 Chapter 7 of Widdershins. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sammy Bean. Widdershins. By Oliver Onion. Chapter 7. The Cigarette Case. A Cigarette Case Loader. I said, offering my case. For the moment Loader was not smoking for long enough, he had not been talking. Thanks, he replied. Taking not only the cigarette, but the case also. The others went on talking. Loader became silent again, but I noticed that he kept my cigarette case in his hand and looked at it from time to time. With an interest that neither its design nor its costliness seemed to explain presently I caught his eye. A pretty case, he remarked, putting it down on the table. I once had one exactly like it. I answered that they were in every shop window. Oh yes, he said, putting aside any questions of rarity. I lost mine. Oh. Left. Oh, that's all right. I got it back again. Don't be afraid. I'm going to claim yours. But the way I lost it, found it, the whole thing was rather curious. I've never been able to explain it. I wonder if you could. I answered that I certainly couldn't, till I'd heard it, whereupon Loader, taking up that silver case again and holding it in his hand as he talked, began. This happened in province, when I was about as old as Marsham there, and every bit is romantic. I was there with Carol. You remember, poor old Carol, and what a blade of a boy he was, as romantic as four Marshams rolled into one. Excuse me, Marsham, why don't you? It's a romantic tale, you see, or at least the setting is. We were in province, Carol and I, 24 thereabouts, romantic, as I say. And, and this happened. And it happened on the top of a whole lot of other things. You must understand the things that do happen when you're 24. If it hadn't been province, it would have been somewhere else, I suppose, nearly. If not quite as good, but this was province. That smells, as you might say, of 24, as it smells of Argyle and Wild Lavender and Broom. We'd had the dickens of a walk of it, just with knapsacks, had started somewhere in our dash and tramped south through the vines and almonds and olives of Montemar, orange, Avnang, and fortnight at that blanched skeleton of a town labo. We'd nothing to do and had gone just where we liked, or rather just where Carol had liked, and Carol had had the de bella galinco in his pocket and had had a notion, I fancy, of taking in the whole ground of Roman conquest. I remember he lugged me off to some place or other porays, I believe. Its name was because I forgot how many thousands were killed in a riverbed there, and they stove in the water casks so that if the men wanted water, they'd have to go forward and fight for it. And then we'd gone to Arle, where Carol had fallen in love with everything that had a bow of black velvet in her hair, and after that, tariscon, nins, and so on, and usual round, I won't bother you with that. In a word, we'd had two months of it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the communal washing fountains under the dark, plain trees, singing mangal and cuquantes, and Carol yarning away all the time about Caesar, and a verset tour, and dante, and trying to learn provincial so that he could read the stuff in the journal Dez de Felbrege that he'd never have looked at if it had been in English. Well, we got to Darbysen, we'd run across some young chap or other, Rangan, his name was, who was a vine planter in those parts, and Rangan had asked us to spend a couple of days with him, with him and his mother, if we happened to be in the neighborhood. So as we might as well happen to be there as anywhere else, we sent him a postcard and went. This would be in June or early in July. All day we walked across the plain of vines past hurls of wild canes and great windscreens of valvety cypress. Sixty feet high, all white with dust on the north side of them, for the mistral was having its three days revel, and it whistled and roared through the canes till scores of yards of them at time were bowed nearly to the earth. A roaring day it was, I remember, but the wind fell a little late in the afternoon and we were pouring over what had left of our ordinance survey like fools. We'd got the unmounted paper maps instead of the linen ones when Rangan himself found us coming out to meet us in a very badly turned out trap. He drove us back himself through Darvison to the house a mile and a half beyond it, where he lived with his mother. He spoke no English. Rangan didn't, though, of course, both French and provincial, and as he drove us there was Carol using him as Franco Provincial Dictionary, peppering him with questions about the names of things in the patois. I beg his pardon, the language, though, there's a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this fellow Brej business will be in a good many pieces when Frederick Mistral is under the court of love pavilion arrangement. He's had put up for himself in this graveyard at Milan. If the language has to go, well, it's got to go, I suppose, and while I personally don't want to give it a kick, I rather sympathize with the government. Those jaunts of a Sunday out to Lesboe, for instance, with paper lanterns and Bengal fire and a fellow spouting a blanche van des durelles, there are well enough to compare favorably with our bank holidays and Sunday league picnics, but that's nothing to do with my tale after all. So he drove on and by the time we got to Rangan's house, Carol and I learned the greater part of Meg Alley. As you no doubt know, it's a restricted sort of life in some respects that a young Vin Ron lives in those parts, and it was as we reached the house that Rangan remembered something where he might have been trying to tell us as we came along for all I know and not been able to get a word in edgewise for Carol and his provincial it seemed that his mother was away from home for some days. Apologies of the most profound, of course, our host was the soul of courtesy, though he did try to get at us a bit later. We expressed our polite regards naturally, but I didn't quite see at first what difference it made. I only began to see when Rangan with more apologies told us that we should have to go back for Darvison for dinner. It appeared that when Madame Rangan went away for a few days, she dispersed the whole of the female side of her establishment also, and she left her son with nobody to look after him except the old man we'd seen in the yard mending one of these double cylindered sulfur sprinklers. They clap across the horse's back and drive between the rows of vines. Rangan explained all this as we stood in the hall drinking an aperteeth, a hall crowded with oak furniture and photographs and a cradle like bread crib and doors opening to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor. He had also seemed to ask us to be so infinitely obliging as to excuse him for one hour after dinner our postcard had come unexpectedly, he said, and already he had made an appointment with his agent about the vendage for coming autumn. We begged him, of course, not to allow us to interfere with his business in the slightest degree. He thanked us a thousand times. But though we dine in the village, we will take our own wine with us, he said. A wine, a surfing, one of my wines you shall see. Then he showed us round his place, I forget how many hundreds of acres of vines, and into the great building with the presses and pumps and casks, and a huge barrel they called the thunderbolt, and about seven o'clock we walked back to Darvison to dinner carrying our wine with us. I think the restaurant we dined in was the only one in the place and our galler of a host. He was a straight-backed, well-set up chap with rather fine eyes, did us on the whole pretty well. His wine certainly was good stuff and set our tongues going. A moment ago, I said a fellow like Rangan leads a restricted sort of life in those parts. I saw this more clearly as dinner went on. We dined by an open window from which we could see the stream with the planks across it, where the women washed clothes during the day and assembled in the evening for gossip. There were a dozen or so of them there as we dined laughing and chatting in low tones. They all seemed pretty. It was quickly falling dusk. All the girls were pretty then, and are quite conscious of it. You know, Martian. Behind them, at the end of the street, one of these great cypress windscreen showed black against the sky, a raged edge, something like the line the needle draws on a rainfall chart, and you could only tell whether they were men or women under the plantains by their voices rippling and chattering and suddenly a deeper note. Once I heard a muffled scuffle and a sound like a kiss, it was then that Rangan's little trouble came out. It seemed that he didn't know any girls, wasn't allowed to know any girls. The girls of the village were pretty enough, but you see how it was. He had a position to keep up appearance to maintain. Couldn't be familiar during the year with the girls who gathered his grapes for him in the autumn. And as soon as Carol gave him a chance, he began to ask us questions about English girls, the liberty they had, and so on. Of course, we couldn't tell him much. He hadn't heard already, but that made no difference. He could stand any amount of that, or strapping your vigneron. And he asked us questions by the dozen, and we both tried to answer it once. And his delight in envy. What in England did the young men see the young women of their own class without restraint? The sisters of their friends, Mimei, even at the house, was it permitted that they drank tea with them in the afternoon, or without invitation to pass the sore? He had all the later provosts in his room, he told us. I don't doubt that he had the earlier ones also. Provost and disestablishment between them must be playing with mischief with the covenant systems of education for young girls. And our young men was, what do you call it, co-ed? Co-educationalist by Joe Fias. He seemed to marvel that we should have left a country so blessed as England to visit his dusty wild lavender-smelling girl's province. You don't know half your luck, Martian. While we talked after this fashion, we'd left the dining room of the restaurant, and had planted ourselves on a bench outside with Rangan between us, with Rangan suddenly looked at his watch and said it was time. He was off to see this agent of his. Would we talk or take a walk? He asked us and meet him again there, he said. But as his agent lived in the direction of his own home, we said we'd meet him at the house in our hour or so off we went, and being every Englishman who stepped, I don't doubt. I told you how old, how young we were, I hope. While off goes Rangan and Carol and I got up, stretched ourselves, and took a walk. We walked a mile or so until it began to get pretty dark, and then turned. And it was as we came into the blackness of one of these cypress hedges that the thing I'm telling you of happened. The hedge took a sharp turn at the point as we became round in angle. He saw a couple of women figures hardly more than 20 yards ahead. Don't know how they got there, so suddenly I'm sure. And that same moment, I found my foot on something small and white and glimmering on the grass. I picked it up. It was a handkerchief, a woman's embroidered. The two figures ahead of us were walking in our direction. There was every possibility that the handkerchief belonged to one of them, so we stepped out. At my pardon, madame, and lifted hat, one of the figures turned her head. Then, to my surprise, she spoke in English, cultivated English. I held out the handkerchief. It belonged to the elder lady of the two, the one who had spoken a very gentle, voiced old lady. Older by very many years than her companion. She took the handkerchief and thanked me. Somebody stern, isn't it, says the Englishman. Don't travel to see Englishmen. I don't know whether he'd stand to that in the case of the Englishwoman. Carol and I didn't. We were walking rather slowly along, four breast across the road. We asked permission to introduce ourselves, did so, and received some name in return, which, strangely enough, I've entirely forgotten. I only remember that the ladies were aunt and niece and lived in Darvison. They shook their heads when I mentioned M. Rengan's name and said we were visiting him. They didn't know him. I'd never been in Darvison before, and I haven't been since, so I don't know the map of the village very well. But the place isn't very big, and the house at which we stopped in 20 minutes or so is probably there yet. It had a large double door, a double door in two senses. For it was a big porta-corsche with a smaller door inside it and an iron grill shutting in the hole. The gentle voiced old lady had already taken key from her ridicule and was thanking us again for the little service of the handkerchief. Then, with the little gesture one makes when one has found oneself on the point of omitting a courtesy, she gave a little musical laugh. But she said with a little movement of invitation, one sees so few compatriots here. If you have the time to come in and smoke a cigarette, also the cigarette she added with another rippled laugh, for we have a few collars and a live lone, hastily, as I was about to accept Carol, was before me professing a nostalgia for the sound of the English tongue that made his recent protestations about provincial, a shameless hypocrisy, persuasive young rascal. Carol was poor chap, so the elder lady opened the grill and the wooden door beyond it, and we entered. By the light of the candle which the younger lady took from a bracket just within the door, we saw that we were in a handsome hall of vestibule, and my wonder the Rangan had made no mention of what was apparently a considerable establishment was increased by the fact that its tenets must be known to be English and could be seen to be entirely charming. I couldn't understand it, and I'm afraid hypothesis rushed into my head that cast doubts on Rangans, you know, whether they were all right. We knew nothing about our young planter, you see. I looked about me. There were tubs here and there against the walls gaily painted with glossy-leaved aloes and palms in them. One of the aloes, I remember, was flowering a little fountain in the middle made a tinkling noise. We put our caps on a carved and gilt council table, and before us rose a broad staircase with shallow steps of spotless stone and a beautiful raw iron handrail. At the top of the staircase were more palms and aloes, and double doors painted in a clear gray. We followed our hostesses up the staircase. I can hear yet the sharp clean click our boots made on that hard, shiny stone. See the lights of the candle gleaming on the handrail. The young girl, she was not much more than a girl, pushed at the doors, and we went in. The room we entered was all of peace with the rest of rather old-fashioned fineness. It was large, lofty, beautifully kept. Carol went round for a miss, whatever her name was, lighting candles and scones. And as the flames crept up, they glimmered on a beautifully polished floor, which was bare except for an eastern rug here and there. The other lady had sat down in a gilt chair Louis 14th, I should have say, with a stripped rep of the collar of a pentunia. And I really don't know, don't smile, Smith, what induced me to lead her to it by the fingertips, bending over her hand for a moment as she sat down. There was an old timbre frame behind her chair, I remember, and a vast oval mirror with clustered candle brackets filled the greater part of the further wall, the brightest and clearest glass I've ever seen. He paused, looking at my cigarette case, which he had taken into his hand again. He smiled at some recollection or other. And it was a minute or so before he continued, I must admit that I found it a little annoying after what we'd been talking about at dinner an hour before, that Rangan wasn't with us. I still couldn't understand how he could have neighbors so charming without knowing about them. But I didn't care to insist on this to the old lady, who, for all I knew, might have her own reasons for keeping to herself. And after all, it was our place to return Rangan's hospitality in London, if we ever came there not so to speak on his own doorstep. So presently, I forgot all about Rangan, and I'm pretty sure that Carol, who was talking to his companion of some felberge, junketing, or other, and having the air of Gannon's morale hummed softly over to him, didn't waste a thought on him either. Soon Carol, you remember, what a pretty crooning humming voice he had. Soon Carol was murmuring what they call seconds, but so low that the sound hardly came across the room. And I came in with a soft bass note from time to time, no instrument, you know, just an accompanied murmur, no louder than an alien harp. And it sounded infinitely sweet and plaintive. And what shall I say, weak, a tinnished, faint pal? You might almost say in that formal, rather old fashioned salon, with that great, clear oval mirror throwing back the still flames of the candles and the scones on the walls. Outside the wind had now fallen completely. All was very quiet, and suddenly, you know, voice not much louder than a sigh. Carol's companion was singing hoft in a stilly night. You know it. He broke off again to murmur the beginning of the air, then with a little laugh for which he saw, no reason, he went on again. Well, I'm not going to try to convince you of such a special and delicate thing as the charm of that hour. It wasn't more than an hour. It would be all about an hour we stayed. Things like that just have to be said and left. You destroy them the moment you begin to insist on them. We've every one of us had experiences like that. And don't say much about them. I was as much in love with my old lady as Carol evidently was with his young one. I can't tell you why being in love has just to be taken for granted, too. I suppose Marsham understands. We smoked our cigarettes and sang again, once more filling the clear painted quiet apartment with a murmuring no louder than if a light breeze found that the bells of a bed of flowers were really bells and played on. The old lady moved her fingers gently on the round table by the side of her chair. Oh, infinitely pretty it was. Then Carol wandered off into the Q-Cantes, awfully pretty. It is not for myself I sing, but for my friend who is near me. And I can't tell you how like four old friends we were, those two so oddly met ladies and Carol and myself and so too oft in still a night again. But for all the sweetness and the glamour of it we couldn't stay on indefinitely and I wondered what time it was. But didn't ask anything to do with clocks and watches would have seemed a cold mechanical sort of thing just then. And when presently we both got up neither Carol nor I asked to be allowed to call again in the morning to thank them for a charming hour. And they seemed to feel the same as we did about it. There was no hoping that we should meet again in London, neither an or a revere nor a goodbye, just a tacit understanding that that hour should remain isolated except like a good gift without looking, the gift horse in the mouth. Single unattached to any hours before or after. I don't know whether you see what I mean. Give me a match somebody. And so we left with no more than looks exchanged and fingertips resting between the back of our hands and our lips for a moment we found our way out by ourselves down the shallow step staircase with the handsome handrail and let ourselves out of the double door and grill closing it softly we made for the village without speaking a word. Hi-ho! Loader had picked up the cigarette case again. But for all the way his eyes rested on it, I doubted whether he really saw it. I'm pretty sure he didn't. I knew what he did by the glance he shot at me as much as to say I see you're wondering where the cigarette case comes in. He resumed with another little laugh. Well, he continued, we got back to Rangan's house. I really don't blame Rangan for the way he took it when he told him, you know, he thought we were pulling his leg of course and he wasn't having any, not he. There were no English ladies in Darbus and he said, we told him as nearly as we could just where the house was. We weren't very precise, I'm afraid, for the village had been in darkness as we had come through it. And I had to admit that the Cyprus hedge I tried to describe where we'd met our friends was a good deal like other Cyprus hedges. And as I say, Rangan wasn't taking any of it. I myself was rather annoyed that he should think we were returning his hospitality by trying to get at him. And it wasn't very easy either to explain in my French and Carol's provincial that we were going to let the thing stand as it was and weren't going to call on our charming friends again. The end of it was that Rangan's just laughed and yawned. I knew it was good, my wine, he said, but I shrugged said the rest, not so good as all that he meant. Then he gave us our candles, showed us our rooms, shook our hands, and marched off to his own room and the provost. I dreamed of my old lady half the night after coffee the next morning. I put my hand into my pocket for my cigarette case and didn't find it. I went through all my pockets and then I asked Carol if he'd got it. No, he replied. Thank you, left it behind at the place last night? Yes, did you? Rangan popped in with a twinkle. I went through all my pockets again, no cigarette case. Of course it was possible that I'd left it behind and I was annoyed again. I didn't want to go back, you see, but on the other hand, I didn't want to lose the case. It was a present and Rangan's smile netled me a good deal too. It was both a challenge to our truthfulness and testimonial to that very good wine of his. Might have done, I grunted, well, in that case we'll go and get it. If one tried the restaurant first, Rangan suggested smiling again. By all means, said I stuffly. Though I remembered having the case after we'd left the restaurant, we were round at the journalist. By half past nine, the case wasn't there. I'd known jolly while beforehand it wasn't and I saw Rangan's mouth twitching with amusement. So, we now seek the abode of English ladies, Hein. He said, yes, said I. And we left the restaurant and strode through the village by the way we'd taken the evening before. Then the Vigneron's smile became more and more irritating to me. It is then the next village, he asked presently, as we left the last house and came out into the open plain. We went back. I was irritated because we were two to one, you see. And Carol backed me up, a doubled door with a grill in front of it. He repeated for the 15th time. Rangan merely replied that it wasn't our good faith. He doubted. He didn't actually use the word drunk. Maz tanes, he said suddenly, trying to conceal his mirth. Sys is possible, sys is possible. I doubled door with a grill, but perhaps that I know it. The demochul of these so elusive ladies come this way. He took us back along a plantain grove street and suddenly turned up an alley that was little more than two gutters and a crack of sky overhead between two broken tile roofs. It was a dilapidated, deserted rule. I was positively angry when Rangan pointed to a blistered old porté courche with a half unhinged railing in front of it. Is it that, your house, he asked? No, sys I, and no, sys Carol. And off we started again, but another half hour brought us back to the same place and Carol scratched his head. Who lives there anyway? He said, gloring at the porté courche, chin forward, hands in pockets. Nobody says Rangan. As much as to say, look at it, Miss Sua then meditates taking it. Then I struck in, quite out of temper by his time. How much would the rent be? I asked as if I really thought of taking the place just to get back at him. He mentioned something ridiculously small in the way of Frank's. One might at least see the place says, I, can the key be got, be bowed? And the key was at the baker's, not a hundred yards away. And he said, we got the key. It was the key of the inner wooden door that grid of rusty iron didn't need one. It came clean off at single hinge when Carol touched it. Carol opened and we stood for a moment motioning to one another to step in. Then Rangan went in first and I heard him murmur, pardon, mesdames, now this is the odd part. We passed into a sort of vestibule or hall with a burst lead pipe in the middle of a dry tank in the center of it. There was a broad staircase rising in front of us to the first floor and double doors just seen in the half light at the head of the stairs old tub stood against the walls. But the ponds and allows and them were dead, only a cabbage stalk or two, and the rusty hoops lay on the ground about them. One tub had come to pieces entirely and was no more than a heap of staves on a pile of split earth. And everywhere, everywhere was dust. The floor was an inch deep in dust, an old plaster that muffled our footsteps. Cobwebs hung like old dusters on the wall. A regular goblin's tatter of cobwebs draped the little bracket inside the door and the iron of the handrail was closed up with webs in which not even a spider moved. The whole thing was preposterous. It is possible that for even a less rental, Rangan murmured, dragging his forefinger and crossed the handrail and leaving an inch deep furrow. Come upstairs, said I suddenly. Up we went, all was in the same state there. A clutter of stuff came down as I pushed at the double doors of the salon and I had to strike a stinking French sulfur match to see into the room at all. Underfoot was like walking on thickness of flannel and except where we put our feet, the place was as printless as a snow-filled dust. Dust on broken gray dust, my match burned down. Wait a minute, I have a bogey, said Carol and struck the wax match. There were the only sconces with never a candle end in them. There was the large oval mirror but hardly reflecting Carol's match for the dust on it and the broken chairs were there, all gutless and rickety old round table. But suddenly I darted forward, something new and bright on the table twinkled with the light of Carol's match. The match went out and by the time Carol had lighted another, I had stopped. I wanted Rangan to see what was on the table. You'll see my footprints how far from the table I've been, I said, will you pick it up? And Rangan stepping forward picked up from the middle of the table my cigarette case. Loader had finished, nobody spoke for quite a minute, nobody spoke and then Loader himself broke the silence, turning to me, make anything of it, he said. I lifted my eyebrows, only your Vigneron's explanation I began but stopped again seeing that wouldn't do. Anybody make anything of it, said Loader, turning from one to another. I gathered from Smith's face that he thought one thing might be made of it, name one. Then Loader had invented the whole tale but even Smith didn't speak. Were any English ladies ever found to have lived in the place, murdered, you know bodies found and all that? Young Martian asked, definitely yearning for an obvious completeness, not that we could ever learn, Loader replied. We made inquiries too, so you all give it up, well so do I. And he rose as he walked to the door myself following him to get his hat and stick. I heard him humming softly, the lines they are from oft in the stilling none. I seem like one who treads alone, some banquet hall deserted, whose guests are fled, whose garlands dead and all but he departed. End of chapter seven, recording by Sammy Bean. Chapter eight of Widdershins. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. To volunteer or for more information, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Melissa Burns Price. Widdershins by Oliver Onions. Chapter eight, The Rocker. Part one. There was little need for the Swart Gypsies to explain as they stood knee-deep in the snow round the bailiff of the Abbey Farm, what it was that had sent them. The unbroken whiteness of the uplands told that and even as they spoke there came up the hill of the dark figures of the farm men with shovels on their way to dig out the sheep. In the summer the bailiff would have been the first to call the gypsies vagabonds and roost robbers. Now they had women with them too. The hairs in the foxes were down four days ago and the liquid manure pumps like a snowman, the bailiff said. Yes, you can lie in the laze and welcome if you can find them. Maybe you'll help us find our sheep too. The gypsies had done so. Coming back again, they had had some adieu to discover the spot where their three caravans made a humick of white against a broken wall. The women, they had four with them, began that afternoon to weave the mats and baskets they hawked from door to door. And in the forenoon of the following day, one of them, the black-haired soft-voiced queen whom the bailiff had heard called Annabelle, set her babe in the sling on her back, tucked a bundle of long cane loops under her oxter and trudged down between the eight-foot walls of snow to the abbey farm. She stood in the lattice porch, dark and handsome against the whiteness, and then, advancing, put her head into the great hall kitchen. Has the lady any chairs for the gypsy woman to mend? She asked in a soft and insinuating voice. They brought her the old chairs. She seated herself on a box in the porch and there she wove the strips of cane in and out, securing each one with a little wooden peg and a tap of her hammer. The child remained in the sling at her back, taking the breast from time to time over her shoulder and the silver wedding ring could be seen as she whipped the cane back and forth. As she worked, she cast curious glances into the old hall kitchen. The snow outside cast a pallet upward light on the heavy ceiling beams. This was reflected in the polished stone floor. And the children, who at first had shyly stopped their play, seeing the strange woman in the porch. The nearest thing they had seen to gypsies before had been the old itinerant glazier with his frame of glass on his back, resumed it, but still eyed her from time to time. In the ancient walnut chair by the hearth sat the old, old lady who had told them to bring the chairs. Her hair, almost as white as the snow itself, was piled up on her head a la marquee. She was knitting, but now and then she allowed the needle in the little wooden sheath at her waist to lie idle, closed her eyes and rocked slowly in the old walnut chair. Ask the woman who was bending the chairs whether she is warm enough out there, the old lady said to one of the children and the child went to the porch with the message. Thank you, little Missy, thank you, dear. Annabella's quite warm, said the soft voice and the child returned to the play. It was the childish game of funerals at which the children played. The hand of death hovering over the dolls had singled out flora, the articulations of whose sawdust body were seams and whose boots were painted on her calves of fibrous plaster. For the greater solemnity, the children had made themselves sweeping trains of the garments of their elders and those with cropped curls had draped their heads with shawls, the fringes of width they had combed out with their fingers to simulate hair. Long hair, such as Sabrina, the eldest, had hanging so low down her back that she could almost sit on it. A cylindrical bodied horse convertible when his flat head came out of its socket into a locomotive, headed the sad cortege, then came the defunct flora, then came Jack, the raffish sailor doll, with other dolls, and the children followed with hushed whisperings. The youngest of the children passed the high back walnut chair in which the old lady sat. She stopped. Aunt Rachel, she whispered slowly and gravely, opening very wide and closing her tight eyes. Yes, dear? Flora's dead. The old lady, when she smiled, did so less with her lips than with her faded cheeks. So sweet was her face that you could not help wondering when you looked on it, how many men had also looked upon it and loved it. Somehow you never wondered how many of them had been loved in return. I'm so sorry, dear Aunt Rachel, who in reality was a great aunt, said. What did she die from this time? She died of brown titus, and now she's going to be buried in a grave as little as her bed. In a what, dear? As little dread, as little as my bed. You said it, Sabrina. She means, Aunt Rachel, teach me to live that I may dread the grave as little as my bed. Sabrina, the eldest, interpreted. Ah, but won't you play at cheerful things, dears? Yes, we will presently, Aunt Rachel. Gee, of course. Shall we go and ask the chairwoman if she's warm enough? Do, dears. Again, the message was taken, and this time it seemed as if Annabelle, the gypsy, was not warm enough, for she gathered up her loops of cane and brought the chair she was mending a little way into the hall kitchen itself. She sat down on the square box that they used to cover the showing machine. Thank you, lady, dear, she murmured, lifting her handsome almond eyes to Aunt Rachel. Aunt Rachel did not see the long, furtive, curious glance. Her own eyes were closed as if she was tired. Her cheeks were smiling. One of them had dropped a little to one shoulder, as if she held in her arms a babe, and she was rocking softly, slowly, the rocker of the chair making a little regular noise on the polished floor. The gypsy woman beckoned to one of the children. Tell the lady when she wakes that I will tack a strip of felt to the rocker, and then it will make no noise at all. Said the low and weatling voice, and the child retired again. The interment of Flora proceeded. An hour later, Flora had taken up the burden of life again. It was as Angela, the youngest, was chastising her for some offense, that Sabrina, the eldest, looked with wondering eyes on the babe in the gypsy's sling. She approached on tiptoe. May I look at it please? She asked timidly. The gypsy set one shoulder forward, and Sabrina put the shawl gently aside, peering at the dusky brown morsel within. Sometime, perhaps, if I'm very careful, Sabrina ventured diffidently. If I'm very careful, may I hold it? Before replying, the gypsy once more turned her almond eyes toward Aunt Rachel's chair. Aunt Rachel had been awakened for the conclusion of Flora's funeral, but her eyes were closed again now, and once more her cheek was dropped in that tender, suggestive little gesture, and she rocked. But you could see that she was not properly asleep. It was somehow less to Sabrina still peering at the babe in the sling than to Aunt Rachel, apparently asleep, that the gypsy seemed to reply. You'll know some day, little missus, that a wean knows its own pair of arms, her seductive voice came, and Aunt Rachel heard. She opened her eyes with a start. The little regular noise of the rocker ceased. She turned her head quickly. Tremulously she began to knit again, and as her eyes rested on the side long eyes of the gypsy woman, there was an expression in them that almost resembled fright. Part two. They began to deck the Great Hall kitchen for Christmas, but the snow still lay thick over the hill and valley, and the gypsies caravans remained by the broken wall where the drifts had overtaken them. Though all the chairs were mended, Annabelle still came daily to the farm, sat on the box they used to cover the sewing machine, and wove mats. As she wove them, Aunt Rachel knitted, and from time to time fragments of talk passed between the two women. It was always the white-haired lady who spoke first, and Annabelle made all sorts of salutes and obiescences with her eyes before replying. I have not seen your husband, Aunt Rachel, set to Annabelle one day. The children at the other end of the apartment had converted a chest into an altar and were solemnizing the nuptials of the resurrected flora and Jack, the raffish sailor doll. Annabelle made roving play with her eyes. He is up at the caravans, lady dear, she replied. Is there anything Annabelle can bid him do? Nothing, thank you, said Aunt Rachel. For a minute, the gypsy watched Aunt Rachel, and then she got up from the sewing machine box and crossed the floor. She leaned so close towards her that she had to put up a hand to steady the babe at her back. Lady dear, she murmured with irresistible softness. Your husband died, didn't he? Aunt Rachel's finger was a ring, but it was not a wedding ring, it was a hoop of pearls. I have never had a husband, she said. The gypsy glanced at the ring. Then that is, that is a betrothal ring, Aunt Rachel replied. Ah, said Annabelle. Then after a minute, she drew still closer. Her eyes were fixed on Aunt Rachel's and the insinuating voice was very low. Ah, and did it die too, lady dear? Again came that quick, half-afrighted look into Aunt Rachel's face. Her eyes avoided those of the gypsy, sought them and avoided them again. Did what die? She asked slowly and guardedly. The child at the gypsy's back did not need suck. Nevertheless, Annabelle's fingers worked at her bosom and she moved the sling. As the child settled, Annabelle gave Aunt Rachel a long look. Why do you rock? She asked slowly. Aunt Rachel was trembling, she did not reply. In a voice soft, a sliding water, the gypsy continued. Lady dear, we are a strange folk to you and even among us there are those who shuffle the pack of cards and read the palm when silver has been put upon it, knowing nothing. But some of us see, some of us see. It was more than a minute before Aunt Rachel spoke. You are a woman and you have had your brave at your breast now. Every woman sees that thing you speak of. But the gypsy shook her head. You speak of seeing with your heart, I speak of eyes, these eyes. Again came a long pause. Aunt Rachel had given a little start but had become quiet again. When at last she spoke, it was in a voice scarcely audible. That cannot be. I know what you mean, but it cannot be. He died on the eve of his wedding. For my bridal clothes, they made me black garments instead. It is long ago and now I wear neither black nor white but her hands made a gesture. Aunt Rachel always dressed as if to suit a sorrow that time had deprived of bitterness. In such a tender and fleecy gray as one sees in the mists that lie like lawn over hedgerow and cops early of midsummer's morning. Therefore, she resumed, your heart may see but your eyes cannot see that which never was. But there came a sudden note of masterfulness into the gypsy's voice. With my eyes, these eyes, she repeated pointing to them. Aunt Rachel kept her own eyes obstinately on her knitting needles. None except I have seen it. It is not to be seen, she said. The gypsy sat suddenly erect. It is not so, keep still in your chair. She ordered, and I will tell you when. It was a curious thing that followed as if all will went out of her. Aunt Rachel sat very still and presently her hands fluttered and dropped. The gypsy sat with her own hands folded over the mat on her knees. Several minutes passed. Then slowly, once more, the sweetest of smiles stole over Aunt Rachel's cheeks. Once more, her head dropped. Her hands moved, noiselessly on the rockers that the gypsy had padded, with felt the chair began to rock. Annabelle lifted one hand. Do vo se li, she said, it is there. Aunt Rachel did not appear to hear her. With that ineffable smile still on her face, she rocked. Then, after some minutes, there crossed her face, such a look as visits the face of one who, waking from sleep, strains his faculties to recapture some blissful and vanishing vision. Jal, it is gone, said the gypsy woman. Aunt Rachel opened her eyes again. She repeated dolly after Annabelle. It is gone. Ghosts, the gypsy whispered presently, are of the dead, therefore it must have lived. But again, Aunt Rachel shook her head. It never lived. You were young and beautiful. Still the shake of the head. He died on the eve of his wedding. They took my white garments away and gave me black ones. How then could it have lived? Without the kiss, no? But sometimes a woman will lie through her life and at the grave side still will lie. Tell me the truth. But they were the same words that Aunt Rachel repeated. He died at the eve of his wedding. They took away my wedding garments. From her lips a lie could hardly issue. The gypsy's face became grave. She broke another long silence. I believe, she said at last, it is a new kind, but no more wonderful than the other. The other I have seen, now I have seen this also. Tell me, does it come to any other chair? It was his chair, he died in it, said Aunt Rachel. And you, shall you die in it? As God wills. Has other life visited long? Many years, but it is always small, it never grows. To their mother's babes never grow. They remain ever babes. None other has ever seen it. Except yourself, none. I sit here, presently it creeps into my arms. It is small and warm. I rock and then it goes. Would it come to another chair? I cannot tell, I think not. It was his chair. Annabelle mused. At the other end of the room, the floor was now bestowed on Jack, the disreputable sailor. The gypsy's eyes rested on the bridal party. Yet another might see it, none has. No, but yet the door does not always shut behind us suddenly. Perhaps one who has toddled, but a step or two over the threshold might, by looking back at your glimpse. What is the name of the smallest one? Angela. That means angel. Look, the doll who died yesterday is now being married. It may be that life has not yet sealed the little one's eyes. Will you let Annabelle ask her if she sees what it is you hold in your arms? Again, the voice was soft and wheeling. No, Annabelle, said Aunt Rachel faintly. Will you rock again? Aunt Rachel made no reply. Rock urged the cajoling voice. But Aunt Rachel only turned the betrothal ring on her finger. Over at the altar, Jack was leering at his new-made bride, past decency, and little Angela held the wooden horse's head, which had parted from its body. Rock and comfort yourself, attempted the voice. Then slowly Aunt Rachel rose from her chair. No, Annabelle, she said gently. You should not have spoken. When the snow melts, you will go and come no more. Why then did you speak? It was mine. It was not meant to be seen by another. I no longer want it. Please go. The swarthy woman turned her almond eyes on her once more. You cannot live without it, she said, as she also rose. And as Jack and his bride left the church on the reheaded horse, Aunt Rachel walked with the hanging head from the apartment. Thence forward, as day followed day, Aunt Rachel rocked no more. And with the packing and partial melting of the snow, the gypsies up at the caverns judged a time to be off about their business. It was on the morning of Christmas Eve that they came down in a body to the Abbey farm to express their thanks to those who had befriended them. But the bailiff was not there. He and the farm men had ceased work and were down at the church practicing the carols. Only Aunt Rachel sat still and knitting in the black walnut chair and the children played on the floor. A night in the toy box had apparently bred discontent between Jack and Flora. Or perhaps they sought to keep their countenances before the world. At any rate, they sat on opposite sides of the room. Jack, keeping Boone company with the lead soldiers, his spouse reposing. Her lead balanced eyes closed in the broken clockwork motor car. With the air of performing something vaguely momentous ritual, the children were kissing one another beneath a bunch of mistletoe that hung from the center beam. In the intervals of kissing, they told one another in whispers that Aunt Rachel was not very well. And Angela woke Flora to tell her that Aunt Rachel had brown Titus also. Stay here, you. I will give the lady dear our thanks, said Annabelle to the group of gypsies gathered about the porch. And she entered the Great Hall kitchen. She approached the chair in which Aunt Rachel sat. There was obiessence in the bend of her body, but command in her long almond eyes as she spoke. Lady dear, you must rock or you cannot live. Aunt Rachel did not look up from her work. Rocking, I shall not live long, she replied. We are leaving. All leave me. Annabelle fears she has taken away her comfort. Only for a little while, the door closes behind us, but it opens again. But for that little time, rock. Aunt Rachel shook her head. No, it is finished. Another has seen. Say goodbye to your companions. They are very welcome to what they have had and God speed you. They thank you, lady dear. Will you not forget what Annabelle saw and rock? No more. Annabelle stooped and kissed the hand that bore the betrothal hoop of pearls. The other hand Aunt Rachel placed for a moment upon the smoky head of the babe in the sling. It trembled as it rested there, but the tremor passed and Annabelle, turning once at the porch, gave her a last look. Then she departed with her companions. That afternoon Jack and Flora had shaken down to wedlock as married folks should and sat together before the board spread with the dolls' teethings. The pallet light in the Great Hall kitchen faded, the candles were lighted, and then the children, first borrowing the stockings of their elders to hang at the bed's foot, were packed off early, for it was custom to bring them down again at midnight for the carols. Aunt Rachel had their good night kisses, not as she had them every night, but with a special ceremony of the mistletoe. Other folk, grown folk, sat with Aunt Rachel that evening, but the old walnut chair did not move upon its rockers. There was merry talk, but Aunt Rachel took no part in it. The board was spread with ale and cheese and spiced loaf for the carols' singers and the time drew near for their coming. When at midnight faintly on the air from the church below, there came the chiming of Christmas morning, all be stirred themselves. They'll be here in a few minutes, they said. Somebody go and bring the children down. And within a very little while, subdued noises were heard outside and the lifting of the latch of the yard gate. The children were in their nightgowns, hardly full awake. A low voice outside was heard giving orders and then there arose on the night the carol. Hush, they said to the wondering children, listen. It was the cherry tree carol that rose outside of how sweet Mary, the queen of Galilee, besought Joseph to pluck the cherries for her babe and Joseph refused and the voices of the singers that had begun hesitatingly grew strong and loud and free. And Joseph wouldn't pluck the cherries, somebody was whispering to the tiny Angela. Mary said to the cherry tree, bow down to my knee, that I may pluck cherries for my babe and me. The carolers sang, now listen, darling, the one who held Angela murmured. The uppermost spray then bowed down to her knee. Thus you may say, Joseph, these cherries are for me. Oh, eat your cherries, Mary. Give them your babe now. Oh, eat your cherries, Mary, that grew upon the bow. The little Angela, within the arms that held her, murmured. It's the gypsies, isn't it, mother? No, darling, the gypsies have gone. It's the carol singers singing because Jesus was born. But mother, it is the gypsies, isn't it? Cause look, look where? At Aunt Rachel, mother, the gypsy woman wouldn't go without her little baby, would she? No, she wouldn't do that. Then has she lent it to Aunt Rachel? Like I lend my new toys sometimes? The mother glanced across at Aunt Rachel and then gathered the nightgown figure more closely. The darlings only half awake, she murmured. Poor Aunt Rachel, sleepy too. Aunt Rachel, her head dropped, her hands lightly folded as if some shape that none saw but herself, her face again ineffable with a sweet and peaceful smile, once more was rocking softly in her chair. End of chapter eight, The Rocker. Recording by Melissa Burns Price, Winchester, Virginia. Chapter nine, part one of Widershins. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Fanny, Widershins by Oliver Onions. He chased it, a tale of artistic conscience. Introduction. As I lighted my guests down the stairs of my Chelsea lodgings, turned up the whole gas that they might see the steps at the front door and shook hands with them, I bathed them goodnight the more heartily that I was glad to see their backs. Less they should seem but an inhospitable confession. Let me state first that they had invited themselves, dropping in in ones and twos, until seven or eight of them had assembled in my garage. And secondly, that I was rather extraordinarily curious to know why at close or midnight, the one I knew least well of all, had seen fit to remain after the others had taken their departure. To these two considerations I must add a third, namely that I had become tardily conscious that if Andryovsky had not lingered of himself, I should certainly have asked him to do so. It was to nothing more than a glance, swift and momentary, directed by Andryovsky to myself while the others had talked, that I traced this desire to see more of the little Polish painter. But a glance derives its import from the circumstance under which it is given. That red deterring of his eyes in my direction and hour before, had held a hundred questions, implications, criticisms, incredulities, condemnations. It had been one of those uncovenanted gestures that holds the promise of the treasures of an eternal friendship. I wondered as I turned down the gas again and remounted the stairs, what personal message and reproach in it had lumped me in with the others. And by the time I had reached my own door again, a phrase had fitted itself in my mind to that quick ironical turning of Andryovsky's eyes, a too brutal. He was telling where I had left him, his small shabby figure in the attitude of a diminutive colossus on my half-rag. About him were the recently vacated chairs, solemnly and ridiculously suggestive of still continuing the high-end choice conversation that had lately finished. The same fancy had evidently taken Andryovsky, for he was turning from chair to chair, his head a little on one side, mischievously and aggravatingly smiling. As one of them, the deep wicker chair that Jameson had occupied suddenly gave a little creak of itself as weaker will when released from his train, his smile broadened to a grin. I had been on the point of sitting down in that chair, but I changed my mind and took another. That's right, said Andryovsky in that wonderful English, which he had picked up in less than three years. Don't sit in the wisdom seat, you might profane it. I knew what she meant. I felt for my pipe and slowly filled it, not replying. Then slowly wagging his head from side to side with his eyes humorously and venturingly on mine, he uttered the very words I had mentally associated with that glance of his. A too brutal, he said, wagging away, so that with each wag the lenses of his spectacles caught the light of the lamp on the table. I too smiled as I felt for a match. It was rather much, wasn't it, I said. But he suddenly stopped his wagging and held up a not very clean forefinger. His whole face was altogether too confoundingly intelligent. Oh no, you don't, she said, apparently. No getting out of it like that the moment they've turned their backs. No running, what is it? No running with the hair and hunting with the hounds. You helped, you know. I confess I fidgeted a little. But hang it all, what could I do? They were in my place, I broke out. He chuckled, enjoying my disconfiture. Then his eyes fell on those absurd and solemn chairs again. Look at them, the archaizing conference he chuckled. That rush city twan, it was talking half an hour ago about sketches in silver and gray. Nice fresh green stuff. To shut him up, I told him that he would find cigarettes and tobacco on the table. Sketches in silver and gray, he chuckled again as he took a cigarette. All this perhaps needs some explanation. It had been the usual thing, usually in those days 20 years ago, smarming about arts and the arts and so forth. They, ooey, as apparently Andrew Obskid had lingered behind for the purpose of reminding me, had perhaps talked a little more so wringly than the ordinary. That was all. There had been Jameson in the wicked chair, fooled to the lips and running over with the color suggestions of the late Edward Calvert. Gips in a pulpy state of adoration of the less legitimate side of the painting of Watts. And Magnani, who had advanced that an essential oneness underlies all the arts and had triumphantly proved his thesis by analogy with the law of the correlation of forces. A book called Music and Morals had appeared about that time and on it, they, we had risen to regions of quite high lunacy about color symphonies, or just a formless color thrown on a magic lantern screen, vieja enough at this time of day. A young newspaper, Men Too, had made mental notes of our adjectives for using his weekly, I nearly sped it weekly with an A, half column of art criticism. And then here was Andriovsky grinning at the chairs and mimicking it all with diabolical glee. Skeets was in silver and gray, word pastels, lyrics in stone, he chuckled. And what was it the fat fellow said? A siren sung in marble. Well, I'll get along. I should just be in time to get a pint of beer to wash it down if I'm quick. But he broke out suddenly. Good man, bid up form and forms. Keep the arts each after its kind. Raise up the dice so that we shan't all be swept away by night and nothingness. And these rats come nosing and blowing and undermining it all. A true brute? Well, when you finish rubbing it in, I grant it. As if you didn't know better. Is that your way of getting back on them now that you've chucked, drawing and going in for writing books? Who am I? Well, I'll go and get my pint of beer. But he didn't go for his pint of beer. Instead, he began to prowl about my room, pryingly, nosingly, touching things here and there. I watched him as he passed from one thing to another. He was very little and very, very shabby. His trousers were frayed and the sole of one of his boots flapped distressingly. His old bowler had, he had not thought it necessary to wait until he got outside before thrusting it on the back of his head was so limp in substance that I barely believed that had he run cautiously downstairs, he would have found when he got to the bottom that its crown had sunk in off its own weight. In spite of his remark about the pint of beer, I doubt if he had the price of one in his pocket. What's this, Brutus? A concertina, he suddenly asked, stopping before the collapsible casing which I kept my rather old dress suit. I told him what it was and he hoisted up his shoulders. And these things he asked, moving to something else. They were a pair of wood trees of which I had permitted myself the economy. I remember they cost me four shillings in the old Brompton Road. And that's your best, I suppose. Dumb bears, too. And oh, good Lord. He had picked up and robbed again as if it had been hot, somebody or other's cart with a date of a day written across the corner of it. As I helped Timon with his overcoat, he made no secret of the condition of its armholes and lining. I don't for one moment suppose that the garment was his. I took a candle to light him down as soon as it should please him to depart. Well, so long, enjoy to you on the high road to success, he said with another grin for which I could have bundled him down the stairs. In later days, I never looked to Andriovsky for tact, but I stared at him for his lack of it that night. And as I stared, I noticed for the first time the broad and low pylon of his forehead, his handsome mouth and chin, and the fire and wit and scorn that smoldered behind his cheap spectacles. I looked again and his smallness, his malice, his pathetic little braggings about his poverty seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my half rug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money and to curse his luck. And the pigment quality of his colossal ship had somehow gone. As I watched him, a neighboring clock struck the half hour, and he did even as I had surmised, cursed the closing time of the English public houses. I lighted him down. For one moment under the whole gas, he almost dropped his chest in manner. You do know better Harrison, you know, he said. But of course, you're going to be a famous author in almost no time. Oh, Sasevoie, no garage for you. It was a treat the way you handled those fellows really. Well, don't forget us others when you are up there. I may want you to write my life someday. I had the slapping of the loose sole as he shuffled down the path. At the gate you tend for a moment. Good night, Brudos, he called. When I had mounted to my garret again, my eyes fell once more on that ridiculous assemblage of empty chairs, all solemnly talking to one another. I burst out into a laugh. Then I undressed, put my jacket on the hanger, took the morose boots from the trees and treat those I had removed, changed the pair of trousers under my mattress and went still laughing at the chairs to bed. This was Michael Andryovsky, the Polish painter who died four weeks ago. One, I knew the reason of Mashka's visit the moment she was announced. Even in the stressful moments of the funeral, she had found time to whisper to me that she hoped to call upon me at an early date. I dismissed the eminences to whom I was dictating the last story of the fourth series of Martin Renard, gave a few haste instructions to my secretary and told the servant to show Miss Andryovsky into the drawing room to ask her to be so good as to excuse me for five minutes, to order tea at once and then to bring my visitor up to the library. A few minutes later, she was shown into the room. She was dressed in the same plainly cut costume of dead black she had worn at the funeral and had pushed up her heavy veil over the clothes fitting cap of black fur that accentuated her slavonic appearance. I noticed again with distressed the pallor of her face and the bestread rings that wigs of nursing had put under her dark eyes. I noticed also her resemblance in feature and statue to her brother. I placed a chair for her. The tea tray followed her in and without more than a murmured greeting, she peeled off her gloves and prepared to preside at the tray. She had filled the cups and I had handed her toast before she spoke. Then, I suppose you know what I've come about, she said. I nodded. Long, long ago, you promised it. Nobody else can do it. The only question is when? That's the only question I agreed. We naturally, she continued after a glance in which her eyes mutely thanked me for my implied promise. I'm anxious that it should be as soon as possible. But of course, I shall quite understand. She gave a momentary glance around my library. I helped her out. You mean that I'm a very important person nowadays and you are afraid to trespass on my time. Never mind that. I shall find time for this. But tell me before we go any further exactly how you stand and precisely what is it you expect. Briefly, she did so. It did not in the least surprise me to learn that her brother had died painless. And if you hadn't undertaken the life, she said, he might just as well not have worked in poverty all these years. You can at least see to his fame. I nodded again gravely and ruminated for a moment. Then I spoke. I can write it fully and in detail up to five years ago, I said, you know what happened then? I tried my best to help him, but he never would let me. Tell me, Masha, why he wouldn't sell me that portrait? I knew instantly from her quick confusion that her brother had spoken to her about the portrait she had refused to sell me and had probably told her the reason for his refusal. I watched her as she evaded the question as well as she could. You know how queer he was about who he sold his things to. And as for those five years in which you saw less of him, Schofield will tell you all you want to know. I relinquished the point. Who's Schofield I asked instead? He was a very good friend of Michael's, of both of us. You can talk quite freely to him. I want to say at the beginning that I should like him to be associated with you in this. I don't know how I divined on the spot her relation to Schofield, whoever he was. She told me that he too was a painter. Michael thought very highly of his things, she said. I don't know them, I replied. You probably wouldn't, she returned. But I caught the quick drop of her eyes from their brief excursion around my library and I felt something within me stiffen a little. He did not need Masha Kandryovsky to remind me that I had not attained my position without, let us say, splitting certain differences. The looseness of the expression can be corrected hereafter. Life consists very largely of compromises. You doubtless know my name, whichever country or hemisphere you happen to live in, as that of the creator of Martin Renard, the famous and popular detective. And I was not at that moment disposed to apologize either to Masha or Schofield or anybody else for having written the stories at the bidding of a gaping public. The moment the public showed that it wanted something better, I was prepared to give it. In the meantime, I sat in my very comfortable library, securely shielded from distress by my balance at my bankers. Well, I said after a moment, let's see how we stand. And first as to what you're likely to get out of this. It goes without saying, of course, that by writing the life, I can get you any amount of fame, advertisement, newspaper talk, and all the things that it struck me Michael always treated with a special scorn. My name alone, I say, will do that. But for anything else, I'm by no means so sure. You see, explained, it doesn't follow that because I can sell hundreds of thousands of you know what that I can sell anything I have a mind to sign. I said it confident that she had not lived all those years with her brother without having learned the axiomatic nature of it. To my discomfort, she should begin to talk like a Callow student. I should have thought that it followed that if you could sell something, she hesitated only for a moment then courageously gave the other stuff, its proper adjective, something rotten, you could have sold something good when you had the chance. Then if you thought that you were wrong, I replied briefly and concisely. Michael couldn't of course, she said, putting Michael out of the question with a little wave of her hand because Michael was, I mean, Michael wasn't a businessman, you are. I'm speaking as one, I replied. I don't waste time in giving people what they don't want. That is business. I don't undertake your brother's life as a matter of business, but as an inestimable privilege. I repeat, it doesn't follow that the public will buy it. But, but, she stammered, the public will buy a pill if they see your name on the testimonial. A pill, yes, I said sadly. Genius and a pill were alas, different things. But I added more cheerfully, you can never tell what the public will do. They might buy it, there's no telling except by trying. Well, Scoffield thinks they will, she informed me with decision. My dad say he does if he's an artist. They mostly do, I replied. He doesn't think Michael will ever be popular, she emphasized the adjective slightly, but he does think he has a considerable following if you could only be discovered. I sighed, all artists think that. They will accept any compromise, except the one that is offered to them. I tried to explain to Mashka that in this world, we have to stand to the chances of all or nothing. You've got to be one thing or the other. I don't know that it matters very much which I said, that's Michael's way and that's mine. That's all, however, we'll try it. All you can say to me and more, I'll say to a publisher for you, but he'll probably wink at me. For a moment she was silent. Then she said, Scoffield rather fancies one publisher. Oh, who is he? I asked. She mentioned the name. If I knew anything at all of business, she might as well have offered the life of Michael Andryovsky to the religious tract society at once. And has Mr. Scoffield any other suggestions I inquired? He had several. I saw that Scoffield's position would have to be defined before he went any further. Hmm, I said again. Well, I shall have to rely on Scoffield for those five years in which I saw little of Michael. But unless Scoffield knows more of publishing than I do and can enforce a better contract and a larger sum on account than I can, I really think, Moshka, that you'll do better to leave things to me. For one thing, it's only fair to me. My name hasn't much of an artistic value nowadays, but it has a very considerable commercial one. And my worth to publishers isn't as a writer of the lives of geniuses. I could see she didn't like it, but that couldn't be helped. It had to be so. Then as we sat for a time in silence over the fire, I noticed again how like her brother she was. She was not, it was true, much like him as he had been on that last visit of mine to him. And I sighed as I remembered that visit. The dreadful scene had come back to me. On account, I suppose, of the divergence of our paths, I had not even heard of his illness until almost the finish. Immediately, I had passed into the Hamstered home only to find him already in the agony. He had not been too far gone to recognize me, however, for he had mattered something brokenly about knowing better that the Spasma had interrupted. Besides myself, only Moshka had been there. And I had been thankful for the summons that had called her for a moment out of the room. I had still written she's already cold hand. His brow had worked with that dreadful struggle and his eyes had been closed. But suddenly he had opened them and the next moment had set up on his pillow. He had striven to draw his hand from mine. Who are you he had suddenly demanded not knowing me? I had come close to him. You know me, Andriovsky. Harrison, I had asked sorrowfully. I had been on the point of repeating my name, but suddenly after holding my eyes for a moment with a look, the profundity and familiarity of which I cannot express, he had broken into the most ghastly, haunting laugh I have ever had. Harrison, the words had broken thoughtfully from him. Oh yes, I know you. You shall very soon know that I know you if the cuff and rattle had come as Mashka had rushed into the room. In 10 seconds, Andriovsky had fallen back down. Two, that same evening, I began to make notes for Andriovsky's life. On the following day, the last of the fourth series of the Martin Renard occupied me until I was thankful to get to bed. But thereafter, I could call rather more of my time my own and I began in good earnest to devote myself to the life. Mashka had spoken no more than the truth when she had said that of all men living, none but I could write that life. His remaining behind in my Chelsea Garrett, that evening after the others had left, had been the beginning of a friendship that barring that lapse of five years at the end had been for 20 years one of complete intimacy. Whatever money that might or might not be in the book, I had seen my opportunity in it, the opportunity to make it the vehicle for all the aspirations, faiths, enthusiasm and exaltations we had shared. And I myself did not realize until I began to note them down one type of the subtle links and associations that had welded our souls together. Even the outward and visible signs of these had been wonderful. Setting out from one or other of the score of Garrett's and cheap lodgings we had in our time inhabited, we had wandered together day after day, night after night, far down east, where as we had threaded our way among the barrels of sauce herrings and the stalls and barrels of unleavened bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish. Up into the bright west of where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances, third music hall managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnets of his own faith, touts, crossing sweepers, painted women. Into Soho, where he had names for the very horses on the cab ranks and the dogs were slumbered under the counters of the sellers of the French literature. Out to the Nathalites and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Eastlington and the North End Road. Into city churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of artists not famous at the ends of dark and breakneck corridors. To see at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinners in the stables of a cavalry barracks to supper in Cabman's shelters. He was possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors and hoardings behind which excavations were in progress. He knew by name the butchers of the depth for yards, the men in the blood caked clothes, so endued to blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another. He took me into an opium cellar within a stone's throw of Oxford Street and into a roof chamber to call upon certain friends of his. Well, they said they were fire extinguishers so I'd better not say they were bombs. Up down here, there, good report, but more frequently evil, we had known this side of our London as well as two men may. And our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the spirit, but this must be spoken of in the proper place. I had arranged with Mashka that Scoffield should bring me the whole of the work Andriovsky had left behind him. And he arrived late one afternoon in a fork wheeler with four grade packages done up in brown paper. I found him to be a big Sheggy-Brout, red-haired, row-bond, Lancashire man of five and 30, given to confidential demonstrations at the length of a baton shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between his words and his right to employ them and bent on asserting inequality that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname. Andriovsky had appointed him his executor and he had ever the air of suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged. I'm glad to be associated with Yee in this melancholy duty Harrison, he said. Now we want waste words. Miss Andriovsky has told me precisely how matters stand. I had, as you know, the honor to be poor Michael's close friend for a period of five years and my knowledge of him is entirely at your disposal. I answered that I should be seriously handicapped without it. Just so, it is Miss Andriovsky's desire that we should pull together. Now in the first place, what is your idea about the form the book should take? In the first place, if you don't mind, I replied, perhaps we'd better run over together the things you brought. The daylight will be gone soon. Just as you like Harrison, he said. Just as you like, it's all the same to me. I cleared the space about my writing table at the window and we turned to the artistic remains of Michael Andriovsky. I was astonished first at the enormous quantity of the stuff and next at its utter and complete revelation of the man. In the flesh, I realized how superb that portion at least of the book was going to be. And Scoffield explained that the work he had brought represented but a fraction of the whole that was at our disposal. You know with what foolish generosity poor Michael always gave his things away, he said. Hallard has a grand set, so has Connolly. And from time to time, he behaved very handsomely to myself. Artists are very considerable talents, both Hallard and Connolly are. Michael thought very highly of their abilities. They expressed the deepest interest in the shape your work will take. And that reminds me, I myself have drafted a rough scenario of the form it appeared to me, the life might with advantage be cast in. A purely private opinion you'll understand Harrison, which he'll be entirely at liberty to disregard. Well, let's finish with the work first, I said. With boards, loose sheets, scraps of paper, notes, studies, campuses stretched and stripped from these stretches, we paved up the library floor, Scoffield keeping up all the time, a running fire of grand, grand, a masterpiece, a gem, that Harrison. They were all that he said, and presently I cease to hear his voice. The splendor of the work issued undimped even from the severe test of Scoffield's praise. And I thought again with pride, how why I was the only man living who could adequately write that life. Aren't they great Scoffield chanted monotonously? They are, I replied, coming to a consciousness of his presence again. But what's that? Secretively he had kept one package until the last. He now removed its wrappings and set it against the chair. There he cried, I'll thank you, Harrison, for your opinion of that. It was the portrait Andriofsky had refused to sell me, a portrait of himself. The portrait was the climax of the display. The Lancastrian still talked, but I profoundly moved, mechanically gathered up the drawings from the floor and returned them to the proper packages and folios. I was dining at home alone that evening, and for form's sake I asked this faithful dog of Andriofsky's to share my meal. But he excused himself. He was done with hallowed and connolly. When the drawings were all put away, all saved that portrait, he gave an inquisitive glance round my library. It was the same glance as Masha had given when she had feared to intrude on my time. But Scoffield did these things with a much more heavy hand. He departed, but not before telling me that even my mansion contained such treasures as it had never had before. That evening after glancing at Scoffield's scenario, I carefully folded it up again for return to him, lest, when the book should appear, he should miss the pleasure of saying that I had had his guidance, but had disregarded it. Then I sat down at my writing table and took out the loose notes I had made. I made other jottings, each on a blank sheet for subsequent amplification. And the sheets overspread the large leather-topped table and thrust one another up the standard of the incandescent with the pearly silk shade. The fire lights shone low and richly in the dusk spaces of the large apartment. And the thick carpet and the double doors made the place so quiet that I could hear my watch ticking in my pocket. I worked for an hour, and then for the purpose of making yet other notes, I rose, crossed the room, and took down the three or four illustrated books to which, in the earlier part of his career, Andriovsky had put his name. I carried them to the table and twinkled as I opened the first of them. It was a book of poems, and in making the designs for them, Andriovsky had certainly not found for himself. Almost any one of these art shades, as he had called them, could have done the thing equally well, and I twinkled again. I did not propose to have much mercy on that. Already Scoffield's words had given birth to a suspicion in my mind that Andriovsky, in permitting these fellows, Harlott, Connolly, and the rest, to suppose that he thought highly of them and their work, had been giving play to that malicious humor of his. And they naturally did not see the joke. That joke, too, was between himself, Dad, and me, preparing to write his life. As if he had been there to hear me, I chuckled and spoke in a low voice. You were pulling their legs, Michael, you know. A little rough on them, you were. But there's a book here of yours that I'm going to tell the truth about. You and I won't pretend to one another. It's a rotten book, and both you and I know it. I don't know what it was that caused me suddenly to see just then something that I had been looking at long enough without seeing. That portrait of himself that I had set leaning against the back of a chair at the end of my writing table. It stood there just within the soft pen number of shadow cast by the silk-shaded light. The canvas had been enlarged. The seam of it clumsily sewn by Andropovsky's own hand. But in that half-light, the rough ridge of paint did not show. And I confessed that the position and effect of the thing started me for a moment. Had I cared to play a trick with my fancy, I could have imagined the head wagging from side to side with such rage and fire was it painted. He had had the temerity to dash a reflection across one of the glasses of his spectacles, concealing the eye behind it. The next moment I had given a short laugh. So you're there, are you? Well, I know you agree very heartily about that book of poems. Hey, Ho, if I remember rightly, you made more money out of that book than out of the others put together. But I'm going to tell the truth about it. I know better, you know. Chancing before I turned in that night to reopen one of his folios, I came across a drawing there by accident, I don't doubt, that confirmed me in my suspicion that Andropovsky had had his quite joke with Schofield, Hallard, Connolly, and Co. It was a sketch of Schofield's imitative, deplorable, a dreadful show-up of incapacity. Well enough drawn in a sense it was. And I remembered how Andropovsky had ever urged that drawing of itself did not exist. I winked at the portrait. I saw his point. He himself had no peer, and rather than invite comparison with stars of the second magnitude, he chose his intimates from among the peddlers of the wares that had had the least possible connection with his art. He too had understood that the compromise must be entirely accepted or totally refused. And while in the divergence of our paths, he had done the one thing and I the other, we had each done it thoroughly with vigor and with persistence, and each could esteem the other, if not as a co-worker, at least as an honorable and out-and-out opposite. Three, within a fortnight, I was so deep in my task that in the realest sense, the greater part of my life was in the past. The significance of those extraordinary peregrinations of ours had been in the opportunity they had afforded for a communion of brain and spirit, of unusual rarity. And all these determined to my work with the accumulated force of its long penning up. I have spoken of Andropovsky's contempt for such as had the conception of their work that it was something they did as distinct from something they were. And unless I succeed in making it plain that not as a mere figure of speech and lose hyperbole but stuckly and literally, Andropovsky was everything he did, my tale will be pointless. There was not one of the basic facts of life, of faith, honor, truth-speaking, falsehood, betrayal, sin that he did not turn, not to moral interpretations as others do, but to the holy purposes of his noblent passionate art. For any man, sin is only mortal when it is sin against that which he knows to be immortally true. And the things Andropovsky knew to be immortally true were the things that he had gone down into the depths in order to bring forth and place upon his paper or canvas. These things are not for the perusal of many. Unless you love the things that he loved with a fervor comparable in kind, if not in degree with his own, you may not come near them. Truth, the highest thing a man may keep, he said, cannot be brought down. A man only attains it by proving his right to it. And I think I need not further state his views on the democratization of art. Of any result from the elaborate processes of art education, he held out no hope whatever. It is in a man or it isn't he ever declared. If it is, he must bring it out for himself. If it isn't, let him turn to something useful and have done with it. I need not press the point that in these things he was almost a solitary. He made of this general despotic principles the fiercest personal applications. I have heard his passionate outbreak of thief, liar, fool over a drawing when it had seemed to him that a man has not vouched with the safety of his immortal soul for the shapes and lines he has committed to it. I have seen him get into such a rage with the eyes of the artist upon him. I have heard the eyes and vinegar of his words when a good man for money has consented to modify and emasculate his work. And there lingers in my memory his side of a telephone conversation in which he told the publisher who had suggested that he should do the same thing precisely what he thought of him. And on the other hand, he once walked from Moldgate to Patni Hill with a loose heel on one of his boots to see a man of whom he had seen but a single drawing. See him he did too in spite of the man's footmen, his levered parlor made and the daunting effect of the electric broom at the door. He is a good man, he said to me afterwards, roofily looking at the place where his boot shield had been. You've got to take your good where you find it. I don't care whether he's a rich amateur or skin and griff in a garret as long as he's got the stuff in him. Nobody else could have fetched me up from the East End this afternoon. So long, see you in a week or so. This was the only time I ever knew him break that sacred time in which he celebrated each year the Passover and the feast of tabernacles. I doubt whether this observance of the ritual of his faith was of more essential importance to him than that other philosophical religion towards which he sometimes leaned. I have said what his real religion was. But to the life, with his things and others as a beginning, I began to add page to page, phase to phase. And in a time, the shortness of which astonished myself, I had pretty well covered the whole of the first 10 years of our friendship. Mashka called rather less and scoffed rather more frequently than I could have wished. And my surmise that he at least was in love with her quickly became a certainty. This was to be seen when they called together. It was when they came together that something else also became apparent. This was their slightly derisive attitude towards the means by which I had attained my success. It was not the less noticeable that it took the form of compliments on the outward and visible results. Simply I could manage them. Together they were inclined to get a little out of hand. I could have taxed them fairly and squarely with these singular together, but for one thing, the beautiful ease with which the light was proceeding. Never had I felt so completely in rapport with my subject. So beautifully was the thing running that I had had the idol fantasy of some actual nerd from Andriovsky himself. And each night before sitting down to work, I set his portrait at my desk's end as if it had been some kind of an observance. The most beautiful result of all was that I felt what I had not felt for five years, that I too was not doing my work, but actually living and being it. At times I took up the sheets I had written as ignorant of their content as if they had proceeded from another pen, so far actually they came to me. And once I vowed I found in my own handwriting a Polish name that I might, it is true, have subconsciously heard at some time or other, but the stead no chord in my memory even when I saw it written. Mashka checked and confirmed it afterwards. And I did not tell her about what odd circumstances it had issued from my pen. The day did come, however, when I found I must have it up with Scoffield about this superseduousness I have mentioned. The fortune had just begun to print the third series of my mark in renar. And this had been made the occasion of another of Scoffield's ponderous compliments. I acknowledged it with not too much graciousness. And then he said, I've not doubt Harrison that by this time the famous sleuth hound of crime has become quite a creature of flesh and blood to ye. It was atone as much as the words that riled me. And I replied that his doubts or the lack of them were a privacy with which I did not wish to meddle. From being merely aboard the fellow was rapidly becoming insolent. But I opined he'll get wearisome now and then and in that case poor Michael Slime will come as a grand relaxation he next observed. If I meant to have it out here was my opportunity. I should have thought you'd have traced a closer connection than that between the two things I remarked. He shot a quick glance at me from beneath his shaggy russet brows. How so, I see very little connection he said suspiciously. There's this connection that while you speak with some freedom of what I do, you are quite willing to take advantage of it when it serves your turn. Advantage Harrison, he said slowly. Of the advertisement Martin Renard gives you, I must point out that you condone a thing when you accept the benefit of it. Either you shouldn't have come to me at all or you should deny yourself the gratification of these slurs. Slurs, he repeated loweringly. Both of you, you and Miss Andriyovsky are machka as I call her, too cool. Don't suppose I don't know as well as you do the exact worth of my sleuth hound as you call him. You didn't come to me solely because I knew Andriyovsky well. You came because I've got the ear of the public also and I tell you plainly that however much you dislike it, Michael's fame as far as I am of any use to him depends on the popularity of Martin Renard. He shook his big head. This is what I feared, she said. More I continued, you can depend upon it that Michael, wherever he is, knows all about that. Aye, aye, he said, say, Chile. I misdoubt your own artistic souls only to be saved by the right go for Michael's life, Harrison. Leave that to me and Michael, we'll settle that. In the meantime, if you don't like it, write and publish the live yourself. He bent his brows on me. It's precisely what I wanted to do from the very first, he said. If you'd care to accept my symposium and the spirit in which it was offered, I cannot see that the live would have suffered. But now when you're next in need of my services, he'll maybe send for me. He took up his head, I assured him and let him take it in what sense he liked that I could do so, and he left me. Not for a single moment did I intend that they should bounce me like that. With or without their sanction and countenance, I intended to write and publish that live. Scoffled in my own house too, had had the advantage that the poor and ill-dressed man has over one who is not poor and ill-dressed. But my duty, first of all, was neither to him, nor to Mashka, but to my friend. The worst of it was, however, that I had begun deeply to suspect that the Lancastrian had hit at least one nail on the head. Your artistic souls only to be saved by writing poor Michael's life he had informed me. And it was truer than I found it pleasant to believe. Perhaps after all, my first duty was not to Andriovsky, but to myself. I could have kicked myself that the fool had been perspicacious enough to see it, but that did not alter the fact. I saw that in the sense in which Andriovsky understood sin, I had sinned. My only defense lay in the magnitude of my sin. I had sinned thoroughly out and out and with a will. It had been the only respectable way. Andriovsky's own way, when he had cut the company of an academician to hope nob with a vagabond. I had at least instituted no comparison, lowered no ideal, was innocent of the accursed attitude of facing both ways that degrades all lovely and moving things. I was by a paradox to let a sinner not to hope for redemption. I fell into a long musing on these things. Had any of the admirers of Martin Renard entered the library of his author that night, he would have seen an interesting thing. He would have seen the creator of that idol of clerks and messenger lads and forth-formed boys, frankly putting the case before a portrait popped up on a chair. He would have had that popular author hiranging, pleading curiously on his defense, turning the thing this way and that. If you'd gone over Michael, that author argued, you'd have done precisely the same thing. If I'd stuck it out, we were, after all, all of a kind. We've got to be one thing or the other, isn't that so, Andriovsky? Since I made up my mind, I faced only one way, only one way. I've kept your ideal and theirs entirely separate and distinct. Not one single beautiful phrase will you find in the Martin Renard. I've cut them out, everyone. I may have ceased to worship, but I've profaned no temple. And think what I might have done, what they all do. They deal out the slush, but with an apologetic glance at the art shades. Oh, Harrison, he does that detective rubbish, but that's not Harrison. If Harrison liked to drop that, he could be a fine artist. I haven't done that. I haven't run with a hair and hunted with a hound. I'm just Harrison who does that detective rubbish. These other chaps, Scofield and Connolly, they are the real sinners, Michael, the fellows who can't make up their minds to be one thing or the other, artists of considerable abilities, ha, ha. Of course, you know, Mashka's going to marry the chap. What will they do, do you think? He'll scrape up a few pounds out of the stoop where I find thousands, marry her, and they'll set up a saloon and talk the stuff the chairs talked that night, you remember? But you wait until I finish your life. I laid it all before him, almost as if I sought to propitiate him. I might have been courting his patronage for his own life. Then with a start, I came to, to find myself talking nonsense to the porter that years before Andriovsky had refused to sell me. End of chapter nine, part one, recording by Fanny Thessaloniki-Griss.