Short Fiction

The Image of the Lost Soul

There were a number of carved stone figures placed at intervals along the parapets of the old Cathedral; some of them represented angels, others kings and bishops, and nearly all were in attitudes of pious exaltation and composure. But one figure, low down on the cold north side of the building, had neither crown, mitre, not nimbus, and its face was hard and bitter and downcast; it must be a demon, declared the fat blue pigeons that roosted and sunned themselves all day on the ledges of the parapet; but the old belfry jackdaw, who was an authority on ecclesiastical architecture, said it was a lost soul. And there the matter rested.

One autumn day there fluttered on to the Cathedral roof a slender, sweet-voiced bird that had wandered away from the bare fields and thinning hedgerows in search of a winter roosting-place. It tried to rest its tired feet under the shade of a great angel-wing or to nestle in the sculptured folds of a kingly robe, but the fat pigeons hustled it away from wherever it settled, and the noisy sparrow-folk drove it off the ledges. No respectable bird sang with so much feeling, they cheeped one to another, and the wanderer had to move on.

Only the effigy of the Lost Soul offered a place of refuge. The pigeons did not consider it safe to perch on a projection that leaned so much out of the perpendicular, and was, besides, too much in the shadow. The figure did not cross its hands in the pious attitude of the other graven dignitaries, but its arms were folded as in defiance and their angle made a snug resting-place for the little bird. Every evening it crept trustfully into its corner against the stone breast of the image, and the darkling eyes seemed to keep watch over its slumbers. The lonely bird grew to love its lonely protector, and during the day it would sit from time to time on some rainshoot or other abutment and trill forth its sweetest music in grateful thanks for its nightly shelter. And, it may have been the work of wind and weather, or some other influence, but the wild drawn face seemed gradually to lose some of its hardness and unhappiness. Every day, through the long monotonous hours, the song of his little guest would come up in snatches to the lonely watcher, and at evening, when the vesper-bell was ringing and the great grey bats slid out of their hiding-places in the belfry roof, the bright-eyed bird would return, twitter a few sleepy notes, and nestle into the arms that were waiting for him. Those were happy days for the Dark Image. Only the great bell of the Cathedral rang out daily its mocking message, “After joy … sorrow.”

The folk in the verger’s lodge noticed a little brown bird flitting about the Cathedral precincts, and admired its beautiful singing. “But it is a pity,” said they, “that all that warbling should be lost and wasted far out of hearing up on the parapet.” They were poor, but they understood the principles of political economy. So they caught the bird and put it in a little wicker cage outside the lodge door.

That night the little songster was missing from its accustomed haunt, and the Dark Image knew more than ever the bitterness of loneliness. Perhaps his little friend had been killed by a prowling cat or hurt by a stone. Perhaps … perhaps he had flown elsewhere. But when morning came there floated up to him, through the noise and bustle of the Cathedral world, a faint heart-aching message from the prisoner in the wicker cage far below. And every day, at high noon, when the fat pigeons were stupefied into silence after their midday meal and the sparrows were washing themselves in the street-puddles, the song of the little bird came up to the parapets—a song of hunger and longing and hopelessness, a cry that could never be answered. The pigeons remarked, between mealtimes, that the figure leaned forward more than ever out of the perpendicular.

One day no song came up from the little wicker cage. It was the coldest day of the winter, and the pigeons and sparrows on the Cathedral roof looked anxiously on all sides for the scraps of food which they were dependent on in hard weather.

“Have the lodge-folk thrown out anything on to the dust-heap?” inquired one pigeon of another which was peering over the edge of the north parapet.

“Only a little dead bird,” was the answer.

There was a crackling sound in the night on the Cathedral roof and a noise as of falling masonry. The belfry jackdaw said the frost was affecting the fabric, and as he had experienced many frosts it must have been so. In the morning it was seen that the Figure of the Lost Soul had toppled from its cornice and lay now in a broken mass on the dust-heap outside the verger’s lodge.

“It is just as well,” cooed the fat pigeons, after they had peered at the matter for some minutes; “now we shall have a nice angel put up there. Certainly they will put an angel there.”

“After joy … sorrow,” rang out the great bell.

Dogged

Artemus Gibbon was, by nature and inclination, blameless and respectable, and under happier circumstances the record of his life might have preserved the albino tint of its early promise; but he was of timid and yielding disposition, and had been carefully brought up, so that his case was clearly hopeless from the first. It only remained for the strong and unscrupulous character to come alongside, and the result was a foregone conclusion. And one afternoon it came. It is a well-tried axiom that, in human affairs, as in steeplechasing, the ugliest croppers occur at the “safest” and most carefully pruned places, and of all conceivable occasions for a young man to go irretrievably wrong, a church bazaar would seem to offer the least appropriate opportunity. Yet it was at such a function, opened by a bishop’s lady, and patronised by the most hopelessly correct people in the neighbourhood, that Artemus Gibbon went unsuspectingly to his undoing.

In the first place it must be admitted that his natural timidity was played upon by the embarrassing absence of anything at the bazaar which a bachelor of prosaic tastes might reasonably be expected to purchase with any approach to hearty conviction that his money was profitably laid out. Baby linen, which seemed to be the staple article on most of the stalls, was not to be thought of for a moment and the innate modesty of his taste in dress caused him to recoil from the “Jubilee Memento Scarves,” hand-worked with the royal arms in a delirium of crimson and gold. Hence, when he had purchased a harmless and unnecessary pincushion and two views of Durham Cathedral, he felt that he might, without odium, effect a dexterous retreat. Here it was that the Foreseen and Inevitable stepped in and changed the placid current of his life. He was pounced upon by a severe-looking dame, with an air of one being in authority, who gave him to understand that it was required of him that he should buy a dog.

“Only two guineas; my niece has charge of him over there. Clara!” Gibbon found himself a moment later confronted by a vivacious damsel—and the dog. The possibility of admitting a canine companion within the narrow compass of his establishment had not been altogether foreign to his speculations on life; a quiet, meek-eyed spaniel for instance, which would occupy an unobtrusive position by his domestic hearth, or participate in his constitutional walks, or, in later days, perhaps, a dignified deerhound with a tendency to statuesque repose—such were the shapes that his occasional ruminations on the subject had taken. But the dog now before him was by no means built according to these patterns. A rakish-looking fox terrier, stamped with the hallmark of naked and unashamed depravity, and wearing the yawningly alert air of one who has found the world is vain and likes it all the better for it, such was the specimen of dog-flesh at which Mr. Artemus Gibbon found himself gazing in blank dismay.

Before he had quite realised the full force of the cataclysm in which he was involved, he had parted with the demanded forty-two shillings, and learned from the vivacious damsel the appalling fact that his new purchase was named Beelzebub. Something instinctively told him that he had parted too with his peace of mind, and as he was towed out of the bazaar premises in the wake of a yelping and plunging terrier, with an accompaniment of noise and publicity uncongenial to his natural modesty, he was dimly aware that he had started on a downgrade path that led to no good and peaceful end. To the ordinary intellect his position might not have appeared irretrievable; the dog which he had been rushed into buying, and whose personality inspired him with the strongest repugnance, was not necessarily a fixture. An immediate purchaser might be discovered, or the undesired acquisition might be given away, lost, or otherwise disposed of.

But here again the working of inexorable laws sterilized the chances of Gibbon’s emancipation. In a conflict between their respective will powers, the man inevitably succumbed to the fox terrier, and, when the dinner-hour exposed the bachelor’s sitting room to the observation of a tray-bearing handmaiden, its occupant was discovered in a condition of deprecatory embarrassment; whilst the dog, snugly ensconced in the only armchair, was the embodiment of self-composure and critical appraisement. As a general rule, Gibbon was not demonstratively communicative with maidservants, and his intercourse in this direction was usually limited to a perfunctory (vocal) salutation, or a mild request for a forgotten napkin, or suchlike trifle. But the advent of Beelzebub had already dislocated the wonted disposition of affairs, and the girl became aware that an appeal of some nature was being addressed to her.

“Er, Mary, this little dog, er, I think you—might say nothing about it to Mrs. Mulberry, er, just yet, that is, I will break it to her—I mean—will tell her myself—tomorrow morning.” While Gibbon was delivering himself of this charge he was shoving a warm, moist shilling Mary-wards along the table with a succession of short pats, as if he thought the coin should have some impetus of its own, and start forward in the desired direction. The hush money staved off the crisis which must assuredly arise when the landlady became aware of the canine presence in her apartments, and Gibbon, having successfully smuggled the contraband article into his bedroom, congratulated himself on having so far made the best of the situation. But, as the dog slipped out next morning on the incoming of the hot water, and chivvied the landlady’s cat into the landlady’s bedroom, and followed it on to her bed and under the blankets, where a muffled but vigorous battle royal ensued, it became doubtful whether the shilling had been, after all, a judicious outlay.

Gibbon found that his selection of new rooms was considerably narrowed by the prejudice aroused in the breasts of prospective landladies on the sight of his canine satellite, who accompanied him as a matter of course on all his quests; and finally, having strayed into a suite of chambers furnished in a style of bohemian extravagance that was wholly out of keeping with his accustomed ways of life, the terrier clinched matters for him by settling down therein and refusing to leave. Gibbon hunted him ineffectually round the place, upset and disarranged the furniture, all to no purpose; and at length, on the suggestion of the proprietor—“you’d better take the rooms, sir, seems as if it was meant like”—he took alarm at the idea of resisting the possible workings of a Higher Power, and yielded. It was the weak character pitted against the strong once more, and the result was as it ever must be.

To the deteriorating effects of baneful companionship were now added the subtle workings of the laws of environment. Gibbon was too bashfully diffident to remove even the most glaringly uncongenial adornments of his new quarters, and it was a sign of his drifting progress that the views of Durham Cathedral did not find hanging room on the well-covered walls. Instead of these solidly respectable works of art, his eyes were daily confronted with presentiments of ladies who had apparently conquered the love of dress that is attributed to their sex, interspersed with portraits of racehorses noted for their fastness, or of society beauties with a similar reputation. But the chief agent in the moral slump which was becoming more and more pronounced in the person of Artemus Gibbon was undoubtedly Beelzebub. The very name was a stumbling block to the leading of a respectable life, and a young man who called an already sufficiently unprepossessing animal by such an unseemly appellation was doomed to be dropped by self-respecting acquaintances.

Then with change of friends came also change of habits. Sober constitutionals became a thing of the past since Beelzebub, speedily bored by such tame affairs, contracted a habit of jumping into the nearest empty hansom; the cabman naturally pulled up, and as the dog would not get out, Gibbon had to get in. Having no address that he could give at the moment—it usually happened a few yards from his own door—a restaurant became the necessary destination, and Beelzebub never left much before closing time. The eye of the waiter, scornfully regarding his slowly emptied glass of lager, invariably impelled the naturally temperate Gibbon to order another drink, and the homeward cab was sometimes a matter of convenience as well as dictation.

As fast as the fate-driven dissipator alienated old acquaintances, Beelzebub supplied him with new ones of a stamp more congruous with his altered circumstances; smart sporting youths, lurid in waistcoats and conversation, foregathered with the guileless owner of the indiscriminately social terrier, and one by one the landmarks of the placid past were swept away. Awaking in the harsh crude light of mature morning from late and unrefreshing sleep, Artemus would cast his eyes wearily round his disordered rooms, and everywhere the trail of the dog met his gaze, in powdery cigarette ashes, empty liqueur glasses, vivid-hued sporting periodicals, and tumbled packs of cards.

But the finishing touch was yet to come. Sitting one night in a café where he and his dog were now recognised habitués, slowly imbibing the Scotch and soda that had supplanted the lager of his earlier dissipations, Gibbon had momentarily lost himself in that superstructure of woe that consists of “remembering happier things”; in particular he was thinking of a certain prodigally inclined young friend of his pre-canine days, by name Hilary Helforlether, whom he had tried to keep, by the force of example and precept, in the straight and narrow way that leads to a respected old age. From the uncomfortable reflections to which this reverie gave rise, he was suddenly aroused by a screamlet of vexed consternation, and turning sharply beheld at an adjoining table a lady, whose entrance had languidly attracted his attention some quarter of an hour ago. She was young and pretty and birdlike—especially with regard to her hair, which was of the tint a Norwich Canary aspires to but seldom attains—and there was just a delicate flavour of a possible foreign extraction about her; her attire was a rhapsody (with lucid intervals) of purple and gold, and a magnificent boa of ostrich feather had supplied the finishing touch to an impressive costume. The soft shimmering lengths of this elegant accessory had attracted the attention of the ever-alert Beelzebub, who had quietly abstracted it as it hung negligently from its owner’s chair, and by a process of “little and often” had conscientiously given to each individual feather a separate and independent existence.

Gibbon’s horrified gaze, attracted by the lady’s excusable agitation, rested on his graceless quadruped snoozing amid the ruin of fluffiness like an eider-duckling in its nest. “No marvel that the lady wept,” or would have if consideration for her complexion had not prevailed, and Beelzebub’s owner hastened to gasp out a little hurricane of apologies and enquiries as to the estimated cost of the damage.

The lady really behaved very sweetly considering her provocation, and if in her agitation she placed the price of her ravaged boa somewhat above its Bond Street level, it was only in accordance with the impulse which teaches us to value things the more when we have lost them. Gibbon had not the amount on him, would the lady give him her address, or, well, yes, perhaps that would be better, he would give her his card, tomorrow afternoon, unfailingly, etc., etc., and before he knew what he was doing he had made an assignation with the boa-bereaved damsel.

Gibbon had never before given tea to a lady in his apartments, and was necessarily rather inept in his administration of this unwonted hospitality, but his fair guest supplied the deficiencies of his experience, and knew exactly when the milder beverage should be followed up by liqueurs and cigarettes. That she was not dissatisfied with her entertainment her host gathered from the fact that she graciously forestalled his invitation to come again and continue his education in the art of tea-giving. In short, she was altogether in affable mood, and if she forgot to give the overwhelmed Gibbon any change for his tenner, she at least atoned for the omission by favouring him with a wholly spontaneous kiss.

This unsolicited kindness was conferred on him while opening his outer door for his visitor’s departure, which was the appropriate psychological moment for its delivery; it was unfortunate, nevertheless, that Hilary Helforlether should have chosen the same moment for appearing hull-down on the staircase horizon. Artemus, having sped the parting guest, greeted his new visitor with a hastily mobilised smile that suffered by comparison with the grin on his sometime disciple’s face.

“Oh, you pipeclayed sepulchre! Thought you were the blamed whiting of a lifeless flower, and all that sort of thing. Rats! Hullo, what a jolly terrier. Does he belong to you?”

“No; I belong to him. Body and soul,” muttered Gibbon, drearily.

The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water

A West-Country Epic

The Cricks lived at Toad-Water; and in the same lonely upland spot Fate had pitched the home of the Saunderses, and for miles around these two dwellings there was never a neighbour or a chimney or even a burying-ground to bring a sense of cheerful communion or social intercourse. Nothing but fields and spinneys and barns, lanes and wastelands. Such was Toad-Water; and, even so, Toad-Water had its history.

Thrust away in the benighted hinterland of a scattered market district, it might have been supposed that these two detached items of the Great Human Family would have leaned towards one another in a fellowship begotten of kindred circumstances and a common isolation from the outer world. And perhaps it had been so once, but the way of things had brought it otherwise. Indeed, otherwise. Fate, which had linked the two families in such unavoidable association of habitat, had ordained that the Crick household should nourish and maintain among its earthly possessions sundry head of domestic fowls, while to the Saunderses was given a disposition towards the cultivation of garden crops. Herein lay the material, ready to hand, for the coming of feud and ill-blood. For the grudge between the man of herbs and the man of live stock is no new thing; you will find traces of it in the fourth chapter of Genesis. And one sunny afternoon in late springtime the feud came—came, as such things mostly do come, with seeming aimlessness and triviality. One of the Crick hens, in obedience to the nomadic instincts of her kind, wearied of her legitimate scratching-grounds, and flew over the low wall that divided the holdings of the neighbours. And there, on the yonder side, with a hurried consciousness that her time and opportunities might be limited, the misguided bird scratched and scraped and beaked and delved in the soft yielding bed that had been prepared for the solace and well-being of a colony of seedling onions. Little showers of earth-mould and root-fibres went spraying before the hen and behind her, and every minute the area of her operations widened. The onions suffered considerably. Mrs. Saunders, sauntering at this luckless moment down the garden path, in order to fill her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of the weeds, which grew faster than she or her good man cared to remove them, stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a more magnificent grievance. And then, in the hour of her calamity, she turned instinctively to the Great Mother, and gathered in her capacious hands large clods of the hard brown soil that lay at her feet. With a terrible sincerity of purpose, though with a contemptible inadequacy of aim, she rained her earth bolts at the marauder, and the bursting pellets called forth a flood of cackling protest and panic from the hastily departing fowl. Calmness under misfortune is not an attribute of either hen-folk or womenkind, and while Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such portions of the slang dictionary as are permitted by the Nonconformist conscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da Gama fowl was waking the echoes of Toad-Water with crescendo bursts of throat music which compelled attention to her griefs. Mrs. Crick had a long family, and was therefore licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have a short temper, and when some of her ubiquitous offspring had informed her, with the authority of eyewitnesses, that her neighbour had so far forgotten herself as to heave stones at her hen—her best hen, the best layer in the countryside—her thoughts clothed themselves in language “unbecoming to a Christian woman”—so at least said Mrs. Saunders, to whom most of the language was applied. Nor was she, on her part, surprised at Mrs. Crick’s conduct in letting her hens stray into other body’s gardens, and then abusing of them, seeing as how she remembered things against Mrs. Crick—and the latter simultaneously had recollections of lurking episodes in the past of Susan Saunders that were nothing to her credit. “Fond memory, when all things fade we fly to thee,” and in the paling light of an April afternoon the two women confronted each other from their respective sides of the party wall, recalling with shuddering breath the blots and blemishes of their neighbour’s family record. There was that aunt of Mrs. Crick’s who had died a pauper in Exeter workhouse—everyone knew that Mrs. Saunders’ uncle on her mother’s side drank himself to death—then there was that Bristol cousin of Mrs. Crick’s! From the shrill triumph with which his name was dragged in, his crime must have been pilfering from a cathedral at least, but as both remembrancers were speaking at once it was difficult to distinguish his infamy from the scandal which beclouded the memory of Mrs. Saunders’ brother’s wife’s mother—who may have been a regicide, and was certainly not a nice person as Mrs. Crick painted her. And then, with an air of accumulating and irresistible conviction, each belligerent informed the other that she was no lady—after which they withdrew in a great silence, feeling that nothing further remained to be said. The chaffinches clinked in the apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and the waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, but between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate, permeating and permanent.

The male heads of the families were necessarily drawn into the quarrel, and the children on either side were forbidden to have anything to do with the unhallowed offspring of the other party. As they had to travel a good three miles along the same road to school every day, this was awkward, but such things have to be. Thus all communication between the households was sundered. Except the cats. Much as Mrs. Saunders might deplore it, rumour persistently pointed to the Crick he-cat as the presumable father of sundry kittens of which the Saunders she-cat was indisputably the mother. Mrs. Saunders drowned the kittens, but the disgrace remained.

Summer succeeded spring, and winter summer, but the feud outlasted the waning seasons. Once, indeed, it seemed as though the healing influences of religion might restore to Toad-Water its erstwhile peace; the hostile families found themselves side by side in the soul-kindling atmosphere of a Revival Tea, where hymns were blended with a beverage that came of tea-leaves and hot water and took after the latter parent, and where ghostly counsel was tempered by garnishings of solidly fashioned buns—and here, wrought up by the environment of festive piety, Mrs. Saunders so far unbent as to remark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the evening had been a fine one. Mrs. Crick, under the influence of her ninth cup of tea and her fourth hymn, ventured on the hope that it might continue fine, but a maladroit allusion on the part of the Saunders good man to the backwardness of garden crops brought the Feud stalking forth from its corner with all its old bitterness. Mrs. Saunders joined heartily in the singing of the final hymn, which told of peace and joy and archangels and golden glories; but her thoughts were dwelling on the pauper aunt of Exeter.

Years have rolled away, and some of the actors in this wayside drama have passed into the Unknown; other onions have arisen, have flourished, have gone their way, and the offending hen has long since expiated her misdeeds and lain with trussed feet and a look of ineffable peace under the arched roof of Barnstaple market.

But the Blood-feud of Toad-Water survives to this day.