Strange Tales (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘I am. That’s why I know. Don’t be an ass, Keller. Remember, I’m seven hundred years your senior, and what your grandchildren may learn five hundred years hence, I learned from my grandfathers about five hundred years ago. You won’t do it, because you can’t.’

  This conversation was held in open sea, where everything seems possible, some hundred miles from Southampton. We passed the Needles Light at dawn, and the lifting day showed the stucco villas on the green and the awful orderliness of England – line upon line, wall upon wall, solid stone dock and monolithic pier. We waited an hour in the Customs shed, and there was ample time for the effect to soak in.

  ‘Now, Keller, you face the music. The Havel goes out today. Mail by her, and I’ll take you to the telegraph-office,’ I said.

  I heard Keller gasp as the influence of the land closed about him, cowing him as they say Newmarket Heath cows a young horse unused to open courses.

  ‘I want to retouch my stuff. Suppose we wait till we get to London?’ he said.

  Zuyland, by the way, had torn up his account and thrown it overboard that morning early. His reasons were my reasons.

  In the train Keller began to revise his copy, and every time that he looked at the trim little fields, the red villas, and the embankments of the line, the blue pencil plunged remorselessly through the slips. He appeared to have dredged the dictionary for adjectives. I could think of none that he had not used. Yet he was a perfectly sound poker-player and never showed more cards than were sufficient to take the pool.

  ‘Aren’t you going to leave him a single bellow?’ I asked sympathetically. ‘Remember, everything goes in the States, from a trouser-button to a double-eagle.’

  ‘That’s just the curse of it,’ said Keller below his breath. ‘We’ve played ’em for suckers so often that when it comes to the golden truth – I’d like to try this on a London paper. You have first call there, though.’

  ‘Not in the least. I’m not touching the thing in our papers. I shall be happy to leave ’em all to you; but surely you’ll cable it home?’

  ‘No. Not if I can make the scoop here and see the Britishers sit up.’

  ‘You won’t do it with three columns of slushy headline, believe me. They don’t sit up as quickly as some people.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think that too. Does nothing make any difference in this country?’ he said, looking out of the window. ‘How old is that farmhouse?’

  ‘New. It can’t be more than two hundred years at the most.’

  ‘Um. Fields, too?’

  ‘That hedge there must have been clipped for about eighty years.’

  ‘Labour cheap – eh?’

  ‘Pretty much. Well, I suppose you’d like to try the Times, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Keller, looking at Winchester Cathedral. ‘’Might as well try to electrify a haystack. And to think that the World would take three columns and ask for more – with illustrations too! It’s sickening.’

  ‘But the Times might,’ I began.

  Keller flung his paper across the carriage, and it opened in its austere majesty of solid type – opened with the crackle of an encyclopedia.

  ‘Might! You might work your way through the bow-plates of a cruiser. Look at that first page!’

  ‘It strikes you that way, does it?’ I said. ‘Then I’d recommend you to try a light and frivolous journal.’

  ‘With a thing like this of mine – of ours? It’s sacred history!’

  I showed him a paper which I conceived would be after his own heart, in that it was modelled on American lines.

  ‘That’s homey,’ he said, ‘but it’s not the real thing. Now, I should like one of these fat old Times columns. Probably there’d be a bishop in the office, though.’

  When we reached London Keller disappeared in the direction of the Strand. What his experiences may have been I cannot tell, but it seems that he invaded the office of an evening paper. at 11.45 a.m. (I told him English editors were most idle at that hour), and mentioned my name as that of a witness to the truth of his story.

  ‘I was nearly fired out,’ he said furiously at lunch. ‘As soon as I mentioned you, the old man said that I was to tell you that they didn’t want any more of your practical jokes, and that you knew the hours to call if you had anything to sell, and that they’d see you condemned before they helped to puff one of your infernal yarns in advance. Say, what record do you hold for truth in this country, anyway?’

  ‘A beauty. You ran up against it, that’s all. Why don’t you leave the English papers alone and cable to New York? Everything goes over there.’

  ‘Can’t you see that’s just why?’ he repeated.

  ‘I saw it a long time ago. You don’t intend to cable, then?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he answered, in the over-emphatic voice of one who does not know his own mind.

  That afternoon I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river-steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries circling round the head of Litchfield A. Keller, journalist, of Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A., whose mission it was to make the Britishers sit up.

  He stumbled gasping into the thick gloom, and the roar of the traffic came to his bewildered ears.

  ‘Let’s go to the telegraph-office and cable,’ I said. ‘Can’t you hear the New York World crying for news of the great sea-serpent, blind, white, and smelling of musk, stricken to death by a submarine volcano, and assisted by his loving wife to die in mid-ocean, as visualised by an American citizen, the breezy, newsy, brainy news paper man of Dayton, Ohio? ’Rah for the Buckeye State. Step lively! Both gates! Szz! Boom! Aah!’ Keller was a Princeton man, and he seemed to need encouragement.

  ‘You’ve got me on your own ground,’ said he, tugging at his overcoat pocket. He pulled out his copy, with the cable forms – for he had written out his telegram – and put them all into my hand, groaning, ‘I pass. If I hadn’t come to your cursed country – if I’d sent it off at Southampton – If I ever get you west of the Alleghannies, if –

  ‘Never mind, Keller. It isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of your country. If you had been seven hundred years older you’d have done what I am going to do.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Tell it as a lie.’

  ‘Fiction?’ This with the full-blooded disgust of a journalist for the illegitimate branch of the profession.

  ‘You can call it that if you like. I shall call it a lie.’

  And a lie it has become; for Truth is a naked lady, and if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behoves a gentleman either to give her a print petticoat or to turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.

  ‘Swept and Garnished’

  When the first waves of feverish cold stole over Frau Ebermann she very wisely telephoned for the doctor and went to bed. He diagnosed the attack as mild influenza, prescribed the appropriate remedies, and left her to the care of her one servant in her comfortable Berlin flat. Frau Ebermann, beneath the thick coverlet, curled up with what patience she could until the aspirin should begin to act, and Anna should come back from the chemist with the formamint, the ammoniated quinine, the eucalyptus, and the little tin steam-inhaler. Meantime, every bone in her body ached; her head throbbed; her hot, dry hands would not stay the same size for a minute together; and her body, tucked into the smallest possible compass, shrank from the chill of the well-warmed sheets.

  Of a sudden she noticed that an imitation-lace cover which should have lain mathematically square with the imitation-marble top of the radiator behind the green plush sofa had slipped away so that one corner hung over the bronze-painted steam pipes. She recalled that she must have
rested her poor head against the radiator-top while she was taking off her boots. She tried to get up and set the thing straight, but the radiator at once receded toward the horizon, which, unlike true horizons, slanted diagonally, exactly parallel with the dropped lace edge of the cover. Frau Ebermann groaned through sticky lips and lay still.

  ‘Certainly, I have a temperature,’ she said. ‘Certainly, I have a grave temperature. I should have been warned by that chill after dinner.’

  She resolved to shut her hot-lidded eyes, but opened them in a little while to torture herself with the knowledge of that ungeometrical thing against the far wall. Then she saw a child – an untidy, thin-faced little girl of about ten, who must have strayed in from the adjoining flat. This proved – Frau Ebermann groaned again at the way the world falls to bits when one is sick – proved that Anna had forgotten to shut the outer door of the flat when she went to the chemist. Frau Ebermann had had children of her own, but they were all grown up now, and she had never been a child-lover in any sense. Yet the intruder might be made to serve her scheme of things.

  ‘Make – put,’ she muttered thickly, ‘that white thing straight on the top of that yellow thing.’

  The child paid no attention, but moved about the room, investigating everything that came in her way – the yellow cut-glass handles of the chest of drawers, the stamped bronze hook to hold back the heavy puce curtains, and the mauve enamel, New Art finger-plates on the door. Frau Ebermann watched indignantly.

  ‘Aie! That is bad and rude. Go away!’ she cried, though it hurt her to raise her voice. ‘Go away by the road you came!’ The child passed behind the bed-foot, where she could not see her. ‘Shut the door as you go. I will speak to Anna, but – first, put that white thing straight.’

  She closed her eyes in misery of body and soul. The outer door clicked, and Anna entered, very penitent that she had stayed so long at the chemist’s. But it had been difficult to find the proper type of inhaler, and – ‘Where did the child go?’ moaned Frau Ebermann – ‘the child that was here?’

  ‘There was no child,’ said startled Anna. ‘How should any child come in when I shut the door behind me after I go out? All the keys of the flats are different.’

  ‘No, no! You forgot this time. But my back is aching, and up my legs also. Besides, who knows what it may have fingered and upset? Look and see.’

  ‘Nothing is fingered, nothing is upset,’ Anna replied, as she took the inhaler from its paper box.

  ‘Yes, there is. Now I remember all about it. Put – put that white thing, with the open edge – the lace, I mean – quite straight on that – ‘ she pointed. Anna, accustomed to her ways, understood and went to it.

  ‘Now, is it quite straight?’ Frau Ebermann demanded.

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Anna. ‘In fact, in the very centre of the radiator.’ Anna measured the equal margins with her knuckle, as she had been told to do when she first took service.

  ‘And my tortoiseshell hair brushes?’ Frau Ebermann could not command her dressing-table from where she lay.

  ‘Perfectly straight, side by side in the big tray, and the comb laid across them. Your watch also in the coralline watch-holder. Everything’ – she moved round the room to make sure – ‘everything is as you have it when you are well.’ Frau Ebermann sighed with relief. It seemed to her that the room and her head had suddenly grown cooler.

  ‘Good!’ said she. ‘Now warm my nightgown in the kitchen, so it will be ready when I have perspired. And the towels also. Make the inhaler steam, and put in the eucalyptus; that is good for the larynx. Then sit you in the kitchen, and come when I ring. But, first, my hot-water bottle.’

  It was brought and scientifically tucked in.

  ‘What news?’ said Frau Ebermann drowsily. She had not been out that day.

  ‘Another victory,’ said Anna. ‘Many more prisoners and guns.’

  Frau Ebermann purred, one might almost say grunted, contentedly.

  ‘That is good too,’ she said; and Anna, after lighting the inhaler-lamp, went out.

  Frau Ebermann reflected that in an hour or so the aspirin would begin to work, and all would be well. Tomorrow – no, the day after – she would take up life with something to talk over with her friends at coffee. It was rare – everyone knew it – that she should be overcome by any ailment. Yet in all her distresses she had not allowed the minutest deviation from daily routine and ritual. She would tell her friends – she ran over their names one by one – exactly what measures she had taken against the lace cover on the radiator-top and in regard to her two tortoiseshell hair brushes and the comb at right angles. How she had set everything in order – everything in order. She roved further afield as she wriggled her toes luxuriously on the hot-water bottle. If it pleased our dear God to take her to Himself, and she was not so young as she had been – there was that plate of the four lower ones in the blue tooth-glass, for instance – He should find all her belongings fit to meet His eye. ‘Swept and garnished’ were the words that shaped themselves in her intent brain. ‘Swept and garnished for –’

  No, it was certainly not for the dear Lord that she had swept; she would have her room swept out tomorrow or the day after, and garnished. Her hands began to swell again into huge pillows of nothingness. Then they shrank, and so did her head, to minute dots. It occurred to her that she was waiting for some event, some tremendously important event, to come to pass. She lay with shut eyes for a long time till her head and hands should return to their proper size.

  She opened her eyes with a jerk.

  ‘How stupid of me,’ she said aloud, ‘to set the room in order for a parcel of dirty little children!’

  They were there – five of them, two little boys and three girls – headed by the anxious-eyed ten-year-old whom she had seen before. They must have entered by the outer door, which Anna had neglected to shut behind her when she returned with the inhaler. She counted them backward and forward as one counts scales – one, two, three, four, five.

  They took no notice of her, but hung about, first on one foot then on the other, like strayed chickens, the smaller ones holding by the larger. They had the air of utterly wearied passengers in a railway waiting-room, and their clothes were disgracefully dirty.

  ‘Go away!’ cried Frau Ebermann at last, after she had struggled, it seemed to her, for years to shape the words.

  ‘You called?’ said Anna at the living-room door.

  ‘No,’ said her mistress. ‘Did you shut the flat door when you came in?’

  ‘Assuredly,’ said Anna. ‘Besides, it is made to catch shut of itself.’

  ‘Then go away,’ said she, very little above a whisper. If Anna pretended not to see the children, she would speak to Anna later on.

  ‘And now,’ she said, turning toward them as soon as the door closed. The smallest of the crowd smiled at her, and shook his head before he buried it in his sister’s skirts.

  ‘Why – don’t – you – go – away?’ she whispered earnestly.

  Again they took no notice, but, guided by the elder girl, set themselves to climb, boots and all, on to the green plush sofa in front of the radiator. The little boys had to be pushed, as they could not compass the stretch unaided. They settled themselves in a row, with small gasps of relief, and pawed the plush approvingly.

  ‘I ask you – I ask you why do you not go away – why do you not go away?’ Frau Ebermann found herself repeating the question twenty times. It seemed to her that everything in the world hung on the answer. ‘You know you should not come into houses and rooms unless you are invited. Not houses and bedrooms, you know.’

  ‘No,’ a solemn little six-year-old repeated, ‘not houses nor bedrooms, nor dining-rooms, nor churches, nor all those places. Shouldn’t come in. It’s rude.’

  ‘Yes, he said so,’ the younger girl put in proudly. ‘He said it. He told them only pigs would do that.’ The line nodded and dimpled one to another with little explosive giggles, such as children use when they tell deeds o
f great daring against their elders.

  ‘If you know it is wrong, that makes it much worse,’ said Frau Ebermann.

  ‘Oh yes; much worse,’ they assented cheerfully, till the smallest boy changed his smile to a baby wail of weariness.

  ‘When will they come for us?’ he asked, and the girl at the head of the row hauled him bodily into her square little capable lap.

  ‘He’s tired,’ she explained. ‘He is only four. He only had his first breeches this spring.’ They came almost under his armpits, and were held up by broad linen braces, which, his sorrow diverted for the moment, he patted proudly.

  ‘Yes, beautiful, dear,’ said both girls.

  ‘Go away!’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘Go home to your father and mother!’

  Their faces grew grave at once.

  ‘H’sh! We can’t,’ whispered the eldest. ‘There isn’t anything left.’

  ‘All gone,’ a boy echoed, and he puffed through pursed lips. ‘Like that, uncle told me. Both cows too.’

  ‘And my own three ducks,’ the boy on the girl’s lap said sleepily.

  ‘So, you see, we came here.’ The elder girl leaned forward a little, caressing the child she rocked.

  ‘I – I don’t understand,’ said Frau Ebermann ‘Are you lost, then? You must tell our police.’

  ‘Oh no; we are only waiting.’

  ‘But what are you waiting for?’

  ‘We are waiting for our people to come for us. They told us to come here and wait for them. So we are waiting till they come,’ the eldest girl replied.

  ‘Yes. We are waiting till our people come for us,’ said all the others in chorus.

  ‘But,’ said Frau Ebermann very patiently – ‘but now tell me, for I tell you that I am not in the least angry, where do you come from? Where do you come from?’

  The five gave the names of two villages of which she had read in the papers,

  ‘That is silly,’ said Frau Ebermann. ‘The people fired on us, and they were punished. Those places are wiped out, stamped flat.’