Seven Gothic Tales (37 page)

“It is very pleasant in here, in this room,” he said, “it is just like old days—do you not think so? With Papa and Mamma below. We three are not very old yet. We are good-looking people still.”

“The circle is complete again,” said Eliza gently, using one of their old expressions.

“Is completed, Lizzie,” said Morten, smiling back at her.

“The vicious circle,” said Fanny automatically, quoting another of their old familiar terms.

“You were always,” said Morten, “such a clever lass.”

At these kind direct words Fanny impetuously caught at her breath.

“And, oh, my girls,” Morten exclaimed, “how we did long then, with the very entrails of us, to get away from Elsinore!”

His elder sister suddenly turned her old body all around in the chair, and faced him straight. Her face was changed and drawn with pain. The long wake and the strain began to tell on her, and she spoke to him in a hoarse and cracked voice, as if she were heaving it up from the innermost part of her chest.

“Yes,” she cried, “yes, you may talk. But you mean to go away again and leave me. You! You have been to these great warm seas
of which you talk, to a hundred countries. You have been married to five people—Oh, I do not know of it all! It is easy for you to speak quietly, to sit still. You have never needed to beat your arms to keep warm. You do not need to now!”

Her voice failed her. She stuttered in her speech and clasped the edge of the table. “And here,” she groaned out, “I am—cold. The world is bitterly cold around me. I am so cold at night, in my bed, that my warming-pans are no good to me!”

At this moment the tall grandfather’s clock started to strike, for Fanny had herself wound it up in the afternoon. It struck midnight in a grave and slow measure, and Morten looked quickly up at it.

Fanny meant to go on speaking, and to lift at last all the deadly weight of her whole life off her, but she felt her chest pressed together. She could not out-talk the clock, and her mouth opened and shut twice without a sound.

“Oh, hell,” she cried out, “to hell!”

Since she could not speak she stretched out her arms to him, trembling. With the strokes of the clock his face became gray and blurred to her eyes, and a terrible panic came upon her. Was it for this that she had wound up the clock! She threw herself toward him, across the table.

“Morten!” she cried in a long wail. “Brother! Stay! Listen! Take me with you!”

As the last stroke fell, and the clock took up its ticking again, as if it meant to go on doing something, in any case, through all eternity, the chair between the sisters was empty, and at the sight Fanny’s head fell down on the table.

She lay like that for a long time, without stirring. From the winter night outside, from far away to the north, came a resounding tone, like the echo of a cannon shot. The children of Elsinore knew well what it meant: it was the ice breaking up somewhere, in a long crack.

Fanny thought, dully, after a long while, What is Eliza thinking?
and laboriously lifted her head, looked up, and dried her mouth with her little handkerchief. Eliza sat very still opposite her, where she had been all the time. She dragged the streamers of her cap downward and together, as if she were pulling a rope, and Fanny remembered seeing her, long, long ago, when angry or in great pain or joy, pulling in the same way at her long golden tresses. Eliza lifted her pale eyes and stared straight at her sister’s face.

“To think,” said she, “ ‘to think, with the halter around my neck, for one minute of
La Belle Eliza
.’ ”

O
N a full-moon night of 1863 a dhow was on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar, following the coast about a mile out.

She carried full sails before the monsoon, and had in her a freight of ivory and rhino-horn. This last is highly valued as an aphrodisiac, and traders come for it to Zanzibar from as far as China. But besides these cargoes the dhow also held a secret load, which was about to stir and raise great forces, and of which the slumbering countries which she passed did not dream.

This still night was bewildering in its deep silence and peace, as if something had happened to the world; as if the soul of it had been, by some magic, turned upside down. The free monsoon came from far places, and the sea wandered on under its sway, on her long journey, in the face of the dim luminous moon. But the brightness of the moon upon the water was so clear that it seemed as if all the light in the world were in reality radiating from the sea, to be reflected in the skies. The waves looked solid, as if one might safely have walked upon them, while it was into the vertiginous sky that one might sink and fall, into the turbulent and unfathomable depths of silvery worlds, of bright silver or dull and tarnished silver, forever silver reflected within silver, moving and changing, towering up, slowly and weightless.

The two slaves in the prow were still like statues, their bodies, naked to the waist in the hot night, iron-gray like the sea where the moon was not shining on it, so that only the clear dark shades running along their backs and limbs marked out their forms against the vast plane. The red cap of one of them glowed dull, like a plum, in the moonlight. But one corner of the sail, catching the light, glinted like the while belly of a dead fish. The air was like that of a hothouse, and so damp that all the planks and ropes of the boat were sweating a salt dew. The heavy waters sang and murmured along the bow and stern.

On the after deck a small lantern was hung up, and three people were grouped round it.

The first of them was young Said Ben Ahamed, the son of
Tippo Tip’s sister, and himself deeply beloved by the great man. He had been, through the treachery of his rivals, for two years a prisoner in the North, and had escaped and got to Lamu by many strange ways. Now he was here, unknown to the world, on his way home to take revenge upon his enemies. It was the hope of revenge within Said’s heart which, more powerful than the monsoon, was in reality forcing the boat on. It was both sail and ballast to the dhow. Had they now been aware that Said was in a ship on his way to Zanzibar tonight, many great people would have been hurriedly packing up their property and their harems, to get away before it should be too late. Of Said’s revenge, in the end, other tales have told.

He sat on the deck crosslegged, bent forward, his hands loosely folded and resting on the planks before him, in deep thought.

The second, and eldest, of the party was a person of great fame, the much-renowned story-teller Mira Jama himself, the inventions of whose mind have been loved by a hundred tribes. He sat with his legs crossed, like Said, and with his back to the moon, but the night was clear enough to show that he had, at some rencounter with his destiny, had the nose and ears of his dark head cut clear off. He was poorly dressed, but still had kept a regard for his appearance. Around his thin body he had a faded, thick, crimson silk scarf, which sometimes, at a movement of his, flamed up and burned like fire or pure rubies in the light of the small lantern.

The third in the company was a red-haired Englishman whose name was Lincoln Forsner, and whom the natives of the coast called Tembu, which may mean either ivory or alcohol, as it pleases you. Lincoln was the child of a rich family in his own country, and had been blown about by many winds to lie tonight flat on his stomach on the deck of the dhow, dressed in an Arab shirt and loose Indian trousers, but still shaved and whiskered like a gentleman. He was chewing the dried leaves which the Swaheli call
murungu
, which keep you awake and in a pleasant mood, and from time to time spitting at a long distance. This
made him communicative. He was joining Said’s expedition out of his love for the young man, and also to see what would happen, as he had before seen things happen in various countries. His heart was light. He was very fond of a boat, and pleased with the speed, the warm night, and the full moon.

“How is it, Mira,” he said, “that you cannot tell us a story as we are sailing on here tonight? You used to have many tales, such as make the blood run cold and make you afraid to trust your oldest friend, tales good on a hot night and for people out on great undertakings. Have you no more?”

“No, I have no more, Tembu,” said Mira, “and that in itself makes a sad tale, good for people out on great undertakings. I was once a great story-teller, and I specialized in such tales as make the blood run cold. Devils, poison, treachery, torture, darkness, and lunacy: these were Mira’s stock in trade.”

“I remember one of your tales now,” said Lincoln. “You frightened me by it, and two young dancers of Lamu, who really need not have been afraid of it, so that we did not sleep all night. The Sultan wanted a true virgin, and after much trouble she was fetched for him from the mountains. But he found her—”

“Yes, yes,” Mira took up the tale, his whole countenance suddenly changing, his dark eyes brightening and his hands coming to life in the old telltale manner, like two aged dancing snakes called out from their basket by the flute, “the Sultan wanted a true virgin, such as had never heard of men. With great trouble she was fetched for him from the Amazon kingdom in the mountains, where all male children had been killed off by the women, who made wild wars on their own. But when the Sultan went in to her, between the hangings of the door he saw her looking out at a young water-carrier, who was walking to and fro in the palace, and heard her speak to herself ‘Oh, I have come to a good place,’ she said, ‘and that creature there must be God, or a strong angel, the one who hurls the lightning. I do not mind dying now, for I have seen what no one has ever seen.’ And at that the
young water-carrier looked up at the window too, and kept standing there, gazing at the maiden. So the Sultan became very sad, and he had the virgin and the young man buried alive together, in a marble chest broad enough to make a marriage bed, under a palm tree of his garden, and seating himself below the same tree he wondered at many things, and at how he was never to have his heart’s desire, and he had a young boy to play the flute to him. That was the tale you heard once.”

“Yes, but better told then,” said Lincoln.

“It was that,” said Mira, “and the world could not do without Mira then. People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of flight and pursuit. Ah, how the world loved me in those days! Then I was handsome, round-cheeked. I drank noble wine, wore gold-embroidered clothes and amber, and had incense burned in my rooms.”

“But how has this change come upon you?” asked Lincoln.

“Alas!” said Mira, sinking back into his former quiet manner, “as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend—I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to
have them. This is why you see me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags, the follower of Said in prison and poverty, instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty, flourishing and flattered, as was young Mira Jama.”

“But could you not, Mira,” Lincoln asked, “make a terrible tale about poverty and unpopularity?”

“No,” said the story-teller proudly, “that is not the sort of story which Mira Jama tells.”

“Well, yes, alas,” said Lincoln, turning around on his side, “what is life, Mira, when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?”

“Oh, Lincoln Forsner,” said the noseless story-teller, “what is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure: to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales which I made—they shall last.”

“What do you do in the meantime to keep so good a face toward it, in this urgency of life to rid itself of you?” Lincoln asked.

“I dream,” said Mira.

“Dream?” said Lincoln.

“Yes, by the grace of God,” said Mira, “every night, as soon as I sleep I dream. And in my dreams I still know fear. Things are
terrible to me there. In my dreams I sometimes carry with me something infinitely dear and precious, such as I know well enough that no real things be, and there it seems to me that I must keep this thing against some dreadful danger, such as there are none in the real world. And it also seems to me that I shall be struck down and annihilated if I lose it, though I know well that you are not, in the world of the daytime, struck down and annihilated, whatever you lose. In my dreams the dark is filled with indescribable horrors, but there are also sometimes flights and pursuits of a heavenly delight.”