by Lord Dunsany
As one who walks a lonely road in terror and in dread,
And having once looked round goes on and turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.8
That’s how I felt that morning, and all that day; and the next day, and the day after. I knew something was after me. I told Bob that morning that the fat man had found out where I lived.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Bob. “He’s got to prove it.”
“He’s got that boy as a witness,” I said, “and probably lots of others.”
“Not he,” said Bob very airily.
But I don’t know how he felt.
“Anyway, I’ll never go there again,” I said. “So, if by any lucky chance he hasn’t got any absolute proof yet, he’ll never get any more.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Bob.
And an awful fear came all over me that Bob would make me go back. Because, if we ever went there again, we hadn’t a chance. I could see that. And Bob isn’t the kind of chap you can disobey, when he says a thing.
Well, the days went on going by, and I was afraid of my own shadow. And they noticed that there was something wrong, at home. But I said it was some work that was worrying me, some lines that I had to learn, and that I couldn’t remember. And my father said, “That’s right. Keep at it.” And my mother said I’d remember them all right. And neither knew the awful thing that was threatening Bob and I. And they tell us at our school that that isn’t grammar. But I can tell you I had much too much to think about, that week, to have any time to bother about grammar, even if it was worth bothering about. And of course they didn’t know about us being pirates. Well, Saturday came at last, and Bob called me over to him that morning. I think he must have seen something too, for he said, “You may be right about those sleuths. It may be a coincidence about the fat man passing your house; but I don’t believe much in coincidences, and we may be up against it.”
“Then you’ll never go back to the main,” I said, as we all called the Round Pond now.
But Bob was silent. I didn’t know what he was going to do, and he wouldn’t say.
And that afternoon he said to me, “We’re going back to the main.”
“We’ll all be hanged,” I said.
“Oh, no we shan’t,” said Bob.
“Prison, then,” I said, “anyway.”
“No,” he said. “You may be right about them suspecting us, but what I’m going to do is to go back there with my ship, and no torpedo-tubes on her. And we’ll sail her right across. Then, if they suspect our ship of being a pirate, they’ll seize her and see their suspicions are groundless. How can they charge us with sinking ships with torpedoes, when ours is quite unarmed?”
It seemed a good idea, and I felt much better; for I feared that Bob would take me and Algernon to the main and sink another ship, and we’d all go to prison that Sunday.
“And we’ll bring the luncheon-basket too,” says Bob. “And do you know what we’ll have in it?”
“No,” I says.
“Luncheon,” says he.
“That’s splendid,” I says.
“And then they can bring their charges for damaging property,” says Bob; “and see how they’ll prove it. Especially when Algernon’s father hires a lawyer to prove we are innocent. Piracy indeed! You don’t only have to catch your pirate. You have to prove he is one. He is only an alleged pirate till then.”
“Yes, we are only alleged pirates,” I says, brightening up.
But Bob folds his arms again, and says, “I am a pirate to the last. But still, they’ll have to prove it.”
That lifted a little of the load off my mind; but I wasn’t easy yet, for the fat man knew where I lived, and he must have been very sure of what we had done, to want to track me down like that. And, when Bob went away, most of the old fears came back, and I couldn’t look into the future without seeing prison. Well, Bob had fixed the same time on Sunday to meet him near to the main; and so I had to go. And I went, and I met him with Algernon. And the luncheon-basket looked lighter. This time, I was glad to see there were no torpedo-tubes on the Rakish Craft. But he had the pirate’s flag flying on her, which seemed a mistake. However, that was Bob’s way. And then we went round to the far side of the pond, meaning to sail her right across and take her out and go straight home. That was the north side; and the first thing I sees is the fat man with his boy and his boat, standing on the east side, where he usually is. And he has a big wireless-set on the ground beside him, playing a tune to amuse the boy, a tune about Teddy bears. Then Bob launches the Rakish Craft, with the skull-and-crossbones flying big and bold from the foremast, and a nice little bit of a wind was making it fly. And he winds her up, and off she goes. There was a small sailing-ship quite near, and I sees Bob look at it with a wistful look; and I was glad he had no torpedoes, because if he had he’d have sunk her for certain, and we should have all been in jail; because you can’t go on and on doing a thing like that and not get caught. But we’ve no torpedoes, and nothing in the luncheon-basket but luncheon, and the sailing-ship goes safe, and the Rakish Craft steams on, and the sound of the tune about the Teddy bears drifts to us over the water. I see the fat man watching us, and I didn’t like it; but I glanced over my shoulder at Bob, and something about the look of him made me see that the more we were watched the better, because the Rakish Craft was going about her lawful business that day, and it was a good thing for people to see it. Still, I knew that I wouldn’t be easy until she had crossed the main, and we were all on our way home. And then I saw a ship about the same size as ours, putting out from the east shore and coming across. She was faster than ours, and looked like cutting across our course. A pity, I thought for a moment, we hadn’t torpedoes. And then I was jolly glad that we had not, because I knew what Bob would have done if his tubes had been loaded.
It was a grey ship, with guns all along her sides; I counted eight of them on each side as she came near, guns that were big enough to have fired a rifle bullet; they seemed rather crowded to me, and I wondered what the ship wanted so many of them for. The ship came on, and the Rakish Craft went on, and I thought the other ship would pass right ahead of her. And then it gave a curve and came straight for the Rakish Craft. Then I thought it would pass astern of her. And then it gave another twist and came straight for our ship again. Bob and I, and I think Algernon too, realized at the same moment that the manoeuvre was too good to be chance. It must be directed! If wireless could fire torpedoes, it could direct a boat. Even aeroplanes have been directed that way. When the strange ship got quite close, she gave a sudden twist to port, which brought her alongside only a few inches away. It was obvious then that the ship was directed. I looked at Bob, and he had his mouth open. Then I looked across the pond at the fat man, and he was sitting beside his big box that was playing the tune for his boy. But I knew that the tune was only camouflage: the box was much larger than what you’d need, for one thing, to play a tune like that. He was sitting there quite unconcernedly. But the boy wasn’t unconcerned: he gave the whole show away, staring at the two ships, glaring would be the right word for it. For a while the two ships kept dead level, quite close; and all of a sudden, bang! And the starboard guns opened fire, the whole broadside. They were pointed downwards, and they hit the Rakish Craft just above the waterline on her port side. Several people looked up when they heard the bang. But there was no smoke to speak of, and I don’t think anyone spotted where the noise came from, except us, who were watching, and that boy.
I could see the holes in our port side, where every shot had hit; and they must have gone right through and made cracks on our starboard side below the waterline. They wouldn’t have been more than cracks, or the Rakish Craft would have sunk, but she remained there, rocking on the water. One of the bullets must have gone right into her engines, for she didn’t go forward any more. Then the strange ship turned round and sailed back the way she had come, and the Rakish Craft stopped rocking
. I thought at first that she would keep afloat, and that the breeze, which was proudly flapping her black-and-yellow flag, would blow her ashore in about ten minutes. But she was making water all the time, and she couldn’t last ten minutes. And we saw her go down with her skull-and-crossbones flying, yellow and black from her masthead, as a pirate’s ship should.
There’s not much more to tell, except one funny thing: the fat man launched his grey gunboat again and sent it right across the Round Pond. And she was flying the skull-and-crossbones too.
Explanatory Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 C. L. Moore to H. P. Lovecraft, 30 January 1936, MS, John Hay Library, Brown University.
2 Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
3 Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight (London: William Heinemann, 1938), p. 30.
4 See Mark Amory, Biography of Lord Dunsany (London: Collins, 1972), p. 40.
5 Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight, p. 9.
6 Dunsany, Patches of Sunlight, pp. 20-21.
7 H. P. Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, 15 November 1936, Selected Letters 1934-1937, ed. August Derleth and James Turner (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1976), p. 354.
8 Dunsany, While the Sirens Slept (London: Jarrolds, 1944), p. 78.
9 Dunsany, Lord Adrian (1933), in The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer and Other Fantasms, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (Philadelphia: Owlswick Press, 1980), p. 336.
10 Dunsany, The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (London: Jarrolds, 1950), p. 13.
11 W. B. Yeats, introduction to Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (1912), in Yeats’s Prefaces and Introductions, ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 140.
12 “Irish Academy,” Manchester Guardian, 19 September 1932, p. 9.
13 Dunsany, The Sirens Wake (London: Jarrolds, 1945), p. 6.
14 Brooks Atkinson, “Three One-Acters by Abbe Workshop,” New York Times, 25 May 1950, p. 36.
15 Dunsany, “Nowadays,” in The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer, p. 138.
I. PEGĀNA AND ENVIRONS
The Gods of Pegaāna was published in October 1905 by Elkin Mathews (London). Its critical and popular success led to the publication, in September 1906, of Time and the Gods by William Heinemann (London). That volume is a direct sequel to The Gods of Pegaāna in the sense that it develops the “Pegāna mythology,” although the tales are more thoroughly developed narratives than the quasi-biblical chapters of The Gods of Pegaāna. Only one story in Time and the Gods appeared previously in a periodical: “Time and the Gods,” first published as “The Lament of the Gods for Sardathrion” in the rare Irish magazine Shanachie, in its undated first issue (1906). The other stories included here—“A Legend of the Dawn,” “In the Land of Time,” and “The Relenting of Sarnidac”—were first published in Time and the Gods. Dunsany virtually abandoned the “Pegāna mythology” in subsequent works, aside from brief allusions to some of his gods in “Idle Days on the Yann” and its two sequels. Thereafter, Dunsany invented mythical realms only for individual tales, such as “The Fall of Babbulkund” (Irish Homestead, Christmas 1907), included in his third volume, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (London: George Allen & Sons, 1908).
1Dunsany refers to Polaris, or the Pole Star, the star around which all the other stars appear to revolve. Currently the Pole Star is Alpha Ursae Majoris; about 4,500 years ago the Pole Star was Alpha Draconis; 12,000 years from now it will be the star Vega in the constellation Lyra.
2 The sentiment is reminiscent of the celebrated passage in Book III of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, in which he propounds the Epicurean notion that death signifies the utter extinction of all sensation and emotion. “ ‘Unhappy man,’ they cry, ‘unhappily cheated by one treacherous day out of all the uncounted blessings of life!’ But they do not go on to say: ‘And now no repining for those lost joys will oppress you any more.’ ” De Rerum Natura 3.898-901 (trans. R. E. Latham).
3 Archaic variant of nevertheless.
4 For a very different etiology of the dawn, see “A Legend of the Dawn” (p. 53).
5 The conception is analogous to the lares et penates of the ancient Romans—the “household gods” whose small images were placed on the hearth for the protection of the family, the clan, and by extension the entire community.
6 For a poignant tale of such “broken things,” see “Blagdaross” (p. 141).
7 Archaic variant of drove.
8 Cf. the serpent’s tempting of Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5).
9 A commonplace of secularist thought. Cf. David Hume as cited by James Boswell: “I told him [Samuel Johnson] that David Hume said to me, that he was no more uneasy to think he should not be after this life, than that he had not been before he began to exist.” James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 426.
10 The Pleiades are a cluster of stars in the constellation Taurus. Orion is a constellation containing such bright stars as Betelgeuse and Rigel. The “morning star” is the name given to the planet Venus when it appears above the eastern horizon before sunrise.
11 For a much later story on this theme, see “Poseidon” (p. 358); also (by implication) “The Exiles’ Club” (p. 242).
12 Dunsany is probably echoing the account in Xenophon’s Anabasis of the march of the Ten Thousand (Greek mercenaries in the service of the Persian satrap Cyrus), who, after an arduous journey from Asia Minor to the Black Sea, cried: “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The sea! The sea!”)
13 Cf. Dunsany’s lament on the increasing prevalence of machinery in modern life: “I know of the boons that machinery has conferred on man, all tyrants have boons to confer, but service to the dynasty of steam and steel is a hard service and gives little leisure to fancy to flit from field to field.” “Romance and the Modern Stage,” National Review, no. 341 (July 1911): 830.
14 For a much more sinister version of this scenario, see The Gods of the Mountain (1911), where seven beggars, impersonating the seven green jade “gods of the mountain,” accept the offerings made by the citizens, including a leg of lamb. As the beggars devour the food, one citizen states skeptically: “It is strange that gods should be thus anxious about the cooking of a leg of lamb.” Five Plays (London: Grant Richards, 1914), p. 22.
15 The name is perhaps meant to evoke Phlegethon, one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld.
II. TALES OF WONDER
The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories and A Dreamer’s Tales (London: George Allen & Sons, 1910) may well constitute the pinnacle of Dunsany’s early short story work. It was at this time that his tales began appearing in the London Saturday Review, where they attracted a wide following. However, the four stories from that volume included here—“The Sword of Welleran,” “The Kith of the Elf-Folk,” “The Ghosts,” and “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth”—were previously unpublished. “The Kith of the Elf-Folk,” telling of a fairy who finds herself uncomfortable with the possession of a human soul, seems to have served as a nucleus for Dunsany’s later novel The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939), in which a young Irish woman believes she is a child of the fairies (although the reader knows otherwise) and chafes at being forced to work in a factory and conduct her life in the manner of other human beings. “The Ghosts” may represent Dunsany’s first tale of supernatural horror, and the first tale set entirely in the recognizably “real” world. “Sacnoth” has received the unusual tribute of serving as the basis for a fine song, “The Fortress Unvanquishable,” by the heavy metal band Destiny’s End (available on their album Breathe Deep the Dark, 1998).
A Dreamer’s Tales contains two of Dunsany’s most poignant narratives, “Blagdaross” (Saturday Review, 16 May 1908) and “Idle Days on the Yann.” The latter tale (not published periodically) was written in 1908, in anticipation of a trip down the Nil
e that Dunsany and his wife took in order to relieve a respiratory ailment his wife had developed. It later inspired two sequels, “A Shop in Go-by Street” (Irish Review, November 1912) and “The Avenger of Perdóndaris” (Irish Review, December 1912), both collected in Tales of Three Hemispheres (Boston: John W. Luce, 1919).
The stories in The Book of Wonder (London: William Heinemann, 1912) are generally parodies of Dunsany’s own earlier manner, with the exception of “The Bride of the Man-Horse” (Sketch, 1 February 1911), a splendid tale of heroic adventure.
1Probably an echo of Kurdistan, the region in the Middle East comprising portions of eastern Turkey, northeastern Syria, and northern Iraq and Iran.
2 Abana and Pharpar are rivers in Syria mentioned jointly in the Bible: “Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” (2 Kings 5:12).
