I went back to bed and must have dozed, for I jumped awake to the furious ringing of my bell. Before my head was clear I had sprung out of bed, and was dragging on my clothes. It is going to happen now, I heard myself saying; but what I meant I had no notion. My hands seemed to be covered with glue—I thought I should never get into my clothes. At last I opened my door and peered down the passage. As far as my candle flame carried, I could see nothing unusual ahead of me. I hurried on, breathless; but as I pushed open the baize door leading to the main hall my heart stood still, for there at the head of the stairs was Emma Saxon, peering dreadfully down into the darkness.
For a second I couldn’t stir; but my hand slipped from the door, and as it swung shut the figure vanished. At the same instant there came another sound from below stairs—a stealthy mysterious sound, as of a latchkey turning in the house door. I ran to Mrs. Brympton’s room and knocked.
There was no answer, and I knocked again. This time I heard someone moving in the room; the bolt slipped back and my mistress stood before me. To my surprise I saw that she had not undressed for the night. She gave me a startled look.
“What is this, Hartley?” she says in a whisper. “Are you ill? What are you doing here at this hour?”
“I am not ill, Madam; but my bell rang.”
At that she turned pale, and seemed about to fall.
“You are mistaken,” she said harshly; “I didn’t ring. You must have been dreaming.” I had never heard her speak in such a tone. “Go back to bed,” she said, closing the door on me.
But as she spoke I heard sounds again in the hall below: a man’s step this time; and the truth leaped out on me.
“Madam,” I said, pushing past her, “there is someone in the house—”
“Someone—?”
“Mr. Brympton, I think—I hear his step below—”
A dreadful look came over her, and without a word, she dropped flat at my feet. I fell on my knees and tried to lift her: by the way she breathed I saw it was no common faint. But as I raised her head there came quick steps on the stairs and across the hall: the door was flung open, and there stood Mr. Brympton, in his traveling clothes, the snow dripping from him. He drew back with a start as he saw me kneeling by my mistress.
“What the devil is this?” he shouted. He was less high-colored than usual, and the red spot came out on his forehead.
“Mrs. Brympton has fainted, sir,” said I.
He laughed unsteadily and pushed by me. “It’s a pity she didn’t choose a more convenient moment. I’m sorry to disturb her, but—”
I raised myself up aghast at the man’s action.
“Sir,” said I, “are you mad? What are you doing?”
“Going to meet a friend,” said he, and seemed to make for the dressing room.
At that my heart turned over. I don’t know what I thought or feared; but I sprang up and caught him by the sleeve.
“Sir, sir,” said I, “for pity’s sake look at your wife!”
He shook me off furiously.
“It seems that’s done for me,” says he, and caught hold of the dressing room.
At that moment I heard a slight noise inside. Slight as it was, he heard it too, and tore the door open; but as he did so he dropped back. On the threshold stood Emma Saxon. All was dark behind her, but I saw her plainly, and so did he. He threw up his hands as if to hide his face from her; and when I looked again she was gone.
He stood motionless, as if the strength had run out of him; and in the stillness my mistress suddenly raised herself, and opening her eyes fixed a look on him. Then she fell back, and I saw the death flutter pass over her face....
We buried her on the third day, in a driving snowstorm. There were few people in the church, for it was bad weather to come from town, and I’ve a notion my mistress was one that hadn’t many near friends. Mr. Ranford was among the last to come, just before they carried her up the aisle. He was in black, of course, being so pale. As he passed me, I noticed that he leaned a trifle on a stick he carried; and I fancy Mr. Brympton noticed it too, for the red spot came out sharp on his forehead, and all through the service he kept staring across the church at Mr. Ranford, instead of following the prayers as a mourner should.
When it was over and we went out to the graveyard, Mr. Ranford had disappeared, and as soon as my poor mistress’s body was underground, Mr. Brympton jumped into the carriage nearest the gate and drove off without a word to any of us. I heard him call out, “To the station,” and we servants went back alone to the house.
Toby Sanders
The Satyr
Toby Sanders, a native Pennsylvanian, former circus performer and author of How to Be a Compleat Clown (Stein and Day, 1978), is currently a New York City schoolteacher. In “The Satyr,” Mr. Sanders, a fluent scholar of Asian language and literature, provides an English version of an authentic Chinese ghost story.
CHINESE GHOSTS are different from Western ghosts in one very particular sense. They have the uncontrollable urge to shock mortals into exemplary behavior. Even thinking about straying from the path of propriety is enough to attract them. Such was the case of Supervisor Wang.
Wang could be seen every day standing by the bulletin board at the main entrance of the factory. He would stare longingly at the women arriving and departing. Occasionally he would try to strike up a conversation with some of them or invite them to lunch. It was not his fault that shyness and inexperience made his invitations seem awkward. The end result was that the younger women avoided him and the older women teased him. This was unfortunate because he had no ulterior motive other than to meet a nice girl.
When he was with his drinking buddies he was forced to listen to their suggestive remarks. They knew Wang was in charge of only women. He had many opportunities, more than most men. Why didn’t he have a girlfriend?
Wang bore his friends’ taunts as long as he could. Finally, in self-defense he began to brag. He told his friends that he could touch any woman on his shift anyplace and the women could do nothing about it.
As long as he pretended the touch was an unavoidable accident while instructing the women under him, nobody could complain.
This was a harmless boast and would have remained so, but Wang felt pressured to live up to the image he had created for himself. Every day he began maneuvering closer to his charges in an attempt to attain any sort of intimate contact. His attempts did not go unnoticed by the women on his shift, who jokingly started to call him “the letch.” The joke got out of hand one day when he accidentally touched one woman’s thigh and she screamed. After that, his suggestive behavior was the talk of the factory. He had a reputation.
One day he received word that the manager wanted to speak to him. He was frightened because of the way he had been behaving. However, he was relieved to learn the only purpose of the manager’s summons was to inform him he would be assigned to train ten new women on the night shift.
He arrived early that night after a quick shower and change. He stood by the door and, with a critical eye, watched the new women enter. One of them was so beautiful that he was instantly overwhelmed. He was unable to give clear instructions to the group because he could not take his eyes off her. An older woman was forced to demonstrate the job to the new employees.
During the shift, Wang kept moving closer to the object that so allured him. He watched her work until she made a mistake, then he stepped behind her and showed her the error in her work, using the opportunity to press against her as close as he could get.
To his surprise, the woman did not object. She merely faced him and laughed. Her action took him aback—especially when he looked down and discovered that her body hadn’t moved at all, only her head. As he stared, horrified, her head literally began to spin. Wang sought help from the other employees, only to see that their heads, too, were twisted backward, and beginning to spin. The women’s hands remained busy at their work, but every head revolved amidst the sound of mocking laughter.
; Wang fled the place and stayed home for the next few days. He could not tell his employer that he had been visited by an entire company of ghosts. Nor did he ever again boast to his friends, even though he could have truthfully claimed that he’d met a large body of women whose heads all turned for him.
Honoré de Balzac
Don Juan;
or The Elixir
of Long Life
A collection of amorous tales would hardly be complete without some exploit of that infamous blasphemer Don Juan, and the following novella is one of the most unusual “Don” stories ever penned. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was the ambitious French author of the Comédie Humaine, an interconnected sequence of ninety-one novels and tales that led some authors and critics, notably Henry James, to honor Balzac as the world’s greatest novelist.
ON A WINTER’S NIGHT, in a sumptuous palace at Ferrara, Don Juan Belvidero was entertaining a Prince of the house of Este. At this period a banquet was a wonderful scene, possible only for the riches of royalty and the power of Princes.
Round a table lit with perfumed tapers sat seven joyous women bandying sweet talk. About them the noblest marble of the greatest masters gleamed white against walls of crimson stucco, and formed a contrast with the gorgeous colors of carpets brought from Turkey.
These women, clad in satin, glittering with gold, loaded with jewels only less brilliant than their eyes, told each her tale of overpowering passions, diverse as their own charms. But among them was no difference either of thought or expression; a movement, a look, a gesture supplied their words with commentaries wanton, lewd, melancholy, or scoffing.
One seemed to say: “My beauty can rekindle the ice-bound heart of age.”
Another: “I love to lie couched among my cushions and think, drunk with the passion of those who adore me.”
A third, a novice at such feasts, would fain have blushed. “In the depth of my heart,” she said, “I feel remorse! I am a Catholic, and I fear hell. But I love you so much, so—so much that for you I can sacrifice eternity.”
The fourth cried, as she drained a cup of Chian wine: “Joy, joy forever! Each morning dawns for me a new existence; each evening I drink deep of life, the life of happiness, the life of desire!”
The woman who sat by Belvidero looked at him with eyes of flame. She was silent. “I should not need a bravo to kill my lover if he deserted me!” She laughed; but her hand crushed convulsively a comfit box of wonderful workmanship.
“When shall you be Grand Duke?” asked a sixth of the Prince, an expression of murderous pleasure in her teeth, of bacchic delirium in her eyes.
“And you, when will your father be dead?” said the seventh, throwing her bouquet at Don Juan with a gesture of maddening playfulness. She was a girl, young and innocent, wont to laugh at all things sacred.
“Ah! do not speak of it,” cried the young and handsome Juan Belvidero. “There is only one eternal father in the world, and as ill-luck will have it, he is mine.”
The seven courtesans of Ferrara, the friends of Don Juan, and even the Prince himself, cried out with horror. Two hundred years later, under Louis XV, the most cultivated society would have laughed at this sally, but perhaps also, at the beginning of an orgy, the soul still sees with clearer eyes. In spite of the flame of candles, the fume of wines, the sight of gold and silver vessels; in spite of the cry of passion and the presence of women most ravishing to look upon, perchance there still brooded in the depths of their hearts a little of that reverence for human and divine things which still struggles on, until it is drowned by debauchery in the last sparkling waves of wine. Nevertheless, their flowers were already faded, their eyes already clouded, and drunkenness possessed them, after the saying of Rabelais, “Down to the heels of their boots.” During a moment of silence a door opened, and, as at the feast of Belshazzar, God revealed Himself. He appeared under the form of an old servant, with white hair and wrinkled brow, and tottering footsteps. He entered with an air of sadness, and withered with one look the garlands, and the bowls of golden plate, and the pyramids of fruit, and all the brightness of the banquet, and the flush on the scared faces of the banqueters, and the colors of the cushions pressed by the white arms of the women; lastly, he cast a pall upon their revelry when with hollow voice he murmured these solemn words, “Sire, your father is dying.” Don Juan rose, making a sign to his guests which might have been interpreted thus, “Excuse me, but this is not a thing which happens every day.”
Does not a father’s death often startle a young man in the midst of the splendors of life, in the very lap of frenzied debauchery? Death is as sudden in his whims as is a courtesan, but he is truer—he has never deceived any man.
When the door of the hall was shut, and Don Juan was passing through a long, gloomy gallery, where the cold was as great as the gloom, he bethought him of his part as a son, and strove to wear a mask to fit the filial character; for his mirth he had thrown aside with his napkin. The night was black. The silent servant who led the young man to the chamber of death lighted the way so dimly that Death was able, by the help of the cold, and the silence, and the gloom—and perhaps too of a recoil from drunkenness—to insinuate certain reflections into the mind of the reveller. He examined his life and grew thoughtful, as a man at law with another, on his way to the court.
Bartolomeo Belvidero, the father of Don Juan, was an old man of ninety years, who had spent almost all his life in the mazes of commerce. Having often travelled over the magic countries of the East, he had there acquired immense riches, and knowledge more precious, he said, than gold or diamonds; indeed for these he now cared scarcely at all. “I prefer a tooth to a ruby, and power to knowledge,” he sometimes cried, and smiled as he spoke. This kind father loved to hear Don Juan relate his youthful frolics, and would say jestingly, as he lavished his gold upon him, “My dear child, only commit such follies as will really amuse thee.” He was the only old man who has ever taken pleasure in the sight of another man’s youth; his paternal love cheated his white hairs as he contemplated the brilliancy of this young life. At the age of sixty Belvidero became enamored of an angel of peace and beauty; Don Juan was the only fruit of this late and short-lived love. Now for fifteen years the old man had deplored the loss of his dear Juana; it was to this affliction of his old age that his numerous servitors and his son attributed the strange habits which he had contracted. Shut up in the most incommodious wing of his palace, he very rarely left it, and Don Juan himself could not penetrate into his father’s apartment without having first obtained his permission. If this voluntary anchorite walked in his own palace or through the streets of Ferrara, he seemed to be searching for something he had lost. He walked as though in a dream, with undecided steps, preoccupied, like a man at war with an idea or a memory.
While the young man gave the most sumptuous banquets and the palace rang with bursts of merriment—while horses champed their bits in the courtyard and pages quarreled over their dice on the steps—Bartolomeo ate seven ounces of bread a day and drank water. If he required a little game, it was only to give the bones to a black spaniel, which was his constant companion. He never complained of the noise; during his sickness, if the sound of the horn and the baying of dogs startled him while he slept, he would only say, “Ah! it is Don Juan returning!” So complacent and indulgent a father was never met with before; thus the young Belvidero, being wont to treat him without consideration, had all the faults of spoilt children. He lived with Bartolomeo as a capricious courtesan lives with an old lover; he gained indulgence for impertinences by a smile; he sold him his good humor, and only allowed his love. As Don Juan reconstructed in thought the picture of his youth, he perceived that it would be difficult to find the kindness of his father at fault. Feeling a sort of remorse arise in the depth of his heart at the moment he was passing through the gallery, he almost felt he could forgive his father for having lived so long; he returned to some sentiment of filial piety just as a robber turns to honesty when the enjoyment of a success
fully stolen million becomes a possibility. The young man had soon passed through the cold and lofty halls which composed his father’s apartment. After having experienced the effects of a damp, chill atmosphere, and inhaled the dense air and the musty odor given out by the ancient tapestries and dusty presses, he found himself in the old man’s chamber, before a bed of sickness close to a fire almost extinct. A lamp, placed upon a table of Gothic design, shed its light in fitful gleams, now brightly, now faintly, upon the bed, and thus displayed the old man’s face under ever-varying aspects. The cold whistled through the ill-fitting casements, and the snow-flakes made a sullen murmur as they scourged the panes. This scene formed so striking a contrast to the scene Don Juan had just left that he could not restrain a shudder.
Then he grew cold, for as he approached the bed an unwonted flood of light, blown by a gust of wind, lit up the head of his father: the features were distorted, the skin clung closely to the bones, its greenish tint rendered still more horrible by the whiteness of the pillow whereon the old man lay; the open, toothless mouth was drawn with pain, and let slip between it sighs whose dolorous depth was sustained by the echoing howls of the tempest. In spite of these signs of dissolution, there beamed from this head an incredible character of power; a mighty spirit was at war with Death. The eyes, hollowed by sickness, preserved a strange steadfastness; it seemed as though Bartolomeo would have slain with his last look an enemy sitting at the foot of his bed. This look, fixed and frigid, was the more frightful because the head remained as immovable as a skull upon a physician’s table. The entire body indicated by the bedclothes showed that the old man’s limbs also lay as rigid as the head. The whole was dead except the eyes. Moreover, the sounds that issued from his mouth had something automatic in them.
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