The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy: 19th Century (European Literary Fantasy Anthologies)

by Brian Stableford

  Before the Baron's seat there stood a table: what sat thereon? well knew the trembling crowds, as with blanched cheek and tottering knees they gazed upon it, and shrank from it even while they gazed: ugly, deformed, ghastly and hideous it sat, with large dull eyes, and bloated cheeks, the magic toad!

  All feared and loathed it, save the Baron only, who rousing himself at intervals from his gloomy meditations, would raise his toe, and give it a sportive kick, of which it took not the smallest notice. He feared it not, no, deeper terrors possessed his mind, and clouded his brow with anxious thought.

  Beneath the table was crouched a quivering mass, so abject and grovelling as scarce to bear the form of humanity: none regarded, and none pitied it.

  Then outspake the Magician: "The man I accuse, if man indeed he be, is - Blowski!" At the word, the shrunken form arose, and displayed to the horrified assembly the wellknown vulture face: he opened his mouth to speak, but no sound issued from his pale and trembling lips ...a solemn stillness settled on all around... the Magician raised the walking-stick of destiny, and in thrilling accents pronounced the fatal words: "Recreant vagabond! misguided reprobate! receive thy due deserts!" ... Silently he sank to the earth ...all was dark for a moment, ... returning light revealed to their gaze...a heap of mashed potatoe...a globular form faintly loomed through the darkness, and howled once audibly, then all was still. Reader, our tale is told.

  WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896) was the most prolific British fantasy writer of the nineteenth century, and the fact that he produced the first full-length Secondary World fantasy, The Wood Beyond the World (1894), has moved him to a central position in the tradition in the eyes of commentators like Lin Carter. Morris met Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Swinburne while he was at Oxford, and there became a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; he subsequently became a devout socialist. He helped to found the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856 and most of his early writings appeared there, including poems later reprinted in The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) and several prose romances, including "A Dream" and the strange allegorical novella "The Hollow Land".

  Morris's verse epics include the classical fantasies The Life and Death of Jason (1867) and The Earthly Paradise (1868). He became greatly enamoured with the Icelandic sagas, which he imitated in The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876). A Dream of John Ball (1888) is a historical fantasy; The House of the Wolfings (1888) and The Roots of the Mountains (1889) are pseudosagas. His later fantastic romances were issued by his own Kelmscott Press between 1891 and 1897. The last two, The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) and the unfinished The Sundering Flood (1897) were dictated in the months before his death and are somewhat rough-hewn, but The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891) is a highly original re-casting of the story of Orpheus, and the long allegory The Well at the World's End (1896) is also interesting. Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895) re-casts the legend of Havelock the Dane.

  None of these works were as successful in their own day as Morris's Utopian romance News from Nowhere (1890) - one of several replies in kind to Edward Bellamy's hugely successful Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) - but the fashionability of contemporary Secondary World fantasy has helped to redeem their reputation and bring them back into print.

  By William Morris

  I dreamed once, that four men sat by the winter fire talking and telling tales, in a house that the wind howled round.

  And one of them, the eldest, said: "When I was a boy, before you came to this land, that bar of red sand rock, which makes a fall in our river, had only just been formed; for it used to stand above the river in a great cliff, tunnelled by a cave about midway between the green-growing grass and the green-flowing river; and it fell one night, when you had not yet come to this land, no, nor your fathers.

  "Now, concerning this cliff, or pike rather (for it was a tall slip of rock and not part of a range), many strange tales were told; and my father used to say, that in his time many would have explored that cave, either from covetousness (expecting to find gold therein), or from that love of wonders which most young men have, but fear kept them back. Within the memory of man, however, some had entered, and, so men said, were never seen on earth again; but my father said that the tales told concerning such, very far from deterring him (then quite a youth) from the quest of this cavern, made him all the more earnestly long to go; so that one day in his fear, my grandfather, to prevent him, stabbed him in the shoulder, so that he was obliged to keep his bed for long; and somehow he never went, and died at last without ever having seen the inside of the cavern.

  "My father told me many wondrous tales about the place, whereof for a long time I have been able to remember nothing; yet, by some means or another, a certain story has grown up in my heart, which I will tell you something of: a story which no living creature ever told me, though I do not remember the time when I knew it not. Yes, I will tell you some of it, not all perhaps, but as much as I am allowed to tell."

  The man stopped and pondered awhile, leaning over the fire where the flames slept under the caked coal: he was an old man, and his hair was quite white. He spoke again presently. "And I have fancied sometimes, that in some way, how I know not, I am mixed up with the strange story I am going to tell you'. Again he ceased, and gazed at the fire, bending his head down till his beard touched his knees; then, rousing himself, said in a changed voice (for he had been speaking dreamily hitherto): "That strange-looking old house that you all know, with the limes and yew-trees before it, and the double line of very old yew-trees leading up from the gateway-tower to the porch - you know how no one will live there now because it is so eerie, and how even that bold bad lord that would come there, with his turbulent followers, was driven out in shame and disgrace by invisible agency. Well, in times past there dwelt in that house an old grey man, who was lord of that estate, his only daughter, and a young man, a kind of distant cousin of the house, whom the lord had brought up from a boy, as he was the orphan of a kinsman who had fallen in combat in his quarrel. Now, as the young knight and the young lady were both beautiful and brave, and loved beauty and good things ardently, it was natural enough that they should discover as they grew up that they were in love with one another; and afterwards, as they went on loving one another, it was, alas! not unnatural that they should sometimes have half-quarrels, very few and far between indeed, and slight to lookers-on, even while they lasted, but nevertheless intensely bitter and unhappy to the principal parties thereto. I suppose their love then, whatever it has grown to since, was not so all-absorbing as to merge all differences of opinion and feeling, for again there were such differences then. So, upon a time it happened, just when a great war had arisen , and Lawrence (for that was the knight's name) was sitting and thinking of war, and his departure from home; sitting there in a very grave, almost a stern mood, that Ella, his betrothed, came in, gay and sprightly, in a humour that Lawrence often enough could little understand, and this time liked less than ever, yet the bare sight of her made him yearn for her full heart, which he was not to have yet; so he caught her by the hand, and tried to draw her down to him, but she let her hand lie loose in his, and did not answer the pressure in which his heart flowed to hers; then he arose and stood before her, face to face, but she drew back a little, yet he kissed her on the mouth and said, though a rising in his throat almost choked his voice, "Ella, are you sorry I am going?" "Yea," she said, "and nay, for you will shout my name among the swordflashes, and you will fight for me." "Yes," he said, "for love and duty, dearest." "For duty? ah! I think, Lawrence, if it were not for me, you would stay at home and watch the clouds, or sit under the lindentrees singing dismal love ditties of your own making, dear knight: truly, if you turn out a great warrior, I too shall live in fame, for I am certainly the making of your desire to fight." He let drop his hands from her shoulders, where he had laid them, and said, with a faint flush over his face, "You wrong me, Ella, for, though I have never wished to fight for the me
re love of fighting, and though," (and here again he flushed a little) "and though I am not, I well know, so free of the fear of death as a good man would be, yet for this duty's sake, which is really a higher love, Ella, love of God, I trust I would risk life, nay honour, even if not willingly, yet cheerfully at least." "Still duty, duty," she said; "you lay, Lawrence, as many people do, most stress on the point where you are weakest; moreover, those knights who in time past have done wild, mad things merely at their ladies' word, scarcely did so for duty; for they owed their lives to their country surely, to the cause of good, and should not have risked them for a whim, and yet you praised them the other day." "Did I?" said Lawrence; "well, and in a way they were much to be praised, for even blind love and obedience is well; but reasonable love, reasonable obedience is so far better as to be almost a different thing; yet, I think, if the knights did well partly, the ladies did altogether ill: for if they had faith in their lovers, and did this merely from a mad longing to see them do "noble" deeds, then had they but little faith in God, Who can, and at His good pleasure does give time and opportunity to every man, if he will but watch for it, to serve Him with reasonable service, and gain love and all noble things in greater measure thereby: but if these ladies did as they did, that they might prove their knights, then surely did they lack faith both in God and man. I do not think that two friends even could live together on such terms but for lovers - ah! Ella, Ella, why do you look so at me? on this day, almost the last, we shall be together for long; Ella, your face is changed, your eyes - 0 Christ! help her and me, help her, good Lord." "Lawrence," she said, speaking quickly and in jerks, "dare you, for my sake, sleep this night in the cavern of the red pike? for I say to you that, faithful or not, I doubt your courage." But she was startled when she saw him, and how the fiery blood rushed up to his forehead, then sank to his heart again, and his face became as pale as the face of a dead man: he looked at her and said, "Yes, Ella, I will go now; for what matter where I go?" He turned and moved toward the door; he was almost gone, when that evil spirit left her, and she cried out aloud, passionately, eagerly: "Lawrence, Lawrence, come back once more, if only to strike me dead with your knightly sword." He hesitated, wavered, turned, and in another moment she was lying in his arms weeping into his hair.

  " 'And yet, Ella, the spoken word, the thought of our hearts cannot be recalled, I must go, and go this night too, only promise one thing.' 'Dearest what? you are always right!' 'Love, you must promise that if I come not again by to-morrow at moonrise, you will go to the red pike, and, having entered the cavern, go where God leads you, and seek me, and never leave that quest, even if it end not but with death.' 'Lawrence how your heart beats! poor heart! are you afraid that I shall hesitate to promise to perform that which is the only thing I could do? I know I am not worthy to be with you, yet I must be with you in body or soul, or body and soul will die.' They sat silent, and the birds sang in the garden of lilies beyond; then said Ella again; 'Moreover, let us pray God to give us longer life, so that if our natural lives are short for the accomplishment of this quest, we may have more, yea, even many more lives.' 'He will, my Ella,' said Lawrence, 'and I think, nay, I am sure that our wish will be granted; and I, too, will add a prayer, but will ask it very humbly, namely, that he will give me another chance or more to fight in his cause, another life to live instead of this failure.' 'Let us pray too that we may meet, however long the time be before our meeting,' she said: so they knelt down and prayed, hand fast locked in hand meantime; and afterwards they sat in that chamber facing the east, hard by the garden of lilies; and the sun fell from his noontide light gradually, lengthening the shadows, and when he sank below the sky-line all the sky was faint, tender, crimson on a ground of blue; the crimson faded too, and the moon began to rise, but when her golden rim first showed over the wooded hills, Lawrence arose; they kissed one long trembling kiss, and then he went and armed himself; and their lips did not meet again after that, for such a long, long time, so many weary years; for he had said: 'Ella, watch me from the porch, but touch me not again at this time; only, when the moon shows level with the lily-heads, go into the porch and watch me from thence.'

  "And he was gone; - you might have heard her heart beating while the moon very slowly rose, till it shone through the rose-covered trellises, level with the lily-heads; then she went to the porch and stood there, -

  "And she saw him walking down toward the gateway tower, clad in his mail coat, with a bright, crestless helmet on his head, and his trenchant sword newly grinded, girt to his side; and she watched him going between the yew-trees, which began to throw shadows from the shining of the harvest moon. She stood there in the porch, and round by the corners of the eaves of it looked down towards her and the inside of the porch two serpent-dragons, carved in stone; and on their scales, and about their leering eyes, grew the yellow lichen; she shuddered as she saw them stare at her, and drew closer toward the half-open door; she, standing there, clothed in white from her throat till over her feet, altogether ungirdled; and her long yellow hair, without plait or band, fell down behind and lay along her shoulders, quietly, because the night was without wind, and she too was now standing scarcely moving a muscle.

  "She gazed down the line of the yew-trees, and watched how, as he went for the most part with a firm step, he yet shrank somewhat from the shadows of the yews; his long brown hair flowing downward, swayed with him as he walked; and the golden threads interwoven with it, as the fashion was with the warriors in those days, sparkled out from among it now and then; and the faint, far-off moonlight lit up the waves of his mail coat; he walked fast, and was disappearing in the shadows of the trees near the moat, but turned before he was quite lost in them, and waved his ungauntletted hand; then she heard the challenge of the warder, the falling of the drawbridge, the swing of the heavy wicket-gate on its hinges; and, into the brightening lights, and deepening shadows of the moonlight he went from her sight; and she left the porch and went to the chapel, all that night praying earnestly there.

  "But he came not back again all the next day, and Ella wandered about that house pale, and fretting her heart away; so when night came and the moon, she arrayed herself in that same raiment that she had worn on the night before, and went toward the river and the red pike.

  "The broad moon shone right over it by the time she came to the river; the pike rose up from the other side, and she thought at first that she would have to go back again, cross over the bridge, and so get to it; but, glancing down on the river just as she turned, she saw a little boat fairly gilt and painted, and with a long slender paddle in it, lying on the water, stretching out its silken painter as the stream drew it downwards, she entered it, and taking the paddle made for the other side; the moon meanwhile turning the eddies to silver over the dark green water: she landed beneath the shadow of that great pile of sandstone, where the grass grew green, and the flowers sprang fair right up to the foot of the bare barren rock; it was cut in many steps till it reached the cave, which was overhung by creepers and matted grass; the stream swept the boat downwards, and Ella, her heart beating so as almost to stop her breath, mounted the steps slowly, slowly. She reached at last the platform below the cave, and turning, gave a long gaze at the moonlit country; 'her last,' she said; then she moved, and the cave hid her as the water of the warm seas close over the pearl-diver.

  "Just so the night before had it hidden Lawrence. And they never came back, they two: - never, the people say. I wonder what their love has grown to now; ah! they love, I know, but cannot find each other yet: I wonder also if they ever will."

  So spoke Hugh the white-haired. But he who sat over against him, a soldier as it seemed, black-bearded, with wild grey eyes that his great brows hung over far; he, while the others sat still, awed by some vague sense of spirits being very near them; this man, Giles, cried out - "Never? old Hugh, it is not so. - Speak! I cannot tell you how it happened, but I know it was not so, not so: - speak quick, Hugh! tell us all, all!"

  "Wait a
little, my son, wait," said Hugh; "the people indeed said they never came back again at all, but I, but I - Ah! the time is long past over." So he was silent, and sank his head on his breast, though his old thin lips moved, as if he talked softly to himself, and the light of past days flickered in his eyes.

  Meanwhile Giles sat with his hands clasped finger over finger, tightly, "till the knuckles whitened;" his lips were pressed firmly together; his breast heaved as though it would burst, as though it must be rid of its secret. Suddenly he sprang up, and in a voice that was a solemn chant, began: "In full daylight, long ago, on a slumberously-wrathful, thunderous afternoon of summer"; - then across his chant ran the old man's shrill voice: " On an October day, packed close with heavy-lying mist, which was more than mere autumn mist" : - the solemn stately chanting dropped, the shrill voice went on; Giles sank down again, and Hugh standing there swaying to and fro to the measured ringing of his own shrill voice, his long beard moving with him, said: -

  "On such a day, warm, and stifling so that one could scarcely breathe even down by the sea-shore, I went from bed to bed in the hospital of the pest-laden city with my soothing draughts and medicines. And there went with me a holy woman, her face pale with much watching; yet I think even without those same desolate lonely watchings her face would still have been pale. She was not beautiful, her face being somewhat peevish-looking; apt, she seemed, to be made angry by trifles, and, even on her errand of mercy, she spoke roughly to those she tended: - no, she was not beautiful, yet I could not help gazing at her, for her eyes were very beautiful and looked out from her ugly face as a fair maiden might look from a grim prison between the window-bars of it.