Twelve Stories and a Dream (7 page)

Towards nightfall the wind fell. The sun set in a calm serenity, and
the man who had once possessed the silver bridle came at last very
cautiously and by an easy slope out of the ravine again; but now he led
the white horse that once belonged to the little man. He would have gone
back to his horse to get his silver-mounted bridle again, but he feared
night and a quickening breeze might still find him in the valley, and
besides he disliked greatly to think he might discover his horse all
swathed in cobwebs and perhaps unpleasantly eaten.

And as he thought of those cobwebs and of all the dangers he had been
through, and the manner in which he had been preserved that day, his
hand sought a little reliquary that hung about his neck, and he clasped
it for a moment with heartfelt gratitude. As he did so his eyes went
across the valley.

"I was hot with passion," he said, "and now she has met her reward. They
also, no doubt—"

And behold! Far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but in
the clearness of the sunset distinct and unmistakable, he saw a little
spire of smoke.

At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed anger.
Smoke? He turned the head of the white horse about, and hesitated. And
as he did so a little rustle of air went through the grass about him.
Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of grey. He looked at
the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.

"Perhaps, after all, it is not them," he said at last.

But he knew better.

After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white
horse.

As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded masses of web. For some
reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that lived
feasted guiltily on their fellows. At the sound of his horse's hoofs
they fled.

Their time had passed. From the ground without either a wind to carry
them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could
do him little evil. He flicked with his belt at those he fancied came
too near. Once, where a number ran together over a bare place, he was
minded to dismount and trample them with his boots, but this impulse he
overcame. Ever and again he turned in his saddle, and looked back at the
smoke.

"Spiders," he muttered over and over again. "Spiders! Well, well.... The
next time I must spin a web."

He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder I can see
him. And if I catch his eye—and usually I catch his eye—it meets me
with an expression.

It is mainly an imploring look—and yet with suspicion in it.

Confound his suspicion! If I wanted to tell on him I should have told
long ago. I don't tell and I don't tell, and he ought to feel at his
ease. As if anything so gross and fat as he could feel at ease! Who
would believe me if I did tell?

Poor old Pyecraft! Great, uneasy jelly of substance! The fattest clubman
in London.

He sits at one of the little club tables in the huge bay by the fire,
stuffing. What is he stuffing? I glance judiciously and catch him biting
at a round of hot buttered tea-cake, with his eyes on me. Confound
him!—with his eyes on me!

That settles it, Pyecraft! Since you WILL be abject, since you WILL
behave as though I was not a man of honour, here, right under your
embedded eyes, I write the thing down—the plain truth about Pyecraft.
The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making
my club unendurable, absolutely unendurable, with his liquid appeal,
with the perpetual "don't tell" of his looks.

And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating?

Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth!

Pyecraft—. I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this very
smoking-room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it. I was
sitting all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly
he came, a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me, and
grunted and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a space, and
scraped for a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then addressed
me. I forget what he said—something about the matches not lighting
properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping the waiters one
by one as they went by, and telling them about the matches in that thin,
fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it was in some such way we began our
talking.

He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence to
my figure and complexion. "YOU ought to be a good cricketer," he said. I
suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would call lean, and
I suppose I am rather dark, still—I am not ashamed of having a Hindu
great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don't want casual strangers to
see through me at a glance to HER. So that I was set against Pyecraft
from the beginning.

But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.

"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and probably
you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people he fancied he ate
nothing.) "Yet,"—and he smiled an oblique smile—"we differ."

And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness; all he did
for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness; what people
had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had heard of people
doing for fatness similar to his. "A priori," he said, "one would think
a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary and a question of
assimilation by drugs." It was stifling. It was dumpling talk. It made
me feel swelled to hear him.

One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time came
when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether too
conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but he would come
wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and gormandised round and
about me while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be clinging
to me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be limited to me;
and from the first there was something in his manner—almost as though
he knew, almost as though he penetrated to the fact that I MIGHT—that
there was a remote, exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.

"I'd give anything to get it down," he would say—"anything," and peer
at me over his vast cheeks and pant.

Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged, no doubt to order another
buttered tea-cake!

He came to the actual thing one day. "Our Pharmacopoeia," he said, "our
Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical science.
In the East, I've been told—"

He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.

I was quite suddenly angry with him. "Look here," I said, "who told you
about my great-grandmother's recipes?"

"Well," he fenced.

"Every time we've met for a week," I said, "and we've met pretty
often—you've given me a broad hint or so about that little secret of
mine."

"Well," he said, "now the cat's out of the bag, I'll admit, yes, it is
so. I had it—"

"From Pattison?"

"Indirectly," he said, which I believe was lying, "yes."

"Pattison," I said, "took that stuff at his own risk."

He pursed his mouth and bowed.

"My great-grandmother's recipes," I said, "are queer things to handle.
My father was near making me promise—"

"He didn't?"

"No. But he warned me. He himself used one—once."

"Ah!... But do you think—? Suppose—suppose there did happen to be
one—"

"The things are curious documents," I said.

"Even the smell of 'em.... No!"

But after going so far Pyecraft was resolved I should go farther. I was
always a little afraid if I tried his patience too much he would fall
on me suddenly and smother me. I own I was weak. But I was also annoyed
with Pyecraft. I had got to that state of feeling for him that disposed
me to say, "Well, TAKE the risk!" The little affair of Pattison to which
I have alluded was a different matter altogether. What it was doesn't
concern us now, but I knew, anyhow, that the particular recipe I used
then was safe. The rest I didn't know so much about, and, on the whole,
I was inclined to doubt their safety pretty completely.

Yet even if Pyecraft got poisoned—

I must confess the poisoning of Pyecraft struck me as an immense
undertaking.

That evening I took that queer, odd-scented sandalwood box out of my
safe and turned the rustling skins over. The gentleman who wrote the
recipes for my great-grandmother evidently had a weakness for skins of
a miscellaneous origin, and his handwriting was cramped to the last
degree. Some of the things are quite unreadable to me—though my family,
with its Indian Civil Service associations, has kept up a knowledge of
Hindustani from generation to generation—and none are absolutely plain
sailing. But I found the one that I knew was there soon enough, and sat
on the floor by my safe for some time looking at it.

"Look here," said I to Pyecraft next day, and snatched the slip away
from his eager grasp.

"So far as I—can make it out, this is a recipe for Loss of Weight.
("Ah!" said Pyecraft.) I'm not absolutely sure, but I think it's that.
And if you take my advice you'll leave it alone. Because, you know—I
blacken my blood in your interest, Pyecraft—my ancestors on that side
were, so far as I can gather, a jolly queer lot. See?"

"Let me try it," said Pyecraft.

I leant back in my chair. My imagination made one mighty effort and
fell flat within me. "What in Heaven's name, Pyecraft," I asked, "do you
think you'll look like when you get thin?"

He was impervious to reason. I made him promise never to say a word to
me about his disgusting fatness again whatever happened—never, and then
I handed him that little piece of skin.

"It's nasty stuff," I said.

"No matter," he said, and took it.

He goggled at it. "But—but—" he said.

He had just discovered that it wasn't English.

"To the best of my ability," I said, "I will do you a translation."

I did my best. After that we didn't speak for a fortnight. Whenever
he approached me I frowned and motioned him away, and he respected our
compact, but at the end of a fortnight he was as fat as ever. And then
he got a word in.

"I must speak," he said. "It isn't fair. There's something wrong. It's
done me no good. You're not doing your great-grandmother justice."

"Where's the recipe?"

He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.

I ran my eye over the items. "Was the egg addled?" I asked.

"No. Ought it to have been?"

"That," I said, "goes without saying in all my poor dear
great-grandmother's recipes. When condition or quality is not specified
you must get the worst. She was drastic or nothing.... And there's one
or two possible alternatives to some of these other things. You got
FRESH rattlesnake venom."

"I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach's. It cost—it cost—"

"That's your affair, anyhow. This last item—"

"I know a man who—"

"Yes. H'm. Well, I'll write the alternatives down. So far as I know
the language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly atrocious.
By-the-bye, dog here probably means pariah dog."

For a month after that I saw Pyecraft constantly at the club and as
fat and anxious as ever. He kept our treaty, but at times he broke
the spirit of it by shaking his head despondently. Then one day in the
cloakroom he said, "Your great-grandmother—"

"Not a word against her," I said; and he held his peace.

I could have fancied he had desisted, and I saw him one day talking to
three new members about his fatness as though he was in search of other
recipes. And then, quite unexpectedly, his telegram came.

"Mr. Formalyn!" bawled a page-boy under my nose, and I took the telegram
and opened it at once.

"For Heaven's sake come.—Pyecraft."

"H'm," said I, and to tell the truth I was so pleased at the
rehabilitation of my great grandmother's reputation this evidently
promised that I made a most excellent lunch.

I got Pyecraft's address from the hall porter. Pyecraft inhabited the
upper half of a house in Bloomsbury, and I went there so soon as I had
done my coffee and Trappistine. I did not wait to finish my cigar.

"Mr. Pyecraft?" said I, at the front door.

They believed he was ill; he hadn't been out for two days.

"He expects me," said I, and they sent me up.

I rang the bell at the lattice-door upon the landing.

"He shouldn't have tried it, anyhow," I said to myself. "A man who eats
like a pig ought to look like a pig."

An obviously worthy woman, with an anxious face and a carelessly placed
cap, came and surveyed me through the lattice.

I gave my name and she let me in in a dubious fashion.

"Well?" said I, as we stood together inside Pyecraft's piece of the
landing.

"'E said you was to come in if you came," she said, and regarded me,
making no motion to show me anywhere. And then, confidentially, "'E's
locked in, sir."

"Locked in?"

"Locked himself in yesterday morning and 'asn't let any one in since,
sir. And ever and again SWEARING. Oh, my!"

I stared at the door she indicated by her glances.

"In there?" I said.

"Yes, sir."

"What's up?"

She shook her head sadly, "'E keeps on calling for vittles, sir. 'EAVY
vittles 'e wants. I get 'im what I can. Pork 'e's 'ad, sooit puddin',
sossiges, noo bread. Everythink like that. Left outside, if you please,
and me go away. 'E's eatin', sir, somethink AWFUL."

There came a piping bawl from inside the door: "That Formalyn?"

"That you, Pyecraft?" I shouted, and went and banged the door.

"Tell her to go away."

I did.

Then I could hear a curious pattering upon the door, almost like some
one feeling for the handle in the dark, and Pyecraft's familiar grunts.