black crosses, and heavy autumnal clouds slowly crawled over the
heaven and with their cold tears watered the narrow dwellings of the
dead. The mournful trees in the cemetery timidly creaked under the
strokes of the wind and stretched their bare branches to the
speechless clouds. The branches were now and then caught by the
crosses, and then a dull, shuffling, awful sound passed over the
churchyard....
The devil was whistling, and he thought:
"I wonder how the dead feel in such weather! No doubt, the dampness
goes down to them, and although they are secure against rheumatism
ever since the day of their death, yet, I suppose, they do not feel
comfortable. How, if I called one of them up and had a talk with him?
It would be a little distraction for me, and, very likely, for him
also. I will call him! Somewhere around here they have buried an old
friend of mine, an author.... I used to visit him when he was alive
... why not renew our acquaintance? People of his kind are dreadfully
exacting. I shall find out whether the grave satisfies him completely.
But where is his grave?"
And the devil who, as is well known, knows everything, wandered for a
long time about the cemetery, before he found the author's grave....
"Oh there!" he called out as he knocked with his claws at the heavy
stone under which his acquaintance was put away.
"Get up!"
"What for?" came the dull answer from below.
"I need you."
"I won't get up."
"Why?"
"Who are you, anyway?"
"You know me."
"The censor?"
"Ha, ha, ha! No!"
"Maybe a secret policeman?"
"No, no!"
"Not a critic, either?"
"I am the devil."
"Well, I'll be out in a minute."
The stone lifted itself from the grave, the earth burst open, and a
skeleton came out of it. It was a very common skeleton, just the kind
that students study anatomy by: only it was dirty, had no wire
connections, and in the empty sockets there shone a blue phosphoric
light instead of eyes. It crawled out of the ground, shook its bones
in order to throw off the earth that stuck to them, making a dry,
rattling noise with them, and raising up its skull, looked with its
cold, blue eyes at the murky, cloud-covered sky. "I hope you are
well!" said the devil.
"How can I be?" curtly answered the author. He spoke in a strange, low
voice, as if two bones were grating against each other.
"Oh, excuse my greeting!" the devil said pleasantly.
"Never mind!... But why have you raised me?"
"I just wanted to take a walk with you, though the weather is very
bad.
"I suppose you are not afraid of catching a cold?" asked the devil.
"Not at all, I got used to catching colds during my lifetime."
"Yes, I remember, you died pretty cold."
"I should say I did! They had poured enough cold water over me all my
life."
They walked beside each other over the narrow path, between graves and
crosses. Two blue beams fell from the author's eyes upon the ground
and lit the way for the devil. A drizzling rain sprinkled over them,
and the wind freely passed between the author's bare ribs and through
his breast where there was no longer a heart.
"We are going to town?" he asked the devil.
"What interests you there?"
"Life, my dear sir," the author said impassionately.
"What! It still has a meaning for you?"
"Indeed it has!"
"But why?"
"How am I to say it? A man measures all by the quantity of his effort,
and if he carries a common stone down from the summit of Ararat, that
stone becomes a gem to him."
"Poor fellow!" smiled the devil.
"But also happy man!" the author retorted coldly.
The devil shrugged his shoulders.
They left the churchyard, and before them lay a street,--two rows of
houses, and between them was darkness in which the miserable lamps
clearly proved the want of light upon earth.
"Tell me," the devil spoke after a pause, "how do you like your
grave?"
"Now I am used to it, and it is all right: it is very quiet there."
"Is it not damp down there in the Fall?" asked the devil.
"A little. But you get used to that. The greatest annoyance comes from
those various idiots who ramble over the cemetery and accidentally
stumble on my grave. I don't know how long I have been lying in my
grave, for I and everything around me is unchangeable, and the concept
of time does not exist for me."
"You have been in the ground four years,--it will soon be five," said
the devil.
"Indeed? Well then, there have been three people at my grave during
that time. Those accursed people make me nervous. One, you see,
straight away denied the fact of my existence: he read my name on the
tombstone and said confidently: 'There never was such a man! I have
never read him, though I remember such a name: when I was a boy, there
lived a man of that name who had a broker's shop in our street.' How
do you like that? And my articles appeared for sixteen years in the
most popular periodicals, and three times during my lifetime my books
came out in separate editions."
"There were two more editions since your death," the devil informed
him.
"Well, you see? Then came two, and one of them said: 'Oh, that's that
fellow!' 'Yes, that is he!' answered the other. 'Yes, they used to
read him in the auld lang syne.' 'They read a lot of them.' 'What was
it he preached?' 'Oh, generally, ideas of beauty, goodness, and so
forth.' 'Oh, yes, I remember.' 'He had a heavy tongue.' 'There is a
lot of them in the ground:--yes, Russia is rich in talents' ... And
those asses went away. It is true, warm words do not raise the
temperature of the grave, and I do not care for that, yet it hurts me.
And oh, how I wanted to give them a piece of my mind!"
"You ought to have given them a fine tongue-lashing!" smiled the
devil.
"No, that would not have done. On the verge of the twentieth century
it would be absurd for dead people to scold, and, besides, it would be
hard on the materialists."
The devil again felt the ennui coming over him.
This author had always wished in his lifetime to be a bridegroom at
all weddings and a corpse at all burials, and now that all is dead in
him, his egotism is still alive. Is man of any importance to life? Of
importance is only the human spirit, and only the spirit deserves
applause and recognition.... How annoying people are! The devil was on
the point of proposing to the author to return to his grave, when an
idea flashed through his evil head. They had just reached a square,
and heavy masses of buildings surrounded them on all sides. The dark,
wet sky hung low over the square; it seemed as though it rested on the
roofs and murkily looked at the dirty earth.
"Say," said the devil as he inclined pleasantly towards the author,
"don't you want to know how your wife is getting on?"
"I don't know whether I want to," the author spoke slowly.
"I see, you are a thorough corpse!" called out the devil to annoy him.
"Oh, I don't know?" said the author and jauntily shook his bones. "I
don't mind seeing her; besides, she will not see me, or if she will,
she cannot recognize me!"
"Of course!" the devil assured him.
"You know, I only said so because she did not like for me to go away
long from home," explained the author.
And suddenly the wall of a house disappeared or became as transparent
as glass. The author saw the inside of large apartments, and it was so
light and cosy in them.
"Elegant appointments!" he grated his bones approvingly: "Very fine
appointments! If I had lived in such rooms, I would be alive now."
"I like it, too," said the devil and smiled. "And it is not
expensive--it only costs some three thousands."
"Hem, that not expensive? I remember my largest work brought me 815
roubles, and I worked over it a whole year. But who lives here?"
"Your wife," said the devil.
"I declare! That is good ... for her."
"Yes, and here comes her husband."
"She is so pretty now, and how well she is dressed! Her husband, you
say? What a fine looking fellow! Rather a bourgeois phiz,--kind, but
somewhat stupid! He looks as if he might be cunning,--well, just the
face to please a woman."
"Do you want me to heave a sigh for you?" the devil proposed and
looked maliciously at the author. But he was taken up with the scene
before him.
"What happy, jolly faces both have! They are evidently satisfied with
life. Tell me, does she love him?"
"Oh, yes, very much!"
"And who is he?"
"A clerk in a millinery shop."
"A clerk in a millinery shop," the author repeated slowly and did not
utter a word for some time. The devil looked at him and smiled a merry
smile.
"Do you like that?" he asked.
The author spoke with an effort:
"I had some children.... I know they are alive.... I had some children
... a son and a daughter.... I used to think then that my son would
turn out in time a good man...."
"There are plenty of good men, but what the world needs is perfect
men," said the devil coolly and whistled a jolly march.
"I think the clerk is probably a poor pedagogue ... and my son...."
The author's empty skull shook sadly.
"Just look how he is embracing her! They are living an easy life!"
exclaimed the devil.
"Yes. Is that clerk a rich man?"
"No, he was poorer than I, but your wife is rich."
"My wife? Where did she get the money from?"
"From the sale of your books!"
"Oh!" said the author and shook his bare and empty skull. "Oh! Then it
simply means that I have worked for a certain clerk?"
"I confess it looks that way," the devil chimed in merrily.
The author looked at the ground and said to the devil: "Take me back
to my grave!"
... It was late. A rain fell, heavy clouds hung in the sky, and the
author rattled his bones as he marched rapidly to his grave.... The
devil walked behind him and whistled merrily.
* * * * *
My reader is, of course, dissatisfied. My reader is surfeited with
literature, and even the people that write only to please him, are
rarely to his taste. In the present case my reader is also
dissatisfied because I have said nothing about hell. As my reader is
justly convinced that after death he will find his way there, he would
like to know something about hell during his lifetime. Really, I can't
tell anything pleasant to my reader on that score, because there is no
hell, no fiery hell which it is so easy to imagine. Yet, there is
something else and infinitely more terrible.
The moment the doctor will have said about you to your friends: "He is
dead!" you will enter an immeasurable, illuminated space, and that is
the space of the consciousness of your mistakes.
You lie in the grave, in a narrow coffin, and your miserable life
rotates about you like a wheel.
It moves painfully slow, and passes before you from your first
conscious step to the last moment of your life.
You will see all that you have hidden from yourself during your
lifetime, all the lies and meanness of your existence: you will think
over anew all your past thoughts, and you will see every wrong step of
yours,--all your life will be gone over, to its minutest details!
And to increase your torments, you will know that on that narrow and
stupid road which you have traversed, others are marching, and pushing
each other, and hurrying, and lying.... And you understand that they
are doing it all only to find out in time how shameful it is to live
such a wretched, soulless life.
And though you see them hastening on towards their destruction, you
are in no way able to warn them: you will not move nor cry, and your
helpless desire to aid them will tear your soul to pieces.
Your life passes before you, and you see it from the start, and there
is no end to the work of your conscience, and there will be no end ...
and to the horror of your torments there will never be an end ...
never!
THE DEVIL AND THE OLD MAN[31]
BY JOHN MASEFIELD
[31] From _A Mainsail Haul_, by John Masefield [Copyright
1913 by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission of the
Author and the Publishers.]
Up away north, in the old days, in Chester, there was a man who never
throve. Nothing he put his hand to ever prospered, and as his state
worsened, his friends fell away, and he grew desperate. So one night
when he was alone in his room, thinking of the rent due in two or
three days and the money he couldn't scrape together, he cried out, "I
wish I could sell my soul to the devil like that man the old books
tell about."
Now just as he spoke the clock struck twelve, and, while it chimed, a
sparkle began to burn about the room, and the air, all at once, began
to smell of brimstone, and a voice said:
"Will these terms suit you?"
He then saw that some one had just placed a parchment there. He picked
it up and read it through; and being in despair, and not knowing what
he was doing, he answered, "Yes," and looked round for a pen.
"Take and sign," said the voice again, "but first consider what it is
you do; do nothing rashly. Consider."
So he thought awhile; then "Yes," he said, "I'll sign," and with that
he groped for the pen.
"Blood from your left thumb and sign," said the voice.
So he pricked his left thumb and signed.
"Here is your earnest money," said the voice, "nine and twenty silver
pennies. This day twenty years hence I shall see you again."
Now early next morning our friend came to himself and felt like one of
the drowned. "What a dream I've had," he said. Then he woke up and saw
the nine and twenty silver pennies and smelt a faint smell of
brimstone.
So he sat in his chair there, and remembered that he had sold his soul
to the devil for twenty years of heart's-desire; and whatever fears he
may have had as to what might come at the end of those twenty years,
he found comfort in the thought that, after all, twenty years is a
good stretch of time, and that throughout them he could eat, drink,
merrymake, roll in gold, dress in silk, and be care-free, heart at
ease and jib-sheet to windward.
So for nineteen years and nine months he lived in great state, having
his heart's desire in all things; but, when his twenty years were
nearly run through, there was no wretcheder man in all the world than
that poor fellow. So he threw up his house, his position, riches,
everything, and away he went to the port of Liverpool, where he signed
on as A. B., aboard a Black Ball packet, a tea clipper, bound to the
China seas.
They made a fine passage out, and when our friend had only three days
more, they were in the Indian Ocean lying lazy, becalmed.
Now it was his wheel that forenoon, and it being dead calm, all he
had to do was just to think of things; the ship of course having no
way on her.
So he stood there, hanging on to the spokes, groaning and weeping
till, just twenty minutes or so before eight bells were made, up came
the Captain for a turn on deck.
He went aft, of course, took a squint aloft, and saw our friend crying
at the wheel. "Hello, my man," he says, "why, what's all this? Ain't
you well? You'd best lay aft for a dose o'salts at four bells
tonight."
"No, Cap'n," said the man, "there's no salts'll ever cure my
sickness."
"Why, what's all this?" says the old man. "You must be sick if it's as
bad as all that. But come now; your cheek is all sunk, and you look as
if you ain't slept well. What is it ails you, anyway? Have you
anything on your mind?"
"Captain," he answers very solemn, "I have sold my soul to the devil."
"Oh," said the old man, "why, that's bad. That's powerful bad. I never
thought them sort of things ever happened outside a book."
"But," said our friend, "that's not the worst of it, Captain. At this
time three days hence the devil will fetch me home."
"Good Lord!" groaned the old man. "Here's a nice hurrah's nest to
happen aboard my ship. But come now," he went on, "did the devil give
you no chance--no saving-clause like? Just think quietly for a
moment."
"Yes, Captain," said our friend, "just when I made the deal, there
came a whisper in my ear. And," he said, speaking very quietly, so as
not to let the mate hear, "if I can give the devil three jobs to do
which he cannot do, why, then, Captain," he says, "I'm saved, and that
deed of mine is cancelled."
Well, at this the old man grinned and said, "You just leave things to
me, my son. _I'll_ fix the devil for you. Aft there, one o' you, and
relieve the wheel. Now you run forrard, and have a good watch below,
and be quite easy in your mind, for I'll deal with the devil for you.
You rest and be easy."
And so that day goes by, and the next, and the one after that, and the
one after that was the day the Devil was due.
Soon as eight bells was made in the morning watch, the old man called
all hands aft.
"Men," he said, "I've got an all-hands job for you this forenoon."
"Mr. Mate," he cried, "get all hands on to the main-tops'l halliards
and bowse the sail stiff up and down."
So they passed along the halliards, and took the turns off, and old
John Chantyman piped up--
There's a Black Ball clipper
Comin' down the river.
And away the yard went to the mast-head till the bunt-robands jammed
in the sheave.
"Very well that," said the old man. "Now get my dinghy off o' the
half-deck and let her drag alongside."
So they did that, too.
"Very well that," said the old man. "Now forrard with you, to the
chain-locker, and rouse out every inch of chain you find there."
So forrard they went, and the chain was lighted up and flaked along
the deck all clear for running.
"Now, Chips," says the old man to the carpenter, "just bend the spare
anchor to the end of that chain, and clear away the fo'c's'le rails
ready for when we let go."
So they did this, too.
"Now," said the old man, "get them tubs of slush from the galley. Pass
that slush along there, doctor. Very well that. Now turn to, all
hands, and slush away every link in that chain a good inch thick in
grease."
So they did that, too, and wondered what the old man meant.
"Very well that," cries the old man. "Now get below all hands! Chips,
on to the fo'c's'le head with you and stand by! I'll keep the deck,
Mr. Mate! Very well that."
So all hands tumbled down below; Chips took a fill o' baccy to leeward
of the capstan, and the old man walked the weather-poop looking for a
sign of hell-fire.
It was still dead calm--but presently, towards six bells, he raised a
black cloud away to leeward, and saw the glimmer of the lightning in
it; only the flashes were too red, and came too quick.
"Now," says he to himself, "stand by."
Very soon that black cloud worked up to windward, right alongside, and
there came a red flash, and a strong sulphurous smell, and then a loud
peal of thunder as the devil steps aboard.
"Mornin', Cap'n," says he.
"Mornin', Mr. Devil," says the old man, "and what in blazes do you
want aboard _my_ ship?"
"Why, Captain," said the devil, "I've come for the soul of one of your
hands as per signed agreement: and, as my time's pretty full up in
these wicked days, I hope you won't keep me waiting for him longer
than need be."
"Well, Mr. Devil," says the old man, "the man you come for is down
below, sleeping, just at this moment. It's a fair pity to call him up
till it's right time. So supposin' I set you them three tasks. How
would that be? Have you any objections?"
"Why, no," said the devil, "fire away as soon as you like."
"Mr. Devil," said the old man, "you see that main-tops'l yard? Suppose
you lay out on that main-tops'l yard and take in three reefs
singlehanded."
"Ay, ay, sir," the devil said, and he ran up the rat-lines, into the
top, up the topmast rigging and along the yard.
Well, when he found the sail stiff up and down, he hailed the deck:
"Below there! On deck there! Lower away ya halliards!"
"I will not," said the old man, "nary a lower."
"Come up your sheets, then," cries the devil. "This main-topsail's
stiff up-and-down. How'm I to take in three reefs when the sail's
stiff up-and-down?"
"Why," said the old man, "_you can't do it_. Come out o' that! Down
from aloft, you hoof-footed son. That's one to me."
"Yes," says the devil, when he got on deck again, "I don't deny it,
Cap'n. That's one to you."
"Now, Mr. Devil," said the old man, going towards the rail, "suppose
you was to step into that little boat alongside there. Will you
please?"
"Ay, ay, sir," he said, and he slid down the forrard fall, got into
the stern sheets, and sat down.
"Now, Mr. Devil," said the skipper, taking a little salt spoon from
his vest pocket, "supposin' you bail all the water on that side the
boat on to this side the boat, using this spoon as your dipper."
Well!--the devil just looked at him.
"Say!" he said at length, "which of the New England States d'ye hail
from anyway?"
"Not Jersey, anyway," said the old man. "That's two up, alright; ain't
it, sonny?"
"Yes," growls the devil, as he climbs aboard. "That's two up. Two to
you and one to play. Now, what's your next contraption?"
"Mr. Devil," said the old man, looking very innocent, "you see, I've
ranged my chain ready for letting go anchor. Now Chips is forrard
there, and when I sing out, he'll let the anchor go. Supposin' you
stopper the chain with them big hands o' yourn and keep it from
running out clear. Will you, please?"
So the devil takes off his coat and rubs his hands together, and gets
away forrard by the bitts, and stands by.
"All ready, Cap'n," he says.
"All ready, Chips?" asked the old man.
"All ready, sir," replies Chips.
"Then, stand by--Let _go_ the anchor," and clink, clink, old Chips
knocks out the pin, and away goes the spare anchor and greased chain
into a five mile deep of God's sea. As I said, they were in the Indian
Ocean.
Well--there was the devil, making a grab here and a grab there, and
the slushy chain just slipping through his claws, and at whiles a
bight of chain would spring clear and rap him in the eye.
So at last the cable was nearly clean gone, and the devil ran to the
last big link (which was seized to the heel of the foremast), and he
put both his arms through it, and hung on to it like grim death.
But the chain gave such a _Yank_ when it came-to, that the big link
carried away, and oh, roll and go, out it went through the hawsehole,
in a shower of bright sparks, carrying the devil with it. There is no
devil now. The devil's dead.
As for the old man, he looked over the bows watching the bubbles
burst, but the devil never rose. Then he went to the fo'c's'le scuttle
and banged thereon with a hand-spike.
"Rouse out, there, the port watch!" he called, "an' get my dinghy
inboard."
NOTES
THE DEVIL IN A NUNNERY
BY FRANCIS OSCAR MANN
According to a German legend, the devil is master of all arts, and
certainly he has given sufficient proof of his musical talent. Certain
Church Fathers ascribed, not without good reason, the origin of music
to Satan. "The Devil," says Mr. Huneker in his diabolical story "The
Supreme Sin" (1920), "is the greatest of all musicians," and Rowland
Hill long ago admitted the fact that the devil has all the good tunes.
Perhaps his greatest composition is the _Sonata del Diavolo_, which
Tartini wrote down in 1713. This diabolical master-piece is the
subject of Gérard de Nerval's story _La Sonate du Diable_ (1830).
While the devil plays all instruments equally well, he seems to prefer
the violin. Satan appears as fiddler in the poem "Der Teufel mit der
Geige," which has been ascribed to the Swiss anti-Papist Pamphilus
Gengenbach of the sixteenth century. In Leanu's _Faust_ (1836)
Mephistopheles takes the violin out of the hands of one of the
musicians at a peasant-wedding and plays a diabolical _czardas_, which
fills the hearts of all who hear it with voluptuousness. An opera _Un
Violon du Diable_ was played in Paris in 1849. _The Devil's Violin_,
an extravaganza in verse by Benjamin Webster, was performed the same
year in London. In his story "Les Tentations ou Eros, Plutus et la
Gloire" Baudelaire presents the Demon of Love as holding in his left
hand a violin "which without doubt served to sing his pleasures and
pains." The devil also appears as limping fiddler in a California
legend, which appeared under the title "The Devil's Fiddle" in a
Californian magazine in 1855. Death, the devil's first cousin, if not
his _alter ego_, has the souls, in the Dance of Death, march off to
hell to a merry tune on his violin. Death appears as a musician also
in the Piper of Hamlin. In this legend, well known to the English
world through Browning's poem "Pied Piper of Hamelin" (1843) and Miss
Peabody's play _The Piper_ (1909), the rats are the human souls, which
Death charms with his music into following him. In the Middle Ages the
soul was often represented as leaving the body in the form of a mouse.
The soul of a good man comes out of his mouth as a white mouse, while
at the death of a sinner the soul escapes as a black mouse, which the
devil catches and brings to hell. Mephistopheles, it will be recalled,
calls himself "the lord of rats and mice" (_Faust_, 1, 1516).
Devil-Death has inherited this wind instrument from the goat-footed
Pan.
"The Devil is more busy in the convents," we are told by J. K.
Huysmans in his novel _En route_ (1895), "than in the cities, as he
has a harder job on hand."
BELPHAGOR
BY NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI