Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (63 page)

There was ample time for me to review it all – to felicitate myself upon my magnificent acumen (barring some errors about Baxter as a thief and possibly a murderer), before the door above opened, and Baxter, evidently a light sleeper, sprang awake.

‘I’ve had a heavenly little nap,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands like a child. ‘Good Lord! That’s not
their
step!’

But it was. I had never before been privileged to see theShadow turned backward on the dial – the years ripped bodily off poor human shoulders – old sunken eyes filled and alight – harsh lips moistened and human.

‘John,’ Miss Mary called, ‘I know now. Aggie didn’t do it!’ and ‘She didn’t do it!’ echoed Miss Bessie and giggled.

‘I did not think it wrong to say a prayer,’ Miss Mary continued. ‘Not for her soul, but for our peace. Then I was convinced.’

‘Then we got conviction,’ the younger sister piped.

‘We’ve misjudged poor Aggie, John. But I feel she knows now. Wherever she is, she knows that we know she is guiltless.’

‘Yes, she knows. I felt it too,’ said Miss Elizabeth.

‘I never doubted’ said John Baxter, whose face was beautiful at that hour. ‘Not from the first. Never have!’

‘You never offered me proof, John. Now, thank God, it will not be the same any more. I can think henceforward of Aggie without sorrow,’ She tripped, absolutely tripped, across the hall, ‘What ideas these Jews have of arranging furniture!’ She spied me behind a big cloisonné vase.

‘I’ve seen the window,’ she said remotely. ‘You took a great risk in advising me to undertake such a journey. However, as it turns out… I forgive you, and I pray you may never know what mental anguish means! Bessie! Look at this peculiarpiano! Do you suppose, Doctor, these people would offer one tea? I miss mine.’

‘I will go and see,’ I said, and explored M’Leod’s new-built servants’ wing. It was in the servants’ hall that I unearthed the M’Leod family, bursting with anxiety.

‘Tea for three, quick,’ I said. ‘If you ask me any questions now, I shall have a fit!’ So Mrs M’Leod got it, and I was butler, amid murmured apologies from Baxter, still smiling and self-absorbed, and the cold disapproval of Miss Mary, who thought the pattern of the china vulgar. However, she ate well, and even asked me whether I would not like a cup of tea for myself.

They went away in the twilight – the twilight that I had once feared. They were going to an hotel in London to rest after the fatigues of the day, and as their fly turned down the drive, I capered on the doorstep, with the all-darkened house behind me.

Then I heard the uncertain feet of the M’Leods, and bade them not to turn on the lights, but to feel – to feel what I had done; for the Shadow was gone, with the dumb desire in the air. They drew short, but afterwards deeper, breaths, like bathers entering chill water, separated one from the other, moved about the hall, tiptoed upstairs, raced down, and then Miss M’Leod, and I believe her mother, though she denies this, embraced me. I know M’Leod did.

It was a disgraceful evening. To say we rioted through the house is to put it mildly. We played a sort of Blind Man’s Buff along the darkest passages, in the unlighted drawing-room, and little dining-room, calling cheerily to each other after each exploration that here, and here, and here, the trouble had removed itself. We came up to thebedroom – mine for the night again – and sat, the women on the bed, and we men on chairs, drinking in blessed draughts of peace and comfort and cleanliness of soul, while I told them my tale in full, and received fresh praise, thanks, and blessings.

When the servants, returned from their day’s outing, gave us a supper of cold fried fish, M’Leod had sense enough to open no wine. We had been practically drunk since nightfall, and grew incoherent on water and milk.

‘I like that Baxter,’ said M’Leod. ‘He’s a sharp man. The death wasn’t in the house, but he ran it pretty close, ain’t it?’

‘And the joke of it is that he supposes I want to buy the place from you,’ I said. ‘Are you selling?’

‘Not for twice what I paid for it – now,’ said M’Leod. ‘I’ll keep you in furs all your life, but not our Holmescroft.’

‘No – never our Holmescroft,’ said Miss M’Leod. ‘We’ll ask
him
here on Tuesday, mamma.’ They squeezed each other’s hands.

‘Now tell me,’ said Mrs M’Leod – ‘that tall one I saw out of the scullery window – did
she
tell you she was always here in the spirit? I hate her. She made all this trouble. It was not her house after she had sold it. What do you think?’

‘I suppose,’ I answered, ‘she brooded over what she believed was her sister’s suicide night and day – she confessed she did – and her thoughts being concentrated on this place, they felt like a – like a burning-glass.’

‘Burning-glass is good,’ said M’Leod.

‘I said it was like a light of blackness turned on us,’ cried the girl, twiddling her ring. ‘That must have been when the tall one thought worst about her sister and the house.’

‘Ah, the poor Aggie!’ said Mrs M’Leod. ‘The poor Aggie, trying to tell every one it was not so! No wonder we felt Something wished to say Something. Thea, Max, do you remember that night—’

‘We need not remember any more,’ M’Leod interrupted. ‘It is not our trouble. They have told each other now.’

‘Do you think, then,’ said Miss M’Leod, ‘that those two, the living ones, were actually told something – upstairs – in your – in the room?’

‘I can’t say. At any rate they were made happy, and they ate a big tea afterwards. As your father says, it is not our trouble any longer – thank God!’

‘Amen!’ said M’Leod. ‘Now, Thea, let us have some music after all these months. “With mirth, thou pretty bird,” ain’t it? You ought to hear that.’

And in the half-lighted hall, Thea sang an old English song that I had never heard before.

With mirth, thou pretty bird, rejoice

Thy Maker’s praise enhanced;

Lift up thy shrill and pleasant voice,

Thy God is high advanced!

Thy food before He did provide,

And gives it in a fitting side,

Wherewith be thou sufficed!

Why shouldst thou now unpleasant be,

Thy wrath against God venting,

That He a little bird made thee,

Thy silly head tormenting,

Because He made thee not a man?

Oh, Peace! He hath well thought thereon,

Therewith be thou sufficed!

THE KNIFE AND THE NAKED CHALK

The children went to the seaside for a month, and lived in a flint village on the bare windy chalk Downs, quite thirty miles away from home. They made friends with an old shepherd, called Mr Dudeney, who had known their Father when their Father was little. He did not talk like their own people in the Weald of Sussex, and he used different names for farm things, but he understood how they felt, and let them go with him. He had a tiny cottage about half a mile from the village, where his wife made mead from thyme honey, and nursed sick lambs in front of a coal fire, while Old Jim, who was Mr Dudeney’s sheep-dog’s father, lay at the door. They brought up beef bones for Old Jim (you must never give a sheep-dog mutton bones), and if Mr Dudeney happened to be far in the Downs, Mrs Dudeney would tell the dog to take them to him, and he did.

One August afternoon when the village water-cart had made the street smell specially townified, they went to look for their shepherd as usual, and, as usual, Old Jim crawled over the door-step and took them in charge. The sun was hot, the dry grass was very slippery, and the distances were very distant.

‘It’s just like the sea,’ said Una, when Old Jim halted in the shade of a lonely flint barn on a bare rise. ‘You see where you’re going, and – you go there, and there’s nothing between.’

Dan slipped off his shoes. ‘When we get home I shall sit in the woods all day,’ he said.

‘Whuff!’ said Old Jim, to show he was ready, and struck across a long rolling stretch of turf. Presently he asked for his beef bone.

‘Not yet,’ said Dan. ‘Where’s Mr Dudeney? Where’s Master?’

Old Jim looked as if he thought they were mad, and asked again.

‘Don’t you give it him,’ Una cried. ‘I’m not going to be left howling in a desert.’

‘Show, boy! Show!’ said Dan, for the Downs seemed as bare as the palm of your hand.

Old Jim sighed, and trotted forward. Soon they spied the blob of Mr Dudeney’s hat against the sky a long way off.

‘Right! All right!’ said Dan. Old Jim wheeled round, took his bone carefully between his blunted teeth, and returned to the shadow of the old barn, looking just like a wolf. The children went on. Two kestrels hung biwering and squealing above them. A gull flapped lazily along the white edge of the cliffs. The curves of the Downs shook a little in the heat, and so did Mr Dudeney’s distant head.

They walked toward it very slowly and found themselves staring into a horseshoe-shaped hollow a hundred feet deep, whose steep sides were laced with tangled sheep-tracks. The flock grazed on the flat at the bottom, under charge of Young Jim. Mr Dudeney sat comfortably knitting on the edge of the slope, his crook between his knees. They told him what Old Jim had done.

‘Ah, he thought you could see my head as soon as he did. The closeter you be to the turf the more you see tilings. You look warm-like,’ said Mr Dudeney.

‘We be,’ said Una, flopping down. ‘
And
tired.’

‘Set beside o’ me here. The shadow’ll begin to stretch out in a little while, and a heat-shake o’ wind will come up with it that’ll overlay your eyes like so much wool.’

‘We don’t want to sleep,’ said Una indignantly; but she settled herself as she spoke, in the first strip of early afternoon shade.

‘O’ course not. You come to talk with me same as your father used.
He
didn’t need no dog to guide him to Norton Pit’

‘Well, he belonged here,’ said Dan, and laid himself down at length on the turf.

‘He did. And what beats me is why he went off to live among them messy trees in the Weald, when he might ha’ stayed here and looked all about him. There’s no profit to trees. They draw the lightning, and sheep shelter under ’em, and
so
,like as not, you’ll lose a half-score ewes struck dead in one storm. Tck! Your father knew that.’

‘Trees aren’t messy,’ Una rose on her elbow. ‘And what about firewood? I don’t like coal.’

‘Eh? You lie a piece more uphill and you’ll lie more natural,’ said Mr Dudeney, with his provoking deaf smile. ‘Now press your face down and smell to the turf. That’s Southdown thyme which makes our Southdown mutton beyond compare, and, my mother told me, ’twill cure anything except broken necks, or hearts. I forget which.’

They sniffed, and somehow forgot to lift their cheeks from the soft thymy cushions.

‘You don’t get nothing like that in the Weald. Watercress, maybe?’ said Mr Dudeney.

‘But we’ve water – brooks full of it – where you paddle in hot weather,’ Una replied, watching a yellow-and-violet-banded snail-shell close to her eye.

‘Brooks flood. Then you must shift your sheep – let alone foot-rot afterward. I put more dependence on a dew-pond any day.’

‘How’s a dew-pond made?’ said Dan, and tilted his hat over his eyes. Mr Dudeney explained.

The air trembled a little as though it could not make up its mind whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it seemed easiest to go downhill, and the children felt one soft puff after another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that baffed on their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs joined with the whisper of the wind over the grass, the hum of insects in the thyme, the ruffle and rustle of the flock below, and a thickish mutter deep in the very chalk beneath them. Mr Dudeney stopped explaining, and went on with his knitting.

They were roused by voices. The shadow had crept half-way down the steep side of Norton Pit, and on the edge of it, his back to them, Puck sat beside a half-naked man who seemed busy at some work. The wind had dropped, and in that funnel of ground every least noise and movement reached them like whispers up a water-pipe.

‘That is clever,’ said Puck, leaning over. ‘How truly you shape it!’

‘Yes, but what does The Beast care for a brittle flint tip? Bah! The man flicked something contemptuously over his shoulder. It fell between Dan and Una – a beautiful dark-blue flint arrow-head still hot from the maker’s hand.

The man reached for another stone, and worked away like a dirush with a snail-shell.

‘Flint work is fool’s work,’ he said at last. ‘One does it because one always did it; but when it comes to dealing with The Beast – no good!’ He shook his shaggy head.

‘The Beast was dealt with long ago. He has gone,’ said Puck.

‘He’ll be back at lambing-time.
I
know him.’ He chipped very carefully, and the flints squeaked.

‘Not he. Children can lie out on the Chalk now all day through and go home safe.’

‘Can they? Well, call The Beast by his True Name, and I’ll believe it,’ the man replied.

‘Surely!’ Puck leaped to his feet, curved his hands round his mouth and shouted: ‘Wolf! Wolf!’

Norton Pit threw back the echo from its dry sides – ‘Wuff! Wuff!’ like Young Jim’s bark.

‘You see? You hear?’ said Puck. ‘Nobody answers. Grey Shepherd is gone. Feet-in-the-Night has run off. There are no more wolves.’

‘Wonderful!’ The man wiped his forehead as though he were hot. ‘Who drove him away? You?’

‘Many men through many years, each working in his own country. Were you one of them?’ Puck answered.

The man slid his sheepskin cloak to his waist, and without a word pointed to his side, which was all seamed and blotchedwith scars. His arms, too, were dimpled from shoulder to elbow with horrible white dimples.

‘I see,’ said Puck. ‘It is The Beast’s mark. What did you use against him?’

‘Hand, hammer, and spear, as our fathers did before us.’

‘So? Then how’ – Puck twitched aside the man’s dark-brown cloak – ‘how did a Flint-worker come by
that
?Show, man, show!’ He held out his little hand.

The man slipped a long dark iron knife, almost a short sword, from his belt, and after breathing on it, handed it hilt-first to Puck, who took it with his head on one side, as you should when you look at the works of a watch, squinted down the dark blade, and very delicately rubbed his forefinger from the point to the hilt.

‘Good!’ said he, in a surprised tone.

‘It should be. The Children of the Night made it,’ the man answered.

‘So I see by the iron. What might it have cost you?’

‘This!’ The man raised his hand to his cheek. Puck whistled like a Weald starling.

‘By the Great Rings of the Chalk!’ he cried. ‘Was
that
yourprice? Turn sunward that I may see better, and shut your eye.’

He slipped his hand beneath the man’s chin and swung him till he faced the children up the slope. They saw that his right eye was gone, and the eyelid lay shrunk. Quickly Puck turned him round again, and the two sat down.

‘It was for the sheep. The sheep are the people,’ said the man, in an ashamed voice. ‘What else could I have done?
You
know, Old One.’

Puck sighed a little fluttering sigh. ‘Take the knife. I listen.’

The man bowed his head, drove the knife into the turf, and while it still quivered said: ‘This is witness between us that I speak the thing that has been. Before my Knife and the Naked Chalk I speak. Touch!’

Puck laid a hand on the hilt. It stopped shaking. The children wriggled a little nearer.

‘I am of the People of the Worked Flint. I am the one son of the Priestess who sells the Winds to the Men of the Sea. I amthe Buyer of the Knife – the Keeper of the People,’ the man began, in a sort of singing shout. ‘These are my names in this country of the Naked Chalk, between the Trees and the Sea.’

‘Yours was a great country. Your names are great too,’ said Puck.

‘One cannot feed some things on names and songs.’ The man hit himself on the chest. ‘It is better – always better – to count one’s children safe round the fire, their Mother among them.’

‘Ahai!’ said Puck. ‘I think this will be a very old tale.’

‘I warm myself and eat at any fire that I choose, but there is no
one
to light me a fire or cook my meat. I sold all that when I bought the Magic Knife for my people. It was not right that The Beast should master man. What else could I have done?’

‘I hear. I know. I listen,’ said Puck.

‘When I was old enough to take my place in the Sheep-guard, The Beast gnawed all our country like a bone between his teeth. He came in behind the flocks at watering-time, and watched them round the Dew-ponds; he leaped into the folds between our knees at the shearing; he walked out alongside the grazing flocks, and chose his meat on the hoof while our boys threw flints at him; he crept by night into the huts, and licked the babe from between the mother’s hands; he called his companions and pulled down men in broad daylight on the Naked Chalk. No – not always did he do so!
This
was his cunning! He would go away for a while to let us forget him. A year – two years perhaps – we neither smelt, nor heard, nor saw him. When our flocks had increased; when our men did not always look behind them; when children strayed from the fenced places; when our women walked alone to draw water – back, back, back came the Curse of the Chalk, Grey Shepherd, Feet-in-the-Night – The Beast, The Beast, The Beast!

‘He laughed at our little brittle arrows and our poor blunt spears. He learned to run in under the stroke of the hammer. I think he knew when there was a flaw in the flint. Often it does not show till you bring it down on his snout. Then –
Pouf! –
thefalse flint falls all to flinders, and you are left with the hammer-handle in your fist, and his teeth in your flank! I havefelt them. At evening, too, in the dew, or when it has misted and rained, your spear-head lashings slack off, though you have kept them beneath your cloak all day. You are alone – but so close to the home ponds that you stop to tighten the sinews with hands, teeth, and a piece of driftwood. You bend over and pull – so! That is the minute for which he has followed you since the stars went out. “Aarh!” he says. “Wurr-aarh!” he says.’ (Norton Pit gave back the growl like a pack of real wolves.) ‘Then he is on your right shoulder feeling for the vein in your neck, and – perhaps your sheep run on without you. To fight The Beast is nothing, but to be despised by The Beast when he fights you – that is like his teeth in the heart! Old One, why is it that men desire so greatly, and can do so little?’

‘I do not know. Did you desire so much?’ said Puck.

‘I desired to master The Beast. It is not right that The Beast should master man. But my people were afraid. Even my Mother, the Priestess, was afraid when I told her what I desired. We were accustomed to be afraid of The Beast. When I was made a man, and a maiden – she was a Priestess – waited for me at the Dew-ponds, The Beast flitted from off the Chalk. Perhaps it was a sickness; perhaps he had gone to his Gods to learn how to do us new harm. But he went, and we breathed more freely. The women sang again; the children were not so much guarded; our flocks grazed far out. I took mine yonder’ – he pointed inland to the hazy line of the Weald – ‘where the new grass was best. They grazed north. I followed till we were close to the Trees’ – he lowered his voice – ‘close
there
where the Children of the Night live.’ He pointed north again.

‘Ah, now I remember a thing,’ said Puck. ‘Tell me, why did your people fear the Trees so extremely?’

‘Because the Gods hate the Trees and strike them with lightning. We can see them burning for days all along the Chalk’s edge. Besides, all the Chalk knows that the Children of the Night, though they worship our Gods, are magicians. When a man goes into their country, they change his spirit; they put words into his mouth; they make him like talkingwater. But a voice in my heart told me to go toward the north. While I watched my sheep there I saw three Beasts chasing a man, who ran toward the Trees. By this I knew he was a Child of the Night. We Flint-workers fear the Trees more than we fear The Beast. He had no hammer. He carried a knife like this one. A Beast leaped at him. He stretched out his knife. The Beast fell dead. The other Beasts ran away howling, which they would never have done from a Flint-worker. The man went in among the Trees. I looked for the dead Beast. He had been killed in a new way – by a single deep, clean cut, without bruise or tear, which had split his bad heart. Wonderful! So I saw that the man’s knife was magic, and I thought how to get it, – thought strongly how to get it.