Five rare stories by GA
ive Rare Stories by GA
MERIEL STANLEY, POACHER
by Grant Allen
Transcribed from The Washington Post
Jan. 14, 1900, p. 27
by
Victor A. Berch
Meriel Stanley is a singular instance of the natural woman still surviving in our midst. And the natural woman is at war with our civilization. I never see poor Meriel without an inner shudder, when I think of the end to which fate and her own temperament must inevitably hurry her. That shapely brown neck, straight and firm as a column, is all too delicate for a rope. Yet a rope it will be, or I am no true prophet.
When I say that Meriel is a natural woman I mean what I say, for good and for evil. See her leaning her elbows on the gate that leads from Sir Walter's copse out on to the heather-clad moorland--a tall, lithe figure, with keen, brown face, eager, wistful eyes, and wealth of black hair just peeping from beneath her pink-and-white sunbonnet--a bronzed woman of the people, quivering with suppressed emotion to the tips of the fingers--and you can guess at once the salient points of her character. Hers is the impassioned temperament, embodied in a sound and vigorous frame; take her as a specimen of the natural woman, a savage still at heart, but a savage of the best type, capable of great love, great revenge, great devotion, great self-sacrifice, great crimes, great repentances, but not of anything mean or small or commonplace.
The savage has in him, in the germ, all that the best and worst among civilized men have developed separately--except one thing--consistency. He can rise to splendid heights of generosity and sink to the vile depths of cruelty and shame; but all is momentary; what he cannot compass is sustained action or sustained feeling. He is a creature of moral impulses, for good or bad. The passing mood, the passing emotion sway him. And Meriel is like that. She can love; she can hate; but she cannot be steadily or persistently anything.
In spite of her strange name, she is not a gypsy. At least not consciously. Much gypsy blood lurks unknown in the wild region of Dorset, where the Stanleys live; and Meriel has associated with gypsies and poachers from her childhood upward. She can even "patter Romany" a little, though only as an outsider; but her people have long been settled in this district, and if ever they were members of the Stanley clan, have forgotten it long ago in all save their surname. As to her fantastic Christian name, Meriel, that came to her from an aunt, who inherited it in turn from five generations of female ancestors. Meriel was christened by that name, though the clergyman who baptized her tried hard to modernize and vulgarize it into Muriel; but her mother stood up stoutly against such new-fangled nonsense. "'Twas always Meriel with the Stanleys and Tibbalds," she said, with true pride of race, "ever since I heard tell of 'em; my mauld shall be Meriel, passon will it or passon nill it." And Meriel she was from that day onward.
It may surprise you to learn that Meriel was ever christened at all; for when she was a bairn, the nearest church to Greydown was at Upton Parva, seven long miles off across the moor as the crow flies; and the people of Greydown in those days fecked little in most ways of churches and parsons. "They were a barbarous folk up here, zur, " Meriel's father said to me one day, in a rare burst of loquaciousness, for he is a silent man: " I don't suppose you'd 'a found a more barbarous folk anywheres in England, go forty years back, than the Greydown people." And he was quite right. The hill itself stands mainly in Dorset; but it lies at the upper end of three river valleys, and at the junction of three shires; so for ages, it was the refuge of all the gypsies, the horse-copers, the sheep-stealers, the poachers, the miscellaneous riff-raff and outlaws of the neighborhood. Nowadays, their descendants for the most part are honestly occupied in broom-making and basket-weaving; but they do not take readily to steady labor, preferring to be free and to be their own masters--a natural taste which I will confess I share with them. Nevertheless, even in their worst days of barbarism, the Greydowners always christened their children in church, and were married by parson; not that they attached much religious importance to the rite in either case; but they liked the importance of it; that was the regular authorized way of doing things, and they would wish the settled folk down yonder at Upton to know that the Greydowners were every bit as good Christians any day as they were. Because you are a broomsquire, that is no valid reason why you shouldn't behave like other civilized gentlefolk.
"Then you really were christened Meriel?" I said to her once interrogatively. And she answered, half-laughing, "Yes; I was christened all right, zur; but I don't suppose it took." And I think she was right; for a verier pagan than Meriel Stanley it would be hard to light upon. As a girl, she grew up on this high, wild moorland, running about shoeless and stockingless among the gorse and heather, and trapping leverets, and browning her shapely legs with paddling in the ponds after newts and tadpoles. To this day, she can tickle trout against any man in Dorsetshire. Her father's cottage lay among tall bracken in a valley or bottom just below the gibbet--that gibbet on which the murderers of the warfaring women were hung in chains a hundred years ago, and which long remained a terror and a warning to evil-doers, the sole symbol of civilization, repressive civilization, in these lonely uplands. You can tell the cottage from others about by the climbing red roses and by the great stacks of dry heather piled outside the door, and waiting to be made up into farmhouse brooms, such as used for rough work in yards and stables. Before Meriel was ten years old, she knew as much about jays and weasels and hawks and foxes as Sir Walter's gamekeeper. She could show you the mottled brown eggs of the night-jar, lying loose on the bare ground without nest or shelter; she could find the wren's callow young and baby stoats in the copse; she had observed at what age the soft little hedgehogs begin to get their prickles hardened, and where the woodcock probed with their long, straight bills after grubs and worms in the soft, spongy moss of the peat-logged hollows. At eighteen, she was tall and beautiful, with wild, unkempt hair; hair long and black and straight and wiry, without a suspicion of curl in it, recalling perhaps the remote Indian blood of her gypsy ancestors, once Jats of the Punjaub. A handsomer girl of her wayward peasant type I have seldom seen. Let me try to describe her.
Meriel's head is shapely and well poised on her shoulders--a trait which you will find almost always accompanies the impassioned character. Her neck is erect, and she carries herself proudly. The pose reminds me at times of the portraits of Dante. And indeed, though it may sound odd to compare this wild English moorland girl with the proud, sardonic Tuscan poet, I can recognize in essence a certain community of type between the two. Her eyes are dark and shy, but with sudden flashes in them. The eyebrows and eyelids are black and abundant. Her long, straight hair flows down on her shoulders when loosed--as it often is--or else is gathered up into a great careless bunch at the back of the head, with folds covering the ears, which recall Charlotte Bronte. For her essentials, Meriel is just a Charlotte Bronte undeveloped. Her features are somewhat large, but soft in outline; her chin strong; her mouth has sensuous, thick lips, redeemed by the exquisite curve, like a Rosetti portrait. The hands are long and slender; the fingers have a curious tremulous movement; the whole emotion of the woman comes out in them at times, as it comes out in her heaving bosom, her flashing eye, her close-set lips, her strange wistful expression. She impresses me always as vaguely longing for something above her--something she has never known and never will know--something from which her class and her lack of education for ever divide her.
You must know Meriel pretty well, indeed, before you begin to suspect how much there is in her. Like most people of intensely passionate natures, she is not given to speech; her thoughts and feelings lie too deep for words; and even if her pride did not prevent her from saying at all times what she feels, her mere lack of vocabulary would suffice to keep her from voluble self-revelation. Nor is she by any means demonstrative. It is an error to suppose that emotional natures are necessarily given to expressing their emotion either in words or gestures. The exact opposite would be truer. Emotion hides itself. Meriel's manners are quiet and reserved; she is not fitful or restless; you cannot often see how profoundly she is thinking or feeling; only at rare moments does some accident reveal the real depth of her nature. Once I caught her at sunset by the two-step stile that leads from the moor into the Lammmas fields. She did not hear me coming. I crept up behind her, admiring her lithe form, silhouetted against the red sky, as she leaned on the stile and gazed at the crimson and orange clouds before her. When I drew quite near, she turned round with a short sigh. To my surprise, I saw she had tears in her eyes. "That's a beautiful sky, Meriel," I said. She clasped her hands and answered, "Oh, beautiful; beautiful! A sky like that makes one cry, zur, doan't it?" Then, as if she had let herself go too much, she turned and fled, like the wayward forest-haunting thing she is. For a month after, whenever she saw me, she seemed to slink on one side, as if ashamed of having let herself be discovered in the act of admiring nature.
A girl of so deeply emotional a temperament could hardly grow up without loving much and loving often. The full wealth of her soul could only expend itself on those she loved profoundly. Even as a child, I remember, she used to creep out of the cottage on summer nights, and go to a spot in the copse where the badger nested; there the badger cubs would steal out, undeterred by the presence of that other wild creature, and play clumsily with their mother in the sober twilight. And Meriel adopted one and loved it, as other children would love a dog or a pigeon. The choice was significant. That sympathetic heart could waste its heart on the veriest bear. Perhaps it was well, for what sort of men could poor Meriel hope to captivate among the chair-menders and basket-makers of her wild moorland home? It is not the man that the woman really loves--especially such impassioned women as this--it is the ideal she makes of him. And a passionate character like Meriel's will erect a golden image of some gamekeeper or some groom, and bow down to it in secret as devotedly and as earnestly as a lady will bow down to her dissolute dragoon or her worthless, drunken cross-country rider. Idealism works this miracle. It is as easy to idealize a laborer or a navvy as an insipid curate or a sneering stock-broker.
When Meriel was sixteen, her passion was for the footman at the great house in the valley--the footman with blue livery and padded calves, who spent half the year at the town house in Mayfair and half at Greydown. Not that she ever told her love: it was not the way of girls like Meriel to wear their hearts upon their sleeves. I would doubt if anybody save myself, who am a novelist by trade, and therefore observant of these little signs of emotion, ever so much as guessed it. But day by day, when Alfred was about, Meriel would hover near the gate of the great house, waiting and watching, amply repaid if the hero of her young love came out on his way to the village on some errand, and gave her a passing nod and a "Good day, young woman." She gloated over his livery. I feel sure; gloated over it with the admiration which an earl's daughter feels for a hero's uniform. But Alfred went away some months later "to better himself" at Brighton, and after mourning him for six weeks, Meriel fell a victim to the charms of the stalwart young policeman who arrested Ted Vaughan for causing incendiary heath fires at Highdown Firs. This, of course, was sheer treason to her class; family honor intervened; Septerius Stanley, her father, was the friend and associate of gypsies, and poachers, and tramps, and horse stealers; he could hardly let his daughter consort uncensured with a mere policeman. And the young policeman, himself was not likely to care for so disreputable a connection. In the essence of things, it is true, Meriel was as far above him as a poetess is above an ordinary young city man; but the essence of things, I fear, counts for little or nothing in matrimonial matters. Meriel had to give up her stalwart policeman, and console herself later on with Ted Vaughan himself, when that noble young savage came gaily out of prison.
But every man and every woman had one great love in a lifetime; and after many lesser trial trips, Meriel Stanley found hers at last in Joe Arundel, the poacher. You may laugh; but I can tell you an affection like Meriel Stanley's is no laughing matter; the fact that she could idealize a great hulking rowdy and bully like Joe is in itself a strong proof of the woman's deep poetic nature. Outwardly tranquil of demeanor, a dreamer and brooder, Meriel has yet a profound admiration such as the natural woman always feels for the man of courage and the man of action. Do you remember Homer's Andromache? She is the true type of the impassioned woman of these lower grades and lower races--the woman who can love and endure much, to whom crime and bloodshed are but natural attributes of the hero she worships. Hector had attacked the town where Andromache lived, had sacked and burned it, and slain her father and mother, and had carried her off as his wife after the primitive mode of "marriage by capture". And did Andromache hate him for these deeds of violence with all her soul? Not a bit of it; she accepted such little episodes as part of the established order of things, and clung to her Hector, and loved and cherished him, and worshipped him with a worship passing that of the willing chooser. "But Hector," she says to him in that immortal passage which has stirred the hearts of a thousand generations, "but Hector, thou to me art father and mother, and thou to me beloved husband." Meriel Stanley is a survivor of barbarism cast in the same mold. She could have worshipped the man who stole her from her home and slew her parents, if only he had qualities she could respect and idealize.
Now Joe Arundel, the poacher, was the whispered terror of his own neighborhood; from childhood up, Meriel had heard all her own set admire and describe with glowing praise the bold acts of this brave and sullen desperado. Joe had been three separate times in prison--a proud distinction; he was even gravely suspected of having murdered the game-keeper, whose corpse was found wrapped up in faded leaves at the bottom of the chestnut copse by Deadman's Hollow. Joe did not admit the impeachment, but neither did he reject it. He tossed his head and looked arrogant whenever the subject was alluded to in his presence. Too proud to deny, too cautious to boast. Meriel would stand by and admire him silently. It was not Meriel's way to be demonstrative either of affection or admiration, only by the quick twitch of her bloodless fingers, by the knitted brow, by the eyes steadily fixed on her chosen hero could one tell how immense was her admiration for the man who had defied the whole banded power of the law and the county, and exposed himself to the risk of a rope for his last portion. Her fists would clinch themselves till the nails dug into the palms and almost drew blood, while Joe talked in dark hints of some little brush with Sir Walter's keepers, or vaguely alluded with picturesque mistiness of thought and language to some fight with the police over a brace or two of pheasants. For, brought up as she had been, passionate rebelliousness was almost a necessary feature of Meriel Stanley's character. She hates law and order with the natural hatred of a hunted creature. What have they ever done for her and hers save harry them into prison, or hound them to the workhouse? The gentry in her eyes are so many oppressors of her wild, free kind; they would drive all the world from the heath and the copse into service or the factories. Meriel wants none such. For her, the open moor and the wide air of heaven!
Joe, for his part, did not readily discover that Meriel was in love with him. Joe is not by nature an intuitive creature. He can read the tracks of bird and beast in the snow far more easily than he can read the marks of human feeling or human passion. And Meriel is the sort of girl to fling herself at any man. She falls in love, it is true, easily and rapidly; her passions have the barbaric quickness and certainty. Almost at sight, she says "I love that man," or "I do not." But she says it to herself alone. Torture would not draw from her the overt confession. In that, once more, she is thoroughgoing savage. Your savage woman loves desperately, but in silence. She is coy and wayward. She flies like a squirrel from him who pursues, and then turns and smiles, not because she wishes to escape, but because some deep instinct of her race teaches her that to fly is the proper part of woman. But I could see from an early point in this growing passion how Meriel was letting her love for Joe swallow up her entire nature. She would sit on the logs by her father's house when Joe came round, with her strong, small chin poised on her open hand, and listened while Joe talked to Septerius Stanley, as rapt as if Joe's few jerky, inarticulate sentences were the purest flowers of human eloquence. Did ever man talk like Joe? Did ever man look like him? Six feet two--though a trifle hulking and shambling in gait, I must admit--with a scar on the left cheek won in open fight with those oppressors of the human race, the police, and with courage enough to go on to the bitter end, till fate landed him at last in that lofty position in death he was bound to occupy. Meriel looked and sighed. He was a king among poachers.
Night after night she would creep out by the copses where Joe might be found, and as he skulked past her with his bleary-eyed ferret, would suggest to him casually in a careless voice where the best pheasants were likely to be found, or point out which path the keeper had last taken on his evening round through the chestnut plantation. She knew as much of woodland lore as Joe himself, I fancy, and Joe accepted her hints with ungraceful country awkwardness. Still, he thought her "a knowing one," and told her so sometimes. Meriel's brown cheek flushed red through the russet at words of praise from her hero's lips. Anybody but a fool--or Joe--would have known she was in love. But Joe, though a sharp hand at a trap or a net, is not remarkable for the quickness of his instincts.
At last one evening as they stood together by the copse (the merry small rabbits gamboling all round them and the corn crake rattling), Meriel told him some points she had observed about the hare's "forms" in the heath; a new wrinkle even to the experienced poacher. Joe gazed at her and smiled--smiled from ear to ear with expansive appreciation. "Meriel maaid," he said slowly, with open mouth and hanging lip, "'ee do know a thing or two, 'ee do! There hain't three maids on Greydown hill knows as much as thee, maaid. If thee an' me was to come together, us 'ould do a good traade in the poachin', 'ouldn't us?"
Meriel's heart beat high; Meriel's cheek flushed crimson. He had recognized her at last, then; this prince of men had spoken! She drew away a step or two, with her quick squirrel glance. "Doan't 'ee talk like that, Joe," she said and gave a little toss of the proud black head--yet her voice was tender. " I hain't one for the men. They'm all deceivers."
It dawned across Joe as she withdrew her face, that Meriel really liked him. Joe was a lady's man in his way; but his way was not Meriel's. He slipped his arm round her waist. Meriel tried to evade him; though 'twas a formal evasion. The proud heart was won long ago. Tears stood in Meriel's eyes. Joe Arundel had chosen her!
After that they met nightly on the moor among the tall green gorse, or else in the copse where Joe killed the keeper. That thrill of romance and terror suited Meriel's fancy well; she felt about the copse as some Homeric maiden of Ilion might have felt about the spot where her lover had slain in open fight amighty man among the Myrmidon. Educated and cultivated, she would have wandered by herself and read Shelley and Rossetti; as it was, she stole off to meet Joe in the copse which had been the scene of his greatest and most successful encounter with the despotic forces. Bye and bye, she began to talk to him tentatively of marriage. Joe didn't think much of that--Joe was not by nature a marrying man; he took it they might get along well enough by themselves without the passon and the passon's fees. But there, Meriel's will was iron. All the Stanleys from all time had been duly married in church, and she wouldn't go back upon the tradition of the family. "Passon to Upton Parva won't want to marry we," Joe objected grinning. "Then us can go to Exeter," Meriel answered with grave earnestness, "but married I will be, and to none but thee, Joe Ar'ndel." After that, Joe felt that there was nought for it but to give way. He gave way with a bad grace, and entered a church for the first time since his christening. "It pleases 'er an' it don't hurt me," was the explanation he gave to his poaching pals of his unsportsmanlike conduct. At the same time he made it clearly understood that he did not mean to let his new state seriously interfere with his manner of living.
Once married, Meriel went on loving her worthless husband with the unvarying and incredible devotion of an impassioned nature. Nothing he could do to her seemed to alter her affection. Her man might come home drunk and beat her; that was only natural; men are built that way; and was it not to be expected that a splendid creature like Joe--six feet two in his shoeless feet, and broad shouldered to match--should knock about a weak woman who loved and admired him? Meriel was no shrew. Souls capable of deep feeling are seldom scolds. She endured it all--and worse--because it was Joe's pleasure. Her first baby came. Meriel positively idolized it--her baby--Joe's baby. I doubt if any child in the squire's nursery was ever so much made of as the poacher's brown boy, with his father's eyes, and black hair like his mother's. Not that she talked of her little one much. Meriel never talked much about anything that moved her inmost soul. She had learned to do without sympathy. But one day as I passed her cottage in the glen, she was seated on a log outside the porch where red roses clambered, holding out a foxglove spike to please her baby. "That's a fine boy, Meriel," I said, looking at him. Tears came into her eyes once more. "Yes, he's a tidy, little man, zur," she answered, holding him up to be admired. "They do tell me he favors Joe." And she said it as she might have said "He resembles the prince, his father." The fierce, suppressed earnestness of her tone fairly touched me. "I never saw a prettier baby in my life," I replied. She looked up at me--a shy glance--with gratitude in her eyes; but she answered nothing. Her thoughts were too deep for such words as she knew. Only a poet could have uttered what was passing within her.
I said at the beginning I could never see Meriel without an inner shudder at the fate which is in store for her. What fate? you ask. Well, it seems to me inevitable. I have a sort of premonition of the very way it will come. Some day, Joe will get into a quarrel with some other man about a woman--the other man's wife, and Meriel's rival. The two will fight; and the other man being quicker though less powerful than Joe, will get him down and hold him. Then Meriel will rush in to her faithless husband's aid, and stab his assailant. She would never stab her rival--she is too proud for that, but she would stab the man who for her rival's sake dared attack her hero. The rest follows of course. And those who read the report of the trial in the papers will only know that a poacher's wife, a very bad lot, the daughter and associate of criminals, was sentenced to death for murdering a man her good-for-nothing husband had been quarreling. But I know all, and in some dim way, I can feel for poor Meriel.
THE WAY TO KERONAN*
by Grant Allen
Transcribed from The Washington Post, April 6, 1902, p. 38
by
Victor A. Berch
Some portions of the text have been lost. Where possible, I have reconstructed the text. In the instances where the text was nigh impossible to reconstruct, the word or words are identified by question marks.
It is easy enough to drive to Keronan now over the broad high road the French have made across the desert from Susa.; but in 1858, when I was sent there first, it was a very different matter. I can honestly assure you. Tunis was then an independent beylik, and any ??? Christian took his life in his hands, if he wished to visit the holy shrine of , My Lord of the Companion of the Blessed Prophet. For Keronan was still considered, in those days, the most sacred city in all North Africa; nay, next to Mecca itself, so the Imams declared, the most sacred city in the whole expanse of Islam. No infidel foot had ever yet defiled the streets of Sicli Dkba's final resting place; no Jew, even, was permitted to pass the barriers that surrounded the dark and gloomy metropolis of North African Mohammedanism. To have been detected entering Keronan in disguise would have been certain death for any European; to be suspected of Christianity in that nursery of Islam would have been as much as the bravest and sturdiest Englishman's life was worth in the middle decades of the present century.
Nevertheless, in that very year, 1858, I determined to make my way, alone and disguised, as a pilgrim to Keronan. I was young in those days and eager for adventure. It was my ambition in the end to reach, perhaps, even Mecca itself; and I thought the experience I could gain in my pilgrimage to the holy city of Africa might help me in time to force my way into the holy city of Arabia as well, unvisited then by a single Westerner.
Those were troublesome times, however, in 1858, and the world of Islam was profoundly stirred to its inmost core by the events that had lately taken place in India. With a Mussulman empire still at Delhi, as the outcome of the ???? mutiny, not yet suppressed, men knew not what mighty things might not be in store for the faithful of the prophet. The long-expected ingathering of the infidels might now, indeed, be close at hand; the triumph of the Moslem over his hereditary foes, delayed so many centuries, in the inscrutable and wonderful counsels of Allah, might now at length be on the point of fulfillment. But, meanwhile, since the affairs of the faith were everywhere so critical, it behooved true Mussulmans all over the world to be duly on their guard against Christian intrigue and Christian interlopers. Islam, always suspicious and always cruel, was just then more suspicious and more warily cruel in temper than ever. Good men and true were murdered, it was rumored upon their way to Mecca, on the bare suggestion of some slight irregularity in the mode of saying their daily prayers or some doubtful observance of strict Mohammedan practice in eating or drinking, without a single question asked or a chance of explanation.
"Better far that ten thousand faithful Moslems should die outright before their time and enter at once into the joys of Paradise," said my Arabic teacher and ???? , Dmar-ben-Marabet, the Moor of Algiers, "than that one dog of an unbeliever should ever set foot, by inadvertence within the holy walls of the capital of Islam."
Nevertheless, in spite of warnings and mutterings of danger, oft-repeated by my French friends, I made up my mind to go to Keronan and risk everything. My three years in Algiers , in the service of the old Bureau Arabe, had given me a good knowledge of the debased colloquial Arabic universally current among the North African populations, as well as a fair idea of the customs of the country through which I was to travel. I knew my Koran half by heart; I understood the ritual of Islam perfectly; I could turn to Mecca at prayer- time with commendable regularity, and I flattered myself that in burnous and turban, I would pass any day with my dark hair and olive-brown Cornish skin, for a very tolerable Tunisian Arab. So I joined myself incontinently to a caravan which was going up country from Susa to Keronan with something of that careless glee that an Englishman always feels in expecting his life to a little more than ordinary danger.
Our caravan, as it chanced, was a large and important one, for it included among other things, the annual gifts which the Shereef of Mecca and the Sheikh-al-Islam at Constantinople always sent as fraternal greetings on the feast of Bahram to the governor of Keronan. Most honored among these presents in accordance with common Mohammedan custom was said to be a beautiful Arabian slave-girl, a maiden of the fairest, destined for the harem of the chief of the faithful in the city of my lord, the champion of the prophet. Of course, we pilgrims of the common herd could none of us see the face of this beautiful girl, selected by the Shereef from all Arabia for so high and dangerous a post of honor; for she was muffled up to the eyes in veils and yasmaks with more even than the usual Mohammedan jealousy. But as we gathered in the yard of the big and dirty caravanserai at Susa to mount our camels for the long, slow journey, I saw with interest a graceful figure, draped in the full trousers and flowing robes of the women of Islam, descend the steps with measured tread, and slowly and reluctantly take a seat upon the foremost dromedary. Her eyes alone looked out, as I thought, with appealing sadness upon the busy scene.
"Poor girl," I said to myself with a touch of compassion; "she's wondering what sort of life she'll have to lead in the harem of that horrid old Arab at Keronan. I'm sorry for her. Her eyes are good. Well, well, it's a comfort, anyhow , to think that to an Arabian girl, accustomed only to the hard, coarse life of the desert, Keronan itself will seem by comparison almost like an earthly paradise."
I had no time, however, to pursue my reflections on the unknown slave girl's probable fate, for as I looked, the white-robed sheikh of the caravan, an evil-eyed old Arab with a long gray beard, observing me closely from under his bushy eyebrows, gave me a dig in the ribs with his stout stick, and cried to me angrily: "Now, son of a dog, will you turn aside your face from gazing on women, and make haste there to get upon your own camel?"
Thus practically adjured, I mounted at once, and waited patiently, through the infinite bustle, noise and gesticulations of an Oriental crowd at a moment of general hurry, for the signal for departure. At last, after infinite delays and twackings and objurgations, and many appealing cries to the Prophet and the holy marabets to look down on us favorably, we got under way in long lines, and proceeded on our road across the dreary, desolate and uninteresting desert. A more hideous journey you can scarcely imagine; indeed, when the Companion of the Prophet first crossed that ghastly expanse to found Keronan, he saw it inhabited, says tradition, only by wild beasts and noxious reptiles, so that he was obliged to make solemn proclamation to them, with beat of drums, in the name of Allah: "Serpents and savage creatures retire! for we, the followers of the Messenger of Heaven, mean to establish ourselves in this your desert." And to this day, in spite of the blessed saint and his formal notice, a worse bit of country can nowhere be found on all the dreary outskirts of the Sahara.
All day long we journeyed through the waterless plain, and at night we halted by a desert well and prepared to bivouac under the stars of heaven. Our first task was to set up a tent for the chief of the caravan, with a pavilion alongside for the Arabian slave girl whom he was solemnly escorting to the home of her new master. A few of us were told off by the sheikh to do this honorable piece of work, among whom I happened to be included on the recommendation of the owner of the camels.
"Here you," he cried to me with a rap of his stick, "what do you call yourself, stranger from Algiers?"
"Abdullah-ben-Abderrhaman, a M'zabite of Algiers, " I answered glibly, as I fell into the order he pointed with his finger.
"Oh, a M'zabite!" the man replied with a dark scowl. "Well look out, Abdullah, that you take great care of the slave of the governor. Keep your eyes shut to what you needn't know and don't go prying into high matters that don't concern you."
As he spoke--was it fancy? --I somehow imagined that the slave girl, now seated on the ground on a bundle of rugs, glanced over at me once more with a strange and frightened yet inquiring look, half curiosity, half appealing terror.
One can judge so little from the eyes alone. They need the aid of the other features to eke out their meaning. With a veiled woman you can guess nothing. Perhaps I was mistaken. After all, she was only an Arabian slave girl.
We pitched the tent and then prepared our own quarters on the dreary desert. In a few minutes more, the baskets of dates and of Arab bread were brought out and opened by the noisy crowd; the camels were watered from the well by the wayside; the buzz of voices resounded through the camp; and, forgetting all else but the business of the moment. I turned in silence to get my own frugal supper of cheese and kouskous.
As the night went, they called me once more--suspiciously, I fancied--into the chief's tent. The sheikh himself, sitting back upon his square Tiemeen carpet on the bare ground, interrogated me at some length upon my name and origin. "A M'zabite," he said, with a curious look. "Oho, a M'zabite!, Abdullah-ben-
Abderrhaman, you are light for that. The Beni M'zab are mostly much darker than you, son of the children of the broad oasis, let me see your arm! I don't like the look of a M'zabite as light and as fair-haired as the dogs of infidels. Especially not on the road to Keronan."
I lifted my robe and showed him my arm. It was brown like my face, for I am a dark Cornishman. He nodded and let me go. "It is well," he muttered. "This man is indeed one of the children of M'zab. Stay here in my tent, though. I may want you tonight. These are days when it befits all true Moslems to guard themselves carefully from the wiles of the infidel." I retired to the corner and lay down, somewhat nervously, when he pointed me out a place on the coarse blankets. My heart began to flutter a little with the excitement of danger. What small observance could I have overlooked, I wondered, that had aroused the suspicion of the caravan and its leaders against me? Had I failed in prayer, in washing, or in gesture? Did they guess already I was not a follower of the Prophet?
As I lay and looked, I saw with perfect certainty this time that the eyes of the slave girl were still riveted in earnest entreaty upon me. She followed my movements with deep attention; nay, more. I even fancied once that she tried to speak to me with her parted lips alone through the folds of her yaskmak. But if so, I failed to make out the words. And all Arab women are such born intriguers!
Some minutes later the gong at the door of the tent sounded. It was the signal for prayer. I rose at once and knocking my head thrice against the ground in the direction of Mecca, prostrated myself in the fashion prescribed by Mohammedan ritual for the customary litany of the third hour.
I don't know whether it was nervousness or accident, or fate, but in the flurry of the moment, in spite of all my careful rehearsal, I made one fatal mistake of detail which the chief of the caravan would surely have noticed had he not been so absorbed at the moment it occurred in his own devotions. I glanced around me anxiously to see if I was detected. No, not by the sheikh; he, I felt sure, had failed to perceive it. But sharper eyes than his were fixed close upon me still. A sudden start and a glance that seemed not so much like horror as surprise showed me at once beyond the shadow of doubt that the slave girl had noted in a second my fatal omission.
Would she cry out to her leader and keeper, "This man is not a Mussulman at all," and destroy me? I turned and trembled. It was an anxious moment. But the slave girl never moved one muscle visibly. I know not how. I vaguely felt through veil and yaskmak that some strange passion was sweeping through her soul at that terrible moment. I dropped my eyes and mechanically continued my gabbling prayer. When I looked up again, she had drawn the veil inscrutably over her head once more and sat mute as a statue in the corner opposite.
"Stop there and watch!" the sheikh murmured sullenly, looking over at me again, as he finished his prayer; and he sat down himself in solemn silence on his dirty rug with the impassive face of the true Arab traveler.
In a few minutes more, two veiled old women led away the muffled slave girl to her quarters for the night in the separate tent. In spite of my doubts, I composed myself for the evening. I dozed where I sat; or rather crouched on the ground, half wondering whether I should ever reach Keronan in safety. It was a quaint adventure, and I rather enjoyed its bold uncertainty. The chief was snoring regularly now. At times I woke to hear the sound of his heavy breath as he turned uneasily his long form on the floor beside me. I wrapped my burnous round my body as well as I was able and tried to sleep in spite of my fear and the obvious discomfort of my present position.
About 2 in the morning something stirred. I awoke with a start, conscious of a touch on my left shoulder. Happily I had the presence of mind to keep quite still. I turned to look. A delicate hand, fair and well proportioned, stretched under the edge of the tent canvas and held out toward me, to my intense surprise, a scrap of written paper. I read on it in ill-formed Arabic letters the single sentence written in pencil in the pure Meccan dialect: "I have found out that you are no Mussulman."
For a moment my brain whirled round bewildered. What on earth could it mean? The Arabian slave girl, then, had really penetrated my clever disguise, and strange to say, had refrained from denouncing me! Could womanly compassion have overcome the prejudices of her cruel religion? Did she mean to betray me, I wondered in soul, or was she going to keep her own counsel?
These Arab women will do anything on earth for an adventure. Cooped up all their lives in the harem of their own house, they love intrigue as the one variation in their monotonous existence. For it, they will face even the sack and the river.
I lifted stealthily the hanging corner of the tent, and gazed into the inner apartment for the women from which we were separated by the thin wall of canvas only. If hands wave to you out of mysterious tents no man of spirit can fail to follow them. The two old Arab women lay fast asleep on their prayer-rugs upon the sandy ground, but the slave girl sat up, awake and unveiled, for my eyes to gaze upon. She was beautiful, indeed, but with a look of utter terror and a wild despair on her sweet young face and a strange appeal in her big black eyes turned imploringly toward me as a last resource, I fancied, from a life of misery.
She wished me to save her from her threatened fate, I supposed. And, indeed, mad as the attempt appears to me, now I think it over in cold blood, I would have given a great deal that moment to effect her escape. But the thing was impossible, clearly impossible. I gazed at her blankly in mute astonishment. I knew I was holding my life by a thread, but she was very beautiful. If any one of them awake--the sheik or the women--they would kill me where I lay as soon as look at me.
Would she risk so great a peril for mere intrigue?
The girl raised the pencil once more and wrote in Arabic again: "If you are not a Mussulman, for heaven's sake, tell me so. I will not betray you. I will keep your confidence."
I didn't hesitate for a moment to take the pencil and paper from her and write in return: "I am no Mussulman. I am a Christian--an Englishman. Treat me as a friend. What can I do for you?"
The girl reeled, almost as if she would have fainted, when she read my answer, and I saw that her hands could hardly hold the pencil aright as she rapidly wrote a few lines in reply. She held the paper up to me in dead silence, with a very white face. I looked at the words in unspeakable astonishment*** A sudden mist seemed to dim my eyes*** It was strange! It was incredible *** She had written in English!
For a second or two, that fact alone was all I could take in. Then by slow degrees the meaning of her message dawned dimly across my bewildered mind. I read the words, and knew the whole strange truth. "I am an English girl. I have come from India. They are taking me to Keronan as a present to the governor. If you are really an Englishman, for heaven's sake, help me! If you can do nothing else for us, at least be merciful and kill me this night here."
Heaven gave me strength to repress the cry of surprise and horror that rose spontaneously to my lips as I read. I seized the pencil and wrote rapidly in reply, in English, of course: "I will help you if I die for it. Thank heaven, I was moved to come in the same caravan with you. No more now. It's too dangerous. I will go back to my own part of the tent for the present. As soon as I can think of any means of escape, I will lift the curtain and communicate again with you."
The tears were rolling fast down the poor girl's cheeks, and she clasped her white hands in speechless agony; but she uttered no sound; neither of us dared to interchange a spoken word one with the other. I dropped the corner of the tent stealthily, and turned to revolve the matter at my own leisure in my own quarters.
As I turned, a terrible and disconcerting sight met my glance. The sheikh was sitting up on his prayer-mat, facing me with wide open eyes and an expression of the fiercest and most resolute hatred on all his savage Arab features. I saw at once that all was discovered. His body was bent slightly forward in the attitude of one who watches intently, and he held his right hand upon the scimitar-shaped knife at his side, half drawn already from its curved wooden scabbard. We were lost, lost, lost beyond hope or chance of recovery! The rustling of the curtain must have woke him as he lay, and he had no doubt watched with those horrid eyes of his all our short and speechless colloquy. Strange to say, however, in spite of this pressing danger that now stared me in the face, one feeling only lay uppermost in my mind, and that feeling was, not of terror, but of pure curiosity. Come what might, he should not kill me till I had solved the mystery of this English slave-girl sent as a present from the Shereef of Mecca to his brother in Islam, the governor of Keronan.
For one flash of the eye, we faced one another and glared at each other's faces in silence. I knew it was war, war to the knife. And the knife alone must now settle it. At a single word, at the sound of a pistol, at one cry from sheikh or the women in the tent, the whole encampment would be alive with angry, fanatical Arabs. My throat would be cut as remorselessly as a butcher cuts a sheep's, and my mysterious companion
might share the same fate, if she was not even reserved for a worse or more cruel one at Keronan. A single infidel's life would be as dust in the balance to that fierce and savage band of armed zealots. It was now or never. No time to reflect, to plan, to decide. My whirling brain never stopped to deliberate. I must act at once or die unsatisfied.
Without one second's hesitation, I drew my short Kabyle knife from my sheath in my girdle and sprang noiselessly like a beast of prey upon that glowering old Arab.
If he gave but one shriek, it was all up with me. I knew it instinctively, and leaped upon him in silence with all my weight. I leaped at his neck. One hand clutched hard the old wretch's throat; with the other, I dug my knife deep and remorselessly into his left bosom. It was our one chance--my own and the slave-girl's. The sheikh was a strong and wiry old man. He had lots of life in him. He struggled hard against my unexpected onslaught; but, happily, youth and agility were on my side. By some miracle of luck, I managed to throttle him tight and hard with my maddened grasp before he had time fully to draw his long, curved knife from its Persian scabbard. My own was straight; on that infinitesimal difference in the two weapons, my life and the Englishwoman's depended that moment. I drove it home to the hilt in his heart. He fell heavily, with a loud cry gurgling unheard in his rattling throat. I felt it was loud, for I saw it convulse him, but my hand never for one indivisible instant of time relaxed its wild pressure on his gasping windpipe. No sound came forth. I choked that desperate shriek unborn in his lungs. Murder as it was, the whole thing passed off as noiselessly and quietly as the lifting of the woman's curtain had done ten minutes earlier.
What an eternity it seemed, those next ten minutes, while I sat and watched and formed my plans hastily, with the warm corpse still bleeding in red pools on the floor and no sound but the regular breath of the Arab women in the next compartment to break the monotonous silence of that awful death chamber.
At last, I collected my scattered thoughts and determined to make the one wild dash still possible for freedom To speak to the slave girl (as I still called her to myself) was clearly out of the question. I must have awoke the Arab women, and the whole camp would then have hacked me to pieces. I dipped my finger cautiously into the pool of blood and wrote in big print letters on the white robe--for I had now neither pencil nor paper at hand--"I have killed the sheikh. Come outside the tent. We two will run for it."
I lifted the curtain and showed that message of blood to the white and trembling girl. Her face never blanched with fear for a moment. She merely bowed her head silently for a moment, and creeping away without further sign, met me outside the tent on the bare sand in the next minute.
I took her hand in mine and led her along. She held it tight as a child might have held it. Even at that supreme moment of doubt and anxiety, the presence thrilled me through to the very heart. We glided stealthily on in the dark, hand in hand together, noiseless as ghosts, in our white robes all stained with blood and passed away toward where the camels were tethered. It was a second of terrible and breathless suspense. If a camel stirred, if an Arab woke, if a dog barked, our fate was sealed.; we would die unknown and our friends in England would never even hear of it. And I should never have solved that strange mystery. I could feel my companion's heart beat just by the mere touch of her hand. I could hear her breath come and go painfully. I drew my knife a second time, still wet with blood, and cut the halter of the swiftest and strongest camel. We seated ourselves in silence on the saddle. The beast rose at once, and with the instinct of his race, began to move slowly away, obedient to my touch from the slumbering camp.
How I thanked heaven that night for his soft footfall of those padded soles on the loose and level sands of the desert. A horse's hoof ringing on the plain would at once have aroused all those vigilant Arabs. The camel, with his long, quick, shambling gait, and fleshy sole, seemed to glide stealthily, as we ourselves had done in the sleeping camp, away toward the open, over the darkling sand waste.
For many minutes we spoke no word. I hardly allowed myself to breathe. I took no care to guide our beast in any particular set direction. I only wished to put as great a space as possible forthwith between our two selves and that caravan full of bloodthirsty Moslems. But at last, as we began to breathe freely once more and to realize that the first pressing danger was behind us, I looked up toward the stars for guidance toward Tunis. Once safe in the capital, the English consul would secure our escape. The great point was to reach the shore before the death of the sheikh was noised abroad. I knew the town lay roughly nor'-nor'west. With a gleam of joy, I discovered the Great Bear in that cloudless sky, and turning my camel's head toward the sea and England, we went on once more in solemn silence.
We had gone, I suppose, an hour or more in the dark across that sea of sand, guided only by our heavenly compass, before I ventured even to address my trembling companion. By that time, however, curiosity at last overcame me. But I dared not speak aloud even then, so deep was my sense of awe and mystery at our solitude and our danger. I whispered low:
"What is your name and how did you come to be taken to Mecca?"
The answer came back in a soft, sweet voice that seemed at once to go through my heart.
"My name's Ethel Maitland. I come from Peshawar. My people were all killed in the mutiny. They carried me off overland to Mecca, and you are the very first European I've seen or spoken to since I left India."
The very simplicity and calmness of manner with which she told me that terrible story in so few words smote my heart to the quick far more truly and deeply than any display of emotion or eloquence could possibly have smitten it. I felt how much she must have suffered and passed through before she reached that sublime height of stoical composure. I couldn't answer her back. I was too profoundly stirred for words to come to me. I merely touched her hand with mine a second time, and urged our camel forward again with redoubled energy.
It was known in England that three English ladies, survivors of the massacre, had been sent to Mecca. My companion was one of them. Horrible to tell, another languishes there to this very day in unspeakable captivity.
The gray dawn was breaking over the northern mountains when we reached the little village of Bent Saida, at the edge of the desert, where the main coast of the Atlas commences. Fortunately, I had with me a sufficiency of money, the sum I had laid aside for my stay at Keronan. We rode into the village and stopped boldly before the little Arab inn. I held up my bloodstained burnous openly. It would serve me there as a positive ally.
"In the name of the prophet," I shouted aloud, "horses, horses! El Islam is at stake. There is fighting going on with infidels in Susa. We are riding to Tunis on important business with the bey from the governor of Keronan. The bride of the shereef is here beside me. The caravan is stopped and the Holy City itself is threatened."
The effect was magical. I had enlisted every man in the village at once in my service. "A Jehad! A Jehad!" they cried. "Death to the infidels."
In ten minutes, we were fairly horsed and had left our camel to the care of the innkeeper.
How we got through the remainder of that ride I hardly know to this day even. We rode for our lives, among the mountain passes, exchanging horses day and night, willingly served by the villagers everywhere, and never stopping till we drew rein at last opposite the British consulate in Soukel-Islam, in our wild ride to outstrip rumor. We had been nearly forty-eight hours on the road and we dropped from our seats more dead than alive. But we had distanced the very report of the sheikh's death, and we were safe at last on what was practically as good as British territory.
That very evening, on a gunboat in the harbor, a stately girl in Arab dress, but unveiled and uncovered, received from all the officers and men the respect and homage due to an English lady. And by the time they had landed us safely at Marseilles, Ethel Maitland and I had made up our minds that we would go henceforth on all our journeys in life together.
And that's why I never got to Keronan at all till I drove across there in an open carriage some six weeks since, along the broad, high road the French engineers have cut through the midst of the desert from Susa.
THE COWARDLY DYNAMITER
by Grant Allen
Transcribed from Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper
Aug. 9, 1896, p. 8
by
Victor A. Berch
* Berch comments: "Portions of the text have been almost impossible to read due to poor microfilming. However, where possible, I have been able to reconstruct the text. Where I was not sure of the reading, I have used question marks to designate those particular words or passages. The theme of the story has been preserved." Since then a better text from the South Wales Echo has been recovered by Robert Jackson. These changes have been incorporated in what follows.
It is an error to suppose that a dynamiter's life is all placid enjoyment. He has his moments like the rest of us. His heart beats high at times with hope, and stands still at others with fear, suspense and horror.
I speak feelingly. In 1890 I was selected by the Central Executive of our organization to attempt the carrying out of a sentence of death passed by the committee against an obnoxious personage, highly-placed in North-eastern Europe. I'm not going to be too precise in my details on this subject, both because the police refuse to recognize the legality of our methods, and also out of consideration for the feelings of English relations of the high-placed personage in question. I will merely mention, therefore, that the sentence was to be executed, not in the personage's own country, but in a neighbouring state, where he was then engaged in visiting members of his family. We understood from information received that on a certain night the Despot, (as I shall make bold to call him for short) was to sleep (if he could) at a certain palace; and we had reason to believe that on the succeeding day he would inspect the famous terraces and hanging gardens which surround the building. My instructions were therefore to lay a dynamite bomb in a part of the grounds indicated to me as sufficiently retired for the purpose; and to place a percussion hammer, fastened by a wire, in such a manner that when he himself or any member of his suite happened to tread upon it, the sentence would at once be automatically carried out without human intervention.
They call us "cowardly dynamiters." I can only say for my part that if I were to put down in full all the mental torments I suffered from the moment I left the Great Eastern station at Liverpool-street, with my dangerous explosive stored away in my portmanteau, till I finally got rid of it in the palace grounds, you would never again use that silly conventionalism. And all for the sake of a pure abstraction! It wasn't my own safety alone I cared about either; it was the good blundering woman who would knock up against that deadly machine; it was the Custom-house officers who would go rummaging at risk of their lives through the recesses of my luggage; it was the innocent children who would insist on jumping upon it at unexpected moments. All these so terrified me for their own precious skins that I nearly gave up on the way half a dozen times over. As we crossed in the little steamer from Nyborg to Korsoer, in particular, I was more than three-parts minded to fling the thing overboard and be done with it for ever. Cowardly dynamiters, indeed! Why, I hadn't a peaceful moment for a whole ten days, and nothing but a profound sense of the importance of my work to the freedom of humanity would ever have induced a sensitive and conscientious man like me to continue to the bitter end on so extremely dangerous and disquieting an errand. You may disapprove of our ends or our means as much as ever you choose; but I tell you dynamiting, in its actual execution, instead of being cowardly, comes precious near heroism.
At last, however, I got the thing safely across to my destination, without having sacrificed a single innocent life on the way, as the Despot himself, to gratify mere dynastic or political greed, would carelessly have sacrificed a whole round million. The bomb and the plan had been prepared with the utmost forethought and deliberation in London; and I had really nothing at all to do myself, once I reached my journey's end , except to obey instructions. I had been provided with a complete numbered suit of uniform, of the pattern worn by the palace gardeners, verderers, and attendants; and as I speak the tongue fluently (having been sometime deputy professor of the Scandinavian languages and literature at Oxford) I found no difficulty at all in introducing myself to the grounds and terraces. The Despot was far less jealously guarded here than in his own dominions; and of course, on a state occasion like this, a considerable number of gardeners beyond the common run were employed in making everything ship-shape for the "illustrious visitors," as they called the Despot and his family.
I saw there was only one way for the "cowardly dynamiter" to work, however, and that was by taking his life in his hands, and completing his arrangements openly, without disguise or fear, before the very eyes of the head gardeners. Of course, if they came up and discovered the nature of the work, it would mean certain death; but we cowards are accustomed to that frequent risk, and for ourselves we think nothing of it, though I must say it always seemed hard to me that the cause of freedom and progress should demand of a man the sacrifice this entails upon his wife and family.
Well, I got the thing placed most securely with little difficulty. But as somebody might walk over the spot prematurely, and so spoil all my labour (besides unnecessarily losing an innocent life), I took care not to attach the actual hammer itself, which acted as a fuse does in any common fire explosive, till the very hour before the Despot's expected visit. Even after I'd fastened it, too, a certain fascination of suspense and plot-interest kept me hovering near the spot, I felt I must see whether the thing succeeded or not; and, moreover, I was tortured with conscientious terrors lest some needless slaughter of hangers-on or retainers should accompany the execution of our sentence upon the condemned person. So I loitered near the spot, as many other gardeners loitered at their work in other parts of the grounds, and waited with feverish fear lest some ill-advised labourer should happen to cross the fatal path too soon, and bring down upon himself the vengeance intended for the common enemy.
The more I thought of this contingency the less I liked it. I am aware that revolutions cannot be made of rose-water. Still, I have such a rooted objection to bloodshed myself, except in case of clear moral necessity, that I made up my mind at all hazards to prevent injustice. If anybody indifferent approached too soon, I held it a moral duty to either tear up the bomb at the risk of my own life, or else to trust them and warn them of the impending destruction Blowing up despots may be a needful incident in the world of progress; but, I tell you, it's an awful thing to take away the life of an innocent bystander, perhaps with a wife and family dependent upon his efforts. The only way to make despotism impossible, of course, is to render the post of despot absolutely untenable; but the practical difficulties that beset the way to that consummation are, for a man of delicate sensibilities and moral scrupulosity, well nigh insuperable.
As I stood there in a corner of the palace grounds, revolving these thoughts in my own mind with myself, and debating even then upon the rights and wrongs of the question (for I'm sorry to say that I am one of those unhappily constituted souls who torture themselves with doubts and moral dilemmas) of a sudden, close by, I heard a child's voice, a little girl of three or four, just the age of our own Portia. Next moment she had run forward from behind a clump of lilacs, a wee dancing thing, followed close by a governess. She was a beautiful, bright creature, very lithe and happy, with soft wealth of yellow hair, and trustful blue eyes exactly like Dot's (Dot is the pet name we give our Portia). She ran out from the lilacs laughing, a very picture of childish freedom and merriment. The governess ran after her in the direction of the mechanism.
I knew who she was in a moment. I had seen her photograph already in all the shop windows. She was one of the Despot's daughters--what they call in their monarchical jargon, princesses, but I could never bear to kill a butterfly that was luxuriating on its broad wings in sun and air --and a child! a little girl! with eyes like Dot! Oh, God, impossible.
There was no time to be lost, however. In a second, she would be upon it. I looked up and down the gravel path. A few hundred yards off, I saw the gleam of a diamond star upon the Despot's breast as he came in his barbaric gala-dress towards us. If I saved the little one, I must lose the labour I had risked my own life for. But I had no time just then to think or doubt or reason. In an agony of terror I flung up my arms. "Stop! stop! my child!" I cried. "Danger! Danger! Danger!"
The little one drew back, terrified. I rushed over to the bomb and seized it in my arms. Let it go off or not, I must fling it far away from her. At the same moment the governess gave a loud, sharp cry. I closed my eyes. I thought all was up with me. They would come up and find me with the horrid thing in my hands, and I should have short shrift of it. Good bye, dear home ones! At any rate it would be better to perish in the act. I tried to work the hammer, but at the last moment it stuck. I stood there glued to the ground. My head swam round. I had but one consolation. I had saved the child's life, if I had failed to kill the Despot!
Next instant I heard a buzz of loud voices all around me. "He has discovered a bomb!" "He has preserved your Majesty!" "He has warned the princess of it." "See, there's wire on the path. That's the way the man noticed it."
The Despot stood forward. He was white as a sheet, and he trembled visibly, but he tried as hard as he could to be an emperor. He unfastened the barbaric bauble from his breast, and pinned it on mine. "My friend," he said in French, "we owe you our deepest gratitude for your fidelity."
I felt in my pocket for my knife, but I shook so much with the excitement of that poor child's peril that I couldn't find it. So I mumbled out a few inarticulate words and fell back, half fainting.
That night I fled. It was all hushed up, of course. Not till after I was gone, however, did the authorities begin to suspect that the gardener who discovered the infernal machine was the Nihilist who had placed it there.
When I reported the circumstances to the executive body in London, they censured me for unnecessary kindness to the spawn of despots. But to kill an innocent child! No; I don't call that legitimate dynamiting. I expressed my dissent, and disassociated myself at once from the revolutionary organization. Since then, all my dynamiting has been done alone, on my own individual responsibility and initiative.
A STUDY FROM THE NUDE
by Grant Allen
Transcribed from The Washington Post
March 17, 1895, p. 22
by
Victor A. Berch
Harley Binns smoked a short clay pipe. His studio was at Kensington. He painted ideal female figures and he painted them exquisitely. He was thick set, bullet headed, bull-necked, vociferous. You would have known him at first sight for a successful artist.
Harley Binns had a friend who worked in the studio with him. His name was Walter Haselton. He also had a model -- a model for the nude -- a splendid girl, one of the finest in London. He was proud of his model. Her name was Emily. She was Miss Higgs in public, but in the studio it ran to Emily.
One day, Harley Binns was strolling casually through the High street when Emily came toward him, walking with another girl. Harley Binns, as it chanced, was not only successful; but also an artist. His eye picked out that girl immediately. She had a superb figure -- lithe, rounded, proportioned -- the figure one paints, one imagines, one dreams about. He could interpret its subtle curves through her simple black dress, for 'twas Harley Binns' trade mentally to disrobe the female form divine as it deployed itself in bodice and skirt before him. This girl's at once attracted him. It wasn't only that its outlines and proportions were perfect; you can get mere mechanical and measurable perfection by paying for them any day. It was that the figure had soul in it. For there is soul, too, in figures. Harley Binns looked at her face. 'Twas a born lady's face -- delicate, beautiful, tender. "By Jove," he said to himself in an artistic rapture, "I'd give ten pounds to paint that girl. If I'd a model like that, Burns-Jones himself would go mad with envy."
He paused as she passed, and looked after her. Then, with just a moment's hesitation, he turned again and overtook them. He touched Emily with one hand. "I say," he cried, with a meaning look, "I want to speak to you."
The other girl walked modestly on with a shy glance at the stranger.
But Emily turned around to him, wholly unabashed. "Well, you can't get her then," she said promptly, jumping at his meaning at once, with instinctive quickness. "You are not the first by a great many that has wanted her. But she don't care to sit. She's my cousin, she is. She's been brought up to the drapery. There's plenty more have asked her, and she's always refused. It's no good trying. You won't sit, will you, Clara?"
A dainty blush, such as Harley Binns had never before seen upon a human face, suffused the girl's face as she answered hastily, "Oh, please don't, Emily. However can you?" Harley Binns was more eager than before when he saw that rich color. Blush rose on white lily! It was exquisite, unapproachable.
He drew Emily aside a little. "Look here, my child," he said quietly, in his most persuasive voice, "I'll give your cousin three times the usual fee if ever she'll sit to me, and I'll give you a ten pound note for yourself the day you first bring her round to me at the studio."
The girl nodded and went away. From that day forth, time after time, Harley Binns asked her, "Well, how about Clara?" And time after time the model shook her head. "It's no good," she answered, with some slight contempt. "Clara's a Philistine--that's where it is; she's dreadful prejudiced." For she had picked up to some extent the slang of the studio.
Harley Binns was piqued. So was Emily, too. To both of them it seemed little short of absurd that a girl who waited behind a counter at a petty draper's shop in a back street should give herself the airs and graces of a duchess. "Why, there's plenty 'o duchesses as 'ud sit themselves, if it comes to that, as soon as look at it," Emily observed, pouting.
"They understand the aims of art," Harley Binns responded, adding a touch to the left shoulder. "What can you expect, after all, from a draper's assistant?"
A month or two went by. Then one day at last Emily began to hint that things were not going well in Clara's family. Her mother was a widow, and her rent was in arrears. The children were short of food. Next day--still better--an execution threatened!
Harley Binns saw his chance, and proceeded to take it. He instructed Emily to make a more tempting offer to her cousin than ever. That very afternoon, the draper, as it chanced, "had words" with Clara. He dismissed her for a month. How exceedingly lucky! She could not hold out long. And next morning, in effect, Emily came round to the painter with good news, indeed. Clara's mother was seriously ill and under stress of compulsion--ruin staring her in the face--Clara had consented to earn an honest penny by sitting in the nude to him.
Harley Binns and Walter Haselton were all agog with excitement.
At eleven o'clock, timid, shrinking, terrified, the new model crept in, and still more crimson than before, retired with shame behind the screen to disrobe herself.. That is the model's modesty. She undresses in private. Emily sat by her side to encourage the novice and accustom her to the ordeal. And when the dreaded moment fairly came, and she stood there nude and trembling, with her face in her hands, it was Emily who pushed her forward, more dead than alive, before the discreet curtain.
Harley Binns had guessed right. His breath came and went. She was an ideal model.
As he stood and gazed, waiting to begin a study of her figure in the delicious pose she herself had unconsciously adopted, a curious sight attracted his attention. The girl was blushing! Not with her face only--that would have been nothing new--but with her whole live body. A great wave of red passed over it, undulating; then a great wave of white; then red again rhythmically. It was wonderful, beautiful. Harley Binns seized his brushes, his sketching pad, his water colors. "That's perfect," he cried in artistic rapture. "If only I could that effect on canvas, Walter. I should feel I wasn't afraid of Titian's Venus!"
The girl writhed in terror. She stood there fixed, immovable. "Let me go," she cried, shrinking back. "I- I didn't mean it. I was driven to it. I didn't know what it was like. Oh, how can you be so cruel?"
Walter Haselton gazed hard at her. He was an unsuccessful artist. "Let her go, Binns," he cried, compassionate. "We ought never to have made her do it. She's a sensitive little thing. She's too good for a model."
But Harley Binns, unmoved, went on sketching those strange alternating waves of red and white. You must remember them, of course, on his marvelous "First Sitting" in last year's New Gallery. They coursed over the girl's body still, like ripples over a millpond. "No, no." he answered, drawing a long puff at his stumpy clay pipe. "Now I've got her, I'll keep her. It isn't likely I'd let her go after this, till I'm done with her. She's perfect, that's what she is. I wouldn't give her up now, not for a hundred pounds. Why she's worth every penny of it!"
"For God's sake," the girl cried, cowering, still chained to the spot. "Oh, Emily, cover me! Throw something or other over me!"
But Harley Binns shook his head and still went on sketching. Her pose was just exquisite--no art, all nature. And those shrinking virginal limbs! And that fervor of modesty! It was the picture he wanted, all making itself of itself without his aid or effort. He was charmed and delighted. "Put more coal on, Walter," he said, puffing away; "she's beginning to shiver."
He sketched for nearly an hour. And all that time the poor girl stood riveted, in an agony of shame, despair and horror. At last she mustered up courage to say, "I can't stand it any more. You must let me go now. That's enough--till--tomorrow."
Then Harley Binns let her go. She'd done quite as much as one can reasonably expect the first day for the lay figure. The model slunk off behind the screen with furtive terror. Emily helped her to muddle on her clothes again somehow. She came out fully dressed, save for her self respect, but she missed that strangely.
"Good morning," Harley Binns said in his cool way; "here's your money, cash down. You were frightened, I know. You'll get used to it in time."
The girl's hand closed over the coin mechanically and dreamily. It was all for her mother. "Yes, I'll get used to it in time, I suppose," she murmured, half dazed. And so out into the open street, and away in reeling fear from that hateful studio.
All day long, when she was gone, Harley Binns worked hard, like one inspired, at touching up the study. He surpassed himself in delicacy. He saw her still before him. He saw those living waves course crimson through her body. If the worst came to worst, from these first rough hints alone, he could manage with care to work up a picture.
Next morning at eleven Emily opened the studio door, whitefaced. Harley Binns gazed at her in surprise.
"Hullo," he cried, "how's this? I say, child, where's the other one?
"She ain't coming this morning," Emily answered , doggedly.
"Not coming this morning?" the painter repeated, drawing back, and holding his breath. "Why, I've not half done with her!"
"But you've done for her!" Emily retorted, looking hard into his cold blue eyes. "She ain't never coming again. She's gone raving mad in the night, and they've taken her to an asylum."
MY ONE GORILLA
by Grant Allen
Transcribed by Victor A. Berch from Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, Aug. 10, 1890
I looked up from my beetles. The night was warm.
A naked little black girl crossed the dusty main street of the village just in front of my hut, carrying in her hand what seemed to me in the gloaming the largest blossom I had ever observed since my arrival in Africa. That was a blossom. It looked like an orchid, pale cream-colour in hue, and very fantastic and bizarre in shape; but what specially attracted my attention at first was its peculiar shining and glistening effect, like luminous paint, which made it glow in the grey dusk with a sort of phosphorescent light such as one observes in tropical seas on calm summer evenings.
To a naturalist, of course, such a vision as that was simply irresistible. "Hullo, there, little girl!" I cried out in Fantee, which I had learned by that time to speak pretty fluently; "let me look at your flower, will you? Where on earth did you get it?"
But instead of answering me civilly, like a Christian child, the scared little savage, alarmed at my white face, set up a wild howl of terror and amazement, and bolted off down the street at the top of her speed, as fast as her small bandy legs would carry her.
Well, science is science. I wasn't to be balked of a unique specimen for my great collection by a trick like that. So, flinging away my cigarette and darting out of my hut, I gave chase incontinently, and rushed, full pelt, down the main street of Tulamba, helter-skelter and devil-take-the-hindmost, in pursuit of my ten-year old.
But I reckoned without my host. Children of the Gaboon beat the record for the quarter-mile. I was quite pumped out and panting for breath before I ran that girl to the earth at last, by her mother's door at the far end of the village. A dozen more of the negroes, loitering about on their backs in the dust of the street, had joined the hue and cry with great gusto by that time. They didn't know, to be sure, what the fuss was about; but given a white man--bestower of rum and money--rushing in mad pursuit, and a poor little frightened black girl scampering away for dear life at the top of her speed, in abject bodily terror, and you may confidently reckon on the chivalry of the Gaboon to range itself automatically on the side of the stronger, and to drive the unhappy small child hopelessly into a very bad corner.
When at last I got up with the object of my quest, she was so alarmed and blown with her headlong career that I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself. Even the pursuit of science, I will frankly admit, hardly justified me in so chivvying that frightened little mortal, ten negroes strong, through the street of Tulamba. However, a bright English sixpence, a red silk pocket-handkerchief, and the promise of a box of European sweets from the old half-caste Portuguese trader's shop in the village, soon restored her confidence. Unhappily, it did not restore that broken and draggled, but priceless, orchid. In her headlong flight, the child had crumpled it hopelessly up in her hand, and distorted it almost beyond the possibility of scientific recognition. All I could make out with certainty now was that the orchid belonged to a new and hitherto undescribed species; that it was large and luminous and extremely beautiful; and that if only I could succeed in securing a plant of it, my name was made as a scientific explorer.
The natives crowded round with disinterested advice, and eyed the torn and draggled blossom curiously. "It's a moon-flower," they said in their own dialect. "Very rare. Hard to get. Comes from the deep shades in the great forest."
"How did you come by it, my child?" I asked, coaxingly, of my sobbing little ten-year old.
"My father brought it in," the child answered, with a burst. "He gave it to me a week ago. He was out in the country of the dwarfs, doing trade. He went for ivory, and he brought this back to me."
"Boys," I cried to the negroes who crowded round, looking on, "do you know where it lives? I want to get one. A good English rifle to any man in Tulamba who guides me to the spot where I can pick a live moon-flower!"
The men shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders dubiously.
"Oh, no," they all answered, like supers at the theatre, with one accord. "Too far! Too dangerous!"
"Why dangerous?" I cried , laughing. "The moon-flower won't bite you. Who says danger in picking a flower?"
My head guide and hunter stood out from the crowd, and looked across at me, awe-struck. "Oh, excellency," he said, in a hushed and frightened voice, "the moon-flower is rare; it is very scarce; it grows only in the dark forest of the inner land where the Ngina dwells. No man dare pick it for fear of the Ngina."
"Oho," said I. "Is that so, my friend? Then I'm not astonished." For Ngina, as no doubt you're already aware, is the native West African name for the gorilla.
Well, I took home the poor draggled blossom to my hut, dissected it carefully, and made what scientific study was possible of its unhappy remains in their much tattered condition. But for the next ten days, as you can readily believe, I could think and talk and dream of nothing but moon-flowers. You can't think what a fascination it exerts on a naturalist explorer's mind--a new orchid like that, as big round as a dessert plate, and marked by so extraordinary and hitherto unknown a peculiarity in plants as phosphorescence. For the moon-flower was phosphorescent; of that I had now not the shadow of a doubt. Its petals gave out by night a faint and dreamy luminousness, which must have made it shine like a moon indeed in the dense dark shade of a tropical African forest.
The more I inquired of the natives about this new plant, the more was my curiosity piqued to possess one. I longed to bring a root of the marvellous bloom to Europe. For the natives all spoke of it with a certain hushed awe or superstitious respect: "It is Ngina's flower," they said. "It grows in dark places--the gardens of Ngina. If any man breaks one off, that is very bad luck; the Ngina will surely overtake and destroy him."
This superstitious awe only inflamed my desire to possess a root. The negroes' stories showed the moon-flower to be really a most unique species. I gathered from what they told me that the blossom had a very long spur or sac, containing honey at its base in great quantities; that it was fertilised and rifled by a huge evening moth, whose proboscis was exactly adapted in length to the spur and its nectary; that it was creamy white in order to attract the insect's eyes in the grey shades of dusk; and that, for the self-same reason, its petals were endowed with the strange quality of phosphorescence, till now unknown in the vegetable kingdom; while it exhaled by night a delicious perfume, strong enough to be perceived at some twenty yards' distance. So great a prize to a man of my tastes was simply irresistible. I made up my mind that, come what might, I must, could and would possess a tuber of the moon-flower.
One fortnight sufficed for me to make my final plans. Heavy bribes overcame the scruples of the negroes. The promise of a good rifle induced the first finder of the first specimen to take service with me as a guide. Fully equipped for a week's march, and well attended with followers all armed to the teeth, I made my start at last for the home of the moon-flower.
To cut a long story short, we went for three days into the primeval shade of the great equatorial African forest. Dense roofs of foliage shut out the light of day; underfoot, the ground was encumbered with thick, tropical brushwood. We crept along cautiously, hacking our way at times among the brake with our cutlasses, and crawling at others through the deep tangle of the underbrush on all fours like monkeys. During all those three days we never caught sight of a single moon-flower. They were growing very rare nowadays, my guide explained in most voluble Fantee. When he was a mere boy, his father found dozens of them; but now, why, you must go miles and miles through the depths of the forest and never so much as light on a specimen.
At last, about noon on the fourth day out, we came upon a torrent, rushing with great velocity among huge boulders, and sending up the spray of its boiling rapids into the trees of the neighbourhood. I sat down to rest, meaning to mix the water from the cool, fresh stream with a spoonful or two of cognac from the flask in my pocket. As I drank it, I tossed back my head and looked up. Something on one of the trees hard by attracted my eyes strangely. A parasite stood out boldly from a fork of the branches, bearing a long, lithe spray of huge luminous flowers as big as dessert-plates. My heart gave a bound; the prize was within sight. I pointed my finger in silence to the tree. All the negroes with one voice raised a loud shout of triumph. Their words rent the air: "The moon-flower--the moon-flower!"
I felt myself for a moment a perfect Stanley or Du Chaillu. I had discovered the most marvellous and beautiful orchid known to science.
In a moment I had tossed off my brandy, laid down my rifle, and mounting on the back of one of my negro porters, was swinging myself up to the lowest branch of the tree where my new treasure shone resplendent in its own dim phosphorescence. I couldn't have trusted any hand but my own to pick or egg out that glorious tuber. I meant to cut it bodily from the bark as it stood, and bear it back in triumph in my own arms to Tulamba.
I had climbed the tree cautiously, and was standing almost within grasp of the prize, when a sudden shout among my followers below startled and discomposed me. I looked down and hesitated. My brain reeled and sickened. A strange sight met my eyes. My negroes, one and all, had taken to their feet down the bed of the stream at the very top of their speed, and were making a most unanimous and inexplicable stampede toward the direction of Tulamba.
For a moment I couldn't imagine what had happened to disconcert them; the, casting my glance casually towards the spot where I had flung down my rifle, I became aware at once of the cause of this commotion. Their retreat was well-timed. By the moss-clad boulders which filled the bed of the torrent, somebody with a big, black face and huge grinning teeth, was standing erect, looking up at me and laughing. I had never seen the somebody's awful features before, but I had no need, for all that, to ask myself his name. I paused face to face with a live male gorilla.
For a moment or two, the creature gazed up at me and grinned. Then he raised my rifle in his arms; held it clumsily before him; and, to my intense surprise, taking a very bad aim, or, rather pointing it aimlessly in the air, pulled both triggers with one hand, and discharged the two barrels at me with one pull, simultaneously. The bullets whizzed past me some ten yards off. They knocked off the twigs beyond my precious moon-flower.
Well, I don't deny, as I say, that I was in a state of blue funk at the creature's gigantic and almost supernatural powers. But still, the moon-flower was at stake, and I wouldn't desert it. I was so horribly frightened that I don't believe wife, or child , or fatherland, or freedom would have induced me to stay one moment alone in such dire extremities. But when it comes to orchids! Well, I say no more than that I am above all things a scientific explorer; each of us has his weakness; and mine is a flower. That touches my heart. For that alone can I be wrought up to the utmost pitch of daring conceivable or possible for me.
So I looked at the huge brute, and I looked at the moon-flower. Slowly and cautiously, gazing down all the time as I went to watch the creature's face, I crept along the branch, took my knife from my pocket, and began to loosen the bark all round the spot where the glorious parasite was all a-growing and all a-blowing. The gorilla, from below, stood watching me and roaring. His roar seemed like an invitation to come down and fight. I never in my life heard anything so awfully human in its deep bass roll. It reminded me of the lowest notes of the stage villain in the Italian operas, magnified, so to speak, two hundred diameters.
Presently, as I went on cutting away the bark, as if for dear life, and loosening the precious tuber, my gorilla, who still remained motionless by his moss-clad boulder, left off his roaring, and appeared to grow interested in the process of the operation. A change came o'er the spirit of his dream. He looked up and wondered, with vague brute curiosity, not unmixed with a certain strange air of low cunning and intelligence. It was clear to me as mud that he was saying to himself inwardly, "Why doesn't the fellow cut and run for his life? Does he think I don't know how to climb a tree? Does he imagine that I couldn't be up there in a jiffy if I liked--to choke or scrag him? What the dickens does he go on hacking away at the bark so quietly like that for, when he ought to be all agog to save his own bacon?"
I despaired of explaining to so rude a creature the imperative nature of scientific need. So with one eye on the orchid and one on the brute, at the risk of contracting a permanent squint for life, I continued to egg out that magnificent moon-flower, root and branch and tuber.
The longer I went on, the closer and more attentively did the gorilla take stock of all my acts and movements. "Well, I declare," I could see him say to himself in the gorilla tongue, opening wide his huge eyes and elevating in surprise his shaggy, brown eyebrows, "such an animal as this I never yet did come across. He isn't one bit afraid, apparently of me, the redoubtable and redoubted king of the great Gaboon forest."
But I was, most consumedly, for all that, though I pretended not to be. Nothing but the presence before my eyes of that magnificent plant would have induced me for one moment to face or confront the unspeakable brute there.
At last I had finished, and held my specimen in my hands entire. The next question now was what to do with it.
I walked slowly and cautiously along the branch of the tree. The gorilla, with his eyes now fixed curiously on the moon-flower, put forth one hairy leg in front of the other, and grinning with a sort of diabolical, brutish good-humour, walked, step for step, on the ground, just as cautiously beneath me.
I came to the end of the bough, and reached the point where interlacing branches enabled me to get on to another tree. I did so somewhat clumsily, for I was handicapped by the moon-flower. The gorilla, still grinning, looked up, and remarked in his own tongue, "I could do that lot, I can tell you, a jolly sight better than you do."
As he smiled those words, I half lost my balance, and, clinging still to my moon-flower in my last chance for life, lowered myself slowly, hand over hand, to the ground in front of him.
With a frightful roar, the creature sprang upon me--and made a wild grab at my precious moon-flower. That was more than human scientific human nature could stand. I turned and fled, carrying my specimen with me. But my pursuer was too quick. He caught me up in a moment. His scowling black face was ghastly to behold; his huge, white teeth gleamed fierce and hideous; his brawny, thick hands could have crushed me to a jelly. I panted and paused. My heart fluttered fast, the stood still within me. There was a second's suspense. At its end, to my infinite horror, he seized--not me-oh no, not me--I might have put up with that--but the priceless moon-flower!
I was helpless to defend myself. Helpless to secure or safeguard my treasure. He took it from me with a grin. I could see through those sunken eyes what was passing in the creature's dim and brutal brain. He was saying to himself, like men at his own low grade of cunning, "If that tuber was worth so much pains to him to get it, it must be worth just as much to me to keep. So, by your leave, my friend, if you'll excuse me, I'll take it."
I stood appalled and gazed at him. The brute snatched that unique specimen of a dying or almost extinct genus in his swarthy, hairy hands of his--raised it bodily to his mouth, crushing and tearing the beautiful petals in his coarse grasp as he went--ate it slowly through, tuber, stem, spray, blossom--and swallowed it conscientiously, with a hideous grimace, to the very last morsel. I had but one grain of consolation or revenge. It was clear the taste was exceedingly nasty.
Then he looked in my face and burst into a loud, discordant laugh. That laugh was hideous.
"Aha!" it said in effect, "so that's all you've got, my fine fellow, after all, for all your pains, and care, and trouble!"
I shut my eyes and waited. My turn would come next. He would rend me in his rage for the nastiness of the taste. I stood still and shuddered. But, alas, he meant only to eat the moon-flower.
When I opened my eyes again, the brute had turned his back without one word of apology, and was walking off at a leisurely pace in contemptuous triumph, shrugging his shoulders as he went, and chuckling low to himself in his vulgar dog-in-the-manger joy and malignancy.
It was four days before I straggled alone, half dead, into Tulamba. I never came across another of those orchids. And that is why at Kew they have still no moon-flower.