perhaps, had worked upon him. He was very open to suggestion. With hands deep in his overcoat pockets, and head sunk forward between his shoulders, he walked briskly, entering the Park at one of the smaller gates. He made his way across the wet turf, avoiding the paths and people. The February sky was shining in the west; beautiful clouds floated over the houses; they looked like the shore-line of some radiant strand his childhood once had known. He sighed; thought dived and searched within; self-analysis, that old, implacable demon, lifted its voice; introspection took the reins again as usual. There seemed a strain upon the mind he could not dispel. Thought circled poignantly. He knew it was unhealthy, morbid, a sign of those many years of difficulty and stress that had marked him so deeply, but for the life of him he could not escape from the hideous spell that held him. The same old thoughts bored their way into his mind like burning wires, tracing the same unanswerable questions. From this torture, waking or sleeping, there was no escape. Had a companion been with him it might have been different. If, for instance, Dr. Hancock—— He was angry with himself for having refused—furious; it was that vile, false pride his long loneliness had fostered. The man was sympathetic to him, friendly, marvellously understanding; he could have talked freely with him, and found relief. His intuition had picked out the little doctor as a man in ten thousand. Why had he so curtly declined his gentle invitation? Dr. Hancock knew; he guessed his awful secret. But how? In what had he betrayed himself? The weary self-questioning began again, till he sighed and groaned from sheer exhaustion. He must find people, companionship, someone to talk to. The Club—it crossed his tortured mind for a second—was impossible; there was a conspiracy among the members against him. He had left his usual haunts everywhere for the same reason—his restaurants where he had his lonely meals; his music-hall, where he tried sometimes to forget himself; his favourite walks, where the very policeman knew and eyed him. And, coming to the bridge across the Serpentine just then, he paused and leaned over the edge, watching a bubble rise to the surface. “I suppose there are fish in the Serpentine?” he said to a man a few feet away. They talked a moment—the other was evidently a clerk on his way home, and then the stranger edged off and continued his walk, looking back once or twice at the sad-faced man who had addressed him. “It’s ridiculous, that with all our science we can’t live under water as the fish do,” reflected Leidall, and moved on round the other bank of the water, where he watched a flight of duck whirl down from the darkening air and settle with a long, mournful splash beside the bushy island. “Or that, for all our pride of mechanism in a mechanical age, we cannot really fly.” But these attempts to escape from self were never very successful. Another part of him looked on and mocked. He returned ever to the endless introspection of self-analysis, and in the deepest moment of it—ran into a big, motionless figure that blocked his way. It was the Park policeman, the one who had always eyed him. He sheered off suddenly towards the trees, while the man, recognising him, touched his cap respectfully. “It’s a pleasant evening, sir; turned quite mild again.” Leidall mumbled some reply or other, and hurried on to hide himself among the shadows of the trees. The policeman stood and watched him, till the darkness swallowed him. “He knows too!” groaned the wretched man. And every bench was occupied; every face turned to watch him; there were even figures behind the trees. He dared not go into the street, for the very taxi-drivers were against him. If he gave an address, he would not be driven to it; the man would know, and take him elsewhere. And something in his heart, sick with anguish, weary with the endless battle, suddenly yielded. “There are fish in the Serpentine,” he remembered the stranger had said. “And,” he added to himself, with a wave of delicious comfort, “they lead secret, hidden lives that no one can disturb.” His mind cleared surprisingly. In the water he could find peace and rest and healing. Good Lord! How easy it all was! Yet he had never thought of it before. He turned sharply to retrace his steps, but in that very second the clouds descended upon his thought again, his mind darkened, he hesitated. Could he get out again when he had had enough? Would he rise to the surface? A battle began over these questions. He ran quickly, then stood still again to think the matter out. Darkness shrouded him. He heard the wind rush laughing through the trees. The picture of the whirring duck flashed back a moment, and he decided that the best way was by air, and not by water. He would fly into the place of rest, not sink or merely float; and he remembered the view from his bedroom window, high over old smoky London town, with a drop of eighty feet on to the pavements. Yes, that was the best way. He waited a moment, trying to think it all out clearly, but one moment the fish had it, and the next the birds. It was really impossible to decide. Was there no one who could help him, no one in all this enormous town who was sufficiently on his side to advise him on the point? Some clear-headed, experienced, kindly man? And the face of Dr. Hancock flashed before his vision. He saw the gentle eyes and sympathetic smile, remembered the soothing voice and the offer of companionship he had refused. Of course, there was one serious drawback: Hancock knew. But he was far too tactful, too sweet and good a man to let that influence his judgment, or to betray in any way at all that he did know. Leidall found it in him to decide. Facing the entire hostile world, he hailed a taxi from the nearest gate upon the street, looked up the address in a chemist’s telephone book, and reached the door in a condition of delight and relief. Yes, Dr. Hancock was at home. Leidall sent his name in. A few minutes later the two men were chatting pleasantly together, almost like old friends, so keen was the little man’s intuitive sympathy and tact. Only Hancock, patient listener though he proved to be, was uncommonly full of words. Leidall explained the matter very clearly. “Now, what is your decision, Dr. Hancock? Is it to be the way of the fish or the way of the duck?” And, while Hancock began his answer with slow, well-chosen words, a new idea, better than either, leaped with a flash into his listener’s mind. It was an inspiration. For where could he find a better hiding-place from all his troubles than Hancock himself? The man was kindly; he surely would not object. Leidall this time would not hesitate a second. He was tall and broad; Hancock was small; yet he was sure there would be room. He sprang upon him like a wild animal. He felt the warm, thin throat yield and bend between his great hands ... then darkness, peace and rest, a nothingness that surely was the oblivion he had so long prayed for. He had accomplished his desire. He had secreted himself forever from persecution—inside the kindliest little man he had ever met—inside Hancock.... He opened his eyes and looked about him into a room he did not know. The walls were soft and dimly coloured. It was very silent. Cushions were everywhere. Peaceful it was, and out of the world. Overhead was a skylight, and one window, opposite the door, was heavily barred. Delicious! No one could get in. He was sitting in a deep and comfortable chair. He felt rested and happy. There was a click, and he saw a tiny window in the door drop down, as though worked by a sliding panel. Then the door opened noiselessly, and in came a little man with smiling face and soft brown eyes—Dr. Hancock. Leidall’s first feeling was amazement. “Then I didn’t get into him properly after all! Or I’ve slipped out again, perhaps! The dear, good fellow!” And he rose to greet him. He put his hand out, and found that the other came with it in some inexplicable fashion. Movement was cramped. “Ah, then I’ve had a stroke,” he thought, as Hancock pressed him, ever so gently, back into the big chair. “Do not get up,” he said soothingly but with authority; “sit where you are and rest. You must take it very easy for a bit; like all clever men who have overworked——” “I’ll get in the moment he turns,” thought Leidall. “I did it badly before. It must be through the back of his head, of course, where the spine runs up into the brain,” and he waited till Hancock should turn. But Hancock never turned. He kept his face towards him all the time, while he chatted, moving gradually nearer to the door. On Leidall’s face was the smile of an innocent child, but there lay a hideous cunning behind that smile, and the eyes were terrible. “Are those bars firm and strong,” asked Leidall, “so that no one can get in?” He pointed craftily, and the doctor, caught for a second unawares, turned his head. That instant Leidall was upon him with a roar, then sank back powerless into the chair, unable to move his arms more than a few inches in any direction. Hancock stepped up quietly and made him comfortable again with cushions. And something in Leidall’s soul turned round and looked another way. His mind became clear as daylight for a moment. The effort perhaps had caused the sudden change from darkness to great light. A memory rushed over him. “Good God!” he cried. “I am violent. I was going to do you an injury—you who are so sweet and good to me!” He trembled dreadfully, and burst into tears. “For the sake of Heaven,” he implored, looking up, ashamed and keenly penitent, “put me under restraint. Fasten my hands before I try it again.” He held both hands out willingly, beseechingly, then looked down, following the direction of the other’s kind brown eyes. His wrists, he saw, already wore steel handcuffs, and a strait waistcoat was across his chest and arms and shoulders.

SELLER OF THE SKY BY DAVE DRYFOOS - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58995/pg58995-images.html

 No one took Old Arch seriously; he was just an
ancient, broken-down wanderer who went about seeking
alms and spreading tales of the great Outside. But
sometimes children are curious and believing when
adults are cynical and doubting....

 He would tell of the wind and the rain and the snow; of the cattalo herds that roamed to the west and the cities that lay to the east and the stars and the Moon that they never had seen. He would claim to have been in the endless forests and on the treeless plains and to have tasted the salt ocean and drunk of the freshwater lakes and rivers.

This is how it happened [said my friend Harborough]. I’m a novelist, as you know, but if I hadn’t had to take to writing I’d have been a rolling stone by profession and by inclination. In my more philosophic moods I perceive that, really, it was sheer luck ... this occurrence about which you’ve asked me to tell you. I should never have made a success of any other trade but authorship. I’d have starved; instead I’m rather well off, as things go. But still—— You understand I was by way of being a bit venturesome, as a young man. I did a certain amount of journalism, from time to time, but my secret hopes were set on all that is implied in that specious phrase, “seeing the world.” I wanted to see the world. Keeping this object in view I shipped on a tramp steamer, with whose captain I had struck up an acquaintanceship. Nominally I was the purser, actually I was the Captain’s guest. Cargo boats such as the S.S. Peterhof do not employ a purser. No need to narrate the history of that voyage nor dwell upon the trivial particulars of our life on board. Suffice it to say that in mid-Atlantic our engines had a break-down. The Peterhof came to a standstill. If it has ever happened to you during a big voyage you will know that there is something portentous about the cessation of a steamer’s machinery in mid-ocean. To be becalmed on a sailing ship may be boring: to be becalmed—if such an expression can be used—on a steamer is almost too queer to be boring. Day and night the engines have throbbed until their throbbing has penetrated into your very marrow, and when the throbbing abruptly dies you are sensible of a shock. When the Peterhof halted I ran up on deck as speedily as though we had had a collision. I saw, all round, nothing but sea, sea, sea, and it was far more amazing than if I had beheld an island or an iceberg or a raft of shipwrecked mariners, or any of the other picturesque phenomena which my fertile fancy had hastened to invent as an explanation for our stoppage. The Peterhof’s engines were antiquated, break-downs had occurred before, and our two engineers, I learnt, would be able to effect a repair. Twenty-four hours’ labour would set us going again—it turned out to be only a slightly over-optimistic prophecy—and meanwhile, we were free to admire, as best we might, the somewhat monotonous beauties of the Atlantic. There was not a breath of wind; the sun blazed from a cloudless sky; as long as the Peterhof had been in motion we had considered the temperature fairly cool, but now that her motion was arrested the heat became very noticeable. The sea was, in a sense, absolutely smooth; but its smoothness did not imply flatness, any more than the smoothness of a carpet’s pile implies flatness if the carpet is being shaken. On the contrary, the Peterhof was rolling upon the undulations of a heavy ground-swell. The surface of that ground-swell was without a wrinkle, polished and glossy like lacquer; but its hills and its dales were gigantically high and deep; far higher and far deeper than I had realised until the engines relinquished their task of propelling us athwart them. Now, lying helpless upon the water, we swooped up to a glazed summit, swooped down to the bottom of a satiny gulf, swooped up again and down again, in a splendid, even oscillation—and (this was what seemed so extraordinary to a landsman)—in absolute silence. It was uncanny. Those fabulous billows never broke. There was not even a hiss of foam against the side of the steamer. The Peterhof just tobogganned down one stupendous gradient and up the next as though she had been sliding on oil. The thing fascinated me. I stood by the rail, revelling in this prodigous sea-saw, and only gradually did it dawn upon me that we were not really rushing down one slant and up the next, we were only being lifted up and down vertically. This discovery sounds foolish, but I can’t tell you how it excited me. I got an empty biscuit tin from the steward and threw it into the sea, as far as I could, and then watched it floating. You’d have said that that biscuit tin would have been drawn away by the strength of the swell, or else dashed against the Peterhof’s side; instead it simply sat there at exactly the spot where it had fallen; and an hour after I had thrown it into the water it had shifted, perhaps, only six or eight inches nearer the steamer. A project was forming in my mind. I looked at the water. It was a peculiar, vitreous green, closer under the steamer, was transparent to the depth of many feet. Beneath my shoe-soles the poop was hot; over side, the sea looked inexpressibly inviting. And on a sudden I turned to the drowsing Captain and exclaimed: “I want to bathe.” “To bathe?” The Captain gazed at me. “Why not?” The Captain yawned out some lethargic suggestion to the effect that to bathe would be dangerous because of the depth—as though I’d be more apt to drown in three miles of water than in three fathoms. Seafaring people are odd in that way—I don’t mean in their ignorance of swimming, though, to be sure, the average sailor is seldom a swimmer. They’re so—how shall I express it?—so unenterprising. In the midst of adventure and romance they are stirred by no recognition either of the adventures or the romantic. I was a city-bred youngster, who had never been out of hail of the homeland before, and I possessed more enterprise in my little finger than that far-travelled Captain had in the whole of his weather-worn, hulking lump of a carcass. I wanted to bathe. I wanted to bathe in the mid-Atlantic. I had learnt to bathe in the public swimming-bath near my old school, and now I wanted to try a swimming-bath three miles deep and tilting continuously at an angle of I don’t know how many degrees. The notion was gorgeous. “I can swim,” I said. “You needn’t be afraid.” “But the waves’ll sweep you away.” “There aren’t any waves. Watch this biscuit tin. The top of the Atlantic, at this moment, is like a string which is being twanged. The vibrations are a hundred yards across, or more, and they look as though they were travelling along the string; I suppose they are travelling along the string; but a fly sitting on the string doesn’t travel along with the vibrations, it only travels up and down. If I go in to bathe I shan’t be swept away.” The Captain hadn’t thought of it in that light. He tried to argue—but my biscuit tin answered his argument. And eventually he allowed me to have the ladder lowered; I stripped, descended the ladder, and launched myself into the sea. I struck out, to get clear of the ship, then ceased swimming and looked around me. The sea was coldish, but not unendurable—and anyhow I was too much in love with my situation to bother about that. Behind me the Peterhof towered, like a cliff; I had never realised, before, how big a five-thousand-ton vessel looks from the water. At her rail I could see a cluster of the crew, watching me; the Captain on the poop. From somewhere in the interior of the ship came the sound of hammering—the engineers at work—and I noticed that this sound reached me more clearly now than when I was on board. But if the Peterhof appeared strange, from the water, how much stranger was the view in the opposite direction! Or rather, the absence of view! The ground-swell had looked formidable when I was on the Peterhof’s deck; here its aspect was terrific. The crystalline slope in which I was cradled seemed to reach the sky; yet, without having climbed it, I immediately found myself, instead of looking up the slope, looking down it—down an oblique abyss of gleaming profundity. I seemed to fall and fall and fall; nevertheless, there was no spasm of nausea; although I was falling I was supported, sensuously, in my fall ... and I never reached the finish of the fall; it merged, imperceptibly, into an ascent; and a moment later I was surveying a fresh trough of glassiness, or else gazing audaciously downward, downward on to the deck of the Peterhof. It was overwhelming. Never in all my life have I attained to a rapture comparable with that bathe in mid-Atlantic. I knew, even at the time, that it would be unforgettable. I had aspired to be able to say that I had swum in water three miles deep ... oh, never mind what vain boast I had promised myself. Boasting was forgotten. I was experiencing. I was surrendered to an ecstasy, an enchantment, a glee, beyond expression grandiose and delicious. I lolled in the pellucid water, not troubling to swim. I let myself go, in those dizzy soarings and sinkings; I abandoned myself to this vast and beautiful force; I felt at once infinitely little and infinitely great. The whole adventure was half terrifying and half ... well, comfortable. Perched on the crown of one of those flawless ridges I felt, as I toppled over, that I must either be smashed to pieces at the end of the plunge or engulfed in some horrid undertow. But I knew that nothing of the sort would happen. Quietly I paddled with my arms and feet; almost contemptuously I gave myself to the puissant and colossal rhythm which swayed me as high as a cathedral at every swing and then gently rocked me down as deep as a valley. I tell you, the sensation was sublime ... and I hadn’t even got my hair wet! I remembered, in the middle of my bliss, this perfectly incongruous fact that I hadn’t got my hair wet, and I prepared to “duck.” But at that moment I heard a shout from the deck of the Peterhof. I turned in the water, and saw that the Captain was gesticulating to me, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The crew were shouting also, and one of them had got a coil of rope over his arm and seemed to be making ready to throw it. What did they mean? Stupidly, in the tingling ardour and gusto of my enjoyment, I didn’t make out, for a minute, what they were driving at; it occurred to me that they had taken it into their heads that because I wasn’t swimming I had got cramp. I signalled cheerily to them, to reassure them; but they did not cease shouting ... and then, as I turned again, a little, in the water, I knew.... Near the skyline rim of the superb mountain-range upon which I was commencing to rise I saw, shadowy in the translucent green, an unmistakable shape—the shape of a great fish: a shark. Its fin cut the surface like a knife. For one instant I stared, and in that instant I observed, with a vivid clearness, all manner of minute details—the burnished sheen on the water, the glistening tautness of its lofty skyline, the sapphire blue of the sky itself, and, most lucidly of all, the silhouette of the shark. Every movement of the shark was now plain to me; and it was moving, there was no doubt of it: a trail of bubbles streamed from its flank and a tiny streak of froth fluttered behind the fin. The shark was not passive, in the element, as I was; it was monarch of the waves, it could drive through them with the precision of a torpedo. I had invaded a realm which I had no business to invade ... and its guardian was come to punish me. An astonishingly coherent train of reflections such as these whirled round my brain. They must have occupied a fraction of a second. I know that, at all events, I struck out for the Peterhof without any apparent pause. My arms and legs worked frantically; I swum as I had never swum before. I hurled myself through the water. Fortunately I had gone only a very short distance from the foot of the steamer’s ladder. It seemed remote enough, though, I can tell you! My eyes were bursting out of their sockets, but I could dimly see the Captain leaning on the rail and shouting, and some of the men running down the ladder to receive me. Then the rope was flung. It splashed across me. I grasped it. I dug my nails into it. I clung to it with a grip so fierce that I felt as though I was crushing it. Simultaneously the men at the other end of the rope began pulling, and I was jerked through the water in a lather of spray which swirled round my shoulders. My arms and head were above the water, I was being dragged so fast up the steamer’s side. I could still see the Captain, vaguely, confusedly. His mouth was open, his hands were waving. But I wasn’t interested in him, I was only interested in what was pursuing behind me. Gad! That was an awful moment. I dream of it, sometimes, even now: the disgusting, obscene terror of that dash for safety ... and I wake sweating with the horror of it. Harborough paused. “And how did your adventure end?” I asked. “I don’t know. I lost consciousness. But I kept tight on to the rope. They hauled me on board ... they told me afterwards that I hadn’t even got my hair wet ... but ...” he hesitated. “I’d had my experience—a never-to-be-forgotten experience. Dash it!” he laughed. “It was almost worth it, I swear ... and I’m making money, now, as a novelist, whereas if I’d continued my life of rolling stone I’d certainly have arrived in prison or the poorhouse. Yes, I suppose that every disaster has its compensations. “But I confess I didn’t think so when I awoke on board the Peterhof—we were plug-plugging onwards again by that time—and found that I’d got only one leg.”

The Native Soil by Alan E. Nourse - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24274/pg24274-images.html

 Before the first ship from Earth made a landing on Venus, there was much speculation about what might be found beneath the cloud layers obscuring that planet's surface from the eyes of all observers.

One school of thought maintained that the surface of Venus was a jungle, rank with hot-house moisture, crawling with writhing fauna and man-eating flowers. Another group contended hotly that Venus was an arid desert of wind-carved sandstone, dry and cruel, whipping dust into clouds that sunlight could never penetrate. Others prognosticated an ocean planet with little or no solid ground at all, populated by enormous serpents waiting to greet the first Earthlings with jaws agape.

But nobody knew, of course. Venus was the planet of mystery.

When the first Earth ship finally landed there, all they found was a great quantity of mud.

 

We have nothing they can use. What would you give them—United Nations coin? They'd just try to eat it."

"How about something they can eat, then?"

"Everything we feed them they throw right back up. Planetary incompatibility."

"But there must be something you can use for wages," Kielland protested. "Something they want, something they'll work hard for."

"Well, they liked tobacco and pipes all right—but it interfered with their oxygen storage so they couldn't dive.

There was dust everywhere; it was a red-hot world of dust. It lay upon the roads where the labouring wheel tracks marked them out; but the whole long plain was dust as well. Neither grass nor any green thing showed, and dead, dry salt-bush, eaten by the sheep till it looked like broken peasticks, was dust colour to the dancing horizon of that world of thirst. For seven months and a week, by Wilson’s almanac, there had been no rain, and what dew had fallen the hot air drank when the fierce sun rose. And now not even the little fenced garden at Warribah showed any sign of verdure. Water was precious, and each day the north wind drank the water-holes drier and drier yet. But, though the world of desolate Warribah was brown, in the roots of grass and the mere sticks of salt-bush was sufficient nourishment to keep life in the sheep who moved across the burnt paddocks of the station; what they needed, and what they began to suffer for was water, and the cloudless sky, luminous and terrible, bent over their world and breathed fire upon them. The wind out of the Austral tropics was as fierce as a blowpipe flame, or so it seemed. Hope and prosperity melted under it, and the home at Warribah dissolved. “I shall go mad,” said Wilson. And having said it, he sent his wife away to the south. He could not keep a cheerful face before her; it was easier to lie upon paper, easier to drift into silence that was not disturbed by her tears. He was a lonely man again, as lonely as when he had first fought with the bush, and conquered a space for himself where no water ran. And now the conquered territory that he had hoped to keep for the uses of civilisation called in the sun and the north wind, and there was a great fight in progress between man and nature. As he walked over what he had won, or as he galloped, the caked and cracked earth fell into powder, and rose choking and impalpable, as fine as flour. The gaunt, spare box trees of the plains were powdered with its red-white film; their dry verdure was obscured. The dust was mud upon his lips, mud upon his cheeks as he sweated ice, to think the day was coming when there could be no hope for him and no help. “How long now?” he asked himself. And all about the plains rose columns of dust as the uneasy, fretful sheep, to whom his men doled water, moved up the wind seeking more. “After ten years—this,” said Wilson, and he laughed. But those who heard him laugh shivered, and contracted their brows. For he was a hard worker, and had slaved for this—for bankruptcy, a sky of brass. “The boss is crazy,” said the men at the hut. An immense, intolerable sense of pity for the sheep possessed him. He had no children, and the land he held had been as a child to him. Now the plains he had delighted in were become ingrate. They refused him help. The sheep were his children and his delight. He knew thousands of them by sight, for he had the shepherd’s eye. There was a character about the Warribah sheep that he had bestowed by his care and by his choice. He had fenced them in against straying; had chased the cowardly dingo and had slain him; he had rejoiced in the grass and the whitening cotton-bush, and the succulence of thick-fleshed salt-bush. How often he had ridden out and watched the sheep graze; it was a happy world when the rains in their due season ceased, and the time for shearing came. It was a riotous pleasure to hear the click of the shears. How the white inner fleece gleamed and fell over, and parted and showed its woven beauty! The movements of the shearers, and the sound of them, and the sound of the pent or loosened sheep wove itself into a kind of fabric; in the loom of time and the due sweet season pleasure grew, and success, and the joy of well-doing. And now there was death in the air and in the north wind. And behind it ruin. There his ten thousand children would perish off the face of the inexorable earth and be no more than white bones lying heaped against a northern fence where no water was. He laughed a thin, crackling laugh, and walked to and fro in front of his lonely house. “The boss is crazy,” his men had said. Now in the hot and idle noon they sat in the southward shadow of the crackling hut and watched him. The old cook, a blear-eyed outcast thrown up by the seas upon the coast of Australia, broke suddenly into a drivelling yarn. “I knew it worse nor this—hell’s flames never beat it, on the Bogan that year——” He mumbled on. “So they died, and the horses, too. Oh, it was cruel, cruel. And Webber cut his throat from ear to ear, cut his crazy ’ead ’arf off.” “What of your paddock, Jim?” asked Hill, the old hand of Warribah. The young boundary rider spat drily. “The jumbucks is suckin’ mud. The water stinks of yolk. You can smell it a mile off. Ter-morrer I’ll have to fetch ’em in.” The black and red ants ran riot in the hut and outside of it. The insect world flourished and abounded. But for all their bronze there was a pallid look about the men. Nature was no friend of theirs; they looked out on fire and blinding light. “I never knowed it worse.” But old Blear Eyes had. “So he blew his brains out.” “Oh, dry up,” said Hill, but the cook murmured of ancient disasters on the Darling and the Macquarie. “Did you die of thirst, you old croaker, and jump up to choke us?” And still Wilson wandered to and fro in the sunlight, though the sky was inexorable. “He’ll be shakin’ his fist at it yet,” said the cook, “and when a man does that he never comes to no good. It’s all up with them as shakes a fist at ’eaven. I’ve seen it myself. Now it was in ’79 that Jones of Quandong Flats went mad. He shook ’is fist at the sky. I seen him, and the next morning ’e was ravin’ ’orrid, as though the ’orrors of drink was on ’im. And well I knowed ’em then.” The boss came towards them through the hot sand, and he leant in the shade against the pole on which the men’s saddles hung. The men looked downcast and half-ashamed. Sydney Jim lost all his flashness and moved uneasily. And the old cook shambled into his kitchen and fell to work upon his bread. “There’s little water in the Ten-Mile Tank, Jim?” “They was suckin’ mud this morning, sir,” said Jim. Wilson tugged at his grizzled beard and pulled his sunburnt hat over his eyes. “We should have put down wells,” said Hill. Wilson broke into sudden blasphemy, and checked it with a kind of gasp, as though he felt that madness lay just beyond the limits of his self-control. “So we should,” he said; “so we should.” And he walked away. “You took that cursin’ very quiet,” said Jim. And there was something in Hill’s eye that made him flinch. “Oh, well,” he said apologetically, and Hill glared at him. The heat was in more than one. “My son,” said Hill, “I’ve half a mind——” And then he rose and followed Wilson. He caught him up and talked hard till Wilson shook his head and went inside and slammed the door. “He should make it up with Grear, and if Grear let him down on to the river he might save some.” For Warribah was in the back-blocks, and Grear held all the river frontage for twenty miles. “But they hate each other, and Wilson ain’t the man to crawl,” said Hill. “He’s a good sort. I’ll go myself.” He went back to the hut and, taking his saddle and bridle, walked to the horse paddock, which seemed as barren as a stockyard. He caught his horse, that was standing at the gate and looking wistfully towards the stable as if he knew that good feed was there. “Come,” said Hill, and he rode south through the pine scrub towards Grear’s. He came to the station as the sun went down, and when he asked for the boss Grear came out. “Oh you!” he said roughly. “And what d’ye want?” He was a long, thin man with a cold eye and thin lips, and as he looked at him Hill felt that it was a foolish errand he had come on. The man was worse than he had imagined. It seemed that Wilson was right. To ask Grear for anything was to invite insult. And though Hill had come twenty miles to ask he turned away. “I haven’t seen you for nigh on a year,” said he, “and now I’ve seen you, why, I shan’t weep if I never see you again.” He got upon his horse solemnly and turned away, leaving Grear with an open mouth. “I was a fool to come,” said Hill, as he ploughed his way among the sandhills. “He used to reckon that all the back-blocks was his, and Wilson took ’em up. Grear don’t forgive.” The night had come upon the land, but there was no remission of the hot north wind. The heated earth radiated heat still, while in the clear obscure of the heavens the stars glittered like sharp points of steel. They stabbed Hill’s very heart as he rode and looked into the rainless depths of heaven. For the sky was no overarching dome at that season. It was an awful emptiness without form; it was space itself, unmitigated and terrible, and heaven’s lamps were near and far and farther still, while black, starless spaces showed like unfathomable patches in a silent sea. “Good God!” said Hill, and fear got hold of him suddenly. He roused his horse to a canter for the sake of the noise of the motion. The sky appalled him, and a peculiar sense of reversion took him. He was hung over depths, and seemed to cling to the suspended earth. “I’m crazy myself,” said Hill, with a quiver in his voice. And his very voice broke the silence like a pistol shot. It made him start until he heard a sheep’s faint baa in the distance. And then a mopoke called its mate in the trees by an old dry creek. Hill pulled up. “But it ain’t a creek after all,” he said to himself. “It’s a Billabong, but it’s twenty years since water came out of the Lachlan so far as Warribah, and Grear put a dam there fifteen years ago. Ah! if the river only rose up, and came down roarin’. But it won’t; it won’t.” As he dreamed of the river, now like a low water-hole with never a current in it, Wilson, at home, lay in an uneasy sleep. He, too, dreamed, and dreamed of rain, and he woke himself shouting, “Rain!” and in his confusion called “Mary” to his wife five hundred miles away. “Oh God! I dreamt it again,” he said. “I dreamed of rain in our old place east, and the river came down with thunder and floods, and the land grew green in an hour—green, green!” He fell asleep again, and when he woke at dawn he was oddly cheerful. Perhaps the rest from anxiety in that happy dream had taken part of the strain from his weary mind. “I do feel as if it had rained somewhere,” he said; “and if the weather only breaks anywhere we may have it here.” “Don’t you think it cooler?” he said to Hill next morning. But the sky was brass and the sun white hot. That evening a man riding through to Conoble from Condobolin told him that he had heard it had rained east of Forbes. And another man who camped at the Ten-Mile Clump said he knew there had been a great thunderstorm to the east. “I dreamed it, so I did!” cried Wilson; “and the Lachlan’s coming down.” His jaw fell even as he spoke. What use was the Lachlan to him out in the beyond, when Grear’s lay between? He had no river frontage. Grear had it all. In such a country, in spite of its apparent desolation, news travels fast. They heard that the Lachlan, so quiet at Condobolin, was running hard at Forbes. It was out in the flats, where the felled trees marked the old mining camp. There had been a storm, a great cloudburst, in its head waters, and the river grew alive. Wilson saddled up and rode thirty miles to see it, and came to the gum-lined ditch just in time to hear the stream awake. It stirred before his eyes, it became turbid, grew grey, bubbled, moved and ran, with sticks and leaves and branches on its full tide. And still the sky overhead was fire, and the sun a flame. Wilson cursed it, and prayed to the beautiful grey water. Why should not rain come there? And soon. But as he rode back he came to sheep of his that stood against a fence, and pressed on it, as though water was beyond it. Pity stirred him; he drove them through a gate, and let them suck his last low tank. That night Wilson came to the men’s hut under its pines in the sand dune, and called to Hill. “Hill, I want to speak to you,” he said, and presently his man came out into the night. The stars were brilliant. Jupiter was like a little moon, and cast faint shadows. “There’ll be no rain here,” said Wilson. “Were you sleeping? I can’t sleep! Do you hear?” He waved his hand around the barren horizon. “I hear,” said Hill. He heard the sheep. “You say that old Billabong once came down to Warribah?” asked Wilson. Hill nodded. “So they say. But Grear’s dam would stop it.” “He’s no right to have it there,” said Wilson, savagely. “Look, Hill, I can’t sleep. I’ll ride out to the dam.” “I’ll come with you,” said Hill. “You’re a good sort, Jack,” cried the boss. And they rode together through the wonderful night, that was so terrible to them, with its hot, dry air out of the oven of the north. When they came at last to the long, low dam they tied their horses to saplings, and sat down. Wilson spoke after a quarter of an hour’s silence. “It would be hard to lose it after these years,” he said. “And here’s Grear’s dam with a fence atop of it. He’s a hard one, Jack!” “Ay,” said Hill, “he’s hard.” And Wilson, who had not really slept for days, lay down upon the earth and dozed, while the star shadows of the gaunt thin boxes moved a foot. In the hollow of the Billabong some dry reeds, like a cane-brake, rustled faintly in the air. The leaves of the trees crackled, and underneath these sharper sounds was the hum of the insect world. Far away, on every side, the sheep called uneasily for water. What had seemed silence grew into a very chorus, organic with the earth. The horses champed their bits and pawed the dusty soil; and once one whinnied, and was answered by a far-off call from Grear’s. “I wonder what the river’s like,” thought Hill. He pulled out his pipe and lighted it. The flare of the match extinguished the starlight for a moment, and then the darkness melted once more, and he saw each separate tree, each leaf, each reed. “I wonder.” For if the river was in high flood, and over the banks, the Billabong must be full at Grear’s. And suddenly he heard a sound that he knew well. He laid his hand upon Wilson’s shoulder. “D’ye hear it, sir? What is it?” But both knew. Grear’s sheep were moving from east and west towards water. “The blackfellows were right,” said Wilson. “The Billabong is coming down.” The horses trampled uneasily, and seemed aware of a change. Perhaps they too smelt the grey flood as it crawled. And all the air seemed full of whispers, loud and louder yet. For even the thinned bush is alive, and holds carnival at midnight and beyond it. A snake crawled by them on the dam, and suddenly being aware of nigh enemies, it slipped away hastily, and hid in the hollow trunk of a fallen dwarf box. The sheep on Warribah grew more uneasy; he heard a distant baa, and then a nearer cry, and a plaintive chorus came down the dry, hot wind. “I can’t listen to ’em,” said Wilson. “It makes me mad.” He rested his head upon his knees, and kept his hands to his ears. But suddenly he rose up. “If the water comes we’ll cut the dam, Hill.” “I would,” said Hill. “Go back and fetch Jim, and bring shovels,” said Wilson. “I’ll cut it. If the water comes, I’ve a right to it.” And Hill rode homeward fast. And as he rode the boss sat still upon the dam, and looked upon the faintly outlined hollow of the ancient waterway. And again he dozed, and did not see that round the far bend of the hollow came a sneaking, quiet band of grey water, like a crawling snake. But as he slept the night chorus increased, and away to the south the full sheep baa’ed with content. The Warribah sheep heard and knew, and moved south through the night: and suddenly ten thousand broke into a gallop, and stayed in a heap against the fence that topped the dam. Their voices agonised; they woke Wilson suddenly, and he reached out his hand and touched water. And he heard horses galloping. This was Hill returning. “Thank God!” said Wilson, and he prayed to Heaven with sudden thankfulness. But then he started, for the horses came from the south. They came from Grear’s, and he knew what that meant. “I’ll do it if I have to kill him,” said Wilson. For behind him the painful chorus of the sheep was deafening. He saw them packed against the bulging wires. His heart bled for them, his children. And then three horses burst through the thin bush. “Oh, we’re in time,” said Grear. “I thought as much, but we’re in time. Who’s that?” “Wilson of Warribah,” said Wilson. “Grear, you will let the water through.” And Grear laughed. “To you that sneaked in and took up my back-lots? Oh, it’s likely, likely!” “But the sheep are dying, Grear.” “Mine ain’t,” said Grear. “Get over the fence and off my land. I’ll not have you here.” And Wilson burst into a passionate appeal that was almost a scream. “Look here, man, if you are a man. I’ll give you ten per cent of ’em to cut the dam. They’re dying. Oh, my God! hear ’em, Grear; hear ’em! And I’ve bred ’em. I watched ’em grow. Oh, Grear, I’ll give you half!” And Grear swore horribly. “I’ll see them die, and see you get out. I don’t want you here.” And now in the noise the sheep made it was difficult to hear a man speak. But the water grew up silently, and spread out, filling the hollow—a grateful and splendid sheet. “’Tain’t all yours,” screamed Wilson. “The dam’s not legal. You’ve no right to rob me and my sheep.” “Then go to law, you dog, and have it proved,” said Grear. And as he spoke Hill came galloping, and with him Jim and two other men. And they carried shovels. “Look,” said Wilson. “We’re five to you three, you and your men. I mean to have the water.” “Never!” cried Grear, and getting off his horse he walked up the dam to where Wilson stood. “Get over the fence,” he said. And Wilson leant against the fence and the sheep behind him. He dabbled with his hand in their wool. Their hot breath fanned him. “Don’t, Grear, don’t,” he pleaded. “What would you think if I did the same to you?” “You can’t,” said Grear, and he laughed. “I’ve the river at my back.” And Hill with a spade in his hand pressed through the sheep, until he came to Wilson. He touched the boss’s shoulder, and Wilson calmed as he took the spade. “You don’t mean that they’re to die, Grear, do you?” he asked, with a catch in his voice. “What’s that to me?” “It’s much to me,” said Wilson. “Oh, Grear, I’d rather be hanged than let it be.” “Would you? Then be hanged, you rat!” said Grear. And Wilson lifted the spade, and split Grear’s head with it, and the man fell back into the water, and dyed it with his blood. But he was dead before he touched the silver grey stream that had slain him. And Wilson fell to work digging. “Good God!” said Hill, and the dead squatter’s men cried out. “Dig, dig,” said Wilson. “Dig! Grear’s got his water. I’ll have mine.” When the sun rose his sheep were content. “Now we’ll see what the law says,” cried Wilson. And he rode south to find the law.

THE EGO MACHINE by HENRY KUTTNER - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32108/pg32108-images.html

 

Connart had started in life with a fine, open, believing disposition, and with that disposition for his chief asset he had entered the world of business. At thirty he had lost nearly everything but his heart, yet it was stolen from him, also, by one Mary Bateman of Boston, a quiet-looking little woman, endowed with common sense, a few thousand dollars and a taste for travel. It was this taste, combined with a slight weakness of the lungs, that induced Connart to go into the Pacific trade, also a legacy, from an English relation, amounting to some two thousand pounds odd, which enabled him to make the new start in business without calling on his wife’s capital. Dobree of San Francisco gave him the pitch. Connart had the qualities of his defects. Men robbed him, but they liked him. Men are queer things. Dobree, in business, was a very tough person indeed, quite without any finer feelings, and never giving a cent or a chance away, yet, taking a liking to Connart, he gave him a house, a go-down, and the chance of success on this Island, by name of Maleka, for nothing. “I had a station there up to six months ago,” said Dobree, “but I’m getting rid of my copra interests. You can have the house, charter a schooner and fill up with trade and go down there, it’s a good climate and will suit your wife. You won’t make a fortune, but you won’t do badly if you stick to your guns and don’t let the Kanakas get the weather gauge on you. There’s only one man there, Seedbaum is his name, he’s a tough customer by all accounts, but there’s copra enough for two—I know a schooner you can have, the Golden Gleam; she’s owned by old Tom Bowlby. I’ve got a fellow at a station on Tomasu, that’s a hundred and fifty miles west of Maleka. There’s a cargo waiting shipment there. Bowlby can drop you and your stuff at Maleka, then pick up my cargo at the other place. You won’t have your copra ready for some months and you can make arrangements with him to come back for it. You might make arrangements to work in future with Bowlby, he’s a straight man. You might work with him as partner.” It was easy to be seen that Dobree was not only giving things away, but going out of his course to make things smooth. Connart felt glowingly thankful. “It’s more than good of you,” said he, “but it seems to me you will lose over this, for a location like that is worth money.” “So are cigars,” said Dobree, “but if I give a box of cigars to a friend he doesn’t complain that the gift is worth money. D——n money,” continued this money-grubber, “it’s worth nothing but the fun of making it—well, will you take your cigars, or shall I give the box to someone else?” Connart said no more. In three weeks’ time the Golden Gleam, which was lying at the wharves, had taken her cargo of all the multitudinous things that go by the name of “trade,” and one bright morning, tacking against the wind from the sea, she left the Golden Gate behind her. Mrs. Connart stood on deck, watching bald Tamalpais across the blue, scudding sea of the wake. When you go to the Pacific Islands you die to all the things you have known, but you are at least sure that you are going to heaven—if you avoid the low islands. Mrs. Connart knew the first fact. Down below in her cabin she carried with her the relics of the life she would no longer lead, down to a well-worn riding habit and a whip that would most likely never touch horse again, but she was not despondent, quite the reverse. You may be sea-sick in a Pacific schooner, bucking against the swell and bending to the north-west trades, you may be mutinous, or angry, or tipsy, but despondency, that low fever of cities and civilisation, has no place out there. “You ain’t feelin’ the sea, ma’am?” said Captain Bowlby, ranging up alongside of her. “No,” said she, “I’m a good sailor.” “I bet you are,” said the captain. Bowlby had a keen eye for ships and women. He had taken a liking to Mrs. Connart at first sight. She had a steady eye and sure smile that pleased him, and some days later, alone with Ambrose the mate, he voiced his opinions. “Looks like a mouse, don’t she? Well, there ain’t no mouse about her barring her look. She’s one of them quiet sorts that’d back-chat a congressman if she was put to it, or take a lion by the tail if it was makin’ for one of her kids. I bet she’s rudder and compass both to Connart. She and he fit as if they was welded. Did you ever take notice that there’s chaps you meet that’re only half men till they get a woman that fits them clapped on to them? If she don’t fit they go under the first beam sea they meet; if she do, weather won’t hurt them.” Ambrose concurred. He was a concurring individual, with few opinions of his own on any matters outside his trade. “I reckon you’re right,” said he, “though I don’t know much about women—I never had the time,” he finished, apologetically. 2 They raised Maleka at six o’clock one brilliant morning, and by nine it had developed before them, mountainous and green, showing, through the glasses, the blowing foliage, torrent traces and the foam on the barrier reef. To Connart and his wife there seemed something miraculous in the unfolding of this island from the wastes of the blue and desolate sea. They had pictured this new home often in their minds, but they had pictured nothing like this. It had been waiting for them all their lives, and it seemed to them now that the souls of all the pleasant places they had ever seen or dreamed of were waiting to greet them on that summer-girdled reef. As they passed the break and entered the lagoon the true island beach of blinding white sand showed its curve lipped by the emerald waters, and through the foliage came glimpses of the white houses of the little town. “Look,” said Mrs. Connart, wide-eyed and drawing deep breaths as if to inhale the strangeness and beauty of the scene before her, “there are people on the beach, natives, and look at the canoes.” “There’s a boat pushing off,” said Connart, “and a big fellow in a striped suit in her.” “That’s Seedbaum,” said Captain Bowlby; “wonder what he wants, comin’ to inspect—gin, likely.” The anchor fell, waking the echoes of the woods, and the Golden Gleam, swinging to the tide that was just beginning to steal out of the lagoon, lay with her nose pointing to the beach whilst the boat came alongside, and the man in the striped suit scrambled on board. He was a big man, with bulging eyes, a shaved head, and feet encased in worn-out tennis shoes. The suit seemed made of flannelette. Mrs. Connart at first sight took a profound dislike to this individual. Seedbaum—for Seedbaum it was—saluted Bowlby, gave him good-day, cast his eye at the strangers and opened up. “I knew you before you made the anchorage,” said he, “dropped in for water, I suppose.” “No, I’ve water enough till I fetch Tomasu,” replied Bowlby, “I’ve brought some trade.” “Trade,” said Seedbaum, offering a cigar. “Well, I don’t mind taking some prints and knives off you at a reasonable price. I’m full up with canned goods and tobacco, still—at a reasonable figure——” “The trade’s not mine,” said Bowlby, lighting the cigar. “It belongs to the new trader—that gentleman there, Mr. Connart’s his name, let me make you known. Mr. Connart, this is Mr. Seedbaum.” “Glad to make your acquaintance,” said Connart. Seedbaum, fingering an unlit cigar, stared at Connart. “Well, this gets me,” said he. “Why, Dobree cleared his last man out for good, there’s not business enough in this island for two—that’s flat—what’d he want sending you for?” “He didn’t send me,” replied Connart. “Then,” said Seedbaum, “what brought you here, anyway?” “I think,” said Mrs. Connart, “this ship brought us here—and, excuse me—do you own this island?” Seedbaum stared at her, then his glance fell before that quiet, unwavering gaze, and he turned to Bowlby. “Well,” said he, “it’s none of my affair if the whole continent of the States comes here to find copra—if it’s to be found—but it seems to me this is a pretty dry ship.” “Come down below,” said Bowlby. They went below and the pop of a beer-bottle cork followed upon their descent. “Oh, what a creature!” said Mrs. Connart. “George, why is it that humanity alone produces things like that?” “I don’t know,” said Connart, “but I wish humanity had not produced it here.” Seedbaum came on deck again mollified by beer. Despite the set-down he had received he nodded to the new-comers as he went over the side, and as they watched him being rowed ashore, Bowlby, leaning on the rail, spat into the water and spoke. “I didn’t much trouble tellin’ you of that chap on the way out,” said Bowlby. “There’s no use in meetin’ troubles half way, and there’s not an island in the hull Pacific you won’t find trouble of some sort in. If you go in for Pacific tradin’ there’s two things you have to face, cockroaches and men. I’ve kept the old Gleam pretty free of ‘roaches by fumigatin’, but you can’t fumigate islands. If you could I reckon you’d see more rats with hands and feet takin’ to the water than’s ever been seen since the Ark discharged cargo. Seedbaum’d be one of them, but you have his measure now and you’ll know enough to go careful with him. Wiart, the last man that was here, got on all right with him. You see, they were pretty much of a pair, and it’s my belief they were hand in glove, as you might say, but I reckon you won’t have much use for a glove like that. Well, I’ll get you ashore now to see your house and I’ll help to fix it up for you. We’ll begin gettin’ the cargo ashore to-morrow.” He ordered a boat to be lowered and they rowed ashore. Never, not even in dreamland, had Mrs. Connart experienced anything so strange as that stepping on shore from the bow of the boat run high and dry on the shelving beach, never anything like the touch of land after the long, long weeks of seafaring, and the sights, the sounds, the perfumes all new, belonging to a new life to be lived in a new world. The white houses set in a little garden at the far end of the village pleased her as much as the place. Her house is almost as much as her husband to a woman, for, to a woman a house implies so much more than to a man. There are good houses and bad houses, crazy houses exhibiting the folly of their builders in stucco turrets or mad chimney pots, and stupid houses without character or proper sculleries and sinks. The house at Maleka, though small and possessing few rooms, was cheerful and had a pleasant personality of its own, but it did not possess a stick of furniture. Mrs. Connart with the prescience of a woman and assisted by the advice of Bowlby, had brought with them from San Francisco articles of furniture not to be obtained in the islands, unless at a ruinous cost. Mats, cane chairs and hammocks could be obtained from the natives. All the same, there had been furniture in the house and it was gone. Dobree had given them a list of things and amongst them was an article on which Mrs. Connart had, woman-like, set her heart. “One red cedar chest, four foot six by three foot,” was its specification. “But who can have taken them?” said she, as they stood in the empty front room, after a tour of inspection. “There was crockery ware, besides, and oh, ever so many things, and Mr. Dobree was so kind. He would not take a penny for them. You remember, George, he said: ‘When I give a friend a box of cigars I don’t take the bands off them, whatever is there you can have’—and now there’s nothing!” “Maybe the Kanakas have taken them,” said Bowlby. “Or Seedbaum,” said Connart. “As like as not,” replied the captain. “He seems to look on the blessed place as his. He told me down in the cabin he reckoned he was king of Maleka, and that all the Kanakas jumped to his orders as if he was king. He’s got a clutch on the place, there’s no denying that, and he manages to keep missionaries away somehow or ’nother. I’m afraid you’re going to have trouble with that chap.” “I’m not afraid of him,” said Connart. “I’ve got a revolver and can use it if worst comes to the worst.” “Oh, it’s not revolvers I’m thinkin’ of,” said the captain, “it’s trickery; he’d trick the devil out of his hoofs and then make gelatine of them, would Seedbaum; have no trade dealin’s with him; take my advice, just stick to the Kanakas.” “Let’s go and ask him, right now, if he knows where the things have gone to,” said Mrs. Connart. “Well, that’s not a bad idea,” said Bowlby. “He’s sure to lie; anyhow, it’ll clear matters.” Seedbaum’s house was a substantially built coral-lime-washed building, with a broad verandah in which hung a cage containing a parrot, the garden was neat and well-tended, and the whole place had an air of quiet prosperity, neatness and order, as though the better part of the owner’s character were here exhibited for the general view. Seedbaum was seated on the verandah, reading a San Francisco paper obtained from Bowlby. Seeing them approach he rose to greet them. “I’ve come to ask you about the furniture in our house,” said Connart. “There were quite a lot of things left by the last man, and I have a list of them, but everything has gone, been taken away—do you know anything of the matter?” “I don’t know anything of what you call furniture,” said the other. “Wiart sold me his sticks when he left for fifty dollars, and a bad bargain it was.” “He sold you them?” “Yes.” “But they belonged to Mr. Dobree.” “Oh, did they; well, Dobree will have to dispute that with Wiart. Wiart said they were his.” “Have you his receipt?” “Lord, no, there was no receipt in the matter. I handed him over the dollars and he handed me over the rubbish. It was a favour to him.” “Was there a cedar-wood chest?” asked Mrs. Connart. “There was. It’s in my house now, there; you can see it through the door.” Through the open door which gave a view of the front room Mrs. Connart saw the object of her desire. It was a beauty, solid, moth-defying, with brass corners and brass handles. It was hers by all right, and Seedbaum had tricked her out of it. She spoke: “That chest is mine,” said she. “Mr. Dobree gave it to me, it was his property, and Mr. Wiart had no right to sell it.” “Well,” said Seedbaum, “he sold it, and if there’s any trouble over it it will be between Dobree and Wiart, and Wiart was going to Japan, so he said when he left here, so Dobree had better go to Japan and have it out with him.” Mrs. Connart turned. “Come,” said she to the others, “there is no use talking any more to this person. I will write to Mr. Dobree.” They turned away and Seedbaum sat down again to read his newspaper. “That’s what I said,” spoke Bowlby. “Monkey tricks; you see how he’s placed; Wiart’s gone Lord knows where, and Pacific Coast law don’t run here. The way for you to do is to lay low and fetch him in the eye unexpected, somehow, though if you take my advice you’ll give him a wide offing. There’s no use in fightin’ with alligators; better leave them be. Hullo, what’s that?” They turned. Seedbaum had come out of the verandah. A passing native had drawn his ire for some reason or another, and the redoubtable Seedbaum was storming at him. Then he kicked the native, and the latter, a big, powerful man, turned and ran. “The coward!” said Mrs. Connart. “I expect that chap ain’t a coward,” said Bowlby. “He’s just ’feared of Seedbaum. I reckon there’re some curious things in nature. I’ve seen a whole ship’s company livin’ in terror of a hazin’ captain. They could have hove him overboard and swore he fell over—for the after guard was as set against him as the fo’c’sle—but they didn’t. Just let themselves be driv’ like sheep and kicked like terriers. It’s the same with the Kanakas on this island, I expect.” “He’s got a personal ascendancy over them,” said Connart. “I reckon he’s got something like that,” said Captain Bowlby. 3 In a week they were settled down, and a few days later, the cargo having been landed and stored, the Golden Gleam took her departure. They went down to the beach to see her off; they watched her topsails vanish beyond the reef, and they returned, feeling very much alone in the world. A good man is warmth and light even to the souls of sinners. Captain Bowlby was illiterate; his language was free; he was not a saint, but he was a good, human man right through. The sea turns out characters like this just as she turns out shells. It is a pity that they have to cling to the ocean and the beaches; the cities want them. “I feel just as if I had lost a near relation,” said Mrs. Connart. “Well, we’ll have him back soon,” said her husband. “It’s up to us now to get the copra to give him a cargo.” Next morning the new trader began business by laying out a selection of goods on the verandah of his store. Mrs. Connart, who knew something of the Polynesian dialects and who had the art of picking up unknown tongues, had already got in touch with the Kanakas; they charmed and pleased her, especially the children, and wherever she went she was greeted by friendly faces. It seemed to her that the population of this island, leaving out Seedbaum, her husband and herself, consisted entirely of children, children of different sizes and different ages, but children all the same. Returning that day from a long walk in the woods she found Connart smoking a pipe on the verandah of their house. He looked rather depressed. “I can’t make it out,” said he; “there’s no trade doing.” “Maybe they don’t know you have started in business yet.” “Oh, yes, they do; lots of them have passed and seen the store open; they’ve turned to look at the goods, and they seemed attracted, but they went on.” “Well, give them time,” said she. “Look,” said Connart, “there’s copra going to Seedbaum’s; they’re trading with him, right enough.” Mrs. Connart watched the copra bearers, but said nothing. In her heart she felt that Seedbaum was moving against them by some stealthy means. At first she thought that it might be possible he had worked upon the native mind and induced the Kanakas to put a taboo upon the newcomers, but she dismissed this idea at once. There was no taboo. The Kanakas were not a bit afraid of either her or her husband, on the contrary, there was every evidence of friendliness. “Well,” she said that night, when the store was closed for the day without a knife or a stick of tobacco changing hands, “there’s nothing to be done till we find out why they are acting so. It’s that creature, I am sure. He began by robbing me of my beautiful cedar-wood chest, and he’s going on to rob you of your chances in business. Well, let him beware. I’m Christian enough not to wish to hurt him, but I’m Christian enough to believe there’s a power that punishes the wicked, and he’s wicked. I knew him for a wicked man directly he came on board the ship.” “He keeps to himself, and that’s one good thing,” said Connart; “but I don’t see how he can stop the natives from trading with us.” “I don’t, either, but I know he does,” said she. The next day passed without business being done, and the next. “We may as well shut up shop, it seems to me,” said Connart. “How would it be if you spoke to some of these people and asked them what is the matter?” “I’ve thought of that,” said his wife, “and I held off because—because—oh, I don’t know, it seems sort of indelicate to ask people why they don’t come to one’s store. I’ll do it to-morrow morning first thing. One mustn’t let one’s feelings stand in the way when one’s living is concerned.” “I wish we had never come here,” said he, “for your sake.” “Never come here?” she cried. “Why, I wouldn’t for the earth have gone anywhere else! I love the place and I love people, and what are difficulties? Why, difficulties are the main excitement in life. If life wasn’t an obstacle race, it would be a very flat affair. George, we have got to beat that man, and I’m going to, you wait and see.” He kissed her and blessed her, and they sat down that night to a game of cribbage, Seedbaum and the wickedness of the world forgotten. Next morning after breakfast Mrs. Connart went out. She passed through the village and on to the beach, brilliant in the morning light, breeze-blown and filled with the murmurs of the reef; some natives were pulling in a net and she watched them, chatting to them and playing with the children who had come down to secure the little fish. Then she had a talk with a woman who was standing by, a woman dark and straight as an arrow, a woman mild-eyed and with a voice sweet as the sound of running water. Leaving her, Mrs. Connart passed to a man who was engaged in mending an outrigger of one of the canoes hauled up on the beach; she had a talk with him. Then she returned, walking slowly and thoughtfully to the house, where she found her husband. “George,” said she. “I am right. It is that Creature. The people hate him, but they are afraid of him. It seems absolutely absurd, but it is so. He holds them in a spell. He kicks them and beats them, but they are not afraid of that. It’s just him.” “Good Lord,” said Connart, “why on earth don’t they rise against him, and tell him to go to the devil; he’s only one man, anyway.” “I don’t know,” said she. “It’s a mystery of human nature. He’s the tyrant type, and it’s always been the same in the world; there’s some sort of magnetism in that type that keeps folk under. History is full of that. It’s the soft man and the kindly man and the good man that’s assassinated, but tyrants seem to go free. He’s what he said he was, the king of this place—well, we must see what we can do to pull him from his throne. I wish there were more whites here.” “That’s the bother,” said Connart. Next morning they found a basket of fruit on their verandah, a gift from some unknown person. It was as though the Kanakas, afraid to show their sympathy and friendliness openly for the strangers, had done it in this manner. But no one came to trade. That night two chickens, some sweet potatoes and another basket of fruit were deposited in the same place. “And we can’t thank them,” said Mrs. Connart; “but I believe these haven’t all come from one person. I think it’s everyone here—they all like us. Oh, George, isn’t it maddening that we can’t have them openly our friends, just because of that Beast!” “It is,” said George. Now at eleven o’clock that morning, Mrs. Connart, seated on the verandah and engaged on some needle-work, noticed a little native girl, who, pausing at the garden gate and seeming undecided, at last picked up courage, opened the gate and came towards the house. Connart was in the house, going over some accounts, when his wife ran in to him. “George, come at once,” cried she; “such a dreadful thing—they’ve risen against Seedbaum and they are killing him somewhere in the woods, and they want us to go and see!” “Good Lord!” cried he, “killing him! Want us to go and see! Are they mad?” He picked up his hat and came out on the verandah, where the pretty little native girl was waiting, a flower of the scarlet hibiscus in her hair and calm contentment in her eyes. “I can’t quite make out all she says,” said Mrs. Connart; “but I can make out her meaning.” “You’d better stay here,” said he, “whilst I go; there may be trouble.” “I am not afraid,” she replied. “Come on, we may be too late.” They followed the child. “Tell her to hurry,” said Connart. “She says we need not hurry,” replied she; “as far as I can make out they are only going to kill him—I expect they have him a prisoner somewhere; well, much as I hate him, I am glad we will be able to save him.” “That depends on how the natives take it,” said he. The child led them from the road by a path trod by the copra gatherers, a path running through the wonderland of the woods, a green gloom where the soaring palms shot upwards through a twilight roofed with moving shadows and sun sparkles. They reached a glade where a number of natives were seated in a circle. Above them and swinging by a cord from two trees was hanging a little disk about half the size of a tambourine; the disk was made of cane, and so constructed as to leave a small hole in the centre. An old native woman seated under the disk was clapping her hands and repeating something that sounded like an incantation. Every pair of eyes in the whole of that assembly was fixed upon the disk. The child whispered something to Mrs. Connart. Then she turned from the child and whispered to her husband. “It’s only witchcraft. That’s a soul trap. They are waiting for a fly to pass through the hole in that thing. If it does, then Seedbaum will die.” “Good heavens,” murmured Connart, with a half-laugh. “Why, the fellow hasn’t any soul—not enough to furnish out a fly.” They watched patiently for ten minutes. There were plenty of flies; they rested on the little tambourine, crawled round its edge, but not one went through the hole. “Come,” whispered Connart. They withdrew, taking the path back. “It’s pathetic,” murmured she. “It’s damned foolishness,” he repeated. “They trade with him, and let him kick them, and then go on with that nonsense. If they refused him copra, they would bring him to his senses quick enough.” “Anyhow they hate him,” said she. “Much good that is,” he replied. 4 Now it came about that the soul trap—turning out a dead failure, since not a single fly went through the hole—instead of destroying Seedbaum, fixed him on a pedestal more secure than that which he had hitherto occupied. He was indestructible, and the power which he exercised over the native mind threatened to be as indestructible as himself. However, vengeance was coming. Retribution for all the wrongs he had committed, his swindlings, brutalities and beatings. It came in this wise: One afternoon Mrs. Connart, seated on the verandah and reading The Moths of the Limberlost, heard the cries of a child. Right in front of the house, King Seedbaum was beating a native child for some fault or fancied disrespect towards his royal highness, cuffing it and cuffing it, whilst the squeals of the cuffed one affronted the heavens and the ears of all listeners. Now, to touch a child or dog or cat in Mrs. Connart’s presence was to raise a devil. White as death she rushed into the house and white as death she rushed out again. She held her riding-whip, a Mexican quirt, ladies’ size, but horribly efficient in energetic hands. Seedbaum saw her coming, couldn’t understand, caught the first lash on his right arm and along his back—he was wearing the pyjama suit—and his yell brought the village flocking and Connart running from a field where he was laying out some plants. He saw the quirt lashing over Seedbaum’s shoulder, across his legs, and across the back, for the King of Maleka was now running, running and pursued for ten yards or so whilst the quirt got one last blow in. Then he had his wife in his arms, and she was weeping. “Did he touch you?” cried Connart. “No—it was a child,” she gasped. “Beast! Look, he has run into his house.” The street was filled with a crowd that all through the beating had remained spell-bound. Now it broke up into knots and small parties, all talking together excitedly. Connart, with his arm around his wife, drew her into the house. She sat down on a couch and laughed and sobbed. She was half hysterical, but not for long. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I would do it again. It’s not because of us—but because he was beating a child.” “Brute!” said Connart. “I’ll go down now and give him more. I want to have it out with him right now.” He turned to the door. She caught him. “No,” she cried, “he’s had enough. He won’t do it again. Listen, what’s that?” From away in the direction of Seedbaum’s house came a sound like the swarming of angry bees, also shouts. They rushed to the door and saw Seedbaum. Seedbaum with fifty people round him, and every person trying to beat him at the same time. “Good God,” said Connart, “you’ve taught them the trick—they’ll kill him.” “He’s got away,” cried Mrs. Connart. Seedbaum, breaking from the crowd, was making up the street, the whole village was after him; he passed the Connarts’ house and headed for the woods where he disappeared. Then his pursuers drew off, and, rushing to the house of Connart, swarmed at the railings, shouting and waving and laughing, whilst Mrs. Connart interpreted. “They say he’ll never come back to the village again,” said she, “for they’ll kill him if he does; that he’ll have to live in the woods. Oh, George! I’m frightened—what will be the end of it all?” The end was a whale ship that came into the lagoon. Seedbaum, living in the woods and supported by the generosity of the Connarts, was given notice by the three chiefs of the island, Matua, Tamura and Ratupea by name, that if he did not go away in the whale ship he would be killed before the next ship arrived. And he went. He was almost friendly with the Connarts, in return for their food and protection, at the last, and as the natives would allow him to take nothing with him, he had to leave everything behind him, including the red cedar-wood chest, which thus came back to its rightful owner. He did not even threaten the natives with governmental retribution; he knew he was done and placed out of court by his own conduct. But the thing that always remained with Connart out of this affair was the fact that a population of active and vigorous people would still have been down-trodden by a merciless tyrant but for a little, quiet, calm-eyed woman, who had unconsciously and just from an uprising of her own spirit, “shown them the trick.” Spirit—after all, what else is there in the world beside it?

Synthetic Hero By ERIK FENNEL - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64515/pg64515-images.html

 

Follow me into one of those shining days of April, when the blue in the sky has lost its March iciness and the village of Wallbridge pauses in its usual grey monotony to look for events. Events come indeed, as they always do, for those who wait long enough for them. The first intimation that something was going to happen chanced to be picked up in the road by Mr. Tapper, labourer of Ford’s Farm. Mr. Tapper had once found a penny in the mud, and ever since that eventful day the good man had kept his eye fixed upon the road when he walked abroad. Mr. Tapper handed the paper he had found when teatime came round to his daughter Lily, remarking as he did so: “’Tain’t nothink,” which merely meant, of course, that the paper wasn’t a penny. Lily—the pretty Lily—gave her head a little shake, and read at the top of the printed sheet the word “Alleluia.” It was all out then, of course, as soon as the pretty Lily had got hold of it, all the whole merry matter of the coming of Alleluia into Wallbridge. After he had handed in those papers at the doors—with the exception of the ones that he wisely dropped in the road, well knowing that anything picked up always interests—invited everyone to his meetings. Alleluia for he must have known everyone would call him Alleluia, began to preach and sing in a devout manner in the handsome tent that he had set up near to his van. He was so gentle and polite and so good at starting those emotional tunes—invented by Mr. Moody—that Wallbridge at once praised and patronised him. Alleluia had come down from Oxford, and his confiding and childlike look, together with his silky moustache, had led him into the bypaths and hedges and so on and on until he reached the village of Wallbridge. There were, of course, troubles in even so gentle a young man’s path; there were difficulties and doubts—little worries—so that Alleluia’s eyes were not always without their tears. The Wallbridge people were not always so loving as they should be. The Rev. John Sutton, the vicar, disapproved of the preacher’s looks and was even slightly contemptuous of the glory hymns. This unkindness hit the young man hard, because, outwardly, the vicar seemed pleased with the work that he was doing. And there was Lily. Lily had to be considered even by Mr. Tapper, her father, as something female. Mr. Tapper put her down entirely, with her mother included, to the simple fact that he had stayed too long out one lovely June fair day at the Stickland revels. Even that day he saw as all Lily’s fault, feeling, truly perhaps, that the child brings her parents together. Even then Mr. Tapper was middle-aged, but that only made him blame Lily the more. If it had not been for Lily, Mr. Tapper might have gone on hawking saucepan lids and receiving beer in exchange for the country matters in his tavern songs. When Lily was eighteen a very important event happened to her. She bought a new looking-glass to replace a cracked one that had always given her face such an ugly cut down the middle. Before this new one—she had stolen the money for it from her drunken parent’s pocket—she could touch herself and preen herself, and wonder at a red mark on her bosom that looked almost like a bite. That must not happen again; of course it wouldn’t after Alleluia’s preaching; young Wakely would have to take her home more gently in future. Following the lovely hymns, it was not quite proper to be covered and eaten and bitten by kisses all the way home. “No you mustn’t, Tom.” Pretty Lily said the words before her glass in order to practise them. She used to sit quite near to the young preacher, and had got his child’s look and his silky upper lip quite by heart. He would be always speaking about love and about doing kind actions to one another, and every hymn was filled with the delicious savour of subdued sin. Lily was quite moved by all the excitement, but she wished to be more careful about Tom, and so she was.... Alleluia had grown fond of looking upwards too, and for many nights he had seen only one face in the sky. Alleluia was forced to allow that the pretty face in the sky had nothing whatever to do with the hymns he had been singing; he knew it was not God’s face, nor David’s, nor any other heavenly person’s. But, alas, it so pleased Alleluia that he wandered abroad in search of it sometimes, and often it was midnight before the preacher opened his van door to go to bed. The excessive longing for events to happen in a village sometimes over-reaches itself; it did, indeed, over-reach itself this time in Wallbridge. As usual, events pass in a sober grey way in the country. The dismal sermons of all the Rev. John Suttons are nearly always of the same dismal colour. And even the Wallbridge quarrel between old Mother Wimple and Farmer Told had become dull coloured, too. The sun shone as best it could, and sometimes the moon would appear, though none of these heavenly lights proved strong enough to break the leaden colouring. But the people had longed, and when the people long something happens. It came in this wise. A morning dawned with a splash of red, that splashed the grey sod, that splashed the hills and the meadows, and even gave to Farmer Told’s white cow a red blood-stained look. Her hymn-book soaked, her pretty Sunday clothes so sadly torn, her pretty lily face rudely beaten and broken: there was quite a little pool of blood in the chalk-pit, the grey colour lurid for once. This was more than peaceful Wallbridge had wished for. This dreadful dash of red made even the April sunshine look a little queer. It could never be the same usual Wallbridge wind that blew upon the stalwart forms of the inspectors and policemen who had the case in hand. Alleluia had been found, almost crazed, near the chalkpit; he had been looking for pretty Lily all night, he said, and had only found her at dawn. There was blood upon his clothes, he had held her body in his arms. Others told so much, too. They had been seen together very often; they had been followed, watched, and the stars needs must have blushed, so folks said. Tom Wakely had been away that red night, so it could not have been he who had done it. Honest Mr. Tapper gave the strongest evidence, and Alleluia was hanged. Perhaps this was a little hard upon Alleluia, but all men said he should have stuck to his hymn-singing and not gone out to look for pretty lilies at night-time. One wit even remarked that he could have sung his hymns in the town in a cheaper fashion without a stretch of the neck at the end of it. The red splash of pretty Lily’s blood coloured some dozen or so years of Wallbridge life, but after that time was passed the old grey began to hang heavy again and an owl hooted. The owl must have settled upon Mr. Tapper’s chimney, so near did the sound of its hooting seem to Mr. Tapper. It was midnight, two old women—one was Mrs. Tapper—were sitting by the dying man’s side. “’E do die ’ard,” Mrs. Tapper remarked in a friendly tone. Mr. Tapper was thoughtful. “If only he hadn’t wandered off into the lanes on that fair day in June! He might even have been drinking beer instead of dying hard.” The owl perched upon the cottage chimney hooted again. The ice upon Ford’s pond cracked—the midnight frost was abroad. Mr. Tapper spoke his last words. “Our Lily, she weren’t murdered by thik young preacher,” said Mr. Tapper. “Who did kill she?” the old women whispered excitedly. “’Twas I,” said Mr. Tapper, “because young Wakely never give I thik beer ’e’d promised. I did blame she for it.” The owl hooted, the old women looked at one another—and Mr. Tapper’s jaw slowly dropped.

the contact point By JACK SHARKEY - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60928/pg60928-images.html

 

Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire. “Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it. “I’m listening,” said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. “Check.” “I should hardly think that he’d come to-night,” said his father, with his hand poised over the board. “Mate,” replied the son. “That’s the worst of living so far out,” bawled Mr. White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; “of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.” “Never mind, dear,” said his wife, soothingly; “perhaps you’ll win the next one.” Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard. “There he is,” said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door. The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself so that Mrs. White said, “Tut tut!” and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage. “Sergeant-Major Morris,” he said, introducing him. The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire. At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples. “Twenty-one years of it,” said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son. “When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him.” “He don’t look to have taken much harm,” said Mrs. White, politely. “I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look round a bit, you know.” “Better where you are,” said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again. “I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,” said the old man. “What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?” “Nothing,” said the soldier, hastily. “Leastways, nothing worth hearing.” “Monkey’s paw?” said Mrs. White, curiously. “Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps,” said the sergeant-major, off-handedly. His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him. “To look at,” said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, “it’s just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.” He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously. “And what is there special about it?” inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table. “It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,” said the sergeant-major, “a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.” His manner was so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter jarred somewhat. “Well, why don’t you have three, sir?” said Herbert White, cleverly. The soldier regarded him in the way that middle-age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. “I have,” he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened. “And did you really have the three wishes granted?” asked Mrs. White. “I did,” said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth. “And has anybody else wished?” persisted the old lady. “The first man had his three wishes. Yes,” was the reply; “I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.” His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group. “If you’ve had your three wishes, it’s no good to you now, then, Morris,” said the old man at last. “What do you keep it for?” The soldier shook his head. “Fancy, I suppose,” he said, slowly. “I did have some idea of selling it, but I don’t think I will. It has caused enough mischief already. Besides, people won’t buy. They think it’s a fairy tale; some of them, and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward.” “If you could have another three wishes,” said the old man, eyeing him keenly, “would you have them?” “I don’t know,” said the other. “I don’t know.” He took the paw, and dangling it between his forefinger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire. White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off. “Better let it burn,” said the soldier, solemnly. “If you don’t want it, Morris,” said the other, “give it to me.” “I won’t,” said his friend doggedly. “I threw it on the fire. If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens. Pitch it on the fire again like a sensible man.” The other shook his head and examined his new possession closely. “How do you do it?” he inquired. “Hold it up in your right hand and wish aloud,” said the sergeant-major, “but I warn you of the consequences.” “Sounds like the Arabian Nights,” said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper. “Don’t you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?” Her husband drew the talisman from pocket, and then all three burst into laughter as the sergeant-major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught him by the arm. “If you must wish,” he said gruffly, “wish for something sensible.” Mr. White dropped it back in his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table. In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second instalment of the soldier’s adventures in India. “If the tale about the monkey’s paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us,” said Herbert, as the door closed behind the guest, just in time for him to catch the last train, “we shan’t make much out of it.” “Did you give him anything for it, father?” inquired Mrs. White, regarding her husband closely. “A trifle,” said he, colouring slightly. “He didn’t want it, but I made him take it. And he pressed me again to throw it away.” “Likely,” said Herbert, with pretended horror. “Why, we’re going to be rich, and famous and happy. Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can’t be henpecked.” He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs. White armed with an antimacassar. Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously. “I don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a fact,” he said, slowly. “It seems to me I’ve got all I want.” “If you only cleared the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you?” said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder. “Well, wish for two hundred pounds then; that’ll just do it.” His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face, somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down at the piano and struck a few impressive chords. “I wish for two hundred pounds,” said the old man distinctly. A fine crash from the piano greeted the words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man. His wife and son ran toward him. “It moved,” he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor. “As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.” “Well, I don’t see the money,” said his son as he picked it up and placed it on the table, “and I bet I never shall.” “It must have been your fancy, father,” said his wife, regarding him anxiously. He shook his head. “Never mind, though; there’s no harm done, but it gave me a shock all the same.” They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their pipes. Outside, the wind was higher than ever, and the old man started nervously at the sound of a door banging upstairs. A silence unusual and depressing settled upon all three, which lasted until the old couple rose to retire for the night. “I expect you’ll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed,” said Herbert, as he bade them good-night, “and something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains.” He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces in it. The last face was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in amazement. It got so vivid that, with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on the table for a glass containing a little water to throw over it. His hand grasped the monkey’s paw, and with a little shiver he wiped his hand on his coat and went up to bed. 2 In the brightness of the wintry sun next morning as it streamed over the breakfast table he laughed at his fears. There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard and with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues. “I suppose all old soldiers are the same,” said Mrs. White. “The idea of our listening to such nonsense! How could wishes be granted in these days? And if they could, how could two hundred pounds hurt you, father?” “Might drop on his head from the sky,” said the frivolous Herbert. “Morris said the things happened so naturally,” said his father, “that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence.” “Well, don’t break into the money before I come back,” said Herbert as he rose from the table. “I’m afraid it’ll turn you into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you.” His mother laughed, and following him to the door, watched him down the road; and returning to the breakfast table, was very happy at the expense of her husband’s credulity. All of which did not prevent her from scurrying to the door at the postman’s knock, nor prevent her from referring somewhat shortly to retired sergeant-majors of bibulous habits when she found that the post brought a tailor’s bill. “Herbert will have some more of his funny remarks, I expect, when he comes home,” she said, as they sat at dinner. “I dare say,” said Mr. White, pouring himself out some beer; “but for all that, the thing moved in my hand; that I’ll swear to.” “You thought it did,” said the old lady soothingly. “I say it did,” replied the other. “There was no thought about it; I had just——What’s the matter?” His wife made no reply. She was watching the mysterious movements of a man outside, who, peering in an undecided fashion at the house, appeared to be trying to make up his mind to enter. In mental connection with the two hundred pounds, she noticed that the stranger was well dressed, and wore a silk hat of glossy newness. Three times he paused at the gate, and then walked on again. The fourth time he stood with his hand upon it, and then with sudden resolution flung it open and walked up the path. Mrs. White at the same moment placed her hands behind her, and hurriedly unfastening the strings of her apron, put that useful article of apparel beneath the cushion of her chair. She brought the stranger, who seemed ill at ease, into the room. He gazed at her furtively, and listened in a preoccupied fashion as the old lady apologised for the appearance of the room, and her husband’s coat, a garment which he usually reserved for the garden. She then waited as patiently as her sex would permit, for him to broach his business, but he was at first strangely silent. “I—was asked to call,” he said at last, and stooped and picked a piece of cotton from his trousers. “I come from ‘Maw and Meggins.’” The old lady started. “Is anything the matter?” she asked, breathlessly. “Has anything happened to Herbert? What is it? What is it?” Her husband interposed. “There, there, mother,” he said, hastily. “Sit down, and don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve not brought bad news, I’m sure, sir;” and he eyed the other wistfully. “I’m sorry——” began the visitor. “Is he hurt?” demanded the mother, wildly. The visitor bowed in assent. “Badly hurt,” he said, quietly, “but he is not in any pain.” “Oh, thank God!” said the old woman, clasping her hands. “Thank God for that! Thank——” She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her, and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s averted face. She caught her breath, and turning to her slow-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his. There was a long silence. “He was caught in the machinery,” said the visitor at length in a low voice. “Caught in the machinery,” repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, “yes.” He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife’s hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting-days nearly forty years before. “He was the only one left to us,” he said, turning gently to the visitor. “It is hard.” The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. “The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,” he said, without looking around. “I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.” There was no reply; the old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband’s face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action. “I was to say that Maw and Meggins disclaim all responsibility,” continued the other. “They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son’s services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.” Mr. White dropped his wife’s hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words. “How much?” “Two hundred pounds,” was the answer. Unconscious of his wife’s shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor. 3 In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realise it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen—something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear. But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness. It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened. “Come back,” he said, tenderly. “You will be cold.” “It is colder for my son,” said the old woman, and wept afresh. The sound of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start. “The paw!” she cried wildly. “The monkey’s paw!” He started up in alarm. “Where? Where is it? What’s the matter?” She came stumbling across the room toward him. “I want it,” she said, quietly. “You’ve not destroyed it?” “It’s in the parlour, on the bracket,” he replied, marvelling. “Why?” She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek. “I only just thought of it,” she said, hysterically. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t you think of it?” “Think of what?” he questioned. “The other two wishes,” she replied, rapidly. “We’ve only had one.” “Was not that enough?” he demanded, fiercely. “No,” she cried, triumphantly; “we’ll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.” The man sat up in bed and flung the bed-clothes from his quaking limbs. “Good God, you are mad!” he cried, aghast. “Get it,” she panted; “get it quickly, and wish——Oh, my boy, my boy!” Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. “Get back to bed,” he said, unsteadily. “You don’t know what you are saying.” “We had the first wish granted,” said the old woman, feverishly; “why not the second?” “A coincidence,” stammered the old man. “Go and get it and wish,” cried his wife, quivering with excitement. The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. “He has been dead ten days, and besides he—I would not tell you else, but—I could only recognise him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?” “Bring him back,” cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door. “Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?” He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand. Even his wife’s face seemed changed as he entered the room. It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it. He was afraid of her. “Wish!” she cried, in a strong voice. “It is foolish and wicked,” he faltered. “Wish!” repeated his wife. He raised his hand. “I wish my son alive again.” The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind. He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him. Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle. At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door. The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house. “What’s that?” cried the old woman, starting up. “A rat,” said the old man in shaking tones—“a rat. It passed me on the stairs.” His wife sat up in bed listening. A loud knock resounded through the house. “It’s Herbert!” she screamed. “It’s Herbert!” She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly. “What are you going to do?” he whispered hoarsely. “It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!” she cried, struggling mechanically. “I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door.” “For God’s sake don’t let it in,” cried the old man, trembling. “You’re afraid of your own son,” she cried, struggling. “Let me go. I’m coming, Herbert; I’m coming.” There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting. “The bolt,” she cried loudly. “Come down. I can’t reach it.” But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish. The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

The Fifty-fourth Of July By Alan E. Nourse - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/66288/pg66288-images.html

 Matt had to destroy the rocket because it
was a symbol of evil that had brought economic
disaster. But must he also destroy—the future?

 Perhaps that's because the President was hanged on the White House lawn the day after he called you. Quite a mob was there. The food pinch was just beginning to be felt. And that was forty-seven days ago—" He glanced up at the Colonel's white face. "Oh, I'm not lying to you. It happened. Have you had any communications recently?"

  Look, the people don't know all the reasons for the collapse. They don't know the whole picture—but they know one thing. They know they've been taxed beyond endurance, their gasoline has been requisitioned, their boys taken for military and labor service, their money devaluated again and again so that the government could get a Rocket off the Earth before the Asians did. And they know that now the whole world has fallen in a heap, and they're starving to death. And they know that this Rocket was being worked on when the crash came.

It was the ebbing light of evening that recalled me out of my story to a consciousness of my whereabouts. I dropped the squat little red book to my knee and glanced out of the narrow and begrimed oblong window. We were skirting the eastern coast of cliffs, to the very edge of which a ploughman, stumbling along behind his two great horses, was driving the last of his dark furrows. In a cleft far down between the rocks a cold and idle sea was soundlessly laying its frigid garlands of foam. I stared over the flat stretch of waters, then turned my head, and looked with a kind of suddenness into the face of my one fellow-traveller. He had entered the carriage, all but unheeded, yet not altogether unresented, at the last country station. His features were a little obscure in the fading daylight that hung between our four narrow walls, but apparently his eyes had been fixed on my face for some little time. He narrowed his lids at this unexpected confrontation, jerked back his head, and cast a glance out of his mirky glass at the slip of greenish-bright moon that was struggling into its full brilliance above the dun, swelling uplands. “It’s a queer experience, railway-travelling,” he began abruptly, in a low, almost deprecating voice, drawing his hand across his eyes. “One is cast into a passing privacy with a fellow-stranger and then is gone.” It was as if he had been patiently awaiting the attention of a chosen listener. I nodded, looking at him. “That privacy, too,” he ejaculated, “all that!” My eyes turned towards the window again: bare, thorned, black January hedge, inhospitable salt coast, flat waste of northern water. Our engine driver promptly shut off his steam, and we slid almost noiselessly out of sight of sky and sea into a cutting. “It’s a desolate country,” I ventured to remark. “Oh, yes, ‘desolate,’” he echoed a little wearily. “But what frets me is the way we have of arrogating to ourselves the offices of judge, jury, and counsel all in one. As if this earth.... I never forget it—the futility, the presumption. It leads nowhere. We drive in—into all this silence, this—this, ‘forsakenness,’ this dream of a world between her lights of day and night time. We desecrate. Consciousness! What restless monkeys men are.” He recovered himself, swallowed his indignation with an obvious gulp. “As if,” he continued, in more chastened tones—“as if that other gate were not for ever ajar, into God knows what of peace and mystery.” He stooped forward, lean, darkened, objurgatory. “Don’t we make our world? Isn’t that our blessed, our betrayed responsibility?” I nodded, and ensconced myself, like a dog in straw, in the basest of all responses to a rare, even if eccentric, candour—caution. “Well,” he continued, a little weariedly, “that’s the indictment. Small wonder if it will need a trumpet to blare us into that last ‘Family Prayers.’ Then perhaps a few solitaries—just a few—will creep out of their holes and fastnesses, and draw mercy from the merciful on the cities of the plain. The buried talent will shine none the worse for the long, long looming of its napery spun from dream and desire. “Years ago—ten, fifteen, perhaps—I chanced on the queerest specimen of this order of the ‘talented.’ Much the same country, too. This”—he swept his glance out towards the now invisible sea—“this is a kind of dwarf replica of it. More naked, smoother, more sudden and precipitous, more ‘forsaken,’ moody! Alone! The trees are shorn there, as if with monstrous shears, by the winter gales. The air’s salt. It is a country of stones and emerald meadows, of green, meandering, aimless lanes, of farms set in their cliffs and valleys like rough time-bedimmed jewels, as if by some angel of humanity, wandering between dark and daybreak. “I was younger then—in body: the youth of the mind is for men of a certain age; yours, maybe, and mine. Even then, even at that, I was sickened of crowds, of that unimaginable London—swarming wilderness of mankind in which a poor, lost, thirsty dog from Otherwhere tastes first the full meaning of that idle word ‘forsaken.’ ‘Forsaken by whom?’ is the question I ask myself now. Visitors to my particular paradise were few then—as if, my dear sir, we are not all of us visitors, visitants, revenants, on earth, panting for time in which to tell and share our secrets, roving in search of marks that shall prove our quest not vain, not unprecedented, not a treachery. But let that be. “I would start off morning after morning, bread and cheese in pocket, from the bare old house I lodged in, bound for that unforeseen nowhere for which the heart, the fantasy, aches. Lingering hot noondays would find me stretched in a state half-comatose, yet vigilant, on the close-flowered turf of the fields or cliffs, on the sun-baked sands and rocks, soaking in the scene and life around me like some pilgrim chameleon. It was in hope to lose my way that I would set out. How shall a man find his way unless he lose it? Now and then I succeeded. That country is large, and its land and sea marks easily cheat the stranger. I was still of an age, you see, when my ‘small door’ was ajar, and I planted a solid foot to keep it from shutting. But how could I know what I was after? One just shakes the tree of life, and the rare fruits come tumbling down, to rot for the most part in the lush grasses. “What was most haunting and provocative in that far-away country was its fleeting resemblance to the country of dream. You stand, you sit, or lie prone on its bud-starred heights, and look down; the green, dispersed, treeless landscape spreads beneath you, with its hollow and mounded slopes, clustering farmstead, and scatter of village, all motionless under the vast wash of sun and blue, like the drop-scene of some enchanted playhouse centuries old. So, too, the visionary bird-haunted headlands, veiled faintly in a mist of unreality above their broken stones and the enormous saucer of the sea. “You cannot guess there what you may not chance upon, or whom. Bells clash, boom, and quarrel hollowly on the edge of darkness in those breakers. Voices waver across the fainter winds. The birds cry in a tongue unknown yet not unfamiliar. The sky is the hawks’ and the stars’. There one is on the edge of life, of the unforeseen, whereas our cities—are not our desiccated, jaded minds ever continually pressing and edging further and further away from freedom, the vast unknown, the infinite presence, picking a fool’s journey from sensual fact to fact at the tail of that he-ass called Reason? I suggest that in that solitude the spirit within us realises that it treads the outskirts of a region long since called the Imagination. I assert we have strayed, and in our blindness abandoned——” My stranger paused in his frenzy, glanced out at me from his obscure corner as if he had intended to stun, to astonish me with some violent heresy. We puffed out slowly, laboriously from a “Halt” at which in the gathering dark and moonshine we had for some while been at a standstill. Never was wedding-guest more desperately at the mercy of ancient mariner. “Well, one day,” he went on, lifting his voice a little to master the resounding heart-beats of our steam-engine—“one late afternoon, in my goalless wanderings, I had climbed to the summit of a steep grass-grown cart-track, winding up dustily between dense, untended hedges. Even then I might have missed the house to which it led, for, hair-pin fashion, the track here abruptly turned back on itself, and only a far fainter footpath led on over the hill-crest. I might, I say, have missed the house and—and its inmates, if I had not heard the musical sound of what seemed like the twangling of a harp. This thin-drawn, sweet, tuneless warbling welled over the close green grass of the height as if out of space. Truth cannot say whether it was of that air or of my own fantasy. Nor did I ever discover what instrument, whether of man or Ariel, had released a strain so pure and yet so bodiless. “I pushed on and found myself in command of a gorse-strewn height, a stretch of country that lay a few hundred paces across the steep and sudden valley in between. In a V-shaped entry to the left, and sunwards, lay an azure and lazy tongue of the sea. And as my eye slid softly thence and upwards and along the sharp, green horizon line against the glass-clear turquoise of space, it caught the flinty glitter of a square chimney. I pushed on, and presently found myself at the gate of a farmyard. “There was but one straw-mow upon its staddles. A few fowls were sunning themselves in their dust-baths. White and pied doves preened and cooed on the roof of an outbuilding as golden with its lichens as if the western sun had scattered its dust for centuries upon the large slate slabs. Just that life and the whispering of the wind: nothing more. Yet even at one swift glimpse I seemed to have trespassed upon a peace that had endured for ages; to have crossed the viewless border that divides time from eternity. I leaned, resting, over the gate, and could have remained there for hours, lapsing ever more profoundly into the blessed quietude that had stolen over my thoughts. “A bent-up woman appeared at the dark entry of a stone shed opposite to me, and, shading her eyes, paused in prolonged scrutiny of the stranger. At that I entered the gate and, explaining that I had lost my way and was tired and thirsty, asked for some milk. She made no reply, but after peering up at me, with something between suspicion and apprehension on her weather-beaten old face, led me towards the house which lay to the left on the slope of the valley, hidden from me till then by plumy bushes of tamarisk. “It was a low grave house, grey-chimneyed, its stone walls traversed by a deep shadow cast by the declining sun, its dark windows rounded and uncurtained, its door wide open to the porch. She entered the house, and I paused upon the threshold. A deep unmoving quiet lay within, like that of water in a cave renewed by the tide. Above a table hung a wreath of wild flowers. To the right was a heavy oak settle upon the flags. A beam of sunlight pierced the air of the staircase from an upper window. “Presently a dark, long-faced, gaunt man appeared from within, contemplating me, as he advanced, out of eyes that seemed not so much to fix the intruder as to encircle his image, as the sea contains the distant speck of a ship on its wide, blue bosom of water. They might have been the eyes of the blind; the windows of a house in dream to which the inmate must make something of a pilgrimage to look out upon actuality. Then he smiled, and the long, dark features, melancholy yet serene, took light upon them, as might a bluff of rock beneath a thin passing wash of sunshine. With a gesture he welcomed me into the large dark-flagged kitchen, cool as a cellar, airy as a belfry, its sweet air traversed by a long oblong of light out of the west. “The wide shelves of the painted dresser were laden with crockery. A wreath of freshly-gathered flowers hung over the chimney-piece. As we entered, a twittering cloud of small birds, robins, hedge-sparrows, chaffinches fluttered up a few inches from floor and sill and window-seat, and once more, with tiny starry-dark eyes observing me, soundlessly alighted. I could hear the infinitesimal tic-tac of their tiny claws upon the slate. My gaze drifted out of the window into the garden beyond, a cavern of clearer crystal and colour than that which astounded the eyes of young Aladdin. “Apart from the twisted garland of wild flowers, the shining metal of range and copper candlestick, and the bright-scoured crockery, there was no adornment in the room except a rough frame, hanging from a nail in the wall, and enclosing what appeared to be a faint patterned fragment of blue silk or fine linen. The chairs and table were old and heavy. A low, light warbling, an occasional skirr of wing, a haze-like drone of bee and fly—these were the only sounds that edged a quiet intensified in its profundity by the remote stirrings of the sea. “The house was stilled as by a charm, yet thought within me asked no questions; speculation was asleep in its kennel. I sat down to the milk and bread, the honey and fruit which the old woman laid out upon the table, and her master seated himself opposite to me, now in a low sibilant whisper—a tongue which they seemed to understand—addressing himself to the birds, and now, as if with an effort, raising those strange grey-green eyes of his to bestow a quiet remark upon me. He asked, rather in courtesy than with any active interest, a few questions, referring to the world, its business and transports—our beautiful world—as an astronomer in the small hours might murmur a few words to the chance-sent guest of his solitude concerning the secrets of Uranus or Saturn. There is another, an inexplorable side to the moon. Yet he said enough for me to gather that he, too, was of that small tribe of the aloof and wild to which our cracked old word ‘forsaken’ might be applied, hermits, lamas, clay-matted fakirs, and such-like; the snowy birds that play and cry amid mid-oceanic surges; the living of an oasis of the wilderness; which share a reality only distantly dreamed of by the time-driven thought-corroded congregations of man. “Yet so narrow and hazardous I somehow realised was the brink of fellow-being (shall I call it?) which we shared, he and I, that again and again fantasy within me seemed to hover over that precipice Night knows as fear. It was he, it seemed, with that still embracive contemplation of his, with that far-away yet reassuring smile, that kept my poise, my balance. ‘No,’ some voice within him seemed to utter, ‘you are safe; the bounds are fixed; though hallucination chaunt its decoy, you shall not irretrievably pass over. Eat and drink, and presently return to life.’ And I listened, and, like that of a drowsy child in its cradle, my consciousness sank deeper and deeper, stilled, pacified into the dream which, as it seemed, this soundless house of stone now reared its walls. “I had all but finished my meal when I heard footsteps approaching on the flags without. The murmur of other voices, distinguishably shrill yet guttural even at a distance, and in spite of the dense stones and beams of the house which had blunted their timbre, had already reached me. Now the feet halted. I turned my head—cautiously, even perhaps apprehensively—and confronted two figures in the doorway. “I cannot now guess the age of my entertainer. These children—for children they were in face and gesture and effect, though as to form and stature apparently in their last teens—these children were far more problematical. I say ‘form and stature,’ yet obviously they were dwarfish. Their heads were sunken between their shoulders, their hair thick, their eyes disconcertingly deep-set. They were ungainly; their features peculiarly irregular, as if two races from the ends of the earth had in them intermingled their blood and strangeness; as if, rather animal and angel had connived in their creation. “But if some inward light lay on the still eyes, on the gaunt, sorrowful, quixotic countenance that now was fully and intensely bent on mine, emphatically that light was theirs also. He spoke to them; they answered—in English, my own language, without a doubt: but an English slurred, broken, and unintelligible to me, yet clear as a bell, haunting, penetrating, pining as voice of nix or siren. My ears drank in the sound as an Arab parched with desert sand falls on his dried belly and gulps in mouthfuls of crystal water. The birds hopped nearer as if beneath the rod of an enchanter. A sweet continuous clamour arose from their small throats. The exquisite colours of plume and bosom burned, greened, melted in the level sun-ray, in the darker air beyond. “A kind of mournful gaiety, a lamentable felicity, such as rings in the cadences of an old folk-song, welled into my heart. I was come back to the borders of Eden, bowed and outwearied, gazing from out of dream into dream, homesick, ‘forsaken.’ “Well, years have gone by,” muttered my fellow-traveller deprecatingly, “but I have not forgotten that Eden’s primeval trees and shade. “They led me out, these bizarre companions, a he and a she, if I may put it as crudely as my apprehension of them put it to me then. Through a broad door they conducted me—if one who leads may be said to be conducted—into their garden. Garden! A full mile long, between undiscerned walls, it sloped and narrowed towards a sea at whose dark unfoamed blue, even at this distance, my eyes dazzled. Yet how can one call that a garden which reveals no ghost of a sign of human arrangement, of human slavery, of spade or hoe? “Great boulders shouldered up, tessellated, embossed, powdered with a thousand various mosses and lichens, between a flowering greenery of weeds. Wind-stunted, clear-emerald, lichen-tufted trees smoothed and crisped the inflowing airs of the ocean with their leaves and spines, sibilating a thin scarce-audible music. Scanty, rank, and uncultivated fruits hung close their vivid-coloured cheeks to the gnarled branches. It was the harbourage of birds, the small embowering parlour of their house of life, under an evening sky, pure and lustrous as a water-drop. It cried, ‘Hospital’ to the wanderers of the universe. “As I look back in ever-thinning, nebulous remembrance on my two companions, hear their voices gutturally sweet and shrill, catch again their being, so to speak, I realise that there was a kind of Orientalism in their effect. Their instant courtesy was not Western, the smiles that greeted me, whenever I turned my head to look back at them, were infinitely friendly, yet infinitely remote. So ungainly, so far from our notions of beauty and symmetry were their bodies and faces, those heads thrust heavily between their shoulders, their disproportioned yet graceful arms and hands, that the children in some of our English villages might be moved to stone them, while their elders looked on and laughed. “Dusk was drawing near; soon night would come. The colours of the sunset, sucking its extremest dye from every leaf and blade and petal, touched my consciousness even then with a vague fleeting alarm. “I remember I asked these strange and happy beings, repeating my question twice or thrice, as we neared the surfy entry of the valley upon whose sands a tiny stream emptied its fresh water—I asked them if it was they who had planted this multitude of flowers, many of a kind utterly unknown to me and alien to a country inexhaustibly rich. ‘We wait; we wait!’ I think they cried. And it was as if their cry awoke echo from the green-walled valleys of the mind into which I had strayed. Shall I confess that tears came into my eyes as I gazed hungrily around me on the harvest of their patience? “Never was actuality so close to dream. It was not only an unknown country, slipped in between these placid hills, on which I had chanced in my ramblings. I had entered for a few brief moments a strange region of consciousness. I was treading, thus accompanied, amid a world of welcoming and fearless life—oh, friendly to me!—the paths of man’s imagination, the kingdom from which thought and curiosity, vexed scrutiny and lust—a lust it may be for nothing more impious than the actual—had prehistorically proved the insensate means of his banishment. ‘Reality,’ ‘Consciousness’: had he for ‘the time being’ unwittingly, unhappily missed his way? Would he be led back at length to that garden wherein cockatrice and basilisk bask, harmlessly, at peace? “I speculate now. In that queer, yes, and possibly sinister company, sinister only because it was alien to me, I did not speculate. In their garden, the familiar was become the strange—‘the strange’ that lurks in the inmost heart, unburdens its riches in trance, flings its light and gilding upon love, gives heavenly savour to the intemperate bowl of passion, and is the secret of our incommunicable pity. What is yet queerer, these things were evidently glad of my company. They stumped after me (as might yellow men after some Occidental quadruped never before seen) in merry collusion of nods and wreathed smiles at this perhaps unprecedented intrusion. “I stood for a moment looking out over the placid surface of the sea. A ship in sail hung phantom-like on the horizon. I pined to call my discovery to its seamen. The tide gushed, broke, spent itself on the bare boulders, I was suddenly cold and alone, and gladly turned back into the garden, my companions instinctively separating to let me pass between them. I breathed in the rare, almost exotic heat, the tenuous, honeyed, almond-laden air of its flowers and birds—gull, sheldrake, plover, wagtail, finch, robin, which as I half-angrily, half-sadly realised fluttered up in momentary dismay only at my presence—the embodied spectre of their enemy, man. Man? Then who were these?... “I lost again a way lost early that morning, as I trudged inland at night. The dark came, warm and starry. I was dejected and exhausted beyond words. That night I slept in a barn and was awakened soon after daybreak by the crowing of cocks. I went out, dazed and blinking into the sunlight, bathed face and hands in a brook near by, and came to a village before a soul was stirring. So I sat under a thrift-cushioned, thorn-crowned wall in a meadow, and once more drowsed off and fell asleep. When again I awoke, it was ten o’clock. The church clock in its tower knelled out the strokes, and I went into an inn for food. “A corpulent, blonde woman, kindly and hospitable, with a face comfortably resembling her own sow’s, that yuffed and nosed in at the open door as I sat on my stool, served me with what I called for. I described—not without some vanishing shame, as if it were a treachery—my farm, its whereabouts. “Her small blue eyes ‘pigged’ at me with a fleeting expression which I failed to translate. The name of the farm, it appeared, was Trevarras. ‘And did you see any of the Creatures?’ she asked me in a voice not entirely her own. ‘The Creatures’? I sat back for an instant and stared at her; then realised that Creature was the name of my host, and Maria and Christus (though here her dialect may have deceived me) the names of my two gardeners. She spun an absurd story, so far as I could tack it together and make it coherent. Superstitious stuff about this man who had wandered in upon the shocked and curious inhabitants of the district and made his home at Trevarras—a stranger and pilgrim, a ‘foreigner,’ it seemed, of few words, dubious manners, and both uninformative. “Then there was something (she placed her two fat hands, one of them wedding-ringed, on the zinc of the bar-counter, and peered over at me, as if I were a delectable ‘wash’), then there was something about a woman ‘from the sea.’ In a ‘blue gown,’ and either dumb, inarticulate, or mistress of only a foreign tongue. She must have lived in sin, moreover, those pig’s eyes seemed to yearn, since the children were ‘simple,’ ‘naturals’—as God intends in such matters. It was useless. One’s stomach may sometimes reject the cold sanative aerated water of ‘the next morning,’ and my ridiculous intoxication had left me dry but not yet quite sober. “Anyhow, this she told me, that my blue woman, as fair as flax, had died and was buried in the neighbouring churchyard (the nearest to, though miles distant from Trevarras). She repeatedly assured me, as if I might otherwise doubt so sophisticated a fact, that I should find her grave there, her ‘stone.’ “So indeed I did—far away from the elect, and in a shade-ridden north-west corner of the sleepy, cropless acre: a slab, scarcely rounded, of granite, with but a name bitten out of the dark, rough surface, ‘Femina Creature.’”

MINOR DETAIL By JACK SHARKEY - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/28156/pg28156-images.html

 General Webb had a simply magnificent idea for getting ground forces into the enemy's territory despite rockets and missiles and things like that. It was a grand scheme, except for one 

He closed one eye in a broad wink and wriggled a thumb in the direction of the driver. "He's only cleared for Confidential material," said the general, his tone casting aspersions on the sergeant's patriotism, ancestry and personal hygiene. "This project is, of course, Top Secret!" He said the words reverently, his face going all noble and brave. Whitlow half-expected him to remove his hat, but he did not.

 Webb's eyes bulged in their sockets. "Great heavens, man, can't you see?" He gestured down at his creation, his baby, his project, as though it were self-evident what its function was.

 

The general, Top Secret or no Top Secret, was divulging nothing that wasn't common knowledge from the ruins of Philadelphia to the great Hollywood crater ...

All at once, weapons had gotten too good. That was the whole problem. Wars, no matter what the abilities of the death-dealing guns, cannon, rifles, rockets or whatever, needed one thing on the battlefield that could not be turned out in a factory: Men.

No one knew better than he that he was an important person. He was number one in not the least important branch of the most important English firm in China. He had worked his way up through solid ability, and he looked back with a faint smile at the callow clerk who had come out to China thirty years before. When he remembered the modest home he had come from, a little red house in a long row of little red houses, in Barnes, a suburb which, aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only a sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent stone mansion, with its wide verandahs and spacious rooms, which was at once the office of the company and his own residence, he chuckled with satisfaction. He had come a long way since then. He thought of the high tea to which he sat down when he came home from school (he was at St. Paul’s), with his father and mother and his two sisters, a slice of cold meat, a great deal of bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea, everybody helping himself, and then he thought of the state in which now he ate his evening meal. He always dressed, and whether he was alone or not he expected the three boys to wait at table. His number one boy knew exactly what he liked, and he never had to bother himself with the details of housekeeping; but he always had a set dinner with soup and fish, entree, roast, sweet and savoury, so that if he wanted to ask anyone in at the last moment he could. He liked his food, and he did not see why when he was alone he should have less good a dinner than when he had a guest. He had indeed gone far. That was why he did not care to go home now; he had not been to England for ten years, and he took his leave in Japan or Vancouver where he was sure of meeting old friends from the China coast. He knew no one at home. His sisters had married in their own station, their husbands were clerks and their sons were clerks; there was nothing between him and them; they bored him. He satisfied the claims of relationship by sending them every Christmas a piece of fine silk, some elaborate embroidery, or a case of tea. He was not a mean man, and as long as his mother lived he had made her an allowance. But when the time came for him to retire he had no intention of going back to England, he had seen too many men do that and he knew how often it was a failure; he meant to take a house near the race-course in Shanghai: what with bridge and his ponies and gold he expected to get through the rest of his life very comfortably. But he had a good many years before he need think of retiring. In another five or six Higgins would be going home, and then he would take charge of the head office in Shanghai. Meanwhile he was very happy where he was; he could save money, which you couldn’t do in Shanghai, and have a good time into the bargain. This place had another advantage over Shanghai: he was the most prominent man in the community and what he said went. Even the consul took care to keep on the right side of him. Once a consul and he had been at loggerheads, and it was not he who had gone to the wall. The taipan thrust out his jaw pugnaciously as he thought of the incident. But he smiled, for he felt in an excellent humour. He was walking back to his office from a capital luncheon at the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank. They did you very well there. The food was first rate and there was plenty of liquor. He had started with a couple of cocktails, then he had had some excellent sauterne, and he had finished up with two glasses of port and some fine old brandy. He felt good. And when he left he did a thing that was rare with him: he walked. His bearers with his chair kept a few paces behind him in case he felt inclined to slip into it, but he enjoyed stretching his legs. He did not get enough exercise these days. Now that he was too heavy to ride, it was difficult to get exercise. But if he was too heavy to ride he could still keep ponies, and as he strolled along in the balmy air he thought of the spring meeting. He had a couple of griffins that he had hopes of and one of the lads in his office had turned out a fine jockey (he must see they didn’t sneak him away, old Higgins in Shanghai would give a pot of money to get him over there) and he ought to pull off two or three races. He flattered himself that he had the finest stable in the city. He pouted his broad chest like a pigeon. It was a beautiful day, and it was good to be alive. He paused as he came to the cemetery. It stood there, neat and orderly, as an evident sign of the community’s opulence. He never passed the cemetery without a little glow of pride. He was pleased to be an Englishman. For the cemetery stood in a place, valueless when it was chosen, which with the increase of the city’s affluence was now worth a great deal of money. It had been suggested that the graves should be moved to another spot and the land sold for building, but the feeling of the community was against it. It gave the taipan a sense of satisfaction to think that their dead rested on the most valuable site on the island. It showed that there were things they cared for more than money. Money be blowed! When it came to “the things that mattered” (this was a favourite phrase with the taipan), well, one remembered that money wasn’t everything. And now he thought he would take a stroll through. He looked at the graves. They were neatly kept, and the pathways were free from weeds. There was a look of prosperity. And as he sauntered along he read the names on the tombstones. Here were three side by side; the captain, the first mate, and the second mate of the barque Mary Baxter, who had all perished together in the typhoon of 1908. He remembered it well. There was a little group of two missionaries, their wives and children, who had been massacred during the Boxer troubles. Shocking thing that had been! Not that he took much stock in missionaries; but, hang it all, one couldn’t have these damned Chinese massacring them. Then he came to a cross with a name on it he knew. Good chap, Edward Mulock, but he couldn’t stand his liquor, drank himself to death, poor devil, at twenty-five: the taipan had known a lot of them do that; there were several more neat crosses with a man’s name on them and the age, twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven; it was always the same story; they had come out to China: they had never seen so much money before, they were good fellows, and they wanted to drink with the rest: they couldn’t stand it, and there they were in the cemetery. You had to have a strong head and a fine constitution to drink drink for drink on the China coast. Of course it was very sad, but the taipan could hardly help a smile when he thought how many of those young fellows he had drunk underground. And there was a death that had been useful, a fellow in his own firm, senior to him and a clever chap too: if that fellow had lived he might not have been taipan now. Truly the ways of fate were inscrutable. Ah, and here was little Mrs. Turner, Violet Turner, she had been a pretty little thing, he had had quite an affair with her; he had been devilish cut up when she died. He looked at her age on the tombstone. She’d be no chicken if she were alive now. And as he thought of all those dead people, a sense of satisfaction spread through him. He had beaten them all. They were dead, and he was alive, and by George he’d scored them off. His eyes collected in one picture all those crowded graves and he smiled scornfully. He very nearly rubbed his hands. “No one ever thought I was a fool,” he muttered. He had a feeling of good-natured contempt for the gibbering dead. Then, as he strolled along, he came suddenly upon two coolies digging a grave. He was astonished, for he had not heard that anyone in the community was dead. “Who the devil’s that for?” he said aloud. The coolies did not even look at him, they went on with their work, standing in the grave, deep down, and they shovelled up heavy clods of earth. Though he had been so long in China he knew no Chinese, in his day it was not thought necessary to learn the damned language, and he asked the coolies in English whose grave they were digging. They did not understand. They answered him in Chinese and he cursed them for ignorant fools. He knew that Mrs. Broome’s child was ailing, and it might have died, but he would certainly have heard of it, and besides that wasn’t a child’s grave, it was a man’s and a big man’s too. It was uncanny. He wished he hadn’t gone into that cemetery; he hurried out and stepped into his chair. His good humour had all gone and there was an uneasy frown on his face. The moment he got back to his office he called to his number two: “I say, Peters, who’s dead, d’you know?” But Peters knew nothing. The taipan was puzzled. He called one of the native clerks and sent him to the cemetery to ask the coolies. He began to sign his letters. The clerk came back and said the coolies had gone and there was no one to ask. The taipan began to feel vaguely annoyed: he did not like things to happen of which he knew nothing. His own boy would know; his boy always knew everything, and he sent for him; but the boy had heard of no death in the community. “I knew no one was dead,” said the taipan irritably. “But what’s the grave for?” He told the boy to go to the overseer of the cemetery and find out what the devil he had dug a grave for when no one was dead. “Let me have a whisky and soda before you go,” he added, as the boy was leaving the room. He did not know why the sight of the grave had made him uncomfortable. But he tried to put it out of his mind. He felt better when he had drunk the whisky, and he finished his work. He went upstairs and turned over the pages of Punch. In a few minutes he would go to the club and play a rubber or two of bridge before dinner. But it would ease his mind to hear what his boy had to say, and he waited for his return. In a little while the boy came back, and he brought the overseer with him. “What are you having a grave dug for?” he asked the overseer point blank. “Nobody’s dead.” “I no dig glave,” said the man. “What the devil do you mean by that? There were two coolies digging a grave this afternoon.” The two Chinese looked at one another. Then the boy said they had been to the cemetery together. There was no new grave there. The taipan only just stopped himself from speaking. “But damn it all, I saw it myself,” were the words on the tip of his tongue. But he did not say them. He grew very red as he choked them down. The two Chinese looked at him with their steady eyes. For a moment his breath failed him. “All right. Get out,” he gasped. But as soon as they were gone he shouted for the boy again, and when he came, maddeningly impassive, he told him to bring some whisky. He rubbed his sweating face with a handkerchief. His hand trembled when he lifted the glass to his lips. They could say what they liked, but he had seen the grave. Why, he could hear still the dull thud as the coolies threw the spadefuls of earth on the ground above them. What did it mean? He could feel his heart beating. He felt strangely ill at ease. But he pulled himself together. It was all nonsense. If there was no grave there it must have been an hallucination. The best thing he could do was to go to the club, and if he ran across the doctor, he would ask him to give him a look over. Everyone in the club looked just the same as ever. He did not know why he should have expected them to look different. It was a comfort. These men, living for many years with one another, lives that were methodically regulated, had acquired a number of little idiosyncrasies—one of them hummed incessantly while he played bridge, another insisted on drinking beer through a straw—and these tricks which had so often irritated the taipan now gave him a sense of security. He needed it, for he could not get out of his head that strange sight he had seen; he played bridge very badly; his partner was censorious, and the taipan lost his temper. He thought the men were looking at him oddly. He wondered what they saw in him that was unaccustomed. Suddenly he felt he could not bear to stay in the club any longer. As he went out he saw the doctor reading The Times in the reading-room, but he could not bring himself to speak to him. He wanted to see for himself whether that grave was really there, and, stepping into his chair he told his bearers to take him to the cemetery. You couldn’t have an hallucination twice, could you? And besides, he would take the overseer in with him, and if the grave was not there, he wouldn’t see it, and if it was he’d give the overseer the soundest thrashing he’d ever had. But the overseer was nowhere to be found. He had gone out and taken the keys with him. When the taipan found he could not get into the cemetery, he felt suddenly exhausted. He got back into his chair and told his bearers to take him home. He would lie down for half an hour before dinner. He was tired out. That was it. He had heard that people had hallucinations when they were tired. When his boy came in to put out his clothes for dinner, it was only by an effort of will that he got up. He had a strong inclination not to dress that evening, but he resisted it: he made it a rule to dress, he had dressed every evening for twenty years, and it would never do to break his rule. But he ordered a bottle of champagne with his dinner, and that made him feel more comfortable. Afterwards he told the boy to bring him the best brandy. When he had drunk a couple of glasses of this he felt himself again. Hallucinations be damned! He went to the billiard room and practised a few difficult shots. There could not be much the matter with him when his eye was so sure. When he went to bed he sank immediately into a sound sleep. But suddenly he awoke. He had dreamed of that open grave and the coolies digging leisurely. He was sure he had seen them. It was absurd to say it was an hallucination when he had seen them with his own eyes. Then he heard the rattle of the night watchman going his rounds. It broke upon the stillness of the night so harshly that it made him jump out of his skin. And then terror seized him. He felt a horror of the winding multitudinous streets of the Chinese city, and there was something ghastly and terrible in the convoluted roofs of the temples with their devils grimacing and tortured. He loathed the smells that assaulted his nostrils. And the people. Those myriads of blue-clad coolies, and the beggars in their filthy rags, and the merchants and the magistrates, sleek, smiling, and inscrutable, in their long black gowns. They seemed to press upon him with menace. He hated the country. China! Why had he ever come? He was panic-stricken now. He must get out. He would not stay another year, another month. What did he care about Shanghai? “Oh, my God!” he cried, “if I were only safely back in England!” He wanted to go home. If he had to die, he wanted to die in England. He could not bear to be buried among all these yellow men, with their slanting eyes and their grinning faces. He wanted to be buried at home, not in that grave he had seen that day. He could never rest there. Never. What did it matter what people thought? Let them think what they liked. The only thing that mattered was to get away while he had the chance. He got out of bed and wrote to the head of the firm and said he had discovered he was dangerously ill. He must be replaced. He could not stay longer than was absolutely necessary. He must go home at once. They found the letter in the morning clenched in the taipan’s hand. He had slipped down between the desk and the chair. He was stone dead.

AT THE POST By H. L. GOLD - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32413/pg32413-images.html

 How does a person come to be scratched from the human race? Psychiatry did not have the answer

 

sunday, midday. A landowner, called Kamyshev, is sitting in his dining-room, deliberately eating his lunch at a luxuriously furnished table. Monsieur Champoun, a clean, neat, smoothly-shaven, old Frenchman, is sharing the meal with him. This Champoun had once been a tutor in Kamyshev’s household, had taught his children good manners, the correct pronunciation of French, and dancing: afterwards when Kamyshev’s children had grown up and become lieutenants, Champoun had become something like a bonne of the male sex. The duties of the former tutor were not complicated. He had to be properly dressed, to smell of scent, to listen to Kamyshev’s idle babble, to eat and drink and sleep—and apparently that was all. For this he received a room, his board, and an indefinite salary. Kamyshev eats and as usual babbles at random. “Damnation!” he says, wiping away the tears that have come into his eyes after a mouthful of ham thickly smeared with mustard. “Ough! It has shot into my head and all my joints. Your French mustard would not do that, you know, if you ate the whole potful.” “Some like the French, some prefer the Russian. . .” Champoun assents mildly. “No one likes French mustard except Frenchmen. And a Frenchman will eat anything, whatever you give him—frogs and rats and black beetles. . . brrr! You don’t like that ham, for instance, because it is Russian, but if one were to give you a bit of baked glass and tell you it was French, you would eat it and smack your lips. . . . To your thinking everything Russian is nasty.” “I don’t say that.” “Everything Russian is nasty, but if it’s French—o say tray zholee! To your thinking there is no country better than France, but to my mind. . . Why, what is France, to tell the truth about it? A little bit of land. Our police captain was sent out there, but in a month he asked to be transferred: there was nowhere to turn round! One can drive round the whole of your France in one day, while here when you drive out of the gate—you can see no end to the land, you can ride on and on. . .” “Yes, monsieur, Russia is an immense country.” “To be sure it is! To your thinking there are no better people than the French. Well-educated, clever people! Civilization! I agree, the French are all well-educated with elegant manners. . . that is true. . . . A Frenchman never allows himself to be rude: he hands a lady a chair at the right minute, he doesn’t eat crayfish with his fork, he doesn’t spit on the floor, but . . . there’s not the same spirit in him! not the spirit in him! I don’t know how to explain it to you but, however one is to express it, there’s nothing in a Frenchman of . . . something . . . (the speaker flourishes his fingers) . . . of something . . . fanatical. I remember I have read somewhere that all of you have intelligence acquired from books, while we Russians have innate intelligence. If a Russian studies the sciences properly, none of your French professors is a match for him.” “Perhaps,” says Champoun, as it were reluctantly. “No, not perhaps, but certainly! It’s no use your frowning, it’s the truth I am speaking. The Russian intelligence is an inventive intelligence. Only of course he is not given a free outlet for it, and he is no hand at boasting. He will invent something—and break it or give it to the children to play with, while your Frenchman will invent some nonsensical thing and make an uproar for all the world to hear it. The other day Iona the coachman carved a little man out of wood, if you pull the little man by a thread he plays unseemly antics. But Iona does not brag of it. . . . I don’t like Frenchmen as a rule. I am not referring to you, but speaking generally. . . . They are an immoral people! Outwardly they look like men, but they live like dogs. Take marriage for instance. With us, once you are married, you stick to your wife, and there is no talk about it, but goodness knows how it is with you. The husband is sitting all day long in a café, while his wife fills the house with Frenchmen, and sets to dancing the can-can with them.” “That’s not true!” Champoun protests, flaring up and unable to restrain himself. “The principle of the family is highly esteemed in France.” “We know all about that principle! You ought to be ashamed to defend it: one ought to be impartial: a pig is always a pig. . . . We must thank the Germans for having beaten them. . . . Yes indeed, God bless them for it.” “In that case, monsieur, I don’t understand. . .” says the Frenchman leaping up with flashing eyes, “if you hate the French why do you keep me?” “What am I to do with you?” “Let me go, and I will go back to France.” “Wha-at? But do you suppose they would let you into France now? Why, you are a traitor to your country! At one time Napoleon’s your great man, at another Gambetta. . . . Who the devil can make you out?” “Monsieur,” says Champoun in French, spluttering and crushing up his table napkin in his hands, “my worst enemy could not have thought of a greater insult than the outrage you have just done to my feelings! All is over!” And with a tragic wave of his arm the Frenchman flings his dinner napkin on the table majestically, and walks out of the room with dignity. Three hours later the table is laid again, and the servants bring in the dinner. Kamyshev sits alone at the table. After the preliminary glass he feels a craving to babble. He wants to chatter, but he has no listener. “What is Alphonse Ludovikovitch doing?” he asks the footman. “He is packing his trunk, sir.” “What a noodle! Lord forgive us!” says Kamyshev, and goes in to the Frenchman. Champoun is sitting on the floor in his room, and with trembling hands is packing in his trunk his linen, scent bottles, prayer-books, braces, ties. . . . All his correct figure, his trunk, his bedstead and the table—all have an air of elegance and effeminacy. Great tears are dropping from his big blue eyes into the trunk. “Where are you off to?” asks Kamyshev, after standing still for a little. The Frenchman says nothing. “Do you want to go away?” Kamyshev goes on. “Well, you know, but . . . I won’t venture to detain you. But what is queer is, how are you going to travel without a passport? I wonder! You know I have lost your passport. I thrust it in somewhere between some papers, and it is lost. . . . And they are strict about passports among us. Before you have gone three or four miles they pounce upon you.” Champoun raises his head and looks mistrustfully at Kamyshev. “Yes. . . . You will see! They will see from your face you haven’t a passport, and ask at once: Who is that? Alphonse Champoun. We know that Alphonse Champoun. Wouldn’t you like to go under police escort somewhere nearer home!” “Are you joking?” “What motive have I for joking? Why should I? Only mind now; it’s a compact, don’t you begin whining then and writing letters. I won’t stir a finger when they lead you by in fetters!” Champoun jumps up and, pale and wide-eyed, begins pacing up and down the room. “What are you doing to me?” he says in despair, clutching at his head. “My God! accursed be that hour when the fatal thought of leaving my country entered my head! . . .” “Come, come, come . . . I was joking!” says Kamyshev in a lower tone. “Queer fish he is; he doesn’t understand a joke. One can’t say a word!” “My dear friend!” shrieks Champoun, reassured by Kamyshev’s tone. “I swear I am devoted to Russia, to you and your children. . . . To leave you is as bitter to me as death itself! But every word you utter stabs me to the heart!” “Ah, you queer fish! If I do abuse the French, what reason have you to take offence? You are a queer fish really! You should follow the example of Lazar Isaakitch, my tenant. I call him one thing and another, a Jew, and a scurvy rascal, and I make a pig’s ear out of my coat tail, and catch him by his Jewish curls. He doesn’t take offence.” “But he is a slave! For a kopeck he is ready to put up with any insult!” “Come, come, come . . . that’s enough! Peace and concord!” Champoun powders his tear-stained face and goes with Kamyshev to the dining-room. The first course is eaten in silence, after the second the same performance begins over again, and so Champoun’s sufferings have no end.

FORGOTTEN DANGER BY WILLIAM MORRISON - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68753/pg68753-images.html

 Crusoe could remember only one thing—that
somewhere near some deadly danger
threatened him! He had no way of knowing
what it was, or why he was in the swamp.
Then he found he could work miracles!

 The men settled themselves on the dry grass, pulled their old worn apologies for blankets over them, and began to snore. Around them, as the fire was reduced to embers, the night closed in.

let me tell you, my good man,” began Madame Nashatyrin, the colonel’s lady at No. 47, crimson and spluttering, as she pounced on the hotel-keeper. “Either give me other apartments, or I shall leave your confounded hotel altogether! It’s a sink of iniquity! Mercy on us, I have grown-up daughters and one hears nothing but abominations day and night! It’s beyond everything! Day and night! Sometimes he fires off such things that it simply makes one’s ears blush! Positively like a cabman. It’s a good thing that my poor girls don’t understand or I should have to fly out into the street with them. . . He’s saying something now! You listen!” “I know a thing better than that, my boy,” a husky bass floated in from the next room. “Do you remember Lieutenant Druzhkov? Well, that same Druzhkov was one day making a drive with the yellow into the pocket and as he usually did, you know, flung up his leg. . . . All at once something went crrr-ack! At first they thought he had torn the cloth of the billiard table, but when they looked, my dear fellow, his United States had split at every seam! He had made such a high kick, the beast, that not a seam was left. . . . Ha-ha-ha, and there were ladies present, too . . . among others the wife of that drivelling Lieutenant Okurin. . . . Okurin was furious. . . . ‘How dare the fellow,’ said he, ‘behave with impropriety in the presence of my wife?’ One thing led to another . . . you know our fellows! . . . Okurin sent seconds to Druzhkov, and Druzhkov said ‘don’t be a fool’ . . . ha-ha-ha, ‘but tell him he had better send seconds not to me but to the tailor who made me those breeches; it is his fault, you know.’ Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha. . . .” Lilya and Mila, the colonel’s daughters, who were sitting in the window with their round cheeks propped on their fists, flushed crimson and dropped their eyes that looked buried in their plump faces. “Now you have heard him, haven’t you?” Madame Nashatyrin went on, addressing the hotel-keeper. “And that, you consider, of no consequence, I suppose? I am the wife of a colonel, sir! My husband is a commanding officer. I will not permit some cabman to utter such infamies almost in my presence!” “He is not a cabman, madam, but the staff-captain Kikin. . . . A gentleman born.” “If he has so far forgotten his station as to express himself like a cabman, then he is even more deserving of contempt! In short, don’t answer me, but kindly take steps!” “But what can I do, madam? You are not the only one to complain, everybody’s complaining, but what am I to do with him? One goes to his room and begins putting him to shame, saying: ‘Hannibal Ivanitch, have some fear of God! It’s shameful! and he’ll punch you in the face with his fists and say all sorts of things: ‘there, put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ and such like. It’s a disgrace! He wakes up in the morning and sets to walking about the corridor in nothing, saving your presence, but his underclothes. And when he has had a drop he will pick up a revolver and set to putting bullets into the wall. By day he is swilling liquor and at night he plays cards like mad, and after cards it is fighting. . . . I am ashamed for the other lodgers to see it!” “Why don’t you get rid of the scoundrel?” “Why, there’s no getting him out! He owes me for three months, but we don’t ask for our money, we simply ask him to get out as a favour . . . . The magistrate has given him an order to clear out of the rooms, but he’s taking it from one court to another, and so it drags on. . . . He’s a perfect nuisance, that’s what he is. And, good Lord, such a man, too! Young, good-looking and intellectual. . . . When he hasn’t had a drop you couldn’t wish to see a nicer gentleman. The other day he wasn’t drunk and he spent the whole day writing letters to his father and mother.” “Poor father and mother!” sighed the colonel’s lady. “They are to be pitied, to be sure! There’s no comfort in having such a scamp! He’s sworn at and turned out of his lodgings, and not a day passes but he is in trouble over some scandal. It’s sad!” “His poor unhappy wife!” sighed the lady. “He has no wife, madam. A likely idea! She would have to thank God if her head were not broken. . . .” The lady walked up and down the room. “He is not married, you say?” “Certainly not, madam.” The lady walked up and down the room again and mused a little. “H’m, not married . . .” she pronounced meditatively. “H’m. Lilya and Mila, don’t sit at the window, there’s a draught! What a pity! A young man and to let himself sink to this! And all owing to what? The lack of good influence! There is no mother who would. . . . Not married? Well . . . there it is. . . . Please be so good,” the lady continued suavely after a moment’s thought, “as to go to him and ask him in my name to . . . refrain from using expressions. . . . Tell him that Madame Nashatyrin begs him. . . . Tell him she is staying with her daughters in No. 47 . . . that she has come up from her estate in the country. . . .” “Certainly.” “Tell him, a colonel’s lady and her daughters. He might even come and apologize. . . . We are always at home after dinner. Oh, Mila, shut the window!” “Why, what do you want with that . . . black sheep, mamma?” drawled Lilya when the hotel-keeper had retired. “A queer person to invite! A drunken, rowdy rascal!” “Oh, don’t say so, ma chère! You always talk like that; and there . . . sit down! Why, whatever he may be, we ought not to despise him. . . . There’s something good in everyone. Who knows,” sighed the colonel’s lady, looking her daughters up and down anxiously, “perhaps your fate is here. Change your dresses anyway. . . .”

THE ABYSMAL INVADERS BY EDMOND HAMILTON - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/73504/pg73504-images.html

 1929

 Much of the story, no doubt, we shall never know. Much concerning that staggering, deadly invasion which leapt out upon an unsuspecting world will remain forever hidden by that dark curtain of mystery which screens from us the workings of the unknown. Theories, suggestions, surmises—with these alone can we fill the gaps in our knowledge, and these are valueless. It were better to ignore them entirely, in any history of the thing, and record only the known facts. And such a record begins, inevitably, with the disappearance of Dr. Morton, and with the sensational circumstances surrounding that disappearance.

ivan yegoritch krasnyhin, a fourth-rate journalist, returns home late at night, grave and careworn, with a peculiar air of concentration. He looks like a man expecting a police-raid or contemplating suicide. Pacing about his rooms he halts abruptly, ruffles up his hair, and says in the tone in which Laertes announces his intention of avenging his sister: “Shattered, soul-weary, a sick load of misery on the heart . . . and then to sit down and write. And this is called life! How is it nobody has described the agonizing discord in the soul of a writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears at the word of command when his heart is light? I must be playful, coldly unconcerned, witty, but what if I am weighed down with misery, what if I am ill, or my child is dying or my wife in anguish!” He says this, brandishing his fists and rolling his eyes. . . . Then he goes into the bedroom and wakes his wife. “Nadya,” he says, “I am sitting down to write. . . . Please don’t let anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying or cooks snoring. . . . See, too, that there’s tea and . . . steak or something. . . . You know that I can’t write without tea. . . . Tea is the one thing that gives me the energy for my work.” Returning to his room he takes off his coat, waistcoat, and boots. He does this very slowly; then, assuming an expression of injured innocence, he sits down to his table. There is nothing casual, nothing ordinary on his writing-table, down to the veriest trifle everything bears the stamp of a stern, deliberately planned programme. Little busts and photographs of distinguished writers, heaps of rough manuscripts, a volume of Byelinsky with a page turned down, part of a skull by way of an ash-tray, a sheet of newspaper folded carelessly, but so that a passage is uppermost, boldly marked in blue pencil with the word “disgraceful.” There are a dozen sharply-pointed pencils and several penholders fitted with new nibs, put in readiness that no accidental breaking of a pen may for a single second interrupt the flight of his creative fancy. Ivan Yegoritch throws himself back in his chair, and closing his eyes concentrates himself on his subject. He hears his wife shuffling about in her slippers and splitting shavings to heat the samovar. She is hardly awake, that is apparent from the way the knife and the lid of the samovar keep dropping from her hands. Soon the hissing of the samovar and the spluttering of the frying meat reaches him. His wife is still splitting shavings and rattling with the doors and blowers of the stove. All at once Ivan Yegoritch starts, opens frightened eyes, and begins to sniff the air. “Heavens! the stove is smoking!” he groans, grimacing with a face of agony. “Smoking! That insufferable woman makes a point of trying to poison me! How, in God’s Name, am I to write in such surroundings, kindly tell me that?” He rushes into the kitchen and breaks into a theatrical wail. When a little later, his wife, stepping cautiously on tiptoe, brings him in a glass of tea, he is sitting in an easy chair as before with his eyes closed, absorbed in his article. He does not stir, drums lightly on his forehead with two fingers, and pretends he is not aware of his wife’s presence. . . . His face wears an expression of injured innocence. Like a girl who has been presented with a costly fan, he spends a long time coquetting, grimacing, and posing to himself before he writes the title. . . . He presses his temples, he wriggles, and draws his legs up under his chair as though he were in pain, or half closes his eyes languidly like a cat on the sofa. At last, not without hesitation, he stretches out his hand towards the inkstand, and with an expression as though he were signing a death-warrant, writes the title. . . . “Mammy, give me some water!” he hears his son’s voice. “Hush!” says his mother. “Daddy’s writing! Hush!” Daddy writes very, very quickly, without corrections or pauses, he has scarcely time to turn over the pages. The busts and portraits of celebrated authors look at his swiftly racing pen and, keeping stock still, seem to be thinking: “Oh my, how you are going it!” “Sh!” squeaks the pen. “Sh!” whisper the authors, when his knee jolts the table and they are set trembling. All at once Krasnyhin draws himself up, lays down his pen and listens. . . . He hears an even monotonous whispering. . . . It is Foma Nikolaevitch, the lodger in the next room, saying his prayers. “I say!” cries Krasnyhin. “Couldn’t you, please, say your prayers more quietly? You prevent me from writing!” “Very sorry. . . .” Foma Nikolaevitch answers timidly. After covering five pages, Krasnyhin stretches and looks at his watch. “Goodness, three o’clock already,” he moans. “Other people are asleep while I . . . I alone must work!” Shattered and exhausted he goes, with his head on one side, to the bedroom to wake his wife, and says in a languid voice: “Nadya, get me some more tea! I . . . feel weak.” He writes till four o’clock and would readily have written till six if his subject had not been exhausted. Coquetting and posing to himself and the inanimate objects about him, far from any indiscreet, critical eye, tyrannizing and domineering over the little anthill that fate has put in his power are the honey and the salt of his existence. And how different is this despot here at home from the humble, meek, dull-witted little man we are accustomed to see in the editor’s offices! “I am so exhausted that I am afraid I shan’t sleep . . .” he says as he gets into bed. “Our work, this cursed, ungrateful hard labour, exhausts the soul even more than the body. . . . I had better take some bromide. . . . God knows, if it were not for my family I’d throw up the work. . . . To write to order! It is awful.” He sleeps till twelve or one o’clock in the day, sleeps a sound, healthy sleep. . . . Ah! how he would sleep, what dreams he would have, how he would spread himself if he were to become a well-known writer, an editor, or even a sub-editor! “He has been writing all night,” whispers his wife with a scared expression on her face. “Sh!” No one dares to speak or move or make a sound. His sleep is something sacred, and the culprit who offends against it will pay dearly for his fault. “Hush!” floats over the flat. “Hush!”

SENSE OF OBLIGATION By HARRY HARRISON - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/35204/pg35204-images.html

 It took a very special type of man for the job—and the job was onerous, dangerous, and the only really probable reward was disaster. But when a man who says he knows it's going to kill him asks you to join....

 

The God complex," Brion said, "forcing human lives into a mold whether they want to be fitted into it or not."

"Societics can be that," Ihjel agreed. "It was in the beginning, and there were some disastrous results of attempts to force populations into a political climate where they didn't belong. They weren't all failures—Anvhar here is a striking example of how good the technique can be when correctly applied. It's not done this way anymore, though. Like all of the other sciences, we have found out that the more we know, the more there is to know. We no longer attempt to guide cultures towards what we consider a beneficial goal. There are too many goals, and from our limited vantage point it is hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones. All we do now is try to protect the growing cultures, give a little jolt to the stagnating ones—and bury the dead ones. When the work was first done here on Anvhar the theory hadn't progressed that far. The understandably complex equations that determine just where in the scale from a Type I to a Type V a culture is, had not yet been completed. The technique then was to work out an artificial culture that would be most beneficial for a planet, then bend it into the mold."

 

"Sounds like you're quoting," Brion told him. "No one could possibly make up something that sounds like that on the spur of the moment."

the wind has got up, friends, and it is beginning to get dark. Hadn’t we better take ourselves off before it gets worse?” The wind was frolicking among the yellow leaves of the old birch trees, and a shower of thick drops fell upon us from the leaves. One of our party slipped on the clayey soil, and clutched at a big grey cross to save himself from falling. “Yegor Gryaznorukov, titular councillor and cavalier . .” he read. “I knew that gentleman. He was fond of his wife, he wore the Stanislav ribbon, and read nothing. . . . His digestion worked well . . . . life was all right, wasn’t it? One would have thought he had no reason to die, but alas! fate had its eye on him. . . . The poor fellow fell a victim to his habits of observation. On one occasion, when he was listening at a keyhole, he got such a bang on the head from the door that he sustained concussion of the brain (he had a brain), and died. And here, under this tombstone, lies a man who from his cradle detested verses and epigrams. . . . As though to mock him his whole tombstone is adorned with verses. . . . There is someone coming!” A man in a shabby overcoat, with a shaven, bluish-crimson countenance, overtook us. He had a bottle under his arm and a parcel of sausage was sticking out of his pocket. “Where is the grave of Mushkin, the actor?” he asked us in a husky voice. We conducted him towards the grave of Mushkin, the actor, who had died two years before. “You are a government clerk, I suppose?” we asked him. “No, an actor. Nowadays it is difficult to distinguish actors from clerks of the Consistory. No doubt you have noticed that. . . . That’s typical, but it’s not very flattering for the government clerk.” It was with difficulty that we found the actor’s grave. It had sunken, was overgrown with weeds, and had lost all appearance of a grave. A cheap, little cross that had begun to rot, and was covered with green moss blackened by the frost, had an air of aged dejection and looked, as it were, ailing. “. . . forgotten friend Mushkin . . .” we read. Time had erased the never, and corrected the falsehood of man. “A subscription for a monument to him was got up among actors and journalists, but they drank up the money, the dear fellows . . .” sighed the actor, bowing down to the ground and touching the wet earth with his knees and his cap. “How do you mean, drank it?” That’s very simple. They collected the money, published a paragraph about it in the newspaper, and spent it on drink. . . . I don’t say it to blame them. . . . I hope it did them good, dear things! Good health to them, and eternal memory to him.” “Drinking means bad health, and eternal memory nothing but sadness. God give us remembrance for a time, but eternal memory—what next!” “You are right there. Mushkin was a well-known man, you see; there were a dozen wreaths on the coffin, and he is already forgotten. Those to whom he was dear have forgotten him, but those to whom he did harm remember him. I, for instance, shall never, never forget him, for I got nothing but harm from him. I have no love for the deceased.” “What harm did he do you?” “Great harm,” sighed the actor, and an expression of bitter resentment overspread his face. “To me he was a villain and a scoundrel—the Kingdom of Heaven be his! It was through looking at him and listening to him that I became an actor. By his art he lured me from the parental home, he enticed me with the excitements of an actor’s life, promised me all sorts of things—and brought tears and sorrow. . . . An actor’s lot is a bitter one! I have lost youth, sobriety, and the divine semblance. . . . I haven’t a half-penny to bless myself with, my shoes are down at heel, my breeches are frayed and patched, and my face looks as if it had been gnawed by dogs. . . . My head’s full of freethinking and nonsense. . . . He robbed me of my faith—my evil genius! It would have been something if I had had talent, but as it is, I am ruined for nothing. . . . It’s cold, honoured friends. . . . Won’t you have some? There is enough for all. . . . B-r-r-r. . . . Let us drink to the rest of his soul! Though I don’t like him and though he’s dead, he was the only one I had in the world, the only one. It’s the last time I shall visit him. . . . The doctors say I shall soon die of drink, so here I have come to say good-bye. One must forgive one’s enemies.” We left the actor to converse with the dead Mushkin and went on. It began drizzling a fine cold rain. At the turning into the principal avenue strewn with gravel, we met a funeral procession. Four bearers, wearing white calico sashes and muddy high boots with leaves sticking on them, carried the brown coffin. It was getting dark and they hastened, stumbling and shaking their burden. . . . “We’ve only been walking here for a couple of hours and that is the third brought in already. . . . Shall we go home, friends?”

THE CYBER and JUSTICE HOLMES BY FRANK RILEY - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59148/pg59148-images.html

 Old Judge Anderson feared the inevitable—he
was to be replaced by a Cyber! A machine that
dealt out decisions free of human errors and
emotions. What would Justice Holmes think?

 

marfa petrovna petchonkin, the General’s widow, who has been practising for ten years as a homeopathic doctor, is seeing patients in her study on one of the Tuesdays in May. On the table before her lie a chest of homeopathic drugs, a book on homeopathy, and bills from a homeopathic chemist. On the wall the letters from some Petersburg homeopath, in Marfa Petrovna’s opinion a very celebrated and great man, hang under glass in a gilt frame, and there also is a portrait of Father Aristark, to whom the lady owes her salvation —that is, the renunciation of pernicious allopathy and the knowledge of the truth. In the vestibule patients are sitting waiting, for the most part peasants. All but two or three of them are barefoot, as the lady has given orders that their ill-smelling boots are to be left in the yard. Marfa Petrovna has already seen ten patients when she calls the eleventh: “Gavrila Gruzd!” The door opens and instead of Gavrila Gruzd, Zamuhrishen, a neighbouring landowner who has sunk into poverty, a little old man with sour eyes, and with a gentleman’s cap under his arm, walks into the room. He puts down his stick in the corner, goes up to the lady, and without a word drops on one knee before her. “What are you about, Kuzma Kuzmitch?” cries the lady in horror, flushing crimson. “For goodness sake!” “While I live I will not rise,” says Zamuhrishen, bending over her hand. “Let all the world see my homage on my knees, our guardian angel, benefactress of the human race! Let them! Before the good fairy who has given me life, guided me into the path of truth, and enlightened my scepticism I am ready not merely to kneel but to pass through fire, our miraculous healer, mother of the orphan and the widowed! I have recovered. I am a new man, enchantress!” “I . . . I am very glad . . .” mutters the lady, flushing with pleasure. “It’s so pleasant to hear that. . . Sit down please! Why, you were so seriously ill that Tuesday.” “Yes indeed, how ill I was! It’s awful to recall it,” says Zamuhrishen, taking a seat. “I had rheumatism in every part and every organ. I have been in misery for eight years, I’ve had no rest from it . . . by day or by night, my benefactress. I have consulted doctors, and I went to professors at Kazan; I have tried all sorts of mud-baths, and drunk waters, and goodness knows what I haven’t tried! I have wasted all my substance on doctors, my beautiful lady. The doctors did me nothing but harm. They drove the disease inwards. Drive in, that they did, but to drive out was beyond their science. All they care about is their fees, the brigands; but as for the benefit of humanity—for that they don’t care a straw. They prescribe some quackery, and you have to drink it. Assassins, that’s the only word for them. If it hadn’t been for you, our angel, I should have been in the grave by now! I went home from you that Tuesday, looked at the pilules that you gave me then, and wondered what good there could be in them. Was it possible that those little grains, scarcely visible, could cure my immense, long-standing disease? That’s what I thought—unbeliever that I was!—and I smiled; but when I took the pilule—it was instantaneous! It was as though I had not been ill, or as though it had been lifted off me. My wife looked at me with her eyes starting out of her head and couldn’t believe it. ‘Why, is it you, Kolya?’ ‘Yes, it is I,’ I said. And we knelt down together before the ikon, and fell to praying for our angel: ‘Send her, O Lord, all that we are feeling!’” Zamuhrishen wipes his eyes with his sleeve gets up from his chair, and shows a disposition to drop on one knee again; but the lady checks him and makes him sit down. “It’s not me you must thank,” she says, blushing with excitement and looking enthusiastically at the portrait of Father Aristark. “It’s not my doing. . . . I am only the obedient instrument . . It’s really a miracle. Rheumatism of eight years’ standing by one pilule of scrofuloso!” “Excuse me, you were so kind as to give me three pilules. One I took at dinner and the effect was instantaneous! Another in the evening, and the third next day; and since then not a touch! Not a twinge anywhere! And you know I thought I was dying, I had written to Moscow for my son to come! The Lord has given you wisdom, our lady of healing! Now I am walking, and feel as though I were in Paradise. The Tuesday I came to you I was hobbling, and now I am ready to run after a hare. . . . I could live for a hundred years. There’s only one trouble, our lack of means. I’m well now, but what’s the use of health if there’s nothing to live on? Poverty weighs on me worse than illness. . . . For example, take this . . . It’s the time to sow oats, and how is one to sow it if one has no seed? I ought to buy it, but the money . . . everyone knows how we are off for money. . . .” “I will give you oats, Kuzma Kuzmitch. . . . Sit down, sit down. You have so delighted me, you have given me so much pleasure that it’s not you but I that should say thank you!” “You are our joy! That the Lord should create such goodness! Rejoice, Madam, looking at your good deeds! . . . While we sinners have no cause for rejoicing in ourselves. . . . We are paltry, poor-spirited, useless people . . . a mean lot. . . . We are only gentry in name, but in a material sense we are the same as peasants, only worse. . . . We live in stone houses, but it’s a mere make-believe . . . for the roof leaks. And there is no money to buy wood to mend it with.” “I’ll give you the wood, Kuzma Kuzmitch.” Zamuhrishen asks for and gets a cow too, a letter of recommendation for his daughter whom he wants to send to a boarding school, and . . . touched by the lady’s liberality he whimpers with excess of feeling, twists his mouth, and feels in his pocket for his handkerchief . . . . Marfa Petrovna sees a red paper slip out of his pocket with his handkerchief and fall noiselessly to the floor. “I shall never forget it to all eternity . . .” he mutters, “and I shall make my children and my grandchildren remember it . . . from generation to generation. ‘See, children,’ I shall say, ‘who has saved me from the grave, who . . .’” When she has seen her patient out, the lady looks for a minute at Father Aristark with eyes full of tears, then turns her caressing, reverent gaze on the drug chest, the books, the bills, the armchair in which the man she had saved from death has just been sitting, and her eyes fall on the paper just dropped by her patient. She picks up the paper, unfolds it, and sees in it three pilules—the very pilules she had given Zamuhrishen the previous Tuesday. “They are the very ones,” she thinks puzzled. “. . . The paper is the same. . . . He hasn’t even unwrapped them! What has he taken then? Strange. . . . Surely he wouldn’t try to deceive me!” And for the first time in her ten years of practice a doubt creeps into Marfa Petrovna’s mind. . . . She summons the other patients, and while talking to them of their complaints notices what has hitherto slipped by her ears unnoticed. The patients, every one of them as though they were in a conspiracy, first belaud her for their miraculous cure, go into raptures over her medical skill, and abuse allopath doctors, then when she is flushed with excitement, begin holding forth on their needs. One asks for a bit of land to plough, another for wood, a third for permission to shoot in her forests, and so on. She looks at the broad, benevolent countenance of Father Aristark who has revealed the truth to her, and a new truth begins gnawing at her heart. An evil oppressive truth. . . . The deceitfulness of man!