Here my companion gathered her black drapery about her, and stood for a moment, hesitating. I had been infinitely flurried, but my curiosity touching her was uppermost. Agitated, pale, picturesque, she looked, in the early evening light, very beautiful.
“You have been playing all these years a most extraordinary game,” I said.
She looked at me somberly, and seemed disinclined to reply. “I came in perfect good faith,” I went on. “The last time—three months ago—you remember?—you greatly frightened me.”
“Of course it was an extraordinary game,” she answered at last. “But it was the only way.”
“Had he not forgiven you?”
“So long as he thought me dead, yes. There have been things in my life he could not forgive.”
I hesitated and then—“And where is your husband?” I asked.
“I have no husband—I have never had a husband.”
She made a gesture which checked further questions, and moved rapidly away. I walked with her round the house to the road, and she kept murmuring— “It was he—it was he!” When we reached the road she stopped, and asked me which way I was going. I pointed to the road by which I had come, and she said—“I take the other. You are going to my father’s?” she added.
“Directly,” I said.
“Will you let me know to-morrow what you have found?”
“With pleasure. But how shall I communicate with you?”
She seemed at a loss, and looked about her. “Write a few words,” she said, “and put them under that stone.” And she pointed to one of the lava slabs that bordered the old well. I gave her my promise to comply, and she turned away. “I know my road,” she said. “Everything is arranged. It’s an old story.”
She left me with a rapid step, and as she receded into the darkness, resumed, with the dark flowing lines of her drapery, the phantasmal appearance with which she had at first appeared to me. I watched her till she became invisible, and then I took my own leave of the place. I returned to town at a swinging pace, and marched straight to the little yellow house near the river. I took the liberty of entering without a knock, and, encountering no interruption, made my way to Captain Diamond’s room. Outside the door, on a low bench, with folded arms, sat the sable Belinda.
“How is he?” I asked.
“He’s gone to glory.”
“Dead?” I cried.
She rose with a sort of tragic chuckle.
“He’s as big a ghost as any of them now!”
I passed into the room and found the old man lying there irredeemably rigid and still. I wrote that evening a few lines which I proposed on the morrow to place beneath the stone, near the well; but my promise was not destined to be executed. I slept that night very ill—it was natural—and in my restlessness left my bed to walk about the room. As I did so I caught sight, in passing my window, of a red glow in the north-western sky. A house was on fire in the country, and evidently burning fast. It lay in the same direction as the scene of my evening’s adventures, and as I stood watching the crimson horizon I was startled by a sharp memory. I had blown out the candle which lighted me, with my companion, to the door through which we escaped, but I had not accounted for the other light, which she had carried into the hall and dropped—heaven knew where—in her consternation. The next day I walked out with my folded letter and turned into the familiar cross-road. The haunted house was a mass of charred beams and smoldering ashes; the well cover had been pulled off, in quest of water, by the few neighbors who had had the audacity to contest what they must have regarded as a demon-kindled blaze, the loose stones were completely displaced, and the earth had been trampled into puddles.
EDWARD LEAR
The Dong with a Luminous Nose
Edward Lear (1812–1888), born in London, was the youngest of twenty children and began making his living as an artist at the age of fifteen to help support his family. He worked for the Zoological Gardens, drawing parrots, among other animals. While in the employ for the earl of Derby, Lear wrote nonsense poems for the earl’s children. This work was collected in 1846 as A Book of Nonsense and was immensely successful and influential. Lear is now best known for “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “The Jumblies,” “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and for his limericks, a form he helped popularize.
“The Dong with a Luminous Nose” was first published in Laughable Lyrics: A Fresh Book of Nonsense, Songs, Botany, Music, etc. in 1877. It is both a parody of the fantasy romance quest for a lost love and one of the most heartrending examples of the form.
When awful darkness and silence reign
Over the great Gromboolian plain,
Through the long, long wintry nights;—
When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore;—
When Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore:—
Then, through the vast and gloomy dark,
There moves what seems a fiery spark,
A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal-black night,—
A Meteor strange and bright:—
Hither and thither the vision strays,
A single lurid light.
Slowly it wanders,—pauses,—creeps,—
Anon it sparkles,—flashes and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along,—
“The Dong!—the Dong!
“The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
“The Dong! the Dong!
“The Dong with a luminous Nose!”
Long years ago
The Dong was happy and gay,
Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl
Who came to those shores one day,
For the Jumblies came in a sieve, they did,—
Landing at eve near the Zemmery Fidd
Where the Oblong Oysters grow,
And the rocks are smooth and gray.
And all the woods and the valleys rang
With the Chorus they daily and nightly sang,—
“Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve."
Happily, happily passed those days!
While the cheerful Jumblies staid;
They danced in circlets all night long,
To the plaintive pipe of the lively Dong,
In moonlight, shine, or shade.
For day and night he was always there
By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,
With her sky-blue hands, and her sea-green hair.
Till the morning came of that hateful day
When the Jumblies sailed in their sieve away,
And the Dong was left on the cruel shore
Gazing—gazing for evermore,—
Ever keeping his weary eyes on
That pea-green sail on the far horizon,—
Singing the Jumbly Chorus still
As he sate all day on the grassy hill,—
“Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve."
But when the sun was low in the West,
The Dong arose and said;—
—“What little sense I once possessed
“Has quite gone out of my head!”—
And since that day he wanders still
By lake or forest, marsh and hill, Singing—
“O somewhere, in valley or plain
“Might I find my Jumbly Girl again!
“For ever I’ll seek by lake and shore
‘”Till I find my Jumbly Girl o
nce more!”
Playing a pipe with silvery squeaks,
Since then his Jumbly Girl he seeks,
And because by night he could not see,
He gathered the bark of the Twangum Tree
On the flowery plain that grows.
And he wove him a wondrous Nose,—
A Nose as strange as a Nose could be!
Of vast proportions and painted red,
And tied with cords to the back of his head.
—In a hollow rounded space it ended
With a luminous Lamp within suspended,
All fenced about
With a bandage stout
To prevent the wind from blowing it out;—
And with holes all round to send the light,
In gleaming rays on the dismal night.
And now each night, and all night long,
Over those plains still roams the Dong;
And above the wall of the Chimp and Snipe
You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe
While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain
To meet with his Jumbly Girl again;
Lonely and wild—all night he goes,
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
And all who watch at the midnight hour,
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright,
Moving along through the dreary night,—
“This is the hour when forth he goes,
“The Dong with a luminous Nose!
“Yonder—over the plain he goes,”
“He goes!
“He goes;
“The Dong with a luminous Nose!”
LUCY CLIFFORD
The New Mother
Lucy Lane Clifford (1846–1929) was a British journalist, writer, and dramatist better known as Mrs. W. K. Clifford. After the death of her husband, the mathematician William Kingdom Clifford, she struggled to raise two children. “Mrs. Keith’s Crime,” which advocated euthanasia for a dying child, became one of her most famous stories.
Clifford’s “The New Mother” was first published in 1882 in Anyhow Stories: Moral and Otherwise. Although not well-known today, this story of motherhood and errant children has influenced such disparate writers as Henry James and Neil Gaiman. It is a classic of both children’s literature and horror, standing as an example of Victorian morality for children and the ability of fantasy to actualize our deepest fears with startling power.
I.
The children were always called Blue-Eyes and the Turkey, and they came by the names in this manner. The elder one was like her dear father who was far away at sea, and when the mother looked up she would often say, “Child, you have taken the pattern of your father’s eyes”; for the father had the bluest of blue eyes, and so gradually his little girl came to be called after them. The younger one had once, while she was still almost a baby, cried bitterly because a turkey that lived near to the cottage, and sometimes wandered into the forest, suddenly vanished in the middle of the winter; and to console her she had been called by its name.
Now the mother and Blue-Eyes and the Turkey and the baby all lived in a lonely cottage on the edge of the forest. The forest was so near that the garden at the back seemed a part of it, and the tall fir-trees were so close that their big black arms stretched over the little thatched roof, and when the moon shone upon them their tangled shadows were all over the whitewashed walls.
It was a long way to the village, nearly a mile and a half, and the mother had to work hard and had not time to go often herself to see if there was a letter at the post-office from the dear father, and so very often in the afternoon she used to send the two children. They were very proud of being able to go alone, and often ran half the way to the post-office. When they came back tired with the long walk, there would be the mother waiting and watching for them, and the tea would be ready, and the baby crowing with delight; and if by any chance there was a letter from the sea, then they were happy indeed. The cottage room was so cosy: the walls were as white as snow inside as well as out, and against them hung the cake-tin and the baking-dish, and the lid of a large saucepan that had been worn out long before the children could remember, and the fish-slice, all polished and shining as bright as silver. On one side of the fireplace, above the bellows hung the almanac, and on the other the clock that always struck the wrong hour and was always running down too soon, but it was a good clock, with a little picture on its face and sometimes ticked away for nearly a week without stopping. The baby’s high chair stood in one corner, and in another there was a cupboard hung up high against the wall, in which the mother kept all manner of little surprises. The children often wondered how the things that came out of that cupboard had got into it, for they seldom saw them put there.
“Dear children,” the mother said one afternoon late in the autumn, “it is very chilly for you to go to the village, but you must walk quickly, and who knows but what you may bring back a letter saying that dear father is already on his way to England.”
Then Blue-Eyes and the Turkey made haste and were soon ready to go. “Don’t be long,” the mother said, as she always did before they started. “Go the nearest way and don’t look at any strangers you meet, and be sure you do not talk with them.”
“No, mother,” they answered; and then she kissed them and called them dear good children, and they joyfully started on their way.
The village was gayer than usual, for there had been a fair the day before, and the people who had made merry still hung about the street as if reluctant to own that their holiday was over.
“I wish we had come yesterday,” Blue-Eyes said to the Turkey; “then we might have seen something.”
“Look there,” said the Turkey, and she pointed to a stall covered with gingerbread; but the children had no money. At the end of the street, close to the Blue Lion where the coaches stopped, an old man sat on the ground with his back resting against the wall of a house, and by him, with smart collars round their necks, were two dogs. Evidently they were dancing dogs, the children thought, and longed to see them perform, but they seemed as tired as their master, and sat quite still beside him, looking as if they had not even a single wag left in their tails.
“Oh, I do wish we had been here yesterday,” Blue-Eyes said again as they went on to the grocer’s, which was also the post-office. The postmistress was very busy weighing out half-pounds of coffee, and when she had time to attend to the children she only just said “No letter for you to-day,” and went on with what she was doing. Then Blue-Eyes and the Turkey turned away to go home. They went back slowly down the village street, past the man with the dogs again. One dog had roused himself and sat up rather crookedly with his head a good deal on one side, looking very melancholy and rather ridiculous; but on the children went towards the bridge and the fields that led to the forest.
They had left the village and walked some way, and then, just before they reached the bridge, they noticed, resting against a pile of stones by the wayside, a strange dark figure. At first they thought it was someone asleep, then they thought it was a poor woman ill and hungry, and then they saw that it was a strange wild-looking girl, who seemed very unhappy, and they felt sure that something was the matter. So they went and looked at her, and thought they would ask her if they could do anything to help her, for they were kind children and sorry indeed for any one in distress.
The girl seemed to be tall, and was about fifteen years old. She was dressed in very ragged clothes. Round her shoulders there was an old brown shawl, which was torn at the corner that hung down the middle of her back. She wore no bonnet, and an old yellow handkerchief which she had tied round her head had fallen backwards and was all huddled up round her neck. Her hair was coal black and hung down uncombed and unfastened, just anyhow. It was not very long, but it was very shiny, and it seemed to match her bright black eyes and dark freckled skin. On her feet were coarse gray stockings and thick shabby boots, which she had evident
ly forgotten to lace up.
She had something hidden away under her shawl, but the children did not know what it was. At first they thought it was a baby, but when, on seeing them coming towards her, she carefully put it under her and sat upon it, they thought they must be mistaken. She sat watching the children approach, and did not move or stir till they were within a yard of her; then she wiped her eyes just as if she had been crying bitterly, and looked up.
The children stood still in front of her for a moment, staring at her and wondering what they ought to do.
“Are you crying?” they asked shyly.
To their surprise she said in a most cheerful voice, “Oh dear, no! Quite the contrary. Are you?”
They thought it rather rude of her to reply in this way, for any one could see that they were not crying. They felt half in mind to walk away; but the girl looked at them so hard with her big black eyes, they did not like to do so till they had said something else.
“Perhaps you have lost yourself?” they said gently.
But the girl answered promptly, “Certainly not. Why, you have just found me. Besides,” she added, “I live in the village.”
The children were surprised at this, for they had never seen her before, and yet they thought they knew all the village folk by sight.
“We often go to the village,” they said, thinking it might interest her.
“Indeed,” she answered. That was all; and again they wondered what to do.
Then the Turkey, who had an inquiring mind, put a good straightforward question. “What are you sitting on?” she asked.
“On a peardrum,” the girl answered, still speaking in a most cheerful voice, at which the children wondered, for she looked very cold and uncomfortable.
“What is a peardrum?” they asked.
“I am surprised at your not knowing,” the girl answered. “Most people in good society have one.” And then she pulled it out and showed it to them.
The Treasury Of The Fantastic Page 33
