The Devils & Demons MEGAPACK ®: 25 Modern and Classic Tales

by Mack Reynolds

  Suddenly, as the clock struck seven, he stood upon the carpet before me, while Boule-de-neige stood at the table with a soup tureen in his hand. I declare that I did not see at any time anyone enter the room or go out of it. They appeared to be suddenly in it.

  I do hope that the appearance of small details like the above, at first incredible, will not be taken as proof of want of veracity on my own part. I wish that I could tell the tale without these particulars, but I cannot. I must relate the whole or none.

  “You here?” said Mr. Grumbelow, looking at me with an air of contempt. He seated himself at the table and unfolded his napkin. “Soup, Boule-de-neige.”

  “Massa hungry? Dat young debbel there he look berry pale already.”

  “Pretty well, Boule-de-neige, considering. You, sir, come here, and let me look at you.” I obeyed. “Hold out your hand. It shakes. Let me look at your eyes. They are yellow. Do you know that your appetite seems to me to be failing already—already—and it is only the fourth day.”

  “It is not my fault,” I said.

  “Nonsense. Don’t talk to me, sir, because I will have none of your insolence. I say that you do not walk enough. I order you to walk twelve miles a day—do you hear?”

  “It is not in the contract,” I replied, doggedly.

  “It is in the contract. You are to use every means in your power to keep your faculties in vigour. What means have you used?”

  He banged the spoon on the table and glanced at me so fiercely that I had nothing to say.

  “Massa, soup get cold,” said Boule-de-neige.

  He gobbled it up, every now and then looking up at me with an angry grunt.

  “Now then, you and your contract. This is pretty ingratitude, this is. Here’s a fellow, Boule-de-neige, I pick up out of the gutter, starving; whom I keep expensively; whom I endow with an income; whom I deprive of the temptation to gluttony.”

  “Nebber see such a debbel in all my days,” said the negro; “nebber hear such a ting told nowhere.”

  “No nor ever will. Listen to me, sir. You will walk ten, twelve, or twenty miles a day, according to the dinner I have had. And, mark you, it will be the worse for you if you do not. Remember, if I cannot eat I can drink.”

  There was a fiendish glare in his blood-stained eyes as he spoke, and I trembled. My spirit was so completely gone that I had not even the pluck to appeal to his pity. Perhaps a secret consciousness of the uselessness of such an appeal deterred me.

  “You will now,” he said, “watch me making as large a dinner as your miserably languid appetite will allow.”

  “I have been drunk for four nights,” I pleaded. “Then you have no business to get drunk so easily. Your head is contemptibly weak—what did I take yesterday, Boule-de-neige.”

  “Big bottle champagne, big bottle port, eight goes whisky grog.”

  “I did—and that was all. Why your predecessor stood double the quantity.”

  “Beg pardon, massa. Last young gegleman poor trash—last but two—him mighty strong head—head like bull—nebber get drunk.”

  “Ah, we wasted him, Boule-de-neige; we fooled him away in one imprudent evening. I told you at the time that noyeau punch is a very dangerous thing.”

  “Ho, ho!” the diabolical negro laughed till his teeth showed like the grinning jaws of a death’s head. “Ho, ho! him so blind drunk he tumble out of window—break him neck. Ho, ho!”

  This was a pleasant conversation for me to hear.

  Then Mr. Grumbelow resumed his dinner.

  He ate a good deal in spite of his grumbling, and then he began to drink port. I observed that the wine had a peculiar effect upon him. It made him redder in the face, but not thicker in speech. He drank two bottles, talking to me all the time. I began to get drunk, he only got the more merrily fiendish.

  “This is really delightful,” he said, as I reeled and caught at a chair for support. I wonder I never thought of this before. It is quite a new pleasure to watch the effects of my own drink on another man’s brain, I shall write a book about you. I shall call it ‘The Young Christian deterred, or Leaves from Luke Lucraft’s Wicked Life.’ Ho, ha! Ha, ho! I saw the account in the Morning Post. Heigh, heigh!”—he nearly choked as he recalled the circumstance. “The magistrate admonishing the wicked drunkard. Ho, ho! It is like a farce. Stand up, sir, stand up. He can’t stand up. Can you sing? Can you dance? He could not even dance a hornpipe. Do you feel a little thickness in your speech? Would you be able to explain to the worthy magistrate the circumstances, quite, beyond your own control, which brought you into that painful position in which you stood? It is the best situation that ever was put upon any stage. There’s nothing like it in fiction. Nothing. Walter Scott never invented anything half so rich. Ho, ho, ho, he is really getting drunk already. What a poor creature it is!”

  He paused for a moment and then went on.

  “Boule-de-neige, coffee; brandy in it—plenty of brandy, and a glass of curaçoa afterwards. A large glass, sir! I’ll have a night of it. Your health, Luke Lucraft, in this coffee; and you had better take care of it, or I’ll pack you off with noyeau punch. Pleasant times you are having, eh? Might have been worse, you know. You might have been starving. What? Don’t fall against the table in that way. Take care of the furniture. It cost a great deal more money than you are worth. So, sit down on the floor while I tell you about your predecessors, dead and gone, poor fellows.

  “Let me see. The first was William Saunders, a poor devil of a clerk of mine. He disgraced himself in chapel one week-day prayer-meeting, the very evening of his signature; then he ran away, but Boule-de-neige found him out, and brought him back. He took to praying and crying. One day he died in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital of delirium tremens. He lasted about six months.

  “The next was Hans Hansen, a Dane. He only lasted about three weeks, because he became melancholy directly he found he could no longer taste brandy. I was disappointed with Hansen, and when he jumped off London Bridge into the Thames one night, his appetite having quite gone, I was really very sorry on account of the temporary inconvenience it put me to; and I determined to be very careful in his successor. I remember I had a good deal of trouble to find one.

  “However, at last I got a third man, a stout Cumberland chap, son of a statesman. You poor, puny little strolling actor, I suppose that you will hardly believe that I once took four and twenty tumblers of Scotch whisky and water without affecting that brave fellow’s appetite one bit. He used to take it out in swearing; and really he was almost too often in trouble with the magistrates. He never clearly understood that his safety lay in being home early in the evening. Once he nearly killed Mr. Crackett in his own office. Poor Crackett! that eminent Christian lawyer; I should never have forgiven myself had anything happened to the worthy Crackett. Well! he went too; at least, after a good tough twelvemonth. It was my own fault, and I ought not to grumble. That noyeau punch was strong enough to kill the devil.”

  “Cluck,” said Boule-de-neige.

  “Then we came to Tom Kirby. None of them looked so well or promised so much; none broke down so easily. A whining fellow too; a crying, sobbing, appealing rogue, who wanted to get off his bargain. However, de mortuis—Your health, Luke Lucraft. Hallo! hold up.

  “I tell you what I mean to do after you’re worked off, Luke Lucraft. I mean to have a brace of fellows. I shall go down to the London docks, or else to the railway stations, and find a couple of trusty young porters. They are the sort of men to have. Fine, strong, well-set-up rascals. Men with muscles like rigging ropes—don’t clutch at the chair, Lucraft—if you can’t sit up you may lie down—I shall make them come here—give them a blow out of steak—I wasted a splendid dinner on you—and then I shall make them sign.

  “The great thing, then, will be to have the appetites of two men; twice as much to eat and twice as mu
ch to drink. I never thought of that before.

  “And then to bring both the rogues up here of an evening and make them wait and see me eat; watch them gradually lolling and reeling about till they tumble over each other; go secretly and hear them curse me—me, their benefactor—Ho! ho! I think I shall not be long over you, Luke Lucraft. Hallo! Keep your drunken legs away from the table. Boule-de-neige, roll this intoxicated log into the street.”

  * * * *

  When I came to my senses it was of course the next morning, and I was lying in my own bedroom, whither I had been carried by two strange men, the landlady afterwards told me, who said they were paid for the job. I had a splitting headache. I was sick and giddy; my limbs trembled beneath me when I tried to stand; my hands shook. I looked at myself in the glass. Swollen features and bloodshot eyes greeted me.

  Less than a week had wrought this ruin.

  The ordinary drunkard refreshes himself in the morning with tea. Nothing refreshed me, because I could taste nothing, and because my sufferings sprang from a different source, though they were the same in kind. I had to bear them as best I might.

  I remembered the command which Mr.—Mr.—strange, I had forgotten his name again—gave me, to walk twenty miles after a “heavy night”. I started to obey him.

  Outside London, beyond Islington, where there are now rows of houses but were then fields, I saw a little modest cottage, standing alone in its garden. It was a cottage with four rooms only, covered over with creepers. On the board, standing at the gate, was an announcement that it was to let. A thought struck me: Here could be seclusion, at any rate. Here I could shut myself up every night, and await in comparative safety the dreadful punishment—fast becoming heavier than I could hear—which my tormenter inflicted upon me. Why should I not take the cottage, pay the rent in advance every month—for how many months should I have to pay it?—and so wait in patience and resignation the approach of my inevitable fate?

  I made inquiries at once, and secured the place at a merely nominal rent. Then I moved in a little furniture, bought second hand in Islington High Street, and became the occupant, a lonely hermit, of the house. There were no houses within hearing, in case I should storm and rage in my drunken madness at night. The cottage stood removed from the road, and no callers were likely to trouble me. Within those walls I should be secure from some dangers at least. Here, night after night, I could await the attacks of surfeit and intoxication which regularly came; for my master knew no pity.

  On the first evening I sat down at half-past six to prepare for what was coming. The day was drawing in, and a cold twilight—the month was March—covered the trees and shrubs in my little garden, as I opened the door and looked out.

  Before me stood the negro.

  My spirit was quite broken, and I could only groan.

  “Do you want me to go with you again?” I asked, thinking of the last entertainment at which I provided amusement for his master.

  “Massa say him berry glad you come hyar. You walk the twenty mile ebbery day, else massa know the reason why. How you feel, Massa Lucraft? Heigh! heigh! cluck. Dat most fortunate day for you when you sign dat little paper.”

  He delivered his message and disappeared in the darkness. I heard his footsteps crunching the gravel in the road, and I longed, only now I had no courage or spirit left, to seize him and tear him limb from limb.

  Then I shut myself in, lit one candle, and sat over the fire. I thought of the scenes by which my extravagant fancy had been excited; the garden full of lively girls—what were girls to me now? the country walks I was to have with Juliet—where was my passion for Juliet now? The ease and happiness, the lightness and innocence, of the life before me, drawn by an arch-deceiver, compared with my present, my actual misery, sitting alone, cut off from mankind, the slave and victim of a secret profligate and glutton, doomed to die slowly, unless it should please the murderer to kill me off quickly.

  And then, because the first symptoms of the attack were coming on, I went to bed and stayed there.

  So began my new life. A wretched life it was. There was no occupation possible for me—no amusement. I walked every day, in fair weather or foul, a measured twenty miles.

  This in some degree restored vitality to my system. I never read; I took no interest in any politics. I sat by myself, and brooded.

  As for my meals, I bought them ready prepared. They consisted almost wholly of bread and cold mutton. You may judge of the absolutely tasteless condition to which I was reduced, when I write calmly and truthfully that cold boiled mutton was as agreeable to me as any other form of food. I found, after repeated trials, that mutton forms the best fuel—it is better than either beef or pork—and keeps the human engine at work for the longest time. So I had mutton. As I discovered also that bulk was necessary, and that only a certain amount of animal food was wanted, I used to have cold potatoes always ready. I stoked twice a day, at eleven in the morning and about five in the afternoon. Thus fortified, I got through the miserable hours as best I could.

  I look back on that period as one of unmitigated misery and despair. I was daily growing more bloated, fatter, and flabbier in the cheeks. My hands trembled in the morning. I seemed losing the power of connected thought. My very lips were thickening.

  I hope I am making it clear what was the effect of my bargain on myself—I mean without reference to the sufferings inflicted on me by my tyrant. People, however, never can know, unless they happen to be like myself, which is unlikely, how great a part eating and drinking take in the conduct of life. Between the rest of the world and me there was a great gulf fixed. They could enjoy, I could not; they could celebrate every joyful event with something additional to eat; they could make a little festival of every day; they could give to happiness an outward and tangible form. Alas, not only was I debarred from this, but I was cut off even from joy itself; for, if you look at it steadily, you will find that most of human joy or suffering is connected with the senses. I had bartered away a good half of mine, and the rest seemed in mourning for the loss of their fellows. As for my pale and colourless life, it was as monotonous as the dock. If I neglected to stoke, the usual feebleness would follow. There was no gracious looking forward to a pleasant dinner; no trembling anticipations in hope and fear of what might be preparing, no cheerful contemplation of the joint while the carver sharpens his knife; no discussions of flavour and richness; no modestly hazarded conclusions as to more currants; no rolling of the wine-glass in the fingers to the light, and smacking of lips over the first sip—all these things were lost to me. Reader, if haply this memoir ever sees a posthumous light, think what would happen to yourself if eating and drinking, those perennial joys of humanity, which last from the infantine pap to the senile Revalenta Arabica, were taken away.

  All things tasted alike, as I have said, and cold mutton formed my staple dish. As I could only distinguish between beer, wine, coffee, and tea by the look, I drank water. If I ventured, which was seldom, to take my dinner at a cookshop, I would choose my piece de résistance by the look, by some fancied grace in the shape, but not by taste or smell. The brown of roast beef might attract me one day and repel me the next. I was pleased with the comeliness of a game-pie, or tickled by some inexplicable external charm of a beefsteak-pudding. But three quarters of my life were gone, and with them all my happiness.

  If you have no appetite for eating, you can enjoy nothing in the whole world. That is an axiom. I could not taste, therefore my eye ceased to feel delight in pleasant sights, and my ear in pleasant sounds. It was not with me as in the case of a blind man, that an abnormal development of some other sense ensued; quite the contrary. In selling one, I seem to have sold them all. For, as I discovered, man is one and inseparable; you cannot split him up; and when my arch-deceiver bought my appetite, he bought me out and out. A wine merchant might as well pretend to sell the bouquet of claret and preserve
the body; or a painter the colour of his picture and preserve the drawing; or a sculptor the grace of his group and keep the marble.

  As regards other losses I found I had lost the perception of beauty in form or colour. Why this was so I cannot explain. I was no longer, I suppose, in harmony with other men on any single point. Pretty women passed me unheeded; pictures had no charm for me music was only irritating to my nerves.

  Then I found that I had lost the power of sympathy. I had formerly been a soft-hearted man—I remarked now that the sight of suffering found me entirely callous. There was a poor family living about half a mile from me, whose acquaintance I made through buying some of my supplies of them. They were in distress for rent; they applied to me…there, I cannot bear to think of it. I had the money and I refused them. They were sold up, and I sat at my door and watched them on their way to London—the mother, the two girls, the little boy, had in hand, homeless and penniless, without a pang and without a single prompting of the heart to help them. God knows what became of them. May He forgive me for the hard-hearted cruelty with which I regarded their fate.