Chapter II: Part 2

I had passed so many months in the country listening to the same series of noise, the wind, the leaves, the birds of night or day and the rain, that I had become keenly sensitive or suspicious of the advent of a new sound. This was a wail such as I had never heard before. I listened again and caught the same curious shrieking. It was not, as I thought at first, a dog’s howling. It contained too wild a note. I could not guess what animal could have uttered it, but I sat assuring myself that wolves had been extinct for two hundred years in Ireland. I crept to the door, when the sound came again, and started down the long passage of the ground floor. I had not gone half-way when I heard a sound that thrilled the blood in my brain. It was not one howl but many, a horrible chorus that rose and rang, which neither the wind nor the rain could drown. As the sound sank my courage sank with it. I began to shake like a reed and a gust of wind might have overthrown me. But I felt that I had to look out into the night to locate the source of the sound or I should never have slept. I entered the kitchen. The old cook had retired to bed and I was alone with only a wooden door between me and the outer court. I had the strength to struggle to the window and look into the night. It was not too dark for me to see that the place was alive with wild animals, a dozen, twenty, thirty lithe, slender creatures running round in a quivering, coiling crowd. When one halted all halted. When one raised his thin snout into the air and howled, every living animal howled in echo. All the Diplomas attesting my character for common sense could not prevent me dropping into a dead faint.

It must have been an hour later that I was brought to my senses by a deluge of cold water. A sound of low voices hummed round me, and I heard an Irish voice say: “She must have taken it to heart, but there’s no harm done.” I was led slowly into the passage and to my own room, where I found to my surprise that the children were in an agony of grief. I strove to comfort them as well as I could. I pleaded, and told them stories, but it was all in vain. I had a vague feeling that they wept for me and because I had swooned in the kitchen. I had forgotten for the moment all that preceded the swoon. When I assured them that all was all right, they cried; “But no, Dad is dead, dead; fell from his horse and was found in the wood.” Then my memory began to start from its subconscious lair and I gradually remembered everything.... After putting them to bed I crawled into mine and remained there for that awful night. I could close my eyes but not my ears, and from time to time I heard the howling recommence outside. And within the house I heard the agitated steps of the servants and the men of the hunt, who had returned, bringing the Master’s body. They heard the howling as well as I did, for they stopped dead each time the wild sound recommenced. I knew then that I was not mad alone but that it was a house of the mad. Gradually the howling died down to a wail and passed away into the thin dark of the night. But I could hear men moving all night in the house, and when I came downstairs in the morning, lights were still burning in every room. Hunting men, men of the house and neighbours lay huddled in the arm-chairs just as they had ridden in from the previous day. With blazing fires and copious liquor they had kept grief or fear at bay during the night. I dared only then to look into the courtyard. It was empty!

My nerves had suffered such a strain that I wished to return to England immediately, in spite of my affection for the children. But their grief for their father was pathetic and I decided to remain for a few days trying to soothe them one moment and to fit them into black cotton clothes the next. The remaining days I spent at Gortinealy brought me however a climax of unexplained mystery and horror. The body was being waked and I continually overheard the conversation of the servants and neighbours, who were camped in the house and making the fullest use of the cellars. I gathered that I was far from being the only one to have seen the uncanny visitors of the day. But the amazing thing was that they seemed to have expected those wild howling animals as naturally as they expected the undertaker at the approach of death. All had seen or heard what I had heard or seen and yet nobody was going mad except myself. I heard one voice saying casually enough: “Aren’t they saying there’s no foxes in the other end of the county this fortnight? Every cover drawn blank and the old women saying all the foxes are gone to Gortinealy to see the old man dead!”

Every night for nearly a week they waked the Master’s corpse, sitting and smoking in relays and telling tales of his great charity to his hounds and kindred spirits and of his prowess in the field from evening till dawn. I avoided what seemed to me a painful form of heathen orgies except one night when I was asked to look upon the poor Master’s face once more before it was lowered into the grave for ever. I could not refuse, and old Timotheus offered to take me into the big room where it was laid out in the sickly candlelight.

We went down the creaking stairs and I peeped into half-darkness. The room gave me the feeling of being full of people or things. The candles had mostly guttered out but, when my eyes caught their focus, I thought at first that I saw mourners kneeling round the coffin, tiny, sharp-faced hob-goblins but no! they sprang up like noiseless and beautiful cats and leaped over the furniture and out of the open window into the courtyard. But they were not cats! I could make no mistake what they were, for too often I had seen their mangled pieces brought home after a day’s hunting. They were slender live foxes! wriggling through the furniture like maggots! God have mercy!

Timotheus had dropped to his knees and was reciting prayers at fever heat. Not until the last vestige of fur had slipped from the room did I dare take even a first step forward. Timotheus rose and went before me, but I was not ready for the next shock. I saw him lean over the visage of the dead and stay riveted. I did not look myself, thank God! but I heard the words he gasped. It was only one sentence, the last words I heard in that terrible house, but they will be the last words I shall have the happiness and relief to forget if ever I lose my memory. For all that Timotheus let past his lips was: “Holy of Holy! but they have the face ate off him!”

INSPIRATION

It was a long time before it dawned on Marmaduke McSmith that he must be an artist and a great one possibly. Unfortunately his profession was that of an undertaker’s clerk, which did not allow him all the leisure or any of the atmosphere necessary to greater kinds of writing. This was specially so during the bronchitis season. A writer: since his artistry almost necessarily took the form of pen and ink, for scrivener he was bred. Doubtless had he been educated to ply the brush on front doors or upon bath tubs his instinct would have turned toward portraiture. But the pen had been his technical medium and year after year he had written mortuary letters and filed the missives of mourners and the orders of the orphan. There was a faint suggestion of widows’ houses about his ledger, and the tears of the fatherless had diluted his ink.

All day he sat behind a curtain in the office of the old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash. In the front window were two cremation urns, and like a relic of the past hung a large hatchment scrolled with an extinct coat of arms. Good taste combined with good business to keep all sight of coffins to the inner parlour. Not a hint was heard, not a funeral note. As befitted a member of the British Undertakers’ Association, Marmaduke McSmith was deeply absorbed by the detail and technical knowledge of the burial craft. The _Undertakers’ Journal_ at his side seldom added a new detail or afforded a new suggestion to his mind. He read little else except the obituary notices in every morning paper. In this form he sipped his daily portion of the world’s news. His life was that of a booking clerk to Hades. But his proficiency delighted the customers, and his mastery of minutiæ edified Gammon and Hardwash. Envious clerks whispered that it was only a matter of half a century before he actually became a partner; coequal with Gammon, consubstantial with Hardwash!

He had the true undertaker’s outlook. He often amused himself by measuring people with his eye in the street for their coffins or guessing straight off the style and class of funeral they could afford. He perceived the living world in the terms and catalogue of death. Oak and elm meant to him no stately foliaged trees but polished caskets underground. He had a marvellous mind for “ruffles and sheets,” for breastplates and handles, for cars and cortège. Happy it might be said was the corpse which received the funeral classified as “Class V Adults,” a form of mortuary pomp he had devised to the last detail. In the firm’s catalogue it was simply described as “Gammon and Hardwash’s Jubilee model,” for some of the leading ideas in the disposition of the cortège had been taken from an attentive study of the second Jubilee procession of Queen Victoria. It was a masterpiece of taste and economy and was referred to feelingly in the trade as “Mourner’s Pride.” It was a marvel that so young and inexperienced a man as Marmaduke McSmith should have devised the nonpareil of the undertaking world. He was assuredly intended for high place. He might be President of the Undertakers’ Association yet. But all this was only the sepulchral gossip of the parlours, rumours caught on the chilly little winds that blow down the alleys of one Necropolis or another.

In his way Marmaduke was developing into an artist. Whatever department he touched he adorned. He was given the delicate supervision of the Embalming. He promptly made himself adept in the theory and practice of human conserves. He was generally chosen to nick the wrists and groins of the dead before inserting the blood-pumping tube. His gestures were those of the cunning surgeon rather than the job butcher. He never lost dignity. He never allowed the embalming fluids to be spoken of as pickles! Then he was given the firm’s correspondence. All day he sat perusing the letters and orders that flowed as regularly as death into the letter-box of the firm, corpse measurements, sentimentalities, absurd requests for shells of sandalwood and silk and plush linings, dogs’ coffins, catafalques for favourite cats; all of which he read methodically and answered discreetly, practically and soothingly, and great was the business of Gammon and Hardwash. He wished that clients would write more sensibly and often imagined the brief and businesslike letters he would have written in their place. He possessed a neat pen, but it was a long time before it dawned upon him that it might be the pen of a great artist and that he must write about the living and not the dead.

Had he lived in ancient Egypt when that country was possessed and ruled by one gigantic undertakers’ trust, when embalmment was the national art, and literature found its outlet on the lids of coffins, he might have stayed in the business and realised himself as an artist among the dead. But as he scribbled his first creative phrases on the backs of requiem and obituary cards and sketched his poetical drama in empty corners of his ledger he felt the overwhelming call to follow his Inspiration and cut adrift from this sepulchral business in which he felt he was being slowly buried. But it required pluck as well as decision to swim from his secreted moorings into the literary tide. He knew that he would be without cable or anchor and his eyes had often peered through the curtains on that haggard crowd of clerks and hacks and journalists making their way by day and by night towards Fleet Street and the great printing and publishing houses. He knew how much genius and inspiration had been gulfed in that stagnant Niagara. He knew those waters were oily with the midnight oil and that their eddies were lingering signs of the struggling writers who had sunk beneath the surface. Still the artist in him bade him go out and seek his Inspiration there. He felt confident of his ability to wear the Palm, but a little diffident of his enjoyment of the pains and penalties which crown the palmward path.

Anyhow he had saved enough to afford a three months’ lifebelt, while he took the risk. All Art is a risk. Perhaps the Artist represents the form that gambling takes among the immortal gods, who set the pieces of human life on the earth’s green baize. Perhaps it amuses them to lay odds on the Oddities of Life? Perhaps the gods have Favourites as much as the betting public? It is a gamble whether the divine fire can find itself. It was a risk whether in those three months he could catch anchorage, security or even success and literary position. But he shuddered when he looked at the scurrying whirlpool of souls perhaps once as divinely inspired as he, caught now a hundred times more miserably in the shabby nets of underpaid slavery. There was a side to his nature which appreciated the dignity and seclusion of Gammon and Hardwash. On rainy days and in the bronchial season this was specially the case. The more unpleasant the weather, the snugger he kept himself in the little curtained parlour where he wrote and worked. Better be a dormouse hibernating warmly and well fed in his nest than a starving and unnoticed lion.

He never took the plunge until he was inspired by Queenie Elkington to resign without asking pension or character from Gammon and Hardwash. They used to meet after work was over outside the Tube and sit together in eating-house corners and he used to read her his poetical drama. She listened wonderingly. She was full of admiration for his punctuation even. There was music in his commas and he could convey ecstasy with a semicolon. She was the kind of audience a writer loves, fair in every way.

It was Queenie who persuaded him that he must suffer for his Art. Was starvation necessary? he asked her. She told him that any soul worth its mettle would welcome the pain of its enclosing body. Her words gave him vision and a direct metaphor from life. He felt that to cling to his present stability and petty comfort was stagnation and worse--embalmment! Just as grooms develop horse sense and equine features, so he was in danger of becoming a walking corpse. Undertaking is a mummifying profession. Sometimes he felt as though he were bound by invisible shrouds. And all the while Queenie was hinting liberty, offering to share her dressmaking wage with him and incidentally her starvation. He knew that her hours were twice his and her wage a half of his salary. Between his salary and her slavery a gulf indeed seemed to stretch. Slavery that was primitive, terrible, logical, and perhaps the only setting civilisation still had to offer the bulk of women. She was tempting him to abandon his steady stagnation and clutch the flying success to which she felt inspired to inspire him. And if he missed, she would slave for him. He hardly knew sometimes whether she was tempting or testing him. In the end he felt merely tired. Better be a starving poet, he felt, than a tired undertaker.

The Artist’s head was lowered over his empty teacup and he murmured: “Will the London sparrows bring me bread or the ravens boil me tea?” A quick sheen danced through her eyes and into his, telling him how wonderfully he spoke words and prophesying the lightning that would be evoked by his writing in the future. The Artist could see his genius flashing under her eyelids and his epigrams unborn curling to her lips. Talking to her seemed to cause poetry to swim into his brain and he took the plunge. The old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash regretted the departure of the most sepulchral and unlively of their assistants.

As she had swayed him, so she buoyed him. Once he had made an Artist’s despairing gesture towards life and suffered himself to be carried along upon the tide, she attended to the rest. She toiled to make life in the single room of a tenement practicable. He wrote all day and rested wearily at night while she finished her over-work, not on the delicious teas of fifty years ago but on the black-stewed juice reboiled from the night before. He generally had enough to eat, and the first poems and stories, that she placed for him with editors, served to stave off starvation. But starvation is not easily sated, and besides the Artist owed it to Humanity to devote his time to a great poetical drama. Like many of those whose lives are inspired with the enrichment of Humanity as a whole, humanity is forgotten at home. His Drama grew upon him and he no longer looked with pity into Queenie’s white face. Love even dwindled aside if not away. He looked to her greedily for food and inspiration. He used the light in her eyes like an invisible fire to ferment the images in his brain. As she grew whiter and thinner, his verbalisation increased and his pen glowed with the current of poetic drama he was laying upon sheet after sheet. Had he worked faster, perhaps she would not have had to live so long on half-rations. But the Artist took a slow, luxurious pleasure in his work, and she would not have had him hurried for worlds.

By the time his Poetic Drama was complete their affairs were rather desperate. She took it out to market. It was one thing to find editors who did not mind throwing guineas like solitary bones to poets, but to find a manager willing to produce the most stupendous Drama of modern times was the quest of a lifetime, and her repeated suggestion that it was a lineal and lyrical successor to the works of Shakespeare fell on what might be called Baconian ears. One manager she was able to draw into discussion at least as to its merits, though he was amused at the idea of placing Drama before the public that was not only serious and poetic but beautifully written. He had produced the wildly successful Revue, “Moneytime is Honeytime,” to say nothing of the winsome farce called “Blue-eye’s Eighth Husband.” He was a nice, oil-scrubbed gentleman with permanently waved black wire round his head. He was always kind to ladies on the ground that kindness should be reciprocal. On hearing her mention of Shakespeare he made a personal allusion to Romeo and Juliet which was lost on her. But he promised to read the Drama and make a decision on the morrow.

Next day when she returned, he asked her to come to supper forthwith as an instalment of payment. In a frenzied moment she concluded that he intended to produce the Drama. As she ate his fresh food that evening, her wits gathered themselves out of weary hope and arranged themselves pleasantly on the hall steps of achievement. He made no remarks about the Drama, on which she could have passed an examination, having typed and overtyped and undertyped every line many times. He asked her how often she ate such a supper and whether she took champagne at breakfast, and finally if the dramatist was her husband. To all of which questions the answer was necessarily in the negative. Though he appeared satisfied, he proceeded to detail some of the possible expenditure needed to produce Poetic Drama on the English stage. It was a question of the expenditure to be lavished on a funeral. Great Drama was dead and Mr. McSmith’s Drama was great, he reasoned. He only wished he had the money to embalm such a Drama and keep it on the stage regardless of the public. The omen in his words unnerved her for a moment. A dead hand seemed to be stretched out of the undertaking past to crush the flower of the poetic present. Tears welled in her eyes and she looked hopelessly at the Manager, who promptly judged that the appropriate moment had come to make acceptance of the Drama. He began discussing rehearsals and alluding to royalties, to all the details, the cabbages and kings of the Theatre, the chances of a king in a box at an opening night or of cabbages being thrown at the actors on the last. Nevertheless Mr. McSmith’s Drama was accepted. Thinking only of the Dramatist, she made a practical reflection as to the price to be paid him. “The price of what?” asked the Manager. “The price you would be willing to pay for the acting the drama?” He observed her coolly and observed: “What price would you pay us for producing it?” Then it was all trickery and deception! Was that cold face one of mockery or----? She rose to go.

But he still fingered the manuscript and motioned her to stay. It was several minutes before she quite caught his drift. It struck her with a dim sickness at the back of her brain. Then he did expect such payment as she could make. The situation planted itself round her with ruthless logicality. Art needed a triangle for its woof to be woven. There was the Artist, there was his Inspiration and finally the medium by which his Art reached the world, whether it was publisher or picture-dealer or producer. Without each other they fell into nothingness. Queenie realised that it was not enough to have been the Inspiration. She must find the producer and unite all three as it were in her own person. Dramatic art could not live until the breath of production had been breathed into its verbal coils. Very simply and without tears she decided she must pay the producer, and returned, leaving the manuscript of the Drama at the theatre. She felt no resentment when she surrendered herself.

Late that night she told the man whom she had loved, and, what was greater, whom she had inspired, that his Drama had been accepted on its merits. Then followed days when they both battened on expectancy and drank the thin, vibrating wine of hope. Rehearsals drew near. Contracts appeared in black and white. Rehearsals were successful; and the first night blazed like a comet out of space, the night that affords a greater consummation to the Artist than to the lover. For the first night to the Dramatist is twofold. To him the acts of creation and of birth are simultaneous. Solemnly outwardly, and sinkingly within, Marmaduke McSmith sat through the hours listening to his own words trembling and tossing on the lips of the hired interpreters, while his songs were mercifully tempered by the slow thrill of the choric accompaniment. By his side sat the woman whose whole being had served to bring him to this accomplishment. Marmoreal was her countenance, but her eyes shone with the steady light of sapphires, the unalterable triumph of Art over chaos and night. His eyes glistened one moment like diamonds as panic swept through them and twitched the optic nerve, but the next moment they grew dulled and lulled with the auto-intoxication of pride. Queenie and Marmaduke watched and watched till all was sung or said and he suddenly caught a sweeter sound than even his own words--the repeated cheering of success. All was over! The critics were rushing to their inkpots, the first-nighters were moving towards supper and the Artist was receiving friends in his box, blown and bloated suddenly with the ovation of fame. The golden effluvia of compliments and applause bathed his hot brow. He struggled down to the stage puffed and bewildered; speechless save for the few words he was made to mumble through the blinding calcium.

It was Fate that thrust him into the Manager’s room, where he had left his overcoat, and suffered him to receive one flashlight of Queenie Elkington. The Manager’s evil kiss was upon her marble cheek. Marmaduke blustered between them and dragged her home. He looked at the wretched woman trembling half in pride for him and half in shame for herself. Then he asked: “When did he start doing that?” The inspiration faded out of her eyes. “It wasn’t the first time, was it?” She answered him simply, “No, not the first time. He kissed me the day I brought him your manuscript.” The Artist searched furiously in her cloudless eyes and found nothing in the way of regret.

The next weeks were carried breathlessly upon the Drama’s triumphant wings. Press reviews descended like a mist of coloured laudation. Resonant interviews swamped the thin stream of prickling criticism. The Artist really had no need to worry about his Inspiration. For the time fame was poured to him from silver flagons, and wealth handed up on a gold plate. Vanity of vanities! but all authorship becomes vanity. When the most beautiful member of the chorus knelt and kissed his hand he felt strangely moved. It was because his hand had written the Drama. Men thought it an honour and women thought it lucky to touch that hand, those inspired fingers. He was very pleased with the action of the chorus girl, and the following day he noted that she was fairly fair, and the week following that she was pretty pretty, so to speak. And the more he liked her, the angrier he felt with Queenie for letting the Manager embrace her on that night of nights. It was rather bitter, but bitterness when it stays and curdles in the mind often brings about a decision. Perhaps it was a stroke of luck after all, for it dawned on his mind that he had a perfect excuse for leaving Queenie when he felt so inclined, and he told her so. He spoke to her as a father might speak to an erring daughter. She had served him well and he would always think kindly of her, but now that he was famous he could not afford to have his name connected with a woman who was susceptible to anything as vulgar as a theatrical manager. He was an Artist and he owed a duty to his Inspiration. He turned her out. His drama touched a hundredth performance that same night.

She had no redress and she passed silently and whitely into the black roaring night, into the whirlpool above which she had sustained him in his months of obscurity. For the last time the light glittered in her eyes, though it met no response from his iris, which was blurred with a little red patch as he went his way, floating buoyantly, basking in a limelit sea, watching his own portentous shadow bulge in the theatric moonlight. He thoroughly enjoyed being the successful dramatic writer of the day. He was very agile at bearing the Palm. Actors and Managers came buzzing and puffing round him, pleading and imploring him to write another play. It was weeks before he consented even to return to work. It was without misgiving eventually that he dipped pen into the silver inkstand presented by the staff after the five hundredth performance; the pen by the way tipped with a real ruby, the grateful tribute of the Chorus. For inspiration there was the new beloved practising steps in a Poiret gown on his expensive Persian carpet. Yet it was not all as inspiring as might have been expected. The Artist wrote phrases at intervals and the week’s work filled many sheets, but too often he found himself chewing the ruby knot at the end of his pen. Then he would call the chorus girl to his knee and peer into her eyes, which were lit with artificial radiance. They lacked the stellar light which used to beckon him from Queenie’s orbs. He looked in them and always saw the fiery fume of his own pleasure. There was nothing mysterious or new, nothing that he did not know before. He never saw the shapes he used to see of dreams personifying in his partner’s eyes. But on the material side he was much better off. He drank Tokay instead of tea, and ate fresh caviare instead of stale seed cake. And he twirled his pen and his hair and the chorus girl in turns. And nothing very wonderful happened on paper. He was still twirling all three a year later when his first drama had been given a rest on the stage and managers were asking anxiously and then angrily why he had not filled his contract to write another. He had thought he was safe in giving himself a year to write and he had written reams, but he did not dare show them to the managers. Compared to the first it was merely corked wine.

He felt that he needed a rest and the inevitable and harassing month on the Riviera followed. The chorus girl died of influenza in an hotel after losing six months’ royalties for him in the local Casino. When he returned to London he found he was in debt and that his furniture was being sold out of his flat. He sat down to twirl pen and thumbs again, but only succeeded in breaking the encrusted ruby off his penholder with exasperation. Eventually he mislaid it. It was found next morning and safely placed in a pawnbroker’s safe by a careful charwoman. The silver inkpot had become caked with the ink which flowed in but not out. Hours he passed staring blankly into blank paper and trying to crush the half-formed answers to the eternal query why could he not write another Poetic Drama as beautiful and as wonderful as the first. But the fire was gone and he could not catch the wistful pleasantry which the critics were fond of divining in his lyrics. It would not come to the surface of his mind as it had, when he lived humbly and cheaply, lacking all that he now enjoyed in such abundance. As though abundance can ever be enjoyed, as cats drowning in cream have never failed to observe. He lacked nothing now except perhaps the one thing necessary!

At last he arose darkly and miserably in the night. There was nothing left to be done but to wander forth in search of his lost Inspiration. He felt leaden-footed and soiled in the soul. If his mind still moved it was like a hobbledehoy and no longer a Pegasus. He started in mad search for what he had lost. He swam into the first dance hall and listened to the jazz-rhythms with their slow and broken cross-ripples. He watched the undulating shoulders of the dancers as they circled and cross circled. But neither rhythm nor song did they lend him. Then he passed into a drinking cabaret and began sipping the yellow and pink-coloured mixtures called cocktails which are to true wine as mosaics are to real sculpture. But again he found no release. In vain he drank unintoxicating intoxicants, quenchers that proved unquenching, potations that were impotent, and the chill, stupefying drench which neither cheers nor inebriates and is called wormwood.

The Artist was at the end of all artificial expedients, and it was very late when he came to close truths with himself, and walked deliberately toward the mean street where he believed Queenie was living. He had left her with enough to live on and paid the rent on their old lodging for a year in advance. He crept into the ghastly tenement building. He knocked and knocked vainly. There was no answer. He leaned miserably against the door and it swung open. He slipped into the foul passage and stood before the single room in which his first Drama, his masterpiece, had been written. It was tightly closed, but the lock snapped under his thrust. He felt resentful against the room and against the woman whom he had left there, and resentful against himself, for an Artist only hates himself when he realises that his Art has deserted him. A stale odour and a dead draught met him as he entered. He called and there was no answer. He knew his way round the room in the dark and he groped in the corner for the gas jet. He turned it on, but it made no lucent response to a lighted match. The gas meter was empty and then he noticed that he had turned the gas off instead of on. He twisted it back and forward. By the light of a second match he looked round the room and his eyes fell on the bed where his Inspiration lay cold and self-slain before her time.

In a moment all his ambition and hope seemed to be turned off as completely as the gas. He was where he was before he met Queenie Elkington. He turned and shuffled back to his flat. He knew now that the virtue had gone out of him, and why. The Artist in him shrivelled into the undertaker’s clerk. He sat down before the ink-crusted silver inkstand and began writing on a blank sheet slowly in scrivener’s copperplate. He wrote to order the most beautiful coffin procurable. It must be made of scented wood and lined with silk, and the fittings must be of solid silver. In it he explained that he intended to bury all that was precious to him, his guardian angel in the past, what might have been his ambition in the future, and the Inspiration which had forsaken him in the present. And this pathetic letter he sealed and addressed to the old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash.

BALTHASAR THE CRUEL

Don Balthasar was called the Cruel for a number of very satisfying and respectable reasons. As a child he had flayed a live monkey, which had been brought to amuse him in an ebony cage. And he had been fond of biting off the heads of singing birds or slipping hot needles into their eyes according as he wished to make them sing or not. Arrived at the age of discretion, he showed his seriousness of purpose by taking a breakneck journey across Spain without sleep and almost forfeiting his meals in order to be in time for the execution of his illegitimate brother. His hands had so often failed of killing him that he was seized with the idea of making his eyes at least fratricidal. But Don Balthasar was always morbid.

On the other hand he showed some remarkable traits. His restless energy was an example to the lethargic princelets by whom his boundaries were neighboured. In the infliction of pain or the pursuit of domestic vengeance he would endure what only the bravest and strongest would dare. He had a fine sense of the rules of chivalry and his discrimination in matters of taste was never challenged. When he said a ruby was a ruby, it was not disputed even in the Orient; and for sign of his passionate hobby toward precious stones he wore a large ruby in his iron helm about as large as a cuckoo’s egg dyed in carmine. He personally supervised the cutting and trimming of the velvet vestments used in his private chapel. His chapel was decorated with an excruciating picture of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle being deprived somewhat reluctantly of his apostolic skin. And Don Balthasar’s clothes kept busy several Moorish haberdashers during the greater part of the year.

He had peculiar notions as to property, particularly towards what had ceased to be his property or had ever been dignified by his ownership. For instance, he aped the royal Castilian etiquette, which allowed no lesser man to bestride a horse that had once been ridden by a King of Spain or to marry even a forgotten and abandoned lady love who had once enjoyed the royal embrace. Don Balthasar, once at the end of a long siege discovering in his net a damsel, whom he had seduced in boyhood, comfortably married to a burgess of the fallen town, insisted on strangling him with his own hands that he might realise how high an honour the unfortunate burgess had presumed to pay himself. The burgess who had been found in possession of the Don’s discarded romance died in the market-place with his broken eyeballs staring into the quaint features of Don Balthasar called the Cruel, who considerately provided him with a funeral furnished neither above nor below his rank. What time he could spare from the adornment of his person or the adjustment of etiquette he devoted to the beleaguerment of Castles upon which he or his ancestors had the shadow or phantom of a claim.

At the moment of writing he was engaged in laying close siege to the Castle of his arch-enemy Don Ximenes. His tactical array resembled rather a game of chess than one of those conflicts of sanguinary hordes into which the beautiful mediæval science of war developed. Don Ximenes was not in his lair, for Don Balthasar had been conveniently apprised of his secret absence on a neighbouring campaign to which Don Balthasar had not been invited. He could not lose the opportunity to bring two thousand men against Don Ximenes’s Castle, which was in those days of supreme fortification adequately held by the Seneschal and twelve men. When walls were impenetrable and ramparts unassailable except by the slow poising and escalading of ladders, they were sufficient to ward and defy a host. The Castle of Don Ximenes was as solidly built and magnificently engineered as any Castle in Spain, which was saying a great deal. It was originally a Moorish stronghold. The great dungeon-keep covered one side of the quadrangle. It was crenellated and thinly slashed with murderous arrowholes. The other three sides were flanked at each corner by turrets massively gathered to each other by a fortified passage running round the whole rampart. The dry moat was cut out of the quick rock. Across the moat rose a bridge like the hump of a donkey’s back and protected by a barbican. The angles and embrasures commanded and cross-commanded every approach. While the Seneschal watched from the top of the keep, two men held each turret, three remained in the barbican and three took turns to sleep. The Seneschal had no more than enough men and provender to hold the Castle for Don Ximenes, and it was weary work peeping over the ramparts at every move made by the redoubtable Don Balthasar.

Don Balthasar with his masses of fresh troops attacked or feigned attack at all hours, even at night when his camp fires blazed red with feasting and revelry. Each time an alarm was given by lighting a torch at the menaced turret, the Seneschal would collect the sleepers and hurry them as a reserve to the ramparts to meet each successive attack. Every third or fifth day there was a general attack and a number of surprise attempts to hook scaling ladders to some unwatched portion of the wall. With poles and sledge-hammers the Seneschal and his faithful few dislocated or smashed the feelers of the prying ladders as fast as they appeared above the walls. But day was as weary as night, and only the obstinate loyalty of the Seneschal made the hours pass without question or murmuring among his men. His determination was unflexed. Everything he could possibly value was at stake: the impregnable old keep in which he had been reared as a child, his loyalty to his lord, and incidentally his own wife and daughter who, unknown to the besiegers, were helping to consume his slender store behind the walls. It was a strong satisfaction to him to know that ten feet of masonry lay between their charms and Balthasar called the Cruel.

The Castle possessed all the strength and subtlety of construction and design that Moorish and Gothic architects could give after handling and remodelling each other’s work. Don Balthasar found it quite impossible to take it by assault and sat down in permanent circumsession. Within, there was enough to tide them over until Don Ximenes’s return, provided he returned with the New Year. But occasionally the Seneschal caught sight of a lean look. While the camp echoed with revelry and the air was thick with the steam of feasting, none of the besieged ever ate to satisfy or drank into the delicious preludes of intoxication. And there was a constant lack of sleep, which is a great subduer of grumbling and tedium. But no suspicion of the garrison’s loyalty ever glided through the mind of the Seneschal. He would not allow the possible fall of the Castle to dwell in his mind. He only looked forward to the day of triumph when the portcullis would be drawn and the Don Ximenes enter into his keep as inviolate as upon the day he had left it. If the Castle fell--well, there was nothing worse that Don Balthasar surnamed the Cruel could do to him.

Nevertheless murmuring had arisen and sometimes was hardly hushed before the sore-tried Seneschal stumbled into hearing. Though the besiegers were making no progress, time was; and time was on the side of Don Balthasar. To the garrison it became acutely clear that their days were shortened. There was enough provender for a month or for three months of semi-starvation. Two grim days already appeared on the horizon: the day when the Seneschal would announce half-rations and the day when, drowsy with hunger, they would be surprised and one turret would be taken and occupied with fresh troops, who would pour like a Moorish poison through the passages and into the stony veins of the Castle until every corner was captured. The Seneschal would undoubtedly fight to the end. When they had filled their tiny tasks they would perish like pawns. The life of foot soldiers was not sweet in Old Castile, but it was thought by their lords to be much sweetened by a death in their private service and defence. They could but accept their approaching fate with the devotion of feudal hirelots. It was already a matter of weeks or even days, and meantime Don Balthasar’s banners flaunted the landscape. He was only waiting for the first sign of weakness to show itself, if not in the fortifications, at least in the less enduring minds of men.

The weak spot in the garrison manifested itself one evening as the tired Seneschal was dragging himself to his place of rest. The best prospect before him was a name among those who had served their lords to the death. The garrison had less rosy expectation in the memories of Spanish chivalry. They would be forgotten.... Two men-at-arms stood in the Seneschal’s roadway. They had spent the day guarding one of the turrets and they had come to tell him simply that they were going to mutiny. Knowing how essential they were to the defence, they had no fear of instant execution. The Seneschal might as well surrender the Castle forthwith as dispense with their services. The Seneschal bowed his grey face. Tired as he was, he still struggled for time and thought and breath. He told them that, if they wished to mutiny, the Castle could no longer be held and he would send them over the ramparts to announce the surrender to Don Balthasar the following morning. He only asked them to keep their share of the watch that night. The morrow could care for the morrow. His only present endeavour was to hold the Castle for that night. The mutineers appeared to refuse his courteous offer, for they stood shaking their heads in an awkward way. Then they spoke.

They were not mutinying with any desire to save their skins. Least of all did they wish to join Balthasar or put him in possession of the Castle. They were loyal men and true to their lord. The Seneschal gave them an ironical glower. They were ready to fight to the end, they continued to observe. They only asked for a little consolation in the last days of their lives. They insisted that they were loyal and true to the great law which bound men of valour to their lords. And they would yet obey the Seneschal in all matters except perhaps where a stronger than military custom constrained their souls. This was all pointless speech, and the Seneschal made a sign to express that he thought so. However, they mentioned their readiness to fight to the end on condition that their last hours were sweetened with love. Their tranquil smile hardly seemed to clash against the Seneschal’s baffled misunderstanding. He, poor man, was feebly perplexed. If they had asked for a larger ration of bread or wine he would gladly have reduced that of his own family to satisfy them. But they might as well have asked him for the excitements of the chase or the luxuries of the Moorish bath within the Castle’s narrow world. For a moment they seemed to him mad; rendered mad by the rigours of the siege. His next hope was that they would fight the better for being insane. But what a moment to think of love! And he answered them with a kind laugh:

“Would that I could satisfy your wishes, my dear children, but you must not ask for a well of wine in the desert or for loaves to rain from heaven. Love will come to you some day among the beautiful girls of the town when Don Ximenes has returned to his own. Come, return to your noble duty, and some of the best wine will be served you on the morrow. Oh, my children.”

“But we do not need your red wine,” replied the mutineers. “If we are to die, we prefer we should drink something better than red wine.”

“My children, I would not hesitate if by opening my purse or my veins I could furnish you with a wine worthy of your valour during this siege. If I could encourage you to hold out against Don Balthasar, there is nothing that I would not promise you. And my word is true as you have always known.”

“We do not ask for promises or words. We would prefer to accept what you have to offer on the spot.”

“But I have nothing, my children, except what you know is in the store. If these are our last days (which may the Most Serene Virgin otherwise dispose!) at least you shall feed and drink well.”

But the mutineers still looked at him with their dull stare. “Well, in the Holy Virgin’s name,” shouted the Seneschal, “what do you want?”

“We want love, and if you will allow us a little share of love we will hold the Castle with you till the last of us is killed. It will not be well for any of us to fall alive into the hands of Don Balthasar.”

“Yes, make love,” murmured the tired Seneschal, “make love and be happy.” And he turned slowly away. “But where will you find love in this prison of stone?”

“We thought it convenient as well as pleasant to offer our courteous love to your family.”

The poor Seneschal’s face turned ashen; “You mean my daughter as the price of remaining at your duty?” And his determination to hold the Castle at all costs received a fiercer blow than any that had been dealt by the enemy. But still his staggering mind was essaying how to hold on and on. The mutineers came to his rescue when words failed him.

“We are willing that you choose upon which one of us you will bestow your daughter.”

“And will you return to your duties if I bestow her on the morrow?” he asked. The Seneschal’s word was good and they saluted him with their swords.

“You shall have her,” groaned the unhappy man, as he laid his hand upon the younger and fresher of the two, “but if the God of Castile and the Most Serene Virgin suffer me to bring this Castle through the siege I will not spare you.”

The mutineers laughed; “Be not troubled. Our days shall end long before Don Ximenes returns. Don Balthasar will see to that.” The younger one added: “When may I make the acquaintance of the beautiful daughter you have promised me?”

“On the morrow,” hissed the Seneschal; “have I not said it? I cannot disturb her this night.” The mutineer returned to his turret. His companion remained bulking in the narrow stone passage.

“And I, my master, must my last days be passed without love or solace because my companion in arms has borne less years of fighting and has less scars to show in his boy’s face?”

“Come,” murmured the exhausted Seneschal, “That is no reason for leaving the ramparts. You are a fine battle-pocked warrior and you could not spend your last days more happily than by facing the army of Don Balthasar.”

The grisled warrior seemed to hesitate over what was most likely to felicitate his last days on earth. Then he spoke quite abruptly: “Give me your wife and I will fight better.” It was like saying “check” to a chess player playing with members of his own family instead of wooden pieces. The Seneschal bowed his head in utter despair and the other slowly turned his back. His nod was as good as his word under the circumstances. At that moment a torch flared from the central keep, and the Seneschal rushed to the scene of attack hurrying his reserves on the way. A frontal attack was being made in full force and he rushed from turret to turret shouting hoarse commands and disengaging the cruel little hooks and feelers, that were pushed over the walls, with his own hands. Never had the garrison fought so magnificently. The intrepid coolness and energy of the two mutineers was beyond praise or emulation. They fought with their hands, their feet and their toes, hacking, pushing, kicking, and biting, now in one corner and now in another. With their bare hands they uprooted ladder after ladder and with swift leverage hurled clusters of men headlong into the hard dry moat. The Seneschal caught sight of the pair at moments and his loyal, long-tried heart was at rest.