by M. P. Shiel
say, an Abyssinian Galla;with him were only five or six people about the benches, mostly leaningforward with rested head, so that this place had quite a voidsequestered mood. At all events, this Galla, or Bedouin, with hisgrotesque interest in my doings, restrained my hands: and, finally, bydint of peering, poking, dusting, and adjusting, in an hour's time I gotthe phonograph to go very well.
And all that morning, and far into late afternoon, forgetful of food,and of the cold which gradually possessed me, I sat there listening,musing--cylinder after cylinder: frivolous songs, orchestras, voices offamous men whom I had spoken with, and shaken their solid hands,speaking again to me, but thick-tongued, with hoarse effort andgurgles, from out the vague void beyond the grave: most strange, moststrange. And the third cylinder that I put on, ah, I knew, with afearful start, that voice of thunder, I knew it well: it was thepreacher, Mackay's; and many, many times over I heard those words of histhat day, originally spoken, it seems, when the cloud had just passedthe longitude of Vienna; and in all that torrent of speech not onesingle word of 'I told you so': but he cries:
'...praise Him, O Earth, for He is He: and if He slay me, I will laughraillery at His Sword, and banter Him to His face: for His Sword issharp Mercy, and His poisons kill my death. Fear not, therefore, littleflock of Man! but take my comfort to your heart to-night, and my sweetsto your tongue: for though ye have sinned, and hardened yourselves asbrass, and gone far, far astray in these latter wildernesses, yet He isinfinitely greater than your sin, and will lead you back. Break not,break not, poor broken heart of Earth: for from Him I run herald to theethis night with the sweet and secret message, that of old He chose thee,and once mixed conjugally with thee in an ancient sleep, O Afflicted:and He is thou, and thou art He, flesh of His flesh, and bone of Hisbone; and if thou perish utterly, it is that He has perished utterly,too: for thou art He. Hope, therefore, most, and cheeriest smile, atthe very apsis and black nadir of Despair: for He is nimble as a weasel,and He twists like Proteus, and His solstices and equinoxes, His tropicsand turning-points and recurrences are innate in Being, and when Hefalls He falls like harlequin and shuttlecocks, shivering plumb to Hisfeet, and each third day, lo, He is risen again, and His defeats are butthe stepping-stones and rough scaffolding from which He builds HisParthenons, and from the densest basalt gush His rills, and the last endof this Earth shall be no poison-cloud, I say to you, but Carnival andHarvest-home ... though ye have sinned, poor hearts ...'
* * * * *
So Mackay, with thick-tongued metallic effort. I found this brown roomof the Commons-house, with its green benches, and grilled galleries, soagreeable to my mood, that I went again the next morning, and listenedto more records, till they tired me: for what I had was a prurient itchto hear secret scandals, and revelations of the festering heart, butthese cylinders, gathered from a shop, divulged nothing. I then went outto make for Woolwich, but in the car saw the poet's note-book in which Ihad written: and I took it, went back, and was writing an hour, till Iwas tired of that, too; and judging it too late for Woolwich that day,wandered about the dusty committee-rooms and recesses of thisconsiderable place. In one room another foolishness suddenly seized uponme, shewing how my slightest whim has become more imperious within methan all the Jaws of the Medes and Persians: for in that room, CommitteeRoom No. 15, I found an apparently young policeman lying flat on hisback, who pleased me: his helmet tilted under his head, and near onewhite-gloved hand a blue official envelope; the air of that stagnantquiet room was still perceptibly peach-scented, and he gave not theslightest odour that I could detect, though he had been corporal andstalwart, his face now the colour of dark ashes, in each hollow cheek aragged hole about the size of a sixpence, the flimsy vaulted eye-lidswell embedded in their caverns, from under whose fringe of eye-lashseemed whispered the word: '_Eternity._' His hair seemed very long for apoliceman, or perhaps it had grown since death; but what interested meabout him, was the envelope at his hand: for 'what,' I asked myself,'was this fellow doing here with an envelope at three o'clock on aSunday afternoon?' This made me look closer, and then I saw by a mark atthe left temple that he had been shot, or felled; whereupon I wasthrown into quite a great rage, for I thought that this poor man waskilled in the execution of his duty, when many of his kind perhaps, andmany higher than he, had fled their post to pray or riot. So, afterlooking at him a long time, I said to him: 'Well, D. 47, you sleep verywell: and you did well, dying so: I am pleased with you, and to mark myfavour, I decree that you shall neither rot in the common air, nor burnin the common flames: for by my own hand shall you be distinguished withburial.' And this wind so possessed me, that I at once went out: withthe crow-bar from the car I broke the window of a near iron-monger's inParliament Street, got a spade, and went into Westminster Abbey. I soonprised up a grave-slab of some famous man in the north transept, andcommenced to shovel: but, I do not know how, by the time I had digged afoot the whole impulse passed from me: I left off the work, promising toresume it: but nothing was ever done, for the next day I was atWoolwich, and busy enough about other matters.
* * * * *
During the next nine days I worked with a fever on me, and a map ofLondon before me.
There were places in that city!--secrets, vastnesses, horrors! In thewine-vaults at London Docks was a vat which must certainly havecontained between twenty and thirty thousand gallons: and with dancingheart I laid a train there; the tobacco-warehouse must have coveredeighty acres: and there I laid a fuse. In a house near Regent's Park,standing in a garden, and shut from the street by a high wall, I saw athing...! and what shapes a great city hid I now first know.
* * * * *
I left no quarter unremembered, taking a train, no longer of four, butof eight, vehicles, drawn by an electric motor which I re-charged everymorning, mostly from the turbine station in St. Pancras, once from asteam-station with very small engine and dynamo, found in the PalaceTheatre, which gave little trouble, and once from a similar littlestation in a Strand hotel. With these I visited West Ham and Kew,Finchley and Clapham, Dalston and Marylebone; I exhausted London; Ideposited piles in the Guildhall, in Holloway Gaol, in the new pillaredJustice-hall of Newgate, in the Tower, in the Parliament-house, in St.Giles' Workhouse, in the Crypt and under the organ of St. Paul's, in theSouth Kensington Museum, in the Royal Agricultural Society, inWhiteley's place, in the Trinity House, in Liverpool Street, in theOffice of Works, in the secret recesses of the British Museum; in ahundred inflammable warehouses, in five hundred shops, in a thousandprivate dwellings. And I timed them all for ignition at midnight of the23rd April.
By five in the afternoon of the 22nd, when I left my train in MaidaVale, and drove alone to the solitary house on high ground nearHampstead Heath which I had chosen, the work was well finished.
* * * * *
The great morning dawned, and I was early a-stir: for I had much to dothat day.
I intended to make for the sea-shore the next morning, and had thereforeto choose a good petrol motor, store it, and have it in a place ofsafety; I had also to drag another vehicle after me, stored with trunksof time-fuses, books, clothes, and other little things.
My first journey was to Woolwich, whence I took all that I might everrequire in the way of mechanism; thence to the National Gallery, where Icut from their frames the 'Vision of St. Helena,' Murillo's 'BoyDrinking,' and 'Christ at the Column'; and thence to the Embassy tobathe, anoint myself, and dress.
As I had anticipated, and hoped, a blustering spring gale was blowingfrom the north.
Even as I set out from Hampstead, about 9 A.M., I had been able to guessthat some of my fuses had somehow anticipated the appointed hour: for Isaw three red hazes at various points in the air, and heard the farvague booming of an occasional explosion; and by 11 A.M. I felt surethat a large region of north-eastern London must be in flames. With thesolemn feelings of bridegrooms and marriage-mornings--with a flinching
,a flinching heart, God knows, yet a heart up-buoyed on thrilling joys--Iwent about making preparations for the Gargantuan orgy of the night.
* * * * *
The house at Hampstead, which no doubt still stands, is of ratherpleasing design in quite a stone and rural style, with good breadths ofwall-surface, two plain coped gables, mullioned windows, and oversailingslate verge roofs, but, rather spoiling it, a high square three-storiedtower at the south-east angle, on the topmost floor of which I had sleptthe previous night. There I had provided myself with a jar of paletobacco mixed with rose-leaves and opium, found in a foreign house inSeymour Street, also a genuine Saloniki hookah, together with the bestwines, nuts, and so on, and a gold harp of the musician Krasinski,stamped with his name, taken from his house in Portland Street.
But so much did I find to do that day, and so
