Novelties & Souvenirs
Read Novelties & Souvenirs Online
Authors: John Crowley
Collected Short Fiction
ONTENTS
The stories in this volume were written over the course of twenty-five years, out of varied impulses, and intended for differing venues. After considering possible arrangements, I have decided to present them here in the order of their first publication, which in most, but not all, cases is the order in which they were composed.
“T
HERE WAS, OF COURSE
,” Sir Geoffrey said, “the Inconstancy Plague in Cheshire. Short-lived, but a phenomenon I don’t think we can quite discount.”
It was quite late at the Travellers’ Club, and Sir Geoffrey and I had been discussing (as we seemed often to do in those years of the Empire’s greatest, yet somehow most tenuous, extent) some anomalous irruptions of the foreign and the odd into the home island’s quiet life—small, unlooked-for effects which those centuries of adventure and acquisition had had on an essentially stay-at-home race. At least that was my thought. I was quite young.
“It’s no good your saying ‘of course’ in that offhand tone,” I said, attempting to catch the eye of Barnett, whom I felt as much as saw passing through the crepuscular haze of the smoking room. “I’ve no idea what the Inconstancy Plague was.”
From within his evening dress Sir Geoffrey drew out a cigar case, which faintly resembled a row of cigars, as a mummy case resembles the human form within. He offered me one, and we lit
them without haste; Sir Geoffrey started a small vortex in his brandy glass. I understood that these rituals were introductory—that, in other words, I would have my tale.
“It was in the later eighties,” Sir Geoffrey said. “I can’t remember now how I first came to hear of it, though I shouldn’t be surprised if it was some flippant note in
Punch.
I paid no attention at first; the ‘popular delusions and madness of crowds’ sort of thing. I’d returned not long before from Ceylon, and was utterly, blankly oppressed by the weather. It was just starting autumn when I came ashore, and I spent the next four months more or less behind closed doors. The rain! The fog! How could I have forgotten? And the oddest thing was that no one else seemed to pay the slightest attention. My man used to draw the drapes every morning and say in the most cheerful voice, ‘Another dismal wet one, eh, sir?’ and I would positively turn my face to the wall.”
He seemed to sense that he had been diverted by personal memories, and drew on his cigar as though it were the font of recall.
“What brought it to notice was a seemingly ordinary murder case. A farmer’s wife in Winsford, married some decades, came one night into the Sheaf of Wheat, a public house, where her husband was lingering over a pint. From under her skirts she drew an old fowling piece. She made a remark which was later reported quite variously by the onlookers, and gave him both barrels. One misfired, but the other was quite sufficient. We learn that the husband, on seeing this about to happen, seemed to show neither surprise nor anguish, merely looking up and—well, awaiting his fate.
“At the inquest, the witnesses reported the murderess to have said, before she fired, ‘I’m doing this in the name of all the others.’ Or perhaps it was ‘I’m doing this, Sam [his name], to save the others.’ Or
possibly, ‘I’ve got to do this, Sam, to save you from that other.’ The woman seemed to have gone quite mad. She gave the investigators an elaborate and horrifying story which they, unfortunately, didn’t take down, being able to make no sense of it. The rational gist of it was that she had shot her husband for flagrant infidelities which she could bear no longer. When the magistrate asked witnesses if they knew of such infidelities—these things, in a small community, being notoriously difficult to hide—the men, as a body, claimed that they did not. After the trial, however, the women had dark and unspecific hints to make, how they could say much if they would, and so on. The murderess was adjudged unfit to stand trial, and hanged herself in Bedlam not long after.
“I don’t know how familiar you are with that oppressive part of the world. In those years farming was a difficult enterprise at best, isolating, stultifyingly boring, unremunerative. Hired men were heavy drinkers. Prices were depressed. The women aged quickly, what with continual childbirth added to a load of work at least equal to their menfolk’s. What I’m getting at is that it is, or was, a society the least of any conducive to adultery, amours, romance. And yet for some reason it appeared, after this murder pointed it up, so to speak, dramatically, that there was a veritable plague of inconstant husbands in northern Cheshire.”
“It’s difficult to imagine,” I said, “what evidence there could be of such a thing.”
“I had occasion to go to the county that autumn, just at the height of it all,” Sir Geoffrey went on, caressing an ashtray with the tip of his cigar. “I’d at last got a grip on myself and begun to accept invitations again. A fellow I’d known in Alexandria, a commercial agent who’d done spectacularly well for himself, asked me up for the shooting.”
“Odd place to go shooting.”
“Odd fellow. Arriviste, to speak frankly. The hospitality was lavish; the house was a red-brick Cheshire faux-Gothic affair, if you know what I mean, and the impression it gave of desolation and melancholy was remarkable. And there was no shooting; poured rain all weekend. One sat about leafing through novels or playing Cairo whist—which is what we called bridge in those days—and staring out the windows. One evening, at a loss for entertainment, our host—Watt was his name, and…”
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Exactly. He’d become a student of mesmerism, or hypnotism as he preferred to call it, and suggested we might have a bit of fun probing our dark underminds. We all declined, but Watt was insistent, and at last suborned a hearty local type, old squirearchical family, and—this is important—an inveterate, dirt-under-the-nails farmer. His conversation revolved, chiefly, around turnips.”
“Even his dark undermind’s?”
“Ah. Here we come to it. This gentleman’s wife was present at the gathering as well, and one couldn’t help noticing the hangdog air he maintained around her, the shifty eyes, the nervous start he gave when she spoke to him from behind, and also a certain dreaminess, an abstraction, that would fall on him at odd moments.”
“Worrying about his turnips, perhaps.”
Sir Geoffrey quashed his cigar, rather reproachfully, as though it were my own flippancy. “The point is that this ruddy-faced, absolutely ordinary fellow
was cheating on his wife.
One read it as though it were written on his shirt front. His wife seemed quite as aware of it as any; her face was drawn tight as her reticule. She blanched when he agreed to go under, and tried to lead him away,
but Watt insisted he be a sport, and at last she retired with a headache. I don’t know what the man was thinking of when he agreed; had a bit too much brandy, I expect. At any rate, the lamps were lowered and the usual apparatus got out, the spinning disc and so on. The squire, to Watt’s surprise, went under as though slain. We thought at first he had merely succumbed to the grape, but then Watt began to question him, and he to answer, languidly but clearly, name, age, and so on. I’ve no doubt Watt intended to have the man stand on his head, or turn his waistcoat back-to-front, or that sort of thing, but before any of that could begin, the man began to speak. To address someone. Someone female. Most extraordinary, the way he was transformed.”
Sir Geoffrey, in the proper mood, shows a talent for mimicry and now he seemed to transform himself into the hypnotized squire. His eyes glazed and half-closed, his mouth went slack (though his mustache remained upright), and one hand was raised as though to ward off an importunate spirit.
“‘No,’ says he. ‘Leave me alone. Close those eyes—those eyes. Why? Why? Dress yourself, oh God…’ And here he seemed quite in torment. Watt should of course have awakened the poor fellow immediately, but he was fascinated, as I confess we all were.
“‘Who is it you speak to?’ Watt asked.
“‘She,’ says the squire. ‘The foreign woman. The clawed woman. The cat.’
“‘What is her name?’
“‘Bastet.’
“‘How did she come here?’
“At this question the squire seemed to pause. Then he gave three answers: ‘Through the earth. By default. On the
John Deering.
’ This last answer astonished Watt, since, as he told me
later, the
John Deering
was a cargo ship he had often dealt with, which made a regular Alexandria–Liverpool run.
“‘Where do you see her?’ Watt asked.
“‘In the sheaves of wheat.’”
“He meant the pub, I suppose,” I put in.
“I think not,” Sir Geoffrey said darkly. “He went on about the sheaves of wheat. He grew more animated, though it was more difficult to understand his words. He began to make sounds—well, how shall I put it? His breathing became stertorous, his movements…”
“I think I see.”
“Well, you can’t, quite. Because it was one of the more remarkable things I have ever witnessed. The man was making physical love to someone he described as a cat, or a sheaf of wheat.”
“The name he spoke,” I said, “is an Egyptian one. A goddess associated with the cat.”
“Precisely. It was midway through this ritual that Watt at last found himself, and gave an awakening command. The fellow seemed dazed, and was quite drenched with sweat; his hand shook when he took out his pocket-handkerchief to mop his face. He looked at once guilty and pleased, like—like—”
“The cat who ate the canary.”
“You have a talent for simile. He looked around at the company, and asked shyly if he had embarrassed himself. I tell you, dear boy, we were hard-pressed to reassure him.”
Unsummoned, Barnett materialized beside us with the air of one about to speak tragic and ineluctable prophecies. It is his usual face. He said only that it had begun to rain. I asked for a whiskey and soda. Sir Geoffrey seemed lost in thought during these transactions, and when he spoke again it was to muse: “Odd, isn’t it,” he
said, “how naturally one thinks of cats as female, though we know quite well that they are distributed between two sexes. As far as I know, it is the same the world over. Whenever, for instance, a cat in a tale is transformed into a human, it is invariably a woman.”
“The eyes,” I said. “The movements—that certain sinuosity.”
“The air of independence,” Sir Geoffrey said. “False, of course. One’s cat is quite dependent on one, though she seems not to think so.”
“The capacity for ease.”
“And spite.”
“To return to our plague,” I said, “I don’t see how a single madwoman and a hypnotized squire amount to one.”
“Oh, that was by no means the end of it. Throughout that autumn there was, relatively speaking, a flurry of divorce actions and breach-of-promise suits. A suicide left a note: ‘I can’t have her, and I can’t live without her.’ More than one farmer’s wife, after years of dedication and many offspring, packed herself off to aged parents in Chester. And so on.
“Monday morning after the squire’s humiliation I returned to town. As it happened, Monday was market day in the village and I was able to observe at first hand some effects of the plague. I saw husbands and wives sitting at far ends of wagon seats, unable to meet each other’s eyes. Sudden arguments flaring without reason over the vegetables. I saw tears. I saw over and over the same hangdog, evasive, guilty look I described in our squire.”
“Hardly conclusive.”
“There is one further piece of evidence. The Roman Church has never quite eased its grip in that part of the world. It seems that about this time a number of R.C. wives clubbed together and sent a petition to their bishop, saying that the region was in need of an
exorcism. Specifically, that their husbands were being tormented by a succubus. Or succubi—whether it was one or many was impossible to tell.”
“I shouldn’t wonder.”
“What specially intrigued me,” Sir Geoffrey went on, removing his eyeglass from between cheek and brow and polishing it absently, “is that in all this inconstancy only the men seemed to be accused; the women seemed solely aggrieved, rather than guilty, parties. Now if we take the squire’s words as evidence, and not merely ‘the stuff that dreams are made on,’ we have the picture of a foreign, apparently Egyptian, woman—or possibly women—embarking at Liverpool and moving unnoticed amid Cheshire, seeking whom she may devour and seducing yeomen in their barns amid the fruits of the harvest. The notion was so striking that I got in touch with a chap I know at Lloyd’s, and asked him about passenger lists for the
John Deering
over the last few years.”
“And?”
“There were none. The ship had been in dry dock for two or three years previous. It had made one run, that spring, and then been mothballed. On that one run there were no passengers. The cargo from Alex consisted of the usual oil, dates, sago, rice, tobacco—and something called ‘antiquities.’ Since the nature of these was unspecified, the matter ended there. The Inconstancy Plague was short-lived; a letter from Watt the next spring made no mention of it, though he’d been avid for details—most of what I know comes from him and his gleanings of the Winsford
Trumpet,
or whatever it calls itself. I might never have come to any conclusion at all about the matter had it not been for a chance encounter in Cairo a year or so later.
“I was en route to the Sudan in the wake of the Khartoum dis
aster, and was bracing myself, so to speak, in the bar of Shepheard’s. I struck up a conversation with an archaeologist fellow just off a dig around Memphis, and the talk turned naturally to Egyptian mysteries. The thing that continually astonished him, he said, was the absolute
thoroughness
of the ancient Egyptian mind. Once having decided a thing was ritualistically necessary, they admitted of no deviation in carrying it out.
“He instanced cats. We know in what high esteem the Egyptians held cats. If held in high esteem, they must be mummified after death; and so they were. All of them, or nearly all. Carried to their tombs with the bereaved family weeping behind, put away with favorite toys and food for the afterlife journey. Not long ago, he said, some
three hundred thousand
mummified cats were uncovered at Beni Hasan. An entire cat necropolis, unviolated for centuries.
“And then he told me something which gave me pause. More than pause. He said that, once uncovered, all those cats were disinterred and shipped to England. Every last one.”
“Good Lord. Why?”
“I have no idea. They were not, after all, the Elgin Marbles. This seemed to have been the response when they arrived at Liverpool, because not a single museum or collector of antiquities displayed the slightest interest. The whole lot had to be sold off to pay a rather large shipping bill.”